The Other Texas Miracle, Rick Perry

Tennessee Williams’ advice for survival in a pack: “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”

"This time is different," apocryphal, now easily considered the world's worst economic advice, and a best selling book on economic history by economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff.

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Right about this time of year is the time for family reunion picnics as the last breath of summer leaves, reminding us of fun gatherings of kin folks and of course all those great hot times eating, meeting, talking, sometimes arguing and just having a good 'ol time with friends and family.

So sit a spell as we examine the new national GOP front runner for the presidential nomination sweepstakes, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. It's quite the Texas tall tale filled with enough switchback turns, improbable pasts, gobs of funny money and the ever present threat of gunfire—sort of like any real large family reunion in the South. Hear how that sounds again: Choctaw Bingo by James McMurtry.

As the longest serving governor in Texas history, and indeed the longest continuously-serving current U.S. governor, naturally Perry's running for president as "an outsider." As the then sitting lieutenant governor, Perry first became governor after George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2000, and since has been re-elected to three consecutive full terms as governor.
 
Perry's a career politician who's been at the game so long he was first elected as a Democrat to the Texas state House in 1984, and indeed was Al Gore's Texas state chairman for Gore's ill-fated but mercifully short 1988 presidential run. That experience evidently was so secretly scarring that Perry turned Republican the next year.

Moving on to becoming the powerful Texas state Agriculture commissioner, he narrowly defeated the incumbent legendary liberal rabble rouser Jim Hightower in 1990, heralding the sea-change in Texas and southern politics that was dawning. He served in that office for three full terms. Hightower would never hold elective office again. 

However, Perry was still Democrat-friendly enough to have kind words for Hillary Clinton's health care reform efforts for the early Clinton administration in 1993, describing it as "most commendable" in a formal letter from his Ag Commissioner's Office. 

"Why that was a long time ago, and he was a recovering Democrat then," some might insist.

Then how about his gem then? As governor, Rick Perry proposed a bi-national health insurance plan with Mexico in 2001, for the "coverage of both U.S. and Mexican residents along the border." In the same speech, he had kind words for his Mexican cohort, the then newly elected Vincente Fox, NAFTA, and he also praised the Texas legislature’s bill to increase funding for Medicaid and for the Children’s Health Insurance Program—surely a long lingering sickness, perhaps. 

Presently in his newly-published book Fed Up, Perry bends over backwards to try to disavow any suggestion of such now uncomfortably "moderate" positions. He now claims that both Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional, an opinion he's not shied away from, repeating on the hustings while campaigning this past week. Ditto, for the Nixon administration created Environmental Protection Agency, federal aid for education, and he'd also try to repeal both the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution for starters, too.

Indeed, Perry also claims that a host of other regulations are wholly unconstitutional, including but not limited to all federal banking, consumer protection, civil rights, labor and minimum wages laws.

When not trying to otherwise repeal the 20th Century, Perry has been a loud and vociferous advocate of secession as well. If elected, he'd proudly be the first U.S. president to do so presumably. This despite strangely trying to accuse the current Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke of treason for doing his job (and threatening him with violence), perhaps forgetting that the former Princeton professor was also G.W. Bush's choice for that position as well as serving as chair of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, of course as a Republican too!

But like most career politicians, Perry does have an unenviable track record of saying one thing to get elected, and then double crossing his constituents after the election to the usual benefit of his rich, well-connected cronies. It's this sort of well-heeled and thoroughly-entrenched crony capitalism that's greased the skids on Perry's entire public career. When the Washington Post examined the record, this is what it found:

"The Post looked at Perry’s top 50 donors, who collectively gave more than $21 million to Perry, and found that 34 received some benefit from Perry’s administration or the state, including grants, contracts and appointments. The donor list was compiled by the nonprofit Texans For Public Justice.

Twenty-three donors won Perry’s appointment to state boards, often the boards of regents at the University of Texas or Texas A&M.

Roughly one in three of the top Perry donors had business interests that secured grants, tax subsidies or project approvals under his administration, the Post review found. Five donors gained both an appointment and a state boost to their specific company or interests."

Maybe you've never or not often thought of your government as a giant "pay-to-play" scheme run by some small, corrupt, cabal-of-wealthy elites. But Perry has now effectively utilized his power of appointment to build a dense web of corrupting political patronage that infests every entity of state government, with 4,000 slots in all. They've also garnered Perry more than $102 million in campaign funds, the most in Texas history, for one of the historically weakest governors in the U.S., and his friends saw to it that the governor made a killing in real estate, too. 

Want to actually see how this works in real life? Here's a uniquely rare video of it up close of Bank of America Director of Public Policy James Mahoney making the offer. Evidently, they really no longer enforce the bribery statues in Texas either.

Sure this might easily suggest that Perry is even more of a mendacious flip-flopper than the ever-mercurial, forever-confused and ever-changing political chameleon Willard "Mitt" Romney, but it's made him a very successful career politician and a very rich man. Pound for pound, Romney's never had such a fight on his hands as this is shaping up to be.

Many in Texas agree however, overall, "Whatever Rick Perry’s Record Is, It’s Not Conservative". From his ill-fated, gargantuan Trans Texas Corridor of toll roads to the HPV vaccine scandal to the Texas Enterprise slush fund to the weird "peasant insurance" scheme secretly speculating on the life insurance proceeds of Texas teachers to his singular keystone tax legislation imposing a new state business margins tax as his chief legislative accomplishment, it just always seems to come up smelling like corrupt crony capitalism. And the Wall St. Journal has noticed this as well.

On his business margins tax:

"The problem is, it’s been a disaster. Small businesses hate it because they’re forced to pay regardless of whether they’re turning a profit: it seemed to be the very definition of a 'job-killing' tax. Some conservatives simply hate it on principle. A few even argued that Perry’s business tax is unconstitutional—amounting to a tax on income, which is forbidden by the Texas Constitution."

Indeed, this question is now in the courts. See also here on how Texas state taxes are redistributing taxes upwards towards millionaires and billionaires and away from the middle class.

Still there's plenty of material besides rampant corruption and wasteful government spending where Perry's recent record of governance just does not seem to fit well with the current mood of voters. Yes, just like the man said, Texas' debt has nearly tripled and spending increased two thirds since Perry became governor. See where a student dared to confront Perry with these inconvenient facts. Perry's "big-business-friendly" approach to the hot button issue of immigration is also one of his potential trouble spots.

"Perry actually has a relatively moderate record on immigration. In 2001, he signed a law allowing undocumented students who graduate from Texas high schools to pay in-state tuition at Texas public universities. [A Texas 'Dream Act'] Last year he criticized Arizona's strict new immigration enforcement law (Arizona's SB 1070), and said that it wouldn't be right for Texas. He's called for a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship."

It's this "moderate" toleration of substantial and constant migrant flows and the dramatic population growth it brings, that's the real secret behind the new claims for a Texas "economic miracle." Buoyed by substantial federal stimulus funding (again after first refusing to accept federal dollars with "strings attached"), Texas has benefited mightily from more than 125,000 new public sector government jobs to service and care for all those new residents. That was nearly half of all public sector jobs created nationwide during this period to accommodate the explosive population growth. So despite Perry preaching a dogma of "small government," it's the public sector that actually grew twice as fast as private sector employment in Texas in recent years.

Texas' total job growth per capita has actually substantially lagged the nation as a whole in recent years, since October of 2009 as a matter of fact.

We could go on about the campaign generated mirage that will be carefully constructed to tell of all the wonders this man has done for Texas, despite his abject failures at free market insurance, his ambivalence in the realm of eminent domain, and always the rampant, wasteful government spending on his watch.

I feel like I've seen this movie before and I don't particularly care to endure it again. Still, who am I to question the wisdom of our plutocratic overlords? For some unearthly reason the banksters seek favor with Perry. Being mainly still wards of the state presently, it's likely their calculation that the most easily or readily corrupt politico would be the cheapest and best to buy on a strictly ongoing cost basis. These folks are the true experts in corruption and corrupting, and they've made a fine choice. 

 Me? I want no new Texans!