Texas, founded by slavers and white racists who revolted against Mexico’s antislavery law, has always provided a ready image of our Heart of Darkness and America at its worst; and the shattering of its infrastructure under the hammers of climate change as a consequence of oil dependance and the perfidy and kleptocracy of our political and economic system is sadly no exception.
Our response to the disaster of a snowstorm from which existential threats of water and power shortages have emerged has also, catastrophically, been typically American; create divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorize an elite to receive what help is available, while transferring public wealth to private elites.
It is exactly the same as with our response to the Pandemic, which is why waiting in line for a vaccine which is either not available or not available to you is like waiting in line for bottled water or a generator for your area which the federal government has made available but which your state has made no effort to distribute as needed, while power costs rise a thousand percent.
Beyond the failures of our government and our economy of disaster capitalism which rig the game to serve the interests of power and wealth, there is the pervasive and endemic racism as the basis of both, the gorilla in the room of our legacy of historical injustices and inequalities like Klimt’s image of Typhoeus in the Beethoven Frieze, which reimagines Goya’s interpretation of a parallel myth in Saturn Devouring His Children, confronts us with a chthonic figure of America’s shadow self which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
There is no liberty for anyone unless there is equality for everyone.
And like Klimt’s bestial rebel or Goya’s mad emperor, this power asymmetry and identitarian elitism creates authority and legitimates our subjugation by it, which in recursion authorizes identities and births tyrannies and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Fear, power, force; here lies the heart of state tyranny and terror, racist police gun violence and white supremacist terror, vote suppression and the subversion of democracy, the falsification of ourselves through propaganda and the shaping of some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and control the others; but also of our plutocratic and oligarchic capitalist kleptocracy and the policies of deregulation and privatization which are directly responsible for the systemic failures of our responses to the Texas emergency and to the Pandemic.
America’s nearest parallel in these cases is with Chile, whose economy and society have been savaged and totalized as effects of privatization policies exported by America. As I wrote in my post of November 13 2019, Chile: How Privatization Destabilizes Economies and Drives Wealth Inequality; Today in the streets of Santiago the victims of an economy destabilized by privatization fight for survival and for change in conditions of widespread poverty in which the middle class live in shantytowns on reclaimed garbage dumps; of their struggle for dignity and the preconditions of the universal human right to life, including first health care and safe drinking water, I have every hope for success.
But what makes Chile important to us here in America is that it provides a case study of the effects of privatization and deregulation; for it is American policies which have failed here, ones we have embraced ourselves. The Chicago Boys, economists whom the tyrant Pinochet installed in 1973 to create a firewall against socialism, had been students of Milton Friedman, a devotee of Ayn Rand’s fascist and nihilistic philosophy of might makes right, borrowed from Stalin’s hatchet man Molotov and his ideology of state terror, and who oversaw the remaking of America through an assault on our institutions of social justice.
To see where such policies inevitably lead, we need look no further than our sister state, Chile.
Torch of Liberty 
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