NEOLIBERALISM IS MESSING WITH TEXAS

The deregulation of Texas’s electrical grid is a haven for conservative lawmakers’ policies of free trade and low taxes. Even the Democratic Party leaders are enthralled by privatization, and this might have dire consequences in our climate change policies.

words by Meredith Clark | art by Jenny Katz & photos from Claudia Pharr

On Monday, Feb. 15, Claudia Pharr and the rest of San Antonio woke up to four inches of snow, the most that the city had seen since 2017. The Texas winter storm this past February ravaged the state with subfreezing temperatures, leaving nearly five million homes and businesses without heat or power. As snow seeped through the windows of her one-bedroom home, blankets were one of the only sources of warmth Pharr could find, but even bundled up, she was still so exposed to the below-freezing temperatures that the blankets felt wet. The weekend before the storm hit, Pharr and her fellow employees at the Housing First Community Coalition in San Antonio, where she works in development and case management, scrambled to find hotel rooms and bus passes for their unhoused clients. The rolling blackouts began in Pharr’s neighborhood Sunday night: first just 30 minutes of no power, then three hours, and some homes went without power for three days. In an effort to keep warm and charge her phone, Pharr (and her cats) piled together in her car as she listened to Texas Public Radio. It was then that she learned about Texas’s electrical grid system, called ERCOT, and of Senator Ted Cruz’s brief family vacation to Cancún, Mexico. By March, it was reported that a total of 111 people died from the winter storm, the majority from hypothermia and others from carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Texans froze to death in their homes, cars, and on the street, social media roared with tweets roasting Senator Cruz’s not-so-stealthy escape to Cancún — and even bullied him into flying back to Texas. With Cruz blaming his young daughters for his own badlytimed decision, telling the press they “asked to take a trip with friends,” the jokes wrote themselves. Other jokes, however, fell flat. On Feb. 16, author Stephen King tweeted, “Hey, Texas! Keep voting for officials who don’t believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid! Maybe in 4 years you can vote for Trump again. He believes in the latter but not the former. Perfect.” King, who seldomly leaves his reclusive retreat in Maine, insinuated that Texans were at fault for the mass power outage, a 130-car pile up on Interstate 35, and a failing infrastructure unfit for these winter weather conditions. The reality is that Texas

voters barely have a say in the privatization of their power grid, which became deregulated in 2000 as part of lawmakers’ thirst for cheap energy and a marketbased power system. And even if voters could decide whether or not their energy should be privatized, Texas’s longstanding history of gerrymandering has benefited more Republican-controlled legislatures than any other state, according to a study by the Associated Press.

The privatization of goods and services that are necessary for survival follows a neoliberal trend of free trade, low taxes, and deregulation. Neoliberalism has led to the privatization of not only energy systems but also prisons and health care, the creation of a one percent of wealth-holders in the country, and increased poverty and inequality for significant portions of the population. But it has also fostered a culture of apathy, in which self-proclaimed liberal voters who are privileged to experience the resources of blue states poke fun at red states for their twobrain-celled senators — all without acknowledging the racist and classist systems put in place to make sure that power is in the hands, and homes, of some, while others are left in the dark.

The winter storm revealed to many Texas citizens just exactly how they receive their power. “That was the first time I'd ever heard the fact that Texas has a privatized grid. It just wasn't really on our radar,” said Pharr, who is receiving her master’s in social work at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “I think that's kind of, at least with my friends, when we started getting angry about it. Before I was like, ‘Man, this just sucks.’ And then we realized that it was completely preventable.” While one power grid covers the eastern US states and another covers the west, Texas is the only state with its own deregulated energy market.

Texas’s grid became deregulated in the 1990s, when former President George W. Bush, the then Texas governor, worked with the infamous company Enron to break up the system of state-regulated utilities. Basically, Texas homes and businesses receive power

through a series of perpetual auctions, with private companies maximizing their profits under the guise of “retail choice.” But under a policy of neoliberalism, there is no choice when one person, or the middleman, holds all the power — literally and figuratively. How can it be the decision of Texas voters to privatize their grid if the majority of citizens are freezing in their cars wondering how this mess even began?

The lines of neoliberalism have become blurred over the last few decades. A term that once was a stand-in for policies determined by Margaret Thatcher or Reaganomics has now become a zinger used by Gen Z on Twitter to spotlight the progressive posturing of the Democratic Party. And they’re not wrong to call out Democrats either. As much as the Texas winter storm was exasperated by conservative lawmakers' and regulators’ lack of climate change awareness or their desire to increase profit, our nation’s Democratic Party leaders are just as enthralled by privatization. President Joe Biden has yet to follow through on expanding Medicare — or at least creating some form of public health care program that he promised to do throughout his campaign.

It’s no secret that Democratic leaders are fraught with contradictions and neoliberal inclinations — Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have followed a “tough on crime” policy throughout their careers, with Biden’s introduction of the 1994 Crime Bill that fed mass incarceration and the prisonindustrial complex, and Harris’s background as a criminal prosecutor and self-proclaimed “top cop.” “I think a lot of liberals, Democrats, are fine with the corporatization of all of this stuff, you know? They can hem and haw about equality and access, but it allows them to wipe their hands of a difficult problem,” said Dr. Katherine Kidd, an assistant professor in Syracuse University’s English and Textual Studies program. As climate change becomes an increasing threat to the state of, well, everything, the entire nation could be seeing the same blackouts Texas faced on a mass scale if our leaders’ love fest with privatization persists.

With policies like the Green New Deal at the forefront of many young voters' minds, how much change can voter mobilization and grassroots organizing actually accomplish in places like Texas where gerrymandering influences almost every election and private corporations have a stronghold on the future of climate change infrastructure? For Pharr, the way to make that change isn’t by filling in a circle on a ballot but through community-based mutual aid. “It's kind of discouraging sometimes, but personally I felt a huge kind of relief,” she said. “Like, letting go of this national narrative of changing things and just kind of keeping my head down, going into work every day, serving food, getting people registered.” During the snowstorm, Pharr worked with a mutual aid organization in San Antonio to redistribute money, replace people’s groceries, and pay rent, and even raised $700 for bus passes and hotel rooms on her personal Facebook page.

If people like Stephen King — the “white educated liberal elite” as they have become known — are donating to local mutual aid services, then by all means make all the jokes you want on Twitter (or don’t...), but we highly doubt that’s the case. As it turns out, being a celebrated author, or educated, or even the president, doesn’t deter you from doing capitalism’s dirty work. In times of climate crises — and this will happen more and more as long as climate change exists — calling out systems of privatization just isn’t enough. It’s time for people to build lasting community-based networks of care and support so that Texans, and the rest of us, won’t be left out in the cold.