Cowboy capitalism, not bad weather, caused Texas disaster

People in Texas are freezing to death. The proximate cause of this human disaster is natural, an unusual weather event that has brought frigid temperatures to the U.S. Southwest. But the disaster in Texas is ultimately the consequence of the politics of power in the state and the power of free-for-all Texas-style capitalism.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, manages about 90% of the state’s power for 26 million customers. Texas’s reliance on ERCOT is part of the state’s penchant for deregulating everything and its reliance on the private sector to control and manage everything. Texas-style savage capitalism has contributed to many other recent disasters in the state. The lack of zoning in Houston made the toll of Hurricane Harvey worse than it would have been if land use planning had prevented the building of residential housing in a known flood plain. Prohibiting the location of hazardous industries adjacent to residential areas would have prevented the disaster that took place when one of those plants blew up and caught fire.

There were no immediate fatalities, but contemporary reporting indicated that “the fire is burning a chemical called butadiene, police said. The colorless gas is considered a health hazard. It is made from processing petroleum and is used to make synthetic rubber and plastics.” The long-term health consequences will not be known for years.

What makes it clear that cowboy capitalism is largely responsible for the Texas power debacle is that Oklahoma, which has experienced as cold or colder weather as Texas, avoided the dire human consequences that devastated Texas. Oklahoma cooperates on power with neighboring states and does not depend on a single private provider of power. As a result, CBS reports:

“Another winter storm in Oklahoma is bringing more snow and keeping temperatures below freezing. But less than 1% of Oklahoma electricity customers are without power compared to Texas, which has 25% of residents without power.”

The United States has the least regulated form of capitalism in the developed world—to avoid euphemism, the most savage form of capitalism—and Texas has the most free-for-all capitalism of any state in this country. That’s how hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. state with the biggest endowment of oil and natural gas in the nation end up freezing in their own homes, devoid of power, heat or water.

Cowboy capitalism, not weather, is the ultimate cause of the human disaster in Texas. ERCOT has known for years of the need to harden the power infrastructure to prevent just the kind of catastrophe that is now occurring. But weatherizing costs money and reduces profit so the industry did nothing. Political power and electrical power are interlocked to such an extent in Texas that they constitute a virtual conspiracy against the public interest.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was one of the architects of the go-it-alone, free-for-all power industry that has proved disastrous, said Texans would rather suffer days and days of hardship rather than let the federal government meddle in the Texas energy market.

Perry ran for President in 2016; a major part of his agenda was eliminating four departments of the federal government. In a debate he could only remember three out of the four he aimed to ax. It turned out to be the Energy Department. Donald Trump made Perry Secretary of Energy.

Rick Perry doesn’t know his own mind or his own political program. Who would trust him to speak for a vast, diverse, and rapidly changing state like Texas? That is especially true because the privileged like Perry and Senator Ted Cruz, who tried to avoid the disaster of his party’s own creation by jetting off to Cancun, are not the ones who suffer most from these kinds of events. They have the money to check into a warm hotel or hop on a plane bound for Miami or Cancun.

As for Greg Abbot, the current Republican governor, and another champion of cowboy capitalism, he bears significant responsibility for not only this fiasco but also the high Covid-19 death toll in Texas. Abbot was one of the leaders among the business-first GOP governors whose war against public health precautions amounted to an open-wide to the virus stance.

Lest I come across as beating up unfairly on Texas, Cowboy capitalism is just an extreme regional variety of what exists in many other states and, for the last three decades, in the whole country. In my state of Florida, cracker capitalism has led to similar outcomes: a free-for-all failed response to Covid-19; the deaths of several seniors in a nursing home in Broward County because the state legislature refused to require nursing home operators to maintain emergency power generators in a state with a huge frail elderly population dependent on oxygen and where hurricanes regularly knock out power during the hottest part of the year.

Like Abbot, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a Trump brownnoser who, like the former president, cares more about the health of business than the health of people.

We could compare death rates in Florida with rates in countries like South Korea, New Zealand, Iceland, and others who have put the lives of people first. That could be construed as unfair as those are countries with governments as opposed to Florida, where government is anathema to the Republican leaders of the state and business is king.

Let’s compare Florida with another state that has had a hard time taming the coronavirus, California:

The overall death rate in Florida (137 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents) is higher than in California (122) by more than 10 percent.

Moreover, the number of daily deaths in Florida has held steady at a record-high level for the past month; the corresponding number in California has declined by more than 35 percent.

The trends in Florida and California are moving in opposite directions. About 14 percent of COVID-19 tests in each state were coming back positive a month ago; today Florida’s positivity rate (about 7 percent) seems to have plateaued at a level about twice as high as California’s, which is at 3.5 percent and falling.

Apologists for DeSantis counter that sustaining a higher rate of COVID-19 death and transmission than California is a reasonable trade-off for keeping businesses and schools relatively open. That confirms my argument: Republicans care more about the survival of businesses than those of actual living, breathing human beings. In addition, DeSantis has played crude class and electoral politics with the vaccine by giving special access to two affluent zip codes in Manatee County called Lakewood Ranch that have a low Covid-19 rate and well connected Republican donors.

My own value system is diametrically different. A human life is unique, precious, and irreplaceable. A business is an enterprise by one or more people to make money. Business, especially small and medium-sized businesses, are essential to a productive, vibrant society. But if one of them goes under, especially one I patronize that provides especially good food or other necessary things, I will be sorry. But I won’t shed a tear. Only a human being merits the spilling of tears.