Category: Uncategorized

Yes, the day before her arrest at a Republican fundraiser, Diane Wilson is profiled by Stephanie Hillier in this article at IndiaNest:

When she learned in 1989 that her tiny Calhoun County in South Texas – with 15,000 residents – was named as the most polluted county in the US in a report of the US Environment Protection Agency’s Federal Toxic Release Inventory, her first action was simply to call a lawyer. Formosa Plastics – a Taiwanese company that had been driven from Taipei by a protest of 20,000 people – had built near Lavaca Bay in Calhoun the largest chemical plant in the US, and it was breaking all the rules for legal discharge of toxic wastes.

The lawyer told her to call a meeting, which she did, and that’s hen she set forth on what has since become her life path. "When I first started fighting the corporations," she said, "people thought I was the wrong person for it. After five years I realized I was the perfect one for it because I had the passion to do it. It wasn’t theoretical stuff, it was my flesh and blood."

When legal action against Formosa failed, Wilson went on her first hunger strike; and when that was not enough, she tried to sink her boat in the bay where Formosa discharged its toxic waste. That – and a protest by 200 Vietnamese fisherfolk – finally got Formosa’s attention, and the company agreed to go for zero discharge.

"I truly believe that women are the key to the salvation of this planet, I really do. They have this concept of wholeness. I believe it is the female consciousness that is going to make the difference. Women will be the movement."

Have all the debates you want about whether abortion is right or wrong. Should it be criminalized? With the new Bush court in place, we may soon be given new reasons to arrest people and throw them into freshly built jails.

In the same day (1) the Supreme Court announces it will consider whether Congress can criminalize ‘partial birth’ abortions and (2) South Dakota criminalizes abortions for the sake of instigating a Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade. Doctors found guilty of breaking the law will be subject to fines of $5,000 or five years in prison.

I don’t know anyone who is strictly speaking pro-abortion. But to criminalize abortion is to attack a woman’s right to safely decide whether she will carry a pregnancy to term.

Sex ed, birth control, subsidized child care: these are the policies that will reduce abortions with freedom and dignity. Instead, we are being served an agenda hostile to sex ed, birth control, and child services (including cuts in children’s health insurance).  Add to this mix the criminalization of abortion, and you get a full scale hostility to what we used to call human progress.–gm

Talk about criminalization. The Honorable Aaron Pena dragged
up this story from a San Francisco source: After spending $20 million
of our money investigating the life and friends of Henry Cisneros, a
special prosecutor has been ordered by the US Senate to release his
final report already. It has been kept under seal since August
2004.
We used to be among the good rep’s short list of links, but no
more. He’s gone all Quorum Report on us and AP, not even a
PinkDome link anymore. But we understand, he needs voters, not
philosophers on his side. For example, his answer to the border
drug wars is a committee
on substance abuse. That’s how one behaves in front of voters,
nurturing commonsense hypocrisies with warm milk. Apparently, it
can’t be helped. Here at TCRR we say, legalize it all: the drugs
and the people, too. BEFORE the border war breaks out.
Whatcha wanna bet  Quorum Report readers would think about that?

On page 45 of the Texas Supreme Court decision on school funding, we
find ambivalence on how to measure Texas education through a
standardized national exam. In the first half of the paragraph, the
court buys into the argument made by a State witness that scores should
be adjusted for "socioeconomic and family characteristics" meaning that
poor and non-white students should be compared not to rich white
students but to other poor and non-white students. Since half of Texas
students live in poverty, the choice of comparison makes a big
difference.

In the second half of the paragraph, the court admits that if the
purpose of a public school system is to get students ready for college,
then unadjusted scores in Texas indicate some worrisome failure:

Academic success is also measured by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement test, as witnesses for all
parties at trial acknowledged. In 2000, controlling for socioeconomic
and family characteristics, Texas was first out of 47 states overall,
first for white students, fifth for African-American students, ninth
for Hispanic students, first for fourth- and eighth-graders in math,
and second in rate of improvement. In 2003, Texas ranked first in the
nation in closing the gap between African-American and white
fourth-graders in math, and second in the nation in closing the gap
between Hispanic and white fourth-graders in math and reading. But
unadjusted NAEP data, which may more accurately reflect college
preparation, showed Texas sinking to 37th among the states in
fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading, although it had risen to 22nd in
fourth-grade math and remained 34th in eighth-grade math.

The issue is crucial to deciding on the adequacy and
worthiness of education in Texas. Does the Constitution allow the
Supreme Court to consider education of poor students in Texas ‘good
enough’ so long as it’s no worse than the education of poor students
elsewhere? Or does it flatly mandate widespread college-level prep? Of
course one answer IS more expensive than the other. In choosing the
cheaper path, the Supreme Court seems to rely on rankings of
‘improvement’–a criterion that sounds something like ‘all deliberate
speed’. The court goes on to note that:

In 2003, Texas ranked last among the states in the
percentage of high school graduates at least 25 years old in the
population. Texas also has a severe dropout problem: more than half of
the Hispanic ninth-graders and approximately 46% of the
African-American ninth-graders leave the system before they reach the
twelfth grade. The gaps between white students on the one hand and
African-American and Hispanic students on the other are especially
troublesome since the African-Americans and Hispanics are projected to
be about two-thirds of Texas’ population in 2040. According to the
plaintiffs’ expert, if these gaps are not reduced, Texas will ‘have a
population that not only will be poorer, less well-educated, and more
in need of numerous forms of state services than its present
population, but also less able to support such services . . . [and]
less competitive in the increasingly international labor and other
markets.’

Yet with all these existing challenges the court finds that because
Texas is improving steadily with respect to other states, the education
system is not ‘arbitrary’ and thus cannot be ruled inadequate by
constitutional standards.

Having carefully reviewed the evidence and the district
court’s findings, we cannot conclude that the Legislature has acted
arbitrarily in structuring and funding the public education system so
that school districts are not reasonably able to afford all students
the access to education and the educational opportunity to accomplish a
general diffusion of knowledge.

"We recognize," said the court, "that the standard of arbitrariness
we have applied is very deferential to the Legislature, but as we have
explained, we believe that standard is what the Constitution requires.
Nevertheless, the standard can be violated." The court rejected
all the state’s arguments that would keep the court from staying
involved if facts of Texas education do not continue to improve.

–gm