Wednesday, March 26, 2014

"Act like a Texan"

I still have some thoughts to collect from yesterday's meeting on the Texas Central Railway, so let's catch up on Wendy Davis slamming Greg Abbott around (I'm sure someone somewhere might construe that to be insensitive to a man in a wheelchair)...

Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis delivered a strong message to Republican opponent Greg Abbott on equal pay for women Monday morning, telling him to "act like a Texan" and stop letting his surrogates speak for him on the issue.

"I have a message for Greg Abbott today," Davis said at a speech in Austin. "Stop hiding behind your staff members. Stop hiding behind your surrogates. This Texas gal is calling you out. Act like a Texan and answer this question for yourself: What on earth is going on at your attorney general's office?" 

That's vintage Ann Richards right there.  Or maybe Don Vito Corleone.



Everyone knows she's saying "act like a man" (a phrase usually preceded by "Stand up and") and everyone also knows that Abbott has been acting like a man in his business dealings with the women that have been hired in the OAG over the years.

Two of his surrogates stumbled in television interviews on the subject, saying women are too "busy" to think about equal pay for equal work and insisting that the reason women are paid less is that "men are better negotiators." The San Antonio Express-News reported that Abbott's office pays female assistant attorneys general $6,000 less, on average, than men in the same position, and Abbott's campaign said he would veto equal pay legislation that because current wage discrimination laws are sufficient, he would make it easier for women to sue over pay discrimination.

As attorney general, Abbott also successfully defended the state against a female college professor who was being paid less than her employees for the same work, arguing that federal equal pay protections don't apply in state court.

Davis pointed out on Monday that as state senator, she introduced an equal pay bill in a Republican-controlled Texas legislature that would have changed the circumstances under which women can sue their employers for pay discrimination, and it passed. Gov. Rick Perry (R) vetoed the bill last June.

The only thing Greg Abbott has done in the nearly twelve years he's held office -- besides sue Barack Obama, of course -- is act like a man.  Just as every other man has been acting towards the women they hire, in Texas and across the country, for decades.

Keep in mind that it's just an act.  In order to get men like Greg Abbott to act differently -- and also the millions of other men who have kept women down with this pay gap since, I don't know, forever -- enough shame and blame needs to be heaped on their heads and draped around their shoulders until they get it.  Until they start acting better.

Paying women less than men like me for the same job is wrong.  It's wrong even if their experience differs: if they are good enough to be hired, they are good enough to be paid the same.  Underpaying people on the basis of their genitalia is plain old discrimination.  Since so many women are primary breadwinners in their households now, pay inequality affects the children they are struggling to raise as well.

But here's where we are reminded that Republicans don't really care as much about children as they do fetuses.  Once that umbilical cord is cut you're on your own, kid.  Get out there and make something of yourself, like I did.

Especially if you're a man, like Greg Abbott.  Why, you can have a tree fall on you and collect ten million bucks for it, then make certain nobody else -- man, woman, child, or fetus -- ever does the same.

That might be what a real Texan looks like to Republicans.  But it's not how one acts.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

A bullet train between Houston and Dallas comes into view

Today our little progblog contingent is taking a meeting with the principal players, including former Harris County Judge Bob Eckels and his comm director, David Benzion, about this.

In Asia and Europe, tens of millions of people have been happily riding high-speed bullet trains for decades. On our own shores, however, the implementation of intercity high-speed rail has suffered from a host of delays. The one system that has managed to get moving, somewhat—California’s—has lately found itself beset by legal problems and public cynicism over rising costs and the use of eminent domain to obtain private land for the rail line’s right-of-way.

The situation has fans of high-speed rail worried. If America’s first bullet-train system can’t get built in high-tech, environmentally progressive California, they wonder, where can it possibly get built?

Hold on to your ten-gallon hats. Texas, of all places, has emerged as the state that may stand the best chance of winning the U.S. race for high-speed rail. That California might lose bullet-train bragging rights to a state governed by a pro-fracking climate-change skeptic may come as a surprise. But a Texas triumph could also provide us with a teachable moment about how to tailor bullet-train projects to the different cultures and demographics of all 50 states.

 Way back in 2012, CultureMap had it first.

Talks of the quick trans-Texas trip have been underway since 2010, when Central Japan Railway Company (JR Central) rallied for part of an $8 billion federal grant that President Barack Obama set aside for high-speed rail corridors.

That effort failed, but JR Central has teamed up with the Texas-based company to raise roughly $10 billion in private dollars for the Houston-to-DFW route. Eckels believes federal involvement slows the process and piles on expenses, and claimed that private money would be repaid by riders' fares — "competitive and in many cases less than airfares."

The "no-taxpayer-dollars" thing should be popular with a certain caucus.

Though his company has been working closely with federal and state agencies on safety and right-of-way issues, TCR president Robert Eckels is confident that “our private development approach will be successful for this corridor.” TCR’s market-led approach, he adds, “will be differentiated by the high level of customer experience offered.”

That level is hinted at on TCR’s website, which emphasizes the speed and luxuriousness of the Japanese-built trains that would make up the company’s rolling stock. Clearly TCR hopes to lure the same Texas business travelers who helped make Southwest Airlines a homegrown corporate success story—but who now complain that the time spent getting into and out of airports has made flying between Dallas and Houston not much faster, and definitely not any easier, than driving.

Yes, eminent domain for a private operation such as this might not be a concern here, thanks to a recent development in the Keystone XL pipeline's legal tussle that was resolved in TransCanada's favor and against a Texas landowner.  And when I say 'resolved', I mean the SCOTX declined to hear her case.

The On Earth article has more on the environmental benefits of taking so many cars off the road and airline passengers out of the sky, and here's the bottom line on that.

Mass transit yields an environmental dividend regardless of why people use it. Were the nation’s first bullet train to come about thanks to Texas business travelers—shuttling, ironically, between two capitals of the oil and chemical industries—it could be the best advertisement imaginable. If high-speed rail is good enough for the good ol’ boys and gals of Texas, maybe the rest of America will realize that it’s good enough for them too.

So I'll be anxious to hear what more they can tell us about this development.  I'll have a followup post tomorrow morning.