Forrest for the Trees

Larry Miller/Flickr

There’s undoubtedly something romantic about driving a taxi: working your own hours in your own way, cruising the city streets instead of being anchored to a desk, picking up total strangers and never knowing where you might take them. And then there’s the economic reality. In Austin, cab drivers earn, on average, just $2.75 an hour after deductions for insurance, taxes and paying one of the city’s three cab companies for the privilege of driving their cars. Austin cabbies have brutally long hours—many work 12- to 14-hour shifts, seven days a week, 50-plus weeks a year—and as independent contractors, they have little job security, no unemployment benefits and no employer-provided retirement or health insurance.

For the three taxi franchises in Austin—Austin Cab, Lone Star Cab and Yellow Cab—the economics are much sweeter. The city has granted the three companies a total of 744 permits. In turn, they pay the city $400 a year per taxi. The companies then lease the permits to the drivers for $250 to $295 a week, or between $13,000 and $15,340 a year (a 3,000-percent markup). For Yellow Cab, which controls more than 60 percent of the market, that works out to nearly $6.8 million a year in revenue from permits alone.

“And nobody sees the discrepancy between those numbers?” asks David Passmore, president of the Taxi Drivers Association of Austin. “We’ve been going to City Council for years saying these things and they say, ‘We hear you.’ But they always vote in favor of the franchise.”

Passmore has been driving for Yellow Cab for five years. He likes the flexibility of the work but thinks the city has allowed the drivers to be exploited.

“I’m struggling right now, man,” he said. “It’s that uncertainty you have to work with each day—each day we start off in the negative.”

That’s where the Taxi Drivers Association of Austin comes in. Formed in 2009, the association is a formal vehicle for representing drivers’ interests. In late April, the association went one step further and formally affiliated with the AFL-CIO, making Austin the third city in the U.S. to see its taxi drivers unionize. But the catch is that with a membership of independent contractors, the association isn’t covered by most U.S. labor laws. Still, Passmore said, the affiliation is an important step in securing better pay, improved conditions and bargaining power.

“I do believe that it will give us some leverage,” he said. “It will better our position, speaking with one voice rather than being individual drivers.”

For the AFL-CIO, the affiliation represents a new tack in labor organizing. “How many workers are filing for union recognition and bargaining for a first contract?” asked Aaron Chappell, an Austin-based labor organizer with the AFL-CIO. The traditional methods of growing new unions are “broken,” he said. “People are going to use nontraditional means to make economic gains.”

The taxi drivers plan to ask City Council to cap the fees that cab companies charge their drivers, create a fairer insurance system that doesn’t leave drivers in the hole after an accident, and impose anti-retaliation clauses to protect union members from being punished or fired for their activities.


Patrick Michels

Rick Perry.

Here we are in 2013, and public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of gay rights. More states and more Americans, especially young people, are endorsing marriage equality. Unvarnished homophobia is becoming taboo. But Rick Perry is still at it.

In early May, the Texas governor participated in a webcast to promote his opposition to lifting the Boy Scouts’ ban on gays. In the video, Perry said lifting the ban would allow “pop culture” to “tear up” tradition for “the flavor of the month.” He compared (his own?) opposition to gay rights to Sam Houston’s resistance to Texas joining the Confederacy. This isn’t the first time Perry has engaged in a round of gay-bashing.

In 2005, Perry signed a state constitutional amendment restricting marriage to one man and one woman. He chose as the bill-signing venue a conservative church school in Fort Worth. Rod Parsley, a pastor from Ohio, spoke at the signing, calling gay sex “a veritable breeding ground of disease.” Later, when asked about gay Iraq War veterans, Perry suggested they move to “some other state that has a more lenient view than Texas.” In his bizarre 2008 book on the Boy Scouts, Perry compared homosexuality to alcoholism and begged for tolerance … for those who are “proponents of traditional values.” And during the presidential campaign, he complained in a widely mocked TV ad that “gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas.”

Perry, like a lot of politically conservative Christians, would like us to believe that his views are all about loving the sinner and hating the sin. But being gay is no sin, and hating the way someone is can be destructive, as I saw growing up.

When I was in high school in a small Texas town, a close friend of mine—one of the most intelligent and charismatic people I’ve ever known, a person I’ll call “John”—came out. To his friends, it was like discovering that the sky was blue. We knew. But for his family and many in the evangelical church he and I attended, it was a scandal. Gay men, our church taught, are weak, mentally diseased, feminized, hedonistic and materialistic—the very opposite of the masculine Jesus that we had all had a “personal relationship” with.

Homosexuality was a special sin, a mental disorder that required more than just repentance; it necessitated conversion. To this day, the church offers gay-to-straight counseling, a thoroughly discredited and destructive practice that has been condemned by the American Psychiatric Association. The church leadership teaches that same-sex attraction for men—lesbians are conspicuously absent—arises from the lack of a strong male father figure and the overbearing presence of mothers during childhood.

“We were disconnected from other boys and were often called upon to provide emotional support to our mothers,” reads a pamphlet advertising group same-sex therapy sessions.  “Many of us lived in shame and secrecy always fearful that others would discover our pain. We were trapped in a seemingly hopeless state.”

These are the poisonous waters in which John and his parents—all of us in the church—swam. The “counseling” the church offered, you’ll be shocked to learn, didn’t scare John straight, but it did poison his faith, poison his relationship with his dad and drive him to the destructive habits that “conversion” was supposed to fix. I can’t imagine what it was like for John. Even at a comfortable emotional distance, I found the church’s efforts revolting.

When we were in college, John’s dad—let’s call him Mike—was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was dead within a year, still struggling to make peace with his son. At Mike’s funeral service, one of the pastors of the church gave the eulogy. First, the pastor praised at length the relationship Mike had with John’s younger (straight) brother: sports, fishing, Christian missionary work—the model (straight) son. “And then there was [John],” he said chuckling and smiling along with the audience. “[John] and [Mike] didn’t see eye to eye. [John] was a little different.”

Here was this crisply dressed, well-respected worship leader—someone I’d once admired—smearing a grieving son at his father’s funeral. The pastor’s hurtful words, the knowing chuckles in the church that day, are seared into my memory. I think about them often. I think about them every time the governor of Texas says that non-straight Texans are undeserving of equal treatment.

WCS

Every legislative session, Harold Simmons’ radioactive waste dump company comes to the Legislature with a new favor to ask. Every session Rep. Lon Burnam, a Fort Worth Democrat with a peace activist pedigree, puts up a spirited protest. And every session, Simmons—one of the state’s most generous GOP donors—pretty much gets what he wants. This time was no different.

Yesterday, Burnam won a temporary victory when he knocked down Senate Bill 791 on a technicality. Among other changes, SB 791 would’ve allowed Waste Control Specialists to bring “hotter” (read: more radioactive) waste from out of state. But today, West Texas lawmakers tacked similar provisions onto a related radioactive waste bill. The legislation, SB 347, sailed through on  131-12 vote. The House rejected Burnam’s attempts to require auditing of the radioactive waste shipments as well as requirements to beef up monitoring for water at the site.

Burnam repeatedly referred to the legislation as the “biggest vendor bill” this session—a reference to the considerable political and economic muscle that Simmons brings to the table.

“Have you been listening?,” Burnam said to the House. “I’ve been saying for over a decade that this vendor is going to walk away from this facility as soon as they’ve made as much money as they think they can make … and the state of Texas will be economically liable for the contamination and the leaks and the improper disposal.”

He reminded his colleagues that three Texas Commission on Environmental Quality staffers had quit in protest when their superiors gave Waste Control a permit over their objections. A team of engineers and geologists had unanimously determined that the dump is dangerously close to water tables.

But Rep. Tryon Lewis, a West Texas Republican and the House sponsor of SB 347, said the dump is safe. “This site is about as secured and monitored as about any site you can imagine in this country,” Lewis said.

flickr.com/JimNTexas

Say you’re a Houston energy guy. You’ve done well for yourself, and now you’re in the market for a nice boat. Maybe you’ve got your eye on a 405-foot Frank Mulder-designed giga-yacht that comes with a salon, cinema, fitness center, helicopter garage and 10 luxurious multi-level VIP suites. List price: $209,423,500. At the current Texas sales tax rate of 6.25 percent, your tax would work out to more than $13 million. But wait! Florida, land of sinkholes and bad tans, caps the sales tax on boats at $18,000. Your loyalty to your money being greater than your loyalty to your home state, you go to Florida to buy your yacht and save yourself $12,982,000. Florida reaps all the ancillary benefits: the mooring fees, the maintenance costs, the fuel, the swabbies scrubbing your decks with endangered sea sponges.

This scenario bothers state Sen. Larry Taylor (R-Friendswood). Taylor, who once urged an insurance bureaucrat not to “Jew ’em down,” wants to “level the playing field and make Texas more boater-friendly” by capping the sales tax on yachts at $25,000. Our hypothetical $209 million giga-yacht would carry an effective tax rate of 1/100th of a percent.

You might think a huge tax break for yacht owners sounds unfair, but Taylor insists it’s all about the little guy.

“It’s not about giving tax breaks to the rich,” he told a Senate committee in April. “It’s all about jobs and protecting our Texas economy.” Yacht owners, he claims, are setting sail from Texas and taking jobs with them.

Yet the number of 40-foot-plus boats registered in Texas has remained steady since March 2009 (Florida’s law went into effect in July 2010). So has the total number of boats registered with the state, which suggests there is no mass yacht exodus. But even if there were, this is crazy policy.

I pick on Taylor not because his bill has a chance to pass this session (it doesn’t), but because it illustrates something wrong with how we fund government in Texas.

Typically, state government finances rest on a three-legged stool of sales, income and property taxes. In Texas, we famously don’t have an income tax. Property taxes are just about maxed out. That leaves revenue from the sales tax, which is both volatile (it fluctuates wildly based on the economy) and regressive (it falls disproportionately on poor folks). But it’s the sales tax that’s increasingly being called on to fund critical needs and to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

Much has been made of the reassertion of power by the business wing of the Texas GOP. It’s now considered an act of awesome political bravery to stand up to tea party absolutism. In March, Republican Sen. Kevin Eltife earned cheers from Austin insiders for saying he supported raising the sales tax by half a percent to pay for the state’s woefully underfunded transportation infrastructure.

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka suggested recently that Texas could fund its needs by “raising the sales tax in small increments over time.”

Here’s a better idea: If we need more money—and there’s no doubt we do—let’s undo the massive tax breaks, tax abatements, corporate loopholes and big-business giveaways before we start raising the sales tax. In December, The New York Times calculated that Texas metes out more corporate incentives than any other state—about $19 billion a year.

Here are just two places to start: 1) Abolish the high-cost natural gas tax exemption. This $1 billion-per-year giveaway to natural-gas producers was created in the 1980s, when “fracking” was just a wild idea. The companies profiting from the booming shale plays in Texas no longer need this tax break. 2) Make it harder for local governments to give enormous property tax breaks to feedlots, wind farms and nuclear power plants. Created in 2001 by the Legislature, these deals don’t cost local school districts anything, but drain the system of dollars that would otherwise be dispersed to schools around the state. A bill reauthorizing the program would cost $4.38 billion over the next decade. Even the comptroller, who signs off on these deals, has said the program “over-incentivizes projects that create few or no jobs.”

Curtailing corporate welfare isn’t going to fix a broken system. But it’s a place to start before we stick it to working people.

State Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio)

In a last-ditch effort to salvage payday loan reform this session, Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio) called on a recalcitrant House committee to send legislation to the Full House. (Sen. John Carona, a Dallas Republican, was scheduled to attend the press conference but couldn’t make it.)

“It is time for this Legislature to protect consumers from the cycle of debt,” said Villarreal. “It is time. We need to do this now. We should not put it off any longer.”

In April, the Senate passed a surprisingly tough bill that would’ve imposed strict caps on interest rates for payday and auto-title loans, effectively shutting down the $5 billion market in Texas.

But the House Committee on Investments and Financial Services has refused to budge. Villarreal, who chairs the committee, said today that he is the only ‘yes’ vote on his payday reform bill, even though his version is significantly weaker than what the Senate passed. The committee has two Democrats and five Republicans. In a hearing on April 29, members of the committee spent hours perishing the thought of regulating payday and title loans, which often carry interest rates in excess of 500 percent APR. “It allows individuals to exercise their freedom,” said Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson (R-Waco).

Villarreal’s approach would limit the size of loans based on borrower income; limit the number of loans a consumer can have at any given time; restrict the number of “rollovers” or refinances; and pre-empt cities from enacting their own payday regulations.

That approach, Villarreal said, respects markets while “also recognizing our state’s long history and tradition of moral and legal opposition to usury.”

If the Legislature fails to do something meaningful, Villarreal promised to travel around the state, helping cities pass ordinances to regulate the industry. So far, Austin, Dallas, Denton, El Paso and San Antonio have enacted ordinances.