Texas Gov Deverting Public School Funds To Big Oil Tax Refunds

APNewsBreak: Texas Refineries May Get Back $135M

Three commissioners appointed by Gov. Rick Perry may grant some of the nation's largest refineries a tax refund of more than $135 million — money Texas' cash-strapped schools and other local governments have been counting on to help pay teachers and provide other public services. Full AP Story

On June 28, 2011 Gov. Perry signed a $172 billion budget passed by the super Republican majority Texas House and Senate. The budget signed by Gov. Perry cuts $15 billion from the level of spending last authorized in the 2009-11 state budget. The largest individual cut was to public education, which lost over $4 billion over the biennium. While public education received the deepest cuts, other agencies that saw their budgets reduced, too. Other agencies cut included public universities and community colleges (with the two largest universities in the state losing $100 million in funding) and state health and welfare programs, which saw Medicaid and food stamp funds slashed by up to $2 billion. [Full story on Texas debt growth and budget cuts]

The American Petroleum Institute argues that giving oil companies government handouts will create jobs. However, a new report by the House Natural Resources Democratic Staff finds that the major oil companies have actually shed employees while reaping record profits. From 2005 to 2010, Exxon, BP, Chevron, and Shell dumped 11,200 U.S. employees while raking in $546 billion in profits.

2011’s Off the Charts Weather and Climate Stats

Climate Central: This year is shaping up to be one of the most extreme — if not the most extreme — years in the United States since instrument records began in the late 19th century. Consider a few statistics from just this past June through August to get a better picture of what's been taking place.

Keep in mind that many studies show that certain types of extreme events, such as heavy rainfall events and heat waves, are already becoming more frequent and intense as the climate warms in response to human emissions of greenhouse gases. However, none of these events listed below have been the subject of detailed climate change attribution studies yet, since those take several months to complete, so it would be premature to speculate how big of a role climate change played in their development and evolution.

Map showing the number of days with temperatures above 100 degrees F during summer 2011. Credit: NOAA/NCDC.

• This summer was the second-warmest on record in the United States, and the eighth-warmest globally.
  
• Of the Lower-48 states, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Louisiana had their hottest summers on record. Two states — Texas and Oklahoma — had average temperatures that were so high, they broke all-time summer heat records for any state in the country. In Texas, the average statewide temperature for the summer was a whopping 86.8°F. Both Texas and Oklahoma eclipsed a benchmark set during the Dust Bowl, when a multiyear drought and a series of withering heat waves transformed the Central states into an arid landscape, driving a mass migration westward.
• During the summer of 2011, every state in the Lower-48 except North Dakota and Vermont experienced at least one day with a temperature exceeding 100°F.
• As of today, nearly 88 percent of Texas is locked in the grips of "exceptional drought" conditions, which is the most severe category on the U.S. Drought Monitor. In order to climb out of the deep rainfall deficit, parts of Texas and Oklahoma would need nearly two feet of rainfall, yet new climate outlooks for the next several months show drier than average conditions are likely to continue through the winter.
• According to Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, it is likely that Texas will soon break a record for the driest 12-month period on record, unless there is widespread heavy rain during the second half of September. He said the drought has cost Texas $5.2 billion in agricultural losses alone, with at least another billion from drought-related wildfires, and the NCDC says this is already Texas' most costly drought in recorded history.

Entitlement, My Foot, I Paid Cash For My Social Security Insurance!!!!

By Rob Tornoe - You can find more of his work here.

Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your employer did too. It totaled a percentage of your income before taxes. If you averaged only 30K over your 49 year working life, that’s close to $220,500.

If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer’s contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working you’d have $892,919.98.

If you took out only 3% per year, you would receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years, and that’s with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you’d have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month.

Entitlement, my foot, I paid cash for my Social Security insurance!!!!

Just because congress invested $2.67 trillion of our Social Security Trust Fund in T-Bills, which is counted as 19 percent of our federal debt, doesn't make my Social Security payment benefit some kind of charity or handout!! (The TRUTH About Who Really Owns All Of America's Debt)

Congressional benefits include free healthcare, outrageous retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days, now that's welfare, and they have the nerve to call my retirement entitlements !!!!!!

Republicans call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives, and now, when it’s time for us to collect our paid up insurance benefit, Republicans demonize it as an "entitlement" because they want to privatize it to Wall Street to cut the massive debt they created with tax cuts for the rich. "Starving the Government Beast" through tax cuts is a fiscal-political strategy adopted by American conservatives in the 1970's to create or increase existing budget deficits via tax cuts to force future cuts and eventual privatization of Medicare, Social Security, Public Education and every other public government service. [Starving The Beast]

Cartoon by Jen Sorensen with hat tip to the Jobanger blog

Unnecessary Tax Cuts, Unnecessary Austerity

"We're broke!" Or so claim Tea Party governors and lawmakers all over the country. Our states and our nation can no longer afford, their plaint goes, the programs and services that Americans expect government to provide. We must do with less. We need "austerity."

But we're not broke. Not even close. The United States of America is awash in wealth. The richest 1% of Americans and our largest multinational corporations are hording a record treasure of several trillions of dollars in cash. The Federal Reserve reports corporate cash balances alone grew to $2.05 trillion in September 2011 on a quarter over quarter cash reserve growth rate of nearly 5 percent.

Doling out yet more tax cuts to the richest 1% of Americans and our largest multinational corporations will not induce them to use their already huge treasure trove of cash to create new jobs or move the jobs they have already off shored back to the U.S.

Presidential Approval Ratings

Source:LiveScience

A recent Associated Press-GfK poll showed that nearly 8 in 10 people considered Obama a likable person, and slightly more than half said he understands the problems of ordinary people. Even among those who said the United States is headed in the wrong direction, 43 percent had a favorable opinion of the president, 10 points higher than his job approval rating among that group. Obama's advisers point to his favorability ratings as an asset when the eventual GOP nominee tries to make the case for change in the White House in 2012.

Republican War On Birth Control

With Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) leading the war on women, Texas Republicans this year cut funding for family planning clinics by two-thirds. When the Texas Tribune asked Texas state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said:

“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything.”

Family planning clinics are routinely referred to by many Republican lawmakers across the U.S. as “abortion clinics.” None of the 71 family planning clinics in the state of Texas that receive government funding provide abortions. Those family planning clinics provide reproductive health care services to women as well as information about and access to contraceptives.

Listen to NPR's report on Texas' Cuts to Women's access to birth control choices

As NPR notes, the state estimates that 300,000 women will lose access to family planning services because of these cuts, resulting in roughly 20,000 additional unplanned births. “Texas already spends $1.3 billion on teen pregnancies — more than any other state.”

The GOP’s concerted campaign against women’s health and right to choose to use birth control prescriptions has resulted in about 1,000 anti-abortion bills in state legislatures across the country that include attempts to eradicate women’s access to contraceptives by redefining “personhood” rights as beginning at the moment of conception. Such laws will criminalize the most common birth control choice - the birth control pill.

Mississippians are set to vote on a ballot measure this November that would redefine the word "person" in the state constitution to include embryos and a fertilized egg that hasn't even yet implanted in the womb. Members of the medical and legal communities have raised concerns that the amendment could have unforeseen, far-reaching implications for women's health, such as banning the birth control pill, which prevents pregnancy by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb, in-vitro fertilization and stem cell research.

In defining a legal human being from the moment of fertilization, Mississippi Initiative 26, often called the "Personhood Amendment," would criminalize abortion in Mississippi, with no exceptions for rape, incest or life of the mother. Personhood USA, the advocacy group pushing the amendment, and the Yes on 26 campaign are painting the issue as a black-and-white abortion ban.

"Plain and simple, this seeks to establish human life in the womb," Greg Sanders, the executive director of the Yes on 26 campaign, told HuffPost. "Obviously there's no exception for rape and incest. It's a human life, no matter how it's created."

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, says the language could also have a whole host of legal implications, including some that have nothing to do with women's health.

"What does it mean for property or inheritance law? What happens when you're trying to make districts for voting, and you have to consider fertilized eggs as legal persons?" she told HuffPost. "The meaning of the provision could come up in any number of lawsuits."

Many people do not remember that the purchase and use of birth control products, even by married couples, was against the law in many states until 1965. Use of birth control products may again be criminalized in states that pass "personhood" laws or constitutional amendments.

There are those who, for the last 46 years, have worked to reverse the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court finding that Americans have a fundamental right of privacy to make family planning decisions, which includes the right to use birth control contraceptives.

Read more:

• Personhood At Conception And Criminalizing Birth Control Use
• Where Abortion Rights Are Disappearing

Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics

The median wealth, or net worth, of U.S. households fell from $96,894 in 2005 to $70,000 in 2009, a drop of 28% when adjusted for inflation.

Pew Research Center: The precipitous decline in wealth was not evenly distributed across racial and ethnic groups. Minority households--Hispanics, blacks and Asians--experienced far steeper declines than white households.

In 2009, the median net worth of white households ($113,149) was the highest of all groups.

In sharp contrast, Hispanic and black households had a median net worth of $6,325 and $5,677 respectively. Asian households, with a median net worth of $78,066, had much more wealth in 2009 than Hispanics and blacks but much less than whites.

All groups experienced drops in wealth from 2005 to 2009 but there were sharp differences among them.

Hispanics' median net worth fell 66%, from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 in 2009. Black households experienced a loss of 53%, from $12,124 in 2005 to $5,677 in 2009. The drop in the wealth of white households was modest in comparison, falling 16% from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.

As a result, the median wealth of white households is now 20 times as high as the wealth of black households and 18 times as much as the wealth of Hispanic households. These ratios are about twice as high as the ratios that existed before the onset of the housing crisis, the stock market crash and the Great Recession (which began in late 2007 and ended in 2009)

Minority households experienced greater losses than whites because they are more dependent on home equity as a source of wealth. As noted above, housing values started to fall sooner than stock prices and, unlike the stock market, the housing market has not yet begun to recover.

Hispanics and Asians were further affected because they are disproportionately likely to reside in states that have been among the hardest hit by the housing crisis: California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. Hispanics and blacks have also been more susceptible to home foreclosures, and their home ownership rates have dropped more than any other group.

Read the full Pew Research report

So, Where Is America's Wealth Going?

DOJ v. SCOTUS On Texas' Voter Photo ID Law

All IDs must be unexpired or expired no earlier than 60 days before the election. Acceptable identification includes:

• A driver’s license, election ID certificate, or personal ID card issued by the Department of Public Safety (an election certificate issued to a person 70 years or older does not expire);
• U.S. military ID card that contains the person's photograph;
• U.S. citizenship certificate with a photograph;
• U.S. passport; or
• A license to carry a concealed handgun.

Student IDs and Military Veteran IDs are not accepted in Texas for purposes of identification for voting.

Updated Friday, September 23, 2011 @ 6:45 PM

The status of Texas' new voter photo identification law remains unresolved. In response to Texas' request for pre-clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) voting section, the head of the Department's voting section today wrote Ann McGeehan, Texas Director of Elections, asking for more details on how the state will implement the stricter voting law signed by Republican presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) last May.

"The information sent is insufficient to enable us to determine that the proposed changes have neither the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group," wrote T. Christian Herren Jr. , chief of the Justice Department's voting section.

Herren wrote McGeehan saying that the DOJ needs to know specifics on how the state will alert voters about the new government issued voter photo ID requirement. Texas officials have said that 605,576 residents do not have a Texas drivers license, photo ID card [, or likely any one of the other required government issued photo ID documents]. USDOJ officials also want to know how many of those residents without IDs have Spanish surnames and an explanation of when and where the state will make free voter photo identification certificates available, as well as specifics on how they will educate the public about how to obtain such certificates.

The state must now re-submit the pre-clearance request to the USDOJ with the additional information requested that includes, among others things, how election officials will be trained to correctly implement the voter photo ID law. The USDOJ will have 60 additional days to review the state’s revised request.

Acceptable forms of ID include: a Texas driver's license; a personal ID issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety; an election certificate, which is a new form of state photo identification created by the legislation; a U.S. military ID card; a U.S. passport; or a Texas concealed handgun permit. State university IDs and veteran's IDs are not acceptable. (Herren's letter to McGeehan at the bottom of this article)

Original Post Wednesday, September 14, 2011 @ 8:56 PM

Because Texas and South Carolina have a history of voting rights discrimination, the states are required to have changes to their election laws pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice or the courts under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

DOJ: Texas Congressional Redistricting Map Violates Voting Rights Act

Updated Friday, September 23, 2011 @ 6:41 PM

The U.S. Department Justice (USDOJ) said late today (Friday Sept. 23, 2011) that based on their preliminary investigation, a congressional redistricting map signed into law by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry appears to have been "adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of diminishing the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice to Congress."

USDOJ's Civil Rights Division specifically challenges the redistricting maps for Texas congressional Districts 23 and 27, which they say would not provide Hispanic citizens with the ability to elect candidates of their choice to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Civil Rights Division lawyers say they need more information on the congressional plan to determine what the purpose of the redistricting plan was for sure. But the federal agency came out stronger against the state House of Representatives plan, which they flat out said "violates Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in that it was adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of diminishing the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice to the Texas House of Representatives."

USDOJ said that no matter the purpose of the congressional plan, it would have a discriminatory effect on voters.

"When compared to the existing plan, the proposed Congressional plan will have a retrogressive effect in that it will diminish the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice to the United States House of Representatives," USDOJ said in its latest filing. (see the Sept. 23, 2011 USDOJ filing at the end of this post.)

Original Post Monday, September 19, 2011 @ 2:38 PM

Obama: 'I Am A Warrior For The Middle Class'

In a fiery political — and personal — speech in front of the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, President Barack Obama called on Speaker of the House John Boehner twelve times on his home turf to "Pass this jobs bill."

Speaking in front of a "functionally obsolete" Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati,just few miles from Boehner's home district that connects to the home state of the Senate's top Republican, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Obama was critical of House Republicans for failing to act on his jobs plan.

Making a point to choose a bridge linking House Speaker John Boehner's home state of Ohio with Kentucky, the home of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Obama challenged, "Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge . . . Help us rebuild America. Help us put construction workers back to work. Pass this bill."

The president's incursion into northern Kentucky and southern Ohio is one of his most direct and defiant challenges to leaders of the opposition party as he said:

'We used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America. We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Grand Central Station. So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport? At a time when we've got millions of unemployed construction workers out there just ready to get on the job, ready to do the work to rebuilding America.

So, Cincinnati, we are better than that. We're smarter than that. And that’s why I sent Congress the American Jobs Act 10 days ago. This bill is not that complicated. It's a bill that would put people back to work rebuilding America -- repairing our roads, repairing our bridges, repairing our schools. It would lead to jobs for concrete workers like the ones here at Hilltop; jobs for construction workers and masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, architects, engineers, ironworkers -- put folks back to work."

In a shift from the president's outreach to Boehner this summer, when the two men tried to work out a deal that would extend the nation's borrowing authority and cut long-term deficits as well, Obama said: "So my question is, what's Congress waiting for... Why is it taking so long?"