Everyone knows now that another Texan wants to occupy the White House and is busy spouting radical right-wing soundbites in his attempt to get there. He claims he can create jobs with the same policies he's applied in Texas but guess what folks, not unless he can magically wave a wand. Texas has weathered the recession because Texas has (for now) oil and gas. And Texas has created a lot of low-wage jobs to go with those Big Oil men of wealth--waitresses and clerks and nurse's aides, all making minimum wage or thereabouts while the oilmen rake it in and live high on the hog. That's not a formula that could be repeated on the national level (unless Perry comes up with that magical, oil-conjuring wand) and not a formula that anyone should want to be repeated on the national level.
Worse still, the same governor that thought it might make sense for Texas to secede from the Union (which sounds rather treasonous to me) thinks that the Federal Reserve doing what the Federal Reserve does -- managing monetary policy, including printing money--is traitorous/treasonous. Now why would he say something like that? Possibly because he knows that if we were to combine new economic stimulus (real, job-creating stimulus focussed exclusively on public infrastructure projects and human capital issues) with quantitative easing we could likely solve this Great Recession and start creating jobs. Radical rightwingers don't want that--they hope to use people's ignorance about the economy to get in power, and then continue to reshape the government to their backwards agenda--mixing religion with politics, including using tax money to fund religious organizations; favoring their "have-more" class, no matter what the cost to the have-less group, including through preferential (or zero) tax rates on investment gains, zero corporate taxes, and zero estate taxxes; and continuing to dumbdown the educational enterprise, through a combination of privatization (including especially religious schools), defunding of public schools, and centralized control of the curriculum to favor religious views.
If you have any doubts about the latter topic--the relation of taxes, education and religion in Texas--you should start studying the way private church schools were used to limit the impact of desegregation while furthering the indoctrination of Texas children into a right-wing view on church-state interaction and the corporatist ('low taxes favors business'/'the state better stay out of my business') mentality.
Or listen to Rick Perry when he supports teaching creationism in science classes. The Washington Post ran a story today about Rick Perry Charms His Way Through New Hampshire. Here's an excerpt that reveals how far right Perry really is.
[A] young boy, prompted by his mother, asked Perry whether he believes in evolution.
“It’s a theory that’s out there,” Perry told the child. “It’s got some gaps in it. . . . In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”
So Perry apparently thinks it appropriate for schools to teach both real science (evolution) and fake science (creationism) and then leave it to the young kids to figure it out. That's not, of course, what schools should be doing--they need to help kids learn what scientific discovery is, how it is conducted, what a theory is, and how objective facts can be evaluated to further or disprove a theory. Rick Perry seems to be willing literally to take us backwards in time to a world where only a select few had any comprehension of real science and to see the gap between Americans' science and math abilities compared to other developed countries' grow even larger. The difference between 'gaps' in the scientific theory of evolution and the 'junk science' of the religious doctrine of creationism cannot be bridged with a Fox News 'fair and balanced' approach that treats facts and fiction as on equal footing.
I don't like the world that Rick Perry would work to create on the national level. I want my neighbors to be able to live a healthy and sustainable life. I want all of us to have clean air, clean water, and land that is not contaminated. I want to protect the few pieces of unspoiled nature that are left in our country (and on this planet) so that my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and those that come after them will have a chance to breathe in the bitingly crisp coolness of air off a glacier, to see a fawn frolicking in a green meadow, to hear and see the rush of clear water in a mountain stream. I'd much rather live in a community where most of us have about the same income and wealth and even those with wealth are not so much wealthier than the poorest amongst us that it is impossible for most to comprehend their status. I want a community where children learn how to think, not how to repeat dogma. I want a community where same-sex couples and opposite-sex and black-white couples can marry, have children, and have a say in each other's lives that's recognized legally (whether or not some particular church agrees with their views). I want a community where tax monies are used to support the public good, not funneled to private businesses or used to support somebody else's religious preference. I want a community where people's needs and wishes are the primary consideration behind what government does, rather than one in which an elite group of businessmen and wealthy families determines the agenda. I want regulations that make life better for all of us, not deregulation that lets business do what it wants and forces ordinary folks to simply go along to get along.
I suspect that's what a majority in this country want. Not Rick Perry's return to the wild west where the rashest gunslinger and the most brutal capitalist can grab a fortune and leave everybody quivering in their boots.
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