(If Governor Perry really wants to run on the national stage, he's also going to have to think about how to answer for a lot of things, including all of this. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
Rick Perry is a corrupt career politician who will say and do anything to get elected. He is, without question, in it for himself. The ten-part series below focuses on some of the worst examples of his cover-ups and corruption.
If you have more to add, please leave them in the comments below. You can also see the full list of these articles here: Rick Perry's Cover-Up and Corruption:
There has not been a bigger or more important cover-up this election cycle, and perhaps for decades in Texas, than Rick Perry's refusal to come to grips and be honest about the $25 billion budget shortfall facing the state of Texas. Our state's budget crisis is going to devastate the future of our economy for years, if not longer, unless Texans do something about it immediately.
Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.
Texas' GOPleaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.
The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.
In recent months, Perry has been wildly erratic about the amount of the budget shortfall, at times saying it is nothing to worry about and only $10 billion large, and other times suggesting it is a major financial crisis that could be $21 billion large. When Bill White and Texas lawmakers requested the Comptroller to provide updated revenue estimates, Perry insisted on covering-up the budget projections and called the simple request for taxpayer transparency “bizarre.”
Perry has been quick to blame Washington and the national economic environment for the state’s budget shortfall. The Austin American-Statesman, however, has pointed out repeatedly that such a claim is highly disingenuous, in a column, "Budget mess got going with 2006 property tax cuts":
The economic downturn isn't helping the shortfall, but it's not driving it, either. The driving factor is a decision by Gov. Rick Perry and the Legislature in 2006 to reduce property taxes by $14 billion every two years and raise only about $9 billion to replace that money. In other words, the Legislature committed $5 billion every two years to holding down property taxes instead of spending that money on education, public safety or other priorities. Then the state's new business tax brought in drastically less than projected, and that $5 billion gap turned into a nearly $9 billion gap.
Rick Perry has done his best to cover-up Texas’ dropout crisis, pushing false dropout numbers to hide the fact that at least 3 in 10 Texas high school students do not graduate from high school or get a GED in four years.Perry has spent months arguing about statistics instead of focusing on the true consequences of Texas’ dropout crisis, whatever the size.
Dropouts earn thousands of dollars less than high school graduates each year, and hundreds of thousands of dollars less over a lifetime.
Dropouts are more likely to be unemployed, pay less in taxes and be incarcerated -- all factors that hurt the Texas economy to the tune of $5 billion to $9 billion annually.
As the Houston Chronicle reported in their story, "Poverty, dropout rates bode grim future for state", the dropout crisis will have serious long-term damage to our state’s economy if Rick Perry continues to cover-up the problem:
If nothing changes, average Texas household incomes will be about $6,500 lower in 30 years than they were in 2000, according to Murdock's projections. That number is not adjusted for inflation, so it would be worse than it appears.
In the face of years of research showing the rate upwards of 30 percent, and as high as 50 percent in some large urban districts, Perry's camp insisted it was only about 10 percent.
"The percent of students who enter high school and eventually earn a diploma or equivalent, or who remain in pursuit of a diploma or equivalent, is 90 percent," Perry spokesman Mark Miner told the Chronicle's Gary Scharrer.
The number prompted laughter from a few, including Republican state Rep. Rob Eissler, chair of the House public education committee.
"Yeah. That's not what I base my stuff on," said The Woodlands lawmaker, who believes the figure is about 30 percent. "You've got to categorize that as a bit campaign rhetoric. If our dropout rate were just 10 percent, I'd be feeling a lot better."
Days before an expert was to give testimony, Rick Perry rearranged the board at the Texas Forensic Science Commission to appoint one of his top lieutenants, John Bradley, as the new Chair. Bradley immediately canceled a hearing on the death of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man who could possibly have been executed without having committed the crime he was accused of.
The Houston Chronicle describes the actions of the cover-up in the Rick Casey column, "The revolt of the scientists":
This was the first meeting of the commission under Bradley, who was appointed last September. His first official act was to cancel a meeting three days later at which the commission was scheduled to receive a report from a nationally renowned arson expert hired by the commission in its first high-profile case.
The meeting had drawn national attention because the expert found that the arson investigation that helped lead to the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for the murder of his children was badly flawed. It was especially controversial because Perry had rejected a request to delay Willingham's execution based on similar expert analysis.
Bradley unilaterally wrote the agenda for Friday's meeting to focus on new policies and procedures, omitting the Willingham report. He also unilaterally chose Harlingen (which is as close to Mexico City as to Fort Worth, where three of the nine uncompensated and busy commission members live), making wrong my snide prediction that he would hold the meeting in Presidio to discourage reporters.
Rick Perry has covered-up and refused to answer ethics complaints involving more than $1 million in potentially illegal expenditures. Perry was named as one of the worst governors in the nation for his history of ethical problems by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
One complaint zeroed in on the $816,000 in campaign dollars, reported in lump sums, for what Perry calls "mansion expenses." For months, Perry reported a flat monthly expense ranging from $3,000 or $6,500 as "mansion expenses" without any supporting detail -- a violation of campaign disclosure laws. The expenses were for Perry’s $10,000-a-month taxpayer funded rental mansion. Additionally, Perry failed to disclose $204,400 in debt on his College Station home from 2007-2009.
TPJ alleges that Perry violated campaign disclosure laws by not itemizing how it spent more than $800,000 for such items as food, beverages and flowers. Instead of itemizing the spending, the campaign routinely reports lump sums as much as $63,000 as simply "Mansion Fund." Since 2001, the campaign reported 145 “Mansion Fund” expenditures totaling more than $816,000, according to TPJ.
The Dallas Morning News broke the story that Rick Perry has handed out $16 million in taxpayer dollars from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to companies tied to his top political contributors. Perry’s public corruption scandal showed that he gave his “close friend” and campaign contributor David Nance $4.5 million handout, despite the fact that Nance side-stepped two review boards to receive the handout
Gov. Rick Perry and the state's legislative leaders awarded a $4.5 million grant to a cancer treatment company launched by David Nance, a close Perry friend and campaign donor, after the company sidestepped two review committees, including a statewide board created specifically to evaluate and make recommendations on life-science companies.
Rick Perry sells state government and public office to his campaign donors. His use of political appointees as arms of his campaign re-election team is one of the easiest and most thoroughly documented examples of his unending corruption. Overall, Perry’s pay-to-play public corruption practices have rewarded him with $17 million in campaign cash from his political appointees and their spouses. From a report based on contributions through the July 30 reporting periods by Texans for Public Justice:
From 2001 through June 2010 Perry’s campaign received $17,115,865 from 921 of these appointees or their spouses. Gubernatorial appointees accounted for an impressive 21 percent of the $83.2 million that Perry’s campaign has raised since 2001.
An analysis by the Texas Tribune showed that Perry collected $5.8 million from people who he appointed to influential positions at the state's colleges and universities.
According to state schedules, Perry has used taxpayer-funded staff and other state resources for his campaign purposes, a clear violation of the law. Perry has covered-up his secret state schedules to avoid being held accountable, and for years has maintained a practice of deleting all e-mails after one week. Perry’s office has admitted they keep two calendars.
When Perry was questioned about his spare schedule in an interview with WFAA-TV last month, he estimated he works “12 to 14 hours” a day, and further said, “I consider everything I’m doing state business.” His Sept. 15 schedule shows governor’s staff was tasked with briefing Perry on tort reform in advance of a political endorsement, and that two former gubernatorial appointees were listed as point persons at a roundtable and a dinner hosted for Perry at a Houston couple’s residence.
An investigative report by the Dallas Morning News showed that Rick Perry coordinated with two business partners to flip land he purchased and sold in order to profit more than $500,000. Perry covered-up this scandal by refusing to release the public listing agreement, attempting to hide the identity of the land buyer and hiding the fact that the buyer was a business partner with the original seller.
The Dallas Morning News found evidence that Perry's investment was enhanced by a series of professional courtesies and personal favors from friends, campaign donors and the head of a Texas family with a rich history of political power-brokering. Together they may have enriched Perry by almost $500,000, according to an independent real estate appraisal commissioned by The News.
When it is all added up, Perry made at least $573,238 in profit from the land deal.
In 2007, Texans learned of of a massive sex abuse scandal at the Texas Youth Commission. When news of the scandal broke, Governor Rick Perry claimed he knew nothing about the abuse until he saw it in the paper. That was a lie. In fact, Governor Perry and his office were informed of a stalled investigation into the abuse as early as February 2005, two years before news reports first came out.
Gov. Rick Perry's staff knew as early as June 2005 that two administrators at a Texas Youth Commission facility were not being prosecuted on allegations of sexually abusing youths in their custody, according to records obtained Tuesday by the Houston Chronicle.
Two months ago, four leading advocacy groups that have worked with TYC for years issued a statement saying that systemic abuse at TYC still remains. Immediately, Perry’s board members at TYC denied the allegations, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and have stonewalled the story ever since.
