Editor's note: PA interviews Curly Cohen of the Affordable Power to the People coalition in Chicago, Illinois, which fights electricity shut-offs and price gouging.

PA: Can you talk about the coalition you are involved with?

CC: Affordable Power to the People came about because in the winter of 2000 people in Chicago started receiving their gas bills some of which were $1,200 a month. It was unbearable: they were getting $700 or $800 a month and had a $1,200 gas bill. There wasn’t a lot of room to go anywhere. The seniors were livid. A lot of the people had lived through the Depression and from their point of view, they just weren’t going to go into debt. They were absolutely aggressive about expressing their views. In fact, the whole city was in an uproar.



We focused our attention on trying to resolve the immediate problem and then look at a reasonable approach to energy costs or people’s basic utilities – gas and lights. So the seniors formed one part of the coalition. But there was a really interesting coalition between two sets of people. The other part of the coalition was immigrant workers. If you are an undocumented worker in Chicago there is a certain logic to being an invisible person because that way you don’t bring attention to yourself and have 'la migra' problems. All of a sudden not only did people decide to become visible – they also went out and very courageously stood up to the madness that was taking place.

One of the effects was to force the state, the city and the utility companies to give up about $8 million to solve people’s bills.

PA: Why were prices so high?

CC: It turns out to be a story that wasn’t uncovered until this past spring. The Illinois Commerce Commission is the only agency in the state that can actually order the gas and electric company. Most of the time it is in the pocket of the gas and electric company. There is a law that says that gas prices have to be prudent and to people’s benefit. In the winter of 2000, it turns out that Enron and the gas company in Chicago, People’s Energy (we never call it that), entered into a sinful partnership. By manipulating their on-paper supplies, they acted like they sold the winter supply, at a good profit. Then they said they had to buy. Now get this: they bought from themselves new gas at a rate that was about three times what people paid for gas up until that time. So if you paid between 33 and 36 cents a therm, which is how natural gas is measured, it went up to 93 cents.

PA: Was the Commerce Commission just looking the other way?

CC: Had they bothered to examine the issue closely, or had they bothered to do their sworn duty to protect the people of this city and state, they would have found it. But it took another group called Citizen’s Utility Board to actually dig up that Enron was a player in Chicago. At the very moment this happens, all of the sudden they were playing tapes on the radio of California Enron company people talking to each other about how they were screwing these old grandmothers on their electricity bills. In other words they created their own scare. So here’s Enron who is in a sense is dictating energy policy for the United States. Is there anything sicker?

PA: What was the response of the Chicago coalition?

CC: Even before Affordable Power to the People existed, we understood the problem. We knew that if energy was going to be fair and affordable, it has to be based on people’s income. A mother with one child in the city of Chicago is lucky if she would get $292 a month from public aid. If you’re a disabled worker on SSI, you’d get $564 a month. If let’s say you’re retired getting $600 a month, or loading trucks at UPS making $10 an hour to support people in your household, you’re still eligible for the light/heat program.

On the same day all these people get their bills, the mayor gets his bill. He makes $20,666 a month, but he pays exactly the same rate as the woman who gets $292. The president of the gas company gets about $388,000 a month, and he pays exactly the same rate as the mother who gets $292 pays. So there is something that’s just in your stomach that says this is so wrong, right? It’s sickening that that situation exists.

There is a program where people can apply for help because it is unfair and unaffordable. Some people call our phone and say, 'I’m an 89 year old, my gas is off. You might not reach me because I have to go to someone else’s house to take a bath because I have no hot water.' This is how we treat people? So people come in and they are forced to fill out an application on which they have to write their social security number eleven times on three pages. If it was fair and affordable to begin with, nobody would have to be there.

We want to pass a law that says customers pay based on their income. The average American pays five percent of their income for utility cost. We also know if you live in Section 8 or subsidized housing, they average in about five percent of your income for your utility costs and around 25 percent of your income for rent. So people can breathe because it is always based on what you get and not some artificial or speculative move. We want to pass a law that says if you are within this income, you would pay five percent of your income for the gas and electric service or the bill, which ever is lower.

A year ago [summer 2003] what blew us away was that 25,000 households with four to a household, that’s 100,000 people, were without utilities in the city. By September 1st 2003, there were 50,000 households that were shut off. So we fight and fight, and then on December 1st, it was down to 25,000. By December 13th, it was down to 13,000. 13,000 households had to go through winter with no heat. Unacceptable! Unfathomable to think that in the city of Chicago, we’re a freezing city for seven months out of the year.

PA: Why do you think working people and retired people have to work so hard to just get something as basic as utilities?

CC: It is an attack. If you live in Chicago and are a working family or a fixed-income senior, you’re an endangered species. The land is set up to be so artificially valuable. Million-dollar housing here? Are you nuts? We thought, 'That’ll never happen.' But sure enough, five years later here it is.

PA: High utility rates are a way to squeeze people out who aren’t going to make the real estate companies rich?

CC: The idea of stable neighborhoods is the worst nightmare for speculators because prices might stay reasonable for 25 or 30 years. There’s no buying, selling, construction, or demolition and people can stay in stable neighborhoods.



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