Wrongdoing or evil actions are often masked by good intentions, and sometimes good intentions, when acted upon, may have unforeseen tragic consequences.
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.
Perry prides himself on issues and Texas "successes" that actually expose his incompetence.
August 30, 2011 |
Texas Governor Rick Perry has ridden into the GOP presidential race on his high horse, threatening to ‘get ugly’ with Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, stopping just short of accusing him of treason, and catering, as expected, to the most radical of the radical right wing.
Mr. Perry, for some bizarre reason, has captured the twisted imaginations of those who combine a brand of Christianity that Jesus Christ wouldn’t recognize, with a heavy worship of capitalism, and an irrational fear of anyone not white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant thrown in for good measure.
As he goes about spreading hate and intolerance, both of which play so well to the Tea Party, Mr. Perry often chooses to relinquish facts; again, a trait welcome to the far right wing. This is displayed in a variety of ways that can be seen by looking at some of the governor’s ‘accomplishments’ and statements, as taken from the ‘Perry for President’ website:
“Rick Perry will finally force Washington to fulfill its constitutional duty to secure our international borders.”
One of the Tea Party’s pet peeves is illegal immigration, that dastardly practice of allowing immigrants to slip through the extensive U.S. borders, especially that with Mexico, thus enabling them to wreak untold amounts of havoc as they bus tables, work on construction crews, and cut grass.
In Januray of 2011, a U.S. missionary couple, Sam and Nancy Davis, working in Mexico, were pursued by bandits, possibly seeking to steal their truck, valued at $50,000. As Mr. Davis tried to flee, the bandits began shooting, hitting and killing Mrs. Davis. In response, Mr. Perry’s spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, said Mrs. Davis’ murder underscores the need for greater border security. “’How many Americans are going to have to die for the federal government to pay attention and realize they need to secure the border,’ she said.”
The fact that this tragic shooting occurred at least 70 miles south of the Mexican/US border does not seem to concern Mr. Perry. He did not comment on crime in Mexico; the danger of driving flashy vehicles through areas known for criminal activity; the folly and accompanying risks of attempting to outrun murderous car thieves, etc. No, he seemed to see a crime that occurred in Mexico as demonstrating the need to ‘secure the border.’ Perhaps he is blaming the Davises for crossing into Mexico; after all, one must assume that if the border is ‘secure,’ no one could pass from either side to the other.
“No other candidate for President – Republican or Democrat – can match Rick Perry’s record on job creation.”
The website goes on to say that 40% of new jobs created in the U.S. since June of 2009 have been in Texas. This may be true, but one must not consider rushing off to Texas to achieve the great American dream(whatever that is). Most of those jobs pay minimum wage, and few carry health benefits. Also, industry has been attracted to Texas due to its limited environmental and safety regulations, bringing these businesses from other U.S. states. So if a voter wants to see reduced environmental and safety regulations made the law of the land, and seeks the creation of millions of jobs that pay minimum wage, Mr. Perry is the right candidate. So what if people will not be able to own homes, send their children to college, or get medical care? At least they will be working!
“Rick Perry believes the best way for the federal government to improve healthcare is to stimulate job creation so more Americans are covered by employer-sponsored health plans.”
One wonders how job creation is related to employer-sponsored health plans. A generation ago, health care was one of the standard benefits offered to employees; this has not been the case for years. Anyone who has been employed by a large corporation in the last 25 years is familiar with co-pays, deductibles, exclusion clauses, endless paperwork, etc. Employers are under no obligation to provide health care to their employees.
Also, with all the jobs Mr. Perry claims to have created in Texas, he might notice that most of them do not include health care. Why, one might reasonably ask, should he be trusted to provide this miracle to the entire United States, when he has failed to do so in Texas?
“If elected, Perry will repeal Obamacare.”
And, one presumes, cross his fingers and hope that employers decide to provide medical coverage to all employees. One wonders what color the sky is on Mr. Perry’s planet.
“Rick Perry believes in American exceptionalism.”
Although interpreted in different ways, American exceptionalism is a throwback to ‘Manifest Destiny,’ that belief that the United States was divinely ordained to run roughshod over the rest of the world, making up rules as it went along that only other nations need follow; violate them at their peril.
Mr. Perry “rejects the notion our president should apologize for our country but instead believes allies and adversaries alike must know that America seeks peace from a position of strength. We must strengthen our diplomatic relationships, and stand firm with our allies against our common enemies.”
So when the U.S. embarks on a military misadventure that its major allies shun, then causes a civil war which kills hundreds of thousands of people, destroys a country’s infrastructure and creates strife between sects that had managed to live in relative peace together for generations, there is no need for an apology? When said military action displaces millions of people, causes the U.S. president who spawned it to be seen as the second most dangerous person in the world, and results in the U.S. being hated around the globe, no kind of apology would be necessary? Oh, that’s right: American Exceptionalism. The U.S. is allowed to do whatever it pleases, and is exempt from considering how its actions might negatively impact anyone, including its own citizens.
To say that ‘America seeks peace’ would be laughable, were it not so astoundingly tragic. When a country arbitrarily overthrows democratically-elected governments, supports covert actions against others, and invades a nation whose only crime is the possession of large amounts of oil, it is hard to see it as seeking peace.
And so it goes. Mr. Perry is seen as a viable alternative to the current GOP frontrunner, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the cardboard cutout of himself who has the effrontery to be a Mormon, if one can imagine such a horror. Mr. Romney, additionally, must overcome the crime of having provided healthcare to the people of Massachusetts, and having actually supported the rights of same-sex couples. No, says the Tea Party, which now controls the once-proud Republican Party; Mr. Romney may be next in line for the nomination-coronation, but he is obviously ineligible. It is Mr. Perry, the darling of the evangelical right, who will wear the bright cape, with the big ‘TP’ emblazoned on his chest (that’s for Tea Party, not toilet paper, in case you were wondering), who will save the day.
But it is not yet over; the fat lady has not yet sung. Former Alaska Governor and 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin seems ready to throw her battered hat into the ring, and we mustn’t forget Minnesota Representative Michele Bachman, known mainly for her valiant campaign to restore light-bulb freedom of choice. Ah yes, the brightest lights (speaking of bulbs) may still be on the horizon.
President Obama is seen as vulnerable, due mainly to the sputtering U.S. economy. But the GOP may want to take a lesson from their own party in 1964, and the Democrats in 1972 (probably not, but let’s make the suggestion anyway). In 1964, the Republicans nominated the far-right Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater, wildly popular with the right, but not even tolerated by anyone else. He was decisively defeated by an abominable president, Lyndon Johnson. In 1972, the Democrats, always happy to make their own mistakes rather than learn from the mistakes of others, nominated South Dakota Senator George McGovern, revered by the left wing, but by no one else. He was soundly defeated by another awful president, Richard Nixon.
One might say what they will about the disappointing (at best) administration of Mr. Obama. But when opposed by either of the two Republican clowns mentioned here, or any of the others currently awaiting their turn in the three-ring circus called the Republican Party, he begins to regain some of the luster of his first campaign.
And so it goes. Another U.S. election campaign farce is underway. At least the late-night talk show hosts will have plenty of material to work with for the next 14 months.
Most Americans have never heard of Harold Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low.
August 29, 2011 |
Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency—a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled “Fed Up!” Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a “dirty energy” state where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.
But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.
The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance—and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials—Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.
“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that,” Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. “Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”
Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year, a local monthly in his hometown published the headline “Dallas’ Evil Genius” over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.
In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns—innocuously named Waste Control Systems—manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.
Now reporters for The Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.
In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.
This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry—who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state—voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state Legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to The Los Angeles Times’ report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an “independent” committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another “independent” political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)
According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into “an easy target. ... It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough.” But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the L.A. Times reporters, “This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site ... . Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. ... The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics.”
As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too—to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.
Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.
On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry.
On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol. Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors. They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles.
The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas. A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was “The Prophet State,” anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government. And the governor would have a special role.
The day before the meeting, Schlueter had received a prophetic message from Chuck Pierce, an influential prophet from Denton, Texas. God had apparently commanded Schlueter—through Pierce—to “pray by lifting the hand of the one I show you that is in the place of civil rule.”
Gov. Perry, it seemed.
Schlueter had prayed before his congregation: “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. ... I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.”
And grasp ahold the governor did. At the end of their meeting, Perry asked the two pastors to pray over him. As the pastors would later recount, the Lord spoke prophetically as Schlueter laid his hands on Perry, their heads bowed before a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Schlueter “declared over [Perry] that there was a leadership role beyond Texas and that Texas had a role beyond what people understand,” Long later told his congregation.
So you have to wonder: Is Rick Perry God’s man for president?
Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot.
The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.
Their beliefs can tend toward the bizarre. Some consider Freemasonry a “demonic stronghold” tantamount to witchcraft. The Democratic Party, one prominent member believes, is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. They’ve taken biblical literalism to an extreme. In Texas, they engage in elaborate ceremonies involving branding irons, plumb lines and stakes inscribed with biblical passages driven into the earth of every Texas county.
If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.
In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual.
In all the media attention surrounding Perry’s flirtation with a run for the presidency, the governor’s budding relationship with the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement has largely escaped notice. But perhaps not for long. Perry has given self-proclaimed prophets and apostles leading roles in The Response, a much-publicized Christians-only prayer rally that Perry is organizing at Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6.
The Response has engendered widespread criticism of its deliberate blurring of church and state and for the involvement of the American Family Association, labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its leadership’s homophobic and anti-Muslim statements. But it’s the involvement of New Apostolic leaders that’s more telling about Perry’s convictions and campaign strategy.
Eight members of The Response “leadership team” are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement. They’re employed or associated with groups like TheCall or the International House of Prayer (IHOP), Kansas City-based organizations at the forefront of the movement. The long list of The Response’s official endorsers—posted on the event’s website—reads like a Who’s Who of the apostolic-prophetic crowd, including movement founder C. Peter Wagner.
In a recent interview with the Observer, Schlueter explained that The Response is divinely inspired. “The government of our nation was basically founded on biblical principles,” he says. “When you have a governmental leader call a time of fasting and prayer, I believe that there has been a significant shift in our understanding as far as who is ultimately in charge of our nation—which we believe God is.”
Perry certainly knows how to speak the language of the new apostles. The genesis of The Response, Perry says, comes from the Book of Joel, an obscure slice of the Old Testament that’s popular with the apostolic crowd.
“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help,” Perry says in a video message on The Response website. “That's why I'm calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.”
The reference to Joel likely wasn’t lost on Perry’s target audience. Prominent movement leaders strike the same note. Lou Engle, who runs TheCall, told a Dallas-area Assemblies of God congregation in April that “His answer in times of crisis is Joel 2.”
Mike Bickle, a jock-turned-pastor who runs the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, a sort of command headquarters and university for young End Times enthusiasts, taught a 12-part series on Joel last year.
The Book of Joel describes a crippling drought and economic crisis—sound familiar?—in the land of Judah. The calamities, in Joel’s time and ours, are “sent by God to cause a wicked, oppressive, and rebellious nation to repent,” Bickle told his students.
To secure God's blessing, Joel commands the people to gather in “sacred assembly” to pray, fast, and repent.
More ominously, Bickle teaches that Joel is an “instruction manual” for the imminent End Times. It is “essential to help equip people to be prepared for the unique dynamics occurring in the years leading up to Jesus’ return,” he has said.
The views espoused by Bickle, Engle and other movement leaders occupy the radical fringe of Christian fundamentalism. Their beliefs may seem bizarre even to many conservative evangelicals. Yet Perry has a knack for finding the forefront of conservative grassroots. Prayer warriors, apostles and prophets are filled with righteous energy and an increasing appetite for power in the secular political world. Their zeal and affiliation with charismatic independent churches, the fastest-growing subset of American Christianity, offers obvious benefits for Perry if he runs for president.
There are enormous political risks, too. Mainstream voters may be put off by the movement’s extreme views or discomfited by talk of self-proclaimed prophets “infiltrating” government.
Catherine Frazier, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, wouldn’t respond to specific questions but wrote in an email, “The Response event is about coming together in prayer to seek wisdom and guidance from God to the challenges that confront our nation. That is where the governor's focus is, and he welcomes those that wish to join him in this common cause.”
For the moment, Perry’s relationship with the New Apostles is little known. Few in Texas GOP circles say they’ve ever heard of them. “I wish I could help you,” said Steve Munisteri, the state Republican Party chair. “I’ve never even heard of that movement.”
“For the most part I don't know them,” said Cathie Adams, former head of the Texas Eagle Forum and a veteran conservative activist.
Nonetheless, Perry may be counting on apostles and prophets to help propel him to the White House. And they hope Perry will lead them out of the wilderness into the promised land.
Listen closely to Perry’s recent public statements and you’ll occasionally hear him uttering New Apostle code words. In June, Perry defended himself against Texas critics on Fox News, telling host Neil Cavuto that “a prophet is generally not loved in their hometown.”
It seemed an odd comment. It’s the rare politician who compares himself to a prophet, and many viewers likely passed it off as a flub. But to the members of a radical new Christian movement, the remark made perfect sense.
The phrase “New Apostolic Reformation” comes from the movement’s intellectual godfather, C. Peter Wagner, who has called it, a bit vaingloriously, “the most radical change in the way of doing Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.”
Boasting aside, Wagner is an important figure in evangelical circles. He helped formulate the “church growth” model, a blueprint for worship that helped spawn modern mega-churches and international missions. In the 1990s, he turned away from the humdrum business of “harvesting souls” in mega-churches and embarked on a more revolutionary project.
He began promoting the notion that God is raising up modern-day prophets and apostles vested with extraordinary authority to bring about social transformation and usher in the Kingdom of God.
In 2006, Wagner published Apostles Today: Biblical Government for Biblical Power, in which he declared a “Second Apostolic Age.” The first age had occurred after Jesus’ biblical resurrection, when his apostles traveled Christendom spreading the gospel. Commissioned by Jesus himself, the 12 apostles acted as His agents. The second apostolic age, Wagner announced, began “around the year 2001.”
“Apostles,” he wrote, “are the generals in the army of God.”
One of the primary tasks of the new prophets and apostles is to hear God’s will and then act on it. Sometimes this means changing the world supernaturally. Wagner tells of the time in October 2001 when, at a huge prayer conference in Germany, he “decreed that mad cow disease would come to an end in Europe and the UK.” As it turned out, the last reported case of human mad cow disease had occurred the day before. “I am not implying that I have any inherent supernatural power,” Wagner wrote. “I am implying that when apostles hear the word of God clearly and when they decree His will, history can change.”
There is, of course, a corollary to these predictive abilities: Horrible things happen when advice goes unheeded.
Last year Jacobs warned that if America didn’t return to biblical values and support Israel, God would cause a “tumbling of the economy and dark days will come,” according to Charisma. To drive the point home, Jacobs and other right-wing allies—including The Response organizers Lou Engle and California pastor Jim Garlow—organized a 40-day “Pray and Act” effort in the lead-up to the 2010 elections.
Unlike other radical religious groups, the New Apostles believe political activism is part of their divine mission. “Whereas their spiritual forefathers in the Pentecostal movement would have eschewed involvement in politics, the New Apostles believe they have a divine mandate to rescue a decaying American society,” said Margaret Poloma, a practicing Pentecostal and professor of sociology at the University of Akron. “Their apostolic vision is to usher in the Kingdom of God.”
“Where does God stop and they begin?” she asks. “I don't think they know the difference.”
Poloma is one of the few academics who has closely studied the apostolic movement. It’s largely escaped notice, in part, because it lacks the traditional structures of either politics or religion, says Rachel Tabachnick, a researcher who has covered the movement extensively for Talk2Action.org, a left-leaning site that covers the religious right.
“It’s fairly recent and it just doesn’t fit into people’s pre-conceived notions,” she says. “They can’t get their head around something that isn’t denominational.”
The movement operates through a loose but interlocking array of churches, ministries, councils and seminaries—many of them in Texas. But mostly it holds together through the friendships and alliances of its prophets and apostles.
The Response itself seems patterned on TheCall, day-long worship and prayer rallies usually laced with anti-gay and anti-abortion messages. TheCall—also the name of a Kansas City-based organization—is led by Lou Engle, an apostle who looks a bit like Mr. Magoo and has the unnerving habit of rocking back and forth while shouting at his audience in a raspy voice. (Engle is also closely associated with the International House of Prayer—, Mike Bickle’s 24/7 prayer center in Kansas City.) Engle frequently mobilizes his followers in the service of earthly causes, holding raucous prayer events in California to help pass Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, and making an appearance in Uganda last year to lend aid to those trying to pass a law that would have imposed the death penalty on homosexuals. But Engle's larger aim is Christian control of government.
“The church’s vocation is to rule history with God,” he has said. “We are called into the very image of the Trinity himself, that we are to be His friends and partners for world dominion.”
“It sounds so fringe but yet it’s not fringe,” Tabachnick says. “They’ve been working with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Sam Brownback, and now Rick Perry. ... They are becoming much more politically noticeable.”
Some of the fiercest critics of the New Apostolic Reformation come from within the Pentecostal and charismatic world. The Assemblies of God Church, the largest organized Pentecostal denomination, specifically repudiated self-proclaimed prophets and apostles in 2000, calling their creed a “deviant teaching” that could rapidly “become dictatorial, presumptuous, and carnal.”
Assemblies authorities also rejected the notion that the church is supposed to assume dominion over earthly institutions, labeling it “unscriptural triumphalism.”
The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.
Asked about the meaning of the Seven Mountains, Schlueter says, “God's kingdom just can’t be expressed on Sunday morning for two hours. God’s kingdom has to be expressed in media and government and education. It’s not like our goal is to have a Bible on every child’s desk. That’s not the goal. The goal is to hopefully have everyone acknowledge that God’s in charge of us regardless.”
But climbing those mountains sounds a little more specific on Sunday mornings. Schlueter has bragged to his congregation of meetings with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, and the Arlington City Council. He recently told a church in Victoria that state Rep. Phil King, a conservative Republican from Weatherford, had allowed him to use King’s office at the Capitol to make calls and organize.
“We’re going to influence it,” Schlueter told his congregation. “We’re going to infiltrate it, not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing ... He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain. Just do it, it’s no big deal.’ I was talking with [a member of the congregation] the other day. She’s going to start infiltrating. A very simple process. She’s going to join the Republican Party, start going to all their meetings. Some [members] are already doing that.”
Doug Stringer, a relatively low-profile apostle, is one of the movement’s more complex figures—and one of the few people associated with The Response who returned my calls. His assignment for The Response: mobilizing the faithful from around the nation. Though he's friendly with the governor and spoke at the state GOP convention, Stringer says he’s a political independent, “morally conservative” but with a “heart for social justice.”
Stringer runs Somebody Cares America, a nonprofit combining evangelism with charitable assistance to the indigent and victims of natural disasters. In 2009, Perry recognized Stringer in his State of the State address for his role in providing aid to Texans devastated by Hurricane Ike.
Stringer’s message is that The Response will be apolitical, non-partisan, even ecumenical. The goal, he says, is to “pray for personal repentance and corporate repentance on behalf of the church, not against anybody else.”
I ask him about his involvement with the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, which is overseen by Schlueter. Six of the nine people listed as network “advisors” are involved in The Response, including Stringer, Cindy Jacobs and Waco pastor Ramiro Peña. The Texas group is part of a larger 50-state network of prophets, apostles and prayer intercessors called the Heartland Apostolic Network, which itself overlaps with the Reformation Prayer Network run by Jacobs. The Texas Apostolic Prayer Network is further subdivided into sixteen regions, each with its own director.
Some of these groups’ beliefs and activities will be startling, even to many conservative evangelicals. For example, in 2010 Texas prayer warriors visited every Masonic lodge in the state attempting to cast out the demon Baal, whom they believe controls Freemasonry. At each site, the warriors read a decree—written in legalese—divorcing Baal from the “People of God” and recited a lengthy prayer referring to Freemasonry as “witchcraft.”
Asked whether he shares these views, Stringer launches into a long treatise about secrecy during which he manages to lump together Mormonism, Freemasonry and college fraternities.
“I think there has been a lot of damage and polarization over decades because of the influence of some areas of Freemasonry that have been corrupted,” he says. “In fact, if you look at the original founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, he had a huge influence by Masonry. Bottom-line, anything that is so secretive that has to be hidden in darkness ... is not biblical. The Bible says that everything needs to be brought to the light. That’s why I would never be part of a fraternity, like on campus.”
Why would Perry throw in with this crowd?
One possible answer is that he’s an opportunistic politician running for president who’s trying to get right, if not with Jesus, with a particular slice of the GOP base.
Perry himself may have the gift of foresight. He seems preternaturally capable of spotting The Next Big Thing and positioning himself as an authentic leader of grassroots movements before they overtake other politicians. Think of the prescient way he hitched his political future to the Tea Party. In 2009 Perry spoke at a Tax Day protest and infamously flirted with Texas secession. At the time it seemed crazy. In retrospect it seems brilliant.
Now, he’s made common cause with increasingly influential fundamentalists from the bleeding fringe of American Christianity at a time when the political influence of mainstream evangelicals seems to be fading.
For decades evangelicals have been key to Republican presidential victories, but much has changed since George W. Bush named Jesus as his favorite philosopher at an Iowa debate during the 2000 presidential campaign. There is much turbulence among evangelicals. There’s no undisputed leader, a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson, to bring the “tribes”—to use Stringer’s phrase—together. So you go where the momentum is. There is palpable excitement in the prayer movement and among the New Apostles that the nation is on the cusp of a major spiritual and political revival.
“On an exciting note, we are in the beginning stages of the Third Great Awakening,” Jacobs told Trinity Church in Cedar Hill earlier this year. (Trinity’s pastor, Jim Hennesy, is also an apostle and endorser of The Response. Trinity is probably best known for its annual Halloween “Hell House” that tries to scare teens into accepting Jesus.) “We are seeing revivals pop up all over the United States. ... Fires are breaking out all over the place. And we are going to see great things happening.”
Moreover, various media outlets have documented a possible coalescing of religious-right leaders around Perry’s candidacy. Time magazine reported on a June conference call among major evangelical leaders, including religious historian David Barton and San Antonio pastor John Hagee, in which they “agreed that Rick Perry would be their preferred candidate if he entered the race,” according to the magazine.
Journalist Tabachnick says politicians are attracted to the apostolic movement because of the valuable organizational structure and databases the leadership has built.
“I believe it’s because they’ve built such a tremendous communication network,” she says, pointing to the 50-state prayer networks plugged into churches and ministries. “They found ways to work that didn’t involve the institutional structures that many denominations have. They don’t have big offices, headquarters. They work more like a political campaign.”
But if the apostles present a broad organizing opportunity, the political risks for Perry are equally large.
In 2008 GOP nominee John McCain was forced to reject Hagee’s endorsement after media scrutiny of the pastor’s anti-Catholic comments. Similarly, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign nearly fell apart when voters saw video of controversial sermons by the candidate’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. If anything, Perry is venturing even further into the spiritual wilderness. The faith of the New Apostles will be unfamiliar, strange, and scary to many Americans.
Consider Alice Patterson. She’s in charge of mobilizing churches in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma for The Response. A field director for the Texas Christian Coalition in the 1990s, she’s now a significant figure in apostolic circles and runs a San Antonio-based organization called Justice at the Gate.
Patterson, citing teachings by Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce and Lou Engle, has written that the Democratic Party is controlled by “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure” unleashed by the biblical figure Jezebel.
Patterson claims to have seen demons with her own eyes. In 2009, at a prophetic meeting in Houston, Patterson says she saw the figure of Jezebel and “saw Jezebel’s skirt lifted to expose tiny Baal, Asherah, and a few other spirits. There they were—small, cowering, trembling little spirits that were only ankle high on Jezebel’s skinny legs.”
Those revelations are contained in Patterson’s 2010 book Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform a Nation. Patterson’s aim, as she makes clear in her book, is getting black and brown evangelicals to vote Republican and support conservative causes. A major emphasis among the New Apostles is racial reconciliation and recruitment of minorities and women. The apostolic prayer networks often perform elaborate ceremonies in which participants dress up in historical garb and repent for racial sins.
The formula—overcoming racism to achieve multiracial fundamentalism—has caught on in the apostolic movement. Some term the approach the “Rainbow Right,” and in fact The Response has a high quotient of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans in leadership positions.
Lou Engle, for example, is making a big push to recruit black activists into the anti-abortion ranks. “We’re looking for the new breed of black prophets to arise and forgive us our baggage,” he said at Trinity Assemblies of God, “and then lead us out of victimization and into the healing of a nation, to stop the shedding of innocent blood.”
Rick Perry is a white southern conservative male who may end up running against a black president. It doesn’t take a prophet to see that he could use friends like these.
There’s one other possible reason for Perry’s flirtation with the apostles, and it has nothing to do with politics. He could be a true believer.
Perry has never been shy about proclaiming his faith. He was raised a Methodist and still occasionally attends Austin’s genteel Tarrytown United Methodist Church. But according to an October 2010 story in the Austin American-Statesman, he now spends more Sundays at West Austin’s Lake Hills Church, a non-denominational evangelical church that features a rock band and pop-culture references. The more effusive approach to religion clearly appealed to Perry. “They dunk,” Perry told the American-Statesman. “Methodists sprinkle.”
Still, attending an evangelical church is a long way from believing in modern-day apostles and demons in plain sight. Could Perry actually buy into this stuff?
He’s certainly convinced the movement’s leaders. “He’s a very deep man of faith and I know that sometimes causes problems for people because they think he’s making decisions based on his faith,” Schlueter says. He pauses a beat. “Well, I hope so.”
But the danger of associating with extremists is apparent even to Schlueter, the man who took God’s message to Perry in September 2009. “It could be political suicide to do what he’s doing,” Schlueter says. “Man, this is the last thing he’d want to do if it were concerning a presidential bid. It could be very risky.”
Forrest Wilder, a native of Wimberley, Texas, joined the Observer as a staff writer in April 2005. Forrest specializes in environmental reporting and runs the “Forrest for the Trees” blog. Forrest graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2003 with a degree in Anthropology.
After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.
"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.
Paul doesn't support FEMA because of "moral hazard." The fact that people will receive help should a natural disaster strike encourages people to live where natural disaster happen. (Like "North America.") Paul is mostly talking about the National Flood Insurance Program, which definitely has glaring flaws as public policy, but abolishing the federal agency in charge of responding to natural disasters instead of fixing the problems with one program that agency oversees seems like overkill.
It's very old news that Ron Paul thinks we should abolish FEMA, it's just rare that you hear anyone say we should go back to the good old days of disaster response and management. "We should be like 1900" is a very illuminating statement.
Back in those days, after hurricanes would strike, communities would remain devastated, with thousands of people homeless and hungry, for weeks. And eventually they would beg the Federal War Department for help. (But they all enjoyed their liberty, as they waited in filth and disease for help from Uncle Sam.)
Or maybe we should be like 1927?
He's anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality and anti-education, and that's just the start.
August 26, 2011 |
This article has been updated.
There are few things as maddening in a maddening political season as the warm and fuzzy feelings some progressives evince for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the Republican presidential candidate. "The anti-war Republican," people say, as if that's good enough.
But Ron Paul is much, much more than that. He's the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. He's an anti-reproductive-rights Republican. He's a gay-demonizing Republican. He's an anti-public education Republican and an anti-Social Security Republican. He's the John Birch Society's favorite congressman. And he's a booster of the Constitution Party, which has a Christian Reconstructionist platform. So, if you're a member of the anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality, anti-education, pro-communist-witch-hunt wing of the progressive movement, I can see how he'd be your guy.
Paul first drew the attention of progressives with his vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Coupled with the Texan's famous call to end the Federal Reserve, that somehow rendered him, in the eyes of the single-minded, the GOP's very own Dennis Kucinich. Throw in Paul's opposition to the drug war and his belief that marriage rights should be determined by the states, and Paul seemed suitable enough to an emotionally immature segment of the progressive movement, a wing populated by people with privilege adequate enough to insulate them from the nasty bits of the Paul agenda. (Tough on you blacks! And you, women! And you, queers! And you, old people without money.)
Ron Paul's anti-war stance, you see, comes not from a cry for peace, but from the deeply held isolationism of the far right. Some may say that, when it comes to ending the slaughter of innocents, the ends justify the means. But, in their romance with Ron Paul, what ends do Paulite progressives really seek? The end of war, or simply payback for a president who has let them down. And for that payback some seem all too willing go along with means, that if allowed to come to fruition, involve trading the rights and security of a great many Americans for the promise of non-intervention.
Here's a list -- by no means comprehensive -- of Ron Paul positions and associates that should explain, once and for all, why no self-respecting progressive could possibly sidle up to Paul. 1) Ron Paul on Race
Based on his religious adherence to his purportedly libertarian principles, Ron Paul opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Unlike his son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ron Paul has not even tried to walk back from this position. In fact, he wears it proudly. Here's an excerpt from Ron Paul's 2004 floor speech about the Civil Rights Act, in which he explains why he voted against a House resolution honoring the 40th anniversary of the law:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.
He also said this: "[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty."
Ron Paul also occasionally appears at events sponsored by the John Birch Society, the segregationist right-wing organization that is closely aligned with the Christian Reconstructionist wing of the religious right.
In 2008, James Kirchick brought to light in the pages of the New Republic a number of newsletters with Paul's name in the title -- Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report, and The Ron Paul Investment Letter -- that contained baldly racist material, which Paul denied writing.
At NewsOne, Casey Gane-McCalla reported a number of these vitriolic diatribes, including this, on the L.A. riots after the Rodney King verdict: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began.”
In a related piece, Jon C. Hopwood of Yahoo!'s Associated Content cites a Reuters report on Paul's response to the TNR story, which came in the form of a written statement:
The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.... I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.
2) Ron Paul on Reproductive Rights
The sponsor of a bill to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ron Paul's libertarianism does not apply to women, though it does apply to zygotes. His is a no-exceptions anti-abortion position, essentially empowering a rapist to sire a child with a woman of his choosing. Although Paul attributes his stance on abortion to his background as an ob-gyn physician, it should be noted that most ob-gyns are pro-choice, and that Paul's draconian position tracks exactly with that of his Christian Reconstructionist friends.
While mainstream media, when they're not busy ignoring his presidential campaign in favor of the badly trailing former Utah Gov. John Huntsman, invariably focus on Paul's economic libertarianism, Sarah Posner, writing for the Nation, noted that during his appearances leading up to the Iowa straw poll (in which Paul finished second only to Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minn., by a 200-vote margin), "launched into gruesome descriptions of abortion, a departure from his stump speech focused on cutting taxes, shutting down the Federal Reserve, getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and repealing the Patriot Act." 3) Ron Paul on LGBT People
While it's true that Paul advocates leaving it to the states to determine whether same-sex marriages should be legally recognized, it's not because he's a friend to LGBT people. Paul's position on same-sex marriage stems from his beliefs about the limits of the federal government's role vis-a-vis his novel interpretation of the Constitution.
In fact, a newsletter called the Ron Paul Poltiical Report, unearthed by Kirchick, shows Paul on a rant against a range of foes and conspiracies, including "the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS," to which Paul parenthetically adds, "my training as a physician helps me see through this one." The passage, which also portends a "coming race war in our big cities," complains of the "perverted" and "pagan" annual romp for the rich and powerful known as Bohemian Grove, and takes aim at the "demonic" Skull and Bones Society at Yale, not to mention the "Israeli lobby," begins with the paranoid claim, "I've been told not to talk, but these stooges don't scare me."
While Paul denied, in 2001, writing most of the scurrilous material that ran, without attribution, in newsletters that bore his name in the title, this passage, according to Jon Hopwood, bears Paul's byline. 4) Ron Paul Calls Social Security Unconstitutional, Compares it to Slavery
Earlier this year, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," Paul declared both Social Security and Medicare to be unconstitutional, essentially saying they should be abolished for the great evil that they are -- just like slavery. Here's the transcript, via ThinkProgress:
["FOX NEWS SUNDAY" HOST CHRIS] WALLACE: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.
PAUL: Technically, they are. … There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn't say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause. … That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that's what we have to reverse—that very notion that you're presenting.
WALLACE: Congressman, it's not just a liberal view. It was the decision of the Supreme Court in 1937 when they said that Social Security was constitutional under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
PAUL: And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal, too, and we had to reverse that.
5) Ron Paul, Christian Reconstructionists and the John Birch Society
The year 2008 was a telling one in the annals of Ron Paul's ideology. For starters, it was the year in which he delivered the keynote address [video] at the 50th anniversary gala of the John Birch Society, the famous anti-communist, anti-civil-rights organization hatched in the 1950s by North Carolina candy magnate Robert Welch, with the help of Fred Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and a handful of well-heeled friends. The JBS is also remembered for its role in helping to launch the 1964 presidential candidacy of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and for later backing the segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1968 third-party presidential bid.
The semi-secular ideology of the John Birch Society -- libertarian market and fiscal theory laced with flourishes of cultural supremacy -- finds its religious counterpart, as Fred Clarkson noted, in the theonomy of Christian Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible -- which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men -- as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.
When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).
At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony's son-in-law.)
At a "Pastor's Forum" [video] at Baldwin's Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. "Premillennialist" refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.
They also believe, according to Clarkson, "that 'the Christians' are the 'new chosen people of God,' commanded to do what 'Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do...create the society that God requires.' Further, Jews, once the 'chosen people,' failed to live up to God's covenant and therefore are no longer God's chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are."
Responding to Baldwin's congregant, Paul explained, "I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn't happen to be reflecting God's views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support... And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews -- that maybe there's a broader definition of that."
At the John Birch Society 50th anniversary gala, Ron Paul spoke to another favorite theme of the Reconstructionists and others in the religious right: that of the "remnant" left behind after evil has swept the land. (Gary North's publication is called The Remnant Review.) In a dispatch on Paul's keynote address, The New American, the publication of the John Birch Society, explained, "He claimed that the important role the JBS has played was to nurture that remnant and added, 'The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth.'"
Is there a progressive willing to join that fold?
Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/addiestan
Since Perry is running for president on a record of fiscal responsibility, it’s important to understand his 2006 decision that wreaked havoc on his state.
In his State of the State speech in February, Rick Perry described the $27 billion budget shortfall confronting the Texas Legislature.
“Now, the mainstream media and big government interest groups are doing their best to convince us that we’re facing a budget Armageddon,” Perry said. “Texans don’t believe it and they shouldn’t because it’s not true.”
The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services.
Lou Dubose is the editor of the Washington Spectator, the award-winning independent newsletter covering national affairs (www.washingtonspectator.org). Dubose has covered Texas politics since the mid-eighties when he edited the Texas Observer. With co-author Jan Reid, he wrote The Hammer: God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress (Public Affairs), a political biography of Tom Delay, who was sentenced this year by a Texas jury to three years in jail for money laundering. Dubose was also the co-author with the late Molly Ivins of two New York Times bestsellers about George W. Bush: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, both published by Random House
Perry’s statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill he pushed through the Legislature in a special session five years earlier.
With Perry running for president on a record of fiscal responsibility (and job creation, discussed later in this article), it’s important to understand the consequences of his 2006 “business margins tax” — and to ask if the governor knew that the tax reform he proposed would undermine the state’s budgets in the years that followed.
First, some background. Texas is one of nine states with no income tax. It relies on property taxes to pay for public services — notably, to pay for public education, which consumes the lion’s share of property taxes.
Because there is no income tax, property taxes are high. In 2006, Perry called a special session to address property taxes. With no income tax, there are no easy fixes. Yet Perry found one. A business-margins tax he said would provide enough revenue to allow for reductions in property taxes.
It was evident at the time that the new tax would not deliver what the governor promised. The state comptroller, Carole Strayhorn, had her staff run the numbers on Perry’s tax-reform proposal.
“In 2007,” she wrote in a letter to Perry, “your plan is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short. These are conservative estimates.”
The comptroller warned that “no economic miracle will close the gap your plan creates. Even if every dollar of the current [2006] $8.2 billion surplus was poured into the plan, it would not cover the plan’s cost for more than two years, 2007 and 2008. The gap is going to continue to grow year by year.” The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by tax increases, the comptroller warned, “or massive cuts in essential public services — like public education.”
“It was not only Ms. Strayhorn’s letter,” Houston Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg told me. “Every official document predicting the state’s financial crisis at the time predicted exactly what happened.”
Hochberg, the Legislature’s resident authority on public-education finance, also warned Perry that the tax bill he was promoting would not produce the revenue he promised.
“I asked the governor about this in a small meeting amongst legislators,” Hochberg said. “His answer to me, I remember it as clear as day, was ‘Scott, use your common sense. Don’t you know that when we cut property taxes we will see such an economic boom that you will never even notice the drop in revenue?’”
Perry’s response to the Democratic legislator was candid — and newsworthy. Perry admitted he knew that the tax reform he proposed would result in a “drop in revenue.”
Perry was not alone in that knowledge.
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst told San Antonio Express-News reporter Garry Scharrer this past January that he, too, knew the new tax wouldn’t deliver what it promised:
“Dewhurst now says that he knew that revenue projections from the revised business franchise tax ‘were inflated’ and told Senate members in closed-door caucus meetings at the time that the business tax would not perform as advertised ‘and that we were going to create a structural funding deficit in state government.’ But Dewhurst said he also believed at the time that ‘we would grow out of it by now.’”
A state senator told me last month that Republican leaders in the Senate knew the tax they were supporting wouldn’t provide adequate revenue, and the “grow out of it” trope was their answer to questions from skeptics.
“They knew their projections were bullshit,” the senator said. “When you questioned them about it, they’d say ‘we’ll grow out of it.’”
That’s the story. The state’s Republican governor and lieutenant governor knowingly created a budget crisis.
As the state’s comptroller predicted, a surplus covered some of the 2007-2008 budget shortfall. In 2009, Perry used $17 billion of President Obama’s federal stimulus money to fill the funding gap for the following two years, and to cover a shortfall in the previous fiscal year’s budget. (Perry angrily refused $555 billion in stimulus money designated for the extension of benefits to the unemployed, protesting that the federal dollars came with strings attached.)
When the Legislature convened in January 2011, the federal stimulus money was spent, and the budget shortfall about which the comptroller warned Perry five years earlier had arrived.
Public education took the biggest hit. I asked Hochberg about the $4 billion cut from the state’s public education budget.
He said the funding gap is larger: $4.3 billion on the basic “formulas,” which have always been funded. And “a billion-plus” ($1.4 billion) in “categorical funding” to public schools — funds for teacher incentives, school facilities, pre-kindergarten grants.
Thus far, 12,000 teachers have been laid off. Add to that roughly 6,000 state employees cashiered because of budget cuts, a figure that doesn’t include university professors and other university employees who will lose their jobs because of the $1.2 billion cut from higher ed funding.
Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals were cut, and the final four months of Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2012 were not funded.
There was an alternative to the austerity budget the Texas Legislature passed in June. Democrats and some Republicans proposed tapping the state’s Rainy Day Fund, funded by oil and gas taxes, to cover part of the shortfall.
Perry, however, declared the $9.5 billion fund off limits. He ultimately acquiesced to demands from moderate Republicans and agreed to use $3.2 billion to cover part of the current fiscal year’s deficit. But nothing for the next biennium, when the state’s public schools are short $5.7 billion.
“The governor doesn’t do anything on his own,” Hochberg observed. “The governor was only able to do that because he had a large number of House members, particularly newly elected Tea Party House members, who were willing to say ‘I’m not going to vote against the governor.’
“But, clearly, he led the parade.” When the Legislature convenes in 2013, it will face a shortfall of $10 billion to $18 billion, plus the $4.8 billion in Medicaid expenses it failed to fund this year.
Jobs For Sale
By now we all know what Rick Perry is selling. He collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from other states. The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his creations, have had unprecedented success.
It’s not as simple as Perry would have you believe.
The two big economic development funds Perry controls operate on a trickle-up economic theory. The state takes money from taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create new jobs.
Yet corporations often fail to deliver, and the governor and his staff rewrite corporations’ contracts to relax their job-creation requirements.
Grants are often made to companies that would move into the state or expand their workforce without a taxpayer-funded incentive.
The governor hands over millions of dollars to corporations whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.
And Rick Perry holds all the cards. The lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House have a vote on which corporations get public money. But as a state senator explained to me, neither of them has the staff to evaluate candidates for taxpayer funding.
The same senator also said he would like to know how many times the speaker and lieutenant governor have said ‘no’ to Perry. There is no public record. The governor proposes and the governor disposes, in closed meetings.
And these are scarce dollars. In a low-tax and low-services state, the zero-sum-game nature of the budgetary process is painfully evident. For example, the biggest pot of economic-development dollars, the Texas Enterprise Fund, was started in 2003 by drawing $285 million from the state’s Rainy Day Fund. The same Rainy Day Fund the governor this year declared off limits for the public schools.
The Enterprise Fund also withdrew $161 million from the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund in 2009, at a time when unemployment taxes paid by businesses tripled and only 34 percent of unemployed workers received benefits.
Add to that the total funds appropriated by the Legislature, and you get close to $500 million, all of which has or will be disbursed by the governor.
Perry has been in office for more than 10 years, which has allowed him to use his authority to make political appointments to expand the constitutionally limited powers of his office. He is, in other words, a very strong weak governor.
Every statewide elected office is held by a Republican. And the Republican Party holds a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature. This political hegemony has created a climate that discourages oversight of the Republican governor.
Public Interest Oversight
In the absence of official oversight, a good-government group, Texans for Public Justice (TPJ), did its own audit of the economic development funds and found that in 2009 the number of corporate grant recipients not fulfilling their obligations had increased from 42 percent to 66 percent.
TPJ also found that when companies failed to meet their contractual obligations to provide jobs, the governor’s office discreetly rewrote their contracts.
No state official, appointed or elected, it seemed, was working to ensure that the taxpayer was getting a reasonable return on the $368 billion the governor had handed out at the time TPJ’s report was released.
Beyond the sloppy stewardship of taxpayer dollars, many of Perry’s grants make little sense. Consider $600,000 paid to the Cabela’s sporting-goods chain for a commitment of 400 new jobs in two new super-stores. And the promise of “new hotels, entertainment parks, restaurants and complementary retail stores … expected to total over $250 million and create an additional 2,000 Texas jobs,” according to documents obtained by TPJ.
Cabela’s is not Disney. It created 241 jobs, with average annual salaries of $23,000. The hotels, restaurants, and various retail outlets never materialized. The state recovered $177,288, or 44 percent of the grant.
“It’s a slippery slope when you fund retail,” said Don Baylor, a policy analyst at the non-profit Center for Public Policy Priorities. “Because retail always follows where rooftops are.” In other words, where there are consumers, Cabela’s and other retailers need no incentive.
Other grants were made to corporations expanding facilities they are unlikely to abandon.
Motiva Enterprises, for example, is a joint venture of Shell Oil and the Saudi-Arabian oil company Aramco. In 2006, Texas awarded Motiva $2 million on the promise of 300 jobs it would create through a $3.2 billion project to make its Port Arthur refinery the largest in the nation. With a producing refinery on Port Arthur’s Sabine-Neches Waterway, Motiva was unlikely to take its $3.2 billion expansion project to another state.
Nor was Motiva so illiquid that it could not have expanded its refinery without $2 million from the public treasury. In the quarter in which Motiva’s $2 million check was cut, Shell reported $6.3 billion in earnings.
Taxpayers in Texas also wrote checks to mortgage bankers, while the bankers booked huge profits on the subprime home-loans that foundered the economy in 2007.
Countrywide Home Loans got $20 million in 2004, on a commitment of 7,500 jobs. It created 3,876. Then the bottom fell out of the housing market, Countrywide was charged with defrauding its clients, and was acquired by Bank of America. It has agreed to return 40 percent of its $20 million. By July 2011, the Countrywide loan portfolio, underwritten in part by Texas taxpayers, had cost Bank of America more than 50 percent of its share value.
Texas taxpayers also gave Washington Mutual $15 million in 2005, to open a new $50 million facility in San Antonio. At the time the deal was announced, WaMu had $300 billion in assets, $188 billion in deposits, and 43,000 employees. It was also in the process of dumping its 30-year-fixed-rate mortgage portfolio to clear the books for high-risk subprime loans.
“Those were really negative investments,” Baylor said. “You financed toxic financial products that sucked equity and wealth out of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in Texas, but nationwide.”
WaMu also consistently missed its job targets. TPJ found that the governor’s office amended its contract, allowing aggregated part-time jobs to count as full-time jobs.
Other grants fail to pass the smell test.
Bill White, Perry’s opponent in the 2010 general election, criticized an $8.5 million grant to Caterpillar Inc. to build an engine plant in Seguin. Perry’s office responded that White was desperate because he was trailing in the polls.
Perhaps.
But Peter M. Holt owns the Caterpillar sales outlets in Texas and had donated $424,000 to Perry’s campaigns. The decision to locate the plant in Texas, according to a company press release obtained by White, was made before Caterpillar’s grant was awarded.
Sanderson Farms got $500,000 in exchange for a commitment to build a $7 million chicken hatchery and processing plant in Waco. Sanderson Farms CEO Joe Sanderson had contributed $165,000 to Perry’s campaign.
Close ties between political donors and development grants are not isolated incidents. Texas Observer Editor Dave Mann found that executives and employees of 20 companies that received a combined $174.2 million had donated $2.2 million to Perry, and to the Republican Governors Association he chaired until he began his run for the presidency. In the 2011 legislative session, Democratic Senator Kirk Watson and Republican Senator John Carona passed a bill that provides some transparency in the grant process. Control of the funds remains firmly in Perry’s hands.
Don’t look for the pace of the grants to slow. A week before Perry flew to South Carolina to announce that he’s in the race, his office announced a $300,000 grant to Office Depot.
The company might need the help. Two days before winning the scratch-off lottery in Texas, Office Depot posted a quarterly loss of $29 million.
Lou Dubose is the editor of the Washington Spectator, the award-winning independent newsletter covering national affairs (www.washingtonspectator.org). Dubose has covered Texas politics since the mid-eighties when he edited the Texas Observer. With co-author Jan Reid, he wrote The Hammer: God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress (Public Affairs), a political biography of Tom Delay, who was sentenced this year by a Texas jury to three years in jail for money laundering. Dubose was also the co-author with the late Molly Ivins of two New York Times bestsellers about George W. Bush: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, both published by Random House
The ways in which Michele Bachmann's presidential candidacy could prove harmful -- maybe even ruinous -- to her party are easy to imagine.
There's the remote, but not entirely implausible, scenario in which she scores a momentum-generating win in Iowa, catches a few breaks, and walks off with the GOP nomination, only to terrify swing voters in the fall and cost her party an utterly winnable election. And there's the less dramatic, but equally unnerving for the GOP, scenario in which she fails to win the nomination but succeeds in hijacking the political conversation and pushing her opponents even farther to the right, making the Republican Party's already serious image problem even worse and creating an opening for Obama to win reelection by running against the GOP label.
In other words, Republicans are playing with fire whenever they offer Bachmann encouragement, which probably explains why the Wall Street Journal -- which had previously been happy to help Bachmann build her brand -- turned its guns on her this week.
But the GOP's opinion leaders might not want to go after her too aggressively, at least not yet, because the events of this week have created the possibility that they'll need her to be a strong candidate in the primaries in order to prevent a different disaster.
This is a result of Rick Perry's rambunctious entry into the race. The Texas governor, as we've been noting, was supposed to be a consensus candidate -- one the party's restive base would like and that November-minded elites would be comfortable with. But his performance since last Saturday has not struck that balance at all. With his overheated antics, he's catered to the GOP base and its passions while arousing fears from elites who now wonder if he'd be any stronger than Bachmann as a general election candidate.
This is where Bachmann comes in. Her ability to channel the base's irrational, swing voter-alienating passions may make her a near-certain November loser, but it also positions her to corral many of the voters Perry is now pursuing. For GOP elites who now have reservations about Perry, this is a very helpful dynamic.
At the very least, it buys them time right now, preventing Perry's campaign from becoming a runaway train while they decide what they really make of him and his general election prospects. And if they do ultimately decide that he'd be a bad November bet, then Bachmann could potentially do them a big favor by winning Iowa, a state where Perry will be expected to do well. If he can't beat Bachmann there, his stature would be reduced, and the next contest probably wouldn't go much better for him: New Hampshire Republicans have long been resistant to overtly religious Southerners. Yes, the race then would head South to Perry's natural turf -- but with Bachmann winning Iowa, she'd almost surely prevent Perry from sweeping through the South, just as he'd eat into her support. The big winner in a scenario like this would be Mitt Romney, who is probably the safest (read: most generic) candidate Republicans could nominate.
Like I said, with Bachmann Republicans are playing with fire. If she were to manage an Iowa victory, the remote chance that she'd end up the nominee would become a little less remote. And having her in the spotlight for the early months of 2012 obviously won't help the party's image. But as long as Republicans are genuinely concerned about Perry's electability, they're probably better off having Bachmann around.
Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More: Steve Kornacki
