Under the Dome Kansas- End of Week Summary March 10, 2023
Marcus LeeMar 10, 2023 at 10:07 pm39min
Marcus Lee
Good morning. Today is Friday, March 10. I'm Marcus Baltzell, the director of communications for Kansas NEA. I'm here again with Timothy Graham, who is our Director of Government Relations and coalition's and Loren Tyson Miller, who is our Director of Government Relations and elections. And we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on under the dome or what has happened this week, what we expect next week. Here's some things that we're kind of looking at right now we see the so called parents Bill of Rights is coming up. We've got this this giant what we've called this Frankenstein voucher scheme. We have firearm safety, where the legislature has done a good job of again, mandating what and how we teach.
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00:39Timothy Graham
And we've got a lot going on with capers and taxes. So maybe we should start at the end this time. So Tim, let's let's talk about capers real quick and talk about our what what's going on in that that those committees and what's going on with capers? What are we what are we tracking what's happening? Well, let me start out by telling you what's not going on.
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00:59Timothy Graham
No real talk about reforming tier three, which is a total mess. What there is widespread agreement in that building, that tier three needs to be reformed, because because it is woefully inadequate. Yet there's been no real talk about reforming it. And there's no real talk about any cost of living adjustment, aka Cola, for retirees. So that's what's not going on. What's going on, instead of that is a culture war debate on ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance.
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01:39Speaker 1
What we know is that ESG is kind of a corporate philosophy that can drive the mission and the vision of a company. Is that fair to say?
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01:48Timothy Graham
Yeah, I pointed out in my testimony to both the House and the Senate committees that ESG business behaviors and patterns have been going on for years and years and years. However, all of the sudden, as this world gets more divided. This is another national debate that is designed to scare people divide people. Again, these behaviors have been going on for years, I use the example of McDonald's buying a Big Mac at McDonald's, you no longer get it in a styrofoam box. That's been gone for 25 years, right? I used an example of buying a car and going on to a car lot. And just looking at the sticker. The sticker has environmental greenhouse gas, I'm reading smog ratings, etc. Just on the sticker, all the major car manufacturers are including that. I talked about how these companies have been doing this for years, and no one has really said much about it. But lately, it's been it's been. It's been a situation that's been designed to divide us. And now everybody at the Statehouse over here is up in arms about ESG investing and how it relates to capers. And now they're going down a path of possibly making capers divest, or eat or break relationships with certain financial companies that can cost our capers Trust Fund billions of dollars.
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03:25Speaker 1
So in a nutshell, what's happening here is the leadership in the legislature is leading a Kansas arm of this national movement, the corporate version of diversity and inclusion in schools. In other words, not not that not that it's about diversity and inclusion, but it's about something that they want to rally around to say, you know, now, we don't want these woke teachers teaching this stuff. We don't want these woke companies actually being socially environmentally responsible with the way they with the way they do action. And so we can further weaken capers, by attacking those companies, and, quote unquote, divesting from them if if they try and do business with capers is that kind of what we're saying kind of
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