As usual, it’s almost all and only about wealth and power. About the most protection for the public interest us and the public interest can expect from the MAGA party in congress is feeble virtue signaling. Special interests own and control the MAGA party. An article by tom’s Hardware, US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is ‘toothless’ and doesn’t do enough to protect citizens, makes the situation clear. MAGA politicians proposed a bill that makes it look like they want to protect consumers from costs of gigantic new data centers for AI. The proposed law, the Ratepayer Protection Act, was a bill designed to shield everyday Americans from rapidly rising electricity costs driven by data center buildouts nationwide.
How would the proposed bill to protect consumers from eating the costs of AI electricity demands? By imposing a federal standard for states and Public Utility Commissions that required regulators to consider whether entities that consume large amounts of electricity, such as data centers, should pay the incremental costs of energy infrastructure needed to serve them. MAGA politicians in the House and Senate proudly voted for the toothless bill, but Senate Dems opposed it. The bill died in the Senate because MAGA could not override a Dem veto. In line with special interest benefits, the proposed bill did not require any utility anywhere to do anything to protect consumers. It only required them to consider protecting consumers.
How this will probably play out
Given how sophisticated MAGA and allied special interest propaganda is, most consumers are probably gonna get whacked with big electricity rate increases disguised as something or anything other than charges for the AI industry and big corporate AI users to shift costs onto us so they can capture the cash. Absent enforceable rules to protect us, the cost burden will be allocated through opaque utility proceedings and tactics. We will not see an explicit line item labeled “AI subsidy” or cost. The new charges are likely to quietly appear as (1) bills paid later for infrastructure built against forecasts of future electricity demand, (2) higher base rates and delivery charges, (3) “grid-modernization” or reliability surcharges, (4) new generation and transmission investments characterized as serving the overall load growth, and/or (5) public subsidies and tax expenditures that reduce public revenue for schools, infrastructure, and services.
The bottom line for special interest before the public interest politics is predictable in our now fully corrupted pay-to-play political system. The added cost burden will very likely be diffuse, delayed, technical, hard for any individual household to trace to one firm or one project, and/or hard to impossible to understand. Meanwhile, benefits will be concentrated with utilities, hyperscalers**, big landowners, major contractors, and MAGA-connected developers.
** A hyperscaler is a technology company that operates enormous, globally distributed data-center networks and sells computing power, data storage, networking, and increasingly AI capacity on demand. The usual examples include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Companies like OpenAI are not yet hyperscalers.
Q1: Is it likely that (1) if passed, this bill would this bill have done nothing of substance because nothing stops regulators right now from considering consumer protections, and (2) this bill was only designed to make MAGA politicians in congress look good just before the midterms, so that they can win and continue screwing us for at least the next two years, if not forever?
Q2: Is is fair to say that MAGA politics is almost exclusively about a struggle about concentrating wealth and power with elites at the expense of the public interest?[1]
Footnote:
1. For better or worse, the public interest is a contested concept, arguably an essentially contested concept. Some people will sincerely believe that leaving electricity rates up to the free markets best serves the public interest. Others will disagree. In a democracy, reasonable compromise is supposed to deal with intractable disagreements like this. In authoritarian states, public opinion is mostly irrelevant. To MAGA’s authoritarianism, contrary public opinion is usually mostly irrelevant, unless it is election time. In election season, MAGA politicians try to deliver enough lip service about what we want to get elected or re-elected. The rest of the time, MAGA elites demagogue on us and deceive us to our endless detriment.
In politics, we usually don’t get what we want but we sometimes do get what we voted for.
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