Paradise Lost in Fort Worth
You’ve got to hand it to the Trump administration. Even though they’ve had more turnover than your neighborhood Walmart, they’ve managed to keep a razor-focus on job one: screwing over the American people. Trump Co. has just proposed weakening mercury regulations (the metal is especially dangerous to children and fetuses) and has effectively eliminated the EPA office in charge of children’s health.
And our own state government, never allowing common sense to interfere, has worked tirelessly toward more or less the same aims: to stop young people from voting, to arm teachers, and to stop “those people” from going to the restrooms of their choice. And for their efforts, the base of the Republican party is all energized by these petty cruelties disguised as public policy and foursquare against communists and socialists, neither of which is slated to run in the general election.
And in our own fair city, despite local elections being nonpartisan, the mayor and the power structure all bat from the right and sometimes the far right. And they are second to none in screwing over the average citizen.
Part and parcel of the conservative movement is the 40-year project of underfunding, then delegitimizing, the public sphere. Once they degrade what was once thought to be public, they privatize it to prove most of all that government can’t do anything. Lately, we’ve seen it here in this idea to privatize the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The city’s muckety-mucks want us to shrug our shoulders, see it as a fait accompli. Fort Worth doesn’t have the money to spruce up the gardens, so let’s make it so only those who can pay can go.
Read more: https://www.fwweekly.com/2018/11/07/paradise-lost-2/
