Though seemingly impossible from the seat in his wheelchair, governor Greg Abbott has been doing the Texas Side Step now going on two weeks since the days-long massive power failure and other cascading events, including the failure of water systems throughout the state.  He’s blaming everyone but himself, backed up by a chorus of other conservative Republican libertarian politicians.

Let’s again place blame where the responsibility for this catastrophe actually lay – in the laps of every statewide and legislative politician who has served at any time during the last 25 years.  Late last week, Texas Monthly laid out the history of power deregulation in Texas and the disaster it predictably precipitated.  Not only is Texas an island unto itself when it comes to power, this island is less reliable, AND Texans get to pay more for that privilege.

The fallout from this disaster is an open wound to Texas voters, even as Abbott has shot a few hostages and is now urging the state to “move on”.  He’s urging an investigation into ERCOT, the state’s grid manager, but has ignored the actual problem – him, the two previous governors, Perry and GWB, and the state legislature that has had a single party death grip on power for 19 years in the House and 25 years in the Senate.  Even after calls for tightening regulations after the 2011 and 2017 blackouts, the legislature, under conservative Republican libertarian leadership let every single bill mandating standards and winterizing to die in committee, just so no conservative Republican libertarian would have been forced to vote against it.  And Abbott has now blamed everyone but himself and the cronies he installed at the real problem, the Texas PUC.

This is the point of conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism power – you get all the perks, but don’t take responsibility when something goes wrong.  Here are some other really clear examples of conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism that has gripped our state and federal government now for decades: 1) The US Senate and House delegating their Constitutional trade authority to the president; 2) Delegating acts of war to the President (Patriot Act, and others); 3) Pushing the responsibility of care for the mentally ill to the states, but unfunded (Reagan); 4) Privatizing (prisons, air traffic functions, military support functions, and numerous other functions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars per year; 5) Failing to address the Coronavirus pandemic; 6) Delegating all pandemic response to the states (unfunded).  It goes on and on.  Even conservative Repubulican libertarian Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared this last weekend that he believes NO vaccine distribution plan for his state is best.  You see, if you don’t make a decision, you can’t get blamed.

Conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism works great until it doesn’t.  This is not a matter of ideology here; this is the difference between people who believe in government and those who don’t.  We have now had a state controlled for two and a half decades by those who don’t believe in a functioning government, and the results are not pretty.

Will freezing Texans in the dark for days change votes?  One would only hope.

Just as we figured, the Texas Power Scandal is growing, and it’s going to be as bad as we feared.  It turns out that the Abbott appointees to the PUC have been systematically undoing safety and reliability protocols put in place after the 2011 power grid failure.  In November of last year, the PUC unilaterally canceled the contract with the Texas Reliability Entity, the outside entity which had been monitoring compliance of Texas power grid since the FERC delegated congressional authority to a private non-profit corporation to monitor the national grid.  No entity replaced Texas RE, so no one was minding the store on compliance, winterizing, and reliability.

Even worse, the previous July, the PUC disbanded the Oversight and Enforcement Division, firing it’s chief attorney and reassigning the rest of the staff within the agency.  This committee had been charged with overseeing power providers’ operations and enforcing safety and reliability rules.

So, Greg Abbott, whose appointees had dismantled the PUC’s safety and compliance functions of Texas power producers, is now calling for heads to roll – the heads that he appointed himself.  I think he can start the rolling with his own.

When GWB and other “free market” politicians were pushing deregulation of power markets back in the 1990s, “competition” and “low prices” were the most used words by them and other propagandists to get the bill passed and overcome the fears of consumers at the change.  Two decades later, those lies have been exposed for what they are, lies.  I’ve suspected it for years, but have never really dug into the numbers to prove it.  That liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal, did that digging for us, and published the results.  AND, those results will piss you off like it did me.  I hope you’re sitting down – Since 2004, Texas power consumers forced to buy from retailers have overpaid by $28 BILLION than if we had just stayed regulated.

That’s right; not only did we hand our power grid over to unregulated operators that has led to several major power outages including the one last week where the body count is now 80, we’ve paid extra for the privilege.

Republicans Libertarians have two answers to every problem: cut taxes, and privatize.  As we’ve talked about before, when you only have a hammer in your tool box, every problem looks like a nail.  As we’ve learned with many other services, including health insurance, prisons and military functions, privatizing costs more, provides worse service, and endangers lives when you insert profits into the equation.  We were infected with the disease of privatizing by Reagan when he blamed government for all ills.  He is the one who kicked off the now 4 decades long disassembly of our social safety nets putting millions of Americans at risk and costing hundreds of billions of our dollars.

Even with calls for reform and Abbott’s hostage video last night, the propaganda of “free markets” has been embedded in conservatives’ Libertarians’ DNA and I fear that the misinformation is so pervasive that even this failure will be swept under the rug like all the others and the “reform” will be a little nibbling around the edges keeping the profits in place and keeping Texans’ wellbeing at risk as politicians kick the can down the road.  After all, these are the clowns who say it’s OK for a gun nut to shop at Kroger for this weekly supply of Twinkies with an AR-15 strapped to his chest.  How can we expect them to actually fix a system whose beneficiaries pours millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of those who protect them?

Right now, I’m typing this on my iPad sitting in front of my fireplace in my house with no power, no heat, frozen pipes in one bathroom and wearing the warmest sweater I own.  I’m one of those 60% of  Houstonians who got randomly picked to not have power this week because some idiot arbitrarily made that decision. Oh, and yes, my next door neighbor does have power.  If you don’t have power and are looking for someone to blame for that condition, I have one question for you.  Who do you vote for on Election Day?  If your answer is Republicans, then my answer is to light a candle, walk into your iced up bathroom, hold up the candle to the mirror and look.  The person in the mirror is who’s responsible for you freezing in the dark.

There are three major power systems in the US – the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and…wait for it…Texas.  Why?  Texas didn’t want those big, bad, federal bureaucrats telling it what to do.  It’s been that way all the way back to WWII after the Federal Power Act was signed to provide regulation for interstate power transmission between states.  Under that act, all power that is transmitted over state lines had to conform with federal regulations for safety, measurement, and pricing.  Texas said no thanks to that, preferring to keep everything intrastate and telling surrounding states to kiss our big red butt.   The big NY blackout in 1962 provided more impetus for Texas to emphasize that independence, forming ERCOT in 1965.  Ironically, that acronym stands for Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is most certainly not.

During the deregulation craze of the late ‘90s, the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) issued several rules, including Rule 2000, which provided for the deregulation of the production, transmission, trading, and selling of electricity.  ERCOT took that opportunity to go full “free market” becoming a hub for trading, selling, and buying electricity, designing a system that brought IPPs (independent power producers), local utilities, and industrial customers together.  The problem?  No one was put in charge or held accountable for reliability.  All that works fine in normal times, but in weather events, system upsets, and growth in demand, it’s perfectly set up for Fingerpoint City, which leads us to the clusterfuck that is the week of February 14, 2021.

A little information about how power is generated in Texas – about 50% of our power it generated by natural gas fired generation; 20% comes from coal; 20% from wind, 10% from nukes, and the rest from other renewables including solar, which is only about 1%, which, in my opinion, is unacceptably low.   Also, the Texas Public Utility Commission, which has been a Republican lap dog for decades, has rules that are not enforced.  For example, we’re supposed to have 15% excess capacity for peak demand, but they NEVER enforce that requirement.  In fact, that number has hovered in the 7 to 8% for YEARS.  Worse, we had a wake up call in 2011 when we had a big freeze.  The problem is that ERCOT, Perry, and Abbott have all ignored that wake up call, increasing demand and reliability issues.  Add that to Texas silly anti-federal government dogma, and you get this slow motion disaster that we’re all living.

Abbott woke up from his stupid coma today, and declared that “reforming” ERCOT is now on his emergency legislative agenda for this session.  That’s a laugh, since his last “emergencies” were non-existent voter fraud claims and fretting over who uses which public bathrooms.

Abbott’s had his chance, Perry before him, as has the TXLeg which has been populated by mouth breathers and morons for two decades.  Texas, just like the federal government, can’t survive without an actual functioning government.  Abbott has gotten away for way too long with his cavalier “let them eat cake” strategy.  His cynical “local control until I disagree” strategy hasn’t worked and will never work.  Abbott, Patrick, and all the mouthbreathers and morons have had control long enough.  Texas deserves better.  We deserve a government with adult supervision run by leaders who focus on reliable power, stable government, dependable healthcare, and appropriate education, not the libertarian fever dream that Texas has become.

Impeach Abbott.  Impeach Patrick.  Vote the rest of the bums out.  Maybe millions of Texans spending a week freezing in the dark might just change their votes.

Donald Trump is a dumbass.  We all know that.  He’s also narcissistic, cruel, self obsessed, and utterly devoid of human emotion.  We’ve come to expect the worst in him through pure personal experience.  Now let’s look at Greg Abbott; he graduated from UT and Vanderbilt Law.  He served on the Texas Supreme Court and as Attorney General of Texas.  Greg Abbott is smart.  His problem is that he’s also a partisan hack.  He sued a tree trimming company after a tree fell on him after a storm, paralyzing him from the waist down resulting in an insurance settlement that pays him for life, though he can freely practice law.  After he got his, of course, he spent years trying to undo the very system that supported him when injured.  That makes him a hack, and a hypocrite.  But he’s worse than that.  As governor since 2015, he’s continued Rick Perry’s dismantling of Texas reputation for good education and a fair government.  He’s participated in the culture wars and even sicced the Texas State Guard on the US Army after goofy conspiracy theorists raised hell about how the military exercises are going to “take away their guns”.  It was stupid, and he knew better, but still pandered to screwballs.  He’s now continued that pandering all the way through Trump’s disastrous presidency, and now Texans are actually dying because of that pandering.

Against all common sense and medical experts, Abbott ordered the reopening of businesses and government agencies even though no criteria for reopening had been met.  Trump called for immediate reopening to save his reelection bid, and Abbott happily complied.  He even overruled safety precautions put in place in cities all over the state.  The result?  COVID-19 cases have overwhelmed the hospital systems; medical staff is either exhausted or sick themselves.  People are dying waiting for a hospital bed, or at home, terrified to come to a hospital. Yesterday, Texas hit a new record of over 11,000 new cases and 131 deaths, overwhelming the previous death record by over 100%.  Total deaths since the beginning of this disaster now total over 3,000.

This catastrophe is all on Abbott, period the end.  When he overruled adults like Sylvester Turner and Lina Hidalgo, he took the entire responsibility on himself.  The real tragedy?  Unlike Trump, Abbott is not a dumbass; he knows better.  He’s just a corrupt and cynical politician, and this year should spell the end of his political career and a place in polite society (if that even exists anymore).