When (not if, but when) Rick Perry declares his candidacy for President, he will try to run on his jobs record. He will position himself as the state executive who created more jobs in his state than any other governor. His record will be indisputable in terms of numbers. It's only when you look closer at how those jobs were created, and under what conditions, that the entire argument falls apart.
But how could corporations get people to agree to something so patently unfair and weighted so heavily in their favor? Rick Perry. Under his administration, Texas unapologetically bars the courthouse door to average citizens.
Courts in this state say that just working for a company that has an arbitration clause in its employee manual deprives you of your Constitutional right to access justice. It’s not even a contract, they acknowledge, but you kept working there, so you consented to it.
Having a governor who does whatever businesses want — including appointing compliant judges who will freely disregard the law to serve the interests of large corporations regardless of what they do to people like Cathie Williams makes Texas extremely attractive to business. Corporations don’t generally care about miscarriages of justice. They care about being given free passes so they can earn more money. So Perry has made Texas a state with lots of new jobs because it has a court system weighted in favor of corporations against its citizens.
Rick Perry’s secret to job creation is no secret at all: It’s the same recipe used in places like Mexico and Malaysia. Here, companies save millions they would otherwise have had to spend on responsibility. It’s a tradeoff: Give up on public schools, healthy air, and your Constitutional rights and you can have a job.
Yippee! And if we read Texas textbooks, we can all be ignorant, too. Let's also remember that Texas had a $27 billion shortfall under Perry. But hey, there were jobs. Right?
