Texas will lose out on at least $3.1 billion in sales tax revenue over the next two years thanks to an exemption for the state’s booming data center industry, according to the comptroller’s office. That figure is likely a vast underestimate given the explosion of new facilities being built, but already makes the tax break one of the state’s costliest incentive programs and soon to be the most…
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Kansas, Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, and other states are creating lists of trans people, moves that advocates say would make it nearly impossible to exist in a trans body. In February, Kansas revoked the state identification cards and birth certificates of trans residents, making it the first state to cancel documents of individuals who changed their gender markers. The move was made possible…
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When Thiago Campos bought the Mr. Fancy Pants Carwash business in Corpus Christi, Texas, three years ago, he wasn’t thinking about drought. He was familiar with varnishes and waxes and enjoyed figuring out which kind of soap would best remove local dirt. “I’m a chemical engineer,” Campos said. “I felt like the carwash matched my skill set.” But Mr. Fancy Pants, with its two locations…
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Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation fisherwoman and a lifelong resident of Seadrift, Texas. Wilson has become a global folk hero over the course of her epic, decades-long journey from shrimp boat captain and mother of five to social and ecological justice warrior who took on a multibillion dollar corporation polluting the bays along her beloved Texas Gulf Coast. But the fight to save her home from industrial pollution is far from over. On March 2, Wilson began a hunger strike outside the Dow Chemical Company/Union Carbide plant in Seadrift. “I have a tent and am camping out 24 hours, 7 days a week,” Wilson wrote in a letter to Dow CEO Jim Fitterling, “to impress upon Dow/Union Carbide our intense dislike and frustration of decades of plastic pollution being discharged into our bays and waterways.” In this episode of Working People, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Wilson as her hunger strike enters its third week.
Guest:
Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimper, boat captain, mother of five, author, and an environmental, peace, and social justice advocate. During the last 30 years, she has launched legislative campaigns, demonstrations, hunger strikes, sunk boats, and even climbed chemical towers in her fight to protect her Gulf Coast bay. She is a co-founder of CODEPINK, the women’s anti-war group based in Washington, DC, and co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for inmates’ rights in Texas county jails. Since 2012, Wilson has been executive director and waterkeeper of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper (SABEW) on the Texas Gulf Coast. Wilson is the author of numerous books, including: An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of
Jose Omar Flores-Penaloza was willing to admit that he had entered the United States illegally. He was ready to be deported, according to his attorneys. But federal prosecutors would not let him go last spring without making him answer for another crime — one he had never heard of. Weeks earlier, President Donald Trump, to address what he called a national emergency, ordered a stretch of…
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On Friday, March 6, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, the first and only Palestinian in Congress, visited Leqaa Kordia at Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Kordia, who is the last remaining Columbia protester in detention, has seen a recent groundswell of support following a seizure she suffered in detention due to malnutrition. Arrested on March 13, 2025 by the Department of…
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