Left Out in the Cold

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoffrey Carter

A polar vortex descended upon the lower United States last week, bringing freezing temperatures across the South. While the entire region had to deal with shoveling snow, cold temperatures, and relearning how to drive, the great state of Texas found itself in a full-blown crisis. The extreme cold caused the Texas power grid to fail completely. When the heat went off, pipes froze and burst, wells cracked, and some water treatment centers were forced offline. As a result (according to the New York Times), nearly two-thirds of Texas residents—nearly seven million people—were left without running water. 

Why did hell only freeze over in Texas? Why not Arkansas or Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana? The answer is simple—privatization. Texas is the only state in the union that maintains its own power grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas—or ERCOT. Formed in 1970, ERCOT was designed primarily as a means to avoid federal regulation by facilitating privatization of energy resources. They argued—as all privatization advocates do—that sidestepping Federal regulations increases efficiency, which saves money, and that those savings will be passed on to the customer. Unfortunately, according to PowerGrid International (10/24/2014), this is simply untrue: “Relative electricity prices have increased dramatically, and dangerously lower electrical system reliability is the result of Texas electric utility deregulation.” 

And not only is deregulated energy more costly, but private companies do not, have not—and probably will not—safeguard their facilities against adverse conditions such as extreme cold. This is why Texas is frozen now. And dry. States whose energy companies abide by Federal regulations have power, running water, and functioning infrastructures. 

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Privatization of government services, along with its evil sidekick degregulation—have been creeping into the fabric of our existence since the days of Ronald Reagan, whose famous proclamation, “Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem” paved the way for mercenaries to start taking over our health systems, public schools, prisons, parks, and—yes, our utilities. 

Our health care industry is a tangled mixture of private, public, for-profit, and not-for-profit insurers made possible by the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, signed by Richard M. Nixon. The argument that the American health care system is, at best, inadequate, and, at worst, full of mercenary pirates, is due to the deregulation brought about by Nixon’s HMO Act. 

And then there’s public education. The Charter Schools Program of 1993 began the practice of privatizing public schools in Wisconsin, allowing families to send their children to private schools funded by “vouchers” of public money. The program has grown steadily over the past twenty-eight years, expanding to use of public money vouchers for students to attend private and even parochial schools. As a result, public school has been leached away into privately run charter schools that are many times unreliable organizations run by underqualified educators. As a result, sports, arts programs, and other extra-curriculars at public schools have shut down for lack of funding. Charter schools also typically, in order to avoid the high costs of individualized education plans necessary for students with special needs, tend to underserve or even not service that population. Why? Because privatization is all about profit and cutting corners. Teachers at many charter schools do not have to be state certified. Curriculum at other schools using public funds does not have to be approved by state agencies.

Yet another sterling example of the advantage of deregulating government services has been the acquisition of state prisons by the private sector. Fully twelve percent of all prisoners are housed in private penitentiaries. After the Reagan administration instituted the War on Drugs and subsequently instituted tougher sentencing guidelines, prison populations skyrocketed beyond capacity, and—lo and behold, private corporations stepped in to save the day. But, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Policy Institute, these companies started cutting corners in order to pad the profit lines. They hired fewer employees, paid them less, and failed to adequately train them. Even so, it is unclear whether these institutions cost less than government prisons. Even if they did, any saved money would go directly into the pockets of the corporate operators of these prisons. Abuses are rampant. In 2009, two Pennsylvania judges accepted bribes for sending juveniles to designated juvenile detention centers, a precursor to the notorious school-to-prison pipeline victimizing African American and other minority students. 

The list goes on. Under Donald Trump, the EPA and other federal agencies suffered intense rollbacks of regulations protecting the air, water, and our national parks. Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge got the go-ahead as did mining in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase—Escalante National Parks. The rollbacks also weakened limits on carbon dioxide emissions from autos and power plants, which brings us full circle to deregulation of the energy industry in Texas. 

Reagan was wrong. Government is the solution to these problems. As much as Reagan and his Republican sycophants have espoused the nonsense that private industry is somehow is smarter or more efficient than government-run programs, that notion has been proven wrong time and again. 

Starting with the fiction of trickle-down economics, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans have done nothing but protect the rich by letting them run roughshod over the lives and livelihoods of the average American. Privatization and deregulation have damaged our public schools, dehumanized our penal institutions, and endangered the lives of the public. As of this writing, thirty-eight Texans are dead because of the negligence of their energy providers. This negligence was not accidental or a result of unforeseen circumstances. It was a result of greed—it’s that simple.

Let’s give Texas back to the Texans. And give our schools back to the public. And give our people the health care they need. And give our transgressors the justice they deserve. The American people have been hoodwinked by Reagan and his trickle-down fairy tales long enough. ERCOT needs to be stopped. The government needs to step in to protect its people. 

America is not land of the rich and the home of the hogs: let’s give it back to the people.