Category: Uncategorized

Dynamic Growth in the Rio Grande Valley
By José Joaquín López
Dallas Fed

Texas Manufacturing employmentIts proximity to Mexico and fast-growing, binational job market are major factors in the Rio Grande Valley’s economy. They’re a large part of the reason employment has increased at a faster, steadier pace in the Valley than in the United States, Mexico or Texas as a whole. Despite rapid job creation, the Valley remains relatively poor. The McAllen–Edinburg–Mission metropolitan statistical area ranks last among the nation’s 361 MSAs, with a per capita income of $15,184 a year, less than half the national average of $31,472. The Brownsville–Harlingen MSA comes in next to last at $16,308.

The combination of rapid job growth and low income is unusual. In a study covering 1967 to 1997, Dallas Fed economist Keith Phillips found weak employment gains in other states’ low-income counties—annual averages of 2 percent in Kentucky, 0.4 percent in West Virginia and 0.3 percent in Mississippi. Valley employment, by contrast, rose 3.4 percent a year over the three decades.

Southwest Economy

Issue 2, March/April 2006
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

http://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2006/swe0602c.html

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / DissidentVoice / CounterPunch

"Next year Lord we’d love to give thanks for everybody’s freedom and
equality, but in the meantime please accept our appreciation for the
fact that after you adjust for race and class, some of our kids seem
not too pulled down by impossible situations."

Such was the blessing spoken by the Texas Supreme Court this
week as justices released a long-awaited school funding decision just
in time for the American Winter Holiday Season.

To the wealthier school districts of Texas (known as the West Orange
Cove plaintiffs) the court granted permission to raise local tax rates
in behalf of ‘educational excellence’ in all the right neighborhoods.

To the rest of us, the court explained how the structure of funding in
Texas does not make it impossible for poor districts to keep themselves
accredited, and therefore the urgent pleadings from the poor districts
for more support cannot be expected to rise to the level of
constitutional concern.
In one sense it was a crisp and clear ruling, cutting through
the panic arguments filed by the state in an attempt to steer the case
away from the godawful facts that had impressed the trial judge. Panic
arguments such as the court has no jurisdiction nor the districts
proper standing were one by one dismissed. After all, the court had
already issued a decade or more of school funding rulings all named
‘Edgewood’ after a famous San Antonio school system.

After cutting through the panic arguments, the court took the facts
boldly in hand and said things like, sure, the buildings look like crap
in these pictures, but what does that have to do with education? The
kids seem to be passing, don’t they? It’s a bad situation, but it’s not
that bad. One fourth of all school districts in Texas have not yet
levied special taxes to support their own school buildings, so the
question of the state’s obligation is beside the point.

This Thanksgiving, we can give thanks to a few attorneys and school
districts who jumped into the lawsuit because they wanted to make sure
the rich districts didn’t run away with all the money. In that
struggle, our longstanding heroes from Edgewood and Alvarado seem to
have maintained a very costly line in the form of a warning from the
Supreme Court that if things get much worse, well there has to be some
limit to the amount of hypocrisy the court will publicly tolerate.

MALDEF was quick to denounce the decision as justice delayed
for the children of Texas. With richer districts now able to ‘enhance’
their schools through higher local taxes than previously allowed, and
with the legislature under no real court pressure to make things more
equal (just don’t let them get much more unequal) the timeline for
justice is matching up a little closer to that previously scheduled
cold day in hell.

“In 2003,” said the court, “Texas ranked last among the states
in the percentage of high school graduates at least 25 years old in the
population.” Fully half the Hispanic students and nearly half the
African-American students drop out during high school. In Texas, Black
and Hispanic students are the majority. By the year 2040, these
‘minorities’ will constitute two-thirds of the population. But the cost
of a just education is difficult to quantify said the court. Glaring
challenges of high school literacy the court could not quite translate
into a single legal reason for constitutional urgency.

There was a dissenting opinion: a heartfelt manifesto for
justice through ‘competition’ duly applied to suggestions for
competition between districts and more tax money for private schools.

BTW, all those anti-affirmative action voices who say we should really
start equalizing education at the elementary level? There were so many
of them hollering when the Hopwood case was news. Today they seem quite
happy to note with the Texas Supreme Court that democracy is still good
enough for constitutional purposes so long as you know how to properly
adjust your expectations for differences of race and class.

Anyway, that’s the news from Texas. Dog bites kid. Pass the turkey please.

If we had a flag, we’d lower it half way for a month.  Dear
Rosa,  please don’t let us rest in peace until we are worthy.–gm

By Greg Moses

First you make their pregnancies more likely, then you dismantle
services that would support their children, finally you talk them out
of
abortion. This is the new "pro-life" regime of public policy, thanks to the
Texas Legislature.

In a personal account of being turned away
from her annual exam, an Austin Indymedia
reporter writes about the morning she and 25 other
women ("women of color of course!") were advised by Planned Parenthood
staff of the new state order. A story at the Planned Parenthood
website explains that funding was shifted by the legislature "from
family planning clinics, such as Planned Parenthood, that provide
health services and contraception for low-income women, to so-called
‘pregnancy counseling clinics’ that devote their resources to
convincing women who have unintended pregnancies not to have abortions".

Similar stories have been written in Amarillo, Waco, and Pharr. The Brownsville
Herald reports that "1,500 women in Brownsville may lose access to the
services the clinics in town provide, such as: diabetes and
hypertension screenings, women’s health exams, cervical and breast
cancer screenings and birth control."

In an AP story archived at North Texas
Planned Parenthood, researchers find that over the past decade an
increasing percent of births are not wanted by mothers. The AP
report trades quotes between anti-abortion activists who say the trend
shows a "pro-life" shift and reproductive rights activists who say the
numbers reflect decreased access to "abortion providers."

Strangely missing from the AP report is consideration of the logical
possibility that the increasing number of unwanted births might also
reflect how the attack on "abortion providers" has resulted in
decreased availability of birth control services, as reported by Austin
Indymedia.

Also missing from the analysis is consideration of the effect of
worsening conditions for parenthood over the past decade, exemplified
in Texas by attacks on children’s health insurance. Poor family
services might also account for why mothers increasingly report
unwanted births.

The problem with the so-called anti-abortion agenda is that it focuses
too narrowly on a single, isolated moment of choice. The effective
result is a war on rights to reproduction and parenthood.

To reduce the
number of abortions requires attention to an expanded range of
choices, not only in terms of whether to have an abortion or not, but
in terms of birth control and support for parenthood services,
too. But since the broader agenda would involve empowerment and
solidarity, the so-called anti-abortion movement is not
interested. What they prefer is a hypocritical agenda of judgment and
constraint that reminds us of the Right Rev. Dimsdale in Hawthorne’s
"Scarlett Letter". What they really mean by "pro-life" is
pro-patriarchal control.

A
true agenda of liberation would make the choice of abortion less likely
by increasing the percentage of planned and wanted pregnancies in an
environment that welcomes children through robust services for health
and education. Try telling that to the legislature in Texas.