Promoted in a big way by Steven D
This is an essay written by David Van Os, Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General. He posted it on Daily Kos but, since he does not have an account here (I will encourge that) and since he is slightly tech challenged and majorly time challenged, I posted it here on his behalf. He is responding to questions on Daily Kos. I will get him to register here but it may not happen today.
Thank you for the support. TXsharon, one pissed off Texas gal who is lucky enough to be on David’s steering committee.
This year in Texas, rural voters are presented with a new breed of populist Democratic candidates for state office who are real fighters. These Democratic candidates stand up for the people against the power-grabbing political and corporate elites who are running roughshod over rural Texas in a reign of greed and arrogance. The time is ripe for such candidates, because a populist revolt is percolating across rural Texas, the likes of which has not been seen in decades.
For one thing, many rural Texas voters who have long formed an integral part of the Bush support base are in open revolt against the Establishment Republican political machine over the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC). All up and down the center of rural Texas, these voters are madder’n hell over the TTC, which in one of the most gigantic forcible eminent domain land grabs in American history, will tear up hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the best farmland in the nation so that private Spanish companies can collect billions of dollars in tolls for decades, siphon Texas money to Europe, and reduce Texans to colonial status.
These rural conservative voters are primed to punish the Republican incumbents in this year’s elections for Texas state offices. I don’t need a focus group or a poll to tell me this and I wouldn’t trust a poll anyway. I know it because I’m here listening to people with my own ears and seeing it with my own eyes, as I travel the state in my whistlestop tour of all 254 counties in my campaign to defeat the Republican corporate mouthpiece incumbent state Attorney General.
The TTC, or as I call it, the Trans-Texas Monstrosity, is stimulating many grassroots Democrats and grassroots Republicans to realize that they have a lot more in common with each other than the grassroots in either party have in common with the elite in either party. Out in the Texas countryside, it is unmistakable that a new populist political formation that transcends the standard Democratic-Republican, liberal-conservative lines is taking seed. Or it may be more accurate to call it an old formation that is re-forming.
A key to understanding it is realizing that the national Democratic Party’s decades-long abandonment of salt-of-the-earth populism in favor of neoliberal corporatism was one of the biggest factors in the social wedge issues gaining political potency. The Democrats left a vacuum and all the Republican Party had to do was fill the vacuum, which it gladly used the social wedge issues to do.
The Trans-Texas Corridor is not the only issue galvanizing this new populism to brew across standard party lines. The ever-rising cost of gasoline in contrast with unimaginable Big Oil profits is doing it also. $3-and-up gasoline is devastating to millions of working, farming, and ranching Texans who are struggling unsuccessfully to balance their income to cover it, not to mention fixed-income Social Security recipients, as well as local governments struggling to balance budgets that are constantly pushed out of kilter by rising fuel costs.
The most basic thing to understand about the restoration of southern and western populism is that the rural conservatives who provided the base for the social wedge issues are at the same time, and always have been, instinctively hostile to runaway corporate power. The majority of these voters will base their voting behavior on their hostility to runaway corporate power rather than the social wedge issues, if they are given that choice. For the last 30 years, since Texas corporate money-power lawyer Robert Strauss became chairman of the DNC with the goal of making the Democratic Party an ally of Big Business, the national Democratic Party most of the time and in most elections has not given them that choice.
With my campaign for Texas Attorney General , in which I am openly challenging the greedy hogs who are pushing the TTC, the Big Oil barons, the Insurance Monopolists, the other corporate robber barons, and their political puppets, I am working as hard as I can to give this choice back to rural Texas voters. If I can get most of them to be aware that they have this choice, they will vote for me for Texas Attorney General, of this I have no doubt. Once in office, I will move quickly and forcefully against the robber barons under our state’s antitrust and consumer protection laws. I am certain that my actions to do these things will receive wide popular support across the state.
The same holds true for my Texas Democratic ticketmates who are also challenging the greedy and the power-grabbers in the context of the particular offices for which they are running.
Neither my Texas Democratic ticketmates nor I are doing any of this for the purpose of political gamesmanship. This is not a basketball tournament we’re involved in here. It is not a mere game to see which side can put the most points on a political scoreboard. People are hurting in this robber baron world that the 21st century has turned out to be.
The corporate robber barons and their political power-grabber mouthpieces are equally oppressive to Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and the disaffected citizens who have given up and stopped voting. Millions of Texans regardless of past political affiliation see this and are ready to do something about it, if given the right cues and opportunities. Democrats calling them names for having been hoodwinked by the silk-stocking Republican politicians won’t send them the right cue, that’s for sure. But reaching out to them where they live, all over the vastness of rural and small-town Texas, and talking to them truthfully and plainly about how we the people do have the power to fight back against the Trans-Texas Monstrosity, the Oil Barons, the Insurance Barons, and the crooks squatting in public office will and it is.
The 19th century framers of the Texas Constitution created the office of Texas Attorney General for the very purpose of leveling the playing fields for the people in relation to robber barons and power-grabbers. Due to its size, its population, and its position astride economic and political crossroads, developments in Texas often have enormous impact throughout the states of the U.S. and even the world. (Witness everything that has happened to the U.S. and the world in the past 5 ¾ years as a result of Texas politics.) The populist revolt that is gathering in the hearts and minds of my fellow Texans can change the world. Not only I, but also huge numbers of my fellow Texans, both urban and rural, are ready to fight the forces of greed and arrogance until hell freezes over, and then to fight `em on the ice.
We Texans have helped our fellow Americans in other states on many occasions for decades. For 20 years, Texans have been a cash machine for national and out-of-state political candidates, causes, parties, and political action committees. Now will you help us?
