democrat2democrat

Greenstein Officially Replaces Levine as Jindal's Healthcare Hack

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:18:00 +0000

Bruce Greenstein replaced Alan Levine as Bobby Jindal's Secretary of the Department of Health & Hospitals (DHH) in 2010, but it wasn't until the second week of 2012 that Greenstein succeeded Levine as Jindal's partisan hack on healthcare.

The official coming out event in Greenstein's transition from technocrat to political operative was Greenstein's full-out attack on the Louisiana Budget Project (LBP) for their having pointed out the obvious — namely, that there are a lot of jobs tied to the state's $7 billion Medicaid program.

In a statement to Gannett's Capitol Buruea, Greenstein went ballistic.

"It's a fallacy to say reductions in Medicaid rates impact the economy," Greenstein said. "The liberal Louisiana Budget Project is simply making the same tired case for raising taxes and maintaining the status quo that has gotten us 49th in health outcomes.

It's not clear what about the LBP report so upset Greenstein. After all, the LBP report only echoes claims being made by the Louisiana Hospital Association (LHA) for a number of years, dating back to the period before Greenstein's arrival at DHH.

In reports the LHA issued in 2009 and 2011 on the economic impact of hospitals and healthcare in Louisiana, the LHA quantified the number of hospital jobs tied to Medicaid spending by region and by member hospitals.

In 2009, when the Jindal/Levine regime was threatening cuts of $300 million or more due to budget deficits caused primarily by the repeal of portions of the Stelly Plan, the LHA detailed the importance of Medicaid to hospital and healthcare employment by region and by hospital in a report entitled "Hospitals: Economic Agents in the Louisiana Economy" (PDF).

Included in both reports is information on the size of the healthcare segment in Louisiana — more than 250,000 workers employed in more than 11,000 locations, with an annual aggregate payroll in excess of $8 billion.

The LHA 2009 report declares, "The payroll of the healthcare sector in Louisiana is larger than the payroll of any other industrial classification in the state."

The LHA's 2011 report, "Hospitals and the Louisiana Economy, 2011" (PDF), makes the Medicaid/jobs link explicit and detailed: "In Louisiana, approximately 19% of net revenues are Medicaid- related. Medicaid-related expenditures lead to the creation of 47,483 jobs with personal earnings of $1.8 billion." (Page 6 of the 44-page PDF).

The LBP declaring that there is a link between Medicaid spending and job creation, then, is not radical or liberal. It is just a restatement of established fact made so by the industry that has first-hand knowledge of the impact of that funding — the hospital industry.

Sure, the LHA has a lot of skins in the game but that didn't seem to be a concern when Jindal, the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association (LOGA) and their cronies were whipping up the anti-moratorium hysteria back in the summer of 2010.

Greenstein's claim that there is no connection between jobs and the flow of more than $7 billion through the state's economy in the form of Medicaid-paid healthcare delivery is ludicrous on its face. In effect, he's arguing that there is no connection between the revenue that hospitals, clinics and doctors have and the number of people they employ.

That's not a fallacy. That's a delusion.

A Call for True Believers

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:05:00 +0000

Qualifying for state and local Democratic party positions opens today across Louisiana and the future of the party is riding on who among us will step forward to lead the effort to build this party.

Build is right word because there has never really been a Democratic Party in Louisiana. There has been a Democratic banner under which candidates have run for office, but there has never been much of anything resembling an actual party organization. There have been factions and organizations built around personalities, but there has not been a party organization per sé.

That is one reason why the Louisiana Democratic Party is in shambles today. It has never been more than a device to aid in the election of the top Democrat on the ticket in any particular election year. This year, there was no Democrat at the top of a statewide ticket — in fact, there was not a statewide ticket. There were House and Senate caucuses that managed to stave off Republican efforts to win veto-proof majorities in the Legislature, but there was no party behind any of those efforts. The state party was a mailing permit and a checking account.

This is just what the party was in 2010, only this time there were no statewide Democratic candidates on the ballot that could in any way be considered to have been standards bearers of what passed for the party this year.

The qualifying that opens today provides the opening to begin to change that.

The 210 seats on the State Central Committee are open for qualifying as are the 986 or so seats on the various parish Democratic Executive Committees.

These are the bodies charged with building and maintaining the party at the state and local levels. Based on the results over the last four years, the leadership at the state level has been an abject failure. That failure has many sources, but none more glaring than the fact that the party has not appeared to stand for anything; or, if it did, it could not articulate it. As a result, the party sat in silence as what passed for public policy debates took place (can there really be a debate when only one side is talking?).

For the Democratic Party to have a future in this state, we need committed Democrats to turn out at Clerk of Courts offices across the state and qualify to fill those state and parish party committee seats.

But, not just any Democrats need apply.

What we need now are true believers. Democrats who burn with a passion for our party and its principles (see "What It Means To Be A Democrat" for some ideas). Democrats who stand ready to build a political organization that will provide the boots on the ground for Democratic candidates at the local, state and federal levels. Democrats who will fight the Republican assault on working families, minorities, teachers, public employees and others rather than seek an accommodation with those who are out to dismantle the essential public services that are the pathways to social mobility in this state and this country.

We need zealous Democrats to turn out to qualify for these positions, run strong Democratic campaigns for those seats, and then to engage in the work of party building after those elections are settled in March.

In the church that is the Democratic Party, the state central committee and the parish executive committees are akin to the clergy. They are the keepers of the flame of the party, where the passion must be the greatest and the belief must be the strongest. Why? Because the members of those respective committees swear oaths of office to promote and build the Democratic Party in this state.

As in religions, there are many levels of faith and conviction in our party as is the case in other political organizations.

But, when it comes to party committees, the job calls for the efforts to be focused on building the party and advancing its mission — not in finding middle ground with our opponents.

That is the work of elected officials who serve in the Legislature and other government positions.

We need to look no further than our opponents to catch a glimpse of what the role of party organizations are relative to elected officials — parties put the stake in the ground on issues; elected officials find the middle ground that is somewhere inside of where their party put that stake. One problem with our side is that our party has not put often enough and thus ceded the defining of the terms of the argument (the framing, if you will) to the other side. A result of that has been a radicalization of the other side because not enough of their crazy ideas have been challenged.

Democrats who care about the future of this state, who care about the future of the middle class here, about access to public education, about access to public services, about the ability of their children to find rewarding and challenging work in this state, need to commit to at least four years of work aimed at protecting those things that encompass what we have long stood for as a party and as a people.

We need you to turn out to qualify. We need you to commit your time, effort, and creativity to the task of building a political organization that can first stem, then turn the tide of greed-driven anti-social behavior that masquerades as public policy that spews like an uncapped gusher from our opponents in the party that now appears dominant in our state.

We did not get in this mess overnight. We won't get out of it overnight either. But, if we commit to work harder and smarter to reverse this we can, because as a great American once said, "the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."

If you're ready to fight for your party and your state, go qualify for a party position this week — and let's get to work!

What It Means To Be A Democrat

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:05:00 +0000

(This is a speech delivered at the Lafayette Parish Democratic Executive Committee's fourth annual Lifetime Achievement Awards Banquet which was held on October 6, 2011. I got to deliver the speech by virtue of the fact I was the Democratic candidate for Lafayette City-Parish President.)

There are a lot of people thinking about this these days, particularly in our state and in our parish. Our state party was not able to field a single well-funded candidate for statewide office this year. The so-called smart money has abandoned us. Republicans have achieved the kind of dominance on the state level that some in this room have come to accept to here in Lafayette.

While conventional wisdom has it that these are bad times to be a Democrat, I believe we are exactly where we need to be in order to put our party in working order. There is no recognizable advantage to being a Democrat, so the opportunists have left us for greener pastures.

Clearly, for our party, the time has come to get back to basics. With most of the deadwood out of the way, we can now get down to the work of rebuilding our party.

In preparing for this speech, I went back to the very basics, starting with the root word “demos” in an effort to understand literally what it means to be a democrat.

The dictionary defines “demos” as being the common people of an ancient Greek state.

But, in the centuries since it originated, Demos has come to mean “the common people” in any political unit.

That form of government based on the notion of power flowing from the consent of the governed is called Democracy. Again, based on demos.

Democracy is defined as government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

The United States and Canada are democracies, although there are some in our own country who are working hard to restrict the right to participate in our elections. They are anti-democratic in both the little “D” and big “D” meanings of the word.

Democracy is also defined as a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges. That is, there is only one set of rules that we all agree to play by and that those rules produce a level playing field where your chances for success rest at least as much on what you know as who you know.

There can be no privileged class in a democracy. We are all equal in terms of rights, duties and privileges.

So, demos is the common people. Democracy is rule by the common people, in a place having free elections, and where people have equality based on rights and privileges.

A democrat is an advocate of democracy.

That is, a Democrat is a person who believes in the political or social equality of all people.

We know this is an accurate definition, because for the past five decades in the South, our friends in the other party have used our commitment to equality as a wedge to turn some people away from our party. It worked so well on race, that our friends in the other party have tried to turn our support for equality for women, gays and others into wedges that they can use not just here but across the country.

In Louisiana, a state where we have 32% African American population and 37% total minority population, this tactic has worked to some extent, but has no long term chances for success here, so long as we remain true to our roots.

Our party, you might have read, no longer constitutes more than 50% of all registered voters in the state. We’ve known for a long time that not all people who are registered as Democrats actually support or event vote for Democrats.

The key to rebuilding our party is to embrace who we are and to run with it.

That is, to return to our great Democratic tradition of standing up for equality for all people. We stand for equality for women, for African Americans, for Asians, for Hispanics. We stand for equality of gays. We stand up for those who cannot defend themselves. The poor. The elderly. The infirm.

But also for the people who are the foundation upon which the wealth of this nation was built and continues to be produced. The people who build our roads; who clean our schools and offices; the people who wash those fancy cars; who mow those beautiful lawns; who work two or three jobs to ensure that the lives of their kids will be better than their own; those who teach our children; who work in the oil patch; those people who work countless hours trying to turn their small businesses into a bigger one.

Standing up for those people is the work that once defined us as a party. And that history shows the way up off the canvass and back into the fight.

Our friends in the other party like to defend the people they call “the job creators.” Fair enough — although they don't seem to be doing it very well now. But, let’s call the hard working people that we defend by their true name — They are the wealth creators. Nothing more and damned sure nothing less. These are our people — The people Democrats need to stand up for, to defend, to protect and to champion.

It is the work that we were called into being to do. It is the work upon which our future depends. If this is work that you are not willing to do, then you’re in the wrong party.

This is the work that makes calling ourselves Democrats meaningful. I'm Mike Stagg and this is what being a Democrat means to me — and I hope to you, as well.

Laying Claim to Louisiana

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:25:00 +0000

Progressives and Democrats from across Louisiana will gather in Alexandria on Saturday, August 27, to unite behind a strategy to plug grassroots activists into Democratic legislative campaigns this fall.

The event -- "Laying Claim to Louisiana"-- is the first part of a 500-day strategy to renew and revitalize the Louisiana Democratic Party and change the course of electoral politics in the state.

At the core of the strategy is the belief that all politics is local and that the key to renewing the state party is to harness the enthusiasm and passion of Democratic activists who have been motivated and engaged primarily by national campaigns and national issues.

The organizers of the event include officers and members of the Louisiana Democratic Party at the state and parish levels, traditional Democratic constituencies, and the in-state leaders of organizations active in national Democratic campaigns.

The goal is to build a new, working coalition that begins with electoral politics but extends beyond that into joint work on legislative and public policy issues.

The redistricting process completed earlier this year by the Legislature provides a new map from which the leadership of the Louisiana Democratic Party will be elected next year (qualifying is in early December). The state party leadership is going to change because the legislative map has changed.

We will plug in these activists into that new map to bring new vitality and energy into the state party through the election of members to the state party central committee, as well as to parish Democratic executive committees. The aim is to utilize the structure of the Democratic Party to channel the efforts and enthusiasm of the activist base into Louisiana state and local politics. We want to build a functioning political party that can provide resources, technical skills, and people to help Democratic candidates win election across the state.

It's a model that has been shown to work for Democratic parties in other states. Hell, it's worked for the Republican Party in Louisiana.

The election calendar provides the road map to guide this effort. The October 22 primary election and the November 18 runoff provide great opportunities for activists to connect with Democratic legislators and their allies to help those legislators stave off the attacks coming at them from Republicans led by David Vitter and Bobby Jindal.

Many of the activists who have been drawn to politics by national campaigns have not been as active in Louisiana politics. They have been turned off by Democrats who tended to run 'Republican-lite' campaigns. The exodus from the party of many of those candidates combined with the explicit targeting of Democrats by Vitter and his operatives, Democratic candidates must now follow the model of their Republican peers and understand that winning campaigns begin by securing their base — not in trying to themselves from it.

In Alexandria, there will be a list of targeted races presented where activists will be asked to help Democrats win election. That cooperation can serve as the springboard to greater cooperation between the activist wing of the party and legislators who, prior to this year, tended to operate independent campaigns with little or no regard for party.

The explicit external threat posed by Vitter's Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority has produced a willingness to engage the party's activist base among Democratic legislators that did not heretofore exist.

That opportunity to cooperate shows the path forward for the entire party, not just the legislators.

The entire 500-day plan will be discussed in detail in Alexandria. Keynote speaker Melissa Harris-Perry will put our fight in the national context of other fights in places like Wisconsin and Ohio (the same anti-labor, anti-women, anti-democratic forces at work there, are working with Vitter and Jindal here).

The days of Democrats being able to hide their party label are over -- Vitter and the Republicans have seen to that. The path forward is to embrace to our party. We are the only multi-racial, pro-middle class, pro-education, pro-small business party in our state.

If we lay claim to our party, we can once again lay claim to our state.

See you in Alexandria on Saturday!

Letter to The Advocate: Gulf oil, gas value exaggerated

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:20:00 +0000

On February 23, The Advocate published my Letter to the Editor written in response to an article the paper published asking leaders of the anti-deep water drilling moratorium leaders to explain how tax collections were up and unemployment down in the state and in the markets where the moratorium was predicted to spread economic calamity.

Here's the text of the letter:

Advocate Capitol news bureau reporter Michelle Millhollon’s Feb. 15 article on reality not conforming to the hysteria generated by critics of the deep-water drilling moratorium served a valuable purpose beyond forcing those critics to confront the facts that their scare campaign against the moratorium was a hoax perpetrated against the people of this state.

The oil and gas industry, its lobbyists and public officials dependent on the industry for political funding fanned the anti-moratorium hysteria.

The signs of the hoax can be found in the lawsuit filed to overturn the moratorium a month after it was declared.

When 37 companies joined Hornbeck International in the suit against the moratorium, it looked like an industrywide revolt against the moratorium.

The reality was that those 37 companies were owned or controlled by two prominent Louisiana Republicans, Boysie Bollinger and Gary Chouest. Bollinger controlled 21 of the companies, Chouest 16.

Gov. Bobby Jindal directed state Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to file an amicus brief in the case in which Caldwell and his attorneys lied to Judge Martin Feldman.

On page four of that June 20 brief, in his “Statement of the Case” Caldwell declared: “Because of the moratorium, many thousands of Louisiana workers have lost their employment and many more are at risk of losing it in the near future.”

The only problem with the statement is that it was not true. The Louisiana Workforce Commission weekly reports on new unemployment claims never mentioned the moratorium at any time during the spring and summer of 2010 because thousands of jobs were not lost. In fact, new unemployment claims fell through most of the summer.

Lobbyists such as Don Briggs, of Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, can be forgiven; after all, they are paid to spin stories so as to put their clients in the best light. But those supposedly independent organizations that joined in fanning the fears last summer — Greater New Orleans Inc., the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, the LSU Center for Energy Studies — have had their credibility seriously damaged.

Public officials who were active players in this hoax — Gov. Bobby Jindal, then-interim Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle and Caldwell — must also be held accountable. Either they were knowing participants in this hoax or their industry patrons duped them.

All of this raises the possibility that we might have all been victims of a larger, longer-running hoax.

In light of the moratorium’s failure to cripple our economy, could it be that the economic importance of the offshore oil and gas industry to the state has been vastly overstated all these years?

Who can we now trust to give us an honest answer on this?

Mike Stagg
independent IT consultant
Lafayette

Redistricting and Louisiana Apartheid

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:09:00 +0000

The incredible news regarding Governor Bobby Jindal's appointments to the Board of Regents for Higher Education (BoR) is not just that all of the members he's appointed are white, but that he succeeded in making those appointments while paying no political cost for doing so.

The Legislative Black Caucus called out Jindal for his lily white, pay-to-play practices late last year, but the silence of white elected officials on this matter has been both appalling and — in a way — understandable.

Appalling because the notion that in a state with 37% minority population according to the just-released Census figure (32% Black and the other five percent comprised of Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and others) that the Governor could not find even one person of color in all of Louisiana qualified to serve on the BoR is so outrageous as to demand a public rebuke from anyone with a sense of moral decency. The real issue might have been that Jindal could not find a person of color who could meet his other apparent requirement — that candidates for seats on the BoR be willing to contribute at least $5,000 to the his re-election campaign.

Nonetheless, the silence of the white politicians, particularly Democrats, on the bleaching of the BoR is appalling. The party has spoken out recently, but that comes only after the facts were clearly established in the law suit against Jindal's proposal to merge Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO) and the University of New Orleans (UNO) by the legal team led by former state Senator Cleo Fields.

The reason the silence of white legislators is, in a way, understandable is because Louisiana politics is once again segregated. A review of the voter registration totals from every district in both houses of the Legislature reveal this fact. In the Senate, 24 of the 39 districts there are divided racially by splits that are 70/30 or worse. That is, in 61.5% of the Louisiana Senate districts the racial minorities are too small to effect the outcome of elections held there.

The situation is worse in the House. There, 71 of the 105 districts there have racial splits among voters that are 70/30 or worse. That is, in 67.62% of the House districts in Louisiana, the racial minorities in those districts are too small to affect the outcome of elections there.

These patterns and the resulting dynamic in the Legislature are corrosive and destructive to representative democracy. The proof is in the pudding of Jindal's all-white BoR appointments.

This is Louisiana Apartheid

Apartheid is defined as "A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups." The word is Dutch and came to infamy as a set of white supremacist policies in the country of South Africa that collapsed in the late 1980s.

The Louisiana Legislature, as a result of the redistricting that took place in 2001 is a bastion of apartheid. That is, whites represent whites and blacks represent blacks. As the racial voting splits indicate, legislators elected from the vast majority of the districts in the House and the Senate have little or no reason to take into account the interests of the minority voting block in their districts. It cuts both ways — whites are small racial minorities in many minority majority districts.

Those segregated districts have produced a racially polarized Legislature that lacks the essential ingredient necessary for compromise in a legislative body — some understanding of the needs and interests of the other legislators and his/her constituents.

The Legislature that resulted from the 2000 Census and redistricting process has more Black faces in each chamber, but those lawmakers are less able to produce results. That is not a reflection on the ability of those Black lawmakers. It is, instead, a product of the fact that most white lawmakers in each chamber have little understanding of the needs of Blacks because Blacks are politically insignificant in their districts. Blacks play no relevant political role in those districts, just as whites play no significant role in many heavy minority majority districts.

The problem has worsened since the 2003 election when term limits began to drain both bodies of experienced legislators and the long-term acquaintances (even friendships) that served as the basis for conducting the business of legislating, which frequently involves alliance building and compromise.

Jindal's BoR Frog Boil

Since Bobby Jindal was took office in January 2008 he has had nine opportunities to nominate people to serve on the BoR and all of those nominees he produced were white. Interestingly, there is no group shot of the BoR members on the organization's website. You have to click through on the name of each individual member in order to see who the members actually are.

Under the state Constitution, the Louisiana Senate is required to give its consent to the Governor's BoR appointees before they can officially take their seats. In that same section, the Constitution also states: "The board should be representative of the state's population by race and gender to ensure diversity."

The lawsuit seeking to block the study of the SUNO/UNO merger actually challenges the constitutionality of the the BoR as it has come to exist during Jindal's tenure because the all-white board violates that diversity provision. In court, former Senator Fields called other members of the Senate who voted on the original legislation that put the BoR constitutional amendment on the ballot to testify. The judge in the case ruled that "should" does not mean "shall" and effectively declared Jindal's racial bias to be legal.

This matter never should have gone to court because the Senate should not have allowed Jindal to appoint only whites to the BoR. The problem is that no white senator was willing to stand up to Jindal or stand with Black senators in calling out the Governor for racially biased nature of his appointments.

The reason for their silence has everything to do with the fact that most state senators represent districts that are essentially segregated. White senators in many instances do not have to pay attention to the interests of Blacks because there are not significant percentages of Black voters in their districts.

There are only 10 Black majority districts in the 39-seat Louisiana Senate. Two of those seats are actually held by whites (Francis Thompson from northeast Louisiana and David Heitmeier of the West Bank in the New Orleans area). By the time Jindal's whites-only pattern had become established, Black senators were the only ones willing to speak up and Jindal's denials of bias (despite the facts) seemed to assuage the other 31 members of the Senate.

Like boiling a frog, Jindal's transformation of the BoR from a demographically representative organization to a lily white one was done gradually and, by the time it was noticed, it was a done deal.

This Was No Accident

The bleaching of the BoR is the most blatant example of how Blacks have become marginalized in the Legislature. It is a process that has replicated itself in local governments in Louisiana, as well as legislatures across the South.

The kind of political segregation now evident in the Louisiana Legislature has spread across the South in recent years. It is, in fact, one part of the Republican 'Southern Strategy' of appealing to white voters.

In the 1980s, Republicans hit on a redistricting strategy that gave them the potential to use the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to their political advantage. The law was intended to ensure that Blacks were ensured fair opportunities to take part in governing in the nine Southern states where discriminatory racial practices tied to segregation had prevented them from doing so. Louisiana is one of the nine states covered by the Act.

Republicans came to realize that if they could encourage Blacks to maximize the number of Black majority districts and to encourage them to make them 'safe' districts, that the other result would be that predominantly white districts would become 'whiter' and more conservative. The strategy was first put into play across the South after the 1990 Census, and is covered in depth in the book "Race and Redistricting in the 1990's" by Bernard Grofman. "Maximizing black population districts would minimize black influence districts," Grofman wrote. "Minimizing black influence districts would maximize Republican electoral opportunities."

The "Black influence districts" mentioned by Grofman are those districts that, though having a majority of white voters, have large enough percentages of Black voters as to make them too important a block of voters for any candidate to ignore. The 2001 redistricting followed that formula to perfection, substantially reducing the number of Black influence districts and increasing the number of safe districts.

Former Representative Sherman Copelin told an audience at Southern University Law Center last week that he and Republican Representative Emile 'Peppi' Bruneau engineered the House plan that won approval in 2001. He also said that, in hindsight, it was a mistake. Copelin attributed the deal in part to the failure of white Democrats in the House at the time to work with Blacks on a common approach to redistricting.

Without question, the results have been disastrous for Blacks and for white Democrats. Both have been marginalized with white Democrats in either chamber of the Legislature are now an endangered species. It can all be traced back to the segregating of the districts that took place in 2001.

It Will Be Different This Time

Despite the fact that the Republican Party now holds majorities in both the House and the Senate and despite the fact that David Vitter's Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority stands poised once again to pour millions into electing Republican majorities that can last through all three election cycles that will be covered by this redistricting process (2011, 2015, and 2019), things can and must be different this time around.

The process is much improved in this cycle over in previous redistricting years. The House and Senate Governmental Affairs committees charged with handling the redrawing of maps for each chamber conducted a series of public hearings across the state, allowing for citizen input in the process. The process has been more transparent, but there has also been more public input in that process than at any other time in Louisiana's history.

The Legislature has also called itself into special session to deal with redistricting (this was the first time the Legislature ever called itself into session for any reason). That session will begin on Sunday, March 20 and can run through Wednesday, April 13.

Prior to the start of that session, the two committees are to meet jointly again for still more public input in the process.

These hearings, like the hearings out in the state, are crucial because they create the public record on the process which will be a critical component once the Legislature approves its plans to redraw the district lines in each chamber, as well as the state's six congressional districts, the Public Service Commission, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and, possibly, the Louisiana Supreme Court.

The reason that public record is important is because Louisiana is covered by the Voting Rights Act. Under Section 5 of the Act, any changes in election laws in our state must receive preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice before they take effect. There is a widespread expectation that there will to be challenges filed to whatever plan emerges from the Legislature, particularly for the congressional districts and each chamber of the Legislature.

And this is where the biggest change in the redistricting process will likely show up. For the first time since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a U.S. Department of Justice run by a Democratic administration will conduct the review of Louisiana's redistricting plans.

The significance of this cannot be overstated, not because the Justice Department under the Obama administration is political, but because the Department under the previous Republican administrations were so overtly political. Recall for a moment the way the Bush/Cheney administration politicized the hiring of U.S. Attorneys? Do you think it only went that far?

The Department of Justice will also accept comments from the public during the preclearance review process.

Recognizing the Problem

There is ample evidence that Black legislators recognize the extent to which they have been politically marginalized and the role the 2001 redistricting process contributed to that.

At a redistricting seminar held at Southern University Law Center on March 3, representatives from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund discussed the role that packing, stacking and other vote dilution strategies have played in undercutting the effectiveness of the Legislative Black Caucus in the Louisiana Legislature, as well as the impact that has had at other levels of government.

While the message was well-received, it remains to be seen if Black lawmakers will accept the less polarized districts and find willing partners in either chamber to work towards more heterodox districts in the redistricting session.

If willing majorities are not found (and it certainly does not seem likely, considering the newly minted Republican majorities), then populating the public record with those alternate plans becomes vital to challenges that would be considered in the preclearance review conducted by the Department of Justice.

The bottom line is that this year's redistricting offers a path out of the political segregation that has come to characterize our politics and taint our Legislature. While the maps drawn by this Legislature will be important, by no means will they constitute the final word on the shape of legislative districts in our state for the coming decade.

The process will continue beyond the highly partisan, racially distorted interests and parameters of the Legislature. We must recognize that fact and understand that the ultimate audience for those of us who want political and legislative processes that reflect the ethnic diversity of our state is not limited to Baton Rouge and is not limited to Louisiana.

Our audience includes the U.S. Department of Justice. Our goal should be to convince them to approve only redistricting plans that are consistent with the principles and objectives of the Voting Rights Act and not to merely rubber-stamping the partisan-tinged plans likely to come out of the Legislature.

This is how Louisiana can advance towards the change we both need and seek.

Bobby Jindal: cam head

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 07:11:00 +0000

The self-proclaimed 'Ethics Governor'™was laid bare as a fraud over the past week as the pay to play nature of his administration was revealed for all who cared to see.

Gold digger? Yes! Gold standard? Hardly!

First, last week the New York Times revealed that the Supriya Jindal Foundation was the beneficiary of conspicuous corporate largess, made all the more suspect by the fact that many of those same companies had matters that needed the Governor's attention.

Then, a tenacious legal fight over a study to consider the feasibility of merging the University of New Orleans with Southern University at New Orleans revealed more than a few unflattering facts about the Governor's appointing practices. It turns out that all of the Governor's appointments to the Board of Regents for Higher Education had two things in common: first, they were all maximum contributors ($5,000 per individual, not counting family members and companies); and, second, they were all white.

Jindal won that round of the legal fight, but even Republican sycophant pollster Bernie Pinsonat said he believed the Board of Regents story had the potential to prove costly to the Governor.

It's probably just a coincidence that Pinsonat's remarks were published just before 2 p.m. on Lundi Gras and within two hours Jindal's office announced the resignation from the Board of long time member and Turner Industries President and CEO Roland Toups. Jindal political guru Timmy Teepel made it clear that he and Jindal had asked Toups to resign in order to provide the Governor with the chance to name a minority member to the Board.

Turner Industries, it turns out, is charged with employment discrimination against African Americans in a lawsuit filed in Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 250 workers sued, alleging racial discrimination in hiring, pay, promotions and on-the-job treatment. Turner Industries, the paper reported, has had a number of such suits brought against it by employees and by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The question that should immediately be raised is whether this minority member will have to first contribute to Jindal's campaign in order to get the seat, or has the Jindal camp already scoured their campaign finance reports to identify potential candidates? Is green the only color Jindal can see?

The extent to which Jindal and his team are so out of touch on racial issues is made clear by the belief that appointing a single minority member to the Board of Regents will somehow correct the Governor's defective appointing patterns. That pattern shows that Jindal views African Americans as irrelevant to the governmental process at the state level.

Late last year, the Legislative Black Caucus called attention to Jindal's appointing practices in a press release that came on the heels of legislative testimony by one of Jindal's assistants. The Governor did not feel compelled to respond.

The sacking of Toups indicates that the Governor only started to consider the impact of his appointing practices when it became clear it might cost him something he wanted — specifically, the closure of the SUNO campus. The lack of a minority member on the Board with a vote appears to contradict the will of the Legislature when it passed the law creating the Board of Regents and the amendment to the Louisiana Constitution that voters approved in 1998. When Blacks complained about his pay-to-play system, he could ignore it. But, when the matter got raised in a court of law, that changed things.

Rumor has it that Jindal two conditions for people seeking appointment to the Southern University System Board of Supervisors. The first is that any appointee cannot give money to anyone running against Jindal; the second is that they cannot work against the election of any Republican legislators in their area.

The pay-to-play issue and the racial composition of the Board of Regents will not go away in the SUNO matter because the plaintiffs have announced that they intend to pursue an appeal.

The Jindal Way: Pay-to-Play

The pay-to-play model cropped up in connection with the Supriya Jindal Foundation where, the New York Times first reported, major corporations with business before the state have been making large contributions to the First Lady's foundation. Sure, they only want to help her help the kids, but there is one thing that pushes this beyond some liberal media trying to do a hit job on our nationally irrelevant governor.

The connective tissue between the Jindal Foundation and the Jindal Campaign is Alexandra Bautsch. Ms. Bautsch is listed as an officer of the Supriya Jindal Foundation (the New York Times reported her as the Treasurer). She also happens to be a fundraiser for the Jindal campaign, according to her LinkedIn page.

Ms. Bautsch apparently operated as something of a one-stop contribution window for both Jindals. Imagine the outrage (not to mention federal investigations) if Edwin Edwards and one of his wives had tried a similar arrangement!

While some of Jindal's allies have tried to downplay the significance of this story (see Pinsonat's comments in the link above), the fact is that the story solidifies the fact that Jindal operates a pay-to-play administration — exactly what he said he would end with his self-proclaimed ethics 'Gold Standard' reforms passed in the first few days of his term. As it turns out, his 'reforms' have rendered campaign finance laws virtually unenforceable.

In light of what the public has learned about Jindal in the past two weeks, the question must be asked if this wrecking of the campaign finance enforcement regime by Jindal was a deliberate act?

The Governor's pay-to-play ways are catching up with him. Bills are coming due. Too much damage is being done to public and private institutions in this state by the Governor and his policies based on nothing more than a desire to prevent his patrons from paying more taxes and a desire to turn public coffers into funnels directed into the pockets of donors-to-be through privatization.

Having set up the Board of Regents to carry out his wishes, he handed them the work of dismantling SUNO. It was overreach and it laid bare his pay-to-play approach to appointments to boards and commissions. That policy is exactly what he said he was against. It is a direct contradiction of who he said he was.

Jindal's demise as a presidential contender on the national level came after he repeatedly exposed his lack of substance to national audiences. With his ethics mantel having been shattered, the unraveling of his in-state myth has begun. Whether it unravels fast enough to enable his defeat at the polls remains to be seen. But, life is nothing if not unpredictable.

Doing the Math

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 06:12:00 +0000

Louisiana is going to lose a House seat, based on Census results. We will go from seven to six congressional districts, beginning with the 2012 federal elections.

The 2009 American Community Survey (released in December 2010) revealed that African Americans comprise almost exactly one-third of the state's population.

Louisiana is a Voting Rights state, meaning that special attention is paid to the protection of minority voting rights in our state due to our history.

So, while much talk in recent weeks has centered on ideas like creating a coastal district stretching from Texas to Mississippi, more serious consideration is going to have to be give to creating a congressional reapportionment map that responds to the fundamental demographics of our state.

One-third of six is two. Can two majority African American districts be created? Or, can one African American majority district result in five other districts with significant African American voter bases in them?

This could significantly shift the ideological makeup of our congressional delegation for the better.
White Democrats will have to learn to vote for African Americans. If we can, we can transform politics in our state. If not, we will keep on losing.

Deep Water Drilling Approved; Oil Industry Continues Whining

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:34:00 +0000

That whining Bobby Jindal complained about at the end of last year was apparently coming from his buddies in the oil and gas industry — not the heads of the state's colleges and universities.

The proof could be found this week when, after the Obama administration allowed 13 deep water drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico to resume, the industry cacophony of whining ratcheted up to a higher pitch.

Too little, too late. Not enough. Too slow. Too hot! Too cold! Bwaaahhh!! The industry and its apologists, accustomed to writing the rules they then chose to ignore, are perplexed by the notion of regulation and inspection by people who (at least for now) can't be bought.

Get used to it. The well has been plugged, new rules are in place, but the whining will not stop.

The legitimacy of the whining is best assessed in the context of the earlier rage against the moratorium and the dire predictions the oil and gas lobby, elected officials, academics and other said the temporary moratorium would have on Louisiana's economy.

Lies and Propaganda

The only way to describe the claims made about the moratorium and the way it was used to attack the Obama administration in Louisiana is to call them what they were: lies and propaganda.

The liar in chief was Governor Bobby Jindal who immediately recognized that the moratorium posed a financial threat to his legions of backers in the offshore oil services industry anchored primarily in coastal southeast Louisiana.

After GOP heavy hitter, former co-owner of the New Orleans Hornets, and Jindal backer Gary Chouest's companies threatened immediate layoffs after the moratorium was declared, Jindal spoke at the first anti-moratorium rally held in an Edison Chouest facility at Port Fourchon on June 11. Jindal spoke at the second anti-moratorium rally on June 24th which was held at the Gulf Island Fabricators facility in the port in Houma where that company is working on a Chouest project that is at least partially funded by the State of Louisiana.

That rally was held four days after the Jindal-ordered amicus brief filing in the suit against the moratorium in which the governor's attorneys, headed by Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, lied to the federal judge hearing the case. In the brief, Caldwell and the other attorneys said that the moratorium had cost thousands of Louisiana workers their jobs and cited the Louisiana Workforce Commission as the source of that information.

Only one problem. The claim was not true. It was not true then and was not true all through the summer when new unemployment claims in Louisiana showed no blip attributable to the moratorium. In fact, unemployment in Louisiana stayed below 2009 levels throughout the summer of 2010.

The fact-free attacks on the moratorium (and the Obama administration) reached a crescendo at the Lafayette Cajundome on July 21. On that day, the relentless campaign of economic fear waged by the industry, the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce (technically, there is a difference), and state and local government culminated in the gathering of about 12,000 to get two hours of personally delivered lies.

All of mainstream media in Lafayette bought into the so-called "Rally for Economic Survival," setting aside any pretense of objectivity and shutting down any semblance of critical thinking. There were on-air editorials by local television stations; a front-page editorial by the Gannett daily and a heavy serving of fear-dripping op-eds by opponents of the moratorium.

At the event, then-interim Lt. Governor Scott Angelle delivered the speech he'd been perfecting on smaller audiences in which he claimed President Obama didn't like the oil and gas industry. There was a blatantly misleading presentation from the Louisiana Workforce Commission on the jobs that would be affected by the moratorium. The end of the economic world was near and Lafayette would be in ruins before the summer was out if the moratorium was not lifted.

In September, the BP Gulf Gusher was plugged. In October the moratorium was lifted. The industry whining continued because drilling and/or coastal destruction was not allowed to immediately resume.

After a quick dip in the fund-raising business, Angelle returned to his prior role as Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources where he faced a decision on how to tax his old buddies (and recent contributors) in the oil and gas industry. Some saw the glaring ethical issue that Angelle and his boss the Governor chose to ignore.

New Whinery

Now, with drilling activity officially sanctioned, the industry's apologists have cranked up the whinery again.

Their lies of 2010 rob them of any credibility.

We know for a fact now that the moratorium cost very few jobs in Louisiana and in the offshore drilling industry. There were fewer than 400 claims made on the $100 million fund set up to help compensate those who lost their jobs or income due to the moratorium. We know that the moratorium was never cited as the cause of any spike in job losses in 2010 in the Louisiana Workforce Commission's official reports (which is separate from the propaganda work they did at the behest of the Governor and the industry).

The best evidence of the lack of the impact of the moratorium on the economy, though, came in Lafayette. In December, City/Parish President Joey Durel (a speaker at the anti-moratorium rally in July) got the Lafayette Consolidated Government Council to approve a pay raise for Lafayette Parish governmental workers. Durel cited increased sales tax collections in Lafayette Parish as providing the fiscal underpinning for the raises.

If the moratorium had any economic impact, it was indirect. The direct impact was from the fear campaign waged by opponents of the moratorium who succeeded for a time in convincing people that the 2010 moratorium would send the region's economy into a tailspin that would rival the oil and gas industry collapse of the mid-1980s.

None of that happened.

The people who inflicted this hoax on Louisiana know it. The people know it. The perpetrators of the hoax must not be allowed to go unpunished for their deception.

If Jindal’s Got the Job He Wants, Why Is He Still Fighting Health Care Reform?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:01:00 +0000

Governor Bobby Jindal insists that he is not running for president, that he has the only job he wants — that of being governor of Louisiana.

There is a simple way that the governor could prove that: he could order Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to withdraw Louisiana from the suit challenging the new health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act.

Why? Because the Affordable Care Act is good for what ails Louisiana.

Admitting that might not help Jindal’s standing among national Republicans, but there is no better way to prove his commitment to serving Louisiana than dropping a politicized legal challenge to a law that helps Louisiana families and businesses, the health care provider community, and the State of Louisiana. In fact, under Jindal, state government has moved to take advantage of provisions of the new law.

To understand why this law is good for Louisiana, it is necessary to understand the state of health in Louisiana today. Doing so reveals that the Affordable Care Act goes a long way towards addressing what ails health care in this state (and, also, this country).

The Affordable Care Act addresses key things that ail Louisiana and Louisiana’s health care delivery system. It will not only improve access to care in Louisiana, it will stabilize the finances of the provider community and ensure that the state’s health care dollars (spent primarily through Medicaid) get more bang for the buck.

For Democrats, recognizing the state of health care in Louisiana and understanding how the Act responds to what ails it, reveals the blatantly partisan nature of the attacks on the law by Jindal and others. The sound public policy at the heart of the act reveals the efforts to deny Louisiana citizens, businesses and the provider community the benefits of this Act to be strictly partisan and diametrically opposite of the best interests of the state and its people.

Understanding Louisiana’s health care challenges and how the Act responds to those reveals the opponents of the Act for what they are — partisans who place politics above any consideration for the well being of the people of this state.

This is Louisiana Health Care

The Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals’ Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Unit provides these facts about our state on their website:

Approximately 208,000 adults or seven percent of adults in Louisiana have been diagnosed with diabetes.
African Americans have the highest prevalence of diabetes, with a nine percent diagnosis rate, compared to five percent of Hispanics and six percent of the white population.
Over 20% of adults currently do not have health insurance of any kind, including Medicaid or Medicare.
Nearly one out of four adults is obese.
Louisiana has the fourth highest cardiovascular death rate in the nation.
One in four adults in Louisiana are current smokers.
One in four Louisiana children have tried cigarettes by the 6th grade.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in Louisiana, accounting for almost 40 percent of all death in the state.

The state’s Office of Public Health annual report card shows that chronic diseases kill people at a higher rate in Louisiana than in other states. This is because the diseases are not detected early here and, by the time they are detected, the disease processes have inflicted more damage to the patient’s body. The cost of treatment is higher at that point, the chances of successfully managing the disease lower, the quality of life for the patient is reduced, and the ability of that person to be a productive member of society is reduced as well.

In short, diseases that are manageable if they are diagnosed and treated early, kill more of us because they are not. This is what results when there are barriers that prevent people from getting access to the care that they need. Cost is one of the primary barriers to care — the cost of care or the inability to afford insurance that could help pay for that care. We are afflicted by chronic diseases at higher rates than the rest of the country and those diseases kill us sooner than they do people in other states.

One prominent barrier to access to care in Louisiana is that much of the state (except for the metropolitan areas) has been designated areas where shortages of primary care health professionals exist. Where such shortages exist, it means there either is not a doctor in town, or there are not enough doctors in town to service the population of the community. As a result, people must travel some distance in order to see a doctor.

That often requires a person taking time off from work in order to seek care. Having to travel outside the community to seek care costs the person seeking care time and money. Chronic illnesses, absences from work, and time off to seek care and treatment also have a negative impact on worker productivity, which affects every business in the state.

The High Price of Being Uninsured

Louisiana ranks among the states with the highest percentage of working age residents who don’t have health insurance. The LSU Public Policy Research Lab conducts an annual survey on health insurance coverage in Louisiana for the Department of Health & Hospitals. According to the most recent survey, there are at least 27 parishes in which more than 20 percent of the adult working age population (people between the ages of 19 and 64) do not have health insurance. The margin of error in the survey allows that the number of parishes with at least that percentage of uninsured could be higher, as many as two-thirds of the state’s parishes.

Since most small businesses in Louisiana don’t offer health insurance and only a small majority of other businesses as well, that loss of work is compounded by the significant out of pocket expenses for the person seeking care.

If people try to reduce out of pocket expenses by going to an LSU Hospital or clinic, the reduced cost is replaced by extended time required to wait to get care.

The high percentage of Louisiana’s adult population without any form of insurance has an impact that extends beyond the uninsured person, their family and the businesses where they work. The lack of a third-party payer (that is, some form of insurance) has a profound financial impact on those providers who deliver care to the uninsured. Many people know that if you turn up at a hospital emergency room, you will get to see a doctor and you will get treated. The result of providing care to the uninsured costs Louisiana’s 140 or so acute care hospitals hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

There is a form of reimbursement for that care, based on a formula, but the bulk of those disproportionate share dollars go to the LSU hospitals as part of the state’s method of funding those hospitals and because those hospitals provide care to so many people who don’t have insurance.

The bottom line is that there are so many uninsured working age adults in Louisiana that the disproportionate share dollars don’t go far enough to cover the costs of delivering that care, thereby putting a huge financial strain on hospitals and providers across the state.

Compound that with a steady stream of state cuts in Medicaid reimbursements to private providers and you have the rapidly tightening the financial bind that is crushing private sector health care providers — doctors, clinics and hospitals.

The Cost Shifting Death Spiral

The combination of large numbers of people without a third-party helping them pay their medical bills and a public insurance program that is forced to reduce its payment for services due to state budget woes creates an irrepressible demand by providers to ease some of that pressure by driving up charges to those patients with the ability to pay — that is, people with private insurance coverage. Consequently, costs are shifted onto those patients with private insurance, which produces pressure on the insurance companies to offset those higher costs through premium increases.

That cost-shifting spiral puts the cost of private insurance out of the reach of more people every year as premiums and co-pays escalate beyond the ability and/or willingness of employers and employees to pay. In the summer of 2009, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana estimated that only about 30 percent of small businesses in Louisiana offer their employees any kind of health insurance coverage. Other estimates are that less than 50 percent of all employers in Louisiana offer health insurance to their employees.

The cost shifting has provoked fights between insurance companies and hospitals over reimbursement rates. There were well-publicized clashes in 2010 between the state's largest health care insurance provider Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana and several hospitals and groups, including the state's largest network of private hospitals operated by the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady.

If current trends continue unabated, the number insured will continue to decline and the number of uninsured will continue to rise in a death dance that will ultimately result in the collapse of employment-based health insurance. That, in turn, will bring down much of the provider community with it.

What has been happening in Louisiana has been happening across the country, although the process of decline is not as far advanced elsewhere as it is here.

It is against this backdrop of the spiraling health care costs, growing ranks of the uninsured and mounting financial instability in the provider community that a national consensus developed in 2008 about the need for reform.

Market-based Response to the Death Spiral

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in April 2010 seeks to pull the system out of its death spiral by ensuring that more people have some form of third-party payer helping them pay for their health care needs. That will come through a mandate that just about everyone who can afford it has health insurance or, for those who can’t afford it, Medicaid will be expanded to ensure that the cost of care can be paid.

The mandate was an idea that originated with Republicans in the mid-1990s in response to President Clinton’s attempted health care reform. It was also the cornerstone of health insurance reform implemented in Massachusetts under Republican Governor Mitt Romney earlier in the first decade of this century.

This is not socialized medicine. The federal government has not bought any hospitals. Doctors and nurses are not becoming public servants. As is the case with Medicare and Medicaid, care will still be delivered through private providers. The difference is that the federal government will be helping to pay for the care either through tax credits or through expanded Medicaid eligibility.

To those who say the country can’t afford this, the correct response is that the country can’t afford not to have this program. Health care costs are a major factor driving growth in government spending. It is also a major component in future liabilities of the government.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act bends the cost curve of health care by making sure that more care is paid for at the point of care, rather than shifting costs onto those with private health insurance. Reducing cost shifting improves the viability of Medicare and of private insurance by improving the balance sheet of providers from individual physicians to major hospitals. The health information technology investments included in the 2009 stimulus legislation will also make the system operate more efficiently and improve the quality of care.

In Louisiana, the Affordable Care Act will bring coverage to more than 750,000 residents who currently do not have any form of insurance. About half of the newly covered will receive tax credits to help pay for coverage. This will bring $9 billion new health care dollars into Louisiana and into the coffers of Louisiana providers in the first five years that the health insurance exchange program begins in 2014.

The other half of the newly insured under the Act will come via expanded Medicaid coverage, bringing another $7 billion into the state and into the coffers of health care providers. Yes, the state will have to spend more on Medicaid (about 5% more than it is currently obligated to pay), but the benefits of better care for large segments of the population and financial stability for the provider community represent a tremendous return on that small investment.

The Affordable Care Act will reduce family insurance premiums by between $1,700 and $2,500 for the same benefits package they have now by the second year the insurance exchange program is in effect (2015).

The Affordable Care Act represents a huge tax cut for business by offering tax credits for small businesses that offer health insurance coverage to their employees. In July of last year, about 60,000 Louisiana businesses were notified that they are eligible for these tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.

Also in July, more than 95,000 Louisiana residents who had been denied insurance coverage due to pre-existing conditions became eligible to buy insurance at the same rates as healthy people in their age cohort. Louisiana, under the direction of Governor Jindal, chose not to participate in this program. This immediately stranded 1,700 Louisiana residents who are participants in the state’s high-risk pool for those with pre-existing conditions. Those people are paying higher rates for their coverage than is available to them through the federal program. In addition, Jindal’s refusal to participate in the program means that the federal government had to expand its involvement in health care in Louisiana rather than partner with state government.

In September of last year (2010), children up to the age of 26 became eligible to remain on their parents’ health insurance coverage if those adult children are not offered health insurance on their job. Estimates are that there are more than 25,000 young adults affected by this provision.

At the same time (September 2010), the Act reduced the cost of health insurance for more than 60,000 early retirees in Louisiana who have coverage through their former employees. The state of Louisiana — at Governor Jindal’s direction — enrolled to participate in this aspect of the program to help it pay for health insurance coverage for its early retirees. Yes, the state moved to participate in one of the benefits of the Act at the same time the state was fighting to have the law declared unconstitutional.

The Act also will close the 'donut hole' in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.

The Act also provides funding for 99 new community health centers across Louisiana that will go a long way towards ending health professional shortage areas in the state. In addition, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act includes money for job training for health care professionals ranging from registered nurses down to nurses aides.

The provision that annual health exams and health screens be provided without the need for a deductible or co-payment further reduces access to care, and will enable earlier detection of the chronic diseases that ravage people while they go undetected.

In addition, the Affordable Care Act and spending including in the 2009 stimulus legislation included money for additional training for health professionals and technicians to help ease the health professional shortages that exist in Louisiana and other states.

ACA: Good for What Ails Louisiana and Health Care

Any way you look at it, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a good prescription for what ails Louisiana and Louisiana health care. Better access and care for patients, financial stability and predictability for the provider community, a taming of the cost of health insurance premiums for individuals and businesses, will all contribute to a healthier, more productive Louisiana.

The Affordable Care Act is not a mixed blessing for Louisiana!

In fact, if one were to seriously try to address only Louisiana’s health issues and our health care problems with a commitment for reforming the existing system, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something better than the market-based health insurance reforms that are the core of the Affordable Care Act.

Governor Jindal puts politics ahead of the well being of this state by insisting that Louisiana continue its fight to have this law declared unconstitutional.

If he is truly interested in serving this state and its people, he would drop that quest immediately.

Jindal's Budget Cuts to Kill More Jobs than Drilling Moratorium

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:06:00 +0000

All summer long, Louisiana residents were subjected to non-stop lying and yammering by Governor Bobby Jindal and his allies about the potential threat to Louisiana jobs posed by the deep water drilling moratorium. Although the job losses never materialized, the mere thought of them had Jindal & Co. speaking in apocalyptic terms about Louisiana's economic future in the wake of the temporary drilling shutdown.

In contrast to his previous agitation regarding the possibility of job losses, the Governor seems eerily serene as he prepares to unleash new rounds of state budget cuts that will cut services and cost jobs in both the public and private sector.

In a note to supporters last week, Jindal reiterated his opposition to any form of tax increases. He also took credit for all good news in the state and laid blame for any bad news at the feet of others. That's just the way he rolls.

But a funny thing happened while Jindal was on an out-of-state jaunt: some inconvenient facts escaped into public view.

Turns out that the Governor's plan to close Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge will cost about 400 people their jobs. That fact came via testimony from the hospital's CEO before the Louisiana Senate Finance Committee. That number is significant on a couple of scores.

First, according to the LSU Health System's 2008 annual report (PDF — the most recent one available), there were 1,266 full-time employees at the hospital. So, about one-third of the people working at the hospital will lose their job as a result of the shut down. Ostensibly the hospital is being closed to save money, but LSU VP for the Health System, Dr. Fred Cerise has pointed out that the shift of services to private hospitals will actually drive up the cost of Medicaid services in the Baton Rouge area due to higher reimbursement rates the hospitals are being promised by the state to take the increased patient loads resulting from the closure.

The other reason that the job loss number is significant is that it is larger than the actual number of jobs affected by the deep water drilling moratorium. The Baton Rouge Area Foundation was selected to administer a $100 million fund created to help those who lost their jobs as a result of the moratorium.

Fewer that 400 workers applied for the funds.

So, this single example of Jindal's focus on dismantling public institutions will have a larger negative impact on jobs than the moratorium he so passionately excoriated, yet his allies have not rented any large arenas to rally the populace against the extermination of these jobs.

More Job Losses Are Coming

House Speaker Jim Tucker and Jindal don't agree on much these days, but they do still appear to share a desire to dismantle much (if not all) of the state's public hospital system now run by LSU. Three hospitals are run out of the Shreveport Health Sciences Center in Shreveport (Shreveport, Huey P. Long in Pineville, and E.A. Conway in Monroe). The rest of the system is run by the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. The hospitals run there Earl K. Long in Baton Rouge, Bogalusa Medical Center, Leonard Chabert Medical Center in Houma, University Medical Center in Lafayette, Walter O. Moss Regional Medical Center in Lake Charles, the Interim Public Hospital in New Orleans, and Lallie Kemp Regional Medical Center in Independence.

The two systems employ about 13,000 doctors, nurses, aides, orderlies, and staff.

In the minds of Jindal and his Republican legislative allies, just about all of those hospitals and most of those jobs are on the cutting table.

Coming on the heels of the most recent session where Jindal successfully pushed for the privatization of three state mental health hospitals, the people running these hospitals feel threatened, particularly those at the smaller hospitals.

Last Friday, State Rep. John Bel Edwards, Sen. Ben Nevers, and Tangipahoa Parish President Gordon Burgess took part in a meeting at the hospital about the facility's future. The hospital handled more than 100,000 cases last year. Beyond the essential healthcare services it provides to its patients, 39 percent of which did not have health insurance last year, Lallie Kemp (like the other hospitals in the LSU system) is an economic engine in that region.

According to Rep. Edwards, Lallie Kemp has a $90 million annual economic impact on Independence and the surrounding area in the Florida Parishes. In the 2008 annual LSU annual report, the hospital was listed as having 400 full-time employees or their equivalent.

Although Rep. Edwards said he knows of no current plan to close or cut back services at the hospital, he said that the planning for a 35 percent cut in state funding Jindal has ordered all departments to plan for could change that dramatically.

The loss in access to care would be devastating to the people in that region. But those losses could pale in comparison to the economic impact on communities closing of Lallie Kemp or any of the other public hospitals in the LSU systems would have.

Still, Jindal insists that no taxes will be raised and that the state will make do with the revenue base it currently has.

The Medicaid Rebellion

Jindal's initial DHH Secretary Alan Levine confected a plan to bring private insurance companies into manage the Medicaid program and to reduce funding for the program but claim that the quality of care would not diminish. Brazenly branded "Making Medicaid Better" the plan has met with fierce opposition from the provider community (doctors, hospitals, ambulance providers, etc.).

Why would providers object to cutting funding for care to the poor? Because Medicaid (like Medicare) works by paying providers to deliver care. That is, the money for these 'public' health programs goes directly to private providers (some also goes to public providers like the LSU hospitals).

Shrinking funding while extending new hands in the till to manage the care delivered will result in reduced funding for providers. You can do the math. Reduced funding for providers results in fewer providers willing to deliver the services which, in turn, results in reduced access to care.

The Medicaid program in Louisiana is huge; in excess of $7 billion flows through the program annually, but the vast majority of the money is federal money as Louisiana has one of the most generous federal match ratios in the country due to the fact that we are a poor state and have had strong champions for the program in the Senate.

The Louisiana Hospital Association, fighting proposed budget cuts in 2009, said a $200 million cut in Medicaid funding would cost Louisiana nearly 2,000 healthcare jobs. Although those cuts were staved off at the time, succeeding budget shortfalls have resulted in far more money being cut from Medicaid since that time.

With Jindal's refusal to consider new funding sources and a budget shortfall approaching $2 billion anticipated at the start of the next fiscal year (and with Jindal still not having made good on his pledge to revised the State Constitution to ensure that not all cuts come solely from healthcare and higher education), new cuts in Medicaid are going to result in significant job losses in both the public and private segments of the healthcare delivery system.

Higher Education Remains Targeted

Higher education is the other segment of the state's budgets that are not constitutionally protected. Jindal has been taking heat publicly for his cuts in this area, owing in no small measure for the affection many alums feel for their old schools.

While large segments of our state like to sneer at the 'pointy heads' in academia, higher education has significant economic impact on the communities fortunate enough to have such institutions in their midst. As a native of Eunice, I can tell you that I shudder to think what that city would be like economically today were it not for the presence of the LSU-E campus there.

The University of Louisiana System put together an economic impact fact sheet (PDF) a couple of years ago when Jindal first locked in on his 'no new taxes for any reason' strategy of pursuing his national ambitions.

The economic impact of LSU on the Baton Rouge area is immense and its impact on the entire state through the AgCenter, the LSU Hospital System, and other initiatives is at least as large as the UL system's.

Jindal maintains that the universities are not delivering enough value, that people take too long to graduate, if they do at all. It might do the Governor some good to actually talk to the people who are working their way through college. He would learn about the kind of balancing act they have to do among work, family and school. He might also take a whack at explaining how increasing tuition is going to make those students move through the system faster.

But, as a man with no ties to any higher educational institution in the state, it's all just about numbers to him.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

This summer, Jindal was all about jobs — when he wasn't killing oysters or generally making a nuisance of himself (see page 20) during the BP Gulf Gusher. But the jobs he was worried about were the oilfield service jobs of people employed by his biggest political backers — the Bollingers and the Chouests. His concern, one could convincingly argue, was not about the jobs at all, but about the threat Jindal believed the moratorium posed to his benefactors.

Despite the fact that he is the child of public employees, Jindal exhibits a peculiar disdain for their work and their well being. No doubt his judgment on the worth of these workers and services is clouded by his national Republican ambitions which makes tax increases an anathema, a fact that has been compounded by the rise of the Tea Party wing within the Republican Party.

The complicating factor for Jindal is that 2011 is a statewide election year and his national ambitions cannot be advanced if he cannot get re-elected here.

Democrats are not well positioned now, but neither was the national party in 1991 before Bill Clinton challenged George H.W. Bush (or, 'Bush the Intelligent' compared to his son).

People who value higher education are going to have to step up. Dave Treen is dead and it's doubtful whether another intervention at the Mansion can prevent the new author from pushing ahead with his plans to slash programs.

Jindal was elected, in part, by people who believed that he was a problem solver who understood the value of education and knew how to manage healthcare. He's proven that he is none of the above.

The forces of opposition to his policies are firming. It remains to be seen if someone can step forward and give voice to that opposition in a way that either forces Jindal to change his path — or costs him re-election.

Strange things have a way of happening on the way to coronations in a democracy.

Melancon's Loss Shows Democrats Need to Offer a Choice, Not an Echo

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:22:00 +0000

Louisiana Democrats pondering the drubbing we've been taking in federal elections lately (with a few prominent exceptions) should read conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 book "A Choice, Not an Echo."

In that book, written as an endorsement of Barry Goldwater's bid to win the Republican nomination for the presidency that year, Schlafly called on her party to return to its conservative roots and declared that the party would find electoral success would only come if it embraced a separate identity from Democrats. Republicans, she said, needed to stop being the 'me, too' party.

Charlie Melancon's crushing defeat on November 2 should send a clear message to Louisiana Democrats. The message is not, as Republican mouthpieces would have us believe, 'drop dead.' It is not that the party and our candidates have no future in Louisiana politics.

The message is that Democrats will not win elections again in Louisiana unless and until our candidates stop runing as though we are the "me, too" party of Louisiana, The road to electoral success for Louisiana Democrats will open up when Louisiana Democrats stop trying to sell ourselves as Republican Lite.

The message from last week's election was clear. Republicans know who their candidates are and they are not going to settle for anything less than the 'real thing' — even when that 'real thing' has a personal history that flies in the face of much of what that party once stood for as David Vitter's personal history and the way he's managed his Senate office do. Republicans know they want that real thing. Only some Democrats (and their consultants) think Republicans are willing to accept imitations.

Charlie Melancon is a good man. He is, in fact, many of the things David Vitter once claimed to be — particularly the part about being a devoted family man. But, Charlie who ran as a Democrat, did everything he could to distance himself from his party and its core constituents of African-Americans and activists who have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness — make that an eagerness — to work on behalf of Democratic candidates who will at least make a modicum of effort to align themselves with the party.

That record speaks for itself in presidential election years where, since 1996, no national Democratic ticket has spent significant money in Louisiana after the nominating convention and yet those activists somehow manage to produce vote totals of 40% and upward. Melancon got 38% of the vote against Vitter. He lost core Democratic voters by running against the party and away from its activist base.

Charlie's campaign never reached out to the party's base in any meaningful way. In fact, his campaign insisted on running away from his president, his party and our signature issue of health care reform via the Affordable Care Act. Those actions were at the core of his defeat. Anyone who paid any attention to the campaign knows that Vitter's campaign focused on tying Melancon to the very things he sought to distance himself from, all of which were things that made Charlie look like a Democrat.

It Started With The Affordable Care Act

Charlie's problems started with healthcare reform, which President Obama signed into law in March of this year as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Melancon wanted nothing to do with it. He stayed away from it as much as possible. He avoided opportunities to speak in support of the issue in 2009, when they bill was being shaped and the opposition to the bill in the form of the Tea Party shouting matches erupted.

There was an opportunity then for leadership in helping define the issue. Senator Mary Landrieu did some work on that then, taking part in a televised forum on healthcare reform organized by the Lafayette Parish Democratic Executive Committee that ran in three markets (Shreveport, Lafayette and Lake Charles). Melancon was invited to participate. He refused.

Senator Landrieu made clear that she opposed the public option that was then still part of the discussion, but spoke in support of other aspects of the legislation such as health insurance exchanges, expansion of Medicaid, and tax credits for small businesses.

Charlie's refusal to engage on the issue was apparent to friends and foes alike. His silence cost him dearly in credibility but the vacuum his silence left was filled by the anti-reform rhetoric of the Tea Partiers that not only distorted the debate, but their disinformation helped radicalize voters and made the streets safe for David Vitter to appear in public — even as troubles related to the management of his Senate office appeared to re-enforce his problems with women.

Once the grandstanding ends and more provisions of the ACA kick in, Louisiana families and businesses (as well as the healthcare provider community) are going to find that there is a lot to like in this law. As this happens, Democrats should be pointing to those positives and reminding people who was feeding the distortions.

The Moratorium Hoax

Like most public officials in Louisiana, Charlie and his campaign tried to find a way to take the Republican position on the deep water drilling moratorium. That the claims about the economic impact of the moratorium were a hoax never crossed his mind. He was intent on trying to win over the oilfield service industry that had at one time supported his runs for Congress. It was never going to happen.

Opposition to the moratorium was immediately political because it threatened the pockets of stalwart Republican financial backers, primarily Donal Bollinger and Gary Chouest and their families and networks of limited liability corporations.

To anyone without direct financial ties to the offshore oil industry, the moratorium (issued a month after the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred and while thousands of barrels of oil were gushing uncontrolled into the Gulf of Mexico) not only made sense, it was the prudent thing to do during what was predicted to be an active hurricane season.

Instead of showing some leadership and defining the issue, Charlie again opted to pursue the GOP Lite position of passing a resolution calling for the end of the moratorium. It did not work as oil service money flowed into Vitter's coffers almost as freely as BP's oil gushed into the Gulf.

Again, Melancon's intended audience was not falling for the 'lite' take on the issue and he missed an opportunity to display leadership and give Democrats a reason to rally to his banner.

Adding insult to injury, Melancon's campaign then trumpeted his opposition to President Obama on both healthcare and the moratorium in television spots in the campaign's final weeks.

Historical Perspective

As a rule, Democrats are not going to have more money than Republicans in campaigns. When we win races, though, it is through organization, mobilization and focus. All campaigns rely to some extent on volunteers, but Democratic candidates need them more to help offset the financial edge that Republicans tend to have (it is not always the case, as when an incumbent Democrat seeks re-election as Mary Landrieu did in 2008).

But volunteers have to be motivated. They have to be given reasons to believe that the donation of their time and effort is worthwhile. The prospect of victory can be one of those things, but clearly the record of volunteerism in the presidential campaigns demonstrates that is not the prime motivation.

The prime motivation is that the candidate that these volunteers work for reflects their values and will stand up for those values on the campaign trail and fight for them once elected.

Democratic candidates who position themselves as Republican Lite candidates automatically put up a wall between that volunteer base and their campaigns. It is like restricting the oxygen supply to an athlete or to an engine. It will ultimately diminish performance. This is particularly true when a Democrat is challenging an incumbent Republican.

Volunteers make those commitments because they feel (and want to feel) that they can make a difference. They bring a passion and energy to campaigns that cannot be otherwise obtained.

Democrats who cut themselves off from this volunteer base do so at their own peril.

Yes, President Obama is not popular in Louisiana. But, trying to distance himself from the president and his party did not help Charlie Melancon. It did, though, cut him off from the people who might have made a difference in his campaign.

Could they have won it for him, probably not considering the elements in this election cycle. But, in a low turnout campaign (only 43.1% of Louisiana voters bothered to go to the polls last week), an enthusiastic base could have boosted turnout and might have made for at least a more respectable showing. Go to the Secretary of State's Election Results page and use the graphical election results option to get turnout percentages across the state.

Conservative Republicans took Phyllis Schafly's advice to heart in 1964 and began building a conservative movement within their party that produced Ronald Reagan and the conservatism that has ruled that party in recent decades. She said Republicans could succeed only if they offered voters "A Choice, Not an Echo."

Louisiana Democrats can resume winning state elections if we take that message to heart and embrace our party's base and philosophy. The Republicans have their candidates.

With statewide elections looming next year and the Jindal administration promising to continue relentless cuts to healthcare and higher education, Louisiana Democrats need to start looking for candidates who are truly ours.

Voters might actually embrace a choice that would take us off of the current path to disaster.

Our Culture and Tourism Can't Afford Jay Dardenne as Lieutenant Governor. Elect Caroline Fayard!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:41:00 +0000

Just because Jay Dardenne is a poor Secretary of State is no reason to promote him to the position of Lieutenant Governor.

Dardenne has made a mess of Louisiana's election return system, centralizing precinct reporting in Baton Rouge, making local Clerks of Court personnel little more than equipment collectors, and creating bottlenecks in reporting that have actually slowed the reporting of election returns at the local level. He's also allowed a private contractor (GCR and Associates) with extensive ties to Republican political organizations (like the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority) to manage the state's registered voter database while at the same time providing voter database services to those partisan organizations. It is a situation fraught with ethical questions in view of repeated Republican efforts focused on voter suppression.

The solution for cleaning up Jay Dardenne's mess is not to promote him, but to defeat him at the polls in 2011 when he has to seek a full term.

The state's tourism industry is too valuable to this state to be put into the unimaginative hands of a political plodder like Dardenne. If he follows the path he's taken as Secretary of State, the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (CRT) will be turned into little more than a cash stream for some private company that Dardenne would designate to run the show.

Crony capitalism is the Republican business model and, as Secretary of State, Jay Dardenne has shown himself to be a devotee. Applying that business model to CRT would be the death knell for Louisiana's tourism industry that is already suffering under budget cuts imposed by the Jindal administration. The last thing that department and that industry needs is a sycophant trying to win the favor of our distracted governor.

What CRT needs is a champion. We will have that with Caroline Fayard as Lieutenant Governor.

Democrats have shown that they know how to run this department effectively and efficiently. Kathleen Blanco helped build tourism into an economic powerhouse while serving as Lieutenant Governor for eight years under Governor Mike Foster. When she became Governor in 2004, Mitch Landrieu took over the department and continued to build on Blanco's success, even in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Caroline Fayard gets it. She's seen our state from the inside and from the outside. She's already had a career that has given her extensive connections in the public and private sectors that she can translate into new opportunities for our state. She's bright, articulate, and attractive. She'd be a great 'face' for our state in the tourism industry.

At a time when Louisiana is served by a cynical governor who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, this state needs an independent thinker in the Lieutenant Governor's office. We need someone who will not only work to champion our tourism industry, but will fight to reverse the damage being done to our cultural institutions by the short-sighted policies of the Jindal administration.

As Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, they are the party of the locked-step. They punish those who break with party orthodoxy or who express any kind of independence.

Jay Dardenne is a Republican by choice and by temperament. He will not stand against more cuts, he will stand with Bobby Jindal. He will not object to closing more museums, canceling more festivals, reducing library services, or eliminating more programs. He will fall in line. He will meekly follow. He will obey.

Louisiana's culture and our tourism industry can't afford that attitude. It can't afford Jay Dardenne.

Elect Caroline Fayard Lieutenant Governor in order to save our culture from the mindlessly destructive policies of Bobby Jindal and his fellow Republican cynics.

Charlie Melancon for Senate. Could You Let Your Daughter Work for Vitter?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:17:00 +0000

David Vitter's ads remind me that Charlie Melancon is a Democrat and because of that (and the fact that Melancon is not Vitter) I will vote for Charlie on Tuesday.

David Vitter by his action and inaction has demonstrated that he is not fit to serve in public office. Hell, he's not fit to work in the private sector. Maybe one of his wealthy right-wing benefactors could find him a slot in a so-called 'think tank.' Of course, they'd have to keep a sharp eye on his expense accounts for, you know, extra curricular activities.

If Vitter and his wife have worked things out regarding his use of prostitutes, who are any of us to object. But, Vitter's refusal to account for those acts committed while a public service, using tax payer dollars and a government supplied phone make him unfit to represent this state anywhere, much less in the United States Senate.

Vitter attitude towards women and the men who commit violent acts against them place him outside the bounds of publicly acceptable business behavior.

Vitter's handling of the case of his aide who stabbed a woman and held her against her will clearly demonstrates that the state's junior Senator has fostered or tolerated the development of a hostile atmosphere towards women in his Washington office. Vitter not only let the staffer keep his job, he used taxpayer dollars to transport the man to court dates in Louisiana.

Consider the implications for a private company if Vitter was an office manager or supervisor and had taken a similar approach to crimes committed by a person working in that office. Could a responsible owner allow Vitter to remain on the job? What kind of liability would the company be exposed to as a result of the climate and atmosphere that would exist by allowing an abuser of women to remain on the company payroll and for the company to pay for the guy's transportation to his court dates?

Again, could a responsible owner allow someone like Vitter to remain in a position of authority in view of his handling of the crimes against women committed by his aide?

Could any responsible parent allow their daughter to work in Vitter's DC office? What if a male staffer attacked your daughter? Who could she turn to for help? Vitter?

Not too long ago Vitter, his wife and other Republicans angrily insisted that "character matters." Their words were meant as an indictment of Bill Clinton and, of course, they meant to only apply that rule to Democrats. As we now know, it was pure hypocrisy on Vitter's part and empty rhetoric on the part of his wife and the other Republicans.

Vitter's career in the Senate proves that character does matter. That's why he's proven so ineffective. Who will work with him, other than fellow scandal-plagued Republicans? Vitter has grown more partisan since his prostitution scandals as he has sought to hold on to the Senate seat once held by John Breaux and Russell Long.

Charlie Melancon has character. He's an honorable man. He's worked for a living. He's had a life outside of politics. He's made a payroll. He headed the American Sugar Cane League.

At times, he might not be as strong a Democrat as I would like, but that only makes him ideally suited to represent Louisiana in the Senate. Like Mary Landrieu, Charlie has shown a willingness and ability to work with anyone and everyone to advance the interests of this state.

Louisiana and the country badly need that kind of non-partisan leadership in the Senate. He is the antidote to the poisonous atmosphere that people like Vitter have produced which plagues Washington and hinders our national progress.

As David Vitter's term in the Senate demonstrates, Louisiana can do a lot worse than electing Charlie Melancon to the Senate. It will do much worse if it re-elects this petty narcissist to another term in Washington.

Voter for Charlie Melancon for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

St. Martin Parish Democrats Get Out the Facts on Health Care Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:36:00 +0000

The St. Martin Parish Democratic Executive Committee will run this 30-second spot on Cox Cable's Eastern Acadiana System through the end of October.

It was a pleasure to work with these committed Democrats!

Bobby Jindal: Healthcare Hypocrite

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:23:00 +0000

September 23 will mark six months since President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, signaling a new national effort to save the American health care delivery system as we have known it since World War II.

No, it's not socialized medicine — doctors and nurses have not been turned into public employees, no hospitals have been bought, and the system is still based on the purchase of insurance as a means of paying for care.

It is, in fact, the last best hope of preserving a market-based approach to health care in this country which is the largest industrialized country in the world without a national health plan.

New statistics released this week by the Census Bureau make explicit the logic behind the act and need for reform. For the first time since this data has been collected, the number of Americans with health insurance fell last year. 1.5 million Americans lost their coverage in 2009.

While that is horrible news for those people and their families, it is even worse news for those with coverage. Why? Because the need for care does not disappear just because a person does not have health insurance. They will eventually have to seek care for what ails them and, when they do, it will likely be through an emergency room at a hospital. They'll be sicker than they would have been had they sought treatment earlier and, if they are hospitalized, they won't have the ability to pay the cost.

Who will pay? Those people with insurance. This shifting of costs from those who can't pay onto those who can is at the heart of what has ailed health care costs in the United States in recent decades. Estimates are that the cost of providing care to the uninsured adds about $500 annually to the premium cost of each person with health insurance.

Things are probably even worse in Louisiana, where we have historically been a state where a smaller percentage of employers offer coverage to their workers than in other states. The percentage of Louisiana residents without health insurance has ranged between 18 and 24 percent over the past six years, according to a study done for the Louisiana Department of Insurance (PDF).

Small businesses are said to be the core of Louisiana's economy, yet as of the summer of 2009, 30 percent or less of Louisiana small businesses offered health insurance to their employees, according to a spokesperson for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana. Rising premiums are forcing companies to either drop coverage entirely or shift a greater share of premium costs onto employees.

The employment based health insurance system that the United States has used since the end of World War II came into existence when President Harry Truman proposed a national health program here similar to the one Winston Churchill started in England. It is collapsing. The Affordable Care Act is an attempt to save that system without resorting to a single-payer plan.

Under provisions of the plan, adults and children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, caps on lifetime coverage are being lifted and will be eliminated by 2014, small businesses are eligible for tax credits in return for offering health coverage to their employees, health insurance exchanges will allow consumers to shop intelligently for health coverage and be able to choose the plan that best fits them (just as members of Congress do!), and annual health exams will be provided without a co-pay or deductible. All this is happening this year.

If a health reform plan were being designed for Louisiana where we have high poverty rates, low rates of people with insurance, high rates of chronic disease, and health care providers teetering on the brink of financial ruin trying to provide care for that population, the Affordable Care Act would be pretty damned close to being that program.

Enter the Hypocrite

Ah, but Bobby Jindal is governor of Louisiana and he is consumed by his ambition to become president of the United States. Because the plan was proposed by a Democratic president, passed by a Congress controlled by Democrats, signed into law by that Democratic president, Jindal must oppose the plan for political reasons.

And, so he has. First, he ordered (perhaps bribed) Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to join other states in suing to overturn the law.

Jindal stopped the Louisiana Department of Insurance from its preparations to merge the state's high risk pool with the new federal program to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. It's essentially a four-year program that will exist until the full ban on pre-existing condition exclusions takes effect under ACA. As a result of Jindal's decision, 1,700 Louisiana residents are stranded in the state high risk pool paying much higher premiums than would be available to them under the federal plan.

But, Jindal saved his highest form of duplicity for September. Having sued to have the law declared unconstitutional, having acted to block benefits from the plan from accruing to Louisiana residents, Jindal ordered the Division of Administration to participate in the part of the program that provides federal help for insuring early retirees.

That's right! Jindal does not want the benefits of health care reform to flow to Louisiana individuals, families or businesses, but he wants those benefits flow to state government where (just maybe) it will allow him to take credit for those benefits?

Sound familiar? It should. That's exactly the approach Jindal took to the billions in stimulus dollars flowing into the state. He opposed some of it, but made sure that the federal government got no credit for the work that was done with the dollars he accepted. All those poster-sized checks stamped "Office of the Governor" Jindal flew around the state delivering for public works projects in towns across the state were funded primarily with stimulus dollars.

For all the trashing of the stimulus package that Republicans and conservatives have conducted over the past two years, we know with certainty that the spending has done much to save one job in Louisiana — Bobby Jindal's. The money has helped stave off cuts in higher education and health care that would have made the deep, job-killing cuts already made even harsher.

Jindal went apoplectic over the deep water drilling moratorium primarily because it affected the pockets of his donors in the oil service industries along the coast. He claimed "thousands of jobs" would be lost; possibly a few hundred have. Yet, his cuts in higher education and Medicaid are costing thousands of well-educated people to lose decent paying jobs and he flicks aside concern for those jobs as if they are inconsequential.

The consistency between Jindal's approach to stimulus funding and to health care reform reveals more than just his blind political ambition. It also reveals the full extent to which the interests of Louisiana citizens do not figure in his calculations. Jindal has no allegiance to this state. He has no ties to its institutions (other than state government, in which both he and his mother have worked). As far as he is concerned, he could be governor of Nevada, so long as he could use that state to advance his ambitions.

There is a fundamental indifference to the needs of the people of this state and its institutions that sets Jindal apart from all other people who have been elected as governor. At some core level, all other governors of Louisiana loved the state and sought, in some way, to build it up.

Jindal, on the other hand, views the state as something to serve him and his ambitions. The impact of, say, closing colleges and universities does not matter to him. No, it's more important that he not raise taxes in order to protect those institutions because doing so would jeopardize his pursuit of the Republican nomination for president whenever he feels the time is right.

Closing down public hospitals at a time when (under healthcare reform) there will be more demand placed on the healthcare infrastructure of this state does not bother him, because his only interest (and his only option) is to refrain from raising taxes in order to protect his ambition. Whatever happens to the people working in those hospitals does not matter to him; they are just collateral damage resulting from the single-minded pursuit of his ambition.

Narcissism Masquerading As Policy

In his 1961 inaugural address, President John Kennedy challenged Americans "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Jindal stands this challenge on its head. His policies and his politics call on us to sacrifice for his political ambition, not for the good of our state.

We are being asked to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in order that Jindal's ambitions not be thwarted.

We should forgo the benefits of healthcare reform. We should acquiesce to the destruction of our higher education infrastructure. We should turn Medicaid into a funnel to enrich the hands of private firms hired to manage care for the poor with less money to do it (how can you add more hands in the till yet provide even the same level of care?). We should allow teacher pay to resume its fall in comparison to other states. We should abandon all hope of educating critical thinkers here because Jindal's friends don't need them in their shops — even though critical thinkers are exactly what we need to get out of the mess that Jindal is leading us into. Our children and their children should resign themselves to having to pursue educational opportunities elsewhere, find good paying jobs in some other state. We should continue sacrificing our coast so that his friends in the oil industry can continue extracting and exporting wealth from our state.

Louisiana should sacrifice all of those things so that Bobby can pursue his dream of running for president.

Sounds reasonable, inside his bubble anyway. This is what he means by the Louisiana Way.

Death of a Hoax: Moratorium job losses under 400. Holding Hoaxsters Accountable?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:15:00 +0000

The hoax perpetrated on south Louisiana and the nation — that the six-month moratorium on deep water drilling would wreck our economy and send thousands of workers into unemployment lines — was fully and totally exposed this week.

The death of the hoax was not delivered by Democrats. Instead, the crushing blows arrived via the truth delivered a non-profit and by the Louisiana Workforce Commission through the pages of the Times-Picayune and The Advocate.

After months of relentless propaganda about the supposedly catastrophic impact of the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deep water drilling, the truth turns out to be this: nearly four months into the moratorium, fewer than 400 jobs have been lost to because of it.

The Times-Picayune reported on Tuesday that the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), the organization charged with administering a $100 million fund the federal government had BP set up for workers displaced by the moratorium, had received just 160 requests for funds. By the end of the day Tuesday, that number was up to 220, according to The Advocate.

The Times-Picayune also reported that the Louisiana Workforce Commission said that it has paid unemployment claims to 347 Louisiana residents who have named the moratorium as the reason they're out of work.

The Advocate got unemployment figures for both the BP Gulf Gusher and the moratorium from the LWC:

At the Louisiana Workforce Commission, spokeswoman Lynn Dias-Button said Tuesday that unemployment claims since early May do not reflect the massive numbers that BRAF had expected.

Thus far, 1,656 claimants have stated that they became unemployed because of BP’s oil leak, said Dias-Button. And only 832 of those people have been ruled eligible for benefits.

Since early June, Dias-Button said, unemployment applicants also have been asked whether the moratorium cost them their jobs.

“We have had 724 individuals who have … said they lost their jobs because of the drilling moratorium,” Dias-Button noted.

So far, she said, “We have determined that 347 are eligible for benefits.”

Industry spokespeople were ready with explanations, but the fact remains that the moratorium on deep water drilling has had little or no economic impact on south Louisiana. But, after a summer of misleading statements about the impact of the moratorium, what credibility does the industry have to speak on the moratorium now?

It its weekly report on new unemployment claims last Friday, the LWC reported new unemployment claims were down again, continuing a trend that has been in place for most of the summer.

The New Gulf Reality Sets In

On Monday, Michael Bromwich, the man running the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (successor to the corrupt Mineral Management Service), held a hearing on the moratorium in Lafayette.

According to The Daily Advertiser, at forums along the Gulf coast, California and Alaska, Bromwich heard nearly 100 presentations from 61 representatives of industry, academia and environmental groups, plus 37 public officials. Information gathered at the forums will be contained in a report due Oct. 31 to Salazar as he considers whether it is safe to resume deep water drilling.

Bromwich confronted head-on criticism of the moratorium by explaining its necessity:

Drilling and workplace safety, containment capabilities and spill response capabilities.

If a second spill had occurred while oil was still leaking from the Deepwater Horizon, there would have been insufficient equipment to respond to it, he said.

Interim Lt. Governor Scott Angelle testified at the hearing, decrying the fact that federal officials had not fallen for the 'moratorium-as-economic-disaster' hoax that he played such a prominent role in trying to perpetrate.

"We can't help but believe that our repeated suggestions and other experts suggestions continue to be ignored about lifting this moratorium," Angelle was quoted as saying.

The federal government did not respond to Angelle's repeated exaggerations about the impact of the moratorium nor his allegations that President Obama is biased against the oil and gas industry, nor his taunts of the President waging war against Louisiana families. So, for Angelle's sake, it's probably best to call it a wash.

Bromwich made clear that the days of the industry calling the tune in the Gulf of Mexico are over, that the new safety rules are necessary in the wake of the culture of corruption that had come to typify the relations between the industry and MMS in the Gulf. He said the new rules took time to formulate and time to implement, and that the permitting process will improve as the system becomes fully operations.

In a similar hearing in Biloxi the previous week, Bromwich made clear that the drilling in the Gulf will resume when industry complies with the new rules.

That the fight is out of the anti-moratorium forces was demonstrated by a speaker at the Biloxi hearing. According to the Associated Press, Gary Rook, technical director for Edison Chouest Offshore, said that more than four months after the rig explosion, concerns remain about the ability of the industry to respond to another disaster.

What makes this interesting is that Edison Chouest and its affiliated companies were at the vanguard of the legal fight to overturn the moratorium. Chouest companies were among the first to warn of dire economic impacts the moratorium would have on south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.

Holding Accountable

With the evidence of the hoax mounting and the support for it collapsing, the next question becomes one of what should happen to those who perpetrated this hoax?

The 12,000 or so people who attended the Rally for Economic Survival in Lafayette were victims of this hoax. The hoax was essential to the ability of rally supporters to get that many people to show up. The cooked numbers on the potential impact coming from supposedly reliable sources figured prominently in Judge Feldman's ruling against the moratorium. They figured prominently in the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce's drive to make the rally a matter of community unity and pride.

Those numbers completely bamboozled the mainstream media in Lafayette and across the state — from the Times-Picayune to Gannett to The Advocate, as well as local television and radio stations. Many of these outlets not only supported calls to end the moratorium, they also abandoned critical thinking in assessing the claims made by those opposing the moratorium.

Finally, Governor Bobby Jindal's role in this matter must by officially examined.

The Governor put Scott Angelle on the task of whipping public opposition against the moratorium, but Jindal was acting to defend his deep-pocketed backers in the oil service sector, starting with Gary Chouest and Donald Bollinger. Jindal was rallying for his political survival before the economic case could be cooked up.

The governor ordered the state to intervene in the the court hearings over the moratorium, filing an amicus brief on June 20. In that brief, the state claimed unequivocally:

Because of the moratorium, many thousands of Louisiana workers have lost their employment and many more are at risk of losing it in the near future."

Those "many thousands of Louisiana workers" have never shown up anywhere other than the Jindal's amicus brief and in the now discredited claims of those who used the fear of those job losses to fan opposition to the moratorium, the President and to Democrats.

Former Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown went to prison for allegedly lying to an FBI agent in an interview, yet the agent never had to present any proof of the alleged lie in court. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was recently convicted on a single count of lying to federal agents.

Can the Governor of Louisiana order his attorneys to lie to a federal judge in writing through brief filed in a court with impunity?

Where did that jobs loss claim come from? It certainly appeared to figure prominently in Judge Feldman's ruling against the moratorium. That lie is a central thread in the entire hoax. It first appeared publicly in Jindal's brief.

Someone needs to discover its origins.

The road to accountability begins with piercing the Governor's bubble of secrecy.

Anti-Moratorium Hoax Update: LWC reports new unemployment claims were down again last week

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:42:00 +0000

The Louisiana Workforce Commission reported today (Friday, September 10) that new unemployment claims in the state fell again last week (click the headline of this post to read the full announcement).

Here are the first paragraphs from the LWC announcement today:

Initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) for the week ending September 4, 2010, decreased to 4,083 from the previous week’s total of 4,120. Initial claims were below the comparable week ending September 5, 2009, figure of 5,302.

The four-week moving average of initial claims decreased to 4,085 from the previous week’s average of 4,140.

Continued unemployment insurance weeks claimed for the week ending September 4, 2010, decreased to 54,265 from the previous week’s total of 54,754. Continued weeks claimed were below the comparable week ending September 5, 2009, figure of 61,400.

The four-week moving average of continued weeks claimed decreased to 55,427 from the previous week’s average of 56,134.

So, the predictions of economic ruin made by the anti-moratorium forces have once again failed to materialize. Had their predictions been accurate, new unemployment claims in Louisiana would be rising, not falling.

Instead, the new claims continue to fall and the total number of Louisiana residents collecting unemployment at this point this year continues to be lower than this time last year.

Wow! How can such smart people be so drastically wrong — unless, their intent was to mislead?

Exposing a Hoax: New unemployment claims in Louisiana, April 5 to September 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Opponents of the Obama administration's moratorium on deep water drilling have bemoaned the economic impact of the pause on employment in Louisiana. In June, Governor Bobby Jindal ordered that an amicus brief be filed in the lawsuit against the moratorium. In that brief, the governor's attorneys claimed that thousands of jobs had been lost to the moratorium at that point (less than a month after it was imposed) and that thousands of jobs were threatened by allowing the moratorium to stand.

The feared job losses have not come. And, Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) weekly reports show that Jindal's brief was wrong about the thousands of jobs that the governor's attorneys claimed had already been lost due to the moratorium by late June. Did the Governor and his attorneys not know what LWC's weekly reports were showing? Or, was this like his berms project, where (in that case the scientific) evidence was willfully ignored?

On page 4 of the state's 17-page brief, Jindal's attorneys declared:

The Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) administers Louisiana's unemployment compensation system, its workers' compensation program and its workforce programs, including job training and work search services. Because of the moratorium, many thousands of Louisiana workers have lost their employment and many more are at risk of losing it in the near future. All of the programs administered by LWC have been and will be heavily impacted by its effects. (Emphasis added)

Every Friday, the LWC issues a news release containing the number of new unemployment filings and puts the number in context: LWC compares that week's number to the previous week; compares the number to the same week of the previous year; provides a four-week moving average; and provides a total number of active unemployment claims in the state and compares that number to the previous year, and a four-week moving average for total claims.

Nowhere in the LWC weekly reports issued between the Department of the Interior's declaration of the moratorium (May 27) and the June 20 court filing by Jindal's attorneys is there any mention of any impact on new unemployment claims filings related to the moratorium. Other issues are mentioned at times, like seasonally increased claims resulting from the end of the school year or a transportation equipment disruption which led to a one-week spike. But, the moratorium is not mentioned in that period of time.

Nor has it been mentioned in any of the LWC weekly reports issued since the Jindal court filing.

In fact, based on the numbers generated by the LWC — not the rhetoric coming from Jindal, top LWC management, and other opponents of the moratorium — the deep water drilling moratorium has been a non-event in terms of Louisiana employment.

Follow the Numbers

What follows is a listing of the numbers in each weekly report issued by LWC, starting on April 5 and running through September 3. This provides information on new unemployment claims in the weeks leading up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, through the May 28th imposition of the moratorium, through the dates of the court hearings, through the Rally for Economic Survival, up to the most current report issued by LWC.

A link to each announcement is included. The image at the top of this page charts the numbers for new claims and the moving average.

The weekly reports make clear that there has been no surge of job losses attributable to the moratorium. In fact, while other causes for new unemployment claims are mentioned in some reports, the LWC reports are notable for what they do not mention — the deep water drilling moratorium.

It also needs to be noted that since July 2, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits in Louisiana in 2010 has been lower than the number of people collecting benefits in 2009.

If the deep water drilling moratorium was causing unemployment in Louisiana, these are where the numbers would first appear.

LWC April 5 report: New claims — 4,120; four-week average — 3,988 (This report was filed on the Monday after Easter based on numbers from the previous week).

LWC April 9 report: New claims — 3,689; four-week average — 3,908.

LWC April 16 report: New claims — 4,661; four-week average — 4,067.

LWC April 23 report: New claims — 3,989; four-week average — 4,115.

LWC April 30 report: New claims — 4,982; four-week average — 4,330.

LWC May 7 report: New claims — 4,574; four-week average — 4,552.

LWC May 14 report: New claims — 4,480; four-week average — 4,506.

LWC May 21 report: New claims — 4,584; four-week average — 4,655.

LWC May 28 report: New claims — 4,645; four-week average — 4,571.

LWC June 4 report: New claims — 5,166; four-week average — 4,719. (LWC: "The largest over-the-week increases in initial claims were in educational services and health care and social assistance industries as part of the usual summer seasonal pattern.")

LWC June 11 report: New claims — 5,188; four-week average — 4,896. (LWC: "The largest over-the-week increase in initial claims was in the health care and social assistance industry as part of the usual summer seasonal pattern.")

LWC June 18 report: New claims — 4,902; four-week average — 4,975.

LWC June 25 report: New claims — 4,450; four-week average — 4,927.

LWC July 2 report: New claims — 4,456; four-week average — 4,749.

LWC July 9 report: New claims — 4,750; four-week average — 4,640.

LWC July 16 report: New claims — 4,533; four-week average — 4,547.

LWC July 23 report: New claims —5,237; four-week average — 4,744. (LWC: "The largest over-the-week increase in initial claims was due to a temporary shutdown in the transportation equipment industry.")

LWC July 30 report: New claims — 4,395; four-week average — 4,729. (LWC: "The largest over-the-week decrease in initial claims was in the transportation equipment industry.")

LWC August 6 report: New claims — 4,109; four-week average — 4,569.

LWC August 13 report: New claims — 4,305; four-week average — 4,512.

LWC August 20 report: New claims — 3,987; four-week average — 4,199.

LWC August 27 report: New claims — 4,149; four-week average — 4,138.

LWC September 3 report: New claims — 4,120; four-week average — 4,140.

While the LWC leadership is an active participant in the politically driven, anti-moratorium hysteria, the numbers the commission produces on a weekly basis tell a starkly different story. The numbers don't have a dog in this fight. They are just the numbers; they don't have a political agenda.

The LWC numbers are saying that the impact of the moratorium has been negligible.

Why the Job Loss Claim Matters

Judge Martin Feldman, who ruled on the request for the injunction two days after Jindal's attorneys filed their brief, signaled in his decision that the economic impact of the moratorium weighed heavily in his ruling.

The effect on employment, jobs, loss of domestic energy supplies caused by the moratorium as the plaintiffs (and other suppliers, and the rigs themselves) lose business, and the movement of rigs to other sites around the world will clearly ripple throughout the economy in this region. (Page 22 of Feldman's ruling PDF).

The Times-Picayune, which has steadfastly opposed the moratorium, cited the role of the economic impact of the moratorium on the development of Judge Feldman's ruling.

But, what if the job losses were imaginary, or worse, part of a hoax?

There can be no doubt that a total shutdown of deep water drilling would have a significant economic impact on Louisiana. But, that is not what has been proposed, despite the fact that this is precisely how some opponents of the moratorium have tried to frame the issue. What has been proposed is tighter safety, environmental and liability regulation on an industry that has called the shots in the Gulf of Mexico for several decades. The moratorium was used to allow new rules to be set and to determine what had gone wrong on the Deepwater Horizon.

The suit against the moratorium, though, was not brought by the companies that own the leases and are responsible for the drilling activity in the Gulf. That would be the big oil companies.

Instead, the suit was brought by essentially three groups of service companies who have bet their respective banks on deep water drilling. Those are Hornbeck Offshore Services, and companies controlled by the Bollinger and Chouest families.

These companies and those families have gotten rich helping the energy companies exploit the Gulf and Louisiana's offshore waters. In their view, no ecological or environmental cost has ever been too high a price to pay to enable them to continue their work.

Not even the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

What is equally tragic is that most of Louisiana's political class feels exactly the same way about the price the state pays for the few thousand jobs, the pittance of oil revenue (compared to, say, third world countries), and political contributions through which the industry controls the state.

The Jindal Tragedy

No politician exemplifies this craven attitude more so than Bobby Jindal. Confronted with the ruin of Louisiana's seafood industry, Jindal sided with the Bollingers, the Chouests, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association and others in the 'no price is too high' crowd.

There was a moment after the Deepwater Horizon explosion where Jindal nearly appeared to appreciate the importance of Louisiana's coast. It proved fleeting. When he began prattling publicly for permits to build berms, it was nearly over. Any and all thoughts that Jindal cared about Louisiana's environment (other than as a backdrop for press conferences) were obliterated on June 20 when his attorneys added his voice to those of his patrons' voices in challenging the moratorium. Jindal was back 'home.'

The irony is that this so-called reformed governor is more deeply committed to protecting the interests that have dominated this state for decades than any governor in modern history, including Edwin Edwards. Edwards first came to office in the 1970s while oil and gas were still booming and jobs in the industry were plentiful.

Jindal is governor at a time when the industry has pulled its best jobs out of the state, leaving a few thousand drilling jobs. The refineries are still here. Today, the oil and gas industry in Louisiana has the distinct look and feel of a colonial power. A few tokens are thrown to the locals in the form of jobs and money for politicians, but the wealth is shipped out of state.

President Obama recognized that the interests of Louisiana and the interests of the industry are separate and distinct. He chose the interests of the state in allowing the Department of the Interior to proceed with the moratorium.

Jindal, who dreams of replacing Obama in the White House one day, either does not grasp that divergence, or he does get it but does not have the courage to act on that knowledge. Either way, it's a pretty damning assessment of the governor who is supposed to be the smartest guy in the room.

HOAX!: Moratorium job loss projections deceived a Judge and the Public

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:07:00 +0000

Three months into the the U.S. Department of the Interior's moratorium on deep water drilling and it is abundantly clear that the doom and gloom prophesied by opponents of the moratorium have not materialized.

The Louisiana Workforce Commission's (LWC) latest report shows record employment in the state in July, with falling unemployment in every metro market, including the Houma and Lafayette markets — the areas that opponents of the moratorium said would be devastated by the pause in deep water drilling.

The Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA) shows drilling rig activity holding steady in the range of about 185 rigs.

The Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA) web site offers users the opportunity to examine drilling rig counts over time. In April of this year, LEDA's site shows that there were 75 more drilling rigs active in Louisiana than there were in the same month last year (April is the most recent month available in the LEDA site).

Even the Associate Executive Director for the LSU Center for Energy Studies (LSU CES), David Dismukes, has had to climb down from his predictions of gloom and doom and admit that the job losses the center predicted have not materialized.

Interestingly, all of the above parties were players in the drum beat leading up to the Rally for Economic Survival that opponents of the moratorium organized in Lafayette in July. LOGA was the prime organizer of the event. Presentations by the Louisiana Workforce Commission (PDF) and the LSU Center for Energy Studies (PDF) drove home the supposed dire consequences of the moratorium.

But, at the same time the Louisiana Workforce Commission study was being bandied about on stage in Lafayette, the weekly employment updates from the Commission were reporting falling numbers of new unemployment claims. This trend has continued all summer.

The LWC presentation at the rally was propaganda, pure and simple.

In the three months since it was declared, it has become clear that the moratorium has not had anything remotely near the devastating impact predicted by the oil and gas industry, its apologists and paid hangers on. It has also become clear that the LWC and the LSU CES played key roles in what amounts to a hoax that has been perpetrated against a federal court and the public regarding the moratorium on deep water drilling and its impact.

How do we know this? Steady drilling rig counts. Record employment. Low claims for new unemployment. And court documents.

Confecting A Hoax

To most outside observers, the worst oil spill in U.S. history justified a pause in deep water drilling activity until the causes of the disaster could be determined and new rules promulgated to govern the industry going forward. This is precisely the intent behind the deep water drilling moratorium issued by the Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on May 28.

What Salazar and the Obama administration did not immediately appreciate is that the moratorium threatened the web of offshore service companies in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. Those companies, especially those headed by Gary Chouest and Donald Bollinger, have become the financial muscle behind the rise of the Republican Party in Louisiana.

In fact, when Hornbeck Offshore filed suit against the moratorium, they were joined by 37 companies controlled by Chouest (16) and Bollinger (21). The fight against the moratorium in Louisiana was political from day one. The Office of the Governor filed an amicus brief on June 20 with the court in support of Hornbeck, Chouest and Bollinger. Bobby Jindal has been the beneficiary of the political largess of Chouest and Bollinger and has displayed a certain extravagant gratitude using public dollars — particularly to Chouest.

The anti-moratorium hoax appeared fully formed in the Jindal administration's amicus brief (PDF) on the case. In that filing, the state-endorsed purveyors of gloom and doom for the anti-moratorium forces were in place — the LSU CES and the LWC.

The state's brief points first to LSU CES as the source of its concerns about job losses. In the brief, the State of Louisiana, citing the center, claimed:

The impact of the moratorium is neither speculative nor remote. According to the LSU Center for Energy Studies, within only five months the moratorium will result in the direct layoff of 3,339 Louisiana workers and the loss of an additional 7,656 jobs indirectly in the State. (page 3)

The brief then puts the Louisiana Workforce Commission to work on behalf of the anti-moratorium effort.

The Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) administers Louisiana's unemployment compensation system, its workers' compensation program and its workforce programs, including job training and work search services. Because of the moratorium, many thousands of Louisiana workers have lost their employment and many more are at risk of losing it in the near future. All of the programs administered by LWC have been and will be heavily impacted by its effects. (Emphasis added)

There's only one problem with these claims. They are false.

According to a news release issued by the LWC on June 18, new unemployment claims were falling not rising, as would have been the case if the moratorium were having the impact declared in the state's court filing. Here's the lead paragraph of that release:

Initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) for the week ending June 12, 2010, decreased to 4,902 from the previous week’s total of 5,188. Initial claims were below the comparable week ending June 13, 2009, figure of 5,139.

The LWC release from the following week also contradicted the assertions in the state's court filing:

Initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) for the week ending June 19, 2010, decreased to 4,450 from the previous week’s total of 4,902. Initial claims were below the comparable week ending June 20, 2009, figure of 6,113.

The four-week moving average of initial claims decreased to 4,927 from the previous week’s average of 4,975.

So, the state — through the Office of the Governor as represented by the State Attorney General — was making claims in federal court that it should have known were false.

Those false claims served as a significant reason that Judge Martin Feldman ruled against the moratorium:

The effect on employment, jobs, loss of domestic energy supplies caused by the moratorium as the plaintiffs (and other suppliers, and the rigs themselves) lose business, and the movement of rigs to other sites around the world will clearly ripple throughout the economy in this region. (Page 22 of the ruling PDF.)

The argument that played so well with Judge Feldman would prove equally effective when it went public in support of the anti-moratorium rally in Lafayette.

Creature Comforts

The LSU Center for Energy Studies (LSU CES) is, to put it mildly, a creature of the oil and gas industry. The Center's has an Advisory Council that "provides research direction and guidance and frequently assists the Center in securing finances." The phrase 'bought and paid for' comes to mind.

The Advisory Council is comprised of a who's who of Louisiana energy company executives, including officers from the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association and the Louisiana Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, and interim Lt. Governor Scott Angelle.

Would it be a stretch to imagine that someone on the Advisory Council suggested that the Center take the lead on producing the worst case scenarios that would serve as the basis for the anti-moratorium fight in Louisiana? Would it then be advantageous for the various members of the Advisory Council to begin parroting those 'findings' through their various communications channels to their members and the media?

That certainly appears to be what took place.

The moratorium was issued on May 28. Statistics from LSU CES were cited in the state's court filings on June 20. Those figures became a staple of the anti-moratorium propaganda thereafter.

Political Workforce

The Louisiana Workforce Commission offers a stark example of how the Jindal administration has politicized the upper level management of some state agencies. The proof is in the data that continues to flow from the LWC and how that data has regularly contradicted the claims being made publicly by the LWC's leadership as part of the heavily orchestrated political opposition to the deep water drilling moratorium.

The clearest public display of how Jindal has politicized the LWC can be found on slide two of the commission's presentation used at the Rally for Economic Survival. That slide ("Industries Directly Impacted by Moratorium") includes the questionable use of two employment categories — "Chemical and petroleum merchant wholesalers: includes bulk stations and terminals" and "Gasoline stations."

An argument could be made that there might be some slowdown in business at bulk stations and terminals if, say, the oil and gas industry was completely shut down (which is clearly not the case). But, under what set of circumstances could the moratorium possibly affect people working at gasoline stations?

The only reason these two categories were included in the presentation were to enable moratorium opponents to inflate the size and importance of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana. Including the gasoline station workers (does that include cashiers at, say, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, Valero stations?) ads 18,000 workers to the rolls of the 'potentially' affected.

This distortion was essential to the creation of a climate of fear needed to, at the very least, get 11,000 people to turn out for a political rally against the moratorium.

Follow the Money

The first threat of layoffs resulting from the moratorium was made by Edison Chouest Offshore at Port Fourchon on June 4. The first rally against the moratorium that Jindal attended took place in an Edison Chouest facility at Port Fourchon on June 10. The second event took place at the Gulf Island Fabricators facility in Houma on June 24. Gulf Island Fabricators just happens to be the company building Chouest's LaShip facility that Jindal has supported with state funds.

Jindal was the featured speaker at the Rally for Economic Survival. That was no accident considering the role he and his office have played in orchestrating the politically driven response to the moratorium.

Gary Chouest, though, has maintained an active role in the campaign through the dispersing of campaign contributions to Republican members of Louisiana's congressional delegation.

Contributions from individuals associated with Edison Chouest Offshore are make that firm the largest single contributor to Sixth District Congressman Bill Cassidy, according to the campaign finance website OpenSecrets. Cassidy of Baton Rouge called the deep water drilling moratorium, "a jobs moratorium."

Chouest Offshore-related contributions to An "Joseph" Cao rank that firm at the top of the freshman Republican's contribution list.

Chouest Offshore-related contributions ranked second among all contributors to Senator David Vitter's current campaign, again according to OpenSecrets.

The Chouest/Vitter connection should not be a surprise considering the fact that Chouest pumped $100,000 in to the Vitter-founded Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority in 2006.

Other than Jindal, no Louisiana politician has benefited more from the anti-moratorium furor than Vitter. It provided him a forum to discuss something other than his own sordid past and/or those of his staffers. In leading the fight against the moratorium at the federal level, Vitter spared no effort to ramp up the potential damage (Cassidy cites Vitter as the source for the claim of 150,000 families affected by the moratorium while Vitter cited Cassidy in radio spots.) nor to demonize President Obama.

Donald Bollinger has also been active on the campaign contributions front, but less so than Chouest.

The Fig Leaf

Interim Lt. Governor Scott Angelle has provided cover for the deeply partisan nature of the anti-moratorium effort. Angelle is a Democrat by party registration but, like Jindal, is most interested in pursuing his own ambition.

Angelle was appointed secretary of the Department of Natural Resources by Governor Kathleen Blanco in 2004 and was reappointed by Jindal in 2008. In addition to heading that department, Angelle has acted as a legislative liaison for Jindal in each session of the Legislature. He's also raised money for Jindal, having arranged an over night hunt for thus far unnamed donors earlier this year at a hunting lodge owned by a prominent Louisiana Democrat.

Because this is not an election year, the identity of Angelle's guests at the hunt will not be known until Jindal's campaign files it annual report on this year's activities after the first of the year. Angelle was still DNR secretary at the time. If the campaign party included members of the industries supposedly regulated by DNR, it will raise ethical flags. Of course, the Ethics Governor™ has so screwed up the state's ethics code when it comes to campaign finance, it is unlikely that anything could happen to Angelle even if it were proven that he took Tony Hayward with him out into the marshes of Cameron Parish.

Angelle's stint at DNR earned him some good friends in the oil and gas industry. Some of that friendship was the product of the St. Martin Parish native's winning personality. Some of it might have been related to the haphazard way his department tracked royalty payments the industry owed the state.

Nonetheless, Angelle has been an effective public face on the anti-moratorium farce. He has attack and mocked President Obama at every turn. He wowed the crowd at the anti-moratorium rally in Lafayette with a stump speech he'd been perfecting for at least a month before that event. He also led the effort to get thousands of people to sign a petition calling for the end of the moratorium.

All of that effort was made possible by the fear generated by the claims of the damage that the moratorium would inflict on Louisiana — none of which has come true.

The Circular Citing Squad

Angelle inadvertently revealed the self-fulfilling nature of the gloom and doomers when he testified on August 17 before a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship conducted by Senator Mary Landrieu. At that meeting in Lafayette, in prepared remarks Angelle cited numerous anecdotes from businesses about the supposed impact of the moratorium.

He cited a litany of businesses reporting sales being down in anticipation of the impact of the moratorium. Since the moratorium has had little or no economic impact in terms of jobs or drilling activity, Angelle was really testifying about the effectiveness of the hoax that he, Jindal and the industry have inflicted on the people of south Louisiana.

None of their predictions have come true. Yet, that has not stopped the grandstanding and political opportunism, nor the spreading of their particular brand of fear.

Consider this fact. The disgraced financier Alan Stanford allegedly scammed $8 billion from people through a Ponzi scheme involving IRAs. An estimated $2 billion of those losses came out of Louisiana, primarily in Lafayette and Baton Rouge. Those losses became known last year. The impact is hitting home this year.

The Stanford scam is hitting Louisiana harder than the moratorium. Yet, there is no Republican political gain to be scored by going after a criminal whose activity took place under the noses of the Bush/Cheney edition of the asleep at the switch Securities Exchange Commission.

The politics of fear is something about which Republicans are well-versed on the national level. The anti-moratorium hoax is a clear display of its power in state politics. As the deception becomes apparent, will those who perpetrated this hoax — Jindal, LOGA, Angelle and their allies — pay a price for it?

Louisiana faces some very tough choices. As the impact of the moratorium proves minimal, will the leaders who ran that fear campaign have the reservoirs of credibility to lead us through these challenges? Or, will they resort to gimmickry, trickery and deception — as they have done with the moratorium — to accomplish political objectives that leave us diminished as a state?

44. XLIV. 8-9-10. 2,430.5: My mad dash to the Saints' White House reception with President Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:36:00 +0000

The first call arrived at about 3:30 p.m. on Friday, July 31.

I was at the CC's on Johnston Street in Lafayette awaiting the arrival of a friend and was on hold awaiting my banker (credit union-er?) to return to the line. It was essential business, so I did not put the held call on hold, but let the incoming call ring through to voice mail.

A couple of minutes later, while still on the phone with the credit union, the second call arrived.

After completing the business call, I listened to the voice two voice messages on my phone. The first message said that a second call was coming from New Orleans state senator Karen Carter Peterson. The second message was from the senator.

"I have a friend who is interested in some of the things you've been writing about. I'd like to talk with you about that and to invite you to attend the Saints reception at the White House on August 9. Give me a call."

I sat stunned for a second before returning the second call. My call to Senator Carter Peterson went to voice mail. My message was "I'd like to talk to your friend — and Yes! I'd love to go to the White House for the Saints reception. Please let me know how to proceed. Thank you!"

My friend arrived and I told him what had just happened.

A bit later, a call came in from area code 202 — Washington. I took that call.

It was a woman who said she was from Homeland Security and was calling about the August 9th event at the White House. Did I think I was going to attend? I laughed.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Well, this is kind of an unusual call," I replied.

"Oh, I guess you're right," she replied. If I was interested in attending, I needed to give her my basic information so that they could run a security check on me. A lot of things ran through my mind: Is this for real? Is there anything I might have done that would prevent them from clearing me? Is this a prank?

After hesitating a second, I gave her the information.

Later that evening, the person who was interested in the topics I'd been covering — particularly involving the BP Gulf Gusher and the deep water drilling moratorium — played a bit of phone tag.

Several days passed with no contact from anyone regarding my status to attend. I couldn't make travel arrangements until I had confirmation that I was going. It finally came on Thursday evening, August 5. I was told to be at the southeast gate at the White House on Monday at around 8 a.m.

The challenge of getting up there remained. Flights at that close to the departure date (Sunday) were expensive. I'd have to get a hotel room for at least one night.

Money was tight. I wasn't missing this opportunity. So, I decided to drive to DC.

Four Cylinders And Adrenaline

It mapped out to about a 20-hour drive. I'd made similar drives before, but that was long ago in a galaxy for away. Still, this was doable.

I had work to do on Saturday, the 7th, before I left. Got an edition of Democratic Louisiana out. Edited some video for a campaign I'm working on. Then went to bed, trying to get about four hours of sleep before hitting the road shortly after midnight on Sunday morning. I was too keyed up to get much sleep.

But, the alarm clock went off at midnight. I showered, grabbed some coffee and jumped into the car. I pulled out of the drive way at 12:41 a.m. on the 8th.

My wife Sally had arranged for me to stay with friends of hers — Joe and Victoria Popp — who live in Alexandria, VA. I figured I would arrive there around 8 p.m. or so. And that was about right. Essentially, I just stopped for gas. Although, I had to stop a couple of times to relieve the pressure off my sciatic nerve down my right leg (no cruise control on this new car proved to be a pain in the leg).

After dinner with my hosts, I fell asleep on top of the bed just as soon as I hit it.

At 5 a.m. on Monday, my alarm went off and I sprang out of bed. I followed Joe to the nearby Metro station where we rode into DC together.

I was at the southeast gate of the White House (which is now on the east side of the Treasury Building) for 7:30 a.m. There was no one there. At another gate, a guard told me someone would arrive there at 8 a.m., that I'd have to wait until then.

I crossed the street to a park across from a hotel and checked email and listened to music while awaiting the arrival of others. At this point, I still was not sure what the actual event was. I knew the Saints reception was that morning, but also knew that it was not until about 9:30. It turns out, that it takes about 90 minutes to make it through security. There were probably about 100 people at the gate for the reception by the time security started letting us in beyond the gate.

There were three checkpoints where we had to produce a photo ID and that was checked against the list they had at that checkpoint. I spent most of the 90 minutes talking with Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans who now heads the National Urban League. He had his 8-year-old son Mason with him. The mayor and I know each other a bit from our days in New Orleans. It was a great conversation. His insights into Louisiana politics and the strategies of community change were strikingly clear and concise. Louisiana really does not have the luxury of allowing such leaders get away from us. He was already working for the NUL when Katrina hit. He gave up his home then, saying he didn't have the time to commit to a rebuilding effort with his duties with the league.

The final stop before we got into the White House was a room full of metal detectors similar to those at airports. We did not have to remove our shoes, but we had to empty our pockets and any bags we had were run through an x-ray machine. I had my computer bag, with a camera and other things in it. Thankfully, I had found (and removed) a wine bottle opener before I left Lafayette.

In the East Wing

Suddenly, we were in the East Wing of the White House. The first thing I noticed were the official portraits on the walls. I'd seen many of them before — rather, images of them — and it struck me. These are the originals! There was Jacqueline Kennedy's portrait. William McKinley. Andrew Johnson.

There really wasn't time to gawk as we were moving towards the reception area, which was up a flight of stairs. There was a large reception room (formally called Entrance Hall) where the Marine Jazz Ensemble was playing Dixieland Jazz. Clean cut white guys in Marine red jackets playing jazz. The music was great, but the whole thing was kind of surreal.

At the back of Entrance Hall, away from the front of the White House, was a set of double doors. On either side of the doors were large marble busts. On the left was Abraham Lincoln. On the right, George Washington.

Doors all the way to the left opened and there was the immediately recognizable setting of the East Room: gold drapes bracketed by flags. That's where the reception was going to be and we were directed that way.

As we were preparing to enter the room, there were three people to my left. One gentleman was pushing a man in a wheel chair. The person closest to me, turned to face them and told the man pushing the chair to "stop right there." He raised his camera and took a photo of the man. Directly over his shoulder was the official portrait of Lyndon Johnson.

"Great framing," I said.

"Thanks, I thought so, too," came the reply. It was Wendell Pierce — New Orleans native and one of the stars of the HBO series Treme.

We made our way into the room. I made my way to the left (instinct?), to the side of the stage. I found a seat in the second to last row and whipped out my Saints cap. The camera I brought with me had died. So, I had to use my iPhone camera. The lighting was great (bright lighting for the benefit of the media).

After the rest of the guests had found their seats, someone announced over the sound system, "The Super Bowl 44 Champion New Orleans Saints." The team began entering the room. There was applause, but it died out before all of them had made it into the room. This being pre-season, there were a lot of players. The risers behind the stage were packed. They were followed by coaches and team staff. Then, Coach Sean Peyton and owner Tom Benson entered.

Benson flashed his Super Bowl ring to the crowd.

After a few minutes, "The President of the United States" was announced.

President Obama entered the room. It was electric. It was real.

He delivered a few prepared remarks. The team gave him a jersey with #44 and his name on it. Drew Brees of the Saints noted that this will be the only time that in history that the number of the president and the Super Bowl Champion will be shared.

The President proceeded to work the room, starting with the Saints players lined up behind him. He worked the rest of the room, too, but I was a row or two too far back to shake his hand.

After completing that, he left the room. The announcer told us to stay in our seats until the President had left. Then, the Saints made their way out. Then, we were allowed to leave.

In the larger room where the jazz band had been, I thanked Senator Carter Peterson for arranging the opportunity for me to attend. I told Senator Mary Landrieu hello before heading out to the streets of nation's capital. As the group I was walking with made its way out of a security gate, I spotted two people who were there for the event just making it into the 'metal detector' building. It turned out that they did not get in because of some kind of breakdown in the process of getting their names onto the event list.

Before we made it off the White House grounds, the President's helicopter took off from the White House for what I read later was a trip to Air Force One which would take him to Austin, TX, for a speech on education.

After leaving the White House grounds, I went to a Starbucks I had walked by on my way from the Metro station earlier in the morning. Bought a venti Americano and a cinnamon roll and grabbed some WiFi. After hearing from the folks who didn't get in to the event, I headed to the Metro station to head back out to Alexandria and my car around noon.

On The Road Again

I wanted to beat the rush out of the area and figured I would have a good jump on traffic. And I would have — if I'd have been able to find my car! I had not paid close enough attention when I followed Joe Popp to the station. And, after walking to the area where I thought my car was, I was quickly reminded that all floors of parking garages look remarkably alike. I know because I walked several floors of one garage. After calling Victoria Popp, seeking any possible leads as to where Joe might have parked us, I crossed over into an adjacent garage. I walked a couple of floors there, when Joe called and said we had parked on the fourth level of the first garaged I had searched. As I turned to look at that building, I saw the distinctive roof line of my Honda Fit.

By this time I had done quite a bit of walking in the garage. It was hot. I was sweaty. The air conditioning was welcome. Google Maps wanted me to drive back towards DC to get out of the area the same way I'd come in. I wanted no part of that route.

I knew enough about the area to know that if I could hit I-95, I could head down towards Richmond immediately and eventually cut over towards Atlanta at some point.

My Crocs provided the solution to the sciatic nerve problem that had bothered me on the way up. The padded sole lifted my heel just high enough off the floorboard to lift the back of my right thigh off the edge of the seat.

I resolved to drive as far as my tank of gas would carry me, then call it a day.

It was about 95 miles to Richmond. Approaching there, I saw signs indicating that I-85 heading southwest to Atlanta intersected I-95 a little south of Richmond. I relaxed and enjoyed the drive.

As I approached Lexington, North Carolina, my gas light came on. At the third exit, there was a Comfort Suite motel on one side of the Interstate and an Applebee's Restaurant on the other. I had found where I would spend the night. I gassed up, checked into the hotel and grabbed dinner. Went back to the hotel, grabbed some computer time. I was a little less than 900 miles from Lafayette.

On Tuesday morning, I hit the free breakfast bar for some orange juice, a muffin and some barely drinkable coffee. I was back in the car by 6:45 a.m. I was in NASCAR country. I-85 skirts Kannapolis (home of the late Dale Earnhardt, Sr.) and Charlotte, but I didn't have time to stop. I had work and other business to take care of in Lafayette on Wednesday.

Driving through straight Atlanta on I-85 was a breeze, as I got there at mid-morning, after rush hour traffic had ebbed. I made a stop for gas just before leaving Georgia, then did not stop again until I got to Mobile, AL. By this time, I needed real coffee. So, I found a Starbucks on Spring Hill Avenue via Google Maps and dove in. It felt good to stand up.

I checked the distance to Lafayette from there and it was 254 miles. I could make that without stopping. So, I tanked up in down the street and hit the road again.

I reached Lafayette at about 6:45 p.m. on Tuesday, almost exactly 13 hours after leaving Lexington (allowing for the change of time zone).

The trip odometer registered 2,340.5 miles for the round trip. I'd averaged 800 miles a day and had been gone for about 66 hours.

A Long Strange Trip For A Long Strange Trip

It was a whirlwind trip that I would not have missed for the world. I went for a long swim that night and drank a little wine after that. And reflected on my long personal relationship with what had for so long seemed an ill-fated franchise.

I'd seen the President I helped elect recognize the team that I had supported since their inception all those 40-plus years ago.

I watched John Gilliam return the opening kickoff in the franchise's history at home with my dad in 1967.

I was listening to the radio when the Saints played the Detroit Lions in Tulane Stadium in 1970. Bees knocked out the radio transmitter just as Tom Dempsey kicked his 63-yard field goal, but my Biever Hall windows at Loyola were open and we could tell by the roar that the kick had been good and Dempsey had won the game.

I was in a motel room in Chama, New Mexico, in 1977 when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the first game in their franchise history, beating the Saints in New Orleans. It was the era of The 'Aints.

I was at a telecommunication conference in Aspen, CO, when the Danny Weurfel era began. The first highlight in the open segment of Sports Center was a picture of Weurfel on the field, during a play, with his helmet spun around backwards on his head.

I watched in disgust as Tom Benson tried mightily to move the team to San Antonio in the wake of the devastation of Katrina and the failure of the federal levee system.

Somehow, I had allowed my hopes to be raised when Sean Peyton's 2006 team made it to the NFC championship game where they lost to the Chicago Bears.

And, like just about everyone else in south Louisiana, I relished the amazing 2009 season that culminated with the Super Bowl win in Miami.

No, dammit. I was going to Washington. I am damned grateful that the opportunity presented itself. As a Saints fan, I felt both obligated and due.

Grand Theft NOLA

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:31:00 +0000

In 1985, then Governor Edwin Edwards was indicted and tried on federal charges that he was selling hospital certificates of need to his allies in exchange for money. A hung jury led to a new trial in 1986 in which Edwards and four co-defendants were acquitted.

Suffice it to say that if the thought would have even entered Edwin Edwards' mind to do what Bobby Jindal is doing in New Orleans now with the still-to-be-built Teaching Hospital in New Orleans, grand juries would have already been impaneled and Judge Frank Polozola would be clawing his way back to the bench in anticipation of the indictments and trial.

Looting the Healthcare Infrastructure

What is Jindal doing? He's taking more than $1.2 billion in public money and giving it to a private corporation that will be beyond the control or supervision of the Legislature and the public. The first $800 million or so of the funds were either appropriated by the Legislature or awarded to the state by the federal government through FEMA to replace the former Big Charity Hospital in New Orleans that was flooded in the wake of the federal levee collapse after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The remaining $400 million or so will come through financing arranged through LSU which, when we last checked, was the state's land grant university and a public entity.

Killing the state's public hospital system has been a goal of Jindal's since the days when he ran the Department of Health & Hospitals for Governor Mike Foster. He's made considerable progress. Shortly after taking office, he killed plans laid by Governor Kathleen Blanco to build a new state hospital to replace Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville.

Last year, Jindal made clear to LSU that if it wanted a replacement hospital for Big Charity in New Orleans, it would have to scuttle Earl K. Long Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge. Governor Blanco had also started a funding process to rebuild this hospital, but Jindal made clear to LSU's Health Care Vice President Fred Cerise that killing EKL was the price the university would pay to get a hospital in New Orleans. So, Cerise struck a deal with Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge to take over the handling of some Medicaid patients and to serve as the home institution for LSU's medical education program in Baton Rouge.

Jindal insisted that the Legislature have no say in the appointments to the New Orleans hospital board, fighting hard in the recent Regular Session Senator Ed Murray's attempt to give the Senate the right to confirm appointments to the governing board.

This past week, Jindal grabbed full control of the project when his majority on the LSU Board of Supervisors overruled LSU System President John Lombardi's choice to chair the governing board and replace her with one of Jindal's biggest contributors, Baton Rouge meat magnate Bobby Yarborough. Jindal had appointed Yarborough to the LSU Board of Supervisors in June, apparently with some role like this already in mind.

Jindal's true intentions became abundantly clear when members of Jindal's staff convened a closed door meeting on Wednesday in New Orleans involving nine of the 11 members of the hospital governing board. Jindal legal counsel Stephen Waguespack described it as a "social meeting" that did not violate the state open meetings law. Waguespack told the Time-Picayune that he was not sure if the open meetings law applies to the new corporation.

Pure and simple, this is a power grab to enable a money grab.

The Jindal MO: Public Dollars to Private Donors

The so-called Ethics Governor™ has a record replete with lavishing public dollars in service of the projects of his biggest contributors. Gary Chouest's project got nearly $30 million. Lev Dawson's sweet potato farm just happens to be next door to a ConAgra plant that Jindal put $30 million of state dollars into. The Shaw Group, which gave the Louisiana Republican Party and the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority, a matching set of $50,000 contributions in recent years, got the contract to dredge for Bobby's berms without having to go through a bid process.

Nice rewards that a governor with a compliant Legislature can give. But, as has been clear for quite sometime, Jindal has much higher aspirations than Baton Rouge and to do that, it's going to take a lot more money than he's raised to run for re-election. To do that, he needs another mechanism to draw deeper from the deep pockets of the people who can fund his campaigns.

No, to do that, Jindal needs to do more than a couple of one-off investments in private projects. He needs to create lasting money streams for his supporters — or potential supporters. That business model was perfected under the Bush/Cheney administration. It is crony capitalism.

Jindal's fight to privatize the state's mental health hospitals, in retrospect, was where he showed his hand for what he has in mind for the New Orleans teaching hospital. He wants to be able to distribute lucrative contracts for management and services in a way that is beyond the reach of the Legislature and beyond the review of the public. Jindal said he vetoed HB 1443 by Rep. John Bel Edwards because the "additional steps" of legislative oversight of the privatization process "would hinder" the state's ability to accomplish his goals, which are to distribute the contracts as he sees fit.

Apply that logic to the teaching hospital in New Orleans and what you come up with is Jindal having (and exercising) the power to award contracts for managing and providing services to the hospital built with public dollars without anyone having any ability to review those contracts. Who would do that? The hand-picked board members from LSU? The other board members that Jindal influences or controls?

Jindal is all about monetizing his in-state political power to fuel his national political ambitions.

He intends to take the new hospital in New Orleans behind a wall of secrecy where he can wheel and deal as he sees fit. It will be interesting to see if this hospital, which was supposed to replace Big Charity, will actually provide care to the uninsured, or if they will be shunted elsewhere.

There can be no ethics if there is no transparency — and Jindal has a long record of resisting any and all attempts to bring transparency to the operation of his office.

The theft here is the taking of a public healthcare asset and turning it over to a private corporation so that it can become a profit center, economic engine and political funding machine. The well-being of the citizens who were dependent on Big Charity is nowhere in the Jindal agenda. Jindal's only interest in healthcare is as a political issue. It was a stepping stone for him early in his career. Until the BP Gulf Gusher it was his feeble last leg of credibility on the national scene. Now, it is a vehicle for political alchemy — turning public health into private political profit.

The scale of this power grab is unmatched by anything seen since the days of Huey Long. Unlike Long, Jindal does not pretend to be the least bit interested in throw even collateral benefits to the public as he diligently works to build his funding base upon the wreckage he is creating of Louisiana's public health infrastructure.

No, this is all about Bobby.

The Press Has Been Bamboozled

The mainstream media in this state is bamboozled. Despite Jindal's fierce (and thus far successful) efforts to preserve a wall of secrecy around his office, he still gets the benefit of the doubt on matters like does the open meetings law apply to the new hospital board.

There can be no ethics if there is no transparency. Jindal will not allow transparency. His claims of ethical conduct rest solely on his claims of ethical conduct.

But there is a strain of deception that is becoming more clear every day and it has emerged from his dealings with the Gulf Gusher. We know that he's lied about the origin of the berm plan. He's lied about the terms of the government permit to dredge for the berms. We also know that he's lied about the impact of the deep water drilling moratorium on the state's economy.

All these fresh lies and the press continues to defer to him. At what point do they allow themselves to engage in critical thinking again and begin to examine Jindal's maneuvers with a critical eye?

Probably not until he's hit the national campaign trail. At which point, the next governor will be left cleaning up his mess. Sounds exactly like the task that President Obama assumed after his predecessor's adventures in crony capitalism nearly wrecked the country.

The Rally That Cried Wolf!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 21:12:00 +0000

Another week into the moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and another week of mounting evidence that the opponents of the moratorium who predicted it would crush Louisiana's economy are guilty of crying wolf.

The Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA) website on Saturday that the rig count in Louisiana was 183 rigs. That's down three from the previous week, and one less rig that was operating in Louisiana two weeks ago.

The Louisiana Workforce Commission announced on Friday that new unemployment claims in Louisiana had fallen yet again.

In fact, the LWC said in its statement that unemployment claims in Louisiana have been trending downward all summer:

In July all regular unemployment insurance claimants who have received at least one check during the reference month in Louisiana decreased by 993 from 49,421 in June 2010 to 48,428 in July 2010.

The Times-Picayune reported on Friday that there has not, in fact, been an exodus of deep water drilling companies from the Gulf of Mexico, despite the moratorium:

Despite uncertainty about when the federal moratorium on deepwater oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico may be lifted, drilling companies say they are readying to return to work, maintaining their full complement of rig workers at full pay and making improvements in their rigs to meet new federal safety standards required by the Interior Department.

Rig counts steady. Unemployment falling. Drilling companies say they are keeping people on staff and working to meet the new safety regulations.

All more evidence that "The End is Near" rally was propaganda event perpetrated by the Governor and his allies in the oil and gas industry on the people of this state. Or, in other words, just another day at the office for Bobby Jindal.

Yeah, the Frickin' Moratorium is Killin' Us — NOT!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 22:02:00 +0000

The "End Is Near Rally" in Lafayette a week ago was a veritable doom and gloom fest, complete with charts and predictions from economists that the Obama administration's moratorium on deep water drilling means the end of Louisiana, economically speaking.

The moratorium was declared in late May and has been slugged out in the courts since then, but it has been in effect now for two months. The impact of the forced shutdown of 28 deep water drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico should be reverberating through Louisiana's economy by now.

The End should be at our door, kicking and beating to get in.

Well, a funny thing has happened on the road to Armageddon — nothing.

The latest numbers released this week from various sources show that Louisiana's oil and gas industry is doing quite well, thank you, and the overall employment in the state is improving. Hell, even businesses along the coast supposedly headed for extinction are doing pretty well.

Two months into "The End of the World", the drilling rig count in Louisiana this past week is up three from the week before, to 187. That figure can be found here. It is worth noting that the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association was the prime mover behind the "End is Near Rally" in Lafayette. The videos are still on their website and will stay there, I'm quite certain, until after the fall elections, which is what this propaganda campaign is all about.

Then, the Louisiana Workforce Commission (which at the Rally, included gasoline station workers on its list of industries directly affected by the moratorium) on Friday released its latest unemployment claims numbers. Lo and behold, new claims for unemployment in Louisiana fell last week, two months into the moratorium.

Drilling activity up. New unemployment claims down.

If the moratorium is not, in fact, killing Louisiana, what does that say of the claims made by LOGA, Governor Jindal, Scott Angelle, and others at the rally about the dire consequences resulting from this attempt to prevent further destruction of Louisiana's wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico?

The event was orchestrated. The numbers were massaged. The media's attention was grabbed. And people who trusted these people were scared witless.

All in a days work for political operatives seeking to divert attention from the ecological, cultural and economic damage caused by an industry is still trying to hide the true nature of their operations here from the people they've grown accustomed to abusing.

But, the slow train of the truth is catching up to them. The attempt to convince the people of this state that the perpetrators of the crime in the Gulf are somehow the victims is failing. The industry and their front men are being exposed as the charlatans that they are.

Fear-Fanned Loathing In Lafayette

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Stagg) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:36:00 +0000

Wednesday, July 21, 2010, will go down as the high-water mark of in-state efforts to end the Gulf of Mexico deep water drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama administration in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent blowout.

About 11,000 people turned out at the Lafayette Cajundome for the "Rally for Economic Survival." Getting that many people to turnout for anything other than a sporting event in Louisiana takes some doing. But, the 'doing' that got them there reveals that opponents of the moratorium are engaged in blatant and obvious fear mongering, and have frittered away what little credibility they had on the issue with the lies and distortions included in statements made leading up to and during the event.

Make no mistake about it, what happened in Lafayette on Wednesday was an anti-Obama political rally organized by the oil and gas industry and fronted by Governor Bobby Jindal and his hand-picked interim Lieutenant Governor, Scott Angelle. Angelle was among friends, having run the Department of Natural Resources until Jindal elevated him this spring. Republican Lieutenant Governor candidate Sammy Kershaw provided entertainment (not sure if he just sang or if he read from his federal tax liens, too).

There was steady buildup leading up to the event. In Lafayette, the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce lead the drive to build attendance. Ultimately, all of Lafayette's mainstream media fell in line, becoming virtual (if not outright) partners in the promotion of the event. The Daily Advertiser ran a front page editorial calling for an end of the moratorium on the day of the event. ABC affiliate KATC's station manager delivered an on-air editorial calling for an end to the moratorium. Radio stations did live remotes from the event.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This buildup was based, in fact, on a carefully orchestrated distortion of what the moratorium is, then building a statistical house of cards atop those distortions. The Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), and its president Don Briggs, were prime movers in the effort to ramp up the climate of economic crisis that helped produce the turnout in Lafayette. Briggs is a long-time player in the Lafayette business community, serving on the board of the Lafayette Chamber. LOGA and Briggs have long-standing ties with the Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA) and the LSU Center for Energy Studies, both of which produced economic reports painting horrific stories of the potential impact of a six-month moratorium.

The advisory council for the LSU Center for Energy Studies gives the distinct impression that this is an advocacy group hiding inside academia. This must be where the industry gathers when Lafayette's Petroleum Club is booked. It is not surprising that the rally included a presentation from the Center and the picture painted was bleak.

Do you think they would have been allowed to make a presentation that said anything different? No. Only the finest store-bought statistics were allowed at this privately-funded propaganda event.

The premise of all the pre-event propaganda and the presentations made during the rally is that the Obama administration has shutdown all drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — not just deep water drilling — and that the moratorium will become permanent. This might be good short-term politics, but it is not supported by the facts.

And while companies like Diamond Drilling have made a big show about moving two rigs out of the Gulf of Mexico to other drilling locales, the fact is that decisions on when and where to drill in permitted waters are made by the big oil companies — not by the drilling companies, not by the service companies, and not by lobbying groups.

What are the big oil companies thinking? They plan to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico once the moratorium is over and new rules are promulgated. That announcement was made on the same day as the rally, but strangely did not get much press coverage in south Louisiana.

Governor Bobby Jindal has been milking the BP Gulf Gusher for all the political gain he can get from it, having spent almost three months on the coast chasing down cameras and microphones for opportunities to criticize the federal response to the industry-caused disaster. With a presentation made at the rally, Jindal has apparently put the Louisiana Workforce Commission to work in advancing his political agenda.

The thrust of all of this is that economic ruin will result from the moratorium. To paint this picture, the impact of the oil and gas industry must be inflated and the discrete segments within the industry must be ignored.

Enter the Louisiana Workforce Commission. In a presentation on the rally website (see graphic), the commission includes people who work at "Gasoline Stations" to ramp up the employment numbers of the industry in the state. According to the June employment report issued by the LWC, this adds 18,600 workers to the "industry" payrolls. That means convenience store cashiers and clerks are considered part of the energy industry.

It is also worth noting that, according to the LCW's official job statistics for June (page 8 in the PDF), those 18,600 gasoline station workers out number all of the people engaged in oil and gas drilling and extraction in Louisiana. That is no quirk due to the moratorium. This has been the case in every report this year.

Are gasoline station workers affected by the moratorium? No. But, it heightens the purported importance of the industry of the state's economy and, thus, fits nicely within propaganda objectives of the conference organizers.

Off The Deep End

People say things in unscripted moments that they later sometimes regret. So, in an attempt to provide opponents of the moratorium the kind of fairness they will not provide supporters of the moratorium, this segment will focus on the prepared written statements by Rally organizers which The Daily Advertiser published on the morning of the event.

Reading these, it becomes clear that truth was among the first casualties in the ramp up for the rally. These otherwise staid community and business leaders have been scared witless by what they have been told about the economic impact of the deep water drilling moratorium. They are spouting gibberish based on lies they've been sold.

The statement by Don Briggs is a clear example of how the facts are conflated and mixed to create a potential outcome that has no basis in reality. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Louisiana's oil and gas industry has a more than $70 billion annual impact. The industry supports more than 15 percent of household income in the state — $12.7 billion annually.

The continuing moratorium on offshore drilling affects many more people than the 320,000 working jobs in Louisiana supported by the oil and gas industry. As a result, it also affects far more than the 58,000 Louisianans working in extraction, refining and pipeline jobs.

Reading the first paragraph, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the deep water drilling moratorium is going to wipe out the oil and gas industry in Louisiana. Someone apparently forgot to tell the industry. According to a chart on LOGA's website, there were 184 active drilling rigs in Louisiana last week. This is almost two months into the moratorium. Baker Hughes, Inc., which provides its own count, said there was more drilling activity in Louisiana last week than there was a month ago.

If anyone knows this, it is Mr. Briggs. After all, it is his job and that of his organization to know the Louisiana oil and gas industry. Drilling activity has surged in the Haynesville Trend area of northwest Louisiana. Yet, Mr. Briggs insists on pretending that the deep water drilling moratorium threatens the entire industry in the state.

This fundamental dishonesty undermines legitimate concerns about the economic impact of the moratorium. Yet, this failure to be content with the facts is rampant in the public statements and presentations given in support of the rally and against the moratorium.

Then there is the matter of the jobs. Briggs' second paragraph would lead one to believe that the moratorium on deep water drilling threatens to wipe out, at the very least, all of the jobs related to "extraction, refining and pipeline" work. The Louisiana Workforce Commission's Monthly Employment Bulletin does not break out jobs according to the categories Briggs uses, meaning there is no ready way to verify his numbers other than, you guessed it, relying on the estimates of industry groups like LOGA— a sponsor of the rally and among the leading industry opponents of the moratorium.

Another moratorium opponent given space in The Daily Advertiser is Ovide N. Mercure Jr., Controller of Frederick's Machine and Tool.

Mr. Mercure writes:

Our accidents are tragic and our mistakes are costly, so we work hard to ensure they don't happen. The industry is one of the most heavily regulated in existence. Penalizing an entire industry for the failures of a single company will be catastrophic for your families and neighbors.

Actually, the deep water drilling industry was among the least regulated deep water areas of operation in the world. Operating under rules made during the Bush/Cheney years, the industry wrote their own rules in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, many of the safety rules the industry said it did not need to use in the Gulf of Mexico are safety rules they are required to meet in deep water drilling operations in the North Sea and other locales.

We heard two things repeatedly throughout the 85 days that the well gushed uncontrollably into the Gulf: 1) the best minds in the industry were helping BP try to deal with the blowout; and, 2) the various approaches used to try to cap the well had been used successfully in shallow waters but "never before at this depth."

Rob Guidry, President and CEO of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, claims the win, though, for most outlandish statement when he wrote in The Daily Advertiser, the following:

President Barack Obama has placed economic sanctions on Louisiana, and eventually the United States, beyond those imposed on Iran!

Obama's moratorium on oil and gas drilling is already negatively impacting the jobs of our families and friends. Tens of thousands more jobs will be lost on a daily basis as the irrational moratorium continues.

A temporary moratorium on deep water drilling is worse than U.S. sanctions on Iran? Proof please! Have assets been frozen? Have accounts been seized? Have companies been banned from doing business in Louisiana?

Mr. Guidry is a good man, but he's got a head full of bad information.

Some of those ideas might be coming from Mr. Briggs who sits on the Lafayette Chamber's Board of Directors. Or they might have come from David H. Welch, the President and CEO of Stone Energy, and chairman of the Chamber's Board of Directors. According to Forbes magazine, Mr. Welch is a man with deep ties to deep water drilling, BP. He's also got extensive ties with the energy industry as a whole, serving as a director of the National Ocean Industries Association. It's just a simple twist of fate that this year the Lafayette Chamber would be headed by a man with such a deep history with BP and its various North American operations.

Return to Business As Usual ASAP!

What the rally and the push to end the moratorium are about is an attempt by the oil field service industry and the political leaders dependent upon them for campaign financing to get back to business as usual in the Gulf of Mexico just as quickly as possible. Interestingly, organizers did not meet their goal of getting 15,000 people to attend. Some local television stations were predicting 20,000 attendees with spillover being shuffled into the Cajundome Convention Center next door. Didn't happen.

That means getting back to destroying Louisiana's coast at the alarming, but less conspicuous rate of a football field every 38 minutes. The people who are making the push are careful to preface their call with the obligatory nods of acknowledgment to the 11 workers lost in the original explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and the damage all of the resulting gushed oil is causing to the coast, to fisheries, to fishing families, etc.

But, really, what the push is about is saying that their right to wreck the Gulf and our coast trumps the interests of all others. Nothing is more sacred than their right to make money off what is essentially a colonial extractive operation where workers are expendable and the comparable pittance in royalty money and taxes directed to property owners and the state is part of the cost of making people in other parts of the world wealthy.

Oil and natural gas are essential parts of our economy. But, the BP Gulf Gusher is a defining moment that demands that we change the way we live — the way we power our homes, our vehicles, and our way of life. There is no such thing as cheap oil any more. What happened to BP can happen to other companies drilling in such deep water where margins for error are so tight and unforgiving.

The Rally for Economic Survival at the Cajundome was the last gasp of an old order trying with all its might — by hook or by crook; with conflated facts and distorted data — to cling to an era that has ended. The world will never be the same as it was before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.

What has happened since then in terms of economic and ecological damage proves that we cannot — as a state, as a nation, as people who believe we are bound to be responsible stewards of our state and our environment — allow anything approaching a return to business as usual.

As was just demonstrated by the killing of climate control legislation at the federal level, the energy industry will fight policy changes fiercely. But, we can be stronger. Whatever policy they can buy or block in Washington and Baton Rouge, we can circumvent by making changes in our own lives. Getting solar panels. Reducing energy consumption. Getting more efficient vehicles. Riding bikes. Pushing for high-speed rail.

Change has arrived in Louisiana and that the BP Gulf Gusher brought it. The politicians don't get it yet.

But, that's the way it always is.