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Former Texas Mayor Accuses Winter Storm Victims Of ‘Looking For A Handout’
Texas has long represented a Wild West individualism that elevates personal freedom, and for the past week, residents’ freedom to freeze has been protected above all else.
The state’s prevailing Social Darwinism was expressed most succinctly by Tim Boyd, the now former Mayor of Colorado City. Boyd accused his constituents, that were trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity and drinkable water, of being the “lazy” products of a “socialist government”. The former mayor, being a devoted trump Nazi, then said, “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” and predicting “only the strong will survive and the weak will perish”.
Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America, most of them oil tycoons. Last week, the laissez-faire state energy market delivered a bonanza to oil and gas producers that managed to keep production going during the freeze. (For the trump Nazis, laissez-faire is defined as: abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market.)
It was “like hitting the jackpot”, boasted the president of Comstock Resources on an earnings call. Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, holds a majority of Comstock’s shares.
But most other Texans were marooned, and some did perish. But, like the trump Nazis say about COVID-19, “They would have probably died soon anyway.” Or some such conservative stupidity.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages, leaving thriving parts of Austin, Dallas, and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.
Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut down or restart.
In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off.
Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch, like last week, the wealthy check into hotels or leave town.
On Wednesday night, as millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun, Mexico for a family vacation. Upon their rapid return from “vacation”, Mrs. Cruz said, “Their Houston home was ‘FREEZING.’”
Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class considerably more than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.
Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and trump Nazis, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the Social Darwinian contest.
White grievance put the Republicans in power and helps keep the Republicans in power. The GOP’s control of the government guarantees they can protect their rich political contributors from the over 300 million “rabble” that might otherwise join to demand the basic needs. Basic needs which most Americans were taught were part of the American Dream. In Texas, the citizens’ needs such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power, can be quickly limited to those that live in the “affluent” sections of the state.
Despite the lower-income trump Nazis’ denial, they are no better off than Blacks and Latinos in Texas. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the percentage of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Also, Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average.
And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.
Last Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News and stupidly proclaimed, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”.
Naturally, trump’s Nazis believed Abbott’s every lie. However, the loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change. And regardless of the trump’s Nazis’ denial, climate change is only going to make events like this in Texas more frequent occurrences.
The oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change in Texas. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary, but it’s no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. So, for trump’s Nazis in the Lone Star state, you should consider it your patriotic duty to be always prepared to protect your freedom to freeze to death. But, always know, your deaths were also to protect your home states’ rights to forever be unprepared for any disaster.
‘Only the strong will survive’: Former Texas mayor accuses winter storm victims of ‘looking for a handout’ | News Break
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