Corporate
Sponsorship of Rick Perry’s Partisan Job Piracy
By
Phil Mattera in the Dirt-Diggers Digest
“If
you want to live free — free from overtaxation, free from overlitigation, free
from overregulation … move to Texas.” That’s the pitch Texas
Gov. Rick Perry just made to business executives in Maryland in the latest of
his brazenly partisan job-poaching trips to states led by Democratic governors.
In advance of the trip, Perry ran ads that explicitly criticized Maryland’s
Martin O’Malley, claiming to business owners that “unfortunately, your governor
has made Maryland the tax and fee state.”
My
colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have just published a report questioning whether
Perry’s partisan job piracy is being financed in part with taxpayer dollars.
Many of the dues-paying members of TexasOne, the entity paying for Perry’s
trips, are municipal economic development corporations, which receive a portion
of local sales tax receipts.
It
turns out that an even larger share, roughly half, of TexasOne’s budget comes
from the payments made by businesses. Corporations enjoying the benefits of
Perry’s laissez-faire policies in Texas are bankrolling him to spread that
gospel to Blue States while he tries to steal their jobs and simultaneously
raises his personal political profile on the national stage.
The
cozy relationship between Perry and Texas big business is nothing new. As Texans for Public Justice has shown in a
long series of reports, Perry has perfected the art of crony capitalism during
his dozen years in the governor’s office.
Companies whose executives and
investors have been among the most generous contributors to Perry’s races show
up on lists of the largest state contractors and the recipients of state
economic development subsidies, and they tend to get favorable treatment from
regulatory agencies run by Perry appointees.
This
pattern extends to the companies participating in TexasOne. For example, Shell
Oil ($50,000 in
annual payments to TexasOne) received a $2 million subsidy award (for its Motiva refinery joint
venture) from the Perry-controlled Texas Enterprise Fund. Road-builder Williams
Brothers Construction ($25,000 a year to TexasOne according to one source;
$100,000 a year according to another) has received
hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from the Texas Department of
Transportation.
The
Public Utility Commission of Texas, whose members are appointed by the
governor, awarded huge contracts to a group of companies to build transmission
lines from wind farms in the western part of the state to the major population
centers in central Texas. One of these contracts, worth $1.3 billion, was awarded to
Oncor Electric Delivery (a $25,000 member of
TexasOne).
On
the regulatory front, a prime example is Contran Corporation, which is
currently paying $100,000
a year to TexasOne. Contran is the holding company controlled by Dallas
billionaire Harold Simmons, a heavy
contributor to Perry’s state races.
Contran ponied up $1
million for the super PAC that backed Perry’s 2012 presidential race. Earlier,
the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose members are also appointed
by the governor, awarded a
franchise for a low-level nuclear waste dump to a subsidiary of Contran called
Waste Control Specialists.
In
2011, after Waste Control was granted controversial permission to store nuclear
material brought in from other states, a Dallas Morning News editorial
(January 11, 2011) declared: “Far too much about this process stinks of the
influence that one very rich person wields as a million-dollar campaign
contributor to Gov. Rick Perry.”
Major
contributors to TexasOne include large corporations such as AT&T and
Capital One with business interests that extend far beyond the borders of
Texas. Some of these, such as Verizon, are headquartered in states targeted by
Perry’s partisan job-poaching trips.
It
is unclear whether these companies realize the potential problems they could
face by helping to sponsor Perry’s attack on governors in states where they
have a significant presence. They could alienate their political allies in
those states and might also incur the wrath of their residents.
We’ve
seen how consumer-oriented companies can risk losing customers if they are
identified as financial backers of controversial groups or causes. Dozens of
large companies ended their membership in the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) when it became identified with heated issues such as minority
voter suppression and stand-your-ground gun laws.
For
companies serving national markets, bankrolling high-profile and partisan
interstate job piracy could also become risky business.