"Power Trip"

posted to www.marxmail.org on December 18, 2003

Now playing at the Film Forum in NYC and scheduled for national distribution over the next two months, Paul Devlin's "Power Trip" is an outstanding contribution to a growing body of films dealing with the globalization and neoliberalism onslaught. In contrast to "Life and Debt", a documentary on Jamaica's suffering, Devlin makes little attempt to cast his narrative in didactically black-and-white terms.

AES, the multinational energy company that is forcing the people of Georgia to pay electricity bills that amount to a month's salary, seems motivated by humanitarian goals rather than profit. Its principals, including a pony-tailed Piers Lewis, remind one more of volunteers with Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity than a greedy utility company. It is, of course, this disjunction between ideal and reality that makes the film interesting as well as an accurate portrayal of the capitalist system, for in the final analysis profits and people tend to clash.

In the opening scenes of the film we see angry crowds on the streets of Tbilisi reacting to the news that they will now have to pay for electricity for the first time ever. Under the Soviet Union, this was free. In the course of becoming liberated from totalitarian Communism, they would now have the freedom to earn as much money as the market would allow. By the same token, the market would dictate the price of electricity on a supply-and-demand basis.

Since there is very little demand for Georgian products on the world market, it is no surprise that the average wage comes to less than $75 per month. In fact the director of the still state-owned power dispatch company makes about that. AES was also free to charge what the market will bear, which came to about $25 per month. Imagine paying 1/3 of your monthly wage for electricity and you get an idea of what kind of anger hit the streets. As the camera follows an articulate Georgian woman through a local bazaar, a middle-aged man bursts on the scene and tells the documentary crew that the Americans are responsible for their misery. They should take their dollars and their credits and go home. He, like many Georgians, is apparently still susceptible to the musty charms of socialism.

If the marketplace is supposed to match buyer to seller, things have hardly gotten off the ground in Georgia. All around Tbilisi, apartment dwellers have strung cables from nearby transformers to their apartments with little regard for law or their own safety. We see the casualty of one such illegal tapping, a charred and bloodied corpse being dragged by his feet from a power shed.

Piers Lewis is in Georgia because he enjoys being an outsider. He spent some years in Central America before hooking up with AES. With his blend of management improvement techniques seemingly borrowed from the self-help shelves at Barnes and Noble and a kind of new-age missionary zeal for bringing light and warmth to a beleaguered people, he is both attractive and repellent. His immediate goal is to reduce delinquent accounts. Bill-collecting in his eyes is tantamount to feeding a hungry Ethiopian child.

In some ways, Piers Lewis reminds me of the sort of people who hooked up with Tecnica, a project I was involved with in the late 1980s. In 1989 the FBI visited the personnel offices of about a dozen of our returned volunteers and charged them with being involved with an espionage plot to run high-technology from Nicaragua into Cuba and then the USSR. It caused such an outcry that Nightline devoted a half-hour to Tecnica volunteers, including a young man about Lewis's age who was responsible for keeping the power lines in Managua going during the contra war.

Although Ben Linder was not a Tecnica volunteer, our volunteers--including Jamie Lewontin, the son of Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin--completed it after he was slain by Nicaraguan contras. Ben was an electrical engineer who believed passionately in the importance of electricity. Although he could have made much more money in the USA, he went to Nicaragua and worked for a pittance in order to build a small-scale hydroelectric dam in northern Nicaragua that would provide warmth and light to peasant families. I am sure that Piers Lewis and Ben Linder would have got along famously.

The CEO of AES was Dennis Bakke, who is shown in a photo shaking hands with Bill Clinton. He also keeps a photo of Mother Theresa on his office wall. After the AES board of directors grew impatient with red ink in Georgia, Bakke was let go. A 1999 Businessweek profile depicts him as a "reluctant capitalist":

Q: It sounds almost Marxist: empowering your workers and giving them the means of production.

A: You're not the first person to say that. I was in Brazil at a press conference and was talking about the purpose of the company. It happened to be just about the time of Mother Teresa's death, so I brought with me a picture of Mother Teresa to illustrate what I meant by serving. I put that picture up there, and flashbulbs were going off and the TV cameras were there and our people were like, "Oh no, what's the paper going to look like in the morning, what's the story going to be?" Sure enough there's a big story, a very positive story. Then there's this little sidebar. It's about me. It says, "Christian or Communist?" I said, "It's perfect!" It was great.

Here's another one: I was in China. I had dinner with a big Chinese business executive, a business guy in China, which isn't easy to find. So I'm going on about how we approach this thing, and he listened very carefully through an interpreter. Then he stopped and said, "You know, we have a word for all that. We call it communism." So I thought, "Well, communism isn't all bad."

full: http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_50/b3659121.htm

During the Q&A with Paul Devlin, a banker in the Film Forum audience who had been involved with the financing of AES spoke poignantly about how committed Dennis Bakke was to the poor and how grateful he was for the opportunity to raise money for his projects. He also said that he had the same kind of commitment himself and serves as a consultant to educational institutes in Africa that were teaching the natives the benefits of capitalism. This education would supposedly go along way to remedy the ill effects of a generation of state-owned enterprises that wasted money and suppressed entrepreneurial appetites.

The film concludes with a note that a Russian state-owned electricity company had assumed control over Georgian power after the collapse of AES.

"Power Trip" website: http://www.powertripthemovie.com/index2.html

Film schedule information: http://www.filmforum.com