Chapter 10:
What a Difference
In all three states, it didn’t take much time to see dramatic changes.
The first conflicts came with the greatly shrunken state of Texas. Rick Perry still insisted these were misbehaving groups of malcontents who would come back any day now to “our great state of Texas.” Backtracking from his push that had let them vote, county by county, on whether to leave, Perry now insisted they had no right to. A man who defended the mythical “right” of secession for Texas was not going to allow any secession from Texas.
So Perry thought he would use state resources to break the fledgling new states. Texas state offices were ordered to stay under the control of Texas, not allowing them to transfer to Rio Grande, Pecos, or Austin. The state police would all stay Texas state police, and along with the Rangers would enforce continued Texan state control.
The three new governors quickly consulted by phone and came up with an ingenious solution. Hit Perry in the one area where no conservative politician could bend: taxes. All three governors went to the new congresses, which quickly passed new laws declaring the high sales tax ended in their states. Instead, that would be replaced by state income taxes, 1% for the poorest, 10% for the wealthiest. Local consumers were elated, especially the poorer ones. Their cost of living had just dropped by almost a tenth. Merchants liked not having to collect sales tax anymore as well. Perry would now be stuck having to defend taxes, and collect them using force. And three progressive governors and congresses had just earned reputations as both tax cutters and for soaking the wealthy!
The three governors followed up that maneuver with a second one as ingenious. State police and National Guard within their new states were to be transferred from Texas to Rio Grande, Pecos, and Austin. Any officer wishing to resign and join Texas state police or National Guard could do so. But very few actually did.
Perry seemed to be caught off guard yet again. He blustered in public that he would enforce the law and seemed to be vaguely threatening to even use the National Guard to keep the three new states from breaking away. Guerrero saw a chance and gave pointed public speeches about Perry’s “oppressiveness and tyranny,” throwing Perry’s own words back at him. The speeches struck a chord, and Perry backtracked and insisted publicly he never meant to imply using military force.
The matter was finally settled by Department of Defense rulings that, yes, the National Guard in those new states were being transferred from the state of Texas. The head of the police unions stated publicly he didn’t think most state police would be willing to use force against the three new states either. All three new states organized their new state police (basically just a matter of ordering new uniforms) and Perry lost again.
The final maneuver Perry had left was trying to use state prisoners as a bargaining chip. Texas has close to a hundred prisons, both public and privately run for profit, holding over 160,000 prisoners. The number of parolees is several times that, for the state is notorious for handing out long sentences but also paroling in most cases after as little as 10% of the sentence is served.
(Kind of contradicts the false image of tough Texas justice, doesn’t it? The purpose of long sentences is to have the parolees pay the state through the nose for many years. Prisons are a huge business in Texas, and a big money maker for both the state and private business.)
One of the first laws all three states passed was an end to criminalizing marijuana. Within Mexican culture, there has long been a lesser stigma to using marijuana, even less than for using alcohol. For other drugs, all three states ordered rehab or detox treatment rather than prison sentences for addicts. Ending prison sentences for drug addicts meant that about one fifth of the prisoners from Rio Grande, Pecos, and Austin would go free. Every prisoner sentenced for possession was now free. Those guilty of trafficking in marijuana were now free. Even some of those who had trafficked in other drugs were now free, if they could prove addiction and the amount was for personal use, or if the trafficking was to support their own addiction.
But Perry refused to let any prisoners go. He continued to claim all four states’ prisons were Texas prisons. To his embarrassment, the prison guards union again stated they would not support him, and agreed to turn over their facilities to the new states. So Perry turned to refusing to allow prisoners from Rio Grande, Pecos, or Austin to be set free, if they were locked up in a prison that was still in the shrinking state of Texas.
Perry felt buoyed by this strategy. It allowed him to bluster as tough on crime, and bash these new progressive states as too soft on criminals. The three new governors were stymied.
What none of them counted on were prisoners making a dramatic statement of their own.
The first uprising in Texas prisons actually didn’t involve any prisoners who might be released. That was simply the pretext. Prisons are always bottled rage, violence ready to burst at the slightest excuse, brutality multiplied by grievances real or imagined. The news of one fifth of the prisoners being released stirred a lot of resentment among the prison hierarchy. Prison gangs would be losing their biggest source of income, addicted prisoners paying far more for dope inside the prison than outside of it. Addicts could be coerced, bribed, extorted, prostituted, and forced to make their family members pay as well. The number of criminals imprisoned for violent crime would decline sharply as well if addicts were treated as ill rather than as criminals. The crime rate and prison population would drop overall with drug treatment for addicts, since addiction plays a large role in many crimes.
The gangs didn’t want to see the addicts leave. Some gangs also hated the new states with a passion. Rio Grande and Pecos, states run by Mexicans? The Aryan Brotherhood and Texas Syndicate, which virtually run things inside the state prisons in collusion with corrupt white racist prison guards, could not have that. And the transfer of prisoners from Texas to Rio Grande or Pecos meant that those prisons were bound to be run now by gangs like the Mexican Mafia, Tango Blast, Barrio Azteca, Orejones, Hermanos Pistoleros Latinos, and Texas Chicano Brotherhood. Black prison gangs like the Black Guerilla Family also knew they would be facing a new situation, where they would become the Aryan Brotherhood’s main rivals thanks to far fewer Latinos in Texas prisons.
Some of the uprisings targeted prison guards, and seemed to be protests urging addicted prisoners be released. But some were clearly mass assaults on drug offenders by angry, vengeful, or jealous fellow prisoners. The death toll reached over 100.
Both types of uprisings proved a huge embarrassment to Perry. Even more striking was that none of the uprisings were in prisons in the three new states. Right wing hate radio tried to spin the timing and location of the prison rebellions as a massive conspiracy to embarrass the governor. “Criminals love the new liberal states and will kill to get back at Rick Perry!”
Fox News was, not too surprisingly, virtually silent, except for calling for the uprisings to be put down by massive force. Fox had to remain mostly silent. After all, they had promoted his flirtation with secession as a way to embarrass Obama on healthcare reform. Now it was backfiring badly and giving the Democrats new senators, and the GOP a governor whose prospects as president were fading.
After a week and a half, the last of the prison revolts were crushed. The prison guard union bluntly laid the blame on Perry and his bumbling, but also on the long term neglect of the prisons. In some of the interviews, one couldn’t help but notice how many of the guards favored letting addicts be treated rather than imprisoned. It would ease the overcrowding, weaken the gangs, and certainly make prison guards’ jobs much easier.
In the end, Perry quietly backed down, letting drug offenders from the new states get released. Perry made light of it when asked by reporters. “If they want to go easy on druggies, who am I to tell them different?”
He had played his last hand, and lost. Now all he had left was to insist someday, surely someday, those three states would come back to Texas. He was acting like a jilte
d boyfriend who doesn’t want to admit his girlfriend has moved on.
What a difference it made, the Mexican majority regions (and one progressive city) formerly part of Texas freed from reactionary domination. Lower taxes for the poor, and the wealthy finally paying a fair share. Schools fully funded. Highways far less funded since the oil industry was no longer king.
For all the complaints about big government, none of the three new states had as large a bureaucracy as Texas, not even in proportion to population. The states shifted their funding from corporate welfare to a generous public assistance equal only to California’s. This included generous unemployment retraining and, in Austin, the return of the union hiring halls. The three states had some of the fastest growing unions in the country, Austin especially. This meant that, in the middle of a recession, wealth was actually being redistributed from the wealthy to everyone else, not by government so much as by efforts of the workers themselves. For the first time in generations, the region had thriving unions of construction workers, hotel workers, and the like, not just unions for cops and firefighters. Leading the way were the biggest industries, hi tech, medical, and government, where the employers were progressive minded or the public could pressure them, thus giving way on workers’ rights much easier.
Marijuana had not only been legalized. In Austin they entirely decriminalized it, allowing anyone to grow it individually, or any business to sell it or market it. The only restriction was on use by minors, while driving, or trying to cross the state border with it. In Rio Grande and Pecos, one needed a license much like a liquor license. Austin experimented with harm reduction programs like in Europe, where heroin addicts went through methadone programs. An ugly side effect was the flocking of addicts to the city because the penalty for prosecution was gone.
Ironically, in some ways Austin became something of a Libertarian center. Sex work was also decriminalized in Austin, leading to a booming prostitution trade equal to Nevada’s. This was coupled with extremely strict laws about pimping minors or human trafficking. In a campaign led by feminists, immigrant rights activists, and by Black civil rights leaders drew comparisons to slavery, resulting in some of the harshest sentencing in the nation. A human trafficker in Austin faced life doing hard labor without the possibility of parole. Human trafficking resulting in death was the only crime in Austin for which they had the death penalty.
For all other offenses the city-state at first abolished the death penalty. Later it was reinstated for hate crimes resulting in death, including hate crimes based on orientation. A second change in the death penalty came in the face of threats from the militia movement. Terrorism resulting in death, attempted mass murders, or attempted murder of cops or public officials carried the death penalty. Rio Grande and Pecos followed suit.
Crime dropped in all three states, to the disbelief of conservatives. Open carry of guns ended. There were no serious efforts in the three states, as there are in Texas, to allow guns in bars, churches, and universities. The NRA screamed bloody murder and filed suits repeatedly. Then the NRA began a long propaganda campaign to demonize the three states on gun laws. But it could not change the fact that crime was dropping.
Life truly was better in all three states for having broken away. Crime was down, unemployment was down, the wealth was being spread, and workers had a newfound sense of power. And most unbelievable of all to conservatives, taxes went down for most people.
In all sincerity, some Aztlan Now people were wondering if they shouldn’t publicly thank Rick Perry.
Back in what was left of Texas, the rump state included some who were worse off than ever. The two largest metro areas, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, include most of the state’s Black population. The cities also include a large Latino population. Houston actually has the most Latinos of any city in the state. There are also growing Asian populations, and the rural regions of east Texas include many Blacks.
Being more outnumbered than ever by white Evangelical conservative Republicans, they had less of a voice that ever. Before the breakaways, two fifths of Texans voted Democratic. Most of them were moderate-to-progressive. But the three new states took away a fourth of the Texas population, nearly 90% of them moderate/progressive voters. Blacks, Latinos, and white non-conservatives now found themselves facing a Texas which was the reddest of red states, with three fourths of the voters identifying as conservative.
And Perry and other angry conservatives seemed determined to take it out on the state’s remaining Democrats. The first law to pass was the strictest voter ID law in the nation, aimed squarely at keeping as many poor and dark skinned people from voting as possible, as well as banning the use of college IDs to vote. It was followed by new gerrymandering to reduce the number of minority districts, as much as the legislature thought the federal courts would let them get away with. Then the state topped it off with laws barring any felon from voting, ever. The final step was barring anyone on welfare from voting. There was even an effort to bring back a law requiring property in order to vote, something the nation hadn’t seen since the 1850s.
The hate crime law passed in 2001 was also revoked, dropping any greater penalties for murder based on orientation. Some legislators publicly stated they felt it sent a wrong message to protect a “special class of deviants.” To an extent, this didn’t change much. Texas has long scrupulously avoided using its hate crime laws to protect gays, even while having them on the books.
But death row in Texas continued to grow, made up mostly of Blacks from Houston, sent there by a particularly vicious district attorney using their deaths to get reelected by sending a “tough on crime” message. Poverty in the state continued to grow, along with minimum wages jobs and more wealth for the wealthy. Unions were still weak, dropout rates still high, and prisons still overflowing.
In the new Texas schoolbooks, there was absolutely no mention of why the three new states had broken away. No doubt , the simple answer some parents told their kids was, “It’s the fault of those damned upstart Mexicans.” The Texas State Seal still shows the original shape of the state. Wishful thinking surely dies a hard death.
In the long run, it doesn’t matter. This rump state of Texas will see redneck Texas die out, to be replaced by a Texas of Tejanos also. It just will take another generation. Like the Tea Parties, the current wave of angry GOP, and militias of all sorts, they are the rage of the aging and impotent.