Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

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.

About the Author: Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal advocacy and research work, including its amicus program. He works on a range of anti-monopoly topics, including antitrust law’s role in structuring energy and labor markets and promoting fair competition. From 2015 to 2018, he served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop rules on payday and title lending and debt collection practices. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Law & Policy Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yale Law Journal Forum.

If you’d like to purchase this title online and still support People’s Book, follow the link below:

https://bookshop.org/a/88548/9780226836386

This is an in-person event. Seated capacity at People’s Book is 50 patrons. Standing room is an option. All events are first-come, first-served seating. Accessible seating is always available.