Dateline Houston

Hernan Trujillo doesn’t have a cell phone. He doesn’t have a car. Getting to and from his two jobs takes about two hours on Metro buses, if he doesn’t miss any connections and the traffic is light. From 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., Trujillo washes dishes at a restaurant. From 5 p.m. until 9:30 p.m., he cleans more than 200 elevator landings at Reliant Energy Plaza, a skyscraper in downtown Houston. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment with four other people and spends much of his money supporting his parents, both of whom are sick and uninsured. His mother needs a knee replacement, but can’t afford it, so Trujillo pays for her pain medication. He is 29.

“Even if you work two or three jobs, it’s never enough,” he says.

Trujillo is one of 3,200 janitors represented by Local 1, the Houston-area janitors’ union organized by the Service Employees International Union. You can see him here getting knocked down by a police horse during a protest last Thursday in front of the JP Morgan Chase building. Local 1 has protested daily since mid-May, when negotiations over their new contract broke down. The janitors work for seven companies that provide cleaning services to some of Houston’s largest companies, including Exxon and Chevron. Their contract expired at the end of May.

Houston’s janitors unionized in 2006, before which they made minimum wage. Unionized Houston janitors now earn $8.35 an hour. Few of them are allowed to work 40 hours a week, so the average local janitor makes less than $9,000 a year. (The federal poverty line for one person is $11,170.) They want a $1.65 raise over the next three years, which would bring their hourly pay to $10. Their employers have offered a 50-cent raise over five years. Paloma Martinez, of the SEIU, calls that “insulting.”

“The industry could do so much better,” she says. “Fifty cents isn’t going to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Martinez points out that in other cities, such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, the real estate market is worse than Houston’s—vacancy rates are higher and rents are lower—but their janitors make between $10.25 and $15.45, according to 2012 first-quarter data. Those janitors are also regularly allowed 40-hour work weeks, dramatically increasing their annual pay.

Local 1 held three limited strikes on June 5, 6, and 7, protesting alleged unfair labor practices, intimidation, and threats. Eleven workers were replaced after a one-day strike in Greenspoint, which the union says is illegal. They plan to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

None of the negotiators for the seven cleaning companies returned calls for comment.

Houston’s janitors are not alone in their struggle for a living wage. The asterisk to Perry’s much-crowed-over job creation is that many of those jobs paid very little and offered no benefits. Almost 10 percent of Texas jobs pay minimum wage ($7.25) or less, which ties the state with Mississippi for the greatest proportion of low-paying jobs.

“Everybody’s talking about the American dream, when you work hard, you get ahead,” Trujillo says, “but for us, that’s not true. Many of my coworkers don’t dare to turn on the air conditioning because the electricity bill will be so high they cannot pay it. What are you going to do? Put food on the table or pay the electricity bill? And the people who drive, are they going to put gas in the car or buy shoes for their children?”

“We’re just asking for fairness. We’re not trying to get rich,” he says. “You cannot leave this job and go to another place because the next person that is going to come to this job is going to have to face the same problem. We’re going to keep marching, we’re going to go on strike if it is needed, but we are not going to stop.”

In the three-and-a-half months since Trayvon Martin was killed, Houston courts have heard two cases involving the shooting of unarmed civilians and decided them very differently.

Last night, a Harris County jury found Raul Rodriguez guilty of murder for shooting his neighbor in 2010 over a noisy party. Kelly Danaher, a 36-year-old elementary school teacher, was having a birthday party for his wife and young daughter. Angry about the noise, Rodriguez armed himself with a handgun and video camera and recorded himself telling a police dispatcher, “my life is in danger now,” “these people are going to try and kill me,” and “I’m standing my ground here.” Rodriguez fatally shot Danaher in the street after someone tried to grab his video camera.

Dateline Houston wishes this were a depressing postmodern play about the dangerous, aggrandizing fantasies engendered by constant self-documentation in the social media age—but it’s not. It’s a real news story about a retired firefighter with a concealed carry permit and the Stand Your Ground law that made him think that saying aloud that he believed his life was in danger would protect him from all consequences.

The problem is, Rodriguez wasn’t a cop.

In April, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against two Houston-area cops who shot an unarmed black man, Robbie Tolan, in his driveway in 2008.

Here’s what happened—and please note, these events are not disputed; the issue at stake in the lawsuit was whether these events violated Tolan’s constitutional rights.

Tolan and his cousin were driving home in the wee hours of December 31. Officer John C. Edwards (who is white) was on patrol in the Bellaire neighborhood and ran Cooper’s plates—you know, just because. The plates came back as stolen—because Edwards had entered the plate number wrong.

Edwards called for back-up and confronted Tolan and his cousin on the front lawn, ordering them to the ground. Tolan’s parents heard the commotion and came outside in their pajamas, trying to explain that Tolan lived there and the car was theirs. One of the officers pushed Tolan’s mother toward the garage door and Tolan started to get up, objecting. Sgt. Jeffrey Wayne Cotton, who had been on the scene for 32 seconds, shot Tolan. Per the Chronicle: “Cotton said he thought Tolan was reaching for a gun in his waistband.”

Cotton was charged with first-degree aggravated assault by a public servant and found not guilty at trial in 2010. Naturally. Then the Toban family sued. They lost.

“Sergeant Cotton misinterpreted Robbie Tolan’s intended actions,” the judge wrote, “but his firing on Robbie Tolan did not violate Robbie Tolan’s constitutional rights because Sergeant Cotton feared for his life and could reasonably have believed the shooting was necessary.”

The firing of Jasper’s first black police chief, only a year after his appointment, has brought race tensions to the fore again, and residents are scared.

In June of 1998, three white supremacists in Jasper, dragged James Byrd Jr. behind a pickup truck until his head came off.

Thirteen years later, the city council, which at the time had four black council members and one white, named Rodney Pearson Jasper’s first black police chief. While the town was 46 percent white and 44 percent black, the police force had always been vastly white. Grumbles at the time suggested the pick was racially motivated and that Pearson, who had been Jasper’s first black highway patrolman, was unqualified. Three white candidates sued the city for “reverse discrimination.” Others pointed to the fact that Pearson, when he was 21, had been convicted of a class C misdemeanor for writing a hot check worth less than $20, which he neglected to mention on his application. (This is what conservative outlets claim is Pearson’s main disqualification.)

But Pearson hung on to his post—until now. In the year since Pearson’s appointment, white residents in Jasper organized the city’s first-ever recall election, (in which voter fraud was alleged) ousting three of the four black councilmembers and replacing them with whites, so that now the council’s balance is 4/5 white.

Last night, Pearson was fired. The reason? Job performance, they say, specifically that he allegedly took four unauthorized vacation days. The council is meeting today to discuss the firing. Council members swear up and down that his race is not the reason for the dismissal.

A white Jasper resident, who asked not to be named, told Dateline Houston that the Black Panthers are on their way to the city and that she fears the KKK will also come and there may be violence. “Regardless of what groups come, this is a big deal,” she says. “The white people are saying, ‘This isn’t about race at all!’ But it so obviously is.”

“When it has anything to do with racism, people get really angry. And when people get angry, they get stupid.” She adds, “We’re just going to stay in our house for a few days.”

We’ll keep you posted. 

“Oh, no! Aliens, bio-duplication, nude conspiracies… Oh my God! Lyndon LaRouche was right!” —Homer Simpson

What do you get when you combine the most entertaining parts of the tea party, libertarianism, and the foil hat club?

A…. Democrat?

Yes. Specifically, a LaRouche Democrat. Lyndon LaRouche is an 89-year-old conspiracy theorist with a cult following that likens Obama to Hitler, advocates a world gold standard, and wants to colonize Mars. Oh, and self-identifies as Democratic.

Fringe, you say?

They became slightly less fringe last week when Spring Branch Democrats (and, likely, a few snickering Republicans) handed the Democratic primary for Texas’ Congressional District 22 to a LaRouche Democrat named Kesha Rogers, whose campaign signs declaim, “Impeach Obama Now!”

But unlike Lloyd Oliver and a few other characters having their 15 minutes this election cycle, Rogers’ win wasn’t a fluke. Running in the same district In 2010, she took more than half the vote in a three-way primary. Fortunately for all those Democrats who believe Obama isn’t Hitler-like, CD 22 is a Republican seat, and Rogers got trounced in the 2010 genera election. She won just south of 30 percent against Congressman Pete Olson. But in doing so, she was just emulating LaRouche himself, who ran unsuccessfully for president eight times between 1976 and 2004. (One of those times, whilst he was in prison for tax evasion.)

Rogers will encounter Olson again in November. The results will probably be similar.

Rogers is a 35-year-old Houston native whose non-political experience I can’t get a fix on, though neither can I locate a political job she’s actually acquired. In 2006, she ran unsuccessfully for chairman of the Texas Democratic Party and credits her deep knowledge of the district to that campaign. That appears to have been her first effort.

The biography on her website, kesharogers.com, raises more questions than it answers. Rogers (presumably) writes, “After graduating college in 2001 with a BA in Political Science and Speech Communications from Texas State University, I realized that my generation and those younger had been given no future, and had been maliciously robbed of the knowledge of principles and methods necessary for building one.” (Which is a pretty stirring version of “What do I do with this degree?”) She continues, “In this context, I joined and became an active leader of the LaRouche Youth Movement over nine eventful years ago.”

The LaRouche Youth Movement probably wrote its own Wikipedia page, which describes its goals as to “promote the revival of classical humanist thought, organize politically to establish a new world economic system based on the power of human creativity to increase the power of the human individual in relation to the universe, and fight for a physical economy which can promote the general welfare of humanity, to develop and move toward better living conditions.”

That last bit, about the general welfare of humanity and better living conditions, is why some LaRouchians identify as Democrats. Rogers and others have said that, much like Republicans have strayed from their roots as the party of Lincoln, the Democrats have ceased to be the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. But while many may agree, Rogers in particular seems to think the Democrats’ trouble started, and would end, with the Obama presidency. “Prior to Obama,” her website reads, “the Democratic Party has been the party that fought for the rights of the lower 80%, of organized labor, of scientific progress, and the welfare of the nation.”

So, Rogers’ repeat wins might be symptomatic of Democratic disappointment with Obama’s first term, with issues like his failure to close Guantanamo or his authorization of indefinite detention, right?

Again, no. As is so often the case in political theater, the real answer defies paraphrasing. From kesharogers.com: “Mr. Obama is a puppet of the bankrupt financial system, and has pushed policies made notorious by the Adolph Hitler regime, and since condemned by the entire world. His flagrant violations of the U.S. Constitution, national and international law, in addition to posing a clear and present danger of new violations, including thermonuclear war and the threat of violent suppression of peaceful domestic opposition, warrant his immediate removal from the office of the Presidency by impeachment.”

Not convinced? She adds, “The public record of Mr. Obama’s mental state shows that he is incapable of faithfully performing his duties as president,” and should be removed.

But Rogers is one of five LaRouche Democrats running for Congress around the country, and their persistence suggests that a solid mental state is not the most important prerequisite for running for office.

The term “perennial candidate” is never flattering. But this primary season, Texas Democrats picked at least three of them to continue toward election day: Grady Yarbrough, who made it to a run-off with former state lawmaker Paul Sadler for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate; Kesha Rogers of Fort Bend, who was soundly defeated by Pete Olson in Congressional District 22 last year and is now famous-ish for publicly calling for Obama’s impeachment; and Lloyd Oliver, who barely beat the actually-qualified Zack Fertitta in Tuesday night’s Democratic primary for Harris County District Attorney.

Fertitta was the favorite in that race. Like, a lot. Earlier this month, Neil Aquino, a liberal blogger for the Houston Chronicle, described it as an “easy race to call.” He wrote, “Lloyd Oliver has run for office a number of times before in Harris County as a Republican. He has also voted in Republican primaries. Zack Fertitta is the only credible candidate on the Democratic ballot for DA.”

Fertitta is well-liked and respected by Democrats and Republicans. He’s been an Assistant DA in Harris County since 2003. He was endorsed by the AFL-CIO, the Houston Black American Democrats, and the Houston Tejano Democrats. He was an Eagle Scout.

But he lost to Lloyd Oliver, a defense attorney who says he runs regularly because it’s “good for business.” Earlier this year, Oliver was named “Not Qualified” to be DA by a whopping 88 percent of respondents to the annual Houston Bar Association poll.

The Chronicle has a hilarious/depressing profile of Oliver here, with theories about why Oliver won, including his own (“dumb luck”) and that maybe voters mistakenly thought he was black. Highlight: when asked what’s next, Oliver said, “I’m hoping to get a phone call from some Democratic SuperPAC that will send me a lot of money. If so, I’m going to get me a John Edwards $300 haircut. That’s the first thing I’m going to do.”

Did I mention that he won?

But the bottom line is, Oliver will not (unless that luck stays super-dumb) pose much of a challenge to Mike Anderson, who trounced the incumbent Republican DA, Pat Lykos, 63 to 37 percent.

We profiled Lykos’s troubled term here, in which she was investigated by two grand juries but never indicted—investigations she says were politically motivated. Prosecutors and police say they oppose her for two controversial reforms: her “trace” policy, which says you can’t use drugs as evidence if there isn’t enough of them to be tested twice, and her DIVERT program, which put some convicted of DWI through treatment and probation. She and supporters say those policies freed resources and jail space for more dangerous criminals, and that she’s unpopular because she broke up a “frat house” atmosphere at HPD and a “good old boy” network among prosecutors.

But Lykos—and her reforms, for better or worse—are history. Mike Anderson, who spent 17 years as a prosecutor and 12 years as a district court judge, will replace her on the ballot and likely in the role of DA. Anderson has the support of prosecutors, the Houston Police Officers Union, and Johnny Holmes Jr., the longtime DA who preceded the disastrous Chuck Rosenthal, whom Lykos replaced. Holmes was the poster boy for hard-nosed Texas justice, sending thousands to prison and 200 to death row during his 21-year tenure. Anderson is nostalgic for those days.

“There are some things from the good, old days that are very, very important—honor, integrity, ethics,” Anderson told the Chronicle. “I mean all those things should just flow like a heart beat at that office.”

Oliver, who has served in Anderson’s court, is less misty-eyed about his by-the-book, law-and-order opponent for November. Anderson is a “tyrant,” Oliver said. “He’d make a good prison guard.”