Wall Street Commodity Traders Are Behind Soaring Gas Prices

Unregulated Wall Street commodity traders [speculators] are behind the soaring gas prices.

Here is the straight scoop:

Thank A Teacher For What They Make!

A Tea Party-infused GOP legislature in Austin is calling for $31 billion in cuts to state spending and they claim, as Gov. Perry has stated many times, that Republicans in the legislature are simply doing what the voters sent them there to do. Did the voters really send the GOP to Austin to decimate public education?

On Election Day November, 2, 2010 voters expressed support for GOP Tea Party pledges of yet more rounds of tax cuts and reduced government spending.

Most of the 37% of registered Texas voters who turned out to vote in 2010 expressed support for the GOP Tea Party philosophy that additional rounds of tax cuts and government spending cuts would help rather than hurt the economic environment for job creation in Texas.

Most 2010 voters accepted the GOP Tea Party argument that any tax supported government spending to provide for the common good of the people in areas like health care and public education are socialist big brother government plots of Democrats.

But, did most 2010 voters and the 63% of registered voters who decided not to vote understand that GOP Tea Party candidates want to eliminate government spending for what most believe are basic and critical government services? Did most of the 13,269,233 people registered to vote in Texas truly understand the GOP Tea Party agenda is to eliminate all taxes on business and the wealthy and then eliminate government spending on programs like the public education, public safety, health care for our children and our parents, road construction and maintenance and other such government services? Did the voters understand that the GOP Tea Party call even those most basic government services socialist programs that should be cut ever deeper until they are eliminated altogether?

Up until this month, most voters did not understand the magnitude or the ferocity of the attack the GOP Tea Party has mounted on basic government services, such as public education, that Texans depend on to support our democracy, provide the quality of life our families enjoy and build a better future for our children.

GOP Tea Party rhetoric has hit reality as the Texas House passes a 2011-13 budget that cuts almost $31 billion from spending levels authorized in the 2009-11 budget. "If you want to close this shortfall through cuts alone, you have to either (completely) cut payments to Medicaid providers, cut payments to school districts or lay-off a substantial number of state employees," said state Rep. Jim Pitts, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "You would have to do these things immediately."

It's Not About the Money!

"It's Not About the Money!" - It's time to make the point that the Republican agenda in Congress and many state legislatures, including the Texas legislature, has little or nothing to do with federal and state level budget deficits. Budget deficits that Republicans helped engineer by eliminating taxes for corporations and billionaires at both the federal and state levels. By eliminating taxes for corporations and billionaires Texas and many other states now face devastating cuts to their publicly funded K-12 and college education systems and other critical services like building and maintaining roads.

Much of the battle between Democrats and Republicans over government spending isn't about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling reproductive and contraceptive services, to repealing last year's health insurance reform legislation, to ending the rights of people to organize for job security, to privatizing every government service, including tax funded public education.

In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to eliminate taxes for business and the rich and to eliminate government services, like public education, that working families depend upon to build a better future for their children - regardless of budget deficits and surpluses.

Now on one level this isn't surprising, but these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making "painful but necessary cuts." The truth behind the Tea Party phase "We want to take our county back" is that most far-right Republicans would prefer to live in a country with:

• little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks,
  
• a fully regressive tax code where taxes on corporations and billionaires are eliminated while taxes on working families are greatly increased,
• a privatized education system with no public schools supported by tax dollars,
  
• workplaces that have no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages,
  
• a health care system in which private insurers are free to increase premiums and deny health care to anyone at will,
  
• no social safety net provided through Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and
  
• all forms of reproductive contraception made unavailable and illegal.
  

Republicans also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and government, both federal and state, limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century - the century when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.

It's the right of Republicans to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Texans and Americans in every state would be very unhappy with it, it's the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.

The Internet and Campaign 2010

PewInternet: Fully 73% of adult internet users (representing 54% of all U.S. adults) went online to get news or information about the 2010 midterm elections, or to get involved in the campaign in one way or another. We refer to these individuals as "online political users" and our definition includes anyone who did at least one of the following activities in 2010:

• Get political news online - 58% of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, and 32% of online adults got most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources.
• Go online to take part in specific political activities, such as watch political videos, share election-related content or "fact check" political claims - 53% of adult internet users did at least one of the eleven online political activities we measured in 2010.
• Use Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes - One in five online adults (22%) used Twitter or a social networking site for political purposes in 2010.¹

Increasing Calls For Bexar County Democratic Party Chair Ramos To Resign

After disparaging remarks were made by Dan Ramos, Chair of Bexar County Democratic Party, and posted on a San Antonio news blog, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Ritchie asked for Ramos' resignation and released the following statement:

Budget Cuts Put School Sports On Chopping Block

NPR: School sports surely mean more in the United States than in any other country. For small-town America, sports teams even become a significant part of a community's identity.

And now that so many American school districts –– even whole states –– are facing reductions in school funding, more and more, it is athletics that are being cut back. Sometimes now, public school sports survive only by the grace of private donations, from parents and fans.

Rainy-Day Money Plus Cuts Cover $4.3 Billion 2009-11 Deficit

Many newspaper headlines this morning heralding "Deal breaks impasse on using state’s rainy-day money" and "Perry, legislators reach limited deal on dipping into rainy day fund" are a bit misleading -- and copy below the headlines does little to clarify. Here's the straight scoop...

Republican Claims About NPR Manufactured

The Republicans on the House Rules Committee will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to consider legislation to permanently prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) after conservative activist James O'Keefe released a video smearing the news organization.

Notes From The Campaign

by Lawrence J. Praeger

The elections are over and we have our new elected officials and judges. The Dallas Morning News while critiquing our Commissions, County Judge and other officials opine that partisanship is out of control.

As a citizen of Dallas for the last 25 years I have witnessed a lot of changes, read a lot of editorials, and follow the Dallas Morning News. I am past 50, a lawyer, former prosecutor and run my own law practice. I have a wife and two sons 12 and 15.

I was also a candidate for the 5th District Court of Appeals Place 12 in 2010. I had never before sought elective office. I decided to do this for many reasons. One of which was to show my boys that ours is a government of its citizens. That is the beauty of our republic. Another reason was that – without any false modesty – I thought I was more qualified than my opponent. He had recently been appointed to the office by Governor Perry. I had little money for a multi-county campaign but assumed that people and the media would support a judge based on experience, credentials and independence, not political party or ideology. With apologies to Lemony Snicket, thus began my series of unfortunate assumptions.

Paul Krugman: Leaving The Children Behind In Texas

NYTimes : Paul Krugman OpEd:

Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity? At the federal level, it’s still not clear: Republicans are demanding draconian spending cuts, but we don’t yet know how far they’re willing to go in a showdown with President Obama. At the state and local level, however, there’s no doubt about it: big spending cuts are coming.

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.

Now, politicians — and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians — always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.” Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.

In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.

Consider, as a case in point, what’s happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America’s political future happens first.

Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.

But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right.

Read the full Paul Krugman OpEd @ NYTimes.com