CenterPoint’s profits are guaranteed as part of the regulated monopoly it maintains in Houston, where the utility owns the network of electrical poles and wires carrying power into homes and businesses. Yet regulators have demonstrated they have discretion to reduce those profits when a utility fails to provide adequate maintenance and service to its customers.
This is what privatizing as much as possible looks like. Do government utilities fuck up? Absolutely, but not as bad as the prison slave complex and the utilities like this. They’re just crooks.
I do think that government utilities are better but do want to point out that the biggest utility fuck up was a government utility, Chernobyl.
I think that was under an authoritarian government, that’s a bit different.
