The Things You Can Learn at Juanita Jean’s Beauty Salon….

One of my favorite blogs is written by Juanita Jean, proprietor of “The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.” Juanita Jean’s real name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston, and she lives in Richmond, Texas, which she describes as “the heart of Tom DeLay’s old district, and nuttier than squirrel poop.”

Since I frequently use examples from Texas in my classes–the state is a reliable source of “what not to do”–Juanita Jean has been a godsend, covering as she does a range of idiocy beyond that which hits the  national news.

Here are a couple of recent examples.

Rep. Steve Stockman is the Tea Party candidate running against Sen. John Cornyn in the 2014 Texas Republican Senate primary. (Cornyn, one of the most conservative members of the Senate–and that’s saying something!–is evidently not sufficiently crazy.) Anyway, Stockman has announced that he is now accepting donations in Bitcoins, a virtual currency.

As Juanita Jean explains,

“Of course, Stockman says it’s about … wait for it … freedom.

“I really think digital currency’s more about freedom,” he explained in a YouTube video. “Because all the time people are trying to get in your pocket, trying to do different things to control you. And if you have your own wealth, and control your own wealth, it’s about freedom, it’s not about anything other than that really. Freedom to choose what you do with your money, and freedom to keep your money without people influencing it by printing money or through regulation.”

Yeah, it’s not about ripping people off with a volatile currency.  It’s not even about untraceable campaign donations.  And it certainly isn’t about being able to track what Stockman spends that money on.   It’s about freedom.”

Juanita Jean is at her best, however, when she explains what passes for social policy in the Great State of Texas.  For example, she describes a recent deal between Rick Perry and a payday loan company that will require poor people to visit payday loan offices to set up  accounts in order to use a new toll road.

I’m not making that up.

People who want to set up an account to pay their toll charges can do so by phone, mail or online, but the only places to do so in person in El Paso are at ACE stores. ACE is a payday lender. Individuals who make the transaction at the payday lender will be charged a $3 fee to set up the account and a $2 convenience service fee to replenish a non-credit card.

Let Juanita Jean take it from there….

What the partnership is essentially doing is sending thousands of potential first-time customers directly into the stores of a payday lender.” said Diane Standaert, senior legislative counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending.

But it does not stop there.

Additionally, the man Perry appointed to be Texas’ consumer watchdog, William White, is also vice president of payday lender Cash America. The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently fined the company $19 million.

Do you wanna know what interest Cash America charges for a 14 day loan?  533%.  No, that’s not a typo.  It’s three numbers starting with a 5.  Some poor guy working two jobs living paycheck to paycheck has a sick kid.  Where’s he going to get medicine before his next paycheck?  Welcome to Cash America!  He even charged higher rates to United States service men and women.

William White is going to hell.  But, meanwhile, he’s Texas’s consumer watchdog.

Don’t you just love Texas?

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“Clarifying” HJR3

The Indiana General Assembly has re-introduced the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage previously known as HJR6–it is now HJR3–and in an effort to blunt mounting criticisms of the measure’s “what the hell does that mean?” second sentence, they’ve introduced a “clarifying” companion statute.

As a number of lawyers have pointed out, the “clarification” is a legal non-starter: legislative bodies don’t get to tell judges how to interpret constitutional language, and efforts to do so raise substantial separation of powers issues. The lawyers serving in the Indiana General Assembly undoubtedly know how meaningless this legislation is, but then, its purpose was political, not legal.  HJR3’s second sentence is a disaster, and this is just a lame effort to obscure that fact.

Attempts at distraction aside, here’s what mystifies this recovering lawyer:

Over and over, its proponents insist that a state constitutional amendment is needed because Indiana’s current statute defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman isn’t strong enough. We’re told a constitutional amendment is needed to protect Indiana’s existing ban from “activist” judges.

This is utter horse poop. (I am trying to watch my language.)

In Indiana, “activist” state court judges have already upheld Indiana’s legislation banning same-sex marriages. So there is no threat from the state bench. And a state constitutional provision would be utterly useless should the U.S. Supreme Court affirm a right to marry. In such a case, a state constitutional measure would be just as unenforceable as the existing statute.

Let me spell this out slowly, for those crack legal minds (or was that legal minds on crack?) in the General Assembly: passage of HJR3 will not “protect” Indiana’s current ban on same-sex nuptials.

That isn’t to say that passage of HJR3 would be meaningless. It would do several things: send a signal that Indiana is a backward, intolerant state; invite lots of litigation inviting those “activist judges” to figure out what the hell the second sentence does or doesn’t mean; encourage members of Indiana’s creative class to consider relocation; and make it far more difficult for Hoosier businesses to recruit “the best and brightest.”

Those consequences are clear enough.

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I Am Not a Crook! Er…Bully!

It doesn’t speak well for me, I’ll admit, but there’s a German word for what I’m feeling: schadenfreude. It means taking pleasure from the misfortune of others.

I’ve disliked Chris Christie ever since he first assumed the office of Governor of New Jersey, and decided to cement his “fiscally conservative” bona fides by refusing to allow the feds to fund a much-needed tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York. His decision was all theater, and the effect was to screw up traffic engineering in the whole Tri-State area.

Evidently, screwing up traffic is his preferred modus operandi. 

Between his earlier “look at me, I’m not spending federal dollars” and his more recent “Don’t cross me or I’ll shut down your bridge” episodes, we’ve seen periodic outbursts–yelling at people who question him, crude insults lobbed at hecklers–that gave observers a glimpse into the arrogance of this big bully. If he had a coat of arms, it would say “How dare you cross me? Who do you think you are.”

In his rambling press conference, Christie did what bullies tend to do when they are confronted: throw someone else under the bus. He was shocked–shocked, I tell you–to find that his top aides had engaged in such behavior. He had been betrayed by the people he had hired and mentored. He was the victim.

Anyone who has ever been in politics–for that matter, anyone who has ever worked for someone with a huge ego–knows that subordinates act on the desires and/or orders of their bosses. If you believe that Christie didn’t (directly or tacitly) endorse this bit of petty bullying, I have a different bridge to sell you.

Like I said, schadenfreude.

The truly unanswered question arising out of this abuse of authority is: when will those who work for government figure out that office emails are public and discoverable? Didn’t Tony Bennett’s debacle teach Christie’s folks anything?

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad “Frankenfood”?

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran an extensive article about the highly emotional grass-roots effort to eliminate or label GMOs--genetically-modified organisms–and the political risks to those who resist that emotionalism in favor of reliance on the science.

This is an issue that drives my cousin, a cardiologist and scientist, up the wall. At his own blog, he has written extensively on the subject, pointing out–among other things–that foods made with GMO crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people around the world for more than 15 years with no discernible ill effects; that virtually all processed foods sold in the U.S. contain GMO ingredients; that genetic engineering simply “speeds up” the conventional cross-breeding and hybridization that humans have done for thousands of years.

He also points out that genetic manipulation allows us to produce plants more resistant to insects and disease–which in turn allows us to reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides that can be harmful. He also points to the promise of better nutrition for people in third-world countries.

The scientific community is solidly in my cousin’s corner on the issue.

There is one thing, however, that I think my cousin gets wrong. He has concluded that “the irrational opposition to these products is likely being propagated by the same individuals who deny, among other things, global warming and evolution.”

Not quite.

As the New York Times reported,
Scientists, who have come to rely on liberals in political battles over stem-cell research, climate change and the teaching of evolution, have been dismayed to find themselves at odds with their traditional allies on this issue. Some compare the hostility to G.M.O.s to the rejection of climate-change science, except with liberal opponents instead of conservative ones.

“These are my people, they’re lefties, I’m with them on almost everything,” said Michael Shintaku, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, who testified several times against the bill. “It hurts.”

So why are liberals willing to accept the scientific consensus on climate change and evolution and most other things, but so suspicious of that same science when it comes to GMOs?

There is a lack of scientific literacy that contributes to all “denialism,” of course, and we all suffer from a lack of good reporting on scientific issues. But I think something else is going on here. Liberals are willing to trust scientific expertise in other areas–why not in this one?

I think at least part of the answer is that the GMO issue has become confused in the public mind with other practices of the food industry that are far less benign.

The use of hormones and antibiotics in order to fatten chicken and cattle more quickly and with foodstuffs they wouldn’t otherwise tolerate is a cause of widespread and well-founded concern. The rapacious and well-documented business practices of companies like Montsano certainly suggest that those companies are willing to put profits above people’s health, and shouldn’t be trusted. Films like “Food, Inc.” have disclosed the frequently inhumane treatment of the animals raised to feed us, and engendered a visceral response in viewers. (I couldn’t eat chicken for months!)

Add these unquestionably valid concerns to our very imprecise use of the term “genetically-modified” and you get an understandable–if misplaced–reaction to anything considered remotely “unnatural.”

 
 
 
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Emerging from a Different Kind of Prison?

There are the prisons we all recognize–utilitarian buildings constructed to hold lawbreakers–and then there are prisons of a less recognizable sort: rigid beliefs, the sorts of ideological commitments impervious to evidence.

Yesterday’s post referenced the copious academic literature analyzing one such ideological commitment.

As I noted in that post, for the past thirty-odd years, devotion to contracting-out (mis-labeled “privatization”) has been an article of faith with a lot of public managers and political science theorists, not to mention substantial numbers of folks in the business community that have profited from such contracts and the even higher percentage of nonprofit enterprises that have come to depend upon government funding.

This belief in the benefits of privatization has persisted despite significant amounts of research painting a considerably more nuanced picture.

Sometimes, however, reality really does bite. So I was interested in an article from the Idaho Statesman, reporting that the state will resume control of a prison that has been run by CCA, one of the largest private prison companies in the country.

An Associated Press report last year raised questions about how the Nashville, Tenn.,-based company was staffing the prison, and the state’s move is part of a larger debate over whether prison privatization works.

Over the past several decades, contractors have been brought in to run prisons, federal lockups and even county-level jails. The number of inmates housed in the facilities grew from 85,500 in 2000 to more than 128,000 in 2012, according to federal statistics.

Private prison operators have been repeatedly sued, amid allegations of rampant violence, understaffing, gang activity and contract fraud.
The Idaho Statesman article quoted University of North Florida criminal justice professor Michael Hallett, who has written a book on prison privatization. Hallett said the problems in Idaho reflect those seen nationwide.

“A private prison corporation operates just like an old-fashioned HMO, where the less they spend, the more they make,” Hallett said. “ … There’s lots of ways to game the system, through contract violations and even just legal contracts to house easier inmates.”

Idaho’s governor has been a longtime supporter of privatization, but the problems became too obvious for him to ignore. The situation is reminiscent of then-Governor Daniels’ belated admission that Indiana’s costly experiment with welfare privatization was a disaster.

The lesson today and yesterday isn’t that government should never contract out. The lesson is: the decision to contract for public services is more complicated than ideologues want to make it. Sometimes contracting is a good idea; often, it isn’t.

We deserve public managers who can tell the difference.