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July 30, 2005
How to Cool Your Heels in Texas When It's Late July All Over the World
The message of the Latino Coalition is crisp and bright. But it ain't a cheap message, that's for sure. And Texas voters are having difficulty rising to level of maturity required to say: children first.
By afternoon Thursday, it's not clear that any of this Latino Coalition sunshine has penetrated into the carpeted hush of Senate chambers where up at the gallery level children come and go quickly with their vacationing parents. It's not a bad space to be walking around or sitting around as the July sun climbs up the ladder outside.
A dozen blocks away at City Hall I tug on the first door handle, my body looking forward to the whoosh of chilled air, but what's that noise? Turns out that door handle is unauthorized entrance and I've just set off an intruder alert. A guy is wagging his finger at me. I don't wait for him to finish his sentence. I step back out into the heat. Great. Shows you how well I know City Hall these days.
Okay so back out the door and around through the metal detector and x-ray, probably a video tape, too. Here I don't set off any alarms, so I go stand by the Chief of Police for a second while I search for a seat.
Councilmember Brewster McCracken is looking over the freshly drafted city budget and trying to come to grips with the fact that the city is headed toward a police state far as the eye can see. Of course, that's not the way he says it exactly. But he notices that the police portion of the city budget is up to 75 percent and climbing.
Give us a decade, and we'll all be working for the police union, while not doing jobs like librarian, park maintenance, after school programs, health care--you know, all that socialist nonsense that we began to finally outgrow round about 1980.
So I'm not unhappy to go out and join the socialists, anarchists, greens, poets, artists, and possibly even Democrats who have gathered along Cesar Chavez Street this afternoon to protest the killing of 18-year-old Daniel Rocha, who, according to the sign I was holding, was shot in the back at point blank range. He was unarmed at the time, although possibly guilty of having smoked a reefer two hours earlier, if you believe the revised toxicology report, which folks out here with signs aren't really wanting to to.
How to Cool your Heels in Texas when it's Late July All over the World Texas Civil Rights Review
Posted by gregmoses at 08:28 PM | Comments (828)
Give Prisoners the Right to Vote
A Sunday Sermon with Modest Proposal
So the argument that prisoners shouldn't be allowed to vote, because they broke their 'social contract', is an argument that runs into all kinds of Civil Rights problems, if you take the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to be a central premise of civil rights logic.
But to be honest about it, the flaw of the 'social contract' justification was not what really prompted your humble editor to re-think voting rights for prisoners. More persuasive has been the trend over my adult lifetime for lawmakers across the USA to replace education with incarceration as the great hope of domestic tranquility.
The first time I heard Angela Davis make the argument, I was startled. She said (I forget exactly which time) that if you compare the political economy of the prison population today, with the slave population of 1860, then you get a pattern that expresses some deep, visceral structure of American power relations.
In fact, at no time in American history have we been able to produce a sharable system of freedom and justice for all. Seen in this light, the legislature's failure this summer to provide excellent education (let's face it, for poor kids and brown kids and black kids) is not simply to be chalked up to conflicting personalities between three old white men. The failure is deeply structural.
On a Petition to Give Prisoners the Right to Vote Texas Civil Rights Review
Posted by gregmoses at 08:22 PM | Comments (1324)
July 07, 2005
Texas Justices Seek Role in School Funding
At the end of the day, if one takes clues from the hearing, we might expect to see the tax cap lifted by the Court so that property-rich districts can go above $1.50 in their tax rates.
Then if a majority of justices agree with MALDEF claims that funding formulas for low income students, for limited English proficiency students, and for facilities represent "substantial defaults" by the legislature in meeting its constitutional obligations, the Court may send the legislature back to work on another round of school legislation.
As for the more general question of "systemwide adequacy" there were a couple of clues that readiness for college might serve as a reasonable baseline for a Court standard. Whereas more rigorous test systems would seem to show that the state is hard at work, the performance on those tests combined with poor graduation rates might encourage a majority of the Court to support a more sweeping indictment, especially if they adopt trial court findings that the legislature has not provided funding needed to provide the children of Texas with their each and every right to an adequate education.
Other than glaring inequities in facilities funding, justices seemed not to be very interested in other questions of equity. None of them referenced a brief filed on Friday by the ACLU, NAACP, and LULAC asking for a 'bright line' ruling on equity that would treat every school dollar as sharable. The State's repeated reference to 'equity up to the point of adequacy' met with no challenges. What's 'good enough' for Texas children will continue to depend on where they are born.
Texas Supreme Court Justices Seek Role in Education: Reviewing the Oral Arguments Texas Civil Rights Review
Posted by gregmoses at 07:16 PM | Comments (1589)
July 06, 2005
Progressive Groups ask for Bold Equity in Texas Ed
In a brief filed on Friday, three progressive groups joined voices asking the Texas Supreme Court to stay in the fight for fair funding in Texas education and adopt a higher standard of equity than the one now used by the court. Because the principle of "limited equity" has been so unsuccessful in reforming school funding over the past sixteen years, the groups plead for a new "bright line rule" that will require "full recapture and equalization of every dollar of revenue collected in the system."
The brief filed by the ACLU, NAACP, and LULAC on the eve of Wednesday's historic hearing on school funding says the principle that "requires equity in school funding, but only in some degree, and only up to point" does not work.
"Only full-funding equity—a bright-line rule—will help the Legislature fulfill its constitutional obligation to create an enduringly efficient system," argued the groups in a brief signed by Houston attorneys Sylvia Ann Mayer and Sergio Garza (WEIL, GOTSHAL & MANGES LLP) and Florida attorney John Greenman (FLORIDA COASTAL SCHOOL OF LAW).
ACLU, NAACP, and LULAC Ask Texas Supremes for 'Bright Line' Equity Texas Civil Rights Review
Posted by gregmoses at 07:22 PM | Comments (1647)
July 03, 2005
Dylan's America
For Dylan himself, the Civil War was also a battle between two kinds of time: "In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells." It must have been a Southerner who coined the term 'New York minute' to describe the Northern kind of time -- yes the kind of time that forges capital into imperialism, post-colonialism, and oh-so-helpless-hand-wringing-witness to Jim Crow or Abu Ghraib, whichever.
"After a while," says Dylan, "you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course." And the archetype for this sort of story is found in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. "Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."
Resurrection without synthesis. Crucifixion upon the cross of the Fourth of July. This is the underlying song of the great American folksinger. Why he must die in his shoes.
Dylan's America PeaceFile
Posted by gregmoses at 02:37 PM | Comments (2757)