When a river rises and swallows children, it is not nature that failed us—it is the theology of capitalism. We keep calling it "freedom" when what we mean is "no accountability." We gut the systems meant to protect the vulnerable, then act shocked when the vulnerable drown.
This isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s a spiritual collapse. Somewhere along the line, we decided efficiency was holier than compassion, that deregulation was divine, and that market forces could replace moral ones.
But here's the thing, darling: no amount of GDP can resurrect a ten-year-old girl.
So yes—build fast, but build wisely. Cut red tape, but not lifelines. If a system slows us down but saves lives, it's not broken—it's sacred.
Blessed be the floodplain engineers, the whistleblowers, the grumpy bureaucrats who refused to look the other way. They were never the problem. The problem was thinking we could shortcut care.
Thank you for stating the obvious. In a complex world, the nations that develop scientifically and govern their citizenry ethically (called 'developed' nations) are the ones that continually survive and thrive. Those that don't collapse into chaos, criminality, their citizenry falling into poverty and plagued with disease and are generally ruled through violence (third world countries.) Texas has led the way to unregulated, unethical, economic growth for the elite, obtained by dumbing down their electorate, and promoting evangelicism (anti-female reproductive rights / white male religiosity) for decades. MAGA is a fast plunge into a modern Middle Ages of death, disease, and violence.
Any honest reading of history comes to the conclusion that the wealthy have always made life for everyone else miserable, desperate and uncertain. Unemployment is a tool to keep wages low, war is a tool to abscond with taxpayer's money and prevent pushback, and keeping housing prices high keeps the money flowing upwards from working people to the wealthy. The system has always been rigged, but now it is worse than at many times past. Cutting regulations is a tool to enrich the rich, as is cutting taxes on the rich. Currently, the many of the wealthy in America have far more money than many whole countries do, and you can do a lot of damage to society with that much money and power. If we want to fix things, we are going to have to bring back the 90% top tax rate for the wealthy.
The problem of regulation is a very complex one that definitely needs to be addressed. I also see a deeper problem underlying this tragic event. This is the citizen’s relationship with the government. When a government system is effective, people don’t recognize its existence and complain about paying for systems that are for our protection, but work quietly and effectively. This is what happened with the DOGE cuts. Musk and his young workers understand little about the operations of the government except the agencies that supported Musk. In a country of approximately 350 million people, the government is going to be complex and large. Most of us do not understand all the different parts of the government and what they do. I include myself in that group. It becomes easy for Fox News and Politicians to tell people there is no climate change, therefore we don’t have to prepare for it. That is why the critical agency of NOAA suffered cuts in resources and perhaps was not able to predict the exact location of the rainfall. But the money for NOAA was part of funds given to Billionaires for supporting Trump. We need more critical information about our government and its functioning.
I agree with you but you left out one important facet of the problem: enforcement of regulations. Just because we prohibit bad behavior, and even have regulators assigned to monitor and enforce, the size of the task (and sometimes regulatory capture) too often mean problems and failures grow. The rot in the system is deep.
I agree with every point but would go further. This is the result of the collective failure of We, (me too) the citizens, to participate in self-government at every level for decades. We can make whatever excuses we want but now we are seeing and paying the price for our failure. Now that we see where our disengagement leads, we can either put our heads down and submit to the rising dick-tatorship, or do the hard work of organizing a bottom up, people led, disciplined nonviolent resistance. The choice is ours, as it always has been.
Capitalism demands profit. Every measure of profit is a win in a society addicted to the propaganda of winning. Texas, as a philosophy, leans as heavily on the glory of winning as any area of the country. It also has tons of money at virtually every level of society, except the usual bottom 50 percent of citizens, who struggle for the leftovers. What this has to do with this tragedy, a horrible tragedy, can easily be lost amidst the grief and agony. But resentment and outright disdain for regulating behaviors that attempt to manage the greed of capitalist society are very high in Texas. I know many folks from there and live next door. Headlines almost daily display the state govt. level bureaucracy pushing and shoving this disdain across the entire south central/west area of the country. It is dripping with arrogance and singularity. But the arrogance is not responsible for public safety, it pushes against public safety, considering the private capitalist sector to be the shrine that all should kneel before. Capitalism takes/makes damage at the front end, the middle and the end product. Then there are consequences due to those end products. Here the capitalists disappear, washing their hands, like Pilate, of any fallout. When nearly each and every citizen is left out of the decision making and the means testing that would insure their safety and sustainability, and only a handful of bankers, lawyers, developers and lobbyists RULE the lives of others, failure and tragedy ensue. Flood plain/watershed management is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Mature responsibility and follow through appears to be impossible to understand and carry out. Hence, the horror of this incident and its generational agony will NOT be washed away. Regulation or capitalist free-for-all. Take your pick, if you even have that choice.
Wow, but of course. Tax funded, obviously. Winning, the curse of the society that cannot support itself. The Kwh/Mwh to run a very large stadium can be 25 megawatts per game. Many thousands of stadiums in 'murka. But not much flood control.
Accusing the government of being an ineffective bureaucracy is a GOP talking point solely designed to convince the public that we don't need government so that they can dismantle it. Okay, let's see how that works for Americans. Let the complaining begin.
More Climate Change: severe storms, high temperatures, insufficient rain, no place is safe. There is so much the USA needs to improve. All requires more revenue…and leadership that addresses the needs.
That is the most ridiculous thing ever. No one can truly predict nature. There were warnings. THERE WERE WARNINGS. Did people heed the warnings? Did people trust the warnings? Did people have any other places to go? Stop trying to use this as a political cudgel. I said nothing to do with cuts of any sort.
Absolutely correct. I read a time line breakout of the NWS warnings. There were a number of them, and each one was more severe than the one before. This is with the junkyard dog tactics of TFG/DOGE/maga gutting the agency. Everywhere you look in 'murka there are physical structures that the federal govt. built or funded at the state level. There is a complete system of weather analysis and reporting and emergency messaging. But when the messages went out, in the dead of night, no one at the local/regional level was either awake or on duty, and no one who may have heard the messaging had any responsibility or means to notify all the thousands of persons negatively affected. Profit always comes before safety/protection. Profit comes before everything, as Friedman ranted it is the 'only' thing that matters. Why would anyone build in an existing floodplain, or even the first or second tier older ones? DEVELOPERS and their BANKERS. Insurers hate to insure structural in any flood plain. One million is too much to create and continue flood control measures AFTER structural is allowed to exist in those plains? Money talks, bullshit walks, until failure, then, magically, those in charge or nowhere to be found. We 'murkans are glib, greedy and selfish. We want what we want until we get it, and we get it anyway we can, the cheaper the better. Until failure, and cheap always fails.
I wonder if the rains had come at coffee break would the outcome have been much different? Texas hill country often has nighttime storms. Yes, this one was immense, but the reporting is that the hill country is very flood prone.
We were warned 50 years ago about global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. All the awful weather the world is suffering was predicted years ago. The fossil fuel industry realized the risk. The fossil fuel industry chose not to warn people.
The population of Galveston Tx in 1900 was about 38,000 and it's shipping port facilities were ranked as the fifth most important port facilities in the US. On the morning of September 9th, almost completely without warning, a category 4 (at least) hurricane made US landfall at what is today Padre Island National Seashore killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people, destroying more than 2600 buildings, and wrecking the entire port. A century and a quarter later, Galveston Island has never fully recovered. The port facilities and the rsik connection were never rebuilt and instead an intracoastal waterway was created to connect the Gulf of Mexico to port facilities at Houston. To this day The Great Storm of 1900 remains the most deadly natural disaster in US history. It is one of the significant factors as to why there is a National Weather Service and a National Storm Forecast Center and a National Hurricane Tracking Center. Until Donald John Trump and Elon Musk decided to eliminate those line items from the US Federal Budget and put those US Tax Payer's dollars in their own pockets.
"Eighty-two people died because we've lost the ability to distinguish between regulations that save lives and bureaucracy that just wastes time."
This is wrong... We haven't lost this ability, Republicans have just willfully chosen to ignore it, because they are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, and they don't care about the lives of those that don't directly make them money.
When a river rises and swallows children, it is not nature that failed us—it is the theology of capitalism. We keep calling it "freedom" when what we mean is "no accountability." We gut the systems meant to protect the vulnerable, then act shocked when the vulnerable drown.
This isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s a spiritual collapse. Somewhere along the line, we decided efficiency was holier than compassion, that deregulation was divine, and that market forces could replace moral ones.
But here's the thing, darling: no amount of GDP can resurrect a ten-year-old girl.
So yes—build fast, but build wisely. Cut red tape, but not lifelines. If a system slows us down but saves lives, it's not broken—it's sacred.
Blessed be the floodplain engineers, the whistleblowers, the grumpy bureaucrats who refused to look the other way. They were never the problem. The problem was thinking we could shortcut care.
Thank you for stating the obvious. In a complex world, the nations that develop scientifically and govern their citizenry ethically (called 'developed' nations) are the ones that continually survive and thrive. Those that don't collapse into chaos, criminality, their citizenry falling into poverty and plagued with disease and are generally ruled through violence (third world countries.) Texas has led the way to unregulated, unethical, economic growth for the elite, obtained by dumbing down their electorate, and promoting evangelicism (anti-female reproductive rights / white male religiosity) for decades. MAGA is a fast plunge into a modern Middle Ages of death, disease, and violence.
You are correct.
Any honest reading of history comes to the conclusion that the wealthy have always made life for everyone else miserable, desperate and uncertain. Unemployment is a tool to keep wages low, war is a tool to abscond with taxpayer's money and prevent pushback, and keeping housing prices high keeps the money flowing upwards from working people to the wealthy. The system has always been rigged, but now it is worse than at many times past. Cutting regulations is a tool to enrich the rich, as is cutting taxes on the rich. Currently, the many of the wealthy in America have far more money than many whole countries do, and you can do a lot of damage to society with that much money and power. If we want to fix things, we are going to have to bring back the 90% top tax rate for the wealthy.
....and how much did the affected counties spend on high school football stadiums?
#priorities #YeeeHaaaaah
The problem of regulation is a very complex one that definitely needs to be addressed. I also see a deeper problem underlying this tragic event. This is the citizen’s relationship with the government. When a government system is effective, people don’t recognize its existence and complain about paying for systems that are for our protection, but work quietly and effectively. This is what happened with the DOGE cuts. Musk and his young workers understand little about the operations of the government except the agencies that supported Musk. In a country of approximately 350 million people, the government is going to be complex and large. Most of us do not understand all the different parts of the government and what they do. I include myself in that group. It becomes easy for Fox News and Politicians to tell people there is no climate change, therefore we don’t have to prepare for it. That is why the critical agency of NOAA suffered cuts in resources and perhaps was not able to predict the exact location of the rainfall. But the money for NOAA was part of funds given to Billionaires for supporting Trump. We need more critical information about our government and its functioning.
I agree with you but you left out one important facet of the problem: enforcement of regulations. Just because we prohibit bad behavior, and even have regulators assigned to monitor and enforce, the size of the task (and sometimes regulatory capture) too often mean problems and failures grow. The rot in the system is deep.
I agree with every point but would go further. This is the result of the collective failure of We, (me too) the citizens, to participate in self-government at every level for decades. We can make whatever excuses we want but now we are seeing and paying the price for our failure. Now that we see where our disengagement leads, we can either put our heads down and submit to the rising dick-tatorship, or do the hard work of organizing a bottom up, people led, disciplined nonviolent resistance. The choice is ours, as it always has been.
We are beginning to like Hungary! One of the orange haired buffoons idol.
Capitalism demands profit. Every measure of profit is a win in a society addicted to the propaganda of winning. Texas, as a philosophy, leans as heavily on the glory of winning as any area of the country. It also has tons of money at virtually every level of society, except the usual bottom 50 percent of citizens, who struggle for the leftovers. What this has to do with this tragedy, a horrible tragedy, can easily be lost amidst the grief and agony. But resentment and outright disdain for regulating behaviors that attempt to manage the greed of capitalist society are very high in Texas. I know many folks from there and live next door. Headlines almost daily display the state govt. level bureaucracy pushing and shoving this disdain across the entire south central/west area of the country. It is dripping with arrogance and singularity. But the arrogance is not responsible for public safety, it pushes against public safety, considering the private capitalist sector to be the shrine that all should kneel before. Capitalism takes/makes damage at the front end, the middle and the end product. Then there are consequences due to those end products. Here the capitalists disappear, washing their hands, like Pilate, of any fallout. When nearly each and every citizen is left out of the decision making and the means testing that would insure their safety and sustainability, and only a handful of bankers, lawyers, developers and lobbyists RULE the lives of others, failure and tragedy ensue. Flood plain/watershed management is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Mature responsibility and follow through appears to be impossible to understand and carry out. Hence, the horror of this incident and its generational agony will NOT be washed away. Regulation or capitalist free-for-all. Take your pick, if you even have that choice.
When it comes to SPORTS... unlimited socialism! Scroll down this page, beyond the headline: https://kixs.com/small-texas-town-has-massive-football-stadium/
Wow, but of course. Tax funded, obviously. Winning, the curse of the society that cannot support itself. The Kwh/Mwh to run a very large stadium can be 25 megawatts per game. Many thousands of stadiums in 'murka. But not much flood control.
Accusing the government of being an ineffective bureaucracy is a GOP talking point solely designed to convince the public that we don't need government so that they can dismantle it. Okay, let's see how that works for Americans. Let the complaining begin.
Sad and Republican speaker of the house is flying flags outside his office in our capital building.
More Climate Change: severe storms, high temperatures, insufficient rain, no place is safe. There is so much the USA needs to improve. All requires more revenue…and leadership that addresses the needs.
That is the most ridiculous thing ever. No one can truly predict nature. There were warnings. THERE WERE WARNINGS. Did people heed the warnings? Did people trust the warnings? Did people have any other places to go? Stop trying to use this as a political cudgel. I said nothing to do with cuts of any sort.
Absolutely correct. I read a time line breakout of the NWS warnings. There were a number of them, and each one was more severe than the one before. This is with the junkyard dog tactics of TFG/DOGE/maga gutting the agency. Everywhere you look in 'murka there are physical structures that the federal govt. built or funded at the state level. There is a complete system of weather analysis and reporting and emergency messaging. But when the messages went out, in the dead of night, no one at the local/regional level was either awake or on duty, and no one who may have heard the messaging had any responsibility or means to notify all the thousands of persons negatively affected. Profit always comes before safety/protection. Profit comes before everything, as Friedman ranted it is the 'only' thing that matters. Why would anyone build in an existing floodplain, or even the first or second tier older ones? DEVELOPERS and their BANKERS. Insurers hate to insure structural in any flood plain. One million is too much to create and continue flood control measures AFTER structural is allowed to exist in those plains? Money talks, bullshit walks, until failure, then, magically, those in charge or nowhere to be found. We 'murkans are glib, greedy and selfish. We want what we want until we get it, and we get it anyway we can, the cheaper the better. Until failure, and cheap always fails.
When nature decides to attack 9 to 5
I wonder if the rains had come at coffee break would the outcome have been much different? Texas hill country often has nighttime storms. Yes, this one was immense, but the reporting is that the hill country is very flood prone.
We were warned 50 years ago about global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. All the awful weather the world is suffering was predicted years ago. The fossil fuel industry realized the risk. The fossil fuel industry chose not to warn people.
NWS advance warning image: https://files.catbox.moe/wxjywg.jpg
No one could have predicted this. They can barely even predict that it’s raining in my neighborhood
Did you look at that image I linked? THEY PREDICTED IT. PRECISELY.
*this had nothing to do
The population of Galveston Tx in 1900 was about 38,000 and it's shipping port facilities were ranked as the fifth most important port facilities in the US. On the morning of September 9th, almost completely without warning, a category 4 (at least) hurricane made US landfall at what is today Padre Island National Seashore killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people, destroying more than 2600 buildings, and wrecking the entire port. A century and a quarter later, Galveston Island has never fully recovered. The port facilities and the rsik connection were never rebuilt and instead an intracoastal waterway was created to connect the Gulf of Mexico to port facilities at Houston. To this day The Great Storm of 1900 remains the most deadly natural disaster in US history. It is one of the significant factors as to why there is a National Weather Service and a National Storm Forecast Center and a National Hurricane Tracking Center. Until Donald John Trump and Elon Musk decided to eliminate those line items from the US Federal Budget and put those US Tax Payer's dollars in their own pockets.
Kenneth Lumpkin more comentary
"Eighty-two people died because we've lost the ability to distinguish between regulations that save lives and bureaucracy that just wastes time."
This is wrong... We haven't lost this ability, Republicans have just willfully chosen to ignore it, because they are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, and they don't care about the lives of those that don't directly make them money.
Well, what I’m saying is that there are absolutely insane regulations that are so absurd that they make all regulations like bad
The author’s name should be prominently marked on the piece.
Corbin Trent