02/20/2017

Ted Harvey has decided to make it his business defending President Donald Trump. He came to the work in an odd way. He explains in our interview that he was a Rand Paul supporter when the GOP primary season began. He shifted to Ted Cruz after Paul abandoned his campaign. He jumped to Trump after the hotelier and reality show star emerged as the Republican nominee.

Former Colorado state Senator Ted Harvey.
Harvey’s embrace of Trump came easily as for two years he’d headed the Stop Hillary PAC. His brother serves in the diplomatic corps and Harvey says the infamous Benghazi incident in which four Americans were killed cut close to home for him. Despite the fact that years of House Republican investigations could prove no lawbreaking on the part of Secretary Clinton’s part, the fact that she had ultimate responsibility for the events in Libya (coupled with what he says are “decades of corruption” involving the Clintons) was enough to set him off on his anti-Clinton quest.

The first tumultuous month of the Trump presidency has seen the presidents Republican allies in the U.S. Senate approve every person he’s nominated for a cabinet post — at least all of those who have stuck around for a Senate vote.

Since the election, a lot of energy and anger have been spent trying to manipulate the Constitutionally established election process to overturn the results. There was a massive march on Washington the day after the inauguration accompanied by many in cities across the country. There have been many new avenues to activism created by veteran activists and those new to it, including the Indivisible movement created by now unemployed congressional staffers.

As the results become evident, all of this has been mostly ineffective. Trump is president. His administration is embarking on policy changes that aim to remake the United States into a safety-net free society that has not existed since the Great Depression. This rush to repeal the 20th Century will shift the fights to the courts. The good news is that the systemic inertia that we found so frustrating in the Obama years might well buy us some time to enable us to survive the blitzkrieg of legislative and policy initiatives coming from the administration and the Republican Congress.

The Democratic Party bears a large share of the responsibility for this mess. Sure, the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to block Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. But, where have the DNC and the state party organizations been for the past three decades while Republicans and conservatives were gerrymandering the party nearly out of existence in state houses across the country?

The party — at the state and federal levels — has been so busy chasing corporate cash that it forgot that its basic work is politics. They have been asleep at the switch, ignoring fundamentals on the ground (like redistricting) while Republicans boxed them in.

The opportunity to change the election maps and math won’t really happen until after the 2020 Census. The good news is that there’s time to educate ourselves and organize around that issue. The bad news is that non-corporatists start from a stark disadvantage that extends from state houses to the Capitol. Legislatures redistrict themselves and they redraw congressional district maps. Louisiana will elect a new Legislature in 2019 and there will be significant turnover in the Senate due to term limits. But, there is the problem of the maps of those districts which were designed to lock-in conservative majorities.

Don’t expect much change in the 2018 off-year federal elections as the maps of House districts will be the same ones that have locked in Republican majorities in that chamber since 2012. There are few districts that are or can become competitive because of the way in which they were drawn.

The current frenzied level of activism does not feel sustainable. What is needed now as the fights shift, is a strategic assessment of where we stand and where we can be effective outside the electoral system. We also need to work with those (not only progressives) who see the need for changes in the electoral system ranging from ending gerrymandering to ending the corruption of the political process through the flow of virtually unlimited amounts of money into elections.

All of the major work I see needing to be done is issues-based, not personality driven.

In this sense, the President and his chaotic methods are best viewed a distraction from the work of his administration, the long term damage being inflicted on people and institutions by the Congress, — and the work that we must do to save this country.

We cannot afford to burnout.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserFebruary 20, 2017Comment

02/13/2017

My first guest from the new home is Dan Collins, the whistleblower who won his lawsuit in 2015 against the Department of Natural Resources and now faces a date for oral arguments on the department’s appeal of his win.

The podcast of Dan’s program while we did the show at KPEL was the most-listened to podcast of the year with nearly 1,000 downloads and streams. So, with the appeal looming, I figured let’s get things rolling with an hour of discussing the things that have made our state the fiscal and environmental mess that it is today.

Dan and I only met two years ago as we each chased our corruption stories that involved DNR. Dan’s whistleblower law suit involves the hijacking of a water quality project for the Atchafalaya Basin Program into an oil and gas drilling access canal. He identified manipulation of the state mineral leasing process, as well as unusual activity involving rights of way and property agreements connected to the project.

State mineral leases are run through DNR’s Office of Mineral Resources. They also collect and audit royalty payments that come to the state through oil and gas leases involving state-owned lands and water bottoms.

The corruption story that I was (and still am) chasing led me to OMR, as well. In 2013, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the state of Louisiana had gone three years without auditing oil and gas severance tax payments in the state. The power to perform those audits had been taken away from the state’s chief tax collector (the Department of Revenue) and given to OMR. DoR was supposed to alert OMR about severance tax payers who might be audit candidates, but within three months of the audit authority being taken away from DoR, the Jindal administration also managed to kill the department’s software program that it had used to identify non-payers. For three years, the state flew blind on severance tax payments.

Evidence suggests that the industry was tipped off that this change was coming and they made off like bandits accordingly once the two step (authority transfer, then blinding of DoR) was completed.

As Dan explains in our conversation, his status as a contract employee of the state gave him standing to blow the whistle on what he believed (and a jury agreed) was illegal activity in connection with the project on which he had once worked.

It’s been ten years since he discovered the wrongdoing. Seven years since he filed suit. Just over one year since a jury of his peers in East Baton Rouge Parish unanimously agreed with him. If the state loses its appeal, the case will likely go to the Louisiana Supreme Court. If Dan loses, he says he’ll appeal as well.

This case and the severance tax give away should matter to every Louisiana citizen. Severance taxes and royalty payments represent our modest claim on the mineral wealth of this state. Taken together, severance taxes and royalty payments make up about 15% of the state’s general fund revenue. When they don’t collect what is owed us on that revenue, our leaders are giving away our wealth, often times in ways that directly benefit them at our expense.

It’s estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars in severance tax revenue was lost between 2010 and 2013 when the audits were not done. One attorney whose looked at the numbers (500,000 severance tax transactions each year when the audits were not done) says the revenue losses could be more than $1 Billion.

The industry and the Jindal administration beat back an attempt by the Legislature force an audit of oil and gas production in 2014. They might well have known how much money was lost, but they did not want legislators and the public to know how much had been given away.

We still continue to fight revenue shortfalls in this state today. I think those can be traced in some significant measure to the failure to audit severance taxes during those key years.

The connecting tissue between Dan’s case and my ongoing work is that in each instance the public’s interest and the well-being of the state was put somewhere down the hierarchy of priorities by our elected leaders. Healthcare could be cut, but oil and gas companies could not be made to pay the taxes they owed. Tuition at colleges and universities could rise at the fastest rate in the country but oil and gas companies could not be inconvenienced by making them give us a true accounting of what they had done with our mineral wealth.

Dan Collins stood up for us at considerable sacrifice to himself and his career. Listen to his story in the podcast. We owe him a debt of gratitude.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserFebruary 13, 2017Comment