They’re right. This is totally Texas in a nutshell. Exhibit A for why I hate Texas. I have a problem with being told that I have to trust in their god. If I don’t trust in their god or accept their god as my god, I should leave.
This sign is 100% political posing. Christmas is a secular holiday, it is the requirement of the holiday being named Christmas and being placed on the calendar of a country that does not have an official religion. There is no controversy about the name of the holiday so it isn’t politically correct or incorrect to call it anything other than what the name of the holiday is. Don’t like it? Tough. That’s the way it is. That is the way that law works. The way that law is supposed to work, anyway. This is why there aren’t nativity scenes on public property unless there’s going to be every other kind of religious symbolism invited to sit right alongside it. The holiday isn’t about Jesus even though it’s named for the Catholic celebration of Christ’s birth. Christmas is officially the name of the secular solstice holiday in the United States and so call it Christmas and then explain it to the Trumpists as many times as it takes until it sinks in.
However, Texas is Trumpist land, which is why I hate Texas even though I still live here. Trumpists as a rule are prosperity gospel Christianists. They want us all to worship their capitalist god, even though that god can’t be the god that Jesus was talking about.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
If your imaginary friend (this guy you call god that rewards you with wealth for proper christian living) is not only invited to this party but is going to be put in charge of it; then I’d like to introduce you to my friend, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). The FSM doesn’t have a problem with anybody, not even you. The FSM doesn’t need to be worshiped or even acknowledged. The FSM doesn’t have a Hell because everyone gets to go to his heaven that is stocked with beer volcanos and robot hookers at your beck and call. The FSM would like to be in charge though, if it’s all the same to you. So let’s pit our two imaginary friends against each other and see which one of them recruits more followers. I’m betting it’s going to be the one offering free beer and hookers.
The national motto is “e pluribus unum” and not “in god we trust.” Why? Because the United States is a secular country. You can try and destroy our country, Trumpists, and make it into the country you think it should be, a Christian nation, but you will do it over the dead bodies of the majority of your countrymen. You should think about the odds of that effort being successful before heading any further down this road.
Trumpists don’t support the troops unless they are protecting other Trumpists, and then only as long as it doesn’t personally cost them anything to be respectful. If respecting means paying for their medical bills or helping them deal with mental health crisis or making sure that they have a place to sleep and food to eat, then Trumpists will pretend those troops weren’t the right kind of troops and so don’t have to be respected.
How do I know that the sign hanger was a Trumpist? No one but a Trumpist would think this stupid sign would mean anything in the first place. I’m owning the libs. Sure you are. Keep talking buddy.
More than two million people tried to cross the US-Mexico border in 2022, according to officials. They want to make this sound like a large number. It would be a large number, if these people were migrants and expected to go back and forth across the border each year.
These people are not migrants though, no matter how many talking heads call them migrants. They aren’t moving back and forth across the border several times a year, what migratory means. They aren’t just coming here because they want to move to America, what the word immigrant means. For the most part, these people don’t want to be here, they were forced to come here out of fear of where they were.
They are not immigrants beyond the fact that they want American protection from persecution (as foolish as believing that America will value the lives of refugees may be) and so want to become American citizens, with all the baggage that comes with being brown-skinned people in the original home of White Supremacy.
These people are refugees. That’s how you get two million people crossing a border into another country in a year. They are not invaders, drug runners or any other kind of criminal. They are poor, desperate people and we are using them as pawns in our political battles. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
Americans are outraged about the influx of refugees at the Southern border; at least, that is what Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP would like you to believe. They are betting on you being willing to torture poor refugee families in the name of your own security. That is the bet they are making in 2022. Will you do it? Will you go down to the border and use a cattle prod on these poor people in order to drive them back to their countries of origin, or will you be happy to allow the Texas and Mexican governments do your dirty work for you?
What needs to be done is to fix our amnesty rules, fix the injustices in Venezuela and Brazil and half a dozen other countries South of our border here in the United States. Injustices that we helped to create with decades of money to banana republics that we helped to create in the first place. South America is the way it is now largely because we made it that way, because it suited our corporations commodity-extracting needs. Now that these refugees from our policies show up on our door, we need to torture them some more? I think we’ve seen enough depravity now.
There isn’t a problem on the border that passing legislation that fixes the immigration system won’t address. That isn’t a presidential problem, that’s a @SenTedCruz problem.
The biggest problem with immigration is Republicans cowardice in dealing with immigration. @marcorubio is the poster child for this cowardice, scuttling his own bill in the face of grassroots Republican xenophobia.
These cowards have no room to complain now. We cannot just close the fucking border. That isn’t a possibility and these Senators have to know this. We need immigrants. They do most of the shit jobs in this country, so keeping them out hurts the Republican capitalist religion.
This self destructive bullshit fear mongering has to stop. There is blood on all Republicans hands now. The El Paso shooting, the Uvalde shooting, etcetera. Republicans created the environment where these events take place and so all of them are to blame for those deaths.
It sickens me that I am represented in the Senate by these cowards. That my governor is no better than a coyote exploiting the desperate people who show up at our border seeking help. That Republicans in Texas would encite this violence in their pursuit of power.
I will vote for anyone who has a workable humane solution to this problem that has festered since long before I was born. The problem for Republicans is that they don’t have any proposals that are humane and workable. Which means they won’t be getting any sympathy for from me.
The midterm elections are over. Texas has spoken; and Texas as a whole is every bit as xenophobic and racist as most of us liberals feared it was. Texas has re-elected not only the grandstanding demagogue that is Governor Greg Abbott, but they also re-elected the only Attorney General in the United States that was under felony indictment at the time of their election, Ken Paxton.
Texas has declared its intentions to flaunt the law and common decency for the extent of the foreseeable future, and so I think the United States should answer the declared intentions of the citizenry of Texas. If Texas thinks it can get by without the help of the United States, the federal government should kick out the props that keep the Texas economy afloat and see how well the state really does without that federal money.
There are many ways this can be done without harming the day to day life of the average Texan directly, and yet starving the criminal enterprise that is Texas state government under Greg Abbott and single-party Republican rule. I would start with the money that the federal government gives to Texas to cover the costs of border security and immigration.
The US government pays Texas to deal with immigrants and asylum seekers. This is the second largest income that Texas gets (21 billion in 2004 from the feds) it’s probably not enough given the drain that refugees exact on the governments who wind up sheltering them; but still, Texas is paid to deal with the refugee problem itself and not to spend that money shipping asylum seekers to other states and contractually gagging the contractors that are illegally transporting non-citizens across state lines. Not only should charges be brought against Greg Abbott and the transportation operator for the crime of moving non-citizens across state lines (basically, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are coyotes) but I think that the US government should go even farther and take back the money that Texas is misappropriating and put it to use in solving the problem.
The US and Mexico should just designate an area along the Texas-Mexico border as the place to go to apply for asylum, to apply for entry into the United States, the way that Ellis island was used a century ago. Some portion of Texas and some portion of Mexico should just be federalized and set aside to deal with this growing problem of amnesty and climate refugee status, some place large enough to house these people for as long as it takes to resolve their cases and find them permanent shelter somewhere else. Staff these new facilities with enough judges and US attorneys as well as beds and commissaries to house and feed the people that Texas just leaves out in the cold, pretending they don’t have the funds to fix the problem.
Stop paying Texas to play with the lives of the innocent victims of abusive governments we helped to create, stop paying Texas to keep out migrant labor that the rest of the country needs. It’s time to meet Greg Abbott on the hill he has chosen to die on, politically. If he wants to ally with the White Nationalists and xenophobes that back Trump today, he’s going to have to do so at the cost of Texas land itself and Texas’ economic prosperity.
I had taken off early from work to go get my children from school. It had been a fairly hectic day and I was frazzled and the traffic was the usual Austin stop and go parking lot all the way across town to pick up my daughter from her school. Then I drove back across town through the same traffic to pick up my son from his day care.
We had all just gotten back in the car. I had strapped my son in the child seat, made sure my daughter was buckled into the passenger seat and gotten in the car myself. Visions of which kind of food we’d get on the way home were being discussed when the world came unstuck and started to spin around my head.
I had nothing to alleviate the rotational vertigo with me in the car. I really had no idea how to treat it other than to hug the toilet and throw up until it passed. I couldn’t do either of those things because we were miles away from home. I didn’t have a cellphone at the time because we couldn’t afford one. The school was closed and the teachers had all gone home.
So we waited. It was summer in Texas so we sat there with the engine running in the car and the air conditioner blowing full blast on my face while I stared fixedly at a screw head in the interior finish of my car. This went on for about two hours.
After that time, with little let up in the vertigo and no convenient police cars to flag down, I got my daughter to play lookout for me. I would creep forward to an intersection and wait for her to tell me it was clear. Luckily there was little traffic on the side roads between where we were and where the house was, so I just went block by block until we got back to the house, where I promptly went to the bathroom and started throwing up.
A friend bought a cellphone for me the next day and demanded I allow her to pay for it. I started carrying meclizine around with me. When that proved to not be enough I got valium and promethazine and had to use them and the cellphone pretty regularly to keep the nausea to a minimum and to call people to get me home. Get my children home. Then I stopped working and things got a lot easier to deal with even if paying for them got quite a bit harder.
I’ll never forget that day, though. How helpless I felt. How dreadfully wrong everything could have gone. It is probably one of those scarring events that keeps me from doing things to this day, and that day was about twenty years ago.
Homelessness is a social failure. When your fellow citizens have nowhere else to sleep and so sleep in the streets, this says more about you and the people with someplace to sleep than it does about the poor person who just couldn’t get it all together that month and lost their home. Debt snowballs fast when you live paycheck to paycheck. Before you know it they are putting your stuff in the street and changing the locks on the doors that used to be yours, and you wonder how all that debt piled up that quickly.
Just like that, you are homeless. You were a respectable upstanding citizen with an address before the eviction, and after the eviction you don’t exist. Maintaining an address is the baseline for receiving any assistance. If you don’t have an address, the government can’t and won’t help you. Those are just the facts, especially in Texas. Homeless people die every day on the streets of American cities and no one notices their deaths unless it’s a slow news day and so the homeless death notices reach the evening news. The poor, overworked cops who check the scene for evidence of wrongdoing, the workers at the city morgue who take possession of the remains when there is no known next of kin. They’ll notice, but there is little they can do all by themselves.
…and the only thing that separates you from those lowly, unmourned, unwashed street people is the ability to name your home address and prove that you live there. What would you do if you couldn’t go home to comfort every night? Scary to contemplate, isn’t it? That is life for a lot more Americans than most of us are willing to accept.
When I first listened to the On The Media series on eviction, The Scarlet E, I really couldn’t see myself needing to reference the series. I mean, I’ve never been evicted (knock on wood) I don’t have any first hand knowledge about the subject, it would be presumptuous of me to write anything of length about a subject that I hadn’t experienced personally or hadn’t researched thoroughly, and I wasn’t planning on doing either of those things anytime in the near future.
Then, as most things in life happen, I was reminded of design ideas that I have worked on since homelessness started to be a problem I noticed back in the 1990’s. The city of Austin is drowning in homeless people these days, people who were evicted from housing in Austin that now live on the streets of Austin. Any longtime resident that is paying attention to how housing prices have inflated over the last few decades should not be surprised by this. Housing prices have doubled and quadrupled while wages have remained essentially stagnant. This is a recipe for disaster, and that disaster is now sleeping on the streets of Austin.
Donald Trump tried to criminalize homelessness. Anyone who thinks that law and order will put things back to the way they were (as if the hippies of the 70s were known for their adherence to law and order) needs to understand why we are having the problems we currently have. We cannot jail our way out of this problem, and we cannot expand our way out of this problem either.
What is needed is a countrywide if not continental or worldwide resolution to see that everyone has a home and a bed and decent food. Until we undertake that effort then we will continue to trip over the homeless in our streets. It is a mark of the failings of our economic system that they are in the street in the first place.
The place to start when addressing a homeless problem is to find the right sites to put transition shelters in. You can’t just hide these people and places away, put them out on the edges of society and shun them. We tried that with the State Schools in Texas that were disbanded during the Reagan administration. That was how we handled this problem before and it didn’t work then. I don’t see how doing it again will change the outcome.
The site(s) should be near where the homeless congregate already. Many of the overpasses they sleep under could easily be repurposed into transition shelters. These aren’t ideal locations; but in a crowded city they represent the scarcest commodity of all, under-utilized real estate; which is why the homeless congregate there in the first place. An ideal location would be a large open field near a river. Historically the kind of place that humans have been attracted to.
The transition shelters need to not look like or feel like prisons. No fencing, especially no chain link fencing. No visible guards or towers or patrols. A significant number of homeless people have mental illness problems that being out in nature soothes. The kinds of problems that feeling penned up just makes worse. So don’t pen them up.
The residents of the shelter should be entrusted to do most of the work required to run the shelter. Growing and cooking food, cleaning, etcetera. They are not children and should not be treated as children (children shouldn’t be treated as children either, but that is a different subject entirely) this part of the effort will require the input of metal health experts. These experts should be included in every part of the design process for the transition shelters if we want to avoid repeating previous failed attempts at dealing with homelessness.
The problem with homelessness goes deeper than this though. It goes to the heart of our own misconceptions about what an ideal home is. The single family residence is a pipe dream that has never been attainable for most people and would be catastrophic to the environment if we attempted to give every family their own residence with a landscaped yard and two cars in the driveway. We have to get away from these unattainable dreams and start dealing with concretes.
How much space does one person need?
How much confidence/comfort is required to make a person feel at home where they live?
Government so small it could fit inside a woman’s uterus.
Texas has a woman problem. There is no other way to describe it. Texas is misogynist beyond all proportion. You want proof? Texas is the first state to make prostitution a felony. A felony for selling sex? The hypocrisy of Texas Republicans knows no bounds. They preach about liberty and freedom constantly, and then turn around and pass draconian laws to attempt to force women back into subservience to men. The only liberty that Texas Republicans think matters is the liberty of white men. This has always been true of Texas, the state was founded on it.
Texas leading the charge to make abortion illegal should therefore not be a surprise to anyone paying attention. The drive to make abortion illegal is also contrary to ideas about liberty. Women’s liberty, anyway:
If I was a murderer then it would be child’s play to instruct the people who matter in these kinds of situations, the people who learn from the experience of the fucker in the phrase fuck around and find out. I’m not a murderer, and therefore abortion is not murder, but then most things in life are not as simple as they might seem on the surface.
If I were a murderer, thought that murder was acceptable, it would be child’s play to set up a situation where the target of my ire expired and either vanished or seemed to die of natural causes. Nearly half of US murders go unsolved today. These are real murders of real people, not the fantasies of anti-abortionists who see people who don’t exist.
Real people who are dead or just missing, and these statistics don’t include the people that no one notices went missing in the first place. So, yeah. If you really think the person you’re talking to is a murder, it would be better to keep quiet and let that sleeping dog lie than it would be to tell them that you’re onto them. They might decide it was in their interest to make you disappear. Just a friendly reminder.
Abortion isn’t murder; not because I’m not a murder, but because there is no person there to be murdered. The above linked article explains why a fetus doesn’t meet the high bar required to demonstrate the existence of a unique human life. Read it if the caution about accusing people of murder doesn’t sway you into keeping quiet about your delusions.
I do understand where anti-abortionists are coming from when they say that abortion is murder. Where they think they are coming from when they try to adopt the label pro-life, and then fail utterly at being pro-life. I have two children of my own. When I say that people who oppose abortion fail to grasp objectivity on this subject, I do this with my own subjective, anecdotal experience with my own children to back me up.
Read the rest of it if you want to know why abortion is necessary.
Postscript
Texas is not alone in its woman problem, the United States and possibly the entire world outside of the European Union has a woman problem. However, the United States has just volunteered to illustrate the problem for everyone else. Maybe the rest of the world will learn from the lesson that US women will now teach to US men. Hope springs eternal.
The above was first published as a revised opening section of the linked abortion article. As usual with changes made in the heat of the moment, the changes were ill-conceived and required abortion. Err, required their own article and not be the brash opening of an article that I routinely use as a reference for the subject of abortion. So here they are in their new home, made with the modest investment of a few minutes of effort and no money down. Exactly like the beginnings of the vast majority of lives currently being lived on this planet. Beginnings are cheap and easy. Maintenance is expensive and time consuming.
I ran across a question from some Brits who were going to be driving from Houston to Austin on Reddit. They wanted to know about bars being open, and anything specifically to do on the drive between Houston and Austin. Having only been that way once or twice, I have little to say about the span of distance between those two cities.
The bars in Texas are open. All of Texas is open because our Governor wants to make his Trumpist base believe that he agrees with the lies told by the former President and his supporters. That COVID is a hoax and we don’t need to be vaccinated or worry about anything except what scam cure for the hoax (explain that one) they are supposed to buy this week.
My advice to foreigners coming to Texas? If you have to come, get vaccinated and wear a mask. I’d pick a better vacation spot if I were you though.
In the comments that followed there were dozens of people offering up various eateries all over the state, most of it ethnic food. I’ve always found this tendency to be quite humorous. “What’s the best thing in my city? Something brought here from another place.”
People who live in an area routinely think that the best thing in the area is the thing that isn’t from there (Like suggesting getting Kolaches or other ethnic food that is widely available in Texas) If you can get brisket every day (the staple food of Texas) brisket isn’t the thing that you suggest others eat. A tourist sees things differently. This is why I try to think of the things I would do while visiting a strange place, and then find those kinds of things around me. Things that have merged into the background noise for residents.
Knowing what people who don’t live in Texas might find interesting while visiting Texas is the foundation of at least one person’s fame and livelihood:
However, I have traveled in Texas myself and I have a particular bent towards the kinds of things that I think visitors might overlook. I drove between Austin and San Angelo for years, and the Texas forts trail was always worth the time following when I had the time to devote to it. Fort Concho in San Angelo has Christmas events. Usually.
As someone with architectural/archeological interests that sort of thing is fascinating to me. I stop at roadside markers and explore almost any abandoned structure that I can access from the road. I’ve found neglected churches, abandoned schools and country courthouses just driving down old roads looking for places to explore, when I’ve been required to travel long distance through unfamiliar country.
When I have guests in Austin I always take them to tour the Texas Capitol complex. I don’t know if it’s open now with COVID, but the historical tour combined with the modern underground expansion is a unique bit of architecture to experience. The same goes for shopping at the Domain or visiting the new stadium for the soccer team. Driving out to the F1 track. If you are from Austin you probably never want to go to these places. If you aren’t then it’s probably something that you might find interesting.
After all of that you will want food. The Salt Lick is where most people go or know about if they think about Austin and brisket. When I worked downtown I would walk over to Franklin‘s or the Ironworks. I haven’t been there in years, but both places are still in business so they probably don’t suck as places to go to eat. Places that serve brisket in Texas have to be good if they want to stay in business.
Etenesh Mersha, 46, meanwhile, made a fateful decision, one repeated by scores of Texas residents who lost electricity that week. Desperate to warm up, she went into their attached garage and turned the key to start her car. As the engine hummed, it provided power to run the car’s heater and charge her phone while she talked to a friend in Colorado — at the same time, filling her garage and home with a poisonous gas.
The number of deaths from the Winter storm that passed through Texas and the rest of the nation back in February is almost certainly an undercount. There were 86 deaths that occurred in Travis county in that timeframe, and yet only twelve deaths are claimed as storm-related. I simply don’t accept the number as reported by Republican controlled Texas state agencies.
I find it hard to believe that so many people died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because I was almost killed by carbon monoxide poisoning when I was night stocking at the Piggly Wiggly in San Angelo. They had decided to remodel the store, and they were running gas-powered concrete saws to cut in new refrigerant lines to the new display cases. They didn’t want people to just walk into the store at night, so they locked all the doors and started up the saws. They couldn’t figure out why we all got headaches and had to go home.
Maybe it is because the heat exchanger on our upstairs furnace leaked due to the previous owner welding a crack in the furnace rather than replacing it. We almost died that time as well, until I noticed that I was having the same symptoms that I had when they were cutting the floors that time in the 80’s.
American media is replete with stories about people committing suicide by sitting in their cars in an enclosed garage. I have a hard time believing that most people hadn’t been exposed to the knowledge that carbon monoxide is a killer and that you shouldn’t burn fossil fuels in an enclosed space because of carbon monoxide buildup. Then I remember my own near-misses with the gas, and I am thankful that we put carbon monoxide sensors up in the house after we found out about the leaky heat exchanger.
Knowledge is power. Even this latest winter storm reveals this fact. Knowing the facts about the machines you use and their effects on your environment will keep you from dying. You certainly can’t rely on your government to tell you these things, especially not in Texas.
Lawmakers this year are considering a broader modernization of state building codes that is unrelated to February’s storm. If the measure passes, it would require carbon monoxide alarms in some new homes and apartments, but not those built or renovated before 2022. And it would allow local governments to opt out.
The district went Trump +3 in 2020. Who was dumb enough to think it would go Democratic? That it would go Democratic without the DCCC taking an interest in the race? Every seat in Texas is rigged for Republicans. Rigged. They cheated a decade ago and they’ve yet to be punished for this transgression. That is the fact that you should takeaway from the election. The panel says a lot of stuff about the election and what that means to the nation, stuff that really shouldn’t be applied broadly. Texas Republicans are not like Republicans in other states. Texas politics is not like politics in other states.
As far as the opening segment on the census goes, the states didn’t choose to undercount. Donald Trump chose to undercount while appealing to his White Nationalist base. The real question there is “why did Trump pick up Latino votes in 2020?” I will bet you that this is because a certain portion of the Latino community thought that Trump was talking to them. They don’t know that he’s talking about them when he talks about illegal votes. They are all illegal voters in Trump’s eyes and Trumpist eyes. They need to understand this fact about Trumpismo.
The Republican base has committed political suicide with their support for Trump. The corpse of the Republican party simply hasn’t stopped twitching yet. Give it time. Eventually rigor mortis will set in. I hope.
“This is Bonnie and Clyde,” said Will Whisennand, who oversees care of the mammals at the Austin Aquarium, as he walked into the otter exhibit. “They squeak when they’re happy. They squeak when they’re sad, when they’re excited, when they’re hungry. They’re always squeaking.”
I haven’t been able to hug friends and family for over a year now. When I finally get to hug them again, I’ll be making noises much like that otter is making in the video. There will probably be tears, too.
there were many factors that went into creating the energy disaster with which Texans are now dealing. But at least in one respect, the problems in Texas are a product of an approach to the energy business that Lone Star State companies like Enron pursued at the end of the 20th century.
Ken Lay was George Bush’s best friend, back when George Bush was governor of Texas. That was what Ken Lay would tell you, if he was still alive today. The story is more slanted now that Ken Lay has been convicted of felony crimes and his flagship business, Enron, went bankrupt and took $40 billion dollars and the fortunes of thousands with it. Also, Ken Lay is conveniently dead of natural causes, so it is easy to blame him for all of the greed that was behind the drive to deregulate the energy sector in the United States.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (book) (movie)
It is because of Ken Lay’s friendship with Governor and then President Bush that the Texas and California electrical grids ended up being the mess that they are today. It’s just taken longer for Texas’ grid to fall apart than it did California’s, which has been on the ropes since Enron arranged for it to start suffering rolling blackouts back at the turn of the century.
I watched/read The Smartest Guys in the Room when the movie/book came out back in 2005. The story itself was just another nail in the coffin of my belief in market solutions, the death of my libertarian delusions. Every time that the fraudsters finally convince someone in authority to deregulate, it doesn’t take long to prove that government regulation had been there for a very good reason after all. Enron bought energy companies and then created energy markets for their power to be sold on. That was what those regulations stood in the way of, huge profits on Wall Street.
One of the last acts of desperation in the failing business that Enron became after its meteoric rise on the stock market was to turn off power generation in California’s electrical market in order to drive up the price of electricity and put money in the pockets of Enron executives and traders. Enron created rolling blackouts on purpose in order to profit from the suffering of California citizens. One of the last acts of desperation of the Texas Public Utility Commision during the recent winter storm was to set the price of electricity high enough on the Texas market to inspire power generators to turn on their excess capacity and flood the Texas power grid in their time of need. It’s just too bad that there wasn’t any capacity to be had because the power generators hadn’t bothered to insure against freezing by weatherizing their supply systems. Just too bad that electric energy generators and their investors were more interested in profiting off of the suffering of Texas citizens than they were in spending money weatherizing against winter storms that they hoped would never show up, but still manage to show up about every ten years anyway.
Millions lost power. Hundreds died. How did this happen? KUT’s Mose Buchele explores what happened during the worst blackout in Texas history, how we got the electric grid we have today and what could be done to fix it.
Shares of Macquarie rose 3.4% in Sydney on Monday after the company raised its profit outlook. They are now down 2.8% over the past 12 months.
One customer told the Dallas Morning News that his electric bill for five days stood at $5,000, the amount he would normally pay for several years of power. Another told the Dallas-Fort Worth NBC affiliate that he had been charged more than $16,000 for February.
It is also too bad that Texas’ hostility to federal regulation caused it to seek an isolated grid through ERCOT, which meant that most of Texas went without power when it’s isolated grid went down and no one could send it power to keep it afloat. Unless you were lucky and lived around El Paso, which (along with Amarillo and the panhandle) are not under ERCOT and consequently only saw minor interruptions in service.
This is what happens when you make the essentials for survival into profit-driven commodities; commodities that no one can understand how to profit from unless they are scarce enough to drive demand over available supply. When there is more demand than there is supply of the essentials some people won’t survive. The death toll across Texas due to the winter storm and resulting power outages is still unknown but is likely to be well over 100 people, and a bank in Australia made 200 million off of those deaths.
Texas is misnamed. Texas (tejas) supposedly means friend or ally. Nothing could be further from the truth than seeing Texas as your friend or ally. That is the ploy of the confidence man, the demand to trust him even though he seems to be oilier than all get out. The Texas mascot should be the irresponsible teen who wants to shirk all the day long because he can. It should be the grasshopper that whiles the summer away instead of storing food for the winter. Like the grasshopper and the irresponsible teen, Texas is always unprepared for adversity because of these infantile behavior patterns. Texas is a great place to be young and healthy, because there are no worries about tomorrow here, and no requirement to save anything for that day of need. Texas is a horrible place to be old or sick in because there is no place to go when you reach your hour of need. No allowance for the slackers that we pretend to be fond of, but throw out in the cold the minute that things get tough.
The true beneficiary of Texas largesse is the corporate raider, the false priest, the con artist. Texas is made for thieves. Personal and corporate greed are rewarded here, rewarded more highly than any human virtue. Just look at Ken Lay. He understood what Texas was for. He rode that pony hard and put it up wet counting on not being there when the tax man came for his cut. He died a millionaire, of the diseases of old age he could have avoided if he had straightened up and flown right. Why bother? No one gets out of this life alive.
The Enron legacy is ERCOT and every other Texas boondoggle ever hatched. Every scheme that amounted to nothing more than stealing from public coffers and crafting a golden parachute for yourself. If we had those billions that Enron stole from us, that the deregulation scheme stole from us, we wouldn’t need to go without water or power, the average Austinite wouldn’t have to be out there hand-delivering necessities to people on the verge of death during a pandemic. This lunacy has to stop. The question is, will we pay attention long enough to make it stop?
They don’t go into the facts of Texas’ continued reliance on power systems that were set up for Enron to make profits from. The fact that power systems in all areas where Enron was active are still suffering from the after effects of Enron’s malfeasance.
Governor Greg Abbott made off like a bandit after the legislative session that did not fix the Texas power grid, but not nearly as much of a bandit as one of the owners of Texas’ power generation facilities:
Winter Storm Uri cost us an estimated $293 billion in damages and some estimates put the actual death toll closer to 700. Nearly 5 million Texans lost power; many more went days without water. Remember?
One Texan who hasn’t forgotten is Dallas resident Kelcy Warren, although not because he worried that he and his family were in any danger. Warren, co-founder and now executive chairman of Energy Transfer Partners, lives in a 27,000-square-foot ivy-covered stone castle on nine acres in North Dallas. He bought his humble abode in 2009 for a reported $29 million. We can imagine that the heat stayed on in the Warren manse (or perhaps the family repaired to its private island off the coast of Honduras.)
What the pipeline tycoon remembers, we suspect, is not the nearly $300 billion that the storm cost Texas. It’s the figure $2.4 billion. As Justin Miller reports in the current issue of the Texas Observer, that’s the profit Warren’s company collected during the blackouts, a sizable portion of the $11 billion profit the natural gas industry as a whole collected by, in Miller’s words, “selling fuel at unprecedented prices to desperate power generators and utilities during the state’s energy crisis.”
Warren, a hefty donor over the years to former Gov. Rick Perry, former President Donald Trump and other Republicans, made sure that Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t forget either.
On June 23, Warren wrote out a check to Abbott’s reelection campaign in the amount of $1 million. That’s the biggest check Warren has ever given a Texas politician, according to campaign finance reports. And it’s four times the usual $250,000 gift that Abbott has gotten from his reliable Dallas benefactor nearly every year since he was elected governor in 2014.
This is the Enron legacy, in spades. This is what the for-profit power generation scheme that Ken Lay wanted put in place is there for. It is there to make billions of dollars for people who control access to the power of the state. We are fools to continue to allow this fraud to continue at our expense, at the possible cost of our own lives. If you vote for Republicans in Texas, you are the biggest fool of all.
