04.30.12
Posted in Around The State, Commentary at 8:42 am by wcnews
The Texas Progressive Alliance is slow jamming this week’s roundup.
CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Republicans holding on to private power at the expense of children.
More Congressional candidate interviews from Off the Kuff, who has conversations with Marc Veasey, Ramiro Garza, and Anthony Troiani.
BossKitty at TruthHugger takes a vacation from the sanitized, filtered, hollywood marketing of political candidates and looks at the world. The dramatic trial in Norway, for a mass murderer, has unified civilized Europeans who sang … To Annoy The Monster.
The myth of the disgruntled Texas Republican. WCNews at Eye On Williamson says they’re like a GOP Chupacabra, we always hear about one, but never actually see one. Deeply unhappy Republicans? Don’t be so sure.
Greg Abbott and Susan Combs have both, in the past year, made the serious mistake of exposing millions of Texans to identity fraud by failing to safeguard their social security numbers. Both seek a promotion to higher office in 2014. Is there ANY amount of incompetence and malfeasance a Texas Republican can be guilty of and NOT get elected? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs doesn’t have confidence that the answer is ‘yes’.
BlueBloggin wants Americans to understand there is always more to sensational stories in the headlines. UpDated: What is Adrenarche and Why Are America’s Services Sexually Immature.
Libby Shaw nails it again over at TexasKaos. She explains why she is hoping 2012 is a “buyer’s revenge” election, a judgement on the kiss-ups, brain dead zombies and other assorted creatures that got elected in 2010. See it here: Gov. Oops Grovels for Norquist While Houston Business Leader Kowtows to Perry
Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about Dick Clark and Johnny Rotten.
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04.29.12
Posted in Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Commentary, Money In Politics, Right Wing Lies at 1:20 pm by wcnews
It being the title of this article in the WaPo yesterday, Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
When we have divided government, like we have at the federal level, each side has to compromise in order for government to function for the people. When one side decides to take the ball and go home and the other side doesn’t stand up to them, we get what we have today.
Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.
In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.
On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.
Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.
The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”
And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.
This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.
I think they do a good job of laying out the problem, there solution is probably not going to work. They want the media to start calling out right wing lies, is a non-starter since the media’s trust, like trust in so many things in this country, is gone.
But the reason the GOP continues to do this is because that’s what their constituents – those who bankroll their campaigns – want them to do. Gridlock and do-nothing government, keeps the status quo, and they like the status quo. We’ve got to get the money out of politics to change who gets elected. Until that is done, government of big money, by big money, and for big money will continue.
It plays out different in Texas. Since we are a one party state, and there is no opposition with any political power in Texas, our politics just keeps moving further and further to the far right. For more on that read these two articles on the political evolution of David Dewhurst:
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s Tenure Draws Mixed Reviews.
Dewhurst’s conservatism challenged.
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04.26.12
Posted in Around The State, Commentary, The Lege at 12:24 pm by wcnews
It seems like we keep hearing about how there are many disgruntled, or unhappy, Texas Republicans, who don’t like what Perry’s doing to the state of Texas. But the “disgruntled Texas Republican” meme keeps getting harder and harder to believe as the years roll on. It’s half-way through his current term, (again), and his approval rating is back to 39%. There’s no way Perry can be re-elected, right? Wrong, the Texas GOP will likely keep re-electing Perry until he decides he won’t run any more.
While I believe what people like Harvey Kronberg and Paul Burka report – that there are Republicans out there that tell them they’re unhappy – there aren’t any that show it in public, or during a legislative session. (They’re like a GOP Chupacabra, we always hear about one, but never actually see one). It may be something a few of the caucus members are told to say to the media so they’ll keep reporting it, and Texans will still believe there are sensible Republicans out there.
Be that as it may, whenever I read something like this I try and picture how it would play our during a legislative session. Here’s the end of Kronberg’s latest at YNN, Governor’s budget compact evokes surprising GOP response.
The Republican majorities represent real people back home. It’s an all too familiar list. Rural hospitals suffered from budget cuts. Suburban areas are strangling in traffic with no money to build or repair roads. Almost every community has some public school horror stories about cuts. The current tax system will never have enough money to pay for the water infrastructure needed to support either suburb or agriculture. And on it goes.
Most Republicans were profoundly unhappy with the results from last session. The GOP super-majorities wrote a bunch of hot checks and left them for the next group of lawmakers to pay. From their perspective, the Governor limited their flexibility and made problem solving much more difficult while assuring a continuation of a government funded on hot checks.
That’s not a pretty picture Kronberg paints and we’re supposed to believe that “most Republicans” were “deeply unhappy” with last session. I just haven’t gotten that impression at all. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that most GOP members of the legislature are deeply unhappy with the results of last session. Perry’s signalling he wants the same, only worse, no diversions, gimmicks, and tricks this time.
Other then Perry’s HPV debacle, which was mainly a revolt of the right wing social conservatives, there’s no will, whatsoever, of the GOP members in the legislature to stand up to Perry. Especially on the tax and economic issues. Are we supposed to believe that there will be enough GOP members of the legislature willing to stand up to Perry next session? Not to mention the timing of it all.
The current bets are the partisan balance in the Texas House will move slightly in favor of the Democrats. A switch from a GOP majority of 102 to between 90 and 95. That would mean in the House if every Democrat voted to override a Perry veto, somewhere between 40 and 45 Republicans in the House would have to as well. And in the Senate the partisan balance is likely to stay close to what it is now, a 19-12 GOP advantage. Will there be 9 or 10 GOP Senators willing to vote with the Democrats to override a veto? And that’s assuming both chambers can get a budget passed and on Perry’s desk in time for him to veto, with enough time left in session to override that veto. (See The Limits of the Veto).
There’s also a good possibility that the current Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst will be elected to the US Senate. If he is there will be a intra-party battle before the next session starts to see who will b the next Lt. Gov. It took eight ballots, all secret, in a “committee of the whole” to elect the new Lt. Gov back in 2000. The Senate back then had a 16-15 GOP majority. Wikipedia states Bill Ratliff was elected by a vote of 16-15, with most of his votes coming from Democrats. Suffice it to say that an election like that, just before the legislative session, is likely to stir up passions, not just in the Senate, but those outside the Senate looking to run for Lt. Gov. in 2014. It would be like a Speaker’s race in the Senate.
All of this makes it likely that the 2013 legislative session is going to be an exciting one. Last week, with the release of what Kuff is calling Perry’s budget suicide pact, Texas may finally get a legislative showdown between the two factions of the Texas GOP – between the right wing extremists and the less extreme moderates. Between the Perry Republicans and the rest of them.
If there really are disgruntled or deeply “unhappy” Texas Republicans out there, they’re not going to get anywhere without taking on, and ultimately, taking out Perry. And it certainly can’t be done through the media. They will have to make themselves known and quit being afraid of speaking in public about their disagreements and their deep unhappiness. Otherwise it’ll just be more of the same.
Further Reading:
Hart: Texas leaders with balanced approach need to step up.
“Why don’t the state’s business leaders stand up to Perry?”
DMN: Anti-Compact, Pro-Tax.
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04.23.12
Posted in Around The State, Commentary at 3:28 pm by wcnews
Patricia Kilday Hart highlights a situation where the leaders of the Houston business community shows up to support Gov. Perry’s new “compact” even though it runs contrary to the direction the group believes the state should go in the future. Here’s the article and an excerpt, Why don’t state’s business leaders stand up to Perry?
The folks at the Greater Houston Partnership are well aware of the many ways the Texas Legislature – and our statewide elected officeholders – have failed to invest in the crucial infrastructure required for our exploding population.
Representing the Houston business community, the GHP has researched and adopted resolution after reasoned resolution expressing its collective wisdom.
Through statements vetted by committee, the GHP has supported increasing the cigarette tax, saying the state needs to “create new revenue streams to address the state budget shortfall.” It has opposed budget cuts to Texas colleges and universities. Citing research showing the importance of early childhood education, the pro-business group has supported funding for pre-kindergarten programs.
The resolutions go on and on: Spend more money to educate more Texas doctors and nurses to expand our inadequate healthcare workforce. Make sure Texas Medicaid healthcare providers are adequately reimbursed for their services. Tweak the margins tax to make it fairer, and resist the urge to exempt all small businesses.
So it was shocking to see the GHP’s CEO, Jeff Moseley, standing next to Gov. Rick Perry on Monday when Perry unveiled his “compact” promising no new taxes next legislative session. Perry’s plan not only flies in the face of all of the GHP resolutions, but would make it impossible for the Legislature to provide any funding for highway construction or water resources outlined in our drought-stricken state’s water plan.
The main reason business leaders in Texas are forced into this position is because there is no viable alternative in Texas at this time to Perry’s and the Texas GOP’s extremism. The Texas Democratic Party is so decimated that there is nowhere else for the business community to turn. They only have themselves to blame.
While many in this state, and it’s not just Democrats, keep waiting for the demographic changes to bring back a viable option in this state, it isn’t going to happen by itself. If the business community believes it needs a different government for Texas to be prosperous in the future, then they can’t keep showing up and funding the same politicians that want to keep that from happening.
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Posted in Around The State, Commentary at 8:38 am by wcnews
The Texas Progressive Alliance honors the life of Dick Clark by bringing you a weekly roundup with a good beat that you can dance to.
Off the Kuff began a series of interviews with Congressional candidates in contested primary races, publishing conversations with Rep. Silvestre Reyes, State Rep. Pete Gallego, and former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez.
Republicans are talking like they want a race war. Either that, or they want to just kill all the liberals. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs documents last week’s conservative verbal atrocities.
BossKitty at TruthHugger has had enough of 2012 Zombie Voters.
BlueBloggin wants American voters to understand that until they force honesty and accountability from the leaders they elect, they will become subjects to the Koch Brothers Machine vs American Destiny.
We do, in fact, have a revenue problem in Texas. But there are few, of either party, willing to admit it. WCNews at Eye On Williamson points that out in this post, Little human interest side notes.
CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees the republicans escalating its war on women.
At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw brings us up to date on what Governor Oops is up to, and it isn’t pretty. Read Rick Perry Grovels for Norquist While His War On Women, Children and the Poor Continues.
Neil at Texas Liberal posted the newsletter of Occupy Wall Street: Houston. A strong effort to reboot the Occupy effort in Houston, OWSH is meeting on a regular basis, and has a Facebook page where you can join in and take part.
Stace at Dos Centavos tells us about a study which basically slams Higher Education in Texas. The post is basically an “I told you so!” about Texas’ screwed up priorities in pushing “Tier 1″ funding, while leaving retention and graduation rates to suffer.
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04.20.12
Posted in Around The State, Commentary, Had Enough Yet?, Right Wing Lies, Taxes, The Budget, The Lege at 2:48 pm by wcnews
In light of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s pre-primary “campaign gimmick” a few things need to be clarified. As Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka wrote, “..there is nothing in it that he hasn’t said before“. It’s what the GOP has been campaigning on for decades. They just don’t have the guts, or willingness, to actually enact it once elected. In other words they’re going to tell voters this is what we want to do, but they will never do it.
Last session was no different. Many elected members of the GOP in Texas love to preach to us about “fiscal conservatism”. And many new members who were elected to the legislature last year wound up voting for something that went completely against what they campaigned on when they won their office. When the reality of “no new taxes” and “cuts, cuts, cuts” started to sink in, they did what every legislature has been doing for decades. What Harvey Kronberg calls, “one of those little human interest side notes”, Perry’s Call For Legislative Unilateral Surrender A Year Before The Session Largely Met With Silence.
The event brought to mind one of those little human interest side notes that happen during a legislative session that only seem consequential in the months that follow.
After the House was sworn in and Speaker Straus re-elected last year, Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts stood before the body and over the course of several hours explained what the adoption of a base-line budget in the midst of the Great Recession and precipitously declining state revenues really meant.
He painted a dramatic picture that quantified public school and junior college closings, rural hospitals losing funding, prison closings, impacts on criminal justice and a wide range of other impacts.
Most veteran lawmakers from both parties were stunned, understanding that schools, roads, hospitals, agricultural centers, junior and full tilt colleges were all economic drivers in their communities. Rural communities in particular were going to take it on the chin.
The Tea Party freshman sat quietly and did not seem particularly upset by the implications of the policy picture Pitts had just painted. But they had come to Austin suspicious of government and had no particular frame of reference for the nuances of the budget or the significance to their communities.
It was not until April, four months into the session, that some began understanding what firing teachers and shrinking rural health care facilities might really mean back home.
But it was nursing homes that finally produced head-snapping attention. About 60% of Medicaid funding supports Texas nursing homes. The kind of budget cuts under discussion were going to dramatically reduce matching federal dollars. Nursing homes would have to close and elderly consolidated into fewer nursing homes, Tea Party freshmen told QR of their concerns that constituents’ parents and grandparents would no longer be in facilities ten miles away. Rather they could be “warehoused” 200 miles away. That’s a tough one to explain at those town hall meetings.
The only thing that forestalled the nursing home meltdown was one of the smoke and mirror patches the Governor agreed to last session but wants legislators to pledge to not consider next session. The Legislature with the Governor’s approval funded nineteen months of Medicaid leaving it for the next round of elected officials to pay for the remaining five months in the two year budget cycle. [Emphasis added]
They discovered that cutting health and human services funding could transform a $50 ear ache treatment partially funded by the feds into a $500 emergency room visit funded by local property tax payers.
One rural Tea Party freshman even told us about a self-styled Tea Party local road builder who wanted to end all government spending until he discovered it meant ending his livelihood.
Most tea party members who decried budgetary shenanigans, and tricks, when faced with the decision of cut or use trickery, used trickery. Instead of doing what they said the voters sent them to do, they compromised their integrity, and joined in with the rest of their GOP cohorts in the legislature. They took the easy way out. They knew what they were doing was against what they campaigned on, and they did it anyway. That’s essentially what the budget battle inside the GOP in the legislature came down to last year.
There was much written about this at the time. This article in the Texas Observer, The Sheepish Revolutionary, shows the ignorance and naivete (my words), one tea party freshman had of the legislature.
Thanks to that platform—and a national wave of GOP fervor—she ultimately won by a six-point margin in November. It wasn’t until the first day of the legislative session that Scott, along with other lawmakers, discovered just how bad the budget shortfall was. And when it came time to choose between her promises to fully fund education and to shrink government, Scott chose to vote for a budget that cuts $8 billion from public schools.
Scott gets defensive about the decision. “We all say a lot of things and we all try to do what we say,” she admits. “But once you realize what is actual fact instead of what is just getting passed down to you, there are decisions that have to be changed.” [Emphasis added] She argues that she had to trust the senior legislators. “For me to stand and say I know better than they [the budget writers] do, when they have sat and listened to the testimony and witnesses—it would have been very disingenuous of me to put them down for the decisions they had to make,” Scott says.
Scott was very much still learning. She was surprised to learn the Senate will have to pass its budget bill, and then she will vote again on a compromise between the two versions. She’s not even sure if her vote matters. “I don’t even know why we have to take a vote on it,” she says. “Someone else is going to decide it.” Of course, many credited Tea Party members like Scott for forcing the House leadership into such a bare-bones budget.
And this item as well, Tea party lawmakers agonize over budget.
Like many who ran for and won seats in the Texas House last year, state Rep. Dan Huberty courted tea party activists in his district, promising to cut the fat out of the state’s budget and hold the line on taxes.
But after two months in Austin, Huberty, a former Humble school board president, has seen that much of the budget fat that lawmakers are looking to cut could have a direct impact on the classrooms in the school district he led.
Huberty is one of 11 freshman Republicans who won seats in the House and then joined the Tea Party Caucus, a group of legislators pledged to control government spending and fight off tax increases. And though they remain opposed to tax hikes, the new lawmakers — like many of their veteran colleagues — have seen in recent weeks the difficulty of closing a budget gap with spending cuts alone.
The state is billions of dollars short of what it needs to continue current programs. To avoid tax increases, House and Senate leaders proposed budgets in January that would slash spending on public education and health care — cuts that would affect classrooms, nursing homes and colleges in just about every lawmaker’s hometown.
“I think there were a lot of deer-in-the-headlight looks when the budget was laid out,” Huberty said.
All of this certainly makes it seem like many of the tea party legislators had little actual knowledge of whether there was fat in the state budget. They’ve just been hearing a bunch of Texas Republicans spout these lies over, and over again, and came to believe it to be true. That may be true, but by the time the budget was finally passed they knew exactly what they were doing.
The reality is much different. We do, in fact, have a revenue problem in Texas. But there are few, of either party, willing to admit it. We can’t fund enrolment growth in public education, build needed infrastructure, pay for health care, state parks, and on and on. Simply put, we can’t pay higher taxes then we did in 1992. And that will lead to many more little human interest side notes
Further Reading:
Perry Interested In Another Run For President.
Rick Perry Fuels Speculation About Re-election Bid.
Myths on Spending, Debt, and Taxes Fuel Ryan Vision.
10 Things Republicans Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes
Here are the top 10 (click a link to jump to the details for each below):
- President Obama Cut Taxes for Almost All Working Americans
- Tax Cuts Don’t Pay for Themselves
- Almost All Working Americans Pay Taxes
- The GOP’s “Job Creators” Don’t Create Jobs
- Low Capital Gains Taxes Fuel Income Inequality…
- …But Not Investment
- The Estate Tax Has Virtually No Impact on Family Farms and Businesses
- Income Inequality is at an 80 Year High…
- …While the Federal Tax Burden is at 60 Year Low
- Which of the $1 Trillion in Tax Breaks Will GOP End?
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04.18.12
Posted in Around The Nation, Around The State, Education, Money In Politics, Taxes at 3:57 pm by wcnews
Several reports released this week are worth reading.
First, here’s a good one from the Sunlight Foundation, Lobby more, pay less in taxes.
When it comes to paying less in taxes, having an army of lobbyists appears to be helpful. Many companies lobby on taxes, but those who spend the most report the largest and most consistent declines in tax rates. The eight companies who spent the most money lobbying between 2007 and 2009 all saw their 2010 tax rates decline from what they paid in 2007. While it is difficult to show causality, the likelihood of this happening by random chance is less than 1 in 100. And of those eight companies, six reduced their tax rates by at least seven percentage points. Given the larger patterns we’ve observed, the likelihood of this happening by random chance is less than 1 in 100,000. At the very least, we know that the companies that lobby the most are also the companies who have figured out some way to pay millions less in taxes than they did just a few years ago.
Not much “news” here, just more about how our government has been taken over by wealthy corporations.
Next, here’s one on the state of Texas Higher Ed, Texas Higher Education Must Confront Hard Choices, Penn Study Finds. (Via the HChron, Study: Texas faces “hard choices” in higher education.)
Texas will be forced to put the state’s economic growth at stake by closing the doors to college opportunity for thousands of young people, many of them Latino, unless leaders prioritize their goals for higher education and develop a plan to pay for them, according to a new report released by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Higher Education Research.
Through its strategic plan, Closing the Gaps, Texas has garnered broad public support for a set of statewide goals for higher education: increasing college enrollment, raising the number of degrees awarded, pushing the state’s colleges and universities up in the national rankings, and luring more federal research dollars.
But the admirable goals Texas has set for itself are not compatible, particularly in tough economic times, Laura Perna and Joni Finney of Penn’s Graduate School of Education write in “Hard Choices Ahead: Performance and Policy in Texas Higher Education,” the fourth report of a five-state study.
And this one, Political Pledges as Credible Commitments, seems very appropriate considering this weeks developments. It came via this post from Ezra Klein, Why Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge works — even among voters who support taxes.
The important part is what happens next: Voters — no matter their opinion on taxes vs. spending cuts — hate politicians who break pledges. If a candidate took the pledge and then broke it, voters who wanted more spending cuts turned on him, but so did voters who wanted more tax hikes. They saw it, the authors hypothesize, as a character issue. You can see this on the table below, where I’ve highlighted the scenarios in which a “pledged” politician flipped.
[...]
So that’s the trick: Norquist gets politicians to sign the pledge because it makes them more popular in primaries. And then he keeps them from breaking the pledge because breaking a promise makes them less popular with everybody. And you can see an example of today’s Politico.
Once a pledge, always a pledge. Which is likely the reason some politicians don’t want to “sign on” to Perry’s compact.
As David Atkins at Hullabaloo points our there are Some simple solutions to these problems.
Further Reading:
David Dewhurst signed Rick Perry’s budget pledge
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Posted in Around The Nation, Around The State, Commentary, Criminal Justice at 10:29 am by wcnews
On PBS’s Frontline last night they looked at the science, or lack thereof, in forensic science. The most shocking to me was finding out that fingerprints are based on faith and not science much of the time. Not to mention the fact that anyone can get a forensic credential online. This is extremely shocking especially in light of the Michael Morton case.
Watch it here, The Real CSI.
Grits has more.
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04.17.12
Posted in Commentary at 2:15 pm by wcnews
I found this recent Op-Ed from the Rio Grande Guardian very informative, The Myth of the ‘One Size-fits-All’ Hispanic. Here’s a long excerpt:
There is no doubt that the scope of Spanish-descent citizens in the U.S. is impressive. They live throughout the country and their numbers are huge. Based on the 2010 census, about 50 million citizens in the U.S. are Spanish-surnamed (16 percent of the population). However, sharing Spanish last names doesn’t mean their needs are identical. There are key internal differences within. For example, maintaining trade sanctions against Cuba may be a hot button voting issue in Florida, but it is not in Texas or the Southwest. Additional differences follow on the four main factions:
The first faction (Spanish Mexican-descent) is by far the largest under the big umbrella. It is with this biggest group that the Hispanic and Latino terms prove to be the most inadequate. In the first place, both words reflect only European lineage. Neither word recognizes equally strong Native American (Mexican, Mestizo) bloodlines. With 30 million in number, this group is the main stem (backbone) of the umbrella. They comprise 60 percent of the U.S. “Hispanic” population. Here again, there’s distinct differences within this faction. Specifically, there are two separate arms. One is non-immigrant, and the other is immigrant.
The non-immigrant arm includes descendants of Southwest Spanish Mexican pioneers who were already living in Nuevo México, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and California in 1848, when the U.S. conquered and took the territory from Mexico. Also, their Native American ancestors have lived in the Southwest for at least 10,000 years. Long held as a colonial-style Class Apart, these non-immigrant people of the Southwest are perhaps the most misunderstood by mainstream society. The reason is that most U.S. citizens wrongly believe that all Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are recent immigrants.
Because they value their pre-1848 pioneer roots, those in this group use distinctive regional appellatives, such as, Nuevo Mexicanos, Californios, Coloradenses, and Tejanos. It’s important to note also that this large ethnic group uses the word “Mexican” only as a culture identifier, not nationality or allegiance to Mexico. Their concerns include jobs, fair pay, preservation of their bicultural heritage, civil rights, education, bilingual education in the lower grades, Head Start, economic development, affordable health care and safe, secure neighborhoods.
The other arm of this faction involves immigrants from Mexico who came here after 1848 seeking work to feed their families. (Several times during our nation’s history, these workers have more than once answered the urgent call from the U.S. to meet acute manpower shortages, such as times when our country was at war or desperately needed in good economic boons. Conversely, they are not welcomed during times of economic distress, which is what is happening today.) For example, it is this group that (1) is being incarcerated in prisons built by and enriching far-right extremist contractors and investors; (2) is being threatened by aggressive state officials whose answer to the dilemma is to put their U.S.-born children up for adoption; and (3) is most concerned about the Dream Act and a sensible immigration reform program.
The second major faction is composed of citizens with Puerto Rican roots. Similar to their Spanish Mexican sister group in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans are not immigrants to the U.S., since they are born U.S. citizens. Their number in the U.S. is 4.6 million (9 percent of Hispanics). There are over four million citizens in Puerto Rico itself. (Regrettably, most of the general public is unaware of their U.S. citizenship status, as shown by the recent racial taunting of a Kansas State player of Puerto Rico-descent at an NCAA basketball game in Mississippi.)
The third faction is made up of Cuban-descent citizens (1.7 million (3.5 percent of U.S. Hispanics). Significantly, Cubans arriving in the U.S. enjoy a special privilege that other immigrants do not. They receive instant political refugee status as a result of anti-Communist legislation passed during the U.S.-Soviet Union Cold War. Although the Cold War ended in 1991, arriving Cuban immigrants are not considered illegal today, because immigration agents still treat them as anti-Communists. Therefore, they are not jailed as are illegal immigrants from other countries, such as Mexico. Cuban arrivals are eligible for immediate admittance and are welcomed into this country, free to live anywhere in the U.S. as officially authorized residents.
The fourth and final faction under the Spanish-surnamed umbrella is composed of people who come from countries in Central and South America for exactly the same reasons that European immigrants came here. That is, to answer Emma Lazarus’ call on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your tired masses yearning to breathe free…”
In summary, seeking a Spanish-surnamed person as bait to catch Spanish-surnamed voters is absurd. Your name doesn’t have to be Spanish to help the Spanish-surnamed poor move up the ladder of success. In fact, two of the greatest men of action in advocating and legislating for the Spanish Mexican-descent poor are non-Spanish-surnamed President LBJ and Senator Ralph Yarborough who regularly spoke to Spanish Mexican-descent citizens in person. It is for their daring to help the poor that they are today maligned by far-right extremist conservatives.
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Posted in Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Right Wing Lies, Taxes, The Budget at 2:05 pm by wcnews
Texas House Speaker Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are not going to sign Gov. Rick Perry’s shameful compact. Here’s what Straus said.
“We welcome the input of the executive but the legislature needs to assert itself from time to time as well,” Straus, a San Antonio Republican. “…Every member has to decide on their own whether they sign pledges or not. Many of the members have signed pledges. I don’t, but that an individual decision. I also believe that it’s important that we remember the separation of powers, and remember some of the lessons that we all learned or should have learned in civics class.
And Dewhurst.
In a statement just released — a full day after Perry’s big announcement — Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said: “Gov. Perry and I have worked closely over the last nine years to limit the size of government and balance the budget without raising taxes on Texas taxpayers. The budget objectives proposed by Gov. Perry will reinforce the fiscally conservative principles that Republicans lawmakers have used, and will continue to use, to control spending and keep Texas’ budget balanced long into the future.”
It’s key to point out that while Straus and Dewhurst won’t sign Perry’s phony pledge, neither one of them disagrees with him , or looks likely to change the austerity policies of the GOP in Texas. In other words, we have bunch of Republicans running our state government, and all they’re really fighting over is how fast we should defund essential government services – public education, health care, along with care for the elderly and the disabled, to name a few. Straus and Dewhurst want to do it a little slower than Perry, that’s all.
Further Reading:
Another take on Perry’s compact, Pandering his way into a historical footnote.
Perry has been in public office for most of his adult life and most of that time has been living full time off the taxpayers. By sheer longevity, political bullying and large special-interest campaign donors, he has turned a traditionally weak governor’s office into a force to be reckoned with. But he doesn’t govern. He panders, and he panders to the anti-government ideologues who supposedly dislike what he embodies, a double-dipping, lobby-fed career politician with taxpayer-paid perks running out his ears.
Remember, Perry is pulling down both his $150,000 state salary and early retirement benefits worth another $90,000-plus a year. He lives in a rental mansion that costs taxpayers about $10,000 a month, and his recent, in-over-his-head presidential campaign cost at least $2.8 million in personal security costs for which the governor refuses to reimburse taxpayers.
Yet, there he was again yesterday, laying out a new “Texas Budget Compact,” an anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-public education, anti-public health care, anti-progress manifesto that he is urging legislators and legislative candidates to sign. It is the last thing the governor of Texas should be proposing on the heels of last year’s budget cuts and in the face of an improving state economy. Perry’s compact is reckless and harmful public policy, and it’s not good business for our economy either. But then, this is the same governor who orchestrated the budget cuts, while leaving more than $7 billion of taxpayers’ money in the Rainy Day Fund untouched.
Perry continues to pander, and, unfortunately, so will some lawmakers and candidates who will fall all over themselves to sign the worthless document. Texans deserve better, much better.
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