MOLLY COOK, SENATOR ELECT FOR TEXAS SENATE DISTRICT 15!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TEN POINT SPREAD TO START!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BIG! A bill passed in Hawaii to effectively convert 10,000's of illegal Airbnb's to local housing. Incredible work from Our Hawaiʻi and Lahaina Strong. The winning strategy was uniting fire survivors, advocates, and unions – then going all out. hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/04/24/sho…

This was not the brand of austerity I had anticipated from this administration. Goofy!

Houston Mayor John Whitmire declined an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the Texas Vision Zero Summit.

So you get me instead!

Houston, see you tomorrow. I'll be in conversation with the one-and-only Evan
houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/…

'People know what’s best for their own lives. Investing in families like mine works. What doesn’t work is the system that forced us to jump through a million hoops for food stamps and go on a waiting list for a housing voucher.'

houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outloo…

It’s sad that there is a perfect form of protest that addresses everything the right way and solves the problems being protested and is serious without being threatening and peaceful without being frivolous, but no one is allowed to know what it is :(

Know that what's happening in Texas is happening in other states too, and that it is part of a state by state strategy being funded by the ultra-rich to try to prevent their taxes from going up as a result of basic income.

scottsantens.com/billionaire-fu…

This despite (or because of) multiple pilots in Texas already having ended and already having shown success in their results, including better employment outcomes.

twitter.com/scottsantens/s…

Our time on this earth is so brief. We might as well be brave.

Here’s the story of how Harris County residents organized and officials worked with them to overcome those barriers – lessons that could prove helpful for any government looking to make their buyout programs successful: houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

By and large, buyouts in Harris County are also voluntary, but in 2020, it launched a mandatory buyout program using HUD funds – which allow the use of eminent domain. That decision has forced the county to grapple with all of the reasons people don’t opt into voluntary buyouts.

Harris County has embarked on a striking endeavor – mandatory flood buyouts. The undertaking holds lessons for managed retreat programs across the country.

Jhair A. Romero, Raquel Natalicchio and I spoke to ppl bought out & county officials about takeaways.
houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

NEW: The Texas Supreme Court has blocked Harris County’s guaranteed basic income program, for now. This extraordinary act is disappointing but not surprising given how political the all-Republican court has become.

I will continue to fight to protect Uplift Harris in this case.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: 'All humans engage in the act in question: sleeping. And yet the ordinance operates to penalize only certain individuals, those who have no choice but to do that act in public.'

Toni Morrison describes fascism as the conversion of “all public services to private entrepreneurship…so that the narrow chasm between governance and business disappears.” It “changes citizens into taxpayers..neighbours into consumers” and produces “the perfect capitalist…

update: the judge denied the state's request for temporary injunction & ruled harris county's guaranteed income program can go forward

Billionaire: 'Houston has no history.'

My bookshelf:

'eviction moratoria are bad because we live in a racist society' is an analysis of life-saving public policy so wild it could only have come from a billionaire