March 18th 2017 Newsletter
How an Un-Elected Little Weasel Torpedoes
a Teacher Pay Raise
to Help Fallin Divert $100,000,000.00
per Year from Education
Acting Attorney General Mike Hunter, and we say "acting" as he has never been elected to the post, was appointed by Mary Fallin after former A.G. Scott Pruitt wandered off to Washington D.C.. to run the EPA. Hunter has been a career politician, running for office twice, once winning a House seat, the other losing to Drew Edmondson in a race for the A.G. Office. Hunter appears to have spent some time in private practice but must have found the real world difficult as he constantly returned to public sector work .
The A.G. Office has a long standing prohibition on issuing opinions on pending legislation as that would be meddling in the legislative affairs. After all that isn't their mission. The office can answer questions from legislators on other matters and does frequently, publishing a book of the opinions set out each year, a book kept in most legislative offices. And on their own A.G. website you will see this in the FAQ section:
The same prohibition is found on another page:
And yet Weasel Mike Hunter went against that policy last week, giving an opinion on pending legislation HB 1050, the Gann Plan for providing a raise to public school teachers. Hunter actually served as the Secretary of the Commissioners of the Land Office, the CLO, in charge of the School Land Trust Fund, Federal land that was given in trust at statehood to be used for the benefit of public education.
Hunter issues the opinion on whether or not the capitol gains of Trust property could be distributed to schools, a false flag operation as HB1050 didn't ask for anything other than the income from the trust to be distributed as teacher raises. Existing distributions were left untouched by the bill but the millions of dollars per year in Trust income that had been being ploughed back into the Trust would be rightfully returned to public education. The CLO had been ploughing these millions back into the Trust, growing the investment, based upon a single word in the State Constitution that said the Trust "may" distribute the Trust income each year to the schools.
Who runs the CLO? The Governor, Lt. Governor Todd Lamb, State Auditor Gary Jones, the Superintendent of Public Schools, and the Secretary of Agriculture. The people that received a copy of Mike Hunter's hatchet job of an opinion.
So basically Fallin, Lamb, and Gary Jones have been cheating public education out of hundreds of millions of dollars, preferring to plough those millions back into the Trust.
Instead of sending the much needed dollars to the schools, the CLO has been purchasing commercial property, golf courses, and offering up to 55 year leases to political cronies, adding to the ¾ of a million acres of leased agriculture land and 1.2 million acres of mineral rights. The CLO is the single largest payer of Gross Production Taxes in the state, a fact usually omitted in arguments for raising the GPT.
Two of these thieves, Gary Jones and Todd Lamb, are running for Governor. Hunter of course is running to win the A.G. Office.
Out of the original three million acres of land and mineral rights only one quarter of the land and about one third of the mineral rights remain. So much for the alleged "sacred trust" of school land. Fallin has diverted over $700 million dollars away from the schools and into the Trust commercial land and buildings she took office, around $100 million dollars per year.
And why would Gary Jones, Todd Lamb, Mike Hunter, and Fallin want to divert a hundred million dollars a year from education? To drive the clamor for higher taxes and to divert millions into the pockets of the special interests that put them in office. Which is the same reason why they ordered Mike Hunter to torpedo the $2200.00 per year pay raise for teachers. The teacher strike is a useful thing to have to force another billion dollars per year in new taxes.
In the end, the leaked memo or A.G. Opinion, what ever they call it, which addressed an issue that HB 1050 didn't even cover, gave enough House members an excuse to drop their support for HB 1050 and the bill isn't going to be heard on the floor.
