Lowlights of the Republican Party of Texas Platform 2018

Last week the Republican Party of Texas held its bi-annual state convention in San Antonio. One of the major tasks of any political convention is writing the platform. It should come as no surprise that the RPT platform includes some real doozies and a few jaw droppers. One of my favorites is their stated wish to repeal the seventeenth amendment which would take away our right to elect our United States senators and put it in the hands of the power brokers of the state legislature. I don’t know about you but the last thing I want is a literal handful of legislators who are beholden to their wealthy campaign donors selecting my senators for me.

Apparently hard core Republicans, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believe that “climate change is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives”. There are a lot of old farmers who’ll tell you that over the last 20 years they’ve seen changes in rainfall patterns and amounts from what they experienced when they were young. We’ve had increasingly better predictions of what to expect from climate change as the science develops and is able to test formulas and work with new evidence being collected and yet they want to believe that Democrats just want all of us to toe the line because of some need for control. Oddly these same folks watch the Murdoch family propaganda network enough to put it on top of the ratings rankings.

Under the guise of religions freedom the Republican platform states a desire for school administrators, teachers and staff to be able to display religious paraphernalia on school property and pray in groups. If you’ve ever been an outsider to a school clique you know it can be really uncomfortable to be forced to spend all day every day for years in that environment. Now imagine that the clique isn’t just your peers it also includes your teachers, coaches and other authority figures. I went to Catholic grade school and well remember the year that some poor Baptist girl was enrolled there. She was ostracized from the start and it never ended, fortunately for her she didn’t come back the next year. I doubt there are many Lutherans who would care for a Catholic teacher evangelizing to their children, or vice versa. Real religious freedom doesn’t require making kids who aren’t members of the predominate faith in the neighborhood feel unwelcome. Public employees should not be allowed to proselytize on the tax payers’ dime.

Since Republicans are always focused on cutting taxes without much regard to how to pay for said tax cuts it should come as no surprise that their platform calls for abolishing property taxes entirely but especially those that pay for the operation of public schools. That would be a real boon to anyone with rental property or extensive commercial real estate holdings. Right now if you own real estate in a county you pay property taxes on it whether or not you live there, under their plan people can profit from their real estate holdings without ever having to give anything back to that community. The suggested replacement for property taxes is raising sales tax, are you ready to pay 15-20% sales tax?

Those are just some of the highlights, there’s plenty more outrageous material in the 45 page document including abolition of numerous federal agencies like the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor. Next week I’ll report on the Texas Democratic Party platform for 2018 that I’m helping write.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 22, 2018

A Difference Worthy of Voting

I’ve often heard non-voters say that they don’t bother to vote because all politicians are alike or it doesn’t matter who wins. Of course they’re always wrong but more so this year as there’s a tremendous contrast between Democrats and Republicans right now.

Congressional Democrats are working to put more Americans to work and assure them of better lives. Republicans in Congress are proposing to reduce spending on Social Security and Medicare to cover the deficit they created by giving 80% of tax cuts to millionaires. Most Americans aren’t noticing any difference in their take home pay.

There are two ways to cut that spending, they can tighten eligibility rules by raising the minimum age yet again or they can reduce benefits. Every time we raise retirement age we hurt lower income people more that higher income folks because it’s the lower income workers who do the jobs that wear out their bodies fastest. Raising the eligibility age for Medicare will financially hurt those with health conditions because they’ll be forced to stay on private insurance which will charge them higher premiums due to the care they need. As to cutting benefits, it’s already near impossible to retire on social security alone and still pay for health care, housing and other necessities.

Congressional Democrats on the other hand are proposing expanding Medicare to cover everyone which could cut premiums an average of 13%. Medicare has a 2% overhead rate while insurance companies are allowed 15% over the cost of medical care provided. Democrats also propose dealing with the high cost of medications and medical devices which will help control the overall cost of health care. State Democrats are expected to introduce legislation to create a Texas version of Medicare for All. Considering that Texas has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the country that would help a lot of folks. There will be a rally and march in support of both ideas at Hemisphair Park in San Antonio tomorrow at 10am.

Democrats also have proposed legislation to put more Americans to work called the Jobs for All Act and there is another proposal in discussion to create a federal job guarantee so that anyone who wants a job will have one that pays a living wage and provides benefits like paid vacations and sick leave. Democrats are also pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage and index it for inflation so that workers don’t see their wages fall behind and have to wait a decade or more before action is taken to restore their purchasing power.

Actions speak louder than words and nearly every action Republicans have taken since Trump took office has harmed Americans in one way or another. Democrats are fighting to improve all our lives by assuring that every American has access to health care, every worker earns a living wage and can retire with dignity at a reasonable age, and anyone who wants to work has the opportunity whether or not the private sector needs them.

There is a huge difference between the parties and their candidates and that difference makes it worth the effort to vote. If you have moved recently take a few minutes to update your voter registration, remind family and friends who have moved to do the same. We can change the direction of the country in November but we have to start now.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 15, 2018

Mueller the new Eliot Ness

Donald Trump and his supporters and enablers claim that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation hasn’t shown collusion with Russia so it’s time to end it. The thing is that from what’s been made public so far we know that Mueller’s authority to investigate Trump is far broader just his campaign’s possible conspiracy with Russian agents to interfere in the 2016 election. Just like other criminals of the past the conviction may not be related directly related to the most news worthy crimes. Just look at Al Capone, the notorious Chicago mobster of the 1920’s. Eliot Ness and has team famously known as “The Untouchables” made all the headlines raiding Capone breweries and other illegal enterprises, they gathered evidence and even convictions of Capone subordinates including his brother. Ness had a tough time convicting Capone of anything though and in the end it was accountant Frank J. Wilson of the Internal Revenue Service who made the case for tax evasion that put Capone in jail for 11 years.

Trump may be every bit as slippery as Capone but in the end there is a paper trail and the press has brought much of it to light over the last couple of years. Mueller’s team includes attorneys with experience in both organized crime prosecution and financial crimes. It’s important to realize that Mueller has gotten guilty pleas from five Trump associates and one of them Rick Gates is now a cooperating witness and likely so is Michael Flynn. There are eight or more others under indictment including former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

The first week in April Mueller's investigators made an unannounced visit to the home of an unnamed business associate of the Trump Organization who had worked on foreign deals for the company in recent years. The investigators had warrants for electronic records and to compel sworn testimony.

Among the transactions under investigation are Russian purchases of Trump apartments, a SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, transactions with the Bank of Cyprus which is widely known for money laundering which and one of the banks used by Paul Manafort, and Trump's sale of a Florida mansion for $30 million over its appraised value to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. In addition Mueller’s team has contacted Deutsche Bank, which is the main banking institution doing business with The Trump Organization since no U.S. bank will loan him funds. Reports indicate that Deutsche Bank received a subpoena from Mueller's office concerning people or entities affiliated with President Trump.

The Mueller team took over an existing money laundering investigation into former Trump campaign chairman Manafort and a federal grand jury indicted him and his associate Rick Gates on charges including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, being an unregistered agent of foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, and false statements.

Other potential crimes Mueller’s team is likely to investigate include possible money laundering at Trump Hotel in Panama and a quid pro quo deal with China investing $500 million in Trump project in Indonesia and Trump’s statement that he’s working to help save jobs at Chinese electronics manufacturer ZTE which is under sanctions for selling prohibited technology to Iran and the list goes on.

Just like with Capone it may be near impossible to get the evidence needed to convict Trump of conspiring against the United States but there’s plenty of potential in other areas. I’m all for seeing him go to jail for tax evasion. Three cheers for forensic accountants.

Published in the Seguin Gazette June 8, 218

Treasonous Republicans

As a nation we expect our leaders to be patriots. Many Republican elected officials make a big deal of wearing flag pins on their lapels as if that alone makes them patriots. It’s unfortunate that Republican presidents and vice-presidents over the last 50 years haven’t lived up to our expectations.

In the final weeks leading up to the 1968 presidential election President Lyndon Johnson was working to end the war in Vietnam. During negotiations Republican candidate Richard Nixon contacted the leadership of South Vietnam in an effort to delay a peace treaty in order to gain political advantage in the United States. Nixon offered the South Vietnamese leaders a better deal than Johnson if they would boycott the talks. Nixon violated the Logan Act which prohibits private citizens from trying to “defeat the measures of the United States” or otherwise meddle in its diplomacy. The war dragged on for another five years at a cost of thousands more American lives. It has taken nearly 50 years for the proof to be made public due to Nixon’s efforts to keep his files and those of his top staff secret. This act of treason is proven in great detail by the notes that long time Nixon aide and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman took at the time and which were stored in Nixon’s presidential library.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries took 52 American hostages from the American embassy in Tehran. Carter ran for re-election in 1980 and worked hard to negotiate the release of the hostages. As the campaign heated up Republican candidate Ronald Reagan became concerned that Carter might manage to get the hostages out in time for it to affect the outcome of the election. The Reagan campaign created a private network of military and intelligence contacts to monitor Carter administration efforts and feed that information to Reagan's people. The Reagan team also began their own secret negotiations with an Iranian faction led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time Iraq had invaded Iran and they desperately needed weapons. Reagan’s team offered American weapons and spare parts as well as the release of billions of Iranian government monetary assets held in US banks if only they would hold onto the hostages until after the American presidential election. The hostages were released minutes after Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981.

George W Bush took office in 2001 and later that year hijackers from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda brought down New York’s Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon taking the lives of nearly 3000 people. It wasn’t enough to invade Afghanistan which was harboring bin Laden, Bush also felt the need to invade Iraq. In order to sell the war his team claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in particular that they were building nuclear weapons. As evidence they claimed that Iraq was importing uranium ore from Niger. The CIA asked the former ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, to go to Niger and use his local contacts to investigate the claims. When Wilson filed his report it caused a firestorm and in an effort to discredit him Vice President Dick Cheney outed Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative. It was Cheney aide Scooter Libby who took the fall but it’s clear Cheney committed treason.

With Trump the apple didn’t fall far from the Republican tree as there is growing evidence he too negotiated with hostile foreign powers to affect the outcome of our election. Now Trump appears to monetizing his treachery using the trade war he started to wrangle a $500 million loan from China.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 25, 2018

Unchecked Income Inequality Leads to Revolution

There is plenty of evidence going back more than 2000 years and continuing to the present that high rates of income inequality can cause revolutions. Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive policies especially trust busting kept a lid on that unrest at the turn of the last century. Franklin Roosevelt had to act again in the 1930’s to address income inequality and his policies remained in effect through the 1950’s and 1960’s during which our economy boomed. We are rapidly reaching that state again where income and wealth inequality surges out of control and can lead to significant unrest.

Between 1880 and 1890 there were over 20,000 strikes involving approximately 6.6 million workers. In 1899 in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, union miners, led by the Western Federation of Miners attempted to unionize non-union mines, and have them pay the higher union wage scale. The miners were frustrated with mine operators that paid lower wages, hired Pinkerton or Thiel operatives to infiltrate the union; and routinely fired any miner who held a union card. The worker versus owner confrontation culminated in a dynamite attack that destroyed a non-union mining facility, followed by military occupation of the district.

Government has often been used by the wealthy to keep wages down by suppressing workers rights, sometimes violently, as in the case of the Railroad Strike of 1877, which was precipitated by pay cuts. President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops and the violence eventually led to the deaths of over 100 people. Local governments also stepped in to support their wealthy benefactors such as in the 1897 Lattimer massacre near Hazleton, Pennsylvania in which 19 unarmed striking coal miners and mine workers were killed and 36 wounded by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff for refusing to disperse. Most of the strikers were shot in the back.

Labor unrest wasn’t just happening in the United States, it was a worldwide phenomenon and in France and later Russia, then China, and Cuba, it ended in revolution which at least temporarily reset the level of wealth and income inequality. The United States has managed to escape such revolutions and retain a capitalist economy because of the restraints that Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt place on corporations. Unfortunately beginning in the 1970’s with Ronald Reagan and continuing under Bill Clinton many of those restraints were loosened. Every president since has had some part in removing restraints. States have done their part as well such as the mis-named Right to Work laws passed in many states including Texas which only serve to break unions.

Once again income and wealth inequality in the United States is rocketing toward the stratosphere and many Americans are being left out, some are getting angry. It’s in the interests of the wealthiest among us to recognize that the to 1% of Americans owning the same wealth as the total had by the bottom 40% is unhealthy for their continued physical well being, think guillotines, and the existence of their assets, think Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. History tells us that they won’t act on their own to save themselves.

No one looks forward to suffering through a French style revolution, though you wouldn’t know it from the tax bill passed recently that serves to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. Fortunately Bernie Sanders and many Democratic Party leaders have concluded that it’s past time to take action to reduce income inequality before it’s too late. Your votes in November can help lead the way back from the brink.

Trump Deepens the Swamp

As if it isn’t enough that within the lifetime of many here today rising temperatures and sea levels will change Texas dramatically now the Trump administration seeks to roll back fuel mileage requirements set to go into effect in the next couple of years. The roll back that Trump appointee Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is pushing will just make matters worse for our children and grandchildren. Pruitt is the former Attorney General of Oklahoma who made a name for himself as the go to guy for oil and gas companies that wanted official help in suing the federal government to relax pollution standards so they could increase profits. Pruitt acted like a lobbyist and put their model letters on official Oklahoma government stationary then signed them in his official capacity as the state’s Attorney General in attempts to effect federal regulatory efforts.

Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency at least 14 times while in office and most of those cases are still in the courts. Unfortunately for our children and grand-children Trump put him in charge of the agency he spent so much times suing and is now using that office to make those lawsuits moot by rolling back the regulations he once sued over. While he’s doing that he’s also making trips around the world on the taxpayers dime to sightsee in places like Rome and Morocco with his own 20 person body guard detail.

Pruitt is now under eleven different investigations for a wide range of financial misdeeds such as having a $43,000 sound proof phone booth built into his office in violation of regulations on how much people in his position are allowed to spend on office renovations. Then there is the investigations into him giving out raises to staffers who were ineligible for them by improperly using funding that belonged to other projects and his lavish travel spending on private planes and use of military aircraft. On top of all that his million dollar 20 member personal body guard detail and questionable security measures which are also under investigation for out of budget spending is all predicated on purported threats of violence but records released through Freedom of Information Act requests show that there were only cases, one of which is someone drew a mustache on a picture of him and another was a threat of violence by a man who has been in prison for years and will continue to be so for years to come.

Pruitt is a lot like Mick Mulvaney, currently director of the Office of Management and Budget, who openly admitted to only listening to those who donated to his campaign. Both continue to serve their corporate and billionaire masters.

While never a Trump appointee long time fixer Michael Cohen seems to be drowning in investigations into sketchy dealing as well. Last week we learned that he’s been billed for back taxes to the tune of $280,000 on his taxi businesses. Earlier this week it was revealed that he’s been collected millions of dollars from the likes of AT&T and drug giant Novartis. That’s on top of the questionable payments from Trump for arranging hush money to porn stars and Playboy playmates.

Candidate Trump claimed he’d be different but when he told Americans he would drain the swamp either he lied or he meant some other swamp.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 11, 2018

Honoring a Defender of Democracy

A week ago I had the privilege of attending the League of Women Voters of Texas "Defending Democracy Dinner" honoring Randall Buck Wood for his career defending democracy in Texas. Mr. Wood served as Director of the Elections Division of the Texas Office of the Secretary of State, then he became the Executive Director of Common Cause Texas, a public interest advocacy organization, and now in addition to his private law practice serves as the General Counsel to the Equity Center, an association of over 500 below-average-wealth school districts committed to improving public school funding in Texas.

Common Cause, a citizens’ group focused on government transparency and ethics, hired Wood in September 1972 as Executive Director. Early the previous year, at the beginning of the bi-annual legislative session the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges alleging a far-reaching stock manipulation scheme organized by top business and political leaders which would eventually become known as the Sharpstown scandal. The speaker of the House, one of his top aides and another house member were convicted. The ensuing investigation uncovered other shenanigans involving lobbyists handing out checks on the House floor in exchange for legislative action as well as legislators enriching themselves on the taxpayers dime sometimes through outright theft of public property.

With Texas in the throes of the Sharpstown scandal and having elected a large number of new legislators claiming a reform agenda Wood struck while the iron was hot and pushed his programs through against the opposition of practically every other lobbyist and many of the legislators themselves. Wood was provided several model bills by the national organization which he then modified to meet the needs of Texas and wrote some bills of his own, they all focused on ethics of legislators and state officials; lobby registration and reporting of expenditures; campaign finance reporting; expansion of the open meetings law; thus enlarging the public’s access to government information.

Wood’s work for Common Cause led to an improved open meetings law; tightened controls over campaign contributions and expenditures; easier public access to government records; and, most importantly for the lobby, tightened control over lobbyists and their spending.

After the state lost the landmark school finance case, Edgewood ISD v. Kirby, which alleged discrimination against students in poor school districts the Governor contacted Buck Wood and instructed him to write a public school finance bill that was constitutional in under a week. The school district and several parents had charged that the state's methods of funding public schools violated at least four principles of the state constitution, which obligated the state legislature to provide an efficient and free public school system. His team worked up a bill and saw it through the legislative process successfully.

Since then Mr. Wood, as the General Counsel to the Equity Center, has been involved in most of the numerous school finance cases over the last 30 or so years. All the cases have charged that the state continues to fail in its constitutional duty to provide an efficient and free public school system and the courts have agreed over and over.

Many area districts including San Antonio ISD which has announced staff reductions and Schertz/Cibolo/Universal City ISD which will ask to raise property taxes later this year are or soon will be in difficult straits under the current financing formula. It is unconscionable that after more than 30 years the state legislature still doesn’t have the guts to do what needs doing and develop an equitable tax and funding system. Mr. Wood says he’ll keep working to improve public education through the courts if he has to.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 4, 2018