Op Ed

George W. Bush was the Decider. Rick Perry is the Initiator. And, oh Lord, has Perry initiated one hell of an event.

Called “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis,” the event is a Christians-only rally on Aug. 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston. The event’s website lists Perry as “The Initiator” and bills the rally as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” It is anything but. Politicians thinking of running for president don’t throw apolitical rallies weeks before the Iowa straw polls. The Response appears to be a long-planned, high production-value ploy to wrap Perry in the heartland mantle. If that were the end of it—a religious rally to boost political standing—we’d give Perry a pass. We’ll forgive the governor some religious pandering now and again.

But there is a darker side to the event, and it lies with those whom Perry has cast his lot.

The organizational and financial backing for The Response is coming from a rogues’ gallery of far-right bigots and fundamentalists. Footing the bill for the event is the American Family Association, a zealously homophobic and anti-Muslim organization listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Even within the American evangelical movement, the American Family Association stands out for its vicious stance on gays and lesbians. In 2010, one of its principals, Bryan Fischer, proposed criminalizing homosexuality and posited that “homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”

Two of the main groups involved in The Response are TheCall and the International House of Prayer, both based in Kansas City. TheCall’s founder, Lou Engle, is a virulent opponent of gay rights. Last year Engle showed up in Uganda to lend aid and comfort to religious activists who favored a law imposing the death penalty on gay people.

Perry has also enlisted the help of Alice Patterson, a San Antonio GOP activist associated with the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, an Arlington-based group that believes Texas is a “Prophet State” that will act “as a fulcrum point or anchor for a ‘teetering nation.’”

Keep in mind that Perry isn’t just a speaker at The Response. He’s the organizer, er, Initiator. These are his invited guests. It’s one thing to organize a prayer rally. It’s quite another to partner with zealots. We wish Perry would use prayer to bring people of all faiths together. Instead, his upcoming rally appears bigoted and divisive.

Come on, Obama, do it!

Stand up, stand tall, stand firm! Yes, you can!

The president is thinking about issuing an executive order that would mitigate some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United edict. The ruling unleashes unlimited amounts of secret corporate cash to pervert America’s elections. Obama’s idea is to require that those corporations seeking federal contracts disclose all of their campaign donations for the previous two years, including money they launder through such front groups as the national Chamber of Commerce.

This approach says to those giants sucking up billions of our tax dollars for endless war and privatization of public services: You’re still free to shove trainloads of your shareholders’ money into congressional and presidential races, but, hey, just tell the public how much you’re giving to whom.

Neat. It would be a clean, direct and effective reform. The corporate powers and their apologists are squealing like stuck pigs. Steven Law, a Bush-Cheney operative who is now a Wall Street Journal editorialist and head of a secret corporate money fund, recently decried the idea of public disclosure of contractor campaign contributions: “When I was in the executive branch,” he sniffed, “mixing politics with procurement was
called corruption.”

Yes, Steve, and y’all were corruption experts! Perhaps you’ve forgotten that we remember Halliburton, the Cheney-run corporation that helped put Bush in office and then was handed tens of billions in contracts, becoming the poster child of corrupt, no-bid procurement.

Come on, Obama, don’t back down. Sign that disclosure order! If they’re going to steal our elections, at least make them admit it.

Gary Elkins owns 12 Texas payday loan stores (Big City Finance! Freeway Finance! Cash Station!). He also happens to be a Republican state representative from Houston. The two jobs aren’t mutually exclusive. His role this session in helping quash legislation that might have regulated the loathsome payday-loan industry perfectly illustrates the conflict-of interest-problem at the Texas Legislature.

Elkins stayed out of negotiations on the payday loan bills for almost five months, citing his direct financial interest in the outcome. But that turned out to be a cynical bluff. When two modest reform bills came to the House floor, Elkins seemingly transformed from lawmaker into lobbyist. As we report on page 21 of this issue, not only did Elkins try to kill one of the bills, he also introduced an amendment that would have shut down certain types of payday lenders and increased his own personal market share.

Unfortunately, it’s not that surprising—or unusual. Texas is represented by citizen-legislators. At $7,200 per year in salary, all but the most wealthy members must have outside employment. That’s perfectly OK. As citizens, we want doctors providing expertise on health care, lawyers helping out with complex legal issues and educators crafting education policy. However, lawmakers are too often crossing the ethical line and abusing their public office for personal gain.

Another recent troubling example was the much-needed reform to the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association—an insurer of last resort for coastal homeowners. The key lawmakers negotiating the bill make a living off TWIA-related lawsuits and insurance policy sales. Rep. Craig Eiland, a Galveston Democrat and vice-chair of the House Insurance Committee, has earned at least $620,000 from suits related to Hurricane Ike. Rep. Larry Taylor, a Republican from Friendswood, pulled in at least $300,000 from selling TWIA policies. Eiland and Taylor have worked on many insurance bills over the years, and we see nothing wrong with that. But in this instance, they were seemingly crafting legislation that would directly impact their own livelihoods. We couldn’t think of a clearer conflict of interest.

The Texas Constitution requires legislators to disclose “a personal or private interest in any measure or bill” to their colleagues and states they “shall not vote” on the matter. The provision is rarely, if ever, enforced. The Texas Ethics Commission must rediscover this small-but-critical section of the Constitution and enforce it. When they’re in the Capitol, legislators should work to benefit Texans, not themselves.

If you liked the Texas Budget Massacre of 2011, you’re gonna love the sequel set for release in 2013. Right now Republican politicians are congratulating themselves on handling a $23 billion budget shortfall this session with (all together now!) no new taxes. But in two years, they’ll be back in Austin for the 2013 legislative session, and the state’s finances could be just as bad.

How can that be? First, lawmakers failed to address the state’s long-term financial flaws this session; they simply papered over them (again). And, second, budget writers relied on a series of accounting tricks that could put the state in a precarious fiscal spot in two years.

Take a look at the state’s books and you will find a permanent deficit that runs about $5 billion a year. This is the result of a poorly designed scheme in 2006 to swap a property-tax reduction for a business tax that doesn’t generate enough money. Everyone at the Capitol knows about this mess. But no one has the guts—or the sense of responsibility—to deal with it. As a result, the structural deficit has now become as much a part of state government as the Capitol’s pink granite. In 2013—for the fourth session in a row—the state will start its budget process in a $10 billion hole at a minimum.

Then there are the accounting tricks. To balance the 2012-2013 budget without more revenue, lawmakers used every budget gimmick a dishonest accountant could think off. For instance, the budget proposals delay billions in payments to schools and Medicaid providers until the next biennium and count that as “savings” now. The state will have to pay those bills eventually, probably with a multi-billion-dollar emergency spending plan in 2013.

Lawmakers are recklessly gambling that an improving economy will help alleviate these problems, and they are making wing-and-a-prayer assumptions about future actions of the federal government. The Legislature assumes billions in cost-savings from Medicaid and other health-care waivers that Texas has requested from its dear friends in the Obama administration. That’s not likely, especially given that the Bush administration turned down those very same requests. Another ludicrous rider in the budget assumes the feds will pick up 100 percent of the health-care costs of undocumented immigrants. If these assumptions don’t pan out, Texas’ 2013 bill will be even higher.

This budget not only implements drastic cuts to education and health care, but sets us up for another round of painful reductions in two years.

Republican congresssional leaders don’t seem to be the quickest bunnies in the litter.

Having taken their blunt budget ax to Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, EPA, NPR, and dozens of other popular and effective programs, they then scampered to save one of the least popular and least effective federal programs on the books: the annual taxpayer subsidy for Big Oil.

As gasoline prices were rising to $4-a-gallon and higher, the House GOP voted unanimously to let the oil giants continue siphoning $4 billion a year out of our public treasury. All 241 of the Republican/Tea Party House members—with not even one dissenter in the bunch—declared that in this time of a supposed budget “crisis,” the neediest among us are not the elderly and the poor, but the little waifs of Big Oil.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil just announced a 69 percent leap in profits this year, while Chevron, ConocoPhillips and others are enjoying similar jumps in theirs. Guess what percentage of those enormous profits the corporations are likely to pay in taxes? Zilch. Their lobbyists have punched such gaping loopholes in our tax code that they can escape paying anything for the privileges and benefits they get from America. Exxon, for one oily example, had a $19-billion profit in 2009, but not only did it pay exactly zero in federal income taxes, it manipulated the system to get a $156 million rebate from us. Likewise, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips had multibillion-dollar profits that year, paid not a dime in taxes, and also got refunds.

Republican lawmakers had a clear choice in dealing with the deficit. So why did they choose to cut off your granny’s health care, while helping these corporate billionaires make off like bandits? I guess it’s a matter of whom you really love.

 

Find more information on Jim Hightower’s work—and subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown—at www.jimhightower.com