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S o m e  F a c t s  A b o u t  T e x a s


AUSTIN, TEXAS -- A look at Texas under Bush:
                 National Ranking Among 50 States

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============
How did Texas get this way?  For some insights,
please read the following article . . .
===============
"the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for.
But while guns and geography have certainly played a part,
explanations like these tend to understate . . . "
===============

     The Education Governor of Texas


 1-- Teacher salaries at beginning of 1st term
     36th out of 50
 
Source:   National Education Agency,
Rankings & Estimates: Rankings of the States 1999


 2-- Teacher salaries at beginning of 2nd term
     38th out of 50

Source:   National Education Agency,
Rankings & Estimates: Rankings of the States 1999


 3-- Percentage Change in Average Salaries
     Down by 1.1 Percent in 1989-99 Constant Dollars
 
Source:   National Education Agency,
Rankings & Estimates: Rankings of the States 1999


 4-- Teacher salaries plus benefits
     50th out of 50

Source:   National Education Agency,
Rankings & Estimates: Rankings of the States 1999


 5-- High school completion rate
     48th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Department of Education
Office of Educational Research and Development


 6-- SAT scores - 1996 -- 44th out of 50
     combined math & verbal:  995

Source:  College Examination Board,
Educational Testing Service

 7-- SAT scores - 1997 -- 45th out of 50
     combined math & verbal:  995

Source:  College Examination Board,
Educational Testing Service

 8-- SAT scores - 1998 -- 44th out of 50
     combined math & verbal:  995

Source:  College Examination Board,
Educational Testing Service

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============
How did Texas get this way?  For some insights,
please read the following article . . .
===============
"the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for.
But while guns and geography have certainly played a part,
explanations like these tend to understate . . . "
===============

     Bush Family Values in Texas


 9-- Highest number of children living in poverty
     2nd out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


10-- Highest number of children without health insurance
     2nd out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


11-- Highest % of children without health insurance
     1st out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


12-- Highest % of poor working parents without insurance
     1st out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


13-- Highest % of population without health insurance
     2nd out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


14-- Highest number of people stripped of Medicare benefits
     1st out of 50

Source:  Families USA


15-- Highest teen birth rate
     5th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Dept Health and Human Services,
National Center for Health Statistics


16-- Per capita funding for public health
     48th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Dept Health and Human Services,
National Center for Health Statistics


17-- Delivery of social services
     47th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Dept Health and Human Services,
National Center for Health Statistics


18-- Mothers receiving prenatal care
     45th out of 50

Source:  Children's Rights Council


19-- Child support collections
     45th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Bureau of Census,
Current Population Trends


20-- Number of executions
     1st out of 50

Source:  National Association of Insurance Commissioners


21-- Teen smoking
     Down Nationally, Flat in Texas

Source:   1998 Texas School Survey of Substance Use Among
Students: Grades 7-12, Texas Commission on Alcohol and
Drug Abuse


22-- Teen drug use
     Down Nationally, Up 30% in Texas w/ Bush

Source:   1998 Texas School Survey of Substance Use Among
Students: Grades 7-12, Texas Commission on Alcohol and
Drug Abuse

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============
How did Texas get this way?  For some insights,
please read the following article . . .
===============
"the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for.
But while guns and geography have certainly played a part,
explanations like these tend to understate . . . "
===============

     Pollution in Texas


23-- Pollution released by manufacturing plants
     1st out of 50

Source:   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Office of Pollution and Prevention


24-- Pollution by industrial plants in violation of
     Clean Air Act -- 1st out of 50

Source:   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Office of Pollution and Prevention


25-- Greenhouse gas emissions
     1st out of 50

Source:   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Office of Pollution and Prevention

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============
How did Texas get this way?  For some insights,
please read the following article . . .
===============
"the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for.
But while guns and geography have certainly played a part,
explanations like these tend to understate . . . "
===============

     Quality of Life in Texas


26-- Spending for parks and recreation
     48th out of 50

Source:  The Texas Observer


27-- Spending for the arts
     48th out of 50

Source:  The Texas Observer


28-- Public libraries and branches
     46th out of 50

Source:  Statistical Rankings by State


29-- Spending for the environment
     49th out of 50

Source:  The Texas Observer


30-- Best place to raise children
     48th out of 50

Source:  Children's Rights Council


31-- Affordable Housing
     48th out of 50

Source:  U.S. Bureau of Census,
State Government Finances 1998


32-- Home ownership
     44th out of 50

Source:   U.S. Department of Education,
Office of Educational Research and Development


33-- Highest homes insurance rates in the nation
     1st out of 50

Source:  National Association of Insurance Commissioners


34-- Spending for police protection
     47th out of 50

Source:  U.S. Bureau of Census,
State Government Finances 1998

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============
How did Texas get this way?  For some insights,
please read the following article . . .
===============
"the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for.
But while guns and geography have certainly played a part,
explanations like these tend to understate . . . "
===============

September 2000
The backward state of Texas

Texas breaks all the records. It rates first for capital punishment, second
for size and population, last for public spending, and it is nearly always
behind in health care, racial equality and protection of the environment.

by Daniel Lazare*

Most Americans, including most Texans, assume that Texas, home
to George W. Bush, gets its distinct political character from its cowboy
heritage, its wide open spaces, and its long history of violent struggle
with everyone from Mexico and the Comanche Indians to the Civil War
armies of the American North. When the Indians are on the warpath and
the nearest neighbour is miles away, a man has nothing to fall back on
except his trusty six-gun - which explains why Texans have long prized
individualism and self-reliance above all other virtues.

Thanks to Bush, the United States presidential election is fast turning
into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for. But while guns and
geography have certainly played a part, explanations like these tend to
understate the degree to which Texas was consciously put together
during a brief period in 1875 by a group of 90 or so lawmakers, all of
them white and many of them ex-Confederate (Southern) army officers.
Over the previous half-dozen years, a Northern-sponsored radical state
government had struggled to bring Texas into the modern world by
building public schools, encouraging industry and putting an end to some
of the worst abuses of Mexicans and blacks (1).

The results were so traumatic for Texas's large-scale landowners
that, when the North abandoned reconstruction and the state's brief
experiment with democratic reform was allowed to collapse, they seized
the first opportunity to restore the ancien r�gime. They decreed racial
segregation in state schools, slashed education, banned the use of
general revenues to fund black colleges, and all but dismantled the
governing apparatus that the former governor, Edmund J. Davis, had
worked so hard to create. The upshot was the deliberate reinvention of a
state whose name would become synonymous with hostility to
government, opposition to political change, and violence towards racial
minorities, workers and the poor.

This side of Texas is apparent in virtually everything the state says
and does - in its abysmal urban conditions, its class structure, its boom-
or-bust economy, and its love affair with capital punishment. Texas, as
the tourist brochures say, is a land of contrasts. What they don't say is
that many of those contrasts are the result of deep-rooted contradictions
in its political structure. Texans are contemptuous of politics, yet they
have produced some of the canniest politicians in the country. They
abound in oil and gas millionaires who preach the gospel of free-market
capitalism while milking Washington for tax breaks and subsidies.
Texans are imbued with a can-do spirit, an irrepressible frontier
optimism, yet, thanks to chronic political disorganisation, their history
is a record of one failure after another. The battle of the Alamo, the famous
Spanish fortress in San Antonio in which 187 Texas independistas were
killed by Mexican forces in 1836, was a wholly preventable military
disaster. With unerring accuracy, the state's white population chose the
losing side in the US Civil War of 1861-65. Then, in subsequent
decades, local politicians did everything in their power to make sure the
state stayed an economic backwater by cutting schools and all but
outlawing trade unions.

Despite the discovery of oil in 1901, the state remained undeveloped
well into the 1950s. Although Texas's fortunes took flight in the 1970s
when Opec forced up energy prices, it lost much of its wealth in the
savings-and-loan financial disaster of the 1980s when, relative to the
nation as a whole, its per-capita personal income fell nearly 10%.
It has a loser as governor. George W. Bush managed to go through
$4.7m, put up by family friends and wealthy Republicans, in the oil
business in the 1980s. He nearly ran two energy companies into the
ground and only turned a profit in 1990 when, on the eve of the Gulf war,
a third company in which he was involved won a lucrative oil-exploration
contract from Bahrain - helped by the fact that his his father was
president at the time. George W. Bush did well as the owner of a
professional baseball team, but only after persuading the town of
Arlington, a Houston suburb, to pick up much of the tab for a new $191m
stadium - another example of the Texas bourgeoisie's reliance on public
largesse (2).

George W. Bush did better in his bid to become governor, winning
the election in 1996 and again in 1998, and, of course, he may also do
well in his bid to become president. If he does, however, he will merely
succeed in imposing Texas's losing policies on the nation as a whole. It's
hard to think of anything the world needs less than a right-wing Texas oil
man at the helm of the sole remaining superpower, but that may be
where America's political system is now heading.

Oligarchy and frontier republic

The Texas that rose from the ashes in 1875 was very much an
American creation. In other circumstances, a land-owning class intent on
putting down ex-slaves and impoverished tenant farmers might have
been expected to monopolise political power and wield it with ruthless
force. But Texas's neo-Confederate elite did something more
complicated. Because the previous regime had tried to create a
centralised governing apparatus that would be a force for change, it
instinctively set about dismantling it.

In a special convention called to draft a new state constitution, a
group of hand-picked delegates voted to cripple the executive branch by
dividing it up into five different posts, each one separately elected. They
further fragmented executive power by dividing it up among what are, by
now, some 200 administrative boards, whose members are chosen by
the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate and are largely
unaccountable to either. The delegates also crippled the local legislature
by restricting its members to two-year terms, and limiting their salaries
and the times they could meet, so as to ensure a high turnover of
members.

On the assumption that a judge immediately dependent on the voters
would be less likely to challenge the other two branches, they then
hamstrung the judiciary by requiring that every last member be popularly
elected. As a final measure, they decided to hamstring the electorate as
well, by disenfranchising blacks en masse, and by requiring even white
voters to pay a poll tax and register in person nearly a year prior to each
election. A $1.50 poll tax may not sound like much, but in the days when
subsistence farmers rarely saw money from one season to the next, it
was enough to keep thousands of people away from the polls.
Although often described as a return to loose forms of government
that had existed prior to the Civil War, the new system was actually
worse - more fragmented, more decentralised, less responsible to the
voters at large. Rather than a dictatorship, it was a kind of oligarchic
frontier republic that large-scale landowners had no trouble manipulating
behind the scenes.

In creating their pseudo-democracy, members of the 1875 Texas
convention were able to draw on a sizeable body of US constitutional
beliefs and structures. Although Americans like to think of themselves as
the most modern people on earth, the US constitution of 1787 was (and
is) curiously pre-modern in its elevation of what medieval jurists
described as jurisdictio (law) over gubernaculum (government). Because
law is the closest thing to a sovereign power, the law is always right.
Because it is strong, government can afford to be weak. Indeed, since
Americans have traditionally regarded their constitution as a charter of
liberties, the weaker the government, the stronger and more undiluted
those liberties will be.

Constraint on constraint

This is what Richard Coke, Texas's first governor after the Civil War,
meant when he told the state convention in 1875: "The accepted theory
of American constitutional government is that State Constitutions are
limitations upon, rather than grants of power.." (3). Even though the US
constitution already put permanent limits on the people's ability to govern
themselves, the purpose of a state constitution was to limit it even more.
Constraint was piled on constraint.

Texas's unshakeable state constitution - the state legislature
attempted to create a new one in 1975 but failed - has distorted state
politics ever since. Texas has a brand of folk conservatism that has
become the law nearly as much as driving on the right or stopping at red
lights. If the political culture of the Texas land-owning class helped
shape the Texas state constitution in the 1870s, the constitution has, in
return, served to ensure its hegemony over the ensuing 125 years.
A rigid constitution has led to rigid politics, morality and much else
besides. In the 1890s Texas saw a brief populist revolt by impoverished
farmers, which was all too easily crushed and co-opted by the state's
Jeffersonian elite (4). Thereafter it saw a collection of colourful
politicians go trooping through the governor's mansion, each one promising
change
while doing his best to preserve the status quo. When one governor
found himself impeached by the state legislature, he arranged for his
wife to run in his place so he could continue governing from behind the
throne. Another governor travelled the state in the 1930s with his own
country-and-western band, campaigning on a platform consisting of the
Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and a promise to provide each
retired citizen with a pension. (The pension, needless to say, never came
to pass.) Others made names for themselves by railing against
communism, the federal government, or literature professors who
assigned "obscene" books at the University of Texas.

While politics degenerated into little more than empty theatrics,
morality remained almost tribal. If a Comanche "enjoyed heaping live
coals on a staked-out white man's genitals," wrote T. R. Fehrenbach,
then a white Texan would, just a blithely, "bash an Indian infant's head
against a tree, or gut-shoot a 'greaser' [a Mexican-American] if he
blinked" (5). Texas probably saw more lynchings of blacks between 1900
and 1930 than other states in the deep south. Meanwhile the state militia
known as the Texas Rangers - also the name of the baseball team that
George W. Bush owned before becoming governor - conducted a reign
of terror against the state's Mexican-American population, executing,
without trial, an estimated 300 in the years 1915-19 alone.

Political impoverishment has also led to intellectual impoverishment.
According to Fehrenbach, "The Texan's . distrust for theories [was]
profound. . The practical outweighed the conceptual; things were more
important than ideas; education was to fit children to society, not change
them or produce inherent confusion by educating too many students
beyond their station" (6). If, traditionally, Texans "were not antisocial but
asocial", this perhaps explains the deep sexual unease that Texas's
most famous novelist, Larry McMurtry - author of The Last Picture Show
(1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), and Lonesome Dove (1985) -
argues underlies much of West Texas cowboy culture.

Locked in the past

The Texan economy is also anchored in the past. Thanks to massive
federal investment in military installations and aerospace, Texas has
been successful since the 1980s in its efforts to diversity into computers
and other forms of high tech. Yet it remains an essentially land-based
economy. Regardless of how they make their money, wealthy Texans
consider it de rigueur to buy a few thousand acres out in the hinterlands,
put on jeans and cowboy boots, and set themselves up as ranchers - as
George W. Bush has done with 1,500 of desolate scrubland that he
recently purchased near the remote West Texas town of Crawford (7).
Wealth is not really wealth apparently, unless it takes the form of
property.

Texas's economy is also rooted in the past in terms of its social
policies. Although it ranks dead centre among the 50 states in terms of
personal income, its distribution of wealth is so lopsided that by 1998 it
was among the 10 worst in terms of the portion of the population living
below the poverty level. Proportional to its population, Texas is also in
the bottom fourth in terms of such social indicators as the number of
physicians, full-time college enrolment and infant mortality (8). Thanks to
relentless budget cutting under George W. Bush, it now ranks last in
terms of state spending per capita, an indication that the distribution of
income is continuing to worsen (9).

Because landed wealth is intrinsically anti-urban, Texas has little by
way of mass transit, multi-family housing, neighbourhood playgrounds or
other urban amenities. Because government is so undeveloped, the
people have no means with which to create effective environmental
policies. As a result, Texas is responsible for more water and air pollution
than any other American state or Canadian province. Hundreds of
ageing utilities, chemical plants and oil refineries are exempt from
pollution regulations while, thanks to rising traffic levels, Houston, the
state's petro-chemical capital, beat Los Angeles in 1998 as the city with
the worst ozone levels in the US. Not that George W. Bush seems to
mind, though; one of his top environmental appointees once testified in
Washington that ozone is actually a benign substance (10).
Texas has emerged in the late 1990s as the nation's leader in
"sprawl," a term that Americans use to describe a cancerous blight of
shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and discount stores that now covers
much of the landscape (11). Imagine a smog-shrouded, stiflingly hot (36
degrees centigrade) city with about 20% fewer people than Paris but
spread out over an area more than 13 times greater, where there are
virtually no pedestrians or cyclists but an abundance of traffic-clogged
eight-lane highways going every which way like strands of spaghetti -
that is pretty much what Houston is like today.

Texas incarcerates more people per capita than any other state in
the nation: indeed, it has a system of law enforcement that is now the
most punitive in the industrial world. Though it only has one-tenth of the
population, it hosts a prison population that is now greater than that of
France, Germany and Italy combined. Its criminal justice system is an
uncontrolled Gulag consisting of some 250 county sheriffs, 500-plus
municipal police departments, more judges than in the whole of Great
Britain, and some two dozen state boards and agencies, all more or less
autonomous. The state legislature lacks the constitutional authority to
reorganise this hideous mess even if it wanted to. Given the thousands
of defence attorneys who also have a stake in the status quo, serious
change is unlikely.

Texas's criminal justice system is drawing international attention
because of the more than 200 prisoners executed since the 1970s.
Predictably, state officials have responded to the protests with
resentment and hurt. "I happen to think we live in a rather fine place, and
I think that Texas is being showcased by some for political reasons as
not such a fine place," declared Bush right-hand man Lieutenant-
Governor Rick Perry on the eve of the execution of Gary Graham on 22
June. Graham, a black, protested his innocence to the end, and the
press failed to mention that he was under the age of 18. The US is one
of only six countries still to carry out the death penalty on minors and the
mentally ill - along with Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Incompetent state government not only invites criticism, it fairly
thrives on it. Rather than protecting state autonomy, the Texas state
constitution consistently undermines it by leaving the federal courts and
other US agencies (12) no choice but to step in and clean up state
abuses. Texas's consequent reliance on the federal government serves
to thrust it deep into federal politics, which is why the state has turned
into such a prolific breeding ground for national politicians since the turn
of the century - not only ex-President Lyndon Johnson and the Bushes,
father and son, but also long-time Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn,
Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen Jr., Bush Secretary of State
James Baker and numerous other Washington power brokers.
Texas's backward political structure manifests itself in an unusually
unified ruling class. As an oligarchic republic, Texas not only allows its
wealthy residents and corporations to manipulate politics behind the
scenes, it fairly mandates that they do so to ensure their class interests
are protected. The upshot is an intense level of political involvement on
the part of the state's super-rich, most of them reactionaries to one
degree or another, who have moulded themselves into "a formidable
force that wins more often than it loses in confrontations with . the
largely depoliticised masses" (13).

Texas's energy sector is America's very own Opec, a corporate
clique that believes that global warming is a myth, that the health risks
from smog are much exaggerated, and that it is the duty of every US
citizen to burn all the fuel he can. It is a sector that has never seen a
car, highway, or 10,000-square-foot suburban home that it didn't like as long
as it was filled with oversized refrigerators, 72-inch television sets,
costly exercise machines and other energy-consuming gadgets.
This sector has backed George W. to the hilt - to quote The New
York Times, oil has been the essential lubricant for his unsuccessful run
for Congress, his two gubernatorial campaigns, and his bid to become
president. Bush's most important patron is the Enron Oil Company, and
at least 25 of his top donors are connected to the oil business (14). The
reasons for this support are obvious. The son of an oil driller and a
former oilman himself, George W.Bush is a local patriot whose years at
boarding school in New England, Yale University and the Harvard
Business School only served to strengthen his loyalty to his home state.
He is an enthusiastic glad-hander - as a college student, he reportedly
memorised the names of a thousand fellow undergraduates to ensure
his popularity - and he is thoroughly at home in the deal-making world of
Texas politics (15). He is also a resolute conservative, well to the right of
his father, and he exudes a jovial, anti-intellectual manner. In Texas,
ignorance rules.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the US has grown ever
more like Texas. The process has continued in the last eight years under
Clinton, with the prison population up 50%, the growing use of capital
punishment (Clinton and Gore are both supporters of the death penalty),
and an increasingly punitive war on drugs. If Bush gains the presidency,
the process will simply change pace.

* Journalist, author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996).

(1) Robert A. Calvert and Arnold De Leon, The History of Texas ,
Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990, p. 153. One historian
estimates that one black male in 100 between the ages of 15 and 49
was killed by marauding whites between 1865 and the advent of a
radical state government in 1868.

(2) Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life
of George W. Bush, Random House, New York, 2000, pp. 19-42. In
1998 Bush sold his share in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $15m,
acquired for $600,000 in 1989.

(3) Gary M. Halter, Government and Politics of Texas: A Comparative
View, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1999, p. 21.

(4) Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1990, p. 20.

(5) T.R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans,
Macmillan, New York, 1968.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Frank Bruni, "Bush Finds Comfort Zone In a Remote Texas Ranch,"
The
New York Times, 22 July 2000.

(8) 1997-98 figure. For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html

(9) Louis Dubose, "The Gospels of the Rich and Poor," The Texas
Observer, 12 November 1999. The Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org

(10) Molly Ivins et Louis Dubose, "Bush and the Texas Environment",
The Texas Observer, 14 April 2000.

(11) See John W. Gonzalez, "Urban sprawl in Texas fastest in the
country," The Houston Chronicle, 26 December 1999. See also Dani�le
Stewart, "Do you know the way to San Jose?", Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, July 2000.

(12) The federal government often intervenes in the States of the Union
to ensure that fundamental rules, which apply to all Americans, are
respected.

(13) Davidson, op. cit.

(14) John M. Broder, "Oil and Gas Aid Bush Bid For President," The New
York Times, 23 June 2000. Bush broke all records by accepting nearly
$100m in gifts four months before the general election.

(15) Nicholas D. Kristof, "Ally of an Older Generation Amid the Tumult of
the 60's", The New York Times, 19 June 2000.

===============
For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
===============
The Texas Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
http://www.texasobserver.org
===============



Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
        never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,
        and under his ribs is the heart of the people,
                                             Laughing!