By Richard E Walrath

If you live in Columbus, OH, you buy all your electricity from AEP.  Why?  There’s nobody else selling it. 

So guess what?  AEP is all for deregulation.  Why?  So they can bump up their prices.  Funny thing, where there’s competition, where consumers have different places to buy, you don’t hear the power companies talking about the need for deregulation. 

They’re happy as clams then with regulation, guaranteed rates, and, oh yes, subsidies would be just fine, too. 

When you hear the air filled with, "Let the market decide", you know business has the consumer by the throat.  

When the going gets tough and competition gets rough, you don’t hear so much about "the market" from the power companies, or the utilities, in general, or Big Business.