The Weekly (waiting on the cold front) Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance reminds you that early voting for the November election starts next week as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff looks at the likely effect of voter ID on voter participation. Hint: Fewer people will be able to vote. Who could have guessed?

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out Lamar Smith for his racist legislation that will harm abused women.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson says it's time for the people of Williamson County to stand up so they no longer ask: how do these people keep getting elected?

Neil at Texas Liberal offered some pictures of Occupy Houston. Neil has visited the good folks at Occupy Houston a few times now and donated some supplies and a few bucks. The Occupy movement has taken hold in many Texas cities and across the nation. Please consider supporting Occupy in some fashion.

The Ghost of Sam Houston has some unkind words for Rick Perry's energy plan over at Darth Politico.

In the spirit of Halloween, McBlogger takes a look at The Return of the Living Dread.

Sunday Occupied Funnies

Or is it Octopi?

Open Source Dem on Rebuild Houston's fees going to hike and bike trails

Toes will be stepped upon and oxen will be gored. You've been warned. -- PD

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Re: Rebuild Houston funds may be going to hike/bike trails ...

There may or may not be a good reason for that. We will never know because Houston does not have plans or standards for this or anything. Remember? That Peter Brown was the plans guy, not Annise Parker the financial guy. (Ed.: *ouch*)

We have big deals, small deals, and probably -- in the case of hike/bike trails to or from nowhere -- side-deals. Such are the artifacts of collusive bargaining. The accounting aspects of all that are interesting -- well, to me, the economist -- but the accountability aspects of it are devastating to me the political executive: There are none!

This is pervasive unaccountability, which mainly benefits GOP incumbents and ideologues in state, county, and local governments. That is, government that the GOP here mostly controls but “govmint” that it runs against successfully for lack of any principled opposition or coherent alternative from the cringing liberal party of Vichy Democrats.

Municipalities have something called funds accounting. This (collusive bargaining, not funds accounting) will allow the drainage fee and Rebuild Houston scheme -- a huge transfer of municipal debt into a special-purpose entity “off the books” -- to have consequences that somebody envisioned originally (the transaction lawyers, surely) but that most of our elected officials and few if any citizens even begin to grasp. “Who could have known?” the Tim Geithners and Andy Ickens will ask rhetorically?

Well, the fee-men know for sure. They know about the fiascos they engineer (financially) and the whiz-bangs they plant in government (politically).

The right wing take, a “rain tax”, is farcical but predictable. It was a stupid-clever phrase that was nearly successful in defeating the measure in 2010 and, oh, a great way to sweep Sylvia Garcia out of office. That was not bad politics from the GOP standpoint. The, well, center-wing critique -- a “management district” -- is comparatively lame but true. Still it was nothing cringing liberals wanted to hear, so they lined up behind the drainage fee, and now they get their little hike/bike trails.

Some things are knowable: logically, funds accounting is neither complex nor much different from what people think of as budgeting or as just reconciling a bank account. Funds accounting is something the Democratic Party ought to not just understand but to use if it is to compete with the GOP for votes and, oh, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo or the King Street Patriots for money and activists.

In practice funds accounting can be very complex, indeed opaque, if a municipal or non-profit corporation like a hospital or my favorite, the “Fat Stock Show”, has many sources and uses of money. It may be channeled through many different funds and some officials may be able hide from others what is going on behind the legal mumbo-jumbo that municipal business in Houston is festooned with. To deal with such accounting, financial engineering, and even legal complexity, you have to trust the people managing it or at least appreciate the result ... as Rodeo, Pickup Truck, and Barbecue fans seem to.

Meanwhile, in municipal government …we do not have planning and standards so much as we have deals. We do not have agendas on Commissioners’ Court or City Council, we have dockets. So we fire-proof half a warehouse and wake up one morning with all the voting machines burned up. Duh!

The civil engineering is done not by actual civil engineers but by bond lawyers on behalf of land speculators and slumlords; thus, the engineers design the basements of world-class buildings downtown, then connect them all to an underground garage next to the bayou and eventually wonder: “why do all the buildings flood?” Duh! Plaintiff and defense lawyers -- symbiotes politically, mock adversaries in court -- loot banks and insurance exchanges all over the world with such fiascos and laugh all the way to … wherever else in the world they hide the proceeds. This is the way to run a pirate's cove, not a world-class professional and economic powerhouse.

Corporations, criminals, and syndicates comprised of both only have one fund to account for: a bottom line, also known in the trades as “net, net, net” or, in the original Italian, patrimonio netto. Exotic public/private enterprises use “special-purpose entities” -- specialty bankers or just 'bagmen' -- and now what are called transaction lawyers to do externally what, for example, the City of Houston does internally: exploit the fungible nature of money … creatively, as they say. When the internal and external obfuscation overlap, as they did here in Austin, and in D.C. with Enron, we get grand larceny as well as everything from the incompetent terrorism of the Iranian used-car salesman from Corpus Christi to the flamboyant piracy of Sir Allen Stanford. That is sad and dangerous but at this point almost funny.

There is no telling what will become of Rebuild Houston. Certainly it does not seem to be any different from what has gone before, just a new way to provide public credit for private real estate development and to poorly maintain everything with the cheapest labor possible. Hike and bike trails will certainly appease a few goo-goo liberals among the newly-prized class of political investors with incomes in the $250,000-1,000,000 bracket -- the darlings of political bundlers and consultants, the constituency of Martin Frost.

Sadly, the legalized criminality and criminalized legalism that pass for proficiency in municipal government is not conducive to peace or prosperity. They will destroy moderate Republicans like Ed Emmett and Steven Costello as well as sweep well-meaning Democrats out of citywide and countywide offices they have been elected to.

What we have been doing here in Houston and Harris County for decades cannot go on, so it won’t. The magical realism of the far-right noise and cringing liberal sham of center-left government will end in brutal clarity of some sort.

“You can fool some people all the time and all the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.”

President Lincoln said that, and I think President Obama gets it.

But I worry about the rest of the Democratic Party. It is plain enough that many of the voters I represent have less and less trust in our complex machinations and excuses for cowardice or failure. They do not think that a tortured succession of deals amount to a plan, and the Solyandra vultures on talk radio will not let them forget it.

Yes, this public credit for a private venture was craven, rotten, bundler/consultant politics from first (Bush) to finish (Obama). And that is likely how the White-Parker deal culture will play out as long as whiz-bangs -- in Steampunk terminology called mountebanks -- like Andy Icken are involved.

So who here would trust anything an Andy Icken would vouch for, a Vinson  Elkins would sign off on, and an Arthur Andersen -- now called Protiviti -- would account for?

Nobody in their right mind!

But those are whom the Seinfeld “Party about Nothing” rely on in city government obviously, and County Commissioner Precinct 2 most recently. This deal-culture -- legal or not -- is a suicidal paradigm of politics and government. It benefits the parasites of government and the pirates of modern commerce.

The Tea Party suspects as much. Cringing liberal, center-left office squatters and their entourages do not. They haven’t a clue and in fact live from deal to deal. They will probably lose their Blazing Saddles jobs owing to precisely the sort of demoralization they are spreading with regressive and indirect taxation multiplied many times over by the obfuscation of public finance generally.

Perry campaign needs to muzzle Anita

Before she applies the coup de grace to her husband's already-gravely-wounded presidential aspirations. Yesterday she said this:

"It’s been a rough month. We have been brutalized and beaten up and chewed up in the press to where I need this today," she said. "We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith. He is the only true conservative – well, there are some true conservatives. And they’re there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose."

So it's not the governor's poor debate performances, his swaggering rhetoric, his inconsistent approach to undocumented immigrants or even his unwillingness to condemn a pastor who both endorsed him and called Mitt Romney's religion "a cult" that are the reasons he's come under criticism. And correspondingly lost the respect of GOP voters to the tune of over 20 percentage points in the past month.

She likened Perry's decision to run to encountering a "burning bush," a reference to the Biblical story of Moses receiving a sign from God. And Anita Perry suggested that her husband's current difficulties were a "test."

"Last week, someone came up to Rick and gave him the scripture. He said Rick, I want to tell you God is testing you," she said.

Yeah. Next up for Rick Perry: boils all over his body and  locusts to swarm and cover him entirely and suck the pus from them. You know, before he is rewarded ten-fold (or whatever).

Anyway, then today Anita said this:

"My son had to resign his job because of federal regulations that Washington has put on us," Mrs. Perry said while campaigning for her husband in South Carolina, after a voter shared the story of losing his job.


"He resigned his job two weeks ago because he can't go out and campaign with his father because of SEC regulations," she continued, referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission. "He has a wife... he's trying to start a business. So I can empathize."

"My son lost his job because of this administration," she said a few minutes later.

[...]

Her comments about her son came in response to a question from 45-year-old voter who said he lost a job paying over $100,000 and who now makes $12 an hour as a handyman.

Griffin Perry resigned his six-figure position at Deutsche Bank in order to work on his father's presidential campaign. And -- in the wake of 2008's Great Crash -- because there are SEC regulations now in place to prevent Wall Street executives from participating directly in political campaigns, it's Obama's fault that he lost his job.

These two delusional gaffes followed last week's revelation that "people are hungering" for minimum wage jobs that her husband has graciously provided the citizens of the state of Texas.

There's simply nothing to add to this. There's not sufficient medication to relieve psychotic episodes this severe.

If she keeps saying things like this, even the $17 million bucks he raised in the third quarter isn't going to get him out of the hole she is helping him dig. 'Implosion' is now an understatement.

What the national media is exposing just by following her around and quoting her words is a detachment from reality even most of us in Texas weren't fully aware of. And trust me, it is breathtaking.

Rebuild Houston (drainage fee) funds to pay for hike/bike trails

Texas Watchdog:

It was passed by Houston voters as a tax to address the city’s decrepit drainage system and Third World streets. But $857,000 of the new Proposition 1 fund --- which Mayor Annise Parker pitched as a "lock box that can only be spent for street and drainage improvements" --- is slated for hike and bike trails.

The money will pay for "design, acquisition and construction" of trails as part of an overall plan to provide "an alternate route of travel for bicyclists and/or hikers away from street traffic," according to the city's latest capital improvement plan.

Shown the budget item, a chief proponent of Proposition 1 was baffled.

“The money was not supposed to go for hike and bike trails,” said Bob Jones, part of the successful Renew Houston effort. “This is not the intention for the money that we voted on.”

Wait a second; it's all a mistake. Specifically a too-vaguely-named accounting journal entry.

The fund, also known as Rebuild Houston, draws from four sources: drainage fees on property owners, developer impact fees, property taxes, and government grants.

[...]

The city's Public Works department acknowledged the hike-and-bike program is to receive Rebuild Houston money -- but not via the drainage tax component. The entire Rebuild Houston program is pegged by city charter for "Houston's drainage and streets."

The trails program "will not receive any funding from the drainage fee component," Roberto Medina, senior staff analyst at the department, said via e-mail, adding assurances from a planning person who heads hike and bike trail plans.

"Yes, it is listed as (Dedicated Drainage and Street Renewal) funding, but there are four components to that fund," Medina said. "We are well aware that it is not a clear way of identifying how a project is going to get funded, and it would have been nice for it to be more specific."

Yes, that would have been nice. Meanwhile ...

(Mayor Annise) Parker declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

Uh-oh. What about other supporters of Proposition 1/Renew Houston/Rebuild Houston?

Texas Watchdog contacted several supporters of Prop 1 to weigh in on this story. Jack P. Miller, president of RG Miller Engineers, and Christina Lindsay, executive director of the Houston Council of Engineering Companies, did not return calls. A person answering the phone at the home of Jeff Ross, of Pate Engineers, hung up on this reporter.

The Rebuild Houston Oversight Committee, which includes Ross, meets at 10 a.m. every fourth Tuesday in the Mayor’s Conference Room at City Hall.

Now I mostly take everything Texas Watchdog says with a shaker-full of salt, because they lean too far to the right for my taste. Just take a look at their headlines today, or any other day for that matter. But that doesn't mean a blind hog can't occasionally find a truffle.

What this looks like at first blush is -- at the very least -- yet another black eye for the mayor. But does Councilman Steven Costello earn any blame for the wording of the charter amendment establishing the fund with an exploitable loophole in it? (And if you do think he's at fault, keep in mind he has two three challengers in his re-election bid, and one of them is a real progressive.)

What about the rest of council? And the city's legal team -- led by City Attorney David Feldman -- who are supposed to do the due diligence on matters like these? Feldman certainly has been no stranger to controversy of late.

Or is it we the voters, who believed what they told us -- well, some of us believed; some did not -- who are at fault? Can you accept Medina's contention that it's all just an accounting mashup?

Who do you believe? Or more to the point: who do you want to believe?

Rally for Responsible Energy Sat. October 15

Members of Occupy Houston will rally in silent protest at Energy Day on Saturday October 15, 2011.

Energy Day is sponsored the big oil companies responsible for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and for building the Keystone XL pipeline, a potential environmental disaster running from Alberta, Canada right into our backyard. Valero and other oil refining companies are seeking a tax refund to the tune of $135 million to cover the cost of hydro-treating equipment to reduce the extensive pollution resulting from the refining of the tar sands oil transported by the pipeline.

This refund is coming from our property taxes. Money meant for schools may go to large oil companies to cover these costs! We need to educate festival goers that there are serious threats to our planet, local tax money wasted, and a serious corruption chain behind big oil.

We will march the perimeter of the festival in white shirts and red bandannas or $1 bills over our mouths. Why do we cover our mouths? Why are we silent? Because the 99% of the citizens in this country do not have a voice in this country! Why do we wear white? It’s the opposite of black, the color of oil, and a symbol of the corruption and collusion rampant in the big energy industry.

Meet at 12:00 noon on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at lower Tranquility Park. Show up in your white shirts, bandannas, and bring a $1 bill. After we gather ourselves, get organized, and settled, we march at 12:30pm one block south to Hermann Square Plaza, right outside City Hall. It’s all-right if you don’t show up in a white shirt. We’ll have you covered.

This rally comes as Secretary Clinton, despite all evidence to the contrary, claims she has "no reason to believe" that the review process of Keystone XL has been biased in favor of approval.

Let's be clear: stopping Keystone XL -- in the face of thousands of protests and the direst of warnings about its environmental impact -- is a lost cause. And that is exactly why the fight must continue. Read the comments at the links to the stories here and here, and in the link to the announcement of this protest, and keep in mind the words of Mohandas Ghandi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Be aware also that Metro's light rail is not operating this weekend due to construction of overhead crosswalks in the Texas Medical Center. that ...

METRORail will operate its normal schedule this weekend. The previously scheduled rail interruption for Friday-Sunday, Oct. 14-16, has been canceled.

Steve Jobs was a conservative Republican.

And probably a full-blown TeaBagger as well. And I say that without bothering to research his political contributions.

A personal sidebar here: My first computer was a Macintosh, in November of '88; when I went from the Plainview Daily Herald to the Midland Reporter-Telegram it was sitting on the desk I inherited, the result of a vendor arrangement in exchange for some co-op advertising. The two geeks in what was later called IT did not have anything like it and were very envious. They were working on those old Tandy TRS-80's, typing in MS-DOS. They were also playing around with some local petroleum engineers and geologists on something called a 'bulletin board service'.

(The only computer science I had learned in college in the late '70's was FORTRAN, and we were punching Hollerith cards and turning in a stack for the dining-room sized mainframe to spend a few hours processing.)

By the time I left the newspaper business for good, in January '92, there were about ten Macs in the building, all with big monitors and the paper was paginating (composing pages online). I was giving tutorials to my manager, not to mention the rest of the advertising sales staff. The MRT, to its credit, was ahead of the industry curve with regard to electronic publishing. But I never worked on another Mac after that; I bought PCs for my home use (my first was a Gateway) because I had bought into the meme that there wasn't enough software to run on anything but PCs. And wasn't ever going to be.

I was never willing to pay Apple's premium -- when desktop systems eventually dropped in price from $2K and $3K to around $1000, Macs were still $1500 -- for something that I perceived was nothing more than an affinity brand. Even the persistent urban legend that Macs never get computer viruses didn't sway me. It's also why my first smartphone is an Android. I had originally purchased the jazziest Blackberry on the market four years earlier and could not figure out how to use it. It had the wheel on the side; I couldn't change the font to something I liked ... so I traded it back in on a Motorola RAZR -- which was also one of the trickest phones on the market at the time. But was just a phone, of course; no e-mail.

The news that Jobs was a supreme tyrant and an even more massive tightwad disappoints me greatly. His long refusal to acknowledge the child he had out of wedlock points to the darker nature of his character.

Now I get the marketing whiz part of him completely. He didn't just create an affinity brand like Tiffany, Rolex, Lexus, Neiman Marcus ... he created a culture around his products. Root word being cult.

I get that Steve Jobs was so much smarter than everybody else -- and that he fostered an environment of sophistication within his company that focused on making things as easy as possible for the end-user -- which was clearly demonstrated by the fact that it took Microsoft ten years to copy him (Windows). I totally get that his ego correspondingly dictated that he charge people more for his superior intellect (in product design, razzle-dazzle presentation, etc.) That part is absolutely praiseworthy in our capitalist system.

That he had no measurable record of charitable giving despite a personal fortune estimated to be $8 billion, I admit, shocked me. Steve Jobs was a TeaBagger in at least one respect: he had that classic "I got mine, now you go get yours" attitude. "You don't need/won't get any help from me. I did it all by myself." Herman Cain as recently as this past Thursday espoused this same philosophy with respect to his lack of participation in the civil rights movement.

I find that mentality -- "No handouts, you lazy bums!" -- to be as abhorrent as any other pestilence on the land.

Bill Gates suddenly went up several notches in my estimation by comparison. And that is a crying-ass shame. Because Gates and Microsoft represent the culture of American corporate domination translated into soul-killing mediocrity as much as do the oil and gas companies, the newspaper and automobile companies I worked for once upon a time, et cetera (slow-to-no innovation in new technologies despite massive profit margins being just one hallmark).  I'm sure you can think of other industries that fit this description.

But at least they've given some back to those less fortunate.

It's true what Robert Fulgham wrote: everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten. Steve Jobs was way smarter in business than most people who have ever walked the Earth, and without having finished college. He also apparently did not absorb much from K.