Transparency when it comes to public business doesn’t appear to be in vogue anymore.

This past week in Wisconsin:

Sweeping secrecy is big mistake

July 03, 2015 10:31 am

Republicans are supposed to be suspicious of big government.

Instead, the GOP leaders who run the Legislature’s budget committee want citizens to trust state government with sweeping secrecy.

No thank you.

The full Legislature should reject the Joint Finance Committee’s sneaky attempt Thursday night to exempt state lawmakers from Wisconsin’s open records laws….

[….]

….Aren’t Republicans supposed to favor responsibility? Apparently, Wisconsin Republicans do not.

Among several troubling passages inserted into the state budget Thursday night is this doozy: “No provision of the state’s public records law that conflicts with a rule or policy of the Senate or Assembly or joint rule or policy of the Legislature applies to a record that is subject to such rule or policy.”

In other words, state lawmakers do what they want, when they want – and taxpayers will be in the dark….

[….]

Meanwhile, in Missouri:

Missouri judge dismisses lawsuit over open Senate committee meetings

Lawsuit claimed lawmakers must allow filming of meetings

5:52 PM CDT Jun 30, 2015

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -A Missouri judge dismissed Tuesday an advocacy group’s lawsuit that challenged restrictions on filming Missouri Senate committee meetings.

Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem dismissed the petition brought by Progress Missouri, which claimed decisions by Senate committee chairmen to prohibit filming by the group violates the state’s open meetings law. The liberal advocacy group also said the prohibition infringes on its freedom of speech and association.

The state’s Sunshine Law allows public bodies to establish guidelines on recording to minimize disruption, but the lawsuit said Progress Missouri’s filming wouldn’t have been disruptive. Senate rules state that cameras may be allowed with the permission of the committee chairman “as long as they do not prove disruptive to the decorum of the committee….”

[…]

Sunshine ain’t bustin’ out all over.

The stalwart courage of old media in Missouri is inspiring:

Jason Hancock ‏@J_Hancock

Progress Missouri challenges state Senate on Sunshine Law (via @krcg13) [….] 4:19 PM – 23 Jun 2015

We asked:

Michael Bersin ‏@MBersin

@J_Hancock @KRCG13 So, KRCG was denied permission to film a Senate hearing in the past and they’re not a party to the lawsuit? Why not? 4:31 PM – 23 Jun 2015

Interestingly, there was no response.

Previously:

Because asking politely for people to comply with the law always seems to work out so well (April 15, 2015)

On the wrong side of history and technology (April 20, 2015)

Previously: Campaign Finance: organized labor always looks after working people (May 21, 2012)

Today, at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C111126 05/24/2012 MISSOURIANS FOR RESPONSIBLE LENDING Communications Workers of America 501 Third St NW Washington DC 20001 5/24/2012 $15,000.00

C121010 05/24/2012 GIVE MISSOURIANS A RAISE CWA District 6 Political Educ Committee 10733 Sunset Office Dr Suite 201 Saint Louis MO 63127 5/24/2012 $15,000.00

[emphasis added]

For raising the minimum wage and capping the interest on payday loans.

Would you expect anything else?

Today, at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C121010 05/21/2012 GIVE MISSOURIANS A RAISE Service Employees International Union 1800 Massachusetts Ave Nw Washington DC 20036 5/21/2012 $15,000.00

C111126 05/21/2012 MISSOURIANS FOR RESPONSIBLE LENDING Service Employees International Union 1800 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington DC 20036 5/21/2012 $15,000.00

[emphasis added]

For raising the minimum wage and capping the interest on payday loans.

Would you expect anything else?

The situation: As per Think Progress, a staffer for climate denialist, big-oil loving James Inhoffe actually told the truth – and made a few oil lobbyists uncomfortable. The staffer wrote to “top oil and gas lobbyists” to express the Senator’s displeasure with the industry’s collaboration with the Obama White House on fracking regulations. The email didn’t pull any punches when it came to describing the cozy relationship between Republicans and the oil and gas industries:

Moving forward, we-your partners-would kindly ask for better coordination and communication from you to prevent the Obama administration from pulling similar stunts in the future.

Think Progress also notes that this “partnership” between Big Oil and the GOP is far from one sided. In return for the coordinated “attacks on behalf of industry interests,” GOP congressional types have pulled in a mighty monetary haul – literally millions – over the past few years.

The Missouri angle: Lately Missouri’s GOP Senator Roy Blunt has been highly vocal about rising gas prices – to an almost comic extent. He implicitly and explicitly blamed the Obama administration’s effort to regulate drilling in sensitive areas, subject the Keystone XL pipeline to environmental regulation, and to enact fuel efficiency standards. The underlying theme is, of course, nothing new for Blunt – over the years, he has managed to work it into almost every issue from jobs to taxation. He’s also done his best to insure that the industry keeps pulling down those big taxpayer subsidies – the icing on its highly profitable cake.

The high cost of doing business with Roy Blunt: Blunt has been well rewarded for the services he renders. According to the Center for Responsive Politics (via Think Progress), since 2006 he has pulled in $363,950 in campaign donations from the oil and gas industries. Only nine senators have higher totals for the same period and almost all of them are from big oil producing states or prominent in the GOP leadership (such as Mitch McConnell). It’s a sure thing Blunt isn’t getting the money just because he’s from Missouri. Missouri’s other senator, Democrat Clare McCaskill has received only $55,058 in Big Oil money since 2006. Wonder why Roy gets a bigger handout?

Just keep these facts in mind next time you hear or read statements by Roy Blunt haranguing us about energy policy or ranting about the effect of “job-killing” regulations on the oil and gas industries. Although, come to think about it, intelligent and careful regulation of the oil and gas industries could kill lots of highly rewarded senatorial jobs.      

Today, thanks to a front-page story in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that State Senator Jane Cunningham, in a fit of spite, is willing to gut a program that affects 4000 preschool children. She wants to yank $11.8 million from the Missouri Preschool Project because she thinks that Kathy Thornberg of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (with the backing, incidentally, of the Commissioner of Education and the State Board of Education) has “defied” the legislature and, more to the point I suspect, the rampageous Senator Cunningham herself.

What did Thornberg do to fan Cunningham’s fury? She applied for federal preschool funding that would require the use of a Quality Rating System, or QRS, which the doctrinaire Ms. Cunningham claims is tantamount to “‘social engineering’ on children,” and would force “a ‘Kathy Thornburg one-size-fits-all’ mentality on child-rearing in Missouri.”

According to Cunningham, by applying for a federal Early Learning Challenge grant, “the state Board of Education has slapped us across the face, and we have nowhere else to go but the money.” Don’t you just feel the heat from her white-hot ego? Don’t dare defy crazy Queen Jane or it’ll be to hell with the kids. And all because a federal grant requires evaluative criteria based on what more impartial observers describe as “documented best-practice standards.”

Cunningham, of course, is all for evaluating performance when the criteria reflects her own personal prejudices. Witness the teacher evaluation mandates in her anti-tenure legislative efforts if you want to talk about imposing external, one-size-fits-all criteria. Take, for instance, this year’s effort to punish teachers and hobble teacher unions, SB806:

The bill also includes numerous mandates regarding teacher evaluation systems, such as requiring at least fifty percent of evaluations to be based on student test scores and prohibiting districts and employees from designing evaluation systems within collective bargaining negotiations.  The also repeals the minimum salary law for all teachers.

So standards are okay when they’re used to enforce Cunningham’s prejudices, but professionally developed educational benchmarks are a problem?

Do you maybe think somebody has a few control issues? Maybe little Janey needs to take a time out until she learns to play well with others.

Fortunately for us all, that’s just what’s going to happen. Cunningham has been redistricted out of office and will be gone after November (although I’m sure she’ll do whatever she can to regain some kind of fiefdom, elective or otherwise, from which she can meddle in Missourians’ lives). It does, however, seem like  even some fellow GOPers in the Senate might be getting tired of her high-handed approach:

Springfield Senator Bob Dixon strongly criticized Cunningham for running the bill [SB806] through her own general laws committee instead of it going to the education committee … “To try to bypass a committee that deals specifically with educations when we’re talking about an education bill … I just think that is … not unlike the substance that is referenced in the book of Nehemiah that was placed in a special part of the city after it is expelled from the back end of a camel,” he said.

Yesterday the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a great editorial. The problem it addressed was straightforward: the $500 million plus state budget shortfall. The editorial writers made no bones about the obvious source of the problem:

Digging out of this hole is Missouri’s true challenge. But neither our Legislature nor our governor can get over their “no new taxes” pledges to do anything meaningful about it.

The solution they suggested was just as straightforward:

Mr. Nixon should declare a holiday. A tax credit holiday.

This single action would more than fill the budget hole estimated by legislative leaders to be in the range of $500 million.

Everybody in the Capitol knows that Missouri’s biggest ongoing budget problem, outside of the Great Recession, is the state’s propensity to hand out tax credits like legislative candy along a parade route. Some credits go to good causes, like senior citizens on a fixed income. Most go to developers or corporations as incentives, theoretically, to create jobs.

Unfortunately for the theory that tax credits create jobs, the evidence that they do so overall is just not there. This fact is fairly well known, accounting for the fact that there are folks on all sides of the partisan divide willing to take pot shots at the practice.

Happily, there are some folks who are willing to at least try to take action to rationalize the use of tax credits. Sadly, they aren’t in Missouri. Michigan Democratic lawmakers, referencing the relationship between an educated work force and job creation, put forward a plan to finance free community college tuition for state residents, which would paid for by canceling $3.5 million worth of tax credits:

Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing

So what has our governor decided to do? In spite of the importance of education to our economically beleaguered state, Governor Nixon proposes to partially balance the budget by cutting $89 million from an already mediocre state higher education system.

This year, when you hear talk about the state’s dire budget situation and the pain and suffering it has caused – 860 state jobs will be lost, for just one instance – remember there was a solution staring us in the face, and miracle of miracles, it might even  have garnered some bipartisan support. Also keep in mind that a few days ago, GOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Spence actually proposed a moratorium on tax credits as an important part of his economic plan. He seems to have learned something in those home economics courses.

To give the Governor his due, he’s up against a system that practically dictates that the worst case solution will be the only practicable option. In spite of some GOP criticism of tax credits, others in the legislature have made their unwillingness to reform the state’s program known. Last year, in fact, the Governor was warned by Steve Tilley, who has since become House Speaker, and three other powerful committee chairman – before he even put a budget proposal forward – that they would not permit him to use tax credit reform to balance the budget.

It’s hard not to conclude that once again powerful vested interested are calling the shots when it comes to the distribution of state tax dollars.  Nevertheless, one can’t help wondering just what might be achieved if the Governor had been willing to go out on a limb and show just a little more political courage. Surely there’s a time when we have to fight – even if we’re already backed to the wall? Perhaps that’s when we most need to show some fight.

Todays big Roy Blunt news:

Sen. Roy Blunt, a key Republican political insider, will head Mitt Romney’s effort to secure congressional support for the former Massachusetts governor’s presidential bid, the latest move by the GOP establishment to close ranks for 2012.

According to both Romney and Blunt, this political marriage is based on their mutual concern for “job creation.”  Or is it their mutual concern for “job creators,” as in big corporate campaign contributors?

Then there’s this observation:

A longstanding conservative as well as an establishment figure, Blunt could help polish Romney’s image among both conservatives and Washington insiders.

I think that this means that the Romney camp recognizes that Blunt has managed the essential balancing act between serving GOP corporatist goals and numbly spouting Tea Party bromides. So far, Romney’s efforts to straddle that line looks looks like nothing other than the crassest sort of flip-floppery. My own personal theory about this distinction is that Blunt’s demeanor is so wooden and his delivery so rote that it is taken as unstudied by the literally unstudied Tea Partiers, whereas the glib and relatively animated Romney only excites distrust from the less-polished denizens of Tea Party Land.

It also helps that Blunt never really bothers to explain or justify his past actions; he just grunts and stays on the GOP point du jour. Maybe he can teach Romney to shut up about Romneycare, the forerunner of “Obamacare,” and help him jettison his efforts to justify his abysmal job creation record in Massachusetts. Blunt’s rule is don’t explain, just attack, no matter how crude your weapon, and, so far, it has the  advantage that, as a way to divert attention from his past record, it’s worked.

Blunt and Romney also have one other singular commonality:  They resemble ventriloquist’s dummies popular in the middle of the last century, respectively Howdy Doody and Charlie McCarthy.* This fits well with still yet another narrative attendant upon the announcement of Blunt’s role in the Romney campaign, which is that Romney’s rival, Rick Perry, scares the party establishment silly:

There has been talk in Republican circles that Perry might be too dangerous to run in 2012 because he demonstrates little appeal to independents. Some in the GOP point to 1972, when liberal Sen. George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for president and lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide with long-lasting political consequences.

I can easily imagine that predictable corporate puppets are preferable to the GOP movers-and-shakers – though not necessarily to the GOP base – than the perpetually foot-in-mouth loose-cannon, Rick Perry.

*Sentence edited for clarity.  

Very rich Rex Sinquefield is getting ready for an unholy war against the poor and middle class; his objective: the unFair Tax. Right now he’s busily deploying his proxies, among them Missouri House Speaker Steve Tilley who, along with sundry other foot-soldiers in the Missouri legislature, is seriously in hock to Sinquefield for big chunks of campaign funding. The brute force brigade, known locally as the Let Voters Decide Campaign Committee, is simultaneously taking its place on the battlefield with the filing of not one, but nine versions of a petition for a proposed constitutional amendment that would abolish the income tax and substitute one or another version of a regressive sales tax, deceptively labeled a “fair” tax, to be applied to a vastly expanded body of goods and services. (The differences between the nine versions are summarized in this St. Louis Beacon article.) King Rex is a strategist; he knows to cover his rear flank should the legislative gambit fail to pay off.

I’ve written about why the unFair Tax is such a bad idea here and here; now that it’s coming down the pike and we are dealing with the particulars of Sinquefield’s proposal, mainstream outlets are also piping up (see, for instance this editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Essentially the arguments against Sinquefield’s unFair Tax proposal boil down to the following:

1. The unFair Tax is not revenue neutral and the state would lose money. To make a sales tax/income tax swap an even-steven proposition would entail prohibitively high sales taxes.

2. Revenue from Missouri’s already low income taxes is currently inadequate to meet the needs of the state. If the unFair Tax is enacted as proposed by Sinquefield et al., it would truly decimate state services – and things are already pretty grim on that front.  There’s a reason why CNBC’s Top States for Business Survey ranks Missouri 49th for quality of life.

3. The unFair Tax will create a toxic environment. It’s  obvious that higher sales taxes would seriously impact those with lower incomes. Businesses in border areas could suffer since those of us who can do so will most likely travel out of state when it comes time to make major purchases. To move into the realm of the anecdotal and personal, I would imagine that when it comes time for my husband to retire, should the unFair Tax prevail, we probably won’t be staying in Missouri  – heck, we might even look for a new house on the Illinois side of the river long before retirement. And I bet we won’t be alone; plenty of those who have the option to do so may just head for those nearby hills outside Missouri.

4. Since the proposal envisions exemptions from sales tax for some selected set of services, it doesn’t take a genius to see an opening for some very happy lobbyists and the concomitant nasty corruption.

5. There is no upside – the claim that eliminating state income tax translates into prosperity has been discredited over and over. Take for instance the much touted example of Texas. Unfortunately, it seems that those stories about streets paved with gold in the Lone Star State were fictional; Texas, with a looming $18 billion deficit, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And even worse for the anti-tax clique, Texas’ governor and big-time hypocrite, Rick Perry, has been busy for the past couple of years plugging holes in the state budget with the federal stimulus money against which he so loudly harangued – making things look a lot rosier less thorny than they actually were among the yellow roses of Texas.

6. The most important reason to reject the unfair sales tax is that it is so – wait for it – unfair. Rex Sinquefield wants the working people of Missouri to carry rich men on their backs. There are few cases where one can create wealth without leveraging the educational and physical infrastructure that our taxes provide. Those who make money do so because they have access to an educated workforce, transportation systems, and other elements of publicly provided infrastructure. It is not fair for those who have parlayed those tools into big bucks to weasel out of paying for their use – which is just what Sinquefield’s unfair sales tax would permit. Take a look at the following chart* which gives one a picture of how state and local taxes are actually apportioned:

It’s clear who’s carrying the weight of sales taxes here – and it isn’t the likes of Daddy Warbucks Sinquefield. Now imagine what the chart would look like if income taxes were eliminated and the sales taxes were increased across the board. Did you say regressive? Just before you fainted? All I know is that I’m sure as hell not going to sit idly by while King Rex and his pals try to get a free ride at my expense. And if you want to call this class war, well go ahead. As far as I’m concerned, I know who fired the first volley.

*Chart from “Who Pays?” (PDF), prepared by Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.