Small government is no match for a crisis born of the state’s twin addictions to market fixes and fossil fuels.
Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump administration, declared in a tweet “that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.”
The claims are outlandish. The Green New Deal is, among other things, a plan to tightly regulate and upgrade the energy system so the United States gets 100 percent of its electricity from renewables in a decade. Texas, of course, still gets the majority of its energy from gas and coal; much of that industry’s poorly insulated infrastructure froze up last week when it collided with wild weather that prompted a huge surge in demand. (Despite the claims of many conservatives, renewable energy was not to blame.) It was the very sort of freakish weather system now increasingly common, thanks to the unearthing and burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas. While the link between global warming and rare cold fronts like the one that just slammed Texas remains an area of active research, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, says the increasing frequency of such events should be “a wake up call.”
But weather alone did not cause this crisis. Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action. Fortunately, there’s a way out — and that’s precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear.
An Energy-Market Free-for-All
A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather.
Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike). In a recent appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, summed it up: “We have a deregulated power system in the state and it does not work, because it does not build in the incentives in order to protect people.”
This energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally melts, many Texans are discovering that they owe their private electricity providers thousands of dollars — a consequence of leaving pricing to the whims of the market. The $200,000 energy bills some people received, the photos of which went viral online, were, it seems, a mistake. But some bills approaching $10,000 are the result of simple supply and demand in a radically underregulated market. “The last thing an awful lot of people need right now is a higher electric bill,” said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst with LendingTree. “And that’s unfortunately something a lot of people will get stuck with.” This is bad news for those customers, but great news for shale gas companies like Comstock Resources Inc. On an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial officer said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.”
Put bluntly, Texas is about as far from having a Green New Deal as any place on earth. So why have Republicans seized it as their scapegoat of choice?
A Shock to the System
Blame right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every disaster with a credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus on handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for drinking water. They have less time to engage in politics and a reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress, deferring to strong and decisive leaders — think of New York’s ill-fated love affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.
To explain this phenomenon, I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman. In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Republicans have effectively deployed this tactic even after crises like the 2008 market collapse, created by financial deregulation and made deadlier by decades of austerity. Democrats have, largely, been willing partners. This seems counterintuitive, but it all comes back to Friedman’s credo: The change doesn’t depend on the reasons for the crisis, only on who has the ideas “lying around” — a kind of intellectual disaster preparedness. And for a long time, it was only the right, bolstered by a network of free-market think tanks linked to both major parties, that had its ideas at the ready.
When Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected levees in 2005, there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe might serve as a kind of wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of thousands of residents on their rooftops and in the Superdome, small-government fetishists suddenly lost their religion. “When a city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant, government probably should saddle-up,” Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing commentator, wrote at the time. In environmental circles, there was also discussion that the disaster could spur climate action. Some dared to predict that the collapsed levees would be for the small-government, free-market legacy of Reaganism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.
None of it happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for the shock doctrine. Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced by charter schools. Public housing was demolished, and costly townhouses sprang up, preventing thousands of the city’s poorest residents, the majority of them Black, from ever returning. The reconstruction of the city became a feeding ground for private contractors. Republicans used the cover of crisis to call for expanded oil and gas exploration and new refinery capacity, much as Mr. Perry is doing right now in Texas with his calls for doubling down on gas.
Many tried to stop them. Teachers’ unions, despite having their members scattered throughout the country, did their best to fight the privatizations. Residents of public housing and their supportersfaced tear gas to try to stop the demolition of their homes. But there were no readily available, alternate ideas lying around for how New Orleans could be rebuilt to make it both greener and fairer for all of its residents.
Even if there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such ideas into reality. Though the environmental justice movement has deep roots in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” the climate justice movement was only just emerging at the time Katrina struck. There was no Sunrise Movement, the youth-led organization that occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 2018 midterms to demand “good jobs, and a livable planet.” There was no “squad,” the ad hoc alliance of congressional progressives whose most visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock waves through Washington by joining the Sunrisers in their occupation. There had not yet been two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans how popular these ideas really are. And there was certainly no national movement for a Green New Deal.
Lying in Ruin
The difference between then and now goes a very long way toward explaining why Mr. Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as of now, exists primarily on paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he knows this. He also knows that the Green New Deal, which promises to create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is extremely appealing. This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer under the overlapping crises of
unemployment,
houselessness,
racial injustice,
crumbling public services and
extreme weather.
All that Texas’s Republicans have to offer, in contrast, is continued oil and gas dependence — driving more climate disruption — alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state’s mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead.
Will it work? Unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel. It has been tried and repeatedly tested: by the pandemic, by spiraling hunger and joblessness, by extreme weather. And it is failing all of those tests — so much so that even the most ardent cheerleaders of deregulation now point to Texas’s energy grid as a cautionary tale. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, called the deregulation of Texas’s energy system “a fundamental flaw.”
In short, Republican ideas are no longer lying around — they are lying in ruin. Small government is simply no match for this era of big, interlocking problems. Moreover, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former prime minister, declared that “there is no alternative” to leaving our fates to the market, progressives are ready with a host of problem-solving plans. The big question is whether the Democrats who hold power in Washington will have the courage to implement them.
The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis. So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition — in the battle of ideas.
Discord between U.S. and other World Trade Organization members including the EU and China appears set to paralyze the group’s top court
BRUSSELS—A stalemate between the U.S. and other members of the World Trade Organization, including the European Union and China, stands to cripple the organization’s top court, threatening the global body’s survival.
On Wednesday the court, called the Appellate Body, will no longer have enough judges to rule on big trade disputes between countries.
At stake are international rules negotiated over five decades by the U.S. and Europe to boost global trade. The WTO, established in 1995, is the most significant outcome of that effort, helping to head off damaging cycles of tariffs and retaliation between countries. Now it’s stuck.
Efforts to modernize WTO rules for challenges such as China’s market-distorting state capitalism have repeatedly failed. Talks among its 164 members to regulate e-commerce and other new arenas have stalled for years. And a trans-Atlantic dispute over operations of its top court has sparked the split now threatening the organization’s core.
“The WTO is in crisis,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, who last month ended her term as EU trade commissioner. “If nothing happens, it will become irrelevant.”
Cecilia Malmstrom, until recently the EU trade commissioner, says the WTO risks becoming irrelevant.PHOTO: CHRISTOPHE MORIN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
The WTO’s ability to police global trade rests on the seven-judge Appellate Body, which reviews arbitration rulings. When countries appeal those rulings, three judges examine each case. The Appellate Body already has four vacancies and two current members’ terms end on Tuesday. That will leave it with one judge, precluding WTO appeals and enforcement.
A U.S. block on new appointments triggered the current crisis. Consecutive U.S. administrations have complained of Appellate Body overreach. Two years ago U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer moved to discipline the court or bring it down.
Legal Battleground The U.S. and the European Union are the top litigators in a WTO dispute-settlement mechanism that is on the verge of collapse. Disputes by membersSource: WTO
“Without a functioning Appellate Body, the whole system is sailing into… uncharted water,” a Chinese diplomat said at a WTO gathering on Nov. 22. That would “further tilt the balance in favor of [major] powers.”
Mr. Trump said recently he is “very tentative on the WTO.” He has repeatedly attacked it for being unfair to the U.S. and threatened to quit if the organization doesn’t “shape up.” U.S. officials say the global trade watchdog has strayed from its purpose to liberalize and protect markets.
The U.S. administration’s stance on the WTO is consistent with its hostile position toward international trade pacts, which officials say sap U.S. negotiating power. Mr. Trump has pursued unilateral actions with China and other major trading partners. He exited a trans-Pacific trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and has imposed steel and aluminum tariffs against allies, which have been challenged at the WTO as illegal.
“I’m not excluding the fact that on December 11 champagne corks will pop at the USTR building in Washington,” an EU diplomat said, referring to the day after the Appellate Body loses two more judges.
Europeans want to preserve the WTO. The EU has proposed creating an interim court, based on WTO rules and voluntary participation, to replicate Appellate Body functions and issue binding decisions. Canada and Norway have signed on. China, Russia and other countries are assessing the plan, which represents a snub to the U.S., which opposes the move.
Stopgap measures could prolong some of the WTO’s ability to settle disputes. But preserving WTO power as the ultimate trade enforcer would require resolving fundamental disagreements over the Appellate Body. There, the U.S. and the EU remain far apart.
Europeans favor a global trade court while Washington prefers ad-hoc arbitration for each dispute. EU officials say the Appellate Body has cemented international rules. U.S. officials say the body has aggrandized itself, seizing powers more akin to a court than its original role as a rules enforcer. They say it has missed deadlines, set precedents and undertook lengthy reviews it wasn’t designed to do.
Dennis Shea, right, the U.S. envoy to the WTO, speaking with a Chinese diplomat.PHOTO: DENIS BALIBOUSE/REUTERS
“It simply will not work to paper over the problems,” said U.S. envoy to the WTO Dennis Shea in October.
The divide is also playing out in a personal fight at the WTO’s otherwise tranquil headquarters on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
When the Appellate Body ruled against the U.S. in a dispute with China in July, one member wrote a rare and scathing dissent. The decision was “incoherent” and “unduly complicated,” the judge said. The opinion is anonymous but trade officials in Geneva widely believe it was penned by Thomas Graham, a U.S. judge on the body whose term ends Tuesday.
Mr. Graham didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. also slammed the judgment for undermining WTO rules against Chinese subsidies.
For Appellate Body Director Werner Zdouc, the WTO’s dispute-settlement system is to global trade what the Supreme Court is to U.S. law, according to current and former trade officials. Under his leadership, critics said, the body disregarded dispute-settlement rules designed to prevent countries from circumventing WTO regulations.
Through WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell, Mr. Zdouc declined to comment.
Few options remain to save the Appellate Body. Mr. Graham and Appellate Body Chair Ujal Singh Bhatia, whose term also expires Tuesday, could theoretically stay on to hear ongoing appeals. But Mr. Graham has said he wouldn’t extend his tenure unless Mr. Zdouc is removed, allowing an Appellate Body overhaul.
Appellate Body reform has broad support but WTO members differ on its direction, Mr. Rockwell said. The EU and other WTO members over the past year have offered proposals to revamp the Appellate Body and address U.S. concerns. Washington has said the WTO should follow existing rules.
In a move to further constrain the appellate body, the U.S. also briefly blocked its budget recently. Washington finally agreed to limited resources for next year only, funding Mr. Zdouc’s department at about 7% of its biennial budget of about $3 million. That’s enough to extend Messrs. Graham and Bhatia’s terms until about March, enabling them to issue rulings on three ongoing appeals. After that, China’s Hong Zhao would be left alone until her term ends in November, with at least 10 appeals awaiting review, many more in the pipeline and no new colleagues.
Western powers now risk splitting over global trade, with the U.S. acting unilaterally and the EU rallying some partners to preserve a broken WTO system. China could be left to build its own global links, largely freed from Western rules.
“The problems of the WTO go far beyond any [Appellate Body] crisis,” said Clete Willems, a former Trump administration trade official currently with the law firm Akin Gump. Citing lengthy WTO litigations and Chinese trade practices, he said, “The question is do we have a system that is fit for purpose, given where we are on world trade.”
The Trump administration is not prepared for a foreign policy crisis.
But the administration has not faced an actual national security crisis that tests it and us in a profound way. There is no shortage of possible candidates — a major terrorist attack; a debilitating cyberattack; an infectious disease outbreak; an incident with North Korea, Iran, China or Russia that escalates into a broader conflict. Yet no administration in modern memory has been less prepared to deal with a true crisis than this one.
I spent nearly 25 years in government, and almost as much time studying it. When it comes to the effective stewardship of our nation’s security — especially during crises — the most successful administrations had three things in common:
people,
process and
policy.
People with the experience, temperament and intellectual honesty to give a president good ideas and to dissuade him from pursuing bad ones. An effective process that brings key stakeholders together to question one another’s assumptions, stress test options and consider second-order effects. And all of this in the service of developing clear policies that provide marching orders to everyone in an administration, while putting allies at ease and adversaries on notice about our intentions.
The George H.W. Bush administration’s handling of the end of the Cold War powerfully illustrates these principles. Mr. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and a remarkable team of senior officials proved to be the right people in the right place at the right time. Mr. Scowcroft’s interagency process became a model for every successive administration until this one. The policies they pursued were clear, sustained and comprehensive. The Obama administration’s successes in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice and handling the Ebola epidemic were the results of similar strengths.
When it comes to people, process and policy, Mr. Trump’s administration has gone from bad to disastrous.
For two years, cooler heads like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the national security adviser H.R. McMaster served as something of a check on Mr. Trump’s worst instincts: invade Venezuela, withdraw from NATO, evacuate every American from the Korean Peninsula.Now, their successors — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John Bolton as national security adviser — are as likely to encourage Mr. Trump’s follies as to oppose them.
Equally important, the Partnership for Public Service has found that almost 40 percent of leadership positions requiring Senate confirmation remain unfilled across the administration — at last count 275 out of 705 jobs. About a third of the State Department’s 198 key posts are vacant. One-quarter of the administration’s departments are led by “acting” secretaries.
Under Mr. Bolton, the National Security Council headed by the president, the Principals’ Committee headed by Mr. Bolton and the Deputies Committee, which I once led and which coordinates policy deliberations, have gone into deep hibernation.
Some combination of these committees typically met multiple times a day. Now, it is reportedly once or twice a week at most. The result is greater control of the policy processfor Mr. Bolton and fewer messy meetings in which someone might challenge his wisdom. Mr. Mattis, who once complained about death by meetings, protested to Mr. Bolton about the lack of them.
.. The absence of process has consequences. There were minimal efforts to prepare Mr. Trump for his summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, in which he unilaterally ended military exercises on the Korean Peninsula and mused about withdrawing all American forces. Nor was there a process to game out Mr. Trump’s recent decision to pull out of Syria — instead, the relevant committees scrambled after the fact to bring some order to Mr. Trump’s impulses. Even the welcome progress toward ending the 17-year war in Afghanistan has been hobbled by Mr. Trump’s arbitrary and then partly rescinded announcement that he was cutting forces in Afghanistan by half, thereby undercutting our leverage in negotiations with the Taliban.
As for policy, it’s the lifeblood of any administration. Secretaries, other senior officials, ambassadors and envoys all need to know what the policy is to explain it to others and bring predictability to our nation’s foreign engagements. Mr. Trump’s failure to develop policies — and his tendency to countermand them by tweet — have caused major confusion worldwide about where we stand on issue after issue. In a crisis, having clear policy principles is even more important. Take the meltdown in Venezuela. The administration deserves credit for leading the international isolation of the country’s illegitimate president, Nicolás Maduro. But there is no evidence it has a comprehensive strategy to advance a peaceful transition — or a Plan B if Mr. Maduro digs in or lashes out.
Axios reported that Mr. Trump likes to express his disdain for policy by citing the boxer Mike Tyson: Everybody has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth. It’s true that no policy fully survives first contact. But if you don’t spend time anticipating the shots you are likely to take, you wind up flailing about wildly. Which sounds a lot like Mr. Trump.
These past two years, most of our foreign policy setbacks have been modest, and mostly of Mr. Trump’s own making. These next two, we may not be so lucky.
“For 50 years, and long before that, it was a disaster. But over the last 20, 25 years, it’s gotten worse.”
The numbers suggest that this is not true.
Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declined over the past two decades, according to government data. From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the government reported annually apprehending around 1 million to 1.6 million people who tried to cross the southwestern border illegally. That number has been halved in recent years. By month, border apprehensions averaged more than 81,588 under President George W. Bush, declined to more than 34,647 under President Barack Obama and now stand at 24,241 under Mr. Trump.
.. The president is correct in citing a spike in illegal border crossings that occurred in March: The 37,393 individuals apprehended was a 203 percent increase over the same period in March 2017, though the number was lower than in 2013 and 2014.
.. Research shows that incarceration rates of both legal and undocumented immigrants across the country are lower than those of native-born Americans, and that the net economic impact of immigration is positive.
.. “There’s this misconception that we’re in this lawless land, and it’s the wild, wild frontier, and it’s not,” said the Brownsville police chief, Orlando C. Rodriguez. “We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years, and the numbers are just getting better every year.”
.. Asked whether the city’s population of undocumented immigrants was committing widespread crime, Chief Rodriguez said they were most definitely not.
.. “To say that illegals are running around in Brownsville causing problems, we just don’t see it,” the chief said.
.. In Nogales, Ariz., which borders and shares its name with a Mexican city, the number of violent crimes plummeted by more than 70 percent from 1997 to 2016. Similar trends can be seen in San Luis, Somerton and Yuma. The overall crime rate in Arizona has also dropped by more than a third from 1993 to 2016. During that same time, the state’s undocumented-immigrant population more than doubled
.. The drug trade fuels public corruption.
.. Police chases of smugglers’ vehicles often end in tragedy — in deadly collisions, fatal shootings and rollovers.
.. Sergio Sanchez, a Republican activist and commentator in nearby McAllen, agrees with Mr. Trump’s portrayal of the border and his hard-line approach to illegal immigration.
.. “The crisis is real,” said Mr. Sanchez, the former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party and the host of a conservative talk-radio show called The Wall. “The crisis is immediately south of the border, and it bleeds over to our side. Mexico is literally a lawless land and they need to come to grips with that. The crisis has been going on for decades.
