Democracy In Power A History Of Electrification In The United States 1st Edition Sandeep Vaheesan by Sandeep Vaheesan 9780226836386, 9780226836393, 022683638X, 0226836398 instant download after payment.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Sandeep Vaheesan is legal director of the Open Markets Institute. His popular writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New Republic, Atlantic, and Dissent.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Past

1. Wall Street Keeps Rural America in the Dark

2. Public Power Advances

3. A New Deal for Electricity

4. “Turning Our Darkness to Dawn”

Present

5. Grassroots Democracies?

6. Institutions Serving Two Masters

7. The Continued Dominance of Dirty Power

Promise

8. Our Economy to Make—and Remake

9. Public Power for the Entire Country

10. The Fights Ahead

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index