The Utility of Evil

As hell froze over this winter, Con Edison chomped at the bit, licked its chops and crouched on its haunches, lustily waiting to attack their prey who have no choice but to have an account with them. 

They are at war with their customers. Every billing cycle is new ordnance.

Residential customers' bills have doubled from month to month. It is larceny. Con Edison is the exemplar of corporate villainy.

They pose as good corporate citizens and their posturing regulator, the New York State Public Service Commission (NYSPSC) is in cahoots with them. Customers are forced to submit to this pariah, because Con Edison has no competition. 

Predators in nature are programmed to act instinctively, but Con Edison's feral rapacity is deliberative and merciless.

By midyear in 2025, they had disconnected more than 88,000 as part of their crackdown on vulnerable, defenseless customers, whose life savings are in many cases being cleaned out in exchange for keeping survival-sustaining equipment running and preventing baby nurseries from glaciating.

Take comfort: it's just a business decision.

It's one thing to be fleeced over the price of a concert ticket or the air pocket in an unopened bag of potato chips. Quite another when a "public utility" can charge extortionate rates with impunity. 

The sky's the limit, because like outer space, there is no ceiling.

The NYSPSC is the keeper of the rubber stamp that approves Con Edison's indulgences. There should be a fast-track independent investigation and swift prosecution upon the inevitable discovery of incriminating evidence. Any complicit elected officials, or their appointed lackeys should be voted out or axed. 

The NYSPSC invariably and without resistance, surrenders to Con Edison. For the sake of appearance, they blithely breeze through Con Ed's rate increase request details, using a toothless comb. 

They go through the motions of holding public hearings, but this is a charade. The NYSPSC-Con Ed kiss was a done deal all along.

Con Edison pretends to be consumer-friendly. They send emails about conservation, insulation, installment plans and gracious-sounding schemes for the sick and elderly. They alert us with cautionary blasts about customers' usage trending higher than normal, even when premises were vacant and the heat or air conditioning turned off.

How can it be that the resident of a small house, with only one heated floor, minimal appliances and the thermostat at 65 degrees, be charged $900? Some bills have doubled in a single payment cycle without additional energy consumption.

The NYSPSC minds the store as Con Edison loots it.

Why is there no rhyme or reason for their jacking up their rates at a time when energy costs to them have plummeted? President Trump recently gave them a disparaging shout-out for this.

Due to new policies, trade agreements, and regulatory changes, the procurement of energy is much cheaper, but Con Edison gets away with not passing on any savings to its customers.

Bills are almost approaching mortgage payments. They are taking an exponential toll on budgets and savings.

According to The Guardian, one-sixth of their residential customers were in arrears at the end of 2024, to a debt of almost a billion dollars. Annually, the premature death of around 525 people is attributable to heat-related causes.

Con Edison's defenders tend to be apologists for Big Pharma also.

The TrumpRx.gov website was launched in early February, ostensibly to allow patients "to access large discounts on many of the most popular and highest-priced medications in the country, paying prices in line with the lowest paid by other developing nations." The drugs were mainly for heart disease, diabetes and other serious afflictions.

Monthly prices for Ozempic, for example, will plunge by around 80 percent. Participating manufacturers include Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and twelve others.

When corporations appear to have a human heart, it is almost always part of a grander strategy of deceit and self-aggrandizement. They promise good news, but the tidings they deliver are pregnant with hidden stipulations that mock or cancel it.

If prices indeed became less prohibitive, it would extend life expectancy, which should unequivocally be cheered, but supply side economist Stephen Moore, a favorite guest among all the major conservative radio talk shows, is doubtful and somewhat piqued.

He detects a non-starter, or at least a game changer. It's price controls. They are to him what a cross is to Dracula.

He has his vampires confused.

Moore and his ilk consider windfall profits the mother's milk of prosperity. Unfettered profit margins that befit corporations are sacred utterances to him.

In his faith, the corporate ministry consists of milking newborn pharmaceutical cash cows. Dick Morris, advisor to presidents and storied alleged foot fetishist, concurs, citing "overwhelming data."

They bark that inflation has been crushed, the middle class is blushing with newfound riches and the nation is zooming towards unprecedented well-being. Consumer prices are stable or dipping, and pay boosts for wage slaves is leaving the cost of living trailing in the dust, they proclaim.

They cite some cockamamie "index," which doesn't include the soaring cost of gas and electricity. Con Edison's fig leaf is secure, unless some investigators pulls it off to unveil the scandal that keeps it in place.

Memory of the harsh winter will recede, but the harshness or economic reality and current events will not. The relationship between net worth and the value of human life continues to develop.

The Savannah Guthrie case is tragic by any reckoning, and nothing can diminish the empathy of decent people. But would there be such a massive mobilization of law enforcement assets if the victim was the mother of a neighborhood tailor?

The conventionally acceptable time to wish people a "happy new year" has passed and its trite expressions of good will been cyclically mothballed. February, Black History Month, now reposes until next year, but it should not be sedated by the decree of calendars.

Leontyne Price, going on 100 years old, was undisputably one of the greatest operatic artists on the world stage during the 20th century. She grew up impoverished in rural Mississippi during the most wretched Jim Crow era.

She resoundingly vanquished all the pretexts for bigotry (which nonetheless will survive us all), and persuasively rebuked the delusion that there are separate, uncrossable cultural lanes with operational exclusivity based on race.

Beejhy Barhany, an African-American immigrant from Ethiopia, was unknown until a few weeks ago, and is already consigned to the detritus of public memory because of indifference, or the bias of willful forgetfulness.

She was harassed and felt imperiled because of her religion and driven to close down her restaurant in Harlem. She said she was "demoralized and heartbroken that there are so many bigots out there."

Persecution, whether because of race or religion, emanates from the same hell broth. Their victims all self-identify as humanity and all of society should share that identification.