In this week’s installment of The Weekender, Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton hosted a live show last night with their faithful patreons. They discuss the failure of the Republican leadership in Texas to adequately prepare for a precedented climate event that has cost lives. To unlock this episode, and additional bonus content, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday. | |
| And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there and join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing with a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations. | |
| So Here it is, check it out, and feel free to check out the actual Patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Hey everybody! | |
| Welcome to this week's edition of the Weekender of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| Special treat tonight as we hang out with our patrons, our wonderful, wonderful patrons. | |
| It has been way too long Since we've had one of these live shows where we get to see your wonderful comments, you all get to interact, be good to one another. | |
| We need to do this more often. | |
| It fills me with love and energy. | |
| I am Jared Yates-Hexton, by the way. | |
| I didn't even introduce myself. | |
| I'm so excited about the whole thing. | |
| I'm here, as always, with Nick Halseman. | |
| Listen, let's be straight up. | |
| We have a shit ton of stuff to talk about tonight. | |
| We're also going to be taking questions from our live audience, which, if you want to be involved in that and you're listening to the preview, all you have to do is go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast and become a patron and part of this community. | |
| That's happiness. | |
| That's good stuff, Nick. | |
| There's bad stuff. | |
| There's bad stuff going on. | |
| Right now, the state of Texas is frozen solid. | |
| There are major cities, including the fourth largest city in the United States of America. | |
| Houston, Texas, beautiful city, largely without power. | |
| Austin, Texas, without power. | |
| People are trying to survive Frigid winter temperatures that have been caused by climate catastrophe. | |
| I've got loved ones down there. | |
| I know a lot of our listeners do as well. | |
| It is absolutely disgusting what's going on and we got to talk about it. | |
| We do. | |
| And hey Jared, hi everybody. | |
| Good to see everybody out there in the chat. | |
| I did feel like we should acknowledge a little bit of the comments while we're here just to make sure everyone knows that we see them and hear them and the questions that come through. | |
| So, Teresa, Kelly, Lisa, Julia, Kia, who else? | |
| Joan, Christy, everybody. | |
| I'm not going to be typing like a fiend. | |
| I don't think, unless you start throwing stuff out there that makes me take some serious notes. | |
| You never know. | |
| Maybe I'll start typing my notes on my phone so it's quiet, but nonetheless. | |
| Let's get to what we were talking about, because I don't want to diminish the power of what's happening in Texas, because it is terrible. | |
| We've seen this before. | |
| This isn't new. | |
| It's not recent, but 10 years ago or so when they had a similar thing. | |
| Here's the thing I have about market forces and how this is supposed to deal with what the econ people study in classes in Princeton and Harvard and these smart people, where there never seems to be a notion that you have to invest in potential pitfalls like weather. | |
| Spend money on those things as part of your normal business plan. | |
| It feels like that's just a waste of time and money because it only happens, you know, once in a blue moon. | |
| So we really shouldn't bother focusing on it and are paying any money to do it or worrying about it. | |
| And here we are. | |
| It's basically the direct result of that. | |
| Man, just hearing you say market principles made my blood just curdle. | |
| I mean, really, because first and foremost, you said we've seen this before. | |
| I want to put this in a larger context, and this is This is not at all hyperbole. | |
| This is in a long strain of watching American quote-unquote market principles, building climate catastrophe, this inability to plan for the future, prepare for the future, the idea that profit over everything else is what matters, and on top of that, weaponized austerity, which we've had to deal with for a while. | |
| This is like so many other things that we've been dealing with, whether it's wildfires, floods, earthquakes. | |
| This is a sibling of 2005's Hurricane Katrina. | |
| What we're watching is one thing after another in which America, supposedly the strongest, wealthiest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth, kind of forgot to take care of its people. | |
| And by forgot, I mean there was no profit whatsoever in taking care of the people. | |
| What's important is that you cut out everything human and decent. | |
| You get rid of education, infrastructure, healthcare. | |
| By the way, we're not even talking about the pandemic. | |
| The pandemic is another one of those situations, and we keep seeing these instances where Americans are having to do without their basic human necessities. | |
| Drinking water in Flint, Michigan! | |
| We have a point where supposedly we're the most powerful nation in the world and our people are having to live like they're in developing nations. | |
| And what we're watching is the failure of capitalism. | |
| We're watching the failure of austerity politics. | |
| We're watching also the failure of the American right. | |
| I mean, my God, like this wouldn't, and we got to talk about all of this scapegoating that they're doing, these lies that they're telling. | |
| You know, it's absolutely repulsive, but it is absolutely an indictment of the last few decades of American policy and American economics. | |
| I mean, there's no other way to put it. | |
| Well, we keep saying this, and put a pin in the Green New Deal because we'll have to talk about that in a minute, but we keep saying how if ever there was a doubt that Republicans don't give a shit about their constituents... At all. | |
| And then here's the next example. | |
| And again, over and over and over again, we keep seeing examples of this. | |
| Now, Infrastructure Week became a punchline in the Trump administration because they were always going to have it and talk about it and do all these things and then never got around to doing it at all. | |
| This would have been considered infrastructure to me This wouldn't have been building a stupid wall on the border or even like highway, like a new highway or preparing a bridge. | |
| We're talking about, you know, our electrical grid, which we all know across the country needs help. | |
| Texas has its own grid because of this. | |
| Like they want to be their own. | |
| They might as well secede as it is anyway. | |
| They want to be their own separate country. | |
| I got another quote I want to read to you because I was reading the New York Times article about how this all happened. | |
| Now, so my best friend, you know, he's a Princeton grad. | |
| He's money manager. | |
| He's always got market forces. | |
| Like we said, I'm always, you know, throwing shit at him when I see these things. | |
| I want you to read this because this is where we're at on this and probably why they never even bothered to consider 10 years ago winterizing their gas and their electric generators and all that stuff. | |
| So here's what it says real quick. | |
| Mr. Hogan, a professor of global energy policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, ooh, acknowledged that while many Texans have struggled this week without heat and electricity, the state's energy market has functioned as it was designed. | |
| That design relies on basic economics. | |
| Are you sitting down? | |
| When electricity demand increases, so too does the price for power. | |
| The higher prices force consumers to reduce energy use to prevent cascading failures of power plants that can leave the entire state in the dark, while encouraging power plants to generate more electricity. | |
| It's not convenient, Professor Hogan said. | |
| It's not nice. | |
| It's necessary. | |
| Now, First of all... Wait, can you read that last sentence again? | |
| I love it. | |
| I want to get that tattooed on my body. | |
| It's not convenient, Professor Hogan said. | |
| It's not nice. | |
| It's necessary. | |
| Okay. | |
| I kind of feel like we need that on the dollar bill. | |
| Like we could just take care of E Pluribus Unum and just put that on the dollar bill. | |
| That's incredible. | |
| Well let's pull this out because what he's trying to say is because all the what he's hoping to think that all of a sudden because there's this winter storm He thinks that the prices of heat are going to go up instantly, and people in their homes are going to be like, oh shit, I'm not going to turn my heat up now because I just realized the price of heating went up because I was logged in constantly on my phone watching my kilothermawatt hours, whatever, going up, you know, whatever. | |
| They don't see a raise in prices for a month, maybe, and they're fucking freezing! | |
| They don't give a shit that they pay a little bit more for their gas. | |
| They're going to crank that thing up until they're warm and not freezing anymore. | |
| There's nothing about like, oh, austerity and like the forces of economics are going to work here where people are clearly going to not use as much heat because they realize that price went up in the moment on a, you know, within a few days of having this storm. | |
| It's, it's so mind bogglingly frustrating to read that shit. | |
| And I, and I can't believe that he's a serious person. | |
| Who was this? | |
| What's his name? | |
| It's a fucking Mr. Hogan, but a professor of global energy policy at Harvard. | |
| With all due respect, as a colleague of Dr. Hogan in the academy, I'm sitting here wearing my cardigan. | |
| I just got done teaching. | |
| I'm in the academy. | |
| To my colleague, I offer a sincere fuck you. | |
| Fuck you. | |
| Fuck your cruel dumb ass. | |
| And here's the whole point, and this is really, really important, and I want to go ahead and set this foundation for what we're getting ready to talk about. | |
| This whole idea of market forces, it's an excuse. | |
| It's something that people can say and they're like, well, what do you want me to do? | |
| It's the market. | |
| I don't have any control. | |
| Man, I wish that it wasn't inconvenient. | |
| I wish it wasn't inhumane. | |
| I wish that the market was kinder and gentler, Nick. | |
| And you know, matter of fact, if there was a button to push, I would do it, but gosh darn it, the market does what the market wants, and it's basically a law of nature. | |
| It's basically the invisible hand of God making things happen. | |
| And what the market has done for neoliberals, and this is important because we are living in a neoliberal world, and for anybody who doesn't know this, because we're all about education, getting people up to speed, neoliberal doesn't mean liberal. | |
| Neoliberal is a system of free market, and it's not even free markets, by the way. | |
| They're all damned up, like, to help certain people and they take over governments and yada yada yada. | |
| It's the whole idea that the market will bring everybody into prosperity and it will create a broad middle class. | |
| We've all found out that's not true. | |
| Meanwhile, the remainder of the middle class is dying in Houston, Texas and Austin, Texas tonight. | |
| They got brought up that they can't even, like, survive the evening. | |
| These motherfuckers who sit behind these neoliberal ideas and they're like, man, it's just so sad. | |
| Maybe they can open a GoFundMe. | |
| Maybe if they create something the market wants. | |
| Maybe they want a video that shows cute enough kids or tells a good enough story. | |
| Maybe they'll even learn how to code. | |
| That idea is so cruel and anti-human, it's disgusting. | |
| That was my line. | |
| You just stole my line from me. | |
| I was going to sneak it in there about learning to code, but you're already ahead of me. | |
| But yes, there's no context involved in these things. | |
| If you try and say, well, this is really what's going on in the ground in this specific situation, they'll be like, oh no, the market accounts for all of that. | |
| It's built right in. | |
| Watch out, the market might bring some bread. | |
| Don't worry about it. | |
| Yeah, it built, you know, right in. | |
| And meanwhile, so that excuse is ridiculous because it has nothing to do with people like needing, you know, overusing power, which is then going to shut down the grid. | |
| It's all about not winterizing their equipment, which is what they easily could have done and spent a little bit of money and would have saved some lives and would have saved a lot of problems we're having right now for just a little bit of an investment into that. | |
| And again, I don't want to make it out like the Democrats are terrific at this either, or they're the ones who are, you know, focus on it more, but there's a certain drum beating and chest-baring by the Republicans about this shit, purposely not to do this stuff. | |
| And then, I mean, is it time now to talk about what they're trying to blame all this on? | |
| Well, I'll say a couple things really quickly to get more and more up to speed because so much of what we get told, particularly in mainstream media, is so misleading. | |
| It's just so misleading. | |
| And I'm not just talking about Fox News. | |
| We can talk about what Fox News is saying. | |
| But it's really important. | |
| That for the past few years, and I want to bring up a phrase that some of you might have heard at some point. | |
| It's called the Texas miracle or the miracle of Texas, which is this idea that over the past few years, Texas has become this headquarters. | |
| for innovation and capitalism and you might have remembered Rick Scott being like, the businesses they're coming to Texas and they're going to change everything and they're going to lead to a new capitalistic paradise in Texas. | |
| Guess what happened with the Texas miracle? | |
| They didn't take care of people. | |
| They didn't take care of their infrastructure. | |
| They didn't prepare things for people. | |
| They didn't make sure that a society functioned. | |
| Rick Scott, Scott Perry. | |
| And here's the thing about it. | |
| They, and you've seen it, this quote from like a former mayor in Texas, who's like, it's survival of the fittest, baby! | |
| You know, I don't feel bad for you. | |
| You think government's supposed to make your lights work? | |
| It's supposed to provide heat? | |
| Right? | |
| And it's like, no, that's exactly what your government is supposed to do. | |
| Your government is to make sure that society functions so you can live your life. | |
| That's the entire reason, and by the way, not to get too hyperbolic, but I'm hot. | |
| I'm pissed about this. | |
| Do you know why we have cities? | |
| Do you know why we have governments? | |
| Because when we lived out alone, we were getting picked off by diseases and animals. | |
| And so we came together and we were like, you know what, together we can merge our resources and at least we'll have clean drinking water and a warm place to sleep at night. | |
| And you've been listening to a free preview of our Patreon exclusive weekender show. | |
| If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week, not to mention exclusive content Live hangouts, question and answer sessions. | |
| We're even going to do some of these live, so you can come and watch how the sausage is made. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| On top of that, you get to hang out with the muckrake community, which are a really good group of people. | |
| So you should do that. | |
| That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. |