March Madness in Austin Has Nothing to Do With Basketball

[TexasTowelie]

By Carol Morgan

There’s a game taking place in Texas. It may not be basketball, but it is madness. So far, there are few winners in this game, except for Republican legislators and the industries who buy them. In almost every piece of legislation passed so far, the citizens of Texas are clearly the losers. Given the consistent vote counts of 20-11, divided right down party lines, it looks as if Texans will continue to be the losers.

Texas needs education. Texas needs improvement in infrastructure. Texas needs roads. Texas needs healthcare. So what action has the Texas Legislature taken to fulfill those needs?

Guns, guns, guns. Guns on the street, guns on college campuses. Even though poll after poll has indicated that Texans are uncomfortable with open carry and campus carry, the Texas Legislature knows what’s best.

Just to cap things off (no pun intended!), why don’t we change the Texas motto to “In glock we trust”?

The Senate is swiftly paving the way for vouchers via California activists and enabling educational management corporations to infiltrate the Texas education system just like the Carpetbaggers in the postwar south.

SB 14 is known as the parent trigger law (more gun analogy here) that allows parents to demand that action be taken against failing schools in their neighborhood, even though that option is already available. Friday’s hearing on SB 14 was a travesty. Hate-Cake Queen, Senator Donna Campbell and Chair Larry Taylor bullied those who testified against the bill and gushed at the California activists that testified.

At first glance, SB 14 sounds reasonable, but it’s not.

It allows educational management corporations with no connection to the community to hire consultants and activists to “improve" the failing schools. The private operator manipulates and uses parents in the community to get petitions signed, which initiates the takeover process. Once the parents hand over the keys of the tax-payer funded school to the educational corporation, the opportunists drop the parents from the equation. The school no longer has the protections of TEA, such as class size or qualified teachers, and the corporation is free to do as they choose.

If you have any doubts, read a parent’s story about the corruption, pay-offs, and abuses involved in a charter school’s coup d'état of a neighborhood school in Hesperia.

It’s ironic that the gun lobby gets full support from our Legislators, while school districts and teachers must beg for the leftover crumbs in the budget.

It’s unfortunate that the coming week will be even more of a challenge.

SB 10 will move the Public Integrity Unit out of Travis County and under the jurisdiction of the Attorney General’s office. This is a head-scratcher. Most ethics violations occur in Austin, because that’s where the Capitol and state agencies are located, but the GOP (and Senator Joan Huffman) want to cover their tracks. The real motive for moving the PIU to the Attorney General is to create several layers of bureaucratic review before it reaches the courts. It guarantees and safeguards Texas-sized corruption like 21CT, CPRIT, and ETF, and no one will know about it. We all know how the Texas GOP likes to keep up appearances.

The worst of all possible games begins Monday. There are 8 bills pending in the Legislature which, if all 8 pass, would strip away local control of almost everything. It would decimate the hard work of the WTAP, the Lubbock Oil and Gas committee, and the City Council.

That’s right! Your Texas Legislature aspires to be the City Council of Texas!

It begins with HB 40 and HB 539, which involve oil and gas regulation, but there are six others in queue which will render city councils powerless to solve its local problems.

Some paid mouthpieces attempted to reframe this despotic action with headlines like “Liberty Trumps Local Control”, but that’s only right wing double speak camouflaging state tyranny. Here’s what they claim:

“When cities overreach and enact ordinances that infringe on individual rights, it is the duty of the Legislature to intervene”.

I have to laugh at that statement. Seems as if I’ve heard “overreach” and “infringe on individual rights” before (but they forgot to add “small government&quot . Texas leaders used these same phrases to describe the Federal Government. In the case of pot and kettle, the Texas Legislature’s transformed into the very bogeyman they claim to abhor. To pass local legislation, we’ll now have to ask “mother-may-I?” of Ken Paxton.

The supposedly anti-big government guys stick their noses into local affairs on behalf of their corporate overlords: the oil and gas kingmakers, real estate developers, and payday loan industry. The Lege’s attempting to blame the cities, but the blame for the patchwork quilt of city ordinances sits directly upon the shoulders of Texas Legislators.

Groups in Denton attempted to go through legislative and state agency channels for over a year, hoping to solve their city’s problem with fracking. They were ignored at every turn. There was a two-year struggle with the financial predators. City after city begged the Legislature to act, but they didn’t because the CEOs of the payday lending industry were moonlighting as Texas Legislators.

If a community is forced to exercise its constitutional power as a municipal government, then you can bet that community is wrestling with a problem that the Texas Legislature has either screwed up, or failed to act upon. Passing an ordinance is the choice of last resort, the course of action when all else fails and most of all, when municipal government (and city businesses) must bear the costs of problems that the Lege conveniently ignores.

Let’s be honest, shall we? Texas’ Republicans do not care about freedom, safety, health or the environment; it’s all rhetoric. The truth is this: the members of the Texas Legislature are purchased, just like a new piece of furniture, by monied special interests like oil, gas, land, and the financial sector. The payday lending industry loved Greg Abbott to the tune of $55,000. The oil and gas industry bequeathed $20 million to Texas legislators in 2011-2012.

Money like this purchases special extra liberties, as well as the unspoken permission for their sugar daddies to run roughshod over everyone else.

Lubbock is not Raymondville, Dallas, or Cut ‘n Shoot. Each community’s problems and solutions are different. It makes more sense to have those affected by the problems to be the problem solvers. If the anti-local control bills pass, I cringe as to how Austin will solve the South Plains’ water conundrum.

What problems are being solved in Austin? It seems as if the Legislature is creating more problems than they're solving. And that’s part of the March Madness.

Nothing but cord and floor, y’all.

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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, a freelance writer, and former Democratic candidate for the Texas House. She is the award-winning author of two books: Of Tapestry, Time and Tears and Liberal in Lubbock. Email Carol at [email protected] , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

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[chillfactor]

1. I am so happy I do not live in Texas....

you really live in a screwed up state....

[TexasTowelie]

2. I love Austin and my alma mater about 25 miles north in Georgetown.

At times I can even say that I liked the Metroplex or when I lived in Brenham. There are other places that I enjoyed the scenery such as the Hill Country or the Piney Woods. However, there are some really stupid people in Texas too and there is an unusually large concentration of them at the Capitol. If I didn't have the connection to my college alma mater, then I would move since there aren't many other reasons for me to be here.

[DhhD]

3. Texas is Big Government Now; Texas Home Rule by Despots with one hand on the Bible and one

behind their back waiting for orders and the pay-off.

Hope Big Brother/Big Sister, DOJ, drops over for look see.