Opinion — Play the Game. Vote for Public Service Commissioners.

Cash, by and large, really does rule everything around us. This is obvious to most people. If you go up to the average person, if they’re even willing to talk to you about politics, they’ll tell you that this is a country for the rich. That’s why today’s elections for Public Service Commissioner matter so much, even for the electorally ambivalent.

Georgia Power is selling us to the highest bidder. They’ve been one of the biggest lobbyists in Georgia for so long that a prominent journalist once quipped to me how nice it was that they let us name the state after them. And they need to be checked.

When is the juice worth the squeeze?

We know when an election is worth participating in when it helps us better understand our reality and the forces holding us back. It’s easy to get confused as to who’s really in charge sometimes, and reactionary and conservative forces exploit that to divide us.

Take, for example, the ruling structure of Atlanta, where elected officials appear to wield the power of the people. But rather than use democracy as their power source, they often turn, instead, to another fuel: capital.  

They turn to the old money and the corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation, like Georgia Power. What the controllers of those resources want to happen is what ends up happening. They want their communities to be taxed less—leaving the city struggling to repair decades of neglect to Black communities? Check. They want Cop City? Check. New Fulton County jail? Check.

At the same time, these corporations don’t want to be seen by the public as political actors. Which creates an interesting tension—how do you wield power while pretending you don’t possess it? 

To do that, you need people or institutions that won’t wield their actual power, but convincingly pretend like they do. In other words, what the masters of capital in the South call “The Atlanta Way”—or “The Houston Way” as was trial-ballooned in the New York Times recently. 

“The Atlanta Way” is the illusion of Black political power that Atlanta elites use to confuse, divide and suppress genuine community movements. Politicians launder corporate policies into the image of community power, even while those same corporations discriminate against residents. 

In this way, their greatest magic trick is also their cheapest. They don’t even get to be the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain. They settle for guarding the door to the Wizard’s chamber. In today’s election, you get the chance to jaw at the man himself.

The Public Service Commission and political reality

With the Public Service Commission, voters are taking the initiative to send a shot across the bow to Georgia Power—a company founded on old Atlanta money and government contracts. 

Its biggest shareholders are Vanguard Financial and BlackRock. Its biggest clients? Data centers, those warehouses of computers powering the drones used by the IDF to commit genocide and now, incidentally, are headquartered at Cop City.

Data centers have become such an industry boom that their expansion is basically propping up the appearance of growth for the entire U.S. economy. The largest tech billionaires and the biggest fossil fuel barons are joining forces to drive unprecedented energy infrastructure spending across the country. Why? Because all of that surveillance, artificial intelligence and financial speculation require massive amounts of electricity to power. And utility companies like Georgia Power are guaranteed profit from any big infrastructure projects they take on. It’s a match made in hell. 

As utilities begin building out the natural gas pipelines and power plants for these data centers, they have to ask the government to raise prices. No, seriously—they have to get approval for raising your bills. This is where the PSC comes in. Since 2023, Georgia Power has asked the Commission for six bill increases, totaling an average of $43/month for residential customers. The Public Service Commission said yes to every one of these. 

Analysis by PowerLines, a nonprofit tracking these figures nationally, shows utility rate increase requests and approvals total more than $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, more than double the $16 billion in requests and approvals over the same period in 2024.

For its part, Georgia Power plans to spend $35 billion in the next five years—money that commissioners are convinced won’t be charged to residents, like what happened with their last mega project, the nuclear Plant Vogtle outside of Augusta. Remember that $43 monthly increase? Most of that increase goes to pay for budget and labor overruns at Vogtle. Today, advocates are concerned that the buildout of methane pipelines and coal plants for the data centers will follow a similar path. 

And the company’s ability to do this, to build the infrastructure that will doom climate goals, make Minority Report-level surveillance possible, and further Meta’s campaign to rot the human brain, is made more likely by “captured” regulators. That’s what we call it when a regulator becomes a rubber stamp for the industry they regulate, which is a major problem in the utility industry here because there are very few guardrails against conflicts of interest.

Robert Baker, a Republican PSC commissioner from 1993 to 2011, told Canary Media in September that he thinks the current commission has failed to sufficiently push back on the utility’s plans.

“You’re dealing with a commission that basically rubber-stamps everything that comes its way from Georgia Power,” he said. 

And that’s the point. It’s not about any particular parties or politicians. It’s about who is really in charge. Politicians will try to divide Georgians with desperate appeals to racial and economic anxiety. Today, we have the chance to show that we won’t be distracted. 

Paul Glaze is a lifelong Georgian. He helped manage Daniel Blackman’s runoff campaign for Public Service Commissioner in 2020 and was the inaugural Communications Director for the GRO Fund. He lives in DeKalb County with his partner and child and is generally excited about Atlanta sports despite available evidence to the contrary.