By: Editors of the Leader
Milwaukee’s Gannett-owned hollowed out blog of record, the Journal Sentinel, lent its talents this week to a bad faith fisking of socialist District 3 alder candidate Alex Brower’s plans to replace the privately owned utility, We Energies, with a public utility. The article is accompanied by the usual passel of sneers and special pleading about why wanting public control of a vital piece of infrastructure is unrealistic. Not mentioned are the rate increases that have pushed more and more Milwaukee area ratepayers towards financial stress for the benefit of We Energies’ shareholders.
It should be said, of course, that there’s nothing wrong with criticizing or asking pointed questions about a fairly dramatic and serious policy proposals such as taking a utility into public ownership. Reasonable concerns about costs, service coverage, changes in billing, and renewable energy are all perfectly valid. Not for nothing, the socialist organizing campaign which has gathered tens of thousands of petitions in favor of this change has made efforts to address exactly those concerns. It’s in the finest tradition of the Sewer Socialists to be both radical and practical, to be bold in proposing necessary change while also sweating the details.
The Journal Sentinel doesn’t seem interested in asking those sorts of questions in good faith. Instead, it provides an assortment of disjointed quotes designed not to genuinely suss out the merits of Mr. Brower’s proposal, but to throw cold water on it. “The bottom line is that this proposed takeover would harm almost everyone and fix nothing,” says a statement from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Why would that be the case? What harm would it cause? The Journal Sentinel doesn’t ask, presumably because it is not interested in the answers. We’re prissily informed by Mayor Johnson’s spokesman that municipalization of We Energies is “definitely not” on the mayor’s agenda. For what reason? The reader is left to wonder.
Drifting over all of this like a fog is the inchoate idea that such a program would simply be “too expensive”, “too much”, “too risky”. Stories of failed municipalization efforts in Boulder or Ann Arbor are waved like bloody shirts. Examples of successful public power companies in cities like Los Angeles or Cleveland handwaved as having taken place “more than 50 years ago”, as if anything that took place before the Violent Femmes or RoboCop is lost in the mists of time, with no more bearing on modern political economy than the pyramids at Giza.
What’s so odd about all this isn’t that Milwaukee’s mainstream press and Democratic sachems are against public ownership of a public utility; big progressive policy swings are not what these sorts of people and institutions tend to support. Nor is their opposition inherently nefarious or corrupt; the Leader takes Mayor Johnson to be sincere in his objections, and it takes the Journal Sentinel to practice what passes for journalistic professionalism at a fully owned subsidiary of Fortress Investment Group, LLC.
But what is peculiar is the sort of peevishness that accompanies these articles and statements. One cannot escape the suspicion that it isn’t just opposition to a policy proposal that we are witnessing (always welcome in the cut-and-thrust of democratic politics), but a sort of irritation that these issues even need to be debated. And yet, Brower’s campaign insists on raising the question, much though His Honor would prefer to discuss the economic windfall of last year’s Republic National Convention (or, er, perhaps not?).
Then again, maybe it’s not so strange. If the mayor, the opposing candidate for District 3 alderman (Dan Bauman), and Milwaukee’s political establishment have to come out against public ownership of We Energies, that might mean that they have to also explain exactly what they are for. And that means, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that they are for the status quo. That they are for rate rises that make working Milwaukeeans choose between light bills and grocery bills. That they are in favor of maintaining business as usual for a company that has leaned hard into fossil fuel generation despite majorities of Wisconsinites expressing a desire to accelerate a transition to renewable energy. That they are prioritizing defending the prerogatives of a company more concerned with its NYSE ticker than with the livelihoods of the working people of this city.
Not a stirring campaign message, all that. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if city hall and Mr. Bauman had to own such a set of political priorities, they might well find that the residents of District 3 were unhappy with what they were being offered. Maybe even unhappy enough to put a socialist back on the city council for the first time in decades.
