Texit wont come cheap

In the recent U.S election I heard one pundit say that the Republican Party would never return to sanity until it lost Texas. Indeed hopes were high that Democrats could turn the state given the influx of Latinos and other dem. leaning voters in recent years. In the event the republicans swept the boards once more dashing the hopes of any fundamental strategy change for the foreseeable future. That this state of affairs is a tragedy for the Lone Star State is lost on the majority of its voters. Some of the chickens came home to roost this past week as unseasonably low temperatures and ice and snow battered the state leaving its people without electricity, water food and heat. The queues for water at some of the city parish pumps would remind you of photographs of the Ireland of sixty years ago. So far dozens are dead from causes ranging between hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning. Right on cue the political charlatans in charge blamed the move to ‘green energy’ as the root cause. Less than ten percent of Texas electricity is green and its infrastructure is not fit for the cold. The wind farms in Canada for example work in the cold. The real failure predictably enough was political. Texas, it turns out operates an independent electricity system preventing it from importing power from out of state. This manoeuvre enables it to operate outside the dreaded ‘federal rules and regulations’ and promotes a race to the bottom from power producers. This keeps prices low ok but gives producers no incentive to invest in infrastructure or maintenance . Everything is hunky dory until something (like an unexpected weather event) goes wrong. So even though Texas is awash in oil and gas and wealth, once the cold came all the pipes froze and with them millions of people. Latest news is that as usual the well off were able to avoid these inconveniences and this included its senior senator Ted Cruz who did as he claims the ‘fatherly thing’ and accompanied his daughters off to the sunny climes of Mexico while his voters shivered and starved. Cruz is routinely described as the most hated man in Washington and even Trump lickspittle Lindsay Graham once quipped that ‘if you murdered Ted on the floor of the Senate and the jury was said senators, nobody would convict you.’
They say that Texans have theee obsessions: God. Guns and gays but it’s fair to say they are also obsessed by their own exceptionalism. Breaking away from Mexico in the 1830’s it was now allowed into the union because of its stance on slavery. It became a republic and even opened embassies in Paris and London. It was allowed join in 1846 but sided with the confederates in the civil war in another miscalculation. The latest wheeze from the lunatic fringe is that if the dems ever regain control they will secede from the union. If they do so they had better be ready to take on the share of the national debt that this would incur which post Trumps four year interregnum is north of five $trillion. This would just be for starters. So a ‘Texit’ won’t come cheap nor would it be cheap for any other aspirant to this political nirvana including Scotland and lately Wales. For the Irish of course it’s the opposite and the natives we are assured only pine for the day when we can unite the four green fields. Once more however the great stumbling of ‘who pays’ is dismissed as negativity. Well what we do know is that currently the English taxpayer is sending in ten billion directly and unknown billions indirectly and as Enda Kenny once said, ‘Paddy likes to know the score’. Well we’ll see. As far as the denizens of Texas are concerned the words of an old West Asian fable occur to me;
Even as the forest was shrinking the trees kept voting for the axe.
For the axe was clever and had convinced the trees that as it too was made out of wood it was just like them.
Drain the swamp is right.