The Texas Observer

It’s early yet, but the Internet is humming with folks who want to oust Sen. John Cornyn in ‘08. They are bolstered by the fact that Cornyn’s approval ratings are not so hot (and still cooling).

Already a site titled simply Stop Cornyn is up and running. A larger collection of bloggers, not satisfied with declared candidate Corpus Christi lawyer Mikal Watts, has gone proactive in finding a replacement. Within the last two weeks they launched a movement to draft state Rep. Rick Noriega, a Houston Democrat with a solid voting record who also happens to be an active member of the National Guard, to run against Cornyn.

It’s easy to see Noriega’s appeal to the netroots: besides his politics, he’s served in both Afghanistan and on the Texas-Mexico border, immediately giving him authority on two issues that Cornyn could use to bully a different opponent. A run-down of many of the widely read blogs is available at Brains and Eggs. There’s also detailed information going up on the Draft Rick Noriega site, where it looks like they’ll be tracking primary opponents like Watts or maybe (emphasis on maybe) U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards.

At the same time, these draft movements don’t exactly have the best track record. When we checked in with Charles Kuffner, the author of Off the Kuff and a member of the Draft Noriega squad, he laid out some ways this might be different. For one, the candidate is an actual politician. “It’s not like we’re trying to persuade someone to come out and run. We know Rick Noriega is seriously considering it,” Kuffner said. Additionally, Kuffner is friends with Rick’s wife Melissa Noriega, who was recently elected to the Houston city council. Kuffner knows Rick. And while he’s not part of the campaign, he is in touch with them.

Given that, the term “draft” is more of a catch-all — shorthand for creating a single entity that can encourage the idea of Noriega running, gather information about him for voters and reporters, and generate interest. Many supporters, like Burnt Orange Report, aren’t campaigning just for Noriega, but encouraging a strong Democratic primary that gets voters involved.

Texas’ progressive bloggers, Kuffner said, have long wanted to emulate successes in other states in generating interest, energy, and — never to be discounted — funds for preferred candidates. Noriega is a “perfect storm candidate” who presents an opportunity to

basically say up front who we think the best candidate is. This sort of came up originally in maybe January. It was coming up at a time when it was going to be Nick Lampson or John Sharp. Someone else who was going to be handed down by … the money powers that be. A lot of us folks felt like, “We want to be a part of this conversation, too.”

It’s worth noting that Kuffner goes to great lengths to point out that this is not some kind of adversarial relationship with the fund-raisers who typically control this process. If Noriega runs he is going to need a lot of money both to get out of the primary and to take on Cornyn. Already Watts is using his money to lock up support around the state. It’s really about being a united voice that can have a say in the process of selecting a candidate, even if the nomination eventually doesn’t go to his guy, asserts Kuffner. “The ultimate goal,” he said, “is replacing our existing Senator.”

We recently caught up with the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery, down in Boerne, a couple months after they made national news when Wal-Mart’s surveillance division (probably hidden behind one of those giant smileys) dubbed the socially conscious sisters “security threats” at the company’s upcoming annual meeting. Story first broke as part of a larger expose in the Wall Street Journal on Wal-Mart’s spying, but local media in San Antonio played up the nuns-as-security-threat angle, and tons of blogs ran with it.

Of course, the nuns, who also happen to be stockholders, were hardly threats to disrupt the event with protests. Their status as a thorn in Wal-Mart’s side is much more overt and happily acknowledged. They’ve been raising hell at the board-room level for the better part of two decades when it comes to Wal-Mart, with no plans to stop, said Sister Susan Mika, who also heads the Socially Responsible Investment Coalition, the mechanism that the nuns and other religious organizations use to get their message into board rooms around the country.

This year the SRIC is celebrating its 25th anniversary, which gives you an idea of how many times they’ve seen media flurries like this come and go.

“Certain companies or certain issues kind of rise up to be more high profile than others at times,” Mika (pronounced MEEK-ah) said. Back in the ’80s, it was protests against the South Texas Project nuclear plant. “People just went crazy. (They) didn’t know nuns or priests would work on that kind of issue.”

The big issues on the coalition’s radar right now range from climate change and emissions controls to local issues like the working conditions in maquiladoras on the Texas-Mexico border.

The goal — and Mika said she can’t stress this enough — is long-term commitment to pressuring companies to act as agents of positive social change. “Companies often just look at the next quarter and what are the dividends going to be, or what is Wall Street going to say,” she said.

How the coalition works is that it gets together to decide which issues are most important. Then they buy enough stock in the appropriate companies that the group’s complaints and suggestions, which now come from partial owners of the company, become legal documents, formally lodged at annual meetings and filed with the SEC. These complaints enter at the level of a corporate secretary and require response from management. This is different from a letter the average customer might write, which would be handled as public relations.

The effort is forward-looking, but it’s also a way to get companies on the record years, or sometimes decades, before they actually take action on an issue. It prevents the companies from saying after the fact that there was never any push from stockholders to take the socially-aware action. Mika said, companies would probably do well to listen to what these focused religious groups are asking for and get ahead of the controversy. She said one executive told her that her organization and others like it were usually good barometers of what would be important to the general public, only the nuns, et al., were about seven years ahead of the curve. With the way information disseminates faster now, Mika said that the lag between when the general public catches up is even shorter.

“Something starts small and then all of the sudden gets more and more traction. Everyone wants to talk about it and everyone wants to do something about,” she said.

Getting back to that old pillar of American-made, Christian-founded capitalism, Wal-Mart has for years been barraged by the socially responsible investors’ calls for better wages and benefits for employees. In one example, Wal-Mart only offered benefits to some employees after they had been with the company two years. They recently shortened that to one year, a move Mika praised. But it wasn’t enough she said, and the coalition continues to point out at annual meetings that most Fortune 500 employees give employees benefits after three months.

As with all of the issues, “You stay in there and you just keep saying, ‘This is not acceptable,’” she said.

UPDATE: Corrected where I erroneously said FCC instead of SEC.

You probably missed it — hardly anyone was paying attention — but legislators rescued renewable energy in Texas at the end of the legislative session. Lawmakers repealed an obscure provision of a 2005 law that would have gutted the consumer-driven green energy market in the last hours of the session.

Current law mandates that by 2015 at least 5 percent of the energy statewide come from renewable sources. By 2025, the target is 10 percent. But a little-noticed 2005 provision allowed utilities to count consumers’ voluntary purchases of green power towards the state’s mandatory renewable energy goals.

It was an absurd proposition: People’s good-faith efforts to stimulate clean wind, solar, and biomass energy in Texas by signing up for green electricity plans would be rendered meaningless. The only beneficiaries would be the coal-belchers and nuke-purveyors that would have an easier time fulfilling their mandate without having to change their habits.

The EPA saw the problem and stepped in. The agency promised to decertify Texas utilities, including city-owned Austin Energy and deregulated retailer Green Mountain Energy, both enrolled in the agency’s Green Power Partnership.

“Nobody had thought very hard about what that one little provision would do,” said Bee Moorhead of Texas Impact, a faith-based organization that helps churches buy renewable power. During the session, Moorhead warned lawmakers that she was actively encouraging faith groups to not purchase Texas renewable energy credits (RECs) and to instead look out of state. (RECs are stock-like certificates sold by brokers that correspond to actual megawatts.)

Wal-Mart, which bulk-purchases green power and may have plans to sell electricity directly to customers, sounded a similar note.

Lawmakers that did recognize the problem, Reps. David Swinford (R-Amarillo) and Mark Strama (D-Austin) and Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin), met with resistance from some utilities and industry players.

Ironically, free-market fanatics and industry heavies have seized upon consumer “choice” as the sine qua non of electricity deregulation but they’ve never been too excited about the burgeoning market for green energy. Reliant Energy tried to zap the voluntary market through the Public Utility Commission last August.

But for consumers or businesses who want to fight global warming and promote clean air, renewable power packages are a sure bet. In Texas, that means wind power.

“You can go out and watch your turbine reducing carbon. For my money it is the most robust carbon credit you can hope for,” said Moorhead. “You are cutting pollution right here in your state, today.”

Over the weekend our jet-setting governor left on yet another international trip, this time to Israel to receive a “Friend of Zion” award. Peggy Fikac, of the Express-News, explores why the Gov received the award:

Asked what Perry had done for Israel to merit the honor, Perry spokesman Robert Black said Perry “has always been a friend of Israel” and a leader in homeland defense, border security and economic development.

“The state of Texas, under his leadership, has taken the lead in all those areas. That has not gone unnoticed outside of the cynical press corps in Austin,” Black said.

A company called Global Capital Associates, which helps Israeli start-ups find investors, is paying for the trip and hosting a gala to give Perry the award. This is the 18th year they’ve hosted these “networking galas,” and past awards have gone to all number and variety of political leaders.

What to make of Perry’s itinerary this year? Lately, it seems like he’s made more trips abroad than Condi Rice.

Besides this trip, just since March, he has also appeared at the secretive Bilderberg Conference in Turkey, where he spoke to international leaders about state-federal relations. (This also earned him a spot in an “international conspiracy,” according to GOP presidential candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul.) And he traveled to Dubai to dedicate a new Texas A&M engineering facility, and perhaps while there he helped Halliburton move its headquarters from Houston to the eastern Arabian Peninsula.

Perry says he’s not running for higher office, but his travel plans seem to involve a lot of international networking. Of course, this could also be about business both drumming it up for the state and for himself. Maybe Perry has dreams of becoming a foreign wheeler-dealer when he leaves the mansion.

Yet Perry’s legislative proposals this session had a distinctly higher office flavor, too. He called for and got a bill passed that divested state investments from business working in Sudan. He helped convince lawmakers to take out a $3 billion loan to try to cure cancer. Lately Perry’s been touting an appearance with U.S. Health and Human Secretary Michael Levitt to sign a Medicaid reform bill. He had a little fun playing Texas tough on a late-night national talk show. And way back, he issued his now infamous HPV vaccine mandate, which he later praised for having started a national debate on the issue. Still, it’s difficult to imagine the nation is ready for another Texan anywhere near the White House. A spot in the cabinet would require the election of a new Republican president.

It’s hard to know what plans and machinations are turning in the governor’s mind. Maybe Perry is just bored and wants to get out of town. Or maybe he’s yearning to spend time in the only region on the planet that’s hotter and has more per capita gun ownership than Texas.

Looking for a cheery weekend protest outside the Hutto Detention Center? Saturday, June 23, from 1 - 3 p.m. a coalition of groups will be protesting the detention of children at Hutto. From the coalition’s press release:

In honor of World Refugee Day, Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, has partnered with Free the Children, a network of Texas and national activists, to plan Hutto Vigil X (ten). … Activists are calling for the closure of Hutto, and that alternative methods be identified to care for children and their families as they are processed through the immigration court system. …

Participating sponsors in Hutto Vigil X include: Amnesty International USA, LULAC National, Texans United For Families (TUFF), Freedom Ambassadors and CAFHTA (Children and Families for Humane Treatment Alliance). Rosa Rosales, President of LULAC, Elizabeth Kucinich, Jay Johnson-Castro and two former detainees are lined up to speak, and bands will perform as well.

More info at CAFHTA’s Yahoo group. The Observer will be reporting on the event.

Over the last week and a half, Gov. Perry has been busy exercising the few concrete powers granted to him by the state’s constitution: appointments and vetoes. The deadline for vetoes was last Sunday, with special projects at community colleges the most visible losers. A full list of vetoes is on Perry’s site, and here’s one newspaper rundown of the highlights.

As for executive branch staffing, Perry shuffled two long-time allies into two important slots. First he appointed Phil Wilson the new Secretary of State. Wilson, who at the time was the governor’s deputy chief of staff, replaces the outgoing Roger Williams. Days later, Perry also announced the resignation of his current chief of staff, Deidre Delisi, who is the daughter-in-law of State Rep. Dianne White Delisi (R-Temple) and, perhaps more relevant to her departure, the mother of recently born twins. Perry appointed his general counsel, Brian Newby, to replace Delisi.

Neither Wilson or Newby are yet household names, perhaps even among those who closely follow politics. Wilson, much like the outgoing Williams, has a background vested more in business than conducting fair elections. Wilson has plenty of “economic development” bonafides, and as SOS, he’ll still be Perry’s designee on hundreds of millions in the Emerging Technology and Texas Enterprise Funds.

More disturbing is his role as point man on the seemingly out-of-nowhere scheme to sell the Texas Lottery. As described in a Statesman editorial:

Gov. Rick Perry’s proposal to sell the state lottery is so entangled with political insiders and its projected payoff so iffy that the idea has to be examined skeptically. …

It’s being pushed by former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, a Republican mentor of Perry’s who is vice president of UBS, a financial services firm hoping to broker the sale of the lottery. Gramm’s political action committee once gave $610,000 to Perry’s campaign.

UBS also hired Perry’s son, Griffin, 23, last month to work in its Dallas office. Former Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan is a lobbyist for UBS, and Perry’s deputy chief of staff, Phil Wilson, spent most of the 1990s working for Gramm.

It’s mere coincidence, say all involved, and has nothing to do with Perry’s proposal, since neither Griffin Perry nor Sullivan are working on lottery sales issues. But it only makes sense to give them jobs with appropriate cover, since UBS stands to make $30 million or more if it brokers the sale.

As for Newby, who now holds an ostensibly less partisan role, his record of public deeds is shorter. He was, though, one of only two staffers who accompanied the governor on a trip to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar in March. The Chron reported (subscription only):

Spokesman Robert Black said he didn’t know yet how much the trip will cost but that it is being financed through TexasOne, a privately financed program controlled by the governor’s office to bring more business to the state.

Some of the biggest contributors to TexasOne - $25,000 to $50,000 a year - include AT&T, Verizon, the Vinson & Elkins law firm, the Associated General Contractors of Texas, CenterPoint Energy, TXU, the BNSF Railway and Williams Brothers Construction Co.

Sounds like he’s familiar with the game.

From the nonpolitical section of the blog, some pictures from the San Antonio Spurs NBA championship parade this weekend, their fourth in the last nine years. Here Tim Duncan and Bruce Bowen celebrate their continued ability to hit bank shots and shoot corner threes, respectively.

With all of 72 hours of perspective, it’s interesting to see how this title was different. The main thing was that it finally brought acceptance to the city of San Antonio that no one outside of S.A. was rooting along with them. After years of hearing about low TV ratings and other supposed indictments against our championship teams, the S.A. Express-News stripped a story across the top of last Sunday’s front page titled “We, alone, love the Spurs.”

The coincidence, though, is that at the same time, the rest of the basketball-watching public (or at least the media) finally seemed to come to a grudging respect for the Spurs. A column on ESPN.com by Jemele Hill is pretty typical: “A great team that fans don’t appreciate.”

That headline, though, is probably inaccurate. Most outside fans appreciate what the Spurs do, it’s just that the team’s workman-like style and lack of off-court soap operas don’t excite them. Oh well, for the Spurs rowdies (the author included), as long as our team keeps taking June floats down the Riverwalk, we’re fine celebrating by ourselves.