Education in Texas

 One of the people I follow on Facebook is Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian who writes interesting posts about current events.  She wrote one yesterday (10-16-21) on a new Texas law which requires teachers to "present opposing views on controversial subjects." Like racism. And the Holocaust. That's right, Texas teachers may be expected to present "both sides" of the Holocaust. I didn't think the Holocaust had another side, unless you are a Nazi who believes in Aryan superiority - aka white superiority.

Worse, Texas has passed a bill on Critical Race Theory (S.B. 3), which will go into effect in December, laying out exactly what should be taught about what we used to call civics: "the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.” This new law essentially limits the study of these things to certain specific documents and people.

I don't want to quote her entire essay, it's quite long, but if you are on Facebook, look it up. We should all read it.

What blew me away were the items and people who may not be taught: the writings of George Washington! Anything about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings! The history of Native Americans and of "founding mothers and other founding persons!" Frederick Douglass! I could go on. It essentially restricts the history of the U.S. and its government to the brilliant deeds of a few white men, leaving out anything that might make white men look bad. Like systemic racism, and genocide of Native Americans, and the fact that until the 20th century, married women were essentially their husbands' property.

I stewed about this all morning - really. History is important to me. If we don't know how we got here, how do we know where we're going? And facts are important to me - if you don't know all the facts, you make wrong decisions. But as I stewed, something occurred to me.

These legislators have forgotten the Internet. (Based on observation of various elected bodies, many of the people elected barely know how to send email.) Many of the kids whose education they want to warp have access to the Internet, and know how to use Google, especially after the last year and a half of virtual learning. If you know how to ask the questions, the Internet will tell you anything you want to know, whether the State of Texas likes it or not. I encourage myself that at least some Texas kids may start wondering about what was left out, and asking the questions.

Regulations

The new administration says, among other things, that it is opposed to "new regulations"; that it will remove 2 old regulations for every new one proposed; and that it wants to destroy the government departments which make and enforce the regulations.  This, they claim, will make us "free." 

I beg to differ.  It will make a small number of us free to do things not currently permitted under government regulations.  The rest of us will have to live with the fallout from that.  Specifically, businesses large and small will now be able to do things not currently permitted.

The new administration has already issued permits for a previously blocked practice:  dumping coal ash.  Pickens County, South Carolina is seriously concerned about a proposal to dump coal ash from another state in a landfill in their county, apparently whether they like it or not.  And they don't.  Dumping substances into streams isn't a problem restricted to coal country.  My husband is from Wisconsin and he has told me stories of creeks poisoned when dairies simply dumped their waste whey into streams, rather than pay to dispose of it.  This was decades ago.  And remember the Gold King Mine waste water spill in 2015?  There were regulations against that, but contractors working on the mine didn't follow the regulations properly and destroyed an entire ecosystem.

If you look back at history, many of the regulations that annoy businesses so much were created because at some point, businesses did things that seriously harmed people, to the point that the government (urged by its voters) told them, "You can't do that any more."  Here are some random examples.  I didn't research these; this is what I can think of offhand.  A lot of these changes came from labor union negotiations, or from citizens joining together to protest a situation.

• The windows in your cars have to shatter into tiny squares with not much edge, so as not to slice you to pieces in a collision.  I'm old enough to remember when car windows broke like any other window, and a piece of the windshield, if you were unlucky, could cut your throat.  
• You can buy a car today with reasonable expectation that it will not only protect you in a crash, but will not emit noxious vapors that pollute the air; all due to government regulations that make cars more expensive to produce.  I remember when none of that was true.  In particular, I remember when the air in Los Angeles was so bad that your eyes began to sting when you drove through the pass on the Grapevine at the edge of the plain containing the city - 1,500 feet above sea level and 88 miles away from downtown L.A.
• You must be paid extra wages if you work longer than 8 hours a day, or on a weekend or holiday.  These rules came about, through union bargaining, because before the rules, you could essentially be forced to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, at threat of losing your job if you complained.  Research the history of factory work in the late 19th and early 20th century if you think I'm kidding.
• If you're injured working on your job, you can apply for worker's compensation to pay for your treatment, which your employer is required to pay into as a form of insurance.  Before worker's comp, if you were injured on the job, you were probably just fired - which left you broke and unable to work.
• Food you buy at the store can't contain poisonous substances.  The classic recent example of this happened in China in 2008, when milk and infant formula adulterated with melamine (cheaper than protein but looks like protein on analysis) poisoned approximately 300,000 infants, of whom 6 died from kidney damage and 54 were hospitalized.  Yeah, that's the same melamine in some dishes.  The World Health Organization said this was "clearly not an isolated accident, [but] a large-scale intentional activity to deceive consumers for simple, basic, short-term profits."  The FDA, which is at considerable risk of being eliminated, is why you don't worry about this here.

The Republican Party and its business supporters want to eliminate government regulations to make life easier for businesses.  Unregulated businesses have a history of operating in a way that makes them money, at the expense of both their employees and their customers.  They say eliminating regulations will make you "free."  Yeah - and disabled, poisoned, and broke.  What kind of freedom is that?  Not all businesses operate this way; but without government oversight, how do we know which ones they are?  This war on regulations is one of the most dangerous things the current President has suggested, and it isn't getting nearly enough attention.

Finally, the Truth

I've been waiting for someone to say this on air for months, and today I finally heard it, on Rose Aguilar's Your Call on KALW 91.7 FM.  Rose's Friday program is always a "media roundup," discussing the week's best recent reporting, and today they started out with this one:

Citigroup settles for $285 million; no Wall Street exec jailed yet

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/19/127742/citigroup-settles-for-285-million.html#ixzz1bTgeSRQe

While discussing the question of why nobody from Wall Street has gone to jail yet, one of the panelists (maybe Jake Bernstein from ProPublica but I'm not sure) said the Unsayable Thing:

Nobody from Wall Street has gone to jail because what they did wasn't really illegal.

It was deceptive; it was a scam; it was wrong.  Read the linked McClatchy story for details of what Citi did, which had all the moral rectitude of a pea-and-shell game.  But - it wasn't illegal.  Why not?  Because we spent the previous 15 or so years removing so much regulation from the banking and financial industry.  The Citi deal centered around a "collateralized debt obligation", a form of derivative - if you aren't sure what a CDO is and would like to know, take an hour and listen to the classic This American Life broadcast from May 2008, Giant Pool of Money.  After that you'll know more about CDOs than you're comfortable with.  But CDOs were unregulated; the financial industry made sure years ago that all financial derivatives were totally unregulated.  No rules on how they could be set up and managed at all.  That's one of the reasons the Lehman crash caused the short-term credit market to freeze solid:  they didn't have to publish records on the derivatives they traded, so they didn't; and when a big player went down, nobody know what anybody else was on the hook for.

So after the crash, Congress put together the Dodd-Frank Act, to put some regulations back in place on the banking industry.  Remember that when you hear the Republicans screaming that Dodd-Frank has to go.  Some of the stuff that went on actually is illegal now, and the Republicans can't stand it.  Personally, I'd like to see Dodd-Frank gone too; but I want it replaced with the Glass-Steagall Act, which probably won't happen.

Along with the PG&E (and other) gas pipelines that regularly blow up and kill people, the financial crash was just one more side effect of the prevailing right-wing believe that All Government Regulation Is Bad.  Personally, I could use a little more of it.

Getting Government Out of the Way

I keep hearing this from Eric Cantor:  to get the country moving again, we have to "get government out of the way."  By this he means (as he's happy to tell you), less government regulation.  Government regulation is Bad.

California has a classic example of a business which was essentially unimpeded by government regulation.  It's called Pacific Gas & Electric.  For at least the last 50 years, based on the investigation results released today by the National Transportation Safety Board, PG&E has ignored the government's regulations regarding gas pipeline safety and maintenance, including the regulations requiring them to keep records of what pipes they had in the ground and what their condition was.  The net result?  On September 9, 2010, a 54 year old gas pipeline failed in production and produced a fireball that killed 8 people and destroyed a neighborhood.  Because PG&E was too cheap to install automatic shutoff valves, it took 90 minutes to get someone to the site to shut off the gas.  If I recall correctly, the first person they sent didn't know how to turn it off.

The pipeline failed because of a weld which was defective even by the standards of 1956 (according to the NTSB report) - PG&E installed it anyway, and to date has not located any of the records relating to who installed the pipe and where they got it.  Having lost the records, and having been too cheap to do the kind of inspections which would have identified a faulty weld, by September 2010 PG&E believed that the pipe had no welds in it.

I could go on longer about PG&E, but my point is that PG&E appears to have been operating under essentially no regulation.  They managed, under a series of Republican governors, to pack the Public Utilities Commission with retired utility executives (I remember checking their CVs at the time of the blast); and "regulation" of PG&E seems to have gone like this:  PG&E reports some safety fault.  The PUC says, gee, that's bad, you should fix that.  PG&E says, yessir, we'll fix that right away.  End of process.  Nothing was ever fixed.  No fines were ever imposed.  And eight people, and a neighborhood, died.  The neighborhood may be rebuilt.  It's too bad about the people, isn't it?

Remember this the next time you hear the Republican leadership ranting about "getting government out of the way."  I don't want government out of the way.  I want government standing squarely between me and Big Business.  My environment, my health, my life, mean nothing to Big Business when set against their profits.  If this isn't enough of an example, look into the people who are mining coal in Appalachia using a marvellous process called "mountaintop removal", or check out the reports of what fracking is doing to the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.