The free-market proponents never rest – even after Texas. Their eternal credo: Eliminate the constrictive regulations strangling business, which will lead to cutting costs, which will result in more money in the pocket for citizens, politicians and CEO’s. A Goldilocks holiday. There’s really no downside, they always assert. The formula can’t miss, can it?
How many times have we gone through a disaster that we’ve just experienced with the Texas electric grid collapse? In reality, it was absolutely nuts to not have back-up electrical capacity in a state essentially built on plentiful and cheap power. Here we are in a heightened extreme weather environment all over the country that we’ll be dealing with for decades, at a minimum. Ah, the siren calls of cheap electricity: the politicians on the take from power companies tout the creation of a stand-alone grid, Texas version, and not spend one dime more to be part of a national one.
To Mr. Gripes, everyone’s complicit in this fiasco: the big-shot power companies who thrived on a de-regulatory environment, the politicians who set up the all-by-its-lonesome electric system and received shovelfuls of cash for doing so, and the average greedy consumer who only sees the prospect of a few more bucks every month in their pockets [yes, let’s admit it: the uninformed citizen always approves of any savings, and doesn’t think of future problems; he is not the hapless victim that the media portrays]. No redundancy of a viable grid necessary to protect the public meant much lower construction and protection costs, resulting in more money for everyone. Fantastic scheme, wasn’t it?
No it wasn’t. Whatever profits were created by the Texas model – as I said, dollars going into the pockets of consumers, politicians and CEOs – have been totally eliminated by the stunning cold and snow event earlier last month. And billions, billions more now will have to be spent to repair the system; with the late-to-the-party citizens now demanding back-up, as the new task becomes astronomically expensive. And guess who’s going to have to pay for all this? You got it: the dumb consumer, who’s going to have to pay through the nose. Next time, before another extreme climate event occurs, for once, you politicians should take possession of some foresight, and pay upfront for protection. The consumer-citizen, who a couple of months ago was gleeful over the ten or 11 bucks he saved each month, will be fleeced for years.
Mr. Gripes has been around for a long time. And he’s learned a thing or two on his bumpy journey. In my eyes, one lesson he’s been taught is immutable: free market economics never works in a complicated system like ours. Erasing regulations that oversee big business always means cutting corners on vigilance and protection, weakening basic performance over time. And, little by little, as once-rigorous standards weaken, just one calamity brings the whole flimsy structure down. [It happened in New Orleans with Katrina, and in New York, with Super storm Sandy, and let’s not forget the forlorn Enron Corporation.]
One last comment: the audacity of the engineers and politicians is breath-taking. To presume there’d be no weather catastrophe EVER that could leave 14 million residents without electricity and water for weeks is, on its face, criminal. Weather is no friend these days. Something horrific could occur at some point anywhere. Yet, no one – no one – raised sufficient alarm to assert that the elimination of back-up grids had a 100% chance to end in disaster. Not a soul. Human beings are so stupid sometimes.
Mr. Gripes sees a silver lining in the riot of January 6th, in which hundreds of Trump supporters overpowered the police’s security perimeter, poured into the Capitol, captured the Senate chamber, and ransacked the building, ultimately causing injury, death and the destruction of Congressional property. Utter mayhem and chaos.
The media had a field day afterwards, running video-tape loops of the invasion and the pitched battles between cop and invaders, incessantly insisting that American democracy was now ‘in shambles’, with the founding fathers metaphorically weeping amidst the end of the American democratic ‘experiment.’ The ‘shocking’ images of that day will cause our allies to abandon us, it was proclaimed, and the country’s reputation abroad will be soiled permanently.
Cable and network news operations have carried on in this hysterical fashion ever since January 6th. And, now in the past week, we’ve been warned that the Trump protesters are gearing up for another full-blown invasion of the Capitol in March when Biden speaks to Congress..
The hysteria never relents, it seems. If Mr. Gripes may usurp a current term bandied about by the Trump crazies, what’s operating here, I think, is nothing but the ‘deep state’ of television news. No, they’re not pushing right-wing ideology, but something much more mundane: the networks are promoting this line of hysterical coverage for one reason and one reason only: it can maintain high ratings for news shows, ever since Donald Trump, the ultimate lollipop gift to TV news, left for Florida. I think on some level we’re being fed ‘fake news.’
Come on, let’s calm down a bit. First piece of business: the Capitol will not ‘fall’ on the day in March Joe Biden delivers his ‘State of the Union’ speech to Congress. Washington DC will be an extraordinarily locked-down fortress that day, probably better fortified than any American air base in Iraq.
Second point: Our democracy and the primacy of the Constitution held steadfast during the post-election onslaught and during weeks afterwards: courts again and again refuted the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to individual states’ voting results, finding no improprieties, in essence certifying Biden’s victory. [Boy, were we fortunate: just imagine another four years of Trump!]
Another aspect of the January 6th invasion of the Capitol that hasn’t really been emphasized is the humiliating conduct of all the law-enforcement entities involved in securing Washington DC, the Capitol and the chambers of Congress. The forces on the premises were woefully undermanned, and there apparently was no sense of urgency once matters turned ugly -- everyone involved was mainly focused on protecting their own rear ends. Heads should have rolled. Not only that, but apparently there was no back-up planning, like reinforcement measures, if things started going south, as they did.
Every one of those law enforcement agencies – the FBI, the DC Metropolitan Police, the Capitol Police, even the National Guard – was asleep at the wheel [9-11, déjà vu, right?]. Sloppy, careless, unforgivable.
But that’s for another day: my point is that all these agencies were terribly embarrassed, and consequently now are going after the attackers with a vengeance, arresting them all over the country [280 at last count]. And that’s my point: if there were no riot on that day, the ultra-right affiliates – the Proud Boys, QAnon, Oath Keepers, etc. – would have remained concealed from public view. Now, I can only imagine the enormous pressure being exerted on these groups – their activities are no longer shielded from exposure, and the full force of American legal power is being utilized to round them up. From now on, these individuals and groups will never operate away from prying ‘eyes’, i.e., cameras, wire taps, infiltration, informants. The FBI and Justice Department are on to them finally, thank God.
Ironically, because of the January 6th mayhem, Americans and their country are likely safer today, and the ultra-right wing nut jobs much weaker.
Here we go again: the latest war cry of the Republican jackals is the new fear-mongering concept called ‘cancel culture.’ It’s become another cudgel to beat over the heads of the opposing party. And what is all this cancel culture nonsense about? If memory serves me correctly, a couple of years ago at Yale University, some students created a delineated ‘sanctuary’ area on the campus in which only political views that agree with their beliefs would be tolerated – all opposing opinions were not permitted in the prescribed area. If anyone disagreed, he or she would be rendered persona non grata, and ousted.
On its face, cancel culture is nothing but a thinly veiled version of totalitarianism: the ruling state rules, opposition is prohibited, and anyone who disagrees is not only ousted from the group, but ostracized as well. Strip the veil away, and you’re left with the murderous reigns of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and Iraq’s Khomeini.
For sure, the cancel culture idea, in a free country, is ridiculous, and down the road, dangerous. But what makes Mr. Gripes most angry about the issue is the manner in which the Republican Party accuses Democrats of pushing the issue of blanket cancellation. How dare they promulgate the false premise that Democrats are in league with backers of those Yale students, especially when one looks at the Republican version.
After all, 74% of Republicans across the country still do not accept the result of the recent Presidential election, and insist that it was illegitimate, even if not a scintilla of evidence to that effect has been produced. Talk about cancel culture. Republican office holders, who know damn well that Mr. Biden was elected fairly, assert the results of the past election should be cancelled, and Donald Trump be reinstalled as President.
Put another way, the crown jewel of our democracy, free and legitimate elections, should be jettisoned, only because Mr. Biden won. This comes from the mouths of politicians who then go out and excoriate Democrats for their pushing [another lie] the cancel culture movement.
The sheer size of that hypocrisy is staggering.
Mr. Gripes
By Jim Israel
March 1, 2021
