Well, it is finally official; Texas Gov. Rick Perry is running for President. I believe those of us here in Austin have a responsibility to tell the rest of the world about Rick Perry. He is unfit to be President. Most of the recent news has been on Perry's championing of The Response along with its many anti-gay, anti-Muslim co-sponsors. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg on how bad Rick Perry is. Please spread the word. Here are the top 10 Items in Rick Perry’s Record that you need to know.
1) Jobs: Perry’s primary claim is that he has a record of job creation in Texas. This is true in that Texas has led the way in creating jobs – really bad jobs. As has been reported by Dave Mann in the New York Times, Texas has added 211,000 jobs in the last year, but 37% of them are paid at or below minimum wage. Texas now leads the nation in minimum-wage workers. Obviously, most of these low wage jobs lack health insurance which makes sense since Texas has the lowest rate of people with health insurance in the country. If he does for America what he’s done in Texas this will be a third world country very soon.
2) Budget: Perry’s biggest accomplishment this year was passing a budget that didn’t raise taxes. Because Texas doesn’t have a State Income tax, has a structurally underfunded property tax system, and is heavily dependent on sales tax revenue, the state budget is chronically underfunded. Since Perry refused to access billions of dollars in the state’s “Rainy Day” Fund, they enacted devastating budget cuts about $4 billion from education and billions more from public health programs. Thousands of teachers are being laid off across the state and poor people will bear the brunt of these budget cuts.
3) Education: Perry’s budget cut back funding to University of Texas - Austin by 16%. These budget cuts will result in increases to tuition at universities and community colleges around the state. More bizarrely, this resulted in major cuts to UT Center for Women's and Gender Studies which laid off much of its staff including Sarah Weddington - the world famous attorney who successfully argued the 1973 Roe v. Wade case before the Supreme Court.
4) Guns: Texas passed a bill to allow university students with concealed carry permits to carry guns in classrooms. This is the state where Charles Whitman killed 16 people from the UT Tower in 1966. While mostly symbolic, this worries me as an educator. By the way, Texas already allows those with a concealed carry permit to enter the Texas Capitol without going through metal detectors.
5) Abortion: Texas passed a law requiring women seeking an abortion to get a sonogram and listen to the fetal heartbeat. This is emotional blackmail of women who are already making a very a difficult decision. They also cut off state funding of hospital districts that pay for abortions. This led the Central Health Board in Austin to cut off the $450,000 that it used to spend to pay for abortions for poor women.
6) Voting: Perry signed a Voter ID law that will make it harder for poor people without photo ID to vote. The gerrymandered Texas redistricting plan will divide the Travis County /City of Austin in 5 Congressional districts o that it will likely be represented by 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat. Even though most of Texas's population growth is among minorities most of the new districts are benefiting Republicans.
7) Tort Reform: They passed "loser pays" tort reform to make it even harder to sue corporations in this state. This will harm average people who try to sue doctors and corporations for harming them.
8) Immigration: Mercifully, they weren't able to pass the Perry’s anti-immigrant bill that would have banned so-called "Sanctuary Cities" – which no one has actually been able to identify. Perry’s advertisement against Houston Mayor Bill White in the last Governor’s race was vicious, manipulative and full of lies. See You Tube of the ad entitled Sergeant Johnson.
9) Federalism: Perry has a radical position of State-Federal relations. He went so far as to suggest to a Tea Party rally in 2009 that Texas should secede from the Union. He is fighting the EPA and insisting on the lower air quality standards of the TCEQ. Houston already has some of the worst air pollution in the country. While Federal law says Food Stamps applications must be processed in 30 days, Texas is refusing to hire enough people to reduce the wait time from 90 days. Perry refused to even apply for the Federal "Race to the Top" educational grant money, because he thought it would have too many Federal strings attached.
10) Capital Punishment: Perry allowed Clarence Todd Willingham - a man now widely believed to have been innocent – to be executed despite considerable evidence that the scientific evidence against him was severely flawed and that he may have been innocent. The New Yorker article Trial by Fire lays out the details as does the Frontline documentary Death by Fire and a more detailed documentary called Incendiary that is still in limited theatrical release. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Perry has allowed a potentially innocent man to be executed. There are many cases in recent years in which there was at the very least a reasonable doubt.
Finally, one should judge a man by the company he keeps. The Texas Observer’s article on The Mainstream Media’s Shallow Coverage of the Response reports on how the Response rally’s speakers called for the conversion of the Jews. The Texas Observer article on Rick Perry’s Army of God further reported on the organizers of the rally that included many individuals who belong to a bizarre Christian extremist fringe movement called the New Apostolic Reformation that is almost too strange to describe. Oh, he has other friends as reported by Salon in Rick Perry’s Confederate Past which includes the neo-Confederate movement – those who defend and champion the racist Confederacy. America needs to get to know Rick Perry in the way that those of here in Austin, Texas know him.