Texas Republicans Work to Defund Public Schools

Governor Abbott and his Christian nationalist billionaire campaign donors made progress in their effort to defund and destroy public education in Texas when they succeeded in getting Alan Schoolcraft nominated as the Republican candidate for State House District 44 which encompasses Guadalupe and Gonzales counties. I have disagreed with John Kuempel, our state representative since 2010, on most issues I’ve always respected his strong defense of public education. That defense cost him support from Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick earlier this year which led to his defeat in the Republican primary by Schoolcraft. Some of the money used by the Schoolcraft campaign came from out-of-state billionaire Jeff Yass, of Pennsylvania, who gave Gov. Greg Abbott $6 million to use in support of pro-voucher candidates Schoolcraft.

The coalition supporting the destruction of Texas public schools includes people like West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who contribute to various political action committees pouring millions into legislative campaigns for candiates who support school vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas. An example of Tim Dunn’s Christian nationalism is that he once told Republican Speaker of the Texas House Joe Straus that he believed only Christians should hold leadership posts. Earlier this year, Baptist News Global published an article by Pastor Rodney W. Kennedy titled "Sorry, Tim Dunn, you are a Christian nationalist".

Recently the campaign donations from Dunn and the Wilks brothers have reached into local communities across Texas, supporting fights over library books, curriculum and vouchers.

There a many examples of the failure of school vouchers to provide high quality education to all our children. There are many reasons for this including the fact that private schools don’t have to accept students with behavioral issues, or learning disabilities. Typically research has shown that parents who use school vouchers to transfer their children to private schools end up with their 4^th or 5^th choice and those schools typically are underperforming their public school counterparts.

Since 2005 when hurricane Katrina struck it New Orleans replaced all traditional public schools with charters run by ostensibly non-profit corporations. Education results for the generation of students passing through those schools has been mixed at best, generally worse than the national average. One of the tricks used by people seeking to profit from charter schools is that while the charter is held by the legally mandated non-profit organization they turn around and subcontract with a for profit group to actually staff and run the school. Often the same people on the board of the non-profit are also on the board or payroll of the for-profit sub-contractor. It’s a scam.

As reported by the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers in their 2022 report “The Lost Decade”, when you take into account actual per-pupil spending in each state compared to the amount needed to achieve the modest goal of U.S. average test scores, Texas comes in 44th place. That leaves more than 90% of Texas public school students are attending inadequately funded schools. Since government budgets are moral documents this tells you what our state leadership thinks of future generations of Texans.

Starting October 21 when early voting begins you have an opportunity to show your support for public education in Texas by voting for Democratic party candidate Eric Norman. Eric believes “It’s time we live our values and support Texas’ public schools.”

Published in the Seguin Gazette - September 25, 2024

Paxton's Voter Suppression

In a throwback to the Civil Rights era Texas Republicans are using the power of government to once again suppress the vote of minority Americans. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent armed teams to the homes of half a dozen Houston area members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Squads of armed officers banged on doors at 6 a.m. to execute search warrants and seize cell phones and other possessions at the homes of folks like 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, apparently for exercising her right register people to vote.

Voter suppression is a tried and true method for retaining power. Paxton’s actions are suspect given that the allegations are related to the 2022 election and it seems strange that after nearly two years his investigators suddenly got to the point where they are ready to seized “evidence” given that we’re ramping up for another election. We also know that while Paxton’s office has investigated hundreds of people for voter fraud and other election related crimes spending millions of dollars yet has only led to a handful of convictions. None of those alleged “crimes” involved enough voters to even change the election outcome of a city council member let alone a member of congress or the governor.

Paxton has proven time and again that he’s willing to use Texas taxpayer dollars to fund specious lawsuits and prosecutions if it means helping Republicans win elections. In 2020 he sued four other states claiming they didn’t run their elections properly. Needless to say all four were swing states where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump. All four lawsuits were laughed out of court, just like so many of his other stunts.

It’s important to remember that Paxton is so corrupt that he was impeached by the Texas House with plenty of Republicans supporting that vote last session.

Paxton is satisfied with just harassing a handful of voting rights activists, he is also threatening to sue Bexar, Travis, and Harris Counties, where Biden/Harris won by large margins, over their efforts to send voter registration cards to everyone. Apparently Paxton doesn’t want private groups to help people register to vote but he also does not want the government to people register to vote.

These tactics are the same sort that led to the Voting Rights Act and in fact were Section 4b of that legislation still in force today many of the Republican voter suppression tactics would be prohibited and the Department of Justice would have sued to enforce it. Unfortunately a decade ago the Supreme Court held that even states with a history of voter suppression can’t be pre-empted from doing it again.

Texas isn’t the only state where Republican voter suppression is going today, Ohio and Alabama are in the act along with several other southern states. Voter suppression can’t just be overwhelmed by getting out the vote, remember that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes and still lost the election due to the electoral college.

It’s going to take patriotic Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney who has put aside his partisanship and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to restore out democracy.

Food Safety Compromised by Republican Philosophy

Republican philosophy calls for deregulating private businesses claiming regulations get in the way of job creation. Food safety is one of several areas where this philosophy is readily proven wrong over and over. You may remember a few years ago when Blue Bell ice cream contaminated with listeria killed 3 people and sickened many others back in 2015 and their products were pulled from the shelves they unavailable for months. Something similar has happened earlier this summer this time it’s Boar's Head deli meats that were contaminated with listeria killing at least 9 people and hospitalizing 57 others in 18 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of a week ago. Worse it may not be over yet as it can take up to 10 weeks for some people to develop symptoms of listeriosis. Listeria spreads easily among equipment, surfaces, hands and food. The real number of sick people in the outbreak is likely higher than the number reported, as some recover without medical care or being tested for listeria.

CBS News reported last week that records released by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service through a Freedom of Information Act request show 69 records of "noncompliances" flagged by inspectors over the past year at the Boar’s Head Jarratt, VA plant where the listeria outbreak originated. While the Food Safety and Inspection Service is ultimately responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations at the plant, it actually relies on staff from Virginia — not USDA employees — to man the site.

Just from January this year to July inspectors found what looked to be mold and mildew around the hand washing sinks for the workers tasked with meats that are supposed to be ready to eat. Mold was also found building up outside of steel vats used by the plant as well as in holding coolers between the site's smokehouses. In addition "A black mold like substance was seen throughout the room at the wall/concrete junction. As well as some caulking around brick/metal," inspectors wrote, saying some spots were "as large as a quarter." Other locations in the plant were found to have a number of issues with leaking or pooling water, including a puddle found to have "a green algal growth" inside and condensation that was found to be "dripping over product being held." An inspector found "ample amounts of blood in puddles on the floor" and a "rancid smell" throughout a cooler used at the plant. A number of records also flag sightings of insects in and around deli meats at the plant. Another record flagged concerns over flies going in and out of "vats of pickle" left by Boar's Head in a room. "Small flying gnat like insects were observed crawling on the walls and flying around the room. The rooms walls had heavy meat buildup," inspectors wrote. Other parts of the facility were also found to have bugs, including what looked to be "ants traveling down the wall," as well as a beetle and a cockroach.

This makes very clear that big business has no incentive to protect consumers since it’s not like plant managers could have missed the disgusting conditions of the facility. It also shows that food inspection is under-funded which is why the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service relies on staff from the company to report problems rather than having actual federal employees overseeing food safety. Who is it that keeps complaining about taxes and cutting government spending? Republicans of course and now at least 9 people are dead. What were their lives worth? Remember, it could have been you.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - September 4, 2024

Republicans Throwing Stones While Living in Glass Houses

 The nominating processes of both the Republican and Democratic parties are over and the most popular third party candidate suspended his campaign then endorsed Trump. The presidential election is now a choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It puts a smile on my face that Republicans including Trump and his vice presidential choice, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, are having trouble finding something to tarnish Harris or her running mate Tim Walz. It’s not for lack of trying but now that Trump is no longer running against Joe Biden, who is only 3 years older, his “Biden is too old” tune doesn’t work anymore.

Attacks on Harris for being soft on crime have fallen flat due to her record as a prosecutor and California attorney general. Attacks on Harris for not being a mother we trashed by her step-children and even her husband’s ex-wife. When those didn’t work Republicans attacked Tim Walz for signing legislation, as governor of Minnesota, that requires all Minnesota public schools to provide feminine hygiene products in the girl’s bathrooms, and women gave them a stoney-eyed glare. They Republicans attacked Walz’s military service record complaining that his 24 years in uniform weren’t enough while using doctored transcripts of a speech which has two minutes of material in the middle missing to make it look like Walz lied about being in combat. Veteran’s organizations have come out in defense of Walz. You can make anyone look bad if you pick and choose which words to repeat.

Last week when Walz’s nomination became official and he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention, the best Republicans could do was target Walz’s 17 year old son, Gus, who cried as he was overcome with emotion. Well Republicans really walked into a meat grinder on that one because that young man has ADHD, an anxiety disorder and a non-verbal learning disorder. Many families with children who have learning or emotional disorders are less than pleased Republican bullying behavior.

Nothing has stuck to the Democratic candidates because there is nothing there, unlike Trump’s 34 felony convictions. Of course, you can watch the video of Trump when he says the Presidential Medal of Freedom was "much better" than the Congressional Medal of Honor whose recipients are usually "dead" or in "very bad shape." If you are or know a veteran you might take exception to that.

Trump tries to claim he had no part in the January 6 insurrection that caused the Capitol Police evacuated both chambers of Congress and several buildings in the Capitol Complex. It seems pretty odd then that next Thursday he is hosting a fundraiser to help pay the insurrectionists legal defense bills at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club where he is expected to speak. Of course it’s not all that different from his attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, the plan to overturn our government that was authored by more than a one hundred of his former administration members. There are still several other criminal cases outstanding such as the one in Florida regarding over a hundred classified documents that Trump refused to return to the federal government which took and FBI raid to get back. There are also two election interference cases awaiting trial, one is a federal case in Washington, D.C. and the other is a state case in Georgia. There’s plenty of dirt out there but so far none of it applies to Democrats.

If we want a government that is based on truth and the interests of the people we need to get out and vote for Democrats in November.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 28, 2024

Project 2025 - Plan for a Dystopian Future

While Donald Trump continues his attempts to dodge connection to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” some of the authors and contributors have been talking up their connection to the Trump campaign and telling the media how extreme the makeover of the federal government will be upon Trump taking office again. It’s important that the public be aware of the damage to governmental institutions and our lives four more years of Donald Trump will cause.

The “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise” which is the official title of the document known “Project 2025” says on page 592 “Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks. Specifically, employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period.” So if your employer wants you to work 60 hours one week and only 20 hours the next week there’s no need to pay you overtime and you can’t complain about the mess that makes of your personal life.

In 1932 at the peak of the Great Depression congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to make the banking industry safer especially for average Americans. Those protections were largely repealed in 1999 and just 8 years later the country suffered the near collapse of the economy brought on by big banks taking on risky and overly complex investment scheme. This period often called the Great Recession was marked by tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes in foreclosure. Unemployment sky rocketed and banks failed. The response from congress was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Almost as soon as it passed big banks and their Republican toadies started complaining and have been trying to overturn it. “Project 2025” page 705 calls for merging functions of the various regulatory agencies. “The new Administration should establish a more stream­lined bank and supervision by supporting legislation to merge the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Reserve’s non-monetary supervisory and regulatory functions.”

Banking interests claim have always claimed that restricting banks to taking deposits and making loans while preventing investment banks from taking consumer deposits makes markets less stable. We have now have empirical evidence that they’re wrong, the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall protections clearly led to 2007 banking collapse yet bankers and Republicans can’t see past the chance to make more private profit while socializing the losses on the backs of the American public.

It’s bad enough that Texas women have lost their bodily autonomy and continue to suffer the lasting health consequences of being unable to get medical care while a miscarriage leaves a rotting carcass in their womb. “Project 2025” states on page 458 that the FDA should “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs” then goes on for another dozen pages on how abortion should be further restricted and what lies should be used to promote their nationwide anti-abortion agenda.

These are just some examples of the dystopian future that a Donald Trump win in November would bring upon you and your loved ones. It isn’t enough for you  to vote for Democrats, it is incumbent on you to inform your family, friends, and neighbors then encourage them to vote as well, otherwise we will all suffer.

 

Republicans Hate Children and Workers

 Last week both our U.S. senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, joined 40 other Republican senators in voting against an expansion of the child tax credit that would have raised 400,000 children out of poverty. The bill had already passed the House with a large bi-partisan majority. Considering that Republicans claim to be the party of families their vote seems counter-productive. In reality they are more interested in denying Joe Biden a victory than helping hungry children.

It’s not just Republicans at the federal level who are heartless. 2.9 million Texas children are going hungry this summer because Gov. Abbott rejected around $350 million in federal funds that would have gone a long way to reduce childhood food insecurity. Abbott joined a dozen other Republican governors who refused to participate in a $2.5 billion program created by Congress, in which eligible low-income households will receive about $1.33 per day for food per child over the three summer months when school-based free and reduced-price lunch programs aren’t available.

Not satisfied with just letting poor kids go hungry, recently the Republican Study Committee – which represents 100% of House Republican leadership and nearly 80% of their members released plans to cut Medicare, Social Security, and increase prescription drug, energy, and housing costs. Their plan would even raise the Social Security retirement age. All this so they can provide tax giveaways for the very rich.

The Republican Study Committee plan calls for over $1.5 trillion in cuts to Social Security, including an increase in the retirement age to 69 and cutting disability benefits. If you work an office job working an extra couple of years before retirement might not seem too bad, but if you work a physical labor job like my dad did as a pipe-fitter adding two more years of lifting heavy materials and suffering through Texas summers outdoors is asking a lot. Years of hard labor have often damaged joints making it increasingly difficult to get the job done and suffering even when they can accomplish the task.

The Republican plan also raises Medicare costs for seniors by taking away Medicare’s recently gained authority to negotiate prescription drug costs, repealing $35 insulin, and the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Republican plan includes transitioning Medicare to a premium support system which means that it would simply provide a fixed amount of money for seniors to use to purchase private insurance from the same for profit providers that gouge Americans now. The Congressional Budget Office has found that such a premium support plan would raise health care costs for many seniors.

Other aspects of the Republican plan cut Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by $450 billion a year, taking away health insurance away from millions of people, including seniors, children, and people with disabilities. Republicans would have us go back to the days where people could be denied care for pre-existing conditions and charged more for health insurance simply for being a woman.

In return for the harm to children and seniors Republicans want to give $5.5 trillion in tax cuts mostly to the wealthy and large corporations, including permanently extending the Trump era tax cuts which increased the budget deficit that Republicans only complain about when Democrats are in office. The Republican plan also calls for repealing the minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations the President Biden signed into law.

Clearly Republicans care more about satisfying their wealthy benefactors than they do about children, families, and people who work for a living.

Tell them what you think by voting in November.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 7, 2024

J.D. Vance Has No Empathy

 A lot has happened in the past two weeks, Trump named J.D. Vance as his running mate and Joe Biden announced he has decided not to run for re-election then endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. Republicans are now in disarray as their whole campaign strategy was centered on Biden being “too” old. Now that gimmick won’t work and J.D. Vance’s ugly remarks about women and his flip flops on significant issues are making his nomination a drag on the Trump campaign instead of broadening support.

In a 2021 Fox News appearance Vance discussed controversial remarks he’d made to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute earlier that month. In it, he called a number of prominent Democratic leaders the “childless left” whom he said had “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

During the Fox interview Vance said "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

Vance added that “if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.”

There is so much to take apart in Vance’s statement so let’s start with the inaccuracies. Kamala Harris is the stepmother of her husband’s two children and had been for over 6 years when Vance shot his mouth off. Pete Buttigieg and his husband had been working toward adopting a pair of twins for quite a while and the adoption was finalized just months after Vance’s insulting assertion. As to AOC, yes she is currently childless and she is also young enough at 34 that she may just not feel ready to have children but then again so what is she chooses not to have kids. AOC has done far more to insure the well-being of Americans and especially children than Vance has.

Then there’s Vance’s claim that people without children have no direct stake in the country. We already know that Republicans have no empathy toward those outside their own families and close friends. Vance can’t see how anyone without children of their own can have the best interest of others unrelated to them in their hearts because he doesn’t and simply projects his feelings on others.

Vance’s utterance regarding a “health ruling class” is the final nail in his coffin. That tells you he sees the world as a place divided between those ordained to rule and those who serve. That’s like the divine right of kings that George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson fought for this nation’s independence from.

Vance is also being taken to task for his flip-flops on issues like climate change where he’s gone from being a big investor in green energy solutions to climate change denier and pushing legislation to provide government support for dirty coal fired power plants.

Perhaps the biggest flip-flop is Vance’s conversion from privately calling Trump “America’s Hitler”, a “moral disaster” a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people and “reprehensible” to accepting Trump’s offer to be his running mate.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 31, 2024