(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where somebody better ‘vestigate soon.
We begin in Missouri, where the local Democrats had a very big night on Tuesday. (The national Democrats did, too, but I’m less sure they’re aware of it.) I don’t minimize flipping a legislative district that went for the president* by four touchdowns last November, but it’s still a very long pull up a dirt road there, and nothing exemplifies that more than the fact that, apparently, not enough Republicans are disgusted enough by the shenanigans of Governor Eric Greitens to do much of anything about him. So, a grand jury has stepped into the breach, or so one of the lawyers informed The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
After those accusations surfaced in January via the woman’s ex-husband — who said he surreptitiously recorded his then-wife in 2015 making the claims — St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner launched a criminal investigation into Greitens. Albert Watkins, the attorney for the ex-husband, said the news meant St. Louis circuit attorney’s office “has elevated its undertakings” by taking the investigation to the grand jury.
For the benefit of patrons who may have entered the shebeen late, Greitens is accused of carrying on with a woman to whom he is not married. He also is accused of blackmailing said lady with compromising photos. The ex-husband of said lady claims to have tapes that would confirm both charges. Greitens has copped to the affair, but not to the blackmail, which he vehemently denies. As one would, if one were someone completely innocent, Greitens banned any reporters from appearances he made at the state’s Lincoln Days celebration in Kansas City. So here we are.
Some local Republicans are blaming the Greitens mess for the crushing loss on Tuesday night. (Good call, folks.) Because Providence is a gifted prankster, the Missouri Republicans held their state convention last weekend. The delegates appear to be maintaining an even strain. Again, from the Post-Dispatch:
As Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft put it, in a grinning comment about the tax debate that could as easily have applied to the whole gathering: “We’re going to politely fight that out.” If the convention sported a notable lack of open conflict among party members, it could be because the meat of it was kept behind closed doors. In an unusual move, party organizers kept reporters out of several meetings at which party leaders hashed out political and legislative issues and strategy. State GOP Executive Director Sam Cooper said the purpose of closing the meetings to the press was to allow “frank discussion with the grass roots” of the party. He offered no further details of what was said.
At least their promising U.S. Senate candidate, state attorney general Josh Hawley, isn’t talking about sexytime anymore. Things are looking up!
We skip on up to Indiana, where those good-government types from the payday lending industry have decided to frolic within that state’s government. From The Indianapolis Star:
Payday lenders could charge interest on small loans at rates more than triple what Indiana law currently defines as criminal loansharking under a bill the Indiana House approved this week. The House on Wednesday narrowly passed House Bill 1319, which would allow storefront lenders to offer three to 12-month loans of $605 to $1,500 with annual percentage rates up to 222 percent.
Vital to this effort to enshrine usury in law were the efforts of Indiana Speaker Brian Bosma, who voted for this bill and who now very likely will be going to hell.
The House passed the measure after Speaker Brian Bosma, who rarely votes on legislation, joined 52 other representatives in supporting the bill, despite his own church's opposition. "Some (GOP lawmakers) had had political concern about it, that it had some political ramifications for them in their home districts and occasionally I will cast a vote on something like that so they’re not left dangling in the wind themselves," Bosma said.
Translation from the original Weaselspeak: I’m giving cover to some people who have taken money from this parasite industry and who rather would not let their voters know that we’re trying to legalize loan-sharking. It’s, like, my job here, man.
Bosma’s ticket to eternal damnation already is punched. If you don’t believe me, or his pastor, take the word of retired Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote, in 2009:
This is all the more necessary in these days when financial difficulties can become severe for many of the more vulnerable sectors of the population, who should be protected from the risk of usury and from despair. The weakest members of society should be helped to defend themselves against usury, just as poor peoples should be helped to derive real benefit from micro-credit, in order to discourage the exploitation that is possible in these two areas.
You got problems, big guy.
Moving on up to Wisconsin, we find that Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage that particular Midwest subsidiary, is working very hard to minimize potential Republican losses in special elections in that state similar to what happened this week in Missouri. Walker has decided that you can’t lose elections that you don’t hold. (Genius!). John Nichols, from The Madison Capital-Times, explains this strategy.
Gov. Scott Walker is thwarting representative democracy in Wisconsin. He is refusing to call prompt special elections to fill the seats of former state Sen. Frank Lasee, of De Pere, and former state Rep. Keith Ripp, of Lodi, a pair of Republicans who quit the Legislature in December to take posts with the governor’s administration. Walker wants to leave those seats open until January 2019 — denying tens of thousands of Wisconsinites representation for a full year.
As Nichols points out, the Republicans in Alabama have decided to try this finagling, too, in the wake of losing a U.S. Senate seat to a Democrat who managed to beat Roy Moore, the Gadsden Mall Creeper. And it wouldn’t be a trip to America’s Dairyland if we didn’t check in on the Foxconn project. Apparently, they’re going to get their own Amtrak stop. From Urban Milwaukee:
The board will also take this proposal up as an opportunity to discuss the need for transit service to the Foxconn development in Pleasant Prairie. The Public Transportation Review Board will also hear about a proposed bill (Assembly Bill 918) in the state Legislature that would prohibit city governments from regulating taxicab companies. Under the proposed legislation, the state’s Department of Safety and Professional Services would be the sole regulator of taxicab companies, maintaining control of all licensing for companies and their drivers.
This thing is going to be a state within a state, and the actual state is going to be unable to maintain its constitutional authority. Wait and see. That’s how this is going to go down. That’s going to be Walker’s lasting legacy in Wisconsin: The Grand Duchy Of Foxconn. There’s a plummeting employee on the royal seal.
We move on down to Puerto Rico (Yes, these people are Americans, too, Mr. President*; have some fries), where the governor has looked at the ongoing crisis there and decided to sell some more books for Naomi Klein. From Reuters:
Speaking in a televised address on Monday, Governor Ricardo Rossello also said every public school teacher in Puerto Rico would receive a $1,500 annual salary increase beginning next school year. It was unclear whether the pay bump would require legislation. The governor’s remarks came 10 days after the island’s education secretary, Julia Keleher, said she planned to decentralize Puerto Rico’s education department and introduce “autonomous schools.” Public school reform is a touchy issue in the U.S. territory, where teachers make an average of about $27,000 a year. But Puerto Rico, struggling simultaneously through the biggest government bankruptcy in U.S. history and the aftermath of September’s Hurricane Maria, its worst natural disaster in 90 years, is trying to embrace much-needed structural reforms.
Whoa, Reuters. I spy with my little eye a thumb on the scale there. Before Rosello announced that public education was for sale, he closed 300 schools, which is generally what happens.
He and Keleher are depending vitally on what was done in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when local politicians and education “reformers” took advantage of that catastrophe virtually to destroy public education in that city. Despite some loud cheerleading from the “reform” community, the results of that makeover are decidedly mixed, as Andrea Gabor pointed out in The New York Times.
A recent report by the Education Research Alliance confirmed that principals engage in widespread “creaming” — selecting, or counseling out, students based on their expected performance on standardized tests. In a forthcoming study, the alliance expects to show that lowest-scoring students are less likely to move to higher-performing schools. The rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality. For example, Paul G. Vallas, the superintendent of the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, boasted recently that only 7 percent of the city’s students attend failing schools today, down from 62 percent before Katrina, a feat accomplished “with no displacement of children.” This was simply false. Consider Joseph S. Clark Preparatory High School, one of the city’s last traditional public schools to be “taken over.” Most of its 366 students declined to re-enroll when it reopened under new management in the fall of 2011. During its first year under FirstLine, a charter management organization, Clark had only 117 “persisters,” or returning students, according to a study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as Credo. FirstLine could not account for where the students went after they left Clark. However, Jay Altman, its chief executive, told me in an email that before FirstLine took over, a similarly low proportion of students, about 35 percent, were returning.
In a few years, I expect to be reading a similar story about Puerto Rico.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the Great State of Oklahoma, but not in our customary fashion. Before we get to our revered regular correspondent, it seems that a crew from The Economist found its way to the north side of the Red River to explain that state's public schools. Things, they discovered, are not good there.
The roots of the fiasco are not hard to determine. As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances. During the shale boom, lawmakers gave a sweetheart deal to its oilmen, costing $470m in a single year, by slashing the gross production tax on horizontal drilling from 7% to 1%. North Dakota, by contrast, taxes production at 11.5%. The crash in global oil prices in 2014 did not help state coffers either. Oklahoma has also cut income taxes, first under Democrats desperate to maintain control over a state that was trending Republican, and then under Republicans, who swept to power anyway. Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, came to office pledging to eliminate the income tax altogether. Since 2008 general state funds for K-12 education in Oklahoma have been slashed by 28.2%—the biggest cut in the country. Property taxes, which might have made up the difference, are constitutionally limited.
Wait. We have to pay for stuff. What’s up with that?
Other state agencies are broke, too. Highway patrolmen are told not to fill their petrol tanks to save money. Those caught drunk-driving are able to keep their licences because there are no bureaucrats to revoke them. Prisons are dangerously overcrowded, to the point that the state’s director of corrections publicly says that “something is going to pop”. But unlike Kansas, whose Republican legislature eventually rebelled and reversed the tax cuts over the governor’s veto, Oklahoma will find its troubling experiment much more difficult to undo. Because of a referendum passed in 1992, any bill that seeks to raise taxes must be approved by three-quarters of the legislature.
Some year far in the future, historians are going to conclude that the Tax Revolt of the late 1970s was the most damaging political development in 20th Century America. It unleashed an incredible amount of energy in the electorate, all of it bad and all of it conducive to a raging madness. Now, the roosts are so crowded with chickens that they’re on the verge of collapse and, as Blog Official Grub Wagon Inspector Friedman of the Plains tells us, Governor Mary Fallin is feeling the roosts falling on her head. From The Frontier:
“This is a defining moment for our state,” Fallin said. “We have two clear choices: We can continue down a path of sliding backwards, or the second path is to say ‘Enough is enough. We can do better. We deserve better. Our children deserve better.’” Fallin’s budget proposal echoes many components of the Step Up Oklahoma plan, including a tax increase on oil and gas production projected to raise $126.7 million in new revenue for the state. Wells currently taxed at 2 percent would be taxed at 4 percent, according to Fallin’s proposed budget. Gross production tax on new wells would start at 4 percent for the first 36 months and then increase to 7 percent. Fallin also proposes generating $231.7 million in new revenue for the state with a cigarette tax increase. The executive budget proposal also calls for tax increases for the wind industry, raising $19.2 million in new revenue. Fallin is also supporting Step Up Oklahoma’s proposed tax reforms, which would generate an estimated $129.2 million in new revenue for the state, according to her budget proposal.
This really is an ungainly dive for the lifeboats.
Rep. Cory Williams, D-Stillwater, said he believes Fallin’s budget and the Step Up Oklahoma’s plan does not go far enough to restore the state’s historic 7 percent tax on oil and gas production. “This Step Up Oklahoma plan you see before you is nothing more but a ploy by the oil and gas industry to avoid a ballot issue in November where Oklahomans will overwhelmingly will adopt a restoration of the gross production tax to 7 percent,” Williams said. Rep. David Perryman, D-Chickasha, decried the proposed tax increases on the wind industry as “vindictive,” noting the proposal could increase utility bills for many Oklahomans.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
