For the past few days I have been reading about Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick's fall in the Houston Chronicle and The Burnt Orange Report. The Burnt Orange Report has provided excellent moment-by-moment coverage of this fascinating drama. The blogosphere is a great place to read about these kinds of developments because it affords lively discussion and debate among the bloggers and their readers.
Yesterday morning the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg wrote an excellent and very revealing commentary on how Houston would benefit from a House Speaker who is from a large urban area.
After reading the article this life-long urban dweller and native of NYC who has lived in Houston for over 20 years, finally understands why I have been so frustrated by how our Austin lawmakers operate. Falkenberg's article nailed it for me. Texas has been run by a bunch of country boys who are more concerned about boll weevil eradication and transporting hogs to markets than they are a big city's crammed prisons, crumbling inner city schools, over-extended hospitals, torn up roads and gridlocked freeways.
But the distribution of power in the House has long been tipped against lawmakers from major population centers and in favor of small-town, rural lawmakers, who have overseen everything from the purse strings of the appropriations committee to major redistricting efforts.
The ongoing struggle between the hog advocates and the city slickers:
Hall said the mayor has long advocated more equity in transportation funding, arguing that the Houston region puts in far more than it gets out. He says rural lawmakers have argued they need roads built to get the hogs to market to feed the cities.
"The response is 'yes,' but do we need four lanes of highway built to get those hogs to market?" Hall said.
Now urbanites can understand why we've been screaming and pulling out our hair. We have been competing with hogs.
Yes, Craddick's fall has been a very enlightening event for me, a city slicker who gets antsy and disoriented when in the country. Houston is comprised of lots of transplants from other urban regions throughout the U.S. I imagine the same is true for Dallas. I have to admit that I was bewildered when I read about hog issues in the nation's fourth largest city's newspaper. Hogs? What on earth do PIGS have to do with anything, I wondered. But soon a light bulb went off in my city slicker brain.
Pigs are a commodity.
And there we have the serious disconnect between urban and rural concerns and policies.
This past weekend I debated the Craddick vs. Straus issue for two days with another Texas Democrat on The Burnt Orange Report. I am not as excited over Straus as some Democrats are because in my book a Republican is a Republican. Straus just happens to be a more reasonable and polite person than Craddick. But I am willing to be patient, at least for awhile, to see if an urban Speaker will deliver the same kind of representation for urban dwelling people that has been afforded to pigs.
During the course of our heated debate on The Burnt Orange Report, my fellow Democrat accused me of bias against Republicans and wrote that I was so far gone that there was no use in continuing the discussion. I responded with "you betcha I am biased and this is why." Given the constraints of time and space, below is an overview of my opinion of Republicans.
I am harshly critical of the Texas Republican Party because I believe its ideology in and of itself is fundamentally flawed. Pigs are only a small part of the Party's inherent anti-people agenda. The Party is anti-choice and anti-quality public school education. Our K-12 schools rank second to last nationwide. Texas Republicans prefer to build new and bigger prisons rather than put these same resources into our schools. Why has it never occurred to some of our leaders in Austin that if we made quality education available to all, we just might need fewer prisons? Better schools and access to community based mental health treatment programs would very likely significantly decrease the prison population. But schools and mental health facilities, unlike pigs and prisons, do not generate profits for fat cats who donate to political campaigns.
Anti-universal health care.
Republicans are anti-universal health care. Texas has the highest no. of uninsured residents, but the boys and girls in Austin are not only unmoved by this disgraceful fact, they simply do not care about people's needs.
Anti-regulation, oversight and transparency.
The Texas Republican Party is anti-government regulation of any sort. It will let the energy and other industries throughout this state pollute, baby, pollute, with few if any consequences. The Republican fat cats hate it when the feds try to poke their noses into our pollution disgrace but since W. has been in power the feds have not been much of a nuisance for them. Meanwhile we the people breathe more and more toxic air. One should drive 25-30 miles southeast of Houston to Pasadena or Texas City if one loves the stench spewing from the oil refineries in the morning. And then there are the spills, explosions and the fires in which people are killed and seriously wounded.
Business interests trump those of people.
The Party embraces corporate and big moneyed interests over those of everyday average and working folks. Its decree "what is good for business is good for people" is certainly not true, as most of us have come to know. Read TXSharon's diaries to learn about the terrible stress, suffering, financial loss and health challenges that business can impose on local residents.
Pay to play politics. Love fests with lobbyists and fat cats.
The Republican Party is too deeply tied to the lobbyists in energy, banking and insurance. Just check out Open Secrets.org to learn who is contributing to our federal lawmakers and Follow the Money to check on our state politicians. Or do a simple Google search on creatures like Jack Abramoff and you will find treasure troves of information.
Anti-democratic and divisive.
Texas Republicans are intrinsically anti-democratic. How can one forget Tom Delay's 2001
gerrymandering scheme that thumbed its nose at the democratic process because it essentially fixed the elections for the House of Representatives, in effect to take the ballot out of out of the hands of we the people. Tom Delay and Karl Rove had been busily scheming behind the scenes to create a permanent Republican majority. The two crooks dreamed of a lawless (for them) fascistic styled dictatorship. These two boys definitely prefer to please pigs over people.
Anti-voting rights.
To add insult to injury to an already compromised democratic process the Texas Republican Party perpetually messes with voting rights. Look at how hard it works to throw up obstacles to vote, especially for minorities and the elderly. It is more than willing to purge particular names from voter rolls with few questions asked. Ask Paul Bettencourt, Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector why he denied the right to vote to so many in Houston.
Bettencourt, by the way, after winning another term in office in November, resigned weeks later. Maybe he will be more comfortable working for pigs than voters.
GOP=The Wrecking Crew
On the national level the Republican Party should rename itself the Wrecking Crew. Speaking of which, there is a book about this horrifying stark reality. Wrecking the people's house, especially the piggy bank and peoples' rights is what conservatives do.
The Bush Administration's Republican rubber stamps, partisan hacks, henchmen and enablers embraced W. ginned up war of choice with Iraq. They supported Cheney's notion of "deficits don't matter" and they gave W. a tax-payer funded credit card with no limit. W. used it like a drunken sop and he racked up a 5 trillion dollar deficit, 1 trillion of it in tax cuts to the rich. These same Republicans stood by W., relentlessly beating the drums of free markets and deregulation. They railed against transparency and oversight. They scorned us for being a nation of whiners. They told us the recession was a mental one of our making. While they berated, insulted and lied to us, the economy was spiraling down, down, down, in a dive straight to hell.
Liars and Hypocrites.
And now these very same goons who stood by W. while he brandished a wrecking ball to every sector of our government, every agency, and the U.S. Constitution to boot, are now screaming about Obama's deficit spending? Why do I feel as if I've seen this predictable movie before?
Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House in 1981 with three major agenda items on his platter. Two of these were just like Mister Bush's 20 years later: greatly increase defense spending and slash taxes on the wealthy. He did both. But his greatest effort was devoted to cutting the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic new piles to play with. Thus did he start us down the road toward a Third World ratio between rich and poor.
Reagan achieved this defense boost and plutocratic tax reduction by borrowing more than all the presidents who had preceded him. That generated a bit of contradiction with the third item supposedly on his agenda: ending the annual budget deficit. At the time of his first inauguration, this hovered around $80 billion a year. The accumulation of past deficits - the national debt - was nearly a trillion dollars. That gave Reagan's speechwriters the focus for a powerful image for him to use in his first address to Congress in February 1981. He said:
I've been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is. The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.
The national debt nearly tripled on Reagan's watch, from $993 billion to $2.6 trillion, a stack of Andrew Jackson's soaring 8450 miles high. But Reagan was frugal. When George W. Bush wandered into the White House January 20, 2001, the national debt had climbed to $5.7 trillion. When he leaves two weeks from today, it will be pushing $10.8 trillion, a stack of twenties 34,000 miles high.
Maybe folks can now understand why I have a serious bias against Republican anything. The Party's record speaks for itself. All of the above is merely the tip of a rather huge iceberg.
We screamed for change, we worked for change and we voted for change. And now, we are finally going to get the change we so desperately need, at least on the national level. We still have quite a road to hoe in Texas, however, given that people have to compete with pigs.
