Wisdom from Fannin County, Texas

Every month a missive from Joyce and Gene Marshall of Bonham, Texas arrives in my inbox. I always read it for the insights from this county of some 17,000 residents on the Texas Oklahoma border.

Here's some profound and (for me) helpful insights and information about our remarkable governor, for the good he has done for Texas, and his hopes to be President of these United States. Enjoy.

Citizens’ Call September 2011
an e-mag on citizen information


Slogan for the Month:
“Let us GROAN that Texas has once again offered a nincompoop
to be the Chief Executive of the most Powerful Institution on Earth.”
Any economy success we have here in Texas is in spite of, rather than because of Rick Perry. Ironically, this irrational hater of the Federal Government is Governor of a State whose economic success is largely dependent upon the Federal Government – its huge military base inputs, its massive perks to the oil industry, and more. Also, the economic success of Texas is highly overrated. See The Texas Unmiracle article below.
Gene Marshall

Rick Perry Says Social Security And Medicare
Are Unconstitutional
By Ian Millhiser
August 12, 2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has, to say the least, a very odd understanding of the Constitution. He thinks Texas should be able to opt out of Social Security, and he believes that everything from federal public school programs to clean air laws are unconstitutional. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry makes his most outlandish claim to date — Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional:

The Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.” But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116, you left “general welfare” out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that “general welfare” includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does “general welfare” mean to you?

[PERRY:] I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”?

[PERRY:] I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

[Silence.]

Perry’s reading of the Constitution raises very serious questions about whether he understands the English language. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States .” No plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness.

Moreover, Perry’s belief that Social Security and Medicare must cease to exist not only puts him well to the right of his fellow Republicans in Congress — who recently voted to gradually phase out Medicare — it also puts him at the rightward fringe of the GOP presidential field. Not even Michele Bachmann has gone on record claiming that America’s two most cherished programs for seniors violate the Constitution, although she did invite a Fox News analyst who shares Perry’s beliefs to lecture her fellow lawmakers on what the Constitution requires .

When House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the GOP’s plan to slowly eliminate Medicare, it was the most conservative budget proposal anyone had seriously considered in generations. Perry’s agenda, however, makes Paul Ryan look like Ted Kennedy.


Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers
By Timothy Egan

A few months ago, with Texas aflame from more than 8,000 wildfires brought on by extreme drought, a man who hopes to be the next president took pen in hand and went to work:

“Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”

In the four months since Rick Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

Then the governor prayed, publicly and often. Alas, a rainless spring was followed by a rainless summer. July was the hottest month in recorded Texas history. Day after pitiless day, from Amarillo to Laredo, from Toadsuck to Twitty, folks were greeted by a hot, white bowl overhead, triple-digit temperatures, and a slow death on the land.

In the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in “extreme or exceptional” drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the worst in Texas history.

Lakes have disappeared. Creeks are phantoms, the caked bottoms littered with rotting, dead fish. Farmers cannot coax a kernel of grain from ground that looks like the skin of an aging elephant.

Is this Rick Perry’s fault, a slap to a man who doesn’t believe that humans can alter the earth’s climate — God messin’ with Texas? No, of course not. God is too busy with the upcoming Cowboys football season and solving the problems that Tony Romo has reading a blitz.

But Perry’s tendency to use prayer as public policy demonstrates, in the midst of a truly painful, wide-ranging and potentially catastrophic crisis in the nation’s second most-populous state, how he would govern if he became president.

“I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this,’” he said in a speech in May, explaining how some of the nation’s most serious problems could be solved.

Pat Sullivan/Associated PressTexas Gov. Rick Perry spoke at a day long prayer and fast rally on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2011, at Reliant Stadium in Houston. That was a warm-up of sorts for his prayer-fest, 30,000 evangelicals in Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Saturday. From this gathering came a very specific prayer for economic recovery. On the following Monday, the first day God could do anything about it, Wall Street suffered its worst one-day collapse since the 2008 crisis. The Dow sunk by 635 points.

Prayer can be meditative, healing, and humbling. It can also be magical thinking. Given how Perry has said he would govern by outsourcing to the supernatural, it’s worth asking if God is ignoring him.

Though Perry will not officially announce his candidacy until Saturday, he loomed large over the Republican debate Thursday night. With their denial of climate change, basic budget math, and the indisputable fact that most of the nation’s gains have gone overwhelmingly to a wealthy few in the last decade, the candidates form a Crazy Eight caucus. You could power a hay ride on their nutty ideas.

After the worst week of his presidency (and the weakest Oval Office speech since Gerald Ford unveiled buttons to whip inflation), the best thing Barack Obama has going for him is this Republican field. He still beats all of them in most polling match-ups.

Perry is supposed to be the savior. When he joins the campaign in the next few days, expect him to show off his boots; they are emblazoned with the slogan dating to the 1835 Texas Revolution: “Come and Take It.” He once explained the logo this way: “Come and take it — that’s what it’s all about.” This is not a man one would expect to show humility in prayer.

Perry revels in a muscular brand of ignorance (Rush Limbaugh is a personal hero), one that extends to the ever-fascinating history of the Lone Star State. Twice in the last two years he’s broached the subject of Texas seceding from the union.

“When we came into the nation in 1845 we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” says Perry in a 2009 video that has just surfaced. “And one of the deals was, we can leave any time we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

He can dream all he wants about the good old days when Texas left the nation to fight for the slave-holding states of the breakaway confederacy. But the law will not get him there. There is no such language in the Texas or United States’ constitutions allowing Texas to unilaterally “leave any time we want.”

But Texas is special. By many measures, it is the nation’s most polluted state. Dirty air and water do not seem to bother Perry. He is, however, extremely perturbed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of laws designed to clean the world around him. In a recent interview, he wished for the president to pray away the E.P.A.

To Jews, Muslims, non-believers and even many Christians, the Biblical bully that is Rick Perry must sound downright menacing, particularly when he gets into religious absolutism. “As a nation, we must call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles,” he said last week.

As a lone citizen, he’s free to advocate Jesus-driven public policy imperatives. But coming from someone who wants to govern this great mess of a country with all its beliefs, Perry’s language is an insult to the founding principles of the republic. Substitute Allah or a Hindu God for Jesus and see how that polls.

Perry is from Paint Creek, an unincorporated hamlet in the infinity of the northwest Texas plains. I’ve been there. In wet years, it’s pretty, the birds clacking on Lake Stamford, the cotton high. This year, it’s another sad moonscape in the Lone Star State.

Over the last 15 years, taxpayers have shelled out $232 million in farm subsidies to Haskell County, which includes Paint Creek — a handout to more than 2,500 recipients, better than one out every three residents. God may not always be reliable, but in Perry’s home county, the federal government certainly is.
The Texas Unmiracle

By PAUL KRUGMAN
August 14, 2011

Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.

Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.

And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

If this picture doesn’t look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there’s a reason: the glowing portrait is false.

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.

If Rick Perry is the Best the Republican Party can offer,
we have a Clear Choice
Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen

The choice is Barack Obama. It is understandable that in these troubled times almost everyone has a complaint against Obama. He has not been the Superman Messiah that some of us hoped for. He has not ranted against the insanity of his opposition as strenuously as others of us would have liked. He is stuck to the task of consensus-building governing, which may be been one of his strong points. In doing so, Obama has had a few amazing achievements in healthcare, in gay rights, and more. Granted, these victories have been small in relation to the huge challenges that we face.

Nevertheless, would anyone in his position would have been able to do significantly better? Even if the answer to that question is “Yes,” we must not overlook the huge wall of opposition Obama has had to work against. First of all, notice the recalcitrant Tea Party radicals who reject the very idea of an effective national government — indeed, these radicals have been non-governing ranters who have been willing to have this nation drop off a cliff rather than compromise their ideological beliefs. Obama has also had to face an enormous wall of money from the richest and greediest part of this nation. Obama would have signed a much stronger national healthcare bill, but health insurance company greedheads would not have it. Even the weak bill he and others finally snaked through the Congress is still rabidly opposed by these greedy forces. The same story has been played over and over in almost every area. If this nation takes out our disappointments with Obama by voting for Rich Perry, an extremest far to the right of Herbert Hoover, then we deserve the still deeper hell into which such an outcome would surely descend us.

Obama is our choice. Superman is not on the ballot. We can choose a flexible, intelligent, hard-working statesman or we can have what Republicans are going to offer us: UGH.
Let us Remember

Beginning with Newt Gingerich ... The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Garrison Keillor
Culture » August 26, 2004

Wisdom from Fannin County, Texas

Citizens’ Call June 2011

an e-mag on citizen information

Republican Economics

Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

The only people who should be excited about Republican economics are some dead economists who can’t vote.

Republicans ran up the national debt with tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens, a needless war in Iraq, and support for an almost unregulated banking establishments that squandered trillions of dollars of wealth. Now they are proposing debt solutions that take it out on Medicare patients and that slash health, education, social services, alternative energy, and every other remotely useful program.

Even wealthy CEO’s and high-paid investment speculators need to notice that Republican economics will lead to the destruction of the economy that has so unfairly rewarded them. Taking money from struggling citizens who have to spend it and giving it to those who don’t need to spend it does not stimulate the economy. Trickle-down economics is an illusion. Republicans actually favor trickle-up economics. Theirs is an economics of downright thieving from middle and lower classes.

Of course money isn’t everything. Republicans also promise to pamper your racism and religious bigotry. If you don’t like a brown-faced president and want to believe Obama was born in Kenya, some Republican people-pleasers have pretended to agree with you on that weird story. Or if you think that your religious beliefs have to be forced into the bedrooms and doctor’s offices of people who dare to believe differently than you, some Republicans have made a career of pretending to agree with you on that bit of old-world theocracy.

Or how about this one? Some Republicans pretend to support you in the illusion that this country of immigrants should shut its doors to Central American workers and potential immigrants in order to preserve an American culture that has never existed.

Even if you don’t believe that money is everything, most of your Republican politicians do. All the questionable social issues that may or may not interest you actually mean nothing to most Republican office holders. They are only interested in money for their wealthy supporters. Money is indeed everything for them. All else is subterfuge and downright lying to get your votes.

How can can we ordinary voters put up with Republican lying about Medicare in order to enrich some health insurance companies, lying about global warming in order to enrich some oil and coal companies, lying about banking practices in order to protect greedy bankers and speculators, lying about Democratic candidates in order to give their mostly incompetent money-pushers a chance at the polls?

So is there any reason for an ordinary Fannin county voter to vote Republican? None at all.

Shall we believe the fiction that Democrats are just a bad as Republicans? Democrats are not perfect, that is certainly true. From my perspective their deepest flaws have to do with going along too much with Republican nonsense. But in general, Democratic office holders (minus some bad apples) are concerned for the well-being of ordinary citizens, the rescue of the U.S. Economy from its worst warpings, the forging of an honorable foreign policy, and an openness to hear from you and me on how they can serve us better. I for one have a lot to say about that. Some Democrats at least listen.

If I am exaggerating about how badly Republicans are lying to us, it is only because there are a few libertarian Republicans who actually believe that government should let the corporate money handlers do whatever they want unimpeded by big government regulations. They honestly claim, it seems, that everything will work out gloriously if we just let the free-market solve everything with its supply and demand magic. But this magic is not as wondrous as claimed, and besides that we do not have free markets. We have markets controlled by the biggest money pools. So we might as well laugh the honest libertarians out of the conversation and get down to business on how to regulate businesses so that businesses serve the pubic good rather than the biggest pocketbooks.

Basically, I am calling upon all citizens to throw out every Republican office holder and never vote for another until Republicans clean up their act. We can deal with the cowardly and half-hearted Democrats after that. This is a democracy. Citizens count. It is way past time for we ordinary citizens to actually be counted.

How Can We Solve the Jobs Crisis?

by Sarah van Gelder

Excerpts from

Yes Magazine

May 11, 2011

At a time when millions of Americans are without work, the political debate has taken a bizarre turn. Instead of discussing how to make the public investments necessary to get Americans back to work, the political right has used the deficit “crisis” to push for cuts in workers’ rights and pay, without explaining how the economy can recover if potential consumers are too poor to buy anything.

What we need is livelihoods, fairness, and ecological sustainability, which together is our best bet for an economy that can support American families.

There are millions of people with talents, skills, and the desire to work. There is a backlog of work that needs doing: people who need food, homes, and education; communities that need bike lanes, rapid transit, renewable and reliable sources of energy, and rebuilt bridges and water systems. There are empty factories and offices, natural resources, and skilled workers ready to pitch in.

The problem is not that we’re broke. It’s that transnational corporations and the extremely wealthy have captured federal government decision-making, skewing policies to allow the exhaustion of the Earth and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of billionaires, while undermining job security for everyone else. Government money floods into unstable big banks and financial institutions, while small businesses, homeowners, state and local governments are left to sink or swim on their own.

Creating sustainable jobs will require restructuring our economy to more equitably share the work and wealth of this country, without destroying the foundation of all economies—the natural world.

So What Can We Do Right Here in Fannin County?

By Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

We need to vote Democratic, but more. We need to challenge the lies being told in our local newspapers, churches, public meetings, and casual conversations. Politics is a matter of understanding some basic things about our common life and talking about them. We do not need to adapt to the foolishness around us into order to elect somebody. We need to change the foolishness so that the population can elect and support the leadership we need. Let us keep thinking about how this can be done. This is the CALL to Fannin CITIZENS.

Is Horrific Weather Related to Global Warming?

By Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

No particular hurricane, tornado, drought, or flood can be directly tied to your car driving or your electric power plant, but it remains true that the rising average temperature of the planet is caused by fossil-fuel burning and that a higher average temperature on Earth makes weather events more extreme and more frequent. Global warming results are already happening. What we are experiencing was set in motions decades ago. And our current fossil-fuel use will produce even more unwelcome results for our grandchildren.

For a more detailed discussion of this important matter here are a few paragraphs from Bill McKibben:

A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

By Bill McKibben

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Bill McKibben is founder of the global climate campaign 350.org and a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont.