Powerful US utilities secretly fund ‘grassroots’ groups to sway cities away from switch to public power

They can pry my public power from my cold dead hands

This has been brutally obvious for well over two decades

The other similar issue is internet providers being locally owned in cooperatives. Many states have pre-empted municipalities from forming them, I think the feds have stepped on them before too, back in 2011 the democrats threw them under the bus to get an extension on UI benefits from the financial crisis, also making the Bush Tax Cuts permanent, all to get that crumb.

But we could just form benefit corporations to do it to get around such prohibitions and the resulting bad faith accusations of socialism that result from the right.

The other alternative are customer owned coops.