The laissez-faire capitalism chronicles: The Texas grid breaks down again

A person has just got to acknowledge the unfailing persistence of laissez-faire capitalists and how they govern. Those buggers never lose sight one the one and only relevant moral value, profit. It doesn't matter how many people die or how how many millions of tons of pollution their profit pursuit spews into the environment. Profit is king, and everything else is a bunch of expendable pawns. NBC News writes:

Texas power grid operator asks customers to conserve 

electricity after six plants go offline

The operator of Texas' power grid asked residents to conserve electricity Friday after six power plants went offline amid soaring temperatures.

Brad Jones, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said in a statement that the company had lost roughly 2,900 megawatts of electricity — or enough to power nearly 600,000 homes, the Texas Tribune reported.

[In keeping with the always popular KYMS propaganda tactic] Jones did not say why the plants went offline, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

[KYMS: Keep your mouth shut]

The non-profit energy organization, which manages power for 90 percent of Texas' electrical grid, faced blistering criticism last year after blackouts left millions without power for days during subfreezing temperatures.

The company blamed frozen equipment in an event that left more than 200 people dead, many from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to stay warm. Others froze to death.

The company's CEO was fired and six board members — including the chairwoman and chairman — resigned. [Nobody went to jail and the executives probably got huge bonuses on their way out the door]

State lawmakers responded with a [hopelessly leaky] raft of legislation aimed at making the grid more resilient to a brutal winter storm.

Nearly a year later, an investigation by NBC News and the Texas Tribune found that the grid remained vulnerable, with new regulations allowing companies to avoid the improvements. [In making a mistake by abandoning from the KYMS tactic and making a mistake,] Jones referenced the unseasonably hot weather, saying it was driving the demand for power across the state. Temperatures approaching 100 degrees were forecast from Austin to Dallas over the weekend and into next week.

By referring to “unseasonably hot weather,” Jones ignores the fact that Texas has hot weather much of the year and there are weather forecasts that predict when it will get hot. One of two possibilities are plausible. Either unseasonably hot weather had nothing to do with the current grid failure, or forecasts of unseasonably hot weather were ignored. Either way, a combination of corruption and incompetence explains the situation.

Also note that the “raft of legislation” was passed by Texas legislators. Most of them are laissez-faire capitalist ideologues. Those ideologues believe that only markets running free, wild, butt naked and drunk as a skunk can solve problems. They live by one and only one moral value, profit. Everything else is secondary, including human life and the environment. 

Without a social conscience[1], the problems that laissez-faire capitalism is seriously concerned about are ones that impair unfettered accumulation, privatization and trickling up of profits while socializing risk and harm, including mass human deaths, vast environmental damage, and subversion and corruption of democracy, government and society. 

Footnote: 

1. Prominent economist Milton Friedman published an essay in 1970, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. He argued that the best type of CEO was not one with a social conscience. CEOs with a social conscience were considered to be “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” Newsweek wrote this in 2017:

In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Flouting the midcentury view (and that of the most influential faculty at the Harvard Business School) that the best type of CEO was one with an enlightened social conscience, Friedman claimed that such executives were “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” His tone was snide. "[Businessmen] believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends, that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Notice the lie in the highlighted last sentence. Capitalism can be regulated into having a social conscience without conversion of government and society to socialism with appropriation by government of the means of production. Friedman’s assertion is a bald faced lie. It is insulting, ruthless capitalist propaganda from an arrogant, ruthless liar.

An awakening of concern for church-state separation?

The Daily Beast writes in an article, There's No Separation of Church and State on the Supreme Court:

In a democracy founded on the separation of church and state, we’ve got a Supreme Court on the cusp of a decision that cements a theological view of abortion that even most Catholics don’t abide by.

All five of the justices who signed onto the draft opinion that would dump Roe (and any ruling associated with it)—plus Chief Justice John Roberts—are progeny of the Federalist Society. Over the past three decades, the legal group’s blessing has become a de facto requirement for Republican presidents who owed their election to white evangelical voters and ran on a promise to deliver an anti-Roe Supreme Court.

“Religion is the elephant in the room,” says Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee (BJC), a legal advocacy group for religious freedom that doesn't take a position on abortion. “We are all free to be religious or not, but we expect our government to be secular and to rule for all Americans and not for their religious views. And that principle is being threatened by at least the appearance of what’s going on in this case,” Tyler adds.

She points out that the words “religion” or “religious” do not once appear in Alito’s leaked draft opinion, yet he calls abortion “a profound moral issue”—phrasing that goes beyond the rule of law. “Many people read into the word ‘moral’ a religious objection, even though he’s going out of his way not to use religion,” says Tyler, which is why she calls it the elephant in the room.

She calls the looming decision by five Federalist Society alums “a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state…an assault on the core pillar of our democracy and the DNA of America.”

The ascendancy of conservative, anti-Roe Catholic jurists has been forty years in the making, dating back to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982.

“The intersection of the religious right with conservative politics occurred with the anti-abortion agenda, and because evangelicals were lacking a bench of legal scholars, they had to turn to Catholics,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College. “Political conservatism is baked into Catholic legal scholarship.”

“All picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump boasted. “All gold standard,” Trump declared as he rallied conservative voters with the promise of delivering the Court they wanted.

When Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame at the time, testified in 2017 before the Senate for a lower court position, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced concern about her religious affiliation with an evangelical offshoot of the Catholic Church. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” Feinstein said. “In your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Feinstein was castigated—and not just by Republicans—for straying into territory that felt uncomfortably close to a religious test. Three years later, Democrats questioning Barrett for the Supreme Court didn’t quiz her on her religious activism and what connection, if any, it might have to her views on Roe.

So, as late as 2017, Senators could not even ask about the role of religion in a nominee’s life. That reflects two things. First how utterly clueless Democrats were and still are about what the Republican Party has become. Second, it shows how effective Republican Party propaganda and messaging tactics really are. They are so effective that the targets of their deceit and lies are unaware of the true nature of who the opposition is and what their intent is. 

Even worse than 2017, by 2020 Senate Democrats had been cowed into not even raising the issue of the role of radical conservative Christian fundamentalism in a judge’s reasoning. Sadly, it is not the case that asking the question would have made any difference. The Republican Party would put any religious freak on the federal bench, no matter how anti-democratic and radical theocratic. The GOP elites, and most of its rank and and file are just fine with White male Christian-dominated neo-fascist theocracy. And, their judicial nominees do not hesitate to use the KYMS[1] tactic on the Senate or to lie by both affirmative lies and lies of omission, all of which they are expert at. 

Clueless does not do justice to what the Democratic Party has degenerated into. At least they voted against radical Christian theocrats and their jihad to replace secular law with Christian Sharia law. An end-game vestige of political opposition. Whoo-hoo, there's a little spunk left in ’em!

The church is swallowing the state before our eyes and most Americans cannot see the threat due either to sheer ignorance and deceit, or they cannot accept the reality because the truth hurts too much. As one observer put it about such situations generally, their fee-fees would be hurt so they do not see what is in plain sight and remain psychologically comfortable and self-assured. But maybe a few more people are starting to wake up to the seriousness of the Christian theocratic threat. Just maybe.

Footnote: 

1. The KYMS or keep your mouth shut propaganda tactic. It is manifested in various popular deceptive, faux responses to questions among professional political propagandists and liars. Popular KYMS examples for judges include ‘I don't recall’, ‘I can’t remember’, ‘no comment’, ‘I can't answer that’, ‘I can't prejudge that until the issue is before me’, ‘that is just a hypothetical and I do not comment on hypotheticals’, ‘it is settled law’, ‘Senator, that is a settled precedent the court has relied on for decades’, etc., etc., etc.

The hypocrisy chronicles: Republicans are against free speech against themselves, but for it against others

The Washington Post writes:

The Republican governors of Virginia and Maryland, where the homes of Supreme Court justices have become the targets of protests, are demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland enforce a federal law that forbids demonstrations intended to sway judges on pending cases.

Demonstrators have gathered over the past week at the homes of several conservative justices, spurred by the leak of a draft opinion suggesting that the high court is preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision guaranteeing access to abortion nationwide.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote to Garland (D) on Wednesday, just days after some conservatives faulted Youngkin for not having protesters outside the Alexandria, Va., home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. arrested under a state statute prohibiting demonstrations at private residences.

“There’s no changing their minds. We’re expressing our fury, our rage,” said Donna Damico, a 70-year-old grandmother who protested outside Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Montgomery County, Md., home last week. “We’re impotent and this is really all we got other than praying that people vote in November.”

A hanger symbolizing unsafe illegal abortions was drawn in chalk outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh over the weekend as abortion rights activists protested in Chevy Chase, Md.

Lots of snotty rich people live in Chevy Chase

Brett and his colleagues are not one of us, they are one of them

Good old Republican politicians. They love and support free speech and slanders used against their enemies. They hate and shut it down it when it is directed at them (e.g., this). Republican elites are fucking shameless, spineless free speech* hypocrites.

 

* And most everything else. Some of 'em are wife beaters too.

Questions: Are Republican elites free speech hypocrites? Whaddabout the rank and file?

Long-term planning and human welfare

Comments here brought up the human trait of weak capacity to do long-term planning. We now possess technologies that can significantly wreck the environment by pollution and climate change. There are nuclear bombs that can blow modern civilization to smithereens in a matter of a day or two. There are pandemics coming that we are just not prepared for. Heck, we're still not prepared for the one we are living through right now. Global supply chains are weak and sometimes break. 

Science is aware of human weakness about long-term planning and preparation. We often just don't do it well enough and react to crises when they pop up instead of planning for them before they hit and kill or harm people. A long article The Conversation published, Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three experts discuss, considers the issue. It's an interesting article and topic. TC writes:

We are built this way

Robin Dunbar

COVID-19 has highlighted three key aspects of human behavior that seem unrelated but which, in fact, arise from the same underlying psychology. One was the bizarre surge in panic buying and stockpiling of everything from food to toilet rolls. A second was the abject failure of most states to be prepared when experts had been warning governments for years that a pandemic would happen sooner or later. The third has been the exposure of the fragility of globalized supply chains. All three of these are underpinned by the same phenomenon: a strong tendency to prioritize the short term at the expense of the future.

Most animals, including humans, are notoriously bad at taking the long term consequences of their actions into account. Economists know this as the “public good dilemma”. In conservation biology, it is known as the “poacher’s dilemma” and also also, more colloquially, as “the tragedy of the commons”.

If you are a logger, should you cut down the last tree in the forest, or leave it standing? Everyone knows that if it is left standing, the forest will eventually regrow and the whole village will survive. But the dilemma for the logger is not next year, but whether he and his family will survive until tomorrow. For the logger, the economically rational thing to do is, in fact, to cut the tree down.

This is because the future is unpredictable, but whether or not you make it to tomorrow is absolutely certain. If you die of starvation today, you have no options when it comes to the future; but if you can make through to tomorrow, there is a chance that things might have improved. Economically, it’s a no-brainer. This is, in part, why we have overfishing, deforestation and climate change.

The process underpinning this is known to psychologists as discounting the future. Both animals and humans typically prefer a small reward now to a larger reward later, unless the future reward is very large. The ability to resist this temptation is dependent on the frontal pole (the bit of the brain right just above your eyes), one of whose functions is to allow us to inhibit the temptation to act without thinking of the consequences. It is this small brain region that allows (most of) us to politely leave the last slice of cake on the plate rather than wolf it down. In primates, the bigger this brain region is, the better they are at these kinds of decisions.

In humans, failure to inhibit greedy behavior quickly leads to excessive inequality of resources or power. This is probably the single most common cause of civil unrest and revolution, from the French Revolution to Hong Kong today.

There is a simple issue of scale that feeds into this. Our natural social world is very small scale, barely village size. Once community size gets large, our interests switch from the wider community to a focus on self-interest. Society staggers on, but it becomes an unstable, increasingly fractious body liable at continual risk of fragmenting, as all historical empires have found.

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The power of politics

Chris Zebrowski

“Discounting the future” may well be a common habit. But I don’t think that this is an inevitable consequence of how our brains are wired or an enduring legacy of our primate ancestry. Our proclivity to short-termism has been socialized. It is a result of the ways we are socially and politically organized today.

Businesses prioritize short-term profits over longer term outcomes because it appeals to shareholders and lenders. Politicians dismiss long-term projects in favor of quick-fix solutions promising instant results which can feature in campaign literature that is distributed every four years.  

Our capacity to deal not only with future pandemics, but larger-scale (and perhaps not unrelated) threats including climate change will require us to exercise the human capacity for foresight and prudence in the face of future threats. It is not beyond us to do so.

This is another example of importance of human cognitive biology and social behavior. Everything or almost everything we do comes back to that. So, if one wants to understand humans, politics and religion at least a little better, one needs to learn at least some things about those aspects of human beings.