The Energy Sham Is a Shame

In the belief that Tip O'Neill, a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was correct when he said “all politics is local,” I will state my locale: I live in Prague, which is in the Czech Republic, which is dead-center in Europe.

Further, my beef with the energy companies is largely universal, as it largely affects those countries within my purview, the 27 nations of the European Union, Great Britain and the United States.

Enough prologue, here’s the beef

My residence serves as both office and home for both me and my wife, as well as being heated and lighted by electricity. Accordingly, our monthly electric bill is above average. The Czech national currency is the koruna, which trades at the moment at 23 ½ crowns to the dollar.

So, with those details having been taken care of, imagine our discomfort when our monthly electric bill came to 10,000 crowns, up 208% from its already barely manageable 4,800. Each of us have a widely variable definition for barely manageable, it being one number for us and quite another for Jeff Bezos. But it went from 12 ½% to 25% of my monthly social security (which is not all, but is the major source of our income).

So, where does our electricity come from?

Not Russia, thank god. Our electric energy is entirely in-country generated by nuclear, coal, solar and wind. And what, pray tell, might possibly affect a doubling of price?

Greed is the answer, there is none other.

Solar and wind are simply there, having been built and their costs amortized. Nuclear is there as well, as no new plants are under construction. Which, embarrassingly, leaves coal, a source we hope to eliminate, but one where the miners are, as they have always been, underpaid. Rail transport is no more costly this year than last.

Energy investors, however, are pocketing profits as never before

Well, bless their stingy little hearts, the investor class rises above all others in both good times and bad. Those of the working class who are not in jail are either living homeless on the streets or struggling to keep bread on the table and a roof overhead. The middle class (at least in America) has been packed off to China, where all the industry that once supported it has lately been transported.

What remains in the US, UK and much of Europe, is the consumer class, a unique combination of those who simply scrape together what funds they can manage to buy cell-phones, games and disposable clothing that suits this week’s fashion statement.

Both consumer class and investor class have developed a relationship never before experienced in human history

In a toxic and symbiotic struggle for survival, each these classes is interdependent; each gains benefits from the other. Consumers enrich investors. Investors enrich other investors. Am I missing something here? What’s the payoff for the consumer, other than cheap shoes?

Sounds not so much as a symbiosis as parasitism, one species (the investor parasite) lives on a host (consumerist) species, at the expense of the consumer. Well, my friends, that sounds like the main cause of our growing worldwide financial inequity. I guess we now know how the infamous 1% came to own everything.

‘Inflation’ is not so much the cause as it is the excuse for profiteering

I remember during WWII we had both price controls and rationing, both of which kept inflation under control. And yet, we are told that inflation is the natural bed-partner of war in Ukraine and Putin’s choking off gas supplies to Europe. Neither of which is true and both of which are excuses to profiteer.

How is it that food prices are doubled while grocery-chain profits are tripled? Why should gasoline prices in Europe top $8 a gallon while Exxon and Shell report $70 billion profits per quarter? My electric bill is a bold case of sham-profit-tomfoolery, while your and my government is allowing energy cartels to strip us to our underwear.

Cost controls and rationing work, but our legislators are on the profiteering bandwagon

Democrats, Republicans, the Labour and Tory parties, as well as our representatives in the European Union are on the payrolls of supply cartels and the investor classes operating in world markets. This would be cause for public outcry if it was anything new, but it’s been going on for 50 years in Britain and America and, during those decades, has become known as business as usual. Well, it simply does not have to be that way.

We talk about taxing the rich, but it’s not the fault of the rich that our governments were for sale and they simply stood in line to buy them

We shake our fists and cry out against excess profits, but what is an excess profit except the failure of capitalism to be controlled?

In my memory of WWII, we had price controls and rationing. Europe will not freeze this year because of Putin, it will ration its heating fuels and move forward as it should have decades ago on renewable energy. Why hasn’t that happened? Because it did not suit the oil industry cartel to limit their greed. It did not suit our environmental progress either but, what the hell, you want clean air and water or greed and misinformation.

I don’t know if we wanted it or not, but what we got was greed and misinformation

The bill for not paying the bill over the past half century is sewage in the rivers, melting polar glaciers, wildfires, floods, landslides, hurricanes, economic and weather-related displacements and—finally—the most damaging human disaster of all: old, white men sitting in power and ignorance on governments far and wide.

You place your bet and spin the wheel

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush or Bill Clinton—take your pick for who you like, they were all the servants of money and power. That’s not all bad and it’s never going to change, but the money and power in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when I was in business was under the control of a not-yet-entirely-paid-off government.

Taxes topped out at 92%, off-shoring of income was not yet a thing and we had millionaires instead of billionaires—but plenty of them and small business was king. My bank was the First National Bank of Evanston and Wells Fargo had not yet been let loose to pillage and rape the middle class. I was a small businessman providing services to the wealthy, paid my taxes and had a Mercedes in the garage and horses in the barn. It was a fine time to be in business.

Then Reagan came along in America and Thatcher in Britain

Political twins joined at the hip, they broke the labor unions, privatized everything that wasn’t nailed down (and some stuff that was) as well as introducing the ‘trickle-down theory.’ Wealth shot up among the already wealthy and poverty trickled down the legs of the formerly middle class.

To bastardize a quote by Winston Churchill, “Never have so few taken so much from so many.”

Which explains away, but does not do much to lower my electric bill or the cost of filling up a tank of gas (petrol, for you Brits).