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Barack's Betrayals Offer Lessons We Can't Deny |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5223"><span class="small">Danny Schechter, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 August 2011 11:01 |
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Danny Schechter writes: "Yet, at the same time, many of us who now know how we have been used will vote for him again, because, as he rightly calculates, there is no one else, and the alternative is even worse. Watch and weep as today's rebels become next year's rationalizers."
President Barack Obama, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meeting with his Cabinet at the White House. (photo: AP)
Barack's Betrayals Offer Lessons We Can't Deny
By Danny Schechter, Reader Supported News
30 August 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
Oh, the pain of the believer.
 ournalists are not supposed to have political opinions, and yet we all do. Our "biases" are usually disguised, not blatant or overtly partisan, and can be divined in what stories we cover and how we cover them,
Even "just the facts ma'am," journos for Big Media have to decide which facts to include and which to ignore.
Our outlooks are always shaped by our worldviews, values and experience, not to mention the outlets we work for.
Which brings me to the challenge of seeking truth and recognizing it when you see it.
I have to admit that I was seduced by the idea of Barack Obama.
The idea of a black president, the idea of a young president, the idea of an articulate president, and the idea of a man married to such a stand-up woman from a working-class family was hard to resist.
Here's a guy who seemed really smart, not just because he went to Harvard, but because professors there I liked were impressed with him. (I taught at Harvard, and know very well how not so smart many students there can be!)
In the end, it doesn't mean much, but in that period he lived about a block away from the house I once shared on Dartmouth Street in Somerville.
Was that a degree of separation?
He had also been a community organizer, starting in politics at the grass roots in Chicago. I also worked at Saul Alinsky-style organizing, and even knew the iconic organizer personally.
Was that another degree?
He invoked the spirit of the civil rights movement, but was not part of it. He treated Dr. King as a monument before the new memorial was conceived, embracing him as a symbol of the past, not a guide to the future.
He took an anti-war stance on pragmatic grounds only, preferring Afghanistan to Iraq. He hasn't extricated us from either battlefield.
His strategy borrowed heavily from the Bush Doctrine. What's the difference, really, as US troops now intervene worldwide and Guantanamo remains open for business?
There was a lot I didn't know. I didn't know the backgrounds of those that groomed him and funded him. His relationship with the centrist DLC was murky, as were the details on the services he performed for a shadowy firm, Business International, said to have CIA links.
There were those who warned, but I guess I didn't want to listen.
Why? I didn't want to reinforce my own skepticism and sense of despair. I feigned at being hopeful even as I took quite a few critical whacks at his positions in my blog. His deviations from a liberal agenda and his paens to the "free market" were considered necessary for his "electability."
I was also influenced by the euphoria for him overseas that had become infectious but has since soured.
To be honest, I was so disgusted with eight years of George Bush for all the right reasons that I wanted him gone full stop, as did millions of Americans.
Hillary didn't appeal to me, not because she's a woman, but because of her slavish affinity for the Israel lobby and middle of the road Democrats. (Yes, Obama did his mea culpa to AIPAC too!)
I was denounced as a super-sexist by a few for not buying into her centrist Clintonista crusade.
She had gone from a student advocate to part of a ruling family; he went from bottom-up activism to top-down elitism.
When she joined his "team," you knew they were always in the same league.
When the right bashed him for associating with radical Bill Ayers, who I knew, it made me suspect he might even be cooler than I thought, even as he raced to distance himself. His membership in Reverend Wright's church hinted at a deeper consciousness, until he buckled in the media heat and threw the man that married him under the bus.
And yet, I wanted to believe because I needed to believe, needed to believe it was possible to change the American behemoth, to believe that, as he kept saying, "it could be different this time."
As the late writer David Foster Wallace put it, "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life ... there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship ... else (what) you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough."
So, in a sense, I became a worshipper like so many, not of the man or the dance he was doing in an infected political environment, but because I convinced myself that I worshipped possibility, that there are times when the unexpected, even the unbelievable - occurs. I had seen Mandela go from prison to the presidency of South Africa.
After all, how does a progressive blast a candidate who has Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing the uncensored version of "This Land Is Your Land" at his inaugural?
Yet, there was always a nagging question: Was he with us, or just co-opting us?
Yes We Can?
Slowly, despite the glow and the aura, deeper truths surfaced, realities I had winked away. It's not surprising that his mantra has gone, as The Washington Post reports, from the "fierce urgency of now," to "Be patient, democracy is big and tough and messy."
Yes, I knew I may have been rationalizing a false god, who was only another, if more attractive, politician who says one thing and does another in a political system where power, not personalities prevail.
Like many of his predecessors he would be "captured" by the power structures, by the military men and contractors at the Pentagon and the money men on Wall Street.
He was in office, but never really in charge. Clearly, he didn't have the votes to enact a real change agenda. But that was because his own party was long ago bought and paid for.
He never had a chance, even if as I wanted to believe, he wanted one. He said he wanted to be a transformational figure, but the system transformed him - and quickly.
Everyone runs "against Washington," even a Senator who was part of it.
And so I held my nose and voted, hoping against my wiser instincts. I even made a positive film about the campaign that showed how he used social media and texting to mobilize new voters. When I tried to get a copy to the White House through an insider there, I found they couldn't be less interested.
By then he had gone from playing the "outside game" to opting into the "inside game" built around compromise in the name of "pragmatism," or "getting it done," in his words. In the end he was a rookie who may have outsmarted himself, or just served the interests who put him there.
He couldn't dump his most passionate and issue-oriented followers fast enough.
While his backers were still hot to trot, he became cooler toward them, and in effect, repudiated them with few progressive appointments. He put on his flag pin and relished the symbolism of the "office." He became the master of the uplifting speech disguising a quite different policy agenda.
He spoke for the people but served the power. His wanted the other side to love him too, even as his stabs at "bi-partisanship" proved non-starters.
When you lie down with those "lambs" (or is it snakes?), you betray not only supporters, but their hopes. FDR was soon spinning in his grave.
I am not surprised that knowledgeable critics of his economic policies not only consider him bull-headed and wrong, but actually, corrupt, aligned and complicit, with the banksters who are still ripping us off. No wonder he's "bundled" more donations from the greedsters and financiers this year than in 2008! No wonder he turned his back on consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren and is trying to kill prosecutions of bank fraud in high places.
Christopher Whalen, who writes for Reuters, say there will be a cost for his doing nothing, "The path of least resistance politically has been to temporize and talk. But by following the advice of Rubin and Summers, and avoiding tough decisions about banks and solvency, President Obama has only made the crisis more serious and steadily eroded public confidence. In political terms, Obama is morphing into Herbert Hoover."
Yet, at the same time, many of us who now know how we have been used will vote for him again, because, as he rightly calculates, there is no one else, and the alternative is even worse. Watch and weep as today's rebels become next year's rationalizers.
It reminds me of when activists were asked to vote for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with the slogan "Part of the Way with LBJ." That way ended with an endless escalation of war in Vietnam and guns trumping butter. Sound familiar?
The search for truth and reality has hit a wall but has to continue. The lessons need to be learned. We have to say we were wrong when we were, not in our beliefs, but in pinning our hopes on a shrewd, ambitious and double-faced political performance artist.
While people who still back him dismiss the accusation that he's a hidden socialist, Kenyan or space alien, all too many suspect he may be a secret Republican. He is who he is, aloof, cautious, and a man in the middle. He's staying there.
Let's give David Foster the last word.
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconscioussness ...
... It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over ..."
Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits the Newsdissector.com blog. He directed "Barack Obama: People's President" (2009) for a South African media company. You may contact him at
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Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: The Election March of the Trolls |
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Monday, 29 August 2011 14:02 |
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Hedges writes: "A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control."
Chris Hedges, journalist and former war correspondent for the New York Times, 04/14/11. (photo: file)
The Election March of the Trolls
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
29 August 11
 This is no fairy tale. The 'corporate trolls' identified by Hedges are lurking under the bridge to the future and have the power to refuse passage to the forces of democracy. -- JPS/RSN
 e have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity - the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.
The only commodity the troll state offers is fear. The corporate trolls, such as the Koch brothers, terrify the birthers, creationists, militia lovers, tea party militants, right-to-life advocates, Christian fascists and God-fearing red-white-and-blue patriots by proclaiming that unless they vote for Perry or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann or some other product of the lunatic fringe of our political establishment, the American family will be destroyed, our children will be corrupted and the country will turn socialist. Barack Obama, who they whisper is a closet Muslim, will take away their guns, raise their taxes and bring homosexual couples into kindergartens.
For those, usually liberals, still rooted in a reality-based world, one that believes in evolutionary science, the corporate trolls offer a more refined, fear-based message of impending doom: If you abandon the Democrats we will be governed by Bible-thumping idiots who will make us chant the Pledge of Allegiance in mass rallies and teach the account of Genesis as historical and biological fact in our nation's schools.
And underneath it all runs the mantra chanted in unison by all the trolls - terror, terror, terror. The troll establishment spins us like windup dolls and laughs all the way to the bank. What idiots, they think. And every election cycle we prove them right.
"The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling groups and those who do their bidding; scientific, technical elites who elucidate the laws of behavior and the functions of society so that people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed," wrote James W. Carey in "Communication as Culture."
The trolls dominate or have neutralized every major institution in the country on behalf of their corporate paymasters. The press, education, Wall Street, labor and our political parties are managed by trolls or have been destroyed by them. Sometimes these trolls speak like liberals. Sometimes they speak like conservatives. Sometimes they are secular. Sometimes they are Christians. But the language they use is a cover for the relentless march toward a totalitarian capitalism and a kingdom where the trolls, if not the rest of us, live happily ever after. Rick Perry and John Boehner overtly make war on Social Security. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi say they would like to save Social Security but are sadly powerless before the decisions of a congressional super committee they helped form. The result, of course, is the same. We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered. Nothing more.
All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.
A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace. They are destroying all legal impediments to corporate exploitation and profit, as well as dismantling the regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen. They defend torture, offshore penal colonies, black sites and kidnapping (they call it "extraordinary rendition") of state enemies. They protect and abet financial fraud. They wage pre-emptive war. They refuse to restore habeas corpus. Without warrants, they monitor, eavesdrop on and wiretap tens of millions of citizens. They order the assassination of US citizens. They deny due process. They give corporations the status of persons. They ignore the suffering of the unemployed and the poor, slashing basic social service programs while doling out hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds to corporations. On these key issues, the only ones that really matter, there is no disagreement among trolls from either the self-identified left or the self-identified right. All their public disputes in the election cycle are a carnival act.
All conventional forms of dissent, from electoral politics to open debates, have been denied us. We cannot rely on the institutions that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. The only route left is to disconnect as thoroughly as possible from the consumer society and engage in acts of civil disobedience and obstruction. The more we sever ourselves from the addictions of fossil fuel and the consumer society, the more we begin to create a new paradigm for community. The more we engage in physical acts of defiance - as Bill McKibben and others did recently in front of the White House to protest the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would increase the flow of "dirty" tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico - the more we can keep alive a new, better way of relating to each other and the ecosystem.
Most important, we must stop being afraid. We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president. We have to defy all formal systems of power. We have to listen closely to the moral voices in our society, from McKibben to Noam Chomsky to Wendell Berry to Ralph Nader, and ignore feckless liberals who have been one of the most effective tools of our disempowerment. We have to create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive. The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment.
In William Shakespeare's play "Coriolanus" the Roman consul is deposed by the mob. Coriolanus, whatever his faults, turns on those who thrust him from power to declare a valediction we should deliver to our class of ruling trolls and all those who remain in their embrace.
Brutus:
There's no more to be said, but he is banish'd,
As enemy to the people and his country:
It shall be so.
Citizens:
It shall be so, it shall be so.
Coriolanus:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.
Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is "The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress."
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How Rick Perry Created His State's $27 Billion Budget Crisis |
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Saturday, 27 August 2011 17:45 |
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry knowingly created a structural budget deficit, and he's driven millions in taxpayer "economic development" dollars toward corporations that funded his campaigns and the Republican Governors Association while he chaired it.
Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry has created a budget crisis in Texas. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
How Rick Perry Created His State's $27 Billion Budget Crisis
By Lou Dubose, The Washington Spectator
27 August 11
He Was Warned
"As of this moment, this legislation is a staggering $23 billion short of the funds needed to pay for the promised property tax cuts over the next five years.... These are conservative estimates."
- Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn, warning Gov. Rick Perry about his 2006 tax reform proposal
 N HIS STATE OF THE STATE SPEECH in February, Rick Perry described the $27 billion budget shortfall confronting the Texas Legislature.
Now, the mainstream media and big government interest groups are doing their best to convince us that we're facing a budget Armageddon," Perry said. "Texans don't believe it and they shouldn't because it's not true."
The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services.
Perry's statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill he pushed through the Legislature in a special session five years earlier.
With Perry running for president on a record of fiscal responsibility (and job creation, discussed later in this article), it's important to understand the consequences of his 2006 "business margins tax" - and to ask if the governor knew that the tax reform he proposed would undermine the state's budgets in the years that followed.
First, some background. Texas is one of nine states with no income tax. It relies on property taxes to pay for public services - notably, to pay for public education, which consumes the lion's share of property taxes.
Because there is no income tax, property taxes are high. In 2006, Perry called a special session to address property taxes. With no income tax, there are no easy fixes. Yet Perry found one. A business-margins tax he said would provide enough revenue to allow for reductions in property taxes.
It was evident at the time that the new tax would not deliver what the governor promised. The state comptroller, Carole Strayhorn, had her staff run the numbers on Perry's tax-reform proposal.
"In 2007," she wrote in a letter to Perry, "your plan is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short. These are conservative estimates."
The comptroller warned that "no economic miracle will close the gap your plan creates. Even if every dollar of the current [2006] $8.2 billion surplus was poured into the plan, it would not cover the plan's cost for more than two years, 2007 and 2008. The gap is going to continue to grow year by year." The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by tax increases, the comptroller warned, "or massive cuts in essential public services - like public education."
"It was not only Ms. Strayhorn's letter," Houston Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg told me. "Every official document predicting the state's financial crisis at the time predicted exactly what happened."
Hochberg, the Legislature's resident authority on public-education finance, also warned Perry that the tax bill he was promoting would not produce the revenue he promised.
"I asked the governor about this in a small meeting amongst legislators," Hochberg said. "His answer to me, I remember it as clear as day, was 'Scott, use your common sense. Don't you know that when we cut property taxes we will see such an economic boom that you will never even notice the drop in revenue?'"
Perry's response to the Democratic legislator was candid - and newsworthy. Perry admitted that he knew that the tax reform he proposed would result in a "drop in revenue."
Perry was not alone in that knowledge.
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst told San Antonio Express-News re-porter Garry Scharrer this past January that he, too, knew the new tax wouldn't deliver what it promised:
"Dewhurst now says that he knew that revenue projections from the revised business franchise tax 'were inflated' and told Senate members in closed-door caucus meetings at the time that the business tax would not perform as advertised 'and that we were going to create a structural funding deficit in state government.' But Dewhurst said he also believed at the time that 'we would grow out of it by now.'"
A state senator told me last month that Republican leaders in the Senate knew the tax they were supporting wouldn't provide adequate revenue, and the "grow out of it" trope was their answer to questions from skeptics.
"They knew their projections were bullshit," the senator said. "When you questioned them about it, they'd say 'we'll grow out of it.'"
That's the story. The state's Republican governor and lieutenant governor knowingly created a budget crisis.
As the state's comptroller predicted, a surplus covered some of the 2007-2008 budget shortfall. In 2009, Perry used $17 billion of President Obama's federal stimulus money to fill the funding gap for the following two years, and to cover a shortfall in the previous fiscal year's budget. (Perry angrily refused $555 billion in stimulus money designated for the extension of benefits to the unemployed, protesting that the federal dollars came with strings attached.)
When the Legislature convened in January 2011, the federal stimulus money was spent, and the budget shortfall about which the comptroller warned Perry five years earlier had arrived.
Public education took the biggest hit.
I asked Hochberg about the $4 billion cut from the state's public education budget.
He said the funding gap is larger: $4.3 billion on the basic "formulas," which have always been funded. And "a billion-plus" ($1.4 billion) in "categorical funding" to public schools - funds for teacher incentives, school facilities, pre-kindergarten grants.
Thus far, 12,000 teachers have been laid off. Add to that roughly 6,000 state employees cashiered because of budget cuts, a figure that doesn't include university professors and other university employees who will lose their jobs because of the $1.2 billion cut from higher ed funding.
Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals were cut, and the final four months of Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2012 were not funded.
There was an alternative to the austerity budget the Texas Legislature passed in June. Democrats and some Republicans proposed tapping the state's Rainy Day Fund, funded by oil and gas taxes, to cover part of the shortfall.
Perry, however, declared the $9.5 billion fund off limits. He ultimately acquiesced to demands from moderate Republicans and agreed to use $3.2 billion to cover part of the current fiscal year's deficit. But nothing for the next biennium, when the state's public schools are short $5.7 billion.
"The governor doesn't do anything on his own," Hochberg observed. "The governor was only able to do that because he had a large number of House members, particularly newly elected Tea Party House members, who were willing to say 'I'm not going to vote against the governor.'
"But, clearly, he led the parade."
When the Legislature convenes in 2013, it will face a shortfall of $10 billion to $18 billion, plus the $4.8 billion in Medicaid expenses it failed to fund this year.
JOBS FOR SALE - By now we all know what Rick Perry is selling. He collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from other states. The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his creations, have had unprecedented success.
It's not as simple as Perry would have you believe.
The two big economic development funds Perry controls operate on a trickle-up economic theory. The state takes money from taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create new jobs.
Yet corporations often fail to deliver, and the governor and his staff rewrite corporations' contracts to relax their job-creation requirements.
Grants are often made to companies that would move into the state or expand their workforce without a taxpayer-funded incentive.
The governor hands over millions of dollars to corporations whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.
And Rick Perry holds all the cards. The lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House have a vote on which corporations get public money. But as a state senator explained to me, neither of them has the staff to evaluate candidates for taxpayer funding.
The same senator also said he would like to know how many times the speaker and lieutenant governor have said 'no' to Perry. There is no public record. The governor proposes and the governor disposes, in closed meetings.
And these are scarce dollars. In a low-tax and low-services state, the zero-sum-game nature of the budgetary process is painfully evident. For example, the biggest pot of economic-development dollars, the Texas Enterprise Fund, was started in 2003 by drawing $285 million from the state's Rainy Day Fund. The same Rainy Day Fund the governor this year declared off limits for the public schools.
The Enterprise Fund also withdrew $161 million from the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund in 2009, at a time when unemployment taxes paid by businesses tripled and only 34 percent of unemployed workers received benefits.
Add to that the total funds appropriated by the Legislature, and you get close to $500 million, all of which has or will be disbursed by the governor.
Perry has been in office for more than 10 years, which has allowed him to use his authority to make political appointments to expand the constitutionally limited powers of his office. He is, in other words, a very strong weak governor.
Every statewide elected office is held by a Republican. And the Republican Party holds a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature.
This political hegemony has created a climate that discourages oversight of the Republican governor.
PUBLIC INTEREST OVERSIGHT - In the absence of official oversight, a good-government group, Texans for Public Justice (TPJ), did its own audit of the economic development funds and found that in 2009 the number of corporate grant recipients not fulfilling their obligations had increased from 42 percent to 66 percent.
TPJ also found that when companies failed to meet their contractual obligations to provide jobs, the governor's office discreetly rewrote their contracts.
No state official, appointed or elected, it seemed, was working to ensure that the taxpayer was getting a reasonable return on the $368 billion the governor had handed out at the time TPJ's report was released.
Beyond the sloppy stewardship of taxpayer dollars, many of Perry's grants make little sense.
Consider $600,000 paid to the Cabela's sporting-goods chain for a commitment of 400 new jobs in two new superstores. And the promise of "new hotels, entertainment parks, restaurants and complementary retail stores … expected to total over $250 million and create an additional 2,000 Texas jobs," according to documents obtained by TPJ.
Cabela's is not Disney. It created 241 jobs, with average annual salaries of $23,000. The hotels, restaurants, and various retail outlets never materialized. The state recovered $177,288, or 44 percent of the grant.
"It's a slippery slope when you fund retail," said Don Baylor, a policy analyst at the non-profit Center for Public Policy Priorities. "Because retail always follows where rooftops are." In other words, where there are consumers, Cabela's and other retailers need no incentive.
Other grants were made to corporations expanding facilities they are unlikely to abandon.
Motiva Enterprises, for example, is a joint venture of Shell Oil and the Saudi-Arabian oil company Aramco. In 2006, Texas awarded Motiva $2 million on the promise of 300 jobs it would create through a $3.2 billion project to make its Port Arthur refinery the largest in the nation.
With a producing refinery on Port Arthur's Sabine-Neches Waterway, Motiva was unlikely to take its $3.2 billion expansion project to another state.
Nor was Motiva so illiquid that it could not have expanded its refinery without $2 million from the public treasury. In the quarter in which Motiva's $2 million check was cut, Shell reported $6.3 billion in earnings.
Taxpayers in Texas also wrote checks to mortgage bankers, while the bankers booked huge profits on the subprime home-loans that foundered the economy in 2007.
Countrywide Home Loans got $20 million in 2004, on a commitment of 7,500 jobs. It created 3,876. Then the bottom fell out of the housing market, Countrywide was charged with defrauding its clients, and was acquired by Bank of America. It has agreed to return 40 percent of its $20 million. By July 2011, the Countrywide loan portfolio, underwritten in part by Texas taxpayers, had cost Bank of America more than 50 percent of its share value.
Texas taxpayers also gave Washington Mutual $15 million in 2005, to open a new $50 million facility in San Antonio. At the time the deal was announced, WaMu had $300 billion in assets, $188 billion in deposits, and 43,000 employees. It was also in the process of dumping its 30-year-fixed-rate mortgage portfolio to clear the books for high-risk subprime loans.
"Those were really negative investments," Baylor said. "You financed toxic financial products that sucked equity and wealth out of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in Texas, but nationwide."
WaMu also consistently missed its job targets. TPJ found that the governor's office amended its contract, allowing aggregated part-time jobs to count as full-time jobs.
Other grants fail to pass the smell test.
Bill White, Perry's opponent in the 2010 general election, criticized an $8.5 million grant to Caterpillar Inc. to build an engine plant in Seguin. Perry's office responded that White was desperate because he was trailing in the polls.
Perhaps.
But Peter M. Holt owns the Caterpillar sales outlets in Texas and had donated $424,000 to Perry's campaigns. The decision to locate the plant in Texas, according to a company press release obtained by White, was made before Caterpillar's grant was awarded.
Sanderson Farms got $500,000 in exchange for a commitment to build a $7 million chicken hatchery and processing plant in Waco. Sanderson Farms CEO Joe Sanderson had contributed $165,000 to Perry's campaign.
Close ties between political donors and development grants are not isolated incidents. Texas Observer Editor Dave Mann found that executives and employees of 20 companies that received a combined $174.2 million had donated $2.2 million to Perry, and to the Republican Governors Association he chaired until he began his run for the presidency.
In the 2011 legislative session, Democratic Senator Kirk Watson and Republican Senator John Carona passed a bill that provides some transparency in the grant process. Control of the funds remains firmly in Perry's hands.
Don't look for the pace of the grants to slow. A week before Perry flew to South Carolina to announce that he's in the race, his office announced a $300,000 grant to Office Depot.
The company might need the help. Two days before winning the scratch-off lottery in Texas, Office Depot posted a quarterly loss of $29 million.
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FOCUS: Prosser Says Contact With Judge's Neck a "Total Reflex" |
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Saturday, 27 August 2011 16:21 |
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Intro: "Friday saw the release of the official documents in the investigation of the alleged physical altercation at the Wisconsin Supreme Court - in which liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley accused conservative Justice David Prosser of grabbing her neck in a chokehold during an argument. A special prosecutor announced Thursday that no charges would be filed."
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser. (photo: John Hart/WI State Journal)
Prosser Says Contact With Judge's Neck a "Total Reflex"
By Eric Kleefeld, TPM Muckraker
27 August 11
 riday saw the release of the official documents in the investigation of the alleged physical altercation at the Wisconsin Supreme Court - in which liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley accused conservative Justice David Prosser of grabbing her neck in a chokehold during an argument. A special prosecutor announced Thursday that no charges would be filed.
The event occurred on June 13, during an argument over the court's decision to uphold Gov. Scott Walker's anti-public employee union legislation, with Prosser in the court's 4-3 conservative majority and Bradley in the liberal minority, along with Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson. Prosser wanted to release the court's decision quickly, at the urging of the state legislature, but Abrahamson disagreed. Prosser and Abrahamson argued over the matter at Bradley's office, with Prosser just outside the door, and Bradley and Abrahamson inside the office itself. Prosser has maintained that Bradley "charged" at him, and he then put up his own hands as a reflex action, briefly making contact with her neck.
Even skimming the papers, which have been posted online by the Wisconsin State Journal, they reveal a detailed portrait of a court that is deeply dysfunctional, breaking down into personal factions along partisan lines.
During the court's initial meeting with Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs, conservative Justice Patience Roggensack told Bradley that she did not condone Prosser's actions during the altercation, but also said "Ann you do realize you goad him." Also, in their later separate interviews with law enforcement, Prosser and his fellow conservative Justices Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman all described Abrahamson and Bradley as having a "mother/daughter" relationship.
On the other side, Bradley has had growing concerns about her safety and Abrahamson's. Bad relationships have been building up on the court over a long period of time, most notably in a February 2010 incident in which Prosser told Abrahamson "you are a bitch," and also added: "There will be a war against you and it will not be a ground war."
The key excerpt from Bradley's interview:
Justice Bradley said at this point Justice Prosser began directing his loud voice at the Chief Justice again. Justice Prosser said something to the effect of, "Chief, I have lost confidence in your leadership."
Justice Bradley said she began to walk over towards where Justice Prosser was standing, which was just outside of her office doorway. As she got closer to him Justice Bradley told Justice Prosser "Buddy don't raise your voice again. I'm no longer willing to put up with this." Justice Bradley described how she was now standing close to Justice Prosser and was "face to face to confront him." Justice Bradley stated she was pointing with her left hand towards the door that was behind him and said, "You get out of my office."
Justice Bradley stated her intention was to get close to him to make sure he knew that she meant it. Justice Bradley said she wanted to look him in the eyes and recalled that she did not point at his face, but was pointing over his right shoulder towards the door that was behind him.
Justice Bradley said it was at this point Justice Prosser grabbed her by the neck in what she described as a "choke hold." Justice Bradley did not recall Justice Prosser squeezing or applying pressure around her neck. Justice Bradley could not describe how many seconds Justice Prosser's hands were around her neck, but she did recall being able to yell something to the effect of, "Get your hands off my neck."
Justice Bradley stated Justice Roggensack pulled her back and away from Justice Prosser. Justice Bradley recalled moving towards her doorway and being pulled back towards her office door. Justice Bradley did not know if anyone had pulled Justice Prosser off of her, but did recall that Justice Gableman and Justice Prosser left her assistant's office immediately.
Justice Bradley recalled right after or as she was pulled away by Justice Roggensack, Justice Roggensack said, "Ann, this isn't like you, you charged at him." Justice Bradley stated she responded by saying, "I didn't touch him at all."
Meanwhile, from Prosser's interview:
Justice Prosser said as he was telling the Chief Justice that he has lost confidence in her leadership his forearms were parallel to the ground with his hands and fingers extended out. Justice Prosser said he talks with his hands generally. Justice Prosser said again that Justice Bradley had "charged at me, it's simple as that" and she came out of her office towards him. Justice Prosser said he has heard some stories that she walked towards him and he said, "No, she charged at me." When she got near him, he said her right fist was in his face. Justice Prosser said as he was approached by Justice Bradley he believes that his hands came up slightly as he leaned backward, "It's as simple as that." Justice Prosser then said, "Did my hands touch her neck, yes, I admit that. Did I try to touch her neck, no, absolutely not, it was a total reflex."
Justice Prosser had no recollection of what he thought during this because it happened so fast. Justice Prosser said when his hands came in contact with Justice Bradley's neck, his thought was immediately, "Oh my god, I'm touching her neck." It was immediately after this that Justice Bradley said "don't you ever put your hands on me." Justice Prosser said he does not remember her saying anything about him choking her. Justice Prosser said he was stunned by what happened.
And also:
Justice Prosser said he had no recollection of his thumbs on Justice Bradley's neck at any point. Justice Prosser could only recall his fingers touching the side of her neck, with one hand on either side of her neck. Justice Prosser said at no point did he squeeze or apply any pressure.
Justice Prosser said, "What does any self respecting man do when suddenly that man finds that his hands, or part of his hands are on a woman's neck? Get them off the neck as soon as possible." Justice Prosser said this was a "reflexive move."
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