Big Beat

In the words of Fred Lewis, an attorney who advocates for campaign finance reform, the Texas Ethics Commission is not just toothless, but gumless—a shell agency that makes a mockery of good government. And that’s by design. The Ethics Commission was created and is funded by the very people it’s supposed to police: our legislators.

Examples of the agency’s weakness aren’t hard to come by, but try this one out: The commission has apparently never formally asked the Travis County district attorney to investigate a case. (The Travis County DA’s Public Integrity Unit is charged with criminal investigations of state officials, most famously indicting former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.)

In a tough-on-crime state, it’s the politicians who enjoy a peculiar lack of enforcement and policing—largely thanks to the Ethics Commission.

The big busts of corrupt politicians in recent years have happened with little help from the Ethics Commission. Instead, the agency has focused on trifling technical violations that have drawn the ire of lawmakers. It’s the equivalent of a cop busting jaywalkers while a nearby bank is robbed.

Take the case of former state Rep. Kino Flores, a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley known to contractors as “Mr. 10 Percent” for his habit of skimming off the top of government contracts. Flores was eventually the target of 59 allegations of misconduct and was convicted in 2010 of ethics violations. During its investigation of Flores, a Travis County grand jury expressed “outrage” at the vagueness of state ethics law. In a letter, the jurors excoriated what they termed “loopholes and vagueness which seem to be common for self-serving legislative laws and codes.”

The jurors specifically cited the opaqueness of the personal financial disclosures filed by elected officials. In Flores’ case, the Ethics Commission allowed him to declare himself a “consultant,” without listing who or what he was consulting for. There is no record of the Ethics Commission ever investigating Flores.

Lax ethics laws also plagued the case of former state Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, who in 2010 got caught double-dipping on travel reimbursements. Jay Root, then a reporter with the Associated Press, noticed the duplications on state and campaign travel records. Driver’s initial defense was that the Ethics Commission told him it was all good. Watchdog groups pointed out that lack of vigilance on the part of the Ethics Commission could lead to rampant abuse by lawmakers.

Because of the confidentiality rule, it’s not known whether the Ethics Commission was investigating Driver, and since House travel records before mid-2005 were already destroyed at the time of Driver’s confession, it was impossible to know how much Driver earned by getting reimbursed twice for the same expenses. Driver admitted to double-dipping for years.

Since former Travis County DA Ronnie Earle nailed former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on money-laundering charges, lawmakers have tried several times, unsuccessfully, to strip the Public Integrity Unit of its funding or authority.

Some board members of the Ethics Commission, perhaps feeling upstaged, suggested in November that the commission take over the Public Integrity Unit’s job. Luckily these proposals have gone nowhere, thanks in part to public outrage.

This legislative session, lawmakers have a golden opportunity to fix the Ethics Commission. The agency is up for sunset review, the once-every-12-years process of reforming state agencies.

Several watchdog groups have proposed that the Ethics Commission create an enforcement director position with the power to execute real investigations. Unfortunately, the sunset staff didn’t adopt that recommendation. But there are other ideas for reform.

Legislators could pump more money into the commission’s stagnant budget, so the agency could, for example, hire more staff with law enforcement backgrounds. They could also clarify the law to allow for sharing of information with law enforcement agencies. Finally, they could empower the executive director to sign off on subpoenas and other investigatory tools without requiring the Ethics Commission board—political appointees, all—to approve them.

Is it too much to hope that lawmakers will shine more light on their own dealings in the murky world of money and politics? Perhaps. Both Republicans and Democrats talk a good game about transparency and disclosure; it’s up to us to make them live up to it.

A shooting at Lone Star College in Houston resulted in three injuries last week, just two days after the first-ever “Gun Appreciation Day.” Gawker tallied at least sixteen incidences of gun-related death or injury on Gun Appreciation Day, too. Because none of these events was a mass shooting, the reader comments on the news stories covering them often contained sentiments like the following from the Houston Chronicle: “No ‘school shooting’ here at all. Just two thugs in a part of town known for gang and gun violence on a daily basis,” or, “A couple of thugs got into a typical thug fight. It happens every day in Houston. The media would have you believe this was a massacre,” or, “This is NOTHING like the shooting at the elementary school…it just happened to happen at a junior college between 2 hot blooded young men!”

They’ve got one thing right. It does happen everyday. Unlike mass shootings, other types of gun violence are so common that, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, more children and teens die from guns every three days than died in the Newtown massacre. That they’re treated as yawn-worthy speaks to our acceptance of gun violence in certain neighborhoods.

Those neighborhoods, of course, tend to be populated by people of color. The Children’s Defense Fund reports that 43 percent of all children and youth killed by firearms in 2009 were black. And while the annual number of shooting deaths of white youth decreased by 44 percent between 1979 and 2009, the deaths of black children and teens increased by 30 percent. The annual number of shooting deaths of Hispanic children decreased, but only by 25 percent.

The question we have to face is this: Do we want to address all gun violence or do we only want to try to prevent mass shootings? Is one group of victims more important than the other? The answer, of course, is no. All lives are important.

Whether it’s a seemingly random mass shooting at a predominantly white, suburban school or the death of a child of color caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting in the inner city, gun violence is often facilitated by two things: Availability of guns and a lack of services and supports available to our children and their families around the issues of drugs, gangs, failing schools and mental health services.

If I had my druthers, we’d ban both assault weapons and handguns, but the proliferation of guns in America makes that a near-impossibility. So, let’s start with the proposal on the table from President Obama. It calls on Congress to close background check loopholes and bans military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Current law only requires background checks be performed by licensed gun dealers, but about 40 percent of guns are sold through private dealers. Requiring all gun sellers to perform background checks and facilitating better sharing of this information among states will help keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

The president’s plan also suggests that Congress allocate money to schools for social and mental health services that address students’ behavioral issues. But it also gives the schools the option to hire more school cops, covertly termed “school resource officers,” that some youth advocates fear will exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline.

Here’s how the ACLU explained it: “We fear that neutral sounding safety policies, such as putting more cops in school will lead to the over-incarceration of school-age children, especially students of color and students with disabilities, who are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted for issues that would normally be handled by school administrators when law enforcement is introduced into schools.”

Legislators must consider not only middle-class, white victims who’ve died in mass shootings, but the victims who are more likely to die everyday because of the color of their skin—think Trayvon Martin or 23-year-old Rodrigo Diaz of Georgia, who was shot in the head and killed this weekend after pulling into the wrong man’s driveway.

The president’s plan is not as comprehensive as it should be.. Studies show most gun crime is committed with handguns and it’s not clear how much of an impact the Obama proposals will have on that. Still, even modest, common sense measures will have trouble clearing Congress, especially the Republican-controlled House. That’s just the current political reality.

But while we’re debating gun violence, let’s no longer pretend that it’s a problem just confined to the occasional mass shooting.

This month, a new film starring Matt Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant, will hit select theaters in time for the holiday movie-going season, a film that will familiarize Americans, if they’re not already, with the f-word—fracking.

(Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing for the uninitiated, is the controversial method of extracting oil and gas by injecting millions of gallons of high-pressure fluids deep underground to fracture rock formations.)

Environmentalists warn that fracking poses serious dangers to groundwater, air quality and public health. They point to evidence that the process can cause earthquakes. Proponents, mostly big oil companies, say that’s nonsense. They argue that fracking is unleashing impressive amounts of domestic energy, decreasing reliance on foreign oil and creating jobs.

Guess which side Matt Damon is on?

In Promised Land Damon plays a young corporate salesman, Steve Butler, who grew up in the heartland and moved to the big city to seek opportunities not available in his small town. On the verge of reaching executive status with his natural gas company, Butler is sent to a rural farming community in Pennsylvania along with his partner, played by Frances McDormand, to buy out the town and begin fracking the hell out of their farmland. Butler’s higher-ups assure him that this is the best thing that could happen to these people who’ve been hit hard by the recession. In fact, many do stand to make millions.

Enter environmentalist Dustin Noble, played by The Office’s John Krasinski. Noble riles the town with a grassroots anti-fracking campaign that includes announcing that fracking killed his farmland. “The land just turned brown and it died,” he says in the trailer. “It’s happened to one of us, it can happen to all of us.” Also featured in the trailer is a short clip of Noble setting a model farm on fire in front of a class of elementary school kids for effect. (This is presumably a reference to a scene from the anti-fracking documentary Gasland in which a man is able to light his tap water on fire.) If that weren’t enough, everybody’s dream grandpa Hal Holbrook plays a local schoolteacher who roundly disapproves of this whole fracking idea.

“You’re a good man, Steve. I just wish you weren’t doing this,” he tells Damon’s character in the trailer. Yeouch.

Critics of the film—mostly conservative news sources at this point since the general public hasn’t seen the film —say the movie is essentially liberal propaganda. One of their favorite items to point out is that Image Nation Abu Dhabi, which helped finance the film, is owned by United Arab Emirates, an oil rich nation that would stand to profit billions by delaying the growth of America’s natural fuel industry. Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who is working on his own fracking documentary and who also directed a documentary called Not Evil, Just Wrong to challenge Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, first raised the issue of Image Nation’s involvement at a promotional Q&A for Promised Land. The confrontation was captured on video by McAleer’s team.

In the clip, Damon, who co-wrote the script with Krasinski, says the film was actually funded by Focus Features and Participant Media. Participant, Damon explains, has a deal with Image Nation, which finances 10 percent of all Focus films sight-unseen.

“The first time we were aware that Image Nation was involved with our movie was when we saw the rough cut and saw their logo, and that’s that.” Damon tells McAleer.

It seems with a deal like that, the government of UAE is probably unaware that they helped fund Promised Land, either.

Later, a podcast of the event posted on iTunes was lacking McAleer’s question, according to The Hollywood Reporter—a fact flogged on the social media site of Energy in Depth, a leading pro-fracking public outreach campaign launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA).

According to The Guardian, Energy in Depth is just one of many pro-fracking interests that are preparing for the public backlash that could result from Promised Land. It has, for example, drafted a fact sheet it is considering sending to the press and distributing to moviegoers.

For their parts, Damon and Krasinski told Peter Tavers of Rolling Stone magazine that judging Promised Land as “the anti-fracking movie” without having seen it is a mistake.

“We’re both happy to discuss anything once people have actually seen the movie and they know what it is they’re upset or feeling good about,” Krasinski said.

“It’s all grey area to me,” said Tavers, who has presumably seen the film. “It’s all people saying, ‘I need the money. What am I doing? How do I justify it to myself?’ It’s people.”

“Frances McDormand’s character is making her decisions entirely on her son and on taking care of her kid,” Damon added. “We all know those people. That’s us.”

The title of the film is ambiguous. In the Bible, the Promised Land is a gift from God. But is man’s moral obligation to guard it, or exploit it for the natural resources it provides? I look forward to finding out soon.

Earlier this year, when San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, many Hispanic Texans felt they had finally arrived. When Latinos overwhelmingly helped re-elect President Obama in November, Tejanos continued to celebrate this apparent rise to power. But Hispanic Texans will never take their rightful place at the table until they succeed economically. Nowhere is this tension between rising political power and lagging economic status more apparent than the Texas border. Sixteen of the 100 poorest counties in America are found along or near the Texas-Mexico border. This isn’t surprising when you consider that Hispanic Texans generally receive inferior educations and experience higher unemployment than their Anglo counterparts. So, what’s to be done?

Some border-based entrepreneurs are trying to address these inequities by giving Latinos access to the rarefied world of venture capital.
Rodolfo Sanchez lives in the Rio Grande Valley, and earlier this year, his company, Plasma2Energy, got a contract from the city of McAllen to build a waste-to-energy plant—a cutting-edge, green-energy technology. Developed by Monterrey, Mexico-based ABA Research, the 27-megawatt plant converts municipal trash into electricity, 25 percent of which would be used by the city.

“This technology offers savings in the long term for the city, which is very attractive,” Sanchez says. “It’s also very clean, and that is very attractive too.”

Sanchez offered to deploy the first commercial-sized facility in the U.S. for ABA Research. He just needed the capital, about $15 million for the first phase.

But raising the money took longer than Sanchez’s Monterrey investor was expecting. ABA got nervous and pulled out, leaving Sanchez to bootstrap Plasma2Energy while he searched for funds—funds he still hasn’t acquired. Ultimately, ABA decided to build a plant in Mexico instead. He hopes that Plasma2Energy will build a plant in McAllen in the future, though that’s uncertain.

Sanchez says the McAllen Economic Development Corporation didn’t understand the technology enough to offer more than standard city incentives—a blow that not only cost him much-needed money, but deprived his company of an endorsement that could have generated interest from venture capitalists.

Sanchez’s experience is all too common for Hispanic entrepreneurs. A 2011 Venture Capital Census of nearly 600 venture capitalists found that 87 percent of all respondents identified as white, with fewer than 2 percent identifying as Latino. Eighty-nine percent were men.

This nearly all-white, all-male demographic adversely affects high-tech entrepreneurs who don’t fit the “white guy” tech mold.

“Most people rely on their relationships with wealthy people to get venture capital,” says Teo Tijerina, co-founder and executive director of Austin-based EDCO Ventures, a nonprofit focused on economic development in poorer areas of Texas, including the border region. EDCO has a goal of raising $50 million to $100 million in venture capital for business investment in Texas. So far it’s amassed $3.5 million from the federal government, private investors and national banks.

“If you can do a semiconductor plant in Taiwan with far less infrastructure, you can do one in the Valley,” says Tijerina, who was raised in McAllen, as was the company’s co-founder Leo Ramirez. “The border region just needs the know-how and the access to capital and technology.

Of course, there’s a whole historical basis for why they don’t have it.”

The state of Texas runs an Emerging Technology Fund to help promising start-ups. Recipients must show that they can also raise capital locally. That can be a challenge for entrepreneurs along the border. Few subsidies from the Tech Fund flow south.

“Perhaps regions like Austin, Dallas and Houston don’t need state funding, but the border, East Texas, and other parts of the state do,” Tijerina says.

Tijerina also says that Texas’ leading research universities don’t do enough to aid poor communities. At a meeting with the University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Technology Commercialization, Tijerina says, an official told him the office prefers to work with entrepreneurs who headquarter in Austin.

“It would make sense that the office show a preference toward entrepreneurs in Texas versus an entrepreneur in Michigan, but it shouldn’t matter whether it’s Austin or San Antonio or Brownsville,” Tijerina said.

It shouldn’t matter, but it always has, and only educated and motivated border entrepreneurs are going to change that.