"Ganey Arsement is a Calcasieu Parish educator who became an education advocate thanks to two men — Bobby Jindal and John White. Jindal began his second term in 2012 with a ferocious attack against public education, public school teachers and local school boards. White arrived in Louisiana from New York in May, 2011 to become head of the Recovery School District. He was immediately touted by Jindal shortly after his arrival as a person the governor would like to see named superintendent of Education for the entire state, not just the RSD. 

In the 2011 BESE election, millions of dollars in out-of-state money poured in to the coffers of some candidates and White was hired by BESE to be the state's new Superintendent of Education in January 2012. That was the last time BESE voted on a contract for White. 

Arsement has filed suit to force BESE to vote on whether to renew White's contract or not. White has served as a month-to-month employee since January 2016 when the current BESE members took office following the 2015 state elections. Even though pro-charter, pro-White candidates were elected in seven of the eight seats filled by election. But, each governor gets to appoint three members to the 11-member board and Governor John Bel Edwards appointed three people to the slots who back his position that the state needs a new superintendent. 

The result is something of a stalemate. State law says that it takes a tw0-third vote of BESE members to hire or fire a superintendent. That's eight votes. White can only muster seven. Or, so it seems since a vote has not been taken since the new board took office. 

So, White has served as a month-to-month employee of BESE — although there's never been a vote taken on that either. 

So, Arsement and others have filed suit in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge (the place where all suits against the state and its departments and agencies must be filed). They are seeking to force BESE to vote on White's contract. 

If a new contract for White cannot muster the required two-thirds vote need, Arsement wants to see the seat declared vacant (as the law provides) and a national search for a new superintendent launched. 

Arsement discusses the lawsuit and the practices that he and other public education advocates say White has used to spin what they claim is a false narrative about the success of charter schools in Louisiana. 

The suit has been assigned to Judge William Morvant, but it looks like it will be a while before the wheels of justice start rolling. The initial hearing has been set for August. 

I met Ganey Arsement in 2015 while working on a min-documentary about the 2011 BESE elections. He's included in the program. Here's the link. 

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. 

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake 

"Paul Douglas is an Evangelical Christian who lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota. He’s also a degreed meteorologist and an entrepreneur. Rounding out the list is the fact that he is a climate change believer. 

I first heard about Paul Douglas through my friend Kevin Shannon who spent an eventful couple of years in Louisiana before returning to Minnesota. 

Paul Douglas co-authored this book on Christians’ and climate change. 
Douglas and Mitch Hescox co-authored a book, Caring For Creation, to urge their fellow Christians to begin taking climate change seriously. The overarching concept is that Christians are called upon to be good stewards of God’s creation, that it appears things have gotten out of hand, and that this creates a call for Christians to drop their skepticism and get engaged in the process of cleaning up the climate on the planet we call home. 

All great spiritual traditions include among their tenets an intergenerational mandate to care for the planet so that future generations can enjoy it as they have. 

Somewhere in the industrial age, this concept was lost or shoved down the hierarchy of priorities of those who have led companies, been captains of industry, investors and elected officials. Short-term thinking either obscured the long-term view that we all learned as part of our spiritual formation, or it replaced it all together. One of the most insidious notions to arise in post-World War II America was the concept of maximizing shareholder value. This Milton Friedman concept elevated profits above all other motivations and concerns for business leaders. 

The concept led to a constricting of the field of corporate vision which drove companies to discount or even ignore concerns of their workers, the well-being of the communities where their plants were located, and, yes, even the impact those company operations had on the air we breath, the water we drink and the soil in which we grow our food. 

Douglas is also a former cigarette smoker. During the interview he recalls how he came to learn about the disinformation campaigns waged by tobacco companies against the science which showed a connection between cigarette smoking and lung and other cancers. Douglas believes — and a growing body of evidence suggests — that the fossil fuel industry has torn several pages from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt playbook to feed skepticism about climate change. 

Douglas believes that “things are not hopeless and we are not helpless.” This is the message he takes to his fellow Christians about climate change. And it’s a recurring theme in our interview. 

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

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

"Listening to the rhetoric of anti-abortionists in and outside of government, it sometimes takes an effort to remember that abortions have been happening for as long as there have been humans and the right to a safe abortion has been protected by the United States Constitution since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. 

But, this is Louisiana where even lost causes are never actually admitted to be lost. We talk in tongues, never saying in public what we mean in our hearts. Unless, of course, we slip and the bile in the form of hatred comes spewing out. 

Louisiana's fetus fetish grew out of the same cultural cul-de-sac that venerates confederate leaders but ignores their barbarous acts. Anti-abortionism uses the fetus to bludgeon the rights of women. It was not until the 1970s in Louisiana that women got the right to borrow money on their own. The resentment against that has never died down. 

Louisiana's restrictions on women's health options have much less to do with the alleged sacredness of life (the canard that is exposed every day in this state by a long litany of statistics ranging from high poverty rates, poor health outcomes, low levels of education, the highest rate of incarceration, etc.) than with the urgent desire of insecure men to maintain control over the lives of women. 

Thus, you have the anti-regulatory legislature passing an increasingly arcane set of regulations on abortion clinics. You have legislators in a state with high teen pregnancy rates fighting to keep sex education out of schools. And you have legislators gutting funding for the Department of Children and Family Services on one day while trying to tighten abortion regulations the next. 

We are a backwards state because our elected leaders consistently try to drag us back to a white male supremacy fantasy world of where everyone knew their place and Trey's son could get a job at a bank even it he couldn't count too well. 

The confederate monuments fight has served two extremely useful purposes. The first is that it has forced us to examine our history. Those monuments had nothing to do with the Civil War but much more to do with trumpeting the rule of white supremacy harkened by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The second thing it has accomplished is peel back the thin veneer of politeness and exposed the ugliness that lurks just below it in the bright light of day. 

Women seeking abortions have seen this ugliness every time they have approached a clinic to exercise their right to a safe medical procedure. The people who protest and try to block them from exercising their right don't care about the women and they don't care about the fetus that the women want to abort. What they care about is attempting to exercise control over those women in a desperate attempt to cling to the illusion of a past that they can't allow themselves to comprehend. 

What unites opponents of removing confederate monuments with anti-abortion activists is the fear and hatred that lies at the core of their beliefs, but which erupt from time to time in ways that are so stark and pronounced as to reveal their alleged higher purpose to be a scam. 

Amy Irvin and I had a great conversation. I'm proud to be included as member of the New Orleans Abortion Fund board of directors."