Texas as a Fascist state; buying politicians.

Texas: Where Every Fascist Worth his Swastika Owns Himself a Politician Like Bush

Texas barely resembles the state it once was. Under Bush, it became a sleazy auction where would-be Bushes sell out the rule of law and the people. Columnist Joseph Galloway asks: "Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government?"

I have a simple explanation. The GOP looks and acts like a criminal conspiracy because it is one. It looks like a crime syndicate because it's cheaper to buy a politician than it is to obey the law. They proved it all in Texas.

Surely, there is probable cause in the public record to justify a Federal Grand Jury investigation of Bush's inner circle for violations under RICO statutes. Galloway goes on to ask:

What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world?

Joe, listen up! I am fourth generation, native Texan. I can tell you --Bush was always a crook. He didn't "go over to The Dark Side"! He never left it! He did leave Texas in ruins --dead last in education, polluted, divided. Bush is not a horseman in the Texas sense of the word. He is, rather, one of four horsemen of a GOP apocalypse. The others are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice.

Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot?

What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?

Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?

What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list?

Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?

--Joseph Galloway, What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?

Bush is not Texan. He's a carpetbagger born in Connecticut who left the state of Texas much worse than he found it. Already the state of the state had not been good thanks to Texas' recent flirtation with Republicanism, corporatism, fascism. I am a Native Texan. I recall another Texas. A better Texas. A Texas not yet sold out to privilege with the Oil Depletion Allowance. While I still lived there, government at all levels outsourced almost everything to "private enterprise", most notoriously the prisons. Convicts are a source of cheap if not slave labor. It is an Orwellian nightmare of no accountability, waste, graft, and fascism.

Suicide Exposes Squalor in Texas Prison

Suicide Shows Squalid Conditions in Privately-Run Texas Prison; Company Operates in 15 States

By JOHN MILLER

After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.

"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."

Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.

It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector.

...

While Governor, Bush presided over significant declines in Texas' education standards. Most notorious was the so-called "Houston Miracle", the brain child of then Governor Bush’s secretary of education, Rod Paige. Briefly, it was all a fraud.

When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.

There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.

In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.

--Rod Paige’s Houston ‘Miracle’, The Carpetbagger Report

Texas still ranks dead last in education. But it was not only in education that Bush failed Texas. Bush left behind an environmental waste land. Under George W. Bush's "leadership", Texas went from dead last in education to "number one polluter" in many categories.

• 1 in the Emission of Ozone Causing Air Pollution Chemicals
• 1 in Toxic Chemical releases into the Air
  
• 1 in use of Deep Well Injectors as method of Waste Disposal
• 1 in counties listed in top 20 of Emitting Cancer Causing Chemicals
• 1 in Total Number of Hazardous Waste Incinerators
• 1 in Environmental Justice Title 6 complaints
• 1 in production of Cancer causing Benzene & Vinyl Chloride
• 1 Largest Sludge Dump in Country
[See: Toxic Texas referenced below]

Bush "outsourced", in other words, "corporatized" the protection of the Texas environment. He insisted upon the state handling the protection of endangered species even as he promoted further, corporate activities, primarily unchecked development, that would endanger those very species. There is, as far as I know, no moves to halt this practice. The Bush legacy in Texas remains a threat to endangered species, a threat to the global environment. Bush's legacy includes his misguided policies with regard to air pollution, wastewater discharges, pesticides, and even nuclear wastes. Bush's misrule was as disastrous to Texas as his occupancy in Washington has been to the rest of the world including Iraq. It was Bush occupied Texas!

It is no coincidence that the state's biggest polluters are also Bush's biggest contributors. The following list is what the word "fascism" is all about.

Apache Corporation $1,000

ARCO $13,250

Assn. of Electric Companies of TX $1,500

BP Amoco $5,000

Central and Southwest Corp/ American Electric Power Co $18,500

Champion International Corp $5,250

Coastal Corp $37,250

Crown Central Petroleum Corp $6,000

Dow Chemical Company $26,000

Duke Capital Corp $23,000

Eastman Chemical Company $7,200

El Paso Energy Corporation $6,000

Enron Corp $30,000

Entergy Gulf States $9,500

Exxon $24,200

Fulbright & Jaworski $67,000

International Paper $5,000

Hired Gun Lobbyists for Grandfathered Firms $150,500

Koch Industries $4,500

Lockheed $17,400

Lyondell Petrochemical GP Inc. $3,500

MND Energy Corporation $2,250

Mobil Oil $250

New Century Energies $2,000

Oryx Energy Company $3,000

PG & E $5,000

Phillips/GPM $11,998

Rohm & Haas $2,000

Southwestern Electric Service Co. $6,250

Tenneco, Inc. $1,000

Texaco Inc $20,000

Texas Utilities $64,800

Torch Energy Marketing $2,400

TX Assn. of Business & Commerce PAC $20,000

TX Cattle Feeders Assn./BEEF PAC $20,000

TX Cotton Ginners Assn. PAC $500

TX Mid-Continent Oil & Gas $18,000

Ultramar Diamond Shamrock $5,000

Union Carbide $3,500

Union Pacific Resources $11,000

Valero Refining $30,000

TOTAL $692,498

Why do corporate polluters buy politicians like Bush? It's cheaper to pony up for crooks than it is to respect the law and the environment. I've often wondered how big corporations could make a credible moral distinction between paying off the mob and paying off the GOP, a Bush, a Harding, a DeLay!

In Texas, it is all systemized. It's the way things are done. Election laws in the "Lone Star" state allow unlimited personal or political action committee contributions to elected officials. It's a licence to buy yourself a politician. Every fascist fat cat has one or several. As braggin' rights, it beats a four car garage, a membership at the River Oaks Country Club, or the Enclave. Best of all, it's a hedge against having to act responsibly. It's license to act like an asshole.

Corporations get away with it because they claim the right of free speech. It's called "corporate personhood" i.e., corporations have the same rights as do individuals. Clearly, however, corporations do not have the same responsibilities. I submit to this forum that if corporations have the same rights as people, then, when corporations break the laws, then the President, the Chairman of the board, the entire board of directors and every large stockholder should be rounded up and brought to trial. They are, after all, "persons" in the eyes of the law. Do the crime. Do the time!

Goebbels Would be Proud.

How did it get like this? How does it continue? Yes, corporations are running the show and that guarantees fascism; that’s how fascism happens. Yes, the leaders are all in hock to the money men. You can’t get elected if you don’t have the money. Yes, the people aren’t as bright as they once were and that isn’t saying much. Yes, the glitter of bright shiny plastic and the star power veneer of bimbo and bozo celebrity as well as the gangsta soundtrack make what should embarrass a borderline intellect look hot, but, what’s the real problem? ...

Deny personhood to "legal abstractions"! The idea that corporations, mere legal abstractions, are to be treated in the eyes of the law as persons possessing First Amendment rights including free speech is absurd. Begin a citizen's movement now to support a Constitutional Amendment spelling out clearly that corporations are not people and are, therefore, subject to any law that "we the people" care to legislate in order to keep out environments clean, our governments free of crooks and liars, our schools excellent, our neighborhoods free of poisons, our lives free of war crimes and the megalomaniacal ambitions of fascist admirers of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
Source: Public Research Works.