John DeSantis is a reporter based in southeast Louisiana. He uncovered a story about the violent end of a sugar cane labor strike in the nearby town of Thibodaux that occurred in 1887. He wrote about what little he could find of the record of the events which, according to the official count, resulted in the deaths of eight people ” all of whom were black sugar cane workers.
The story led to a book contract which pushed DeSantis to dig deeper into the story. With the help of an archivist at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, he was able to locate the names of the eight people who were listed as those killed in the streets of the town on a single day ” November 23, 1887. That led to yet another discovery which enabled him to get to eyewitness accounts of the massacre.
DeSantis believes the number of black workers killed that day in Thibodaux by white vigilantes was between 30 and 60. Most were involved with the Knights of Labor strikes that had originated in Terrebonne Parish the year before, but carried over into neighboring LaFourche Parish in 1887.
The book is a slim volume that unveils a wealth of detail about labor and raced relations in post-Reconstruction Louisiana and the violent events of that day in Thibodaux that reverberate still today.
We talk about the events, the writing of the book, and the key discoveries that unlocked this story that “nobody wanted told.”
DeSantis is now engaged in the effort to locate the place where the victims of the massacre were buried.
At the start of 2018, we are nearly three years out from the formal start of the redistricting process that will redraw lines for every legislative body in Louisiana ranging from town councils and school boards, to parish councils, the Louisiana Legislature and our six congressional districts.
The process formally kicks off at the end of 2020 when the results of the United States Census conducted that year will be released. In 2021, the redrawing of district lines will fall primarily on the legislative bodies that will then elect members from.
But, before we get to that point, Louisiana will elect a new legislature in 2019 and that body will redraw not only its own district lines, but that of our congressional districts and, maybe, our Supreme Court districts.
Dr. Brian Marks teaches political geography at LSU in Baton Rouge. He was a panelist at Fair Districts Louisiana’s Redistricting Summit held at the Lod Cook Alumni Center just off the LSU campus on January 19.
In this conversation, Dr. Marks (who is programming director at WHYR radio station in Baton Rouge) talks about the various kinds of gerrymandering that has been used over the decades in attempts to lock in or lock out political advantage. We also talk about some earlier redistricting processes in Louisiana and the prospects for the use of an independent commission to carryout redistricting.
Representative and House Speaker Pro Tempore Walt Leger III said at the summit that he believes Legislators should not be in the business of choosing their constituents, that it should work the other way around. He didn’t get much support for the idea from fellow Democrats. Removing politics from a political process is easier said than done.
Louisiana’s current congressional district map was redrawn with the explicit purpose of carving out a new seat for Congressman Charles Boustany whose 7th District was taken away due to the more rapid population growth in other states. Boustany won the redrawn 3rd District in a 2012 race that pitted him against freshman Congressman Jeff Landry (who is now state Attorney General).
Black legislators now believe they painted themselves into a corner with the 2011 redistricting which saw many minority majority districts that had super majorities of Black voters in those districts. The problem was, as Rep. Patricia Haynes Smith said at the summit, “while you’re getting seats that are safe for African Americans with that approach, you’re also creating white seats where people elected don’t have to take into account the interests of Black voters.
We cover a good bit of ground here. I think you’ll find it worth your while.
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America was formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012. The group, which now has approximately 5 million members has focused its energies on handgun laws and safety. While it has had success at the state lever (even here in Louisiana), it appeared to be fighting waves of public indifference to the hundreds of mass shootings that have happened since those pre-Christmas days when 20 children and six adults were gunned down at the school in Newton, Connecticut.
The murder of 17 people — 14 students, one teacher and two coaches — last week seems to have broken through the numbness brought on by mass shootings between Sandy Hook and the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week. The very public outcry of survivors of the shootings touched off waves of anger among young people which, in turned, appeared to shame adults whose inability to convince their lawmakers to pass laws to prevent further mass shootings allowed the mid-February murders to take place.
Rhonda Gleason is a teacher and parent. She’s been active in the Louisiana chapter of Moms Demand Action for more than two years, playing mostly defense in this state where the NRA is actually a designated business partner of the State of Louisiana.
As Gleason explains in this interview, Moms Demand Action’s successes in Louisiana have come through putting human faces on gun violence victims. In 2017, the group defeated a bill that would have eliminated the need for a concealed carry permit (and training) for “anyone who could show that they legally possessed a gun.”
The Parkland, Florida, shootings have given the movement for common sense gun laws here and in other states new momentum. Perhaps America’s conscience has been re-engaged on the gun violence issue.
Propelled by the new energy and outrage of young people who are tired of being targets, those opposing the NRA and their gun manufacturer patrons might now have the chance to pass laws that will break the current cycle of mass shootings that has seemed unending at times.
John M. Barry‘s books have informed and moved people, but his greatest accomplishment may well be having singled-handedly (at first) changed Louisiana’s conversation about saving our coast.
Barry did this by working diligently and persistently to convince his fellow members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East (SLFPAE) to launch a lawsuit against what were originally 99 oil, gas and pipeline companies for damage their work inflicted on wetlands under its jurisdiction. The lawsuit drew the wrath of Louisiana’s political gods at the time — Governor Bobby Jindal and the oil and gas industry. Killing the levee board lawsuit became Jindal’s obsession.
Unlike much of Louisiana’s governing processes, the super levee boards created in the wake of the federal levee failures in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, were designed to move the politics out of what was recognized as an essential work of the state — protecting citizens and their property from flooding.
Members of the authorities (east and west) were nominated through a process of committees, who then submitted limited lists of nominees to the governor from which to choose. Terms for the members were fixed — they did not serve at the pleasure of the governor. As a result, Jindal could not replace the board with one more compliant to what had until then be the time-honored Louisiana political position that we knew the oil and gas industry had damaged our coastal wetlands, but our leaders (whose campaigns were financed by that industry) did not want the oil and gas industry to pay for that damage.
Barry’s term had expired by the time Jindal launched his war against the levee board. Barry was not renominated. Instead, he formed the non-profit Restore Louisiana Now where he led the public campaign to explain the logic behind the lawsuit and the fight to prevent Jindal and legislators from killing the lawsuit.
The official count is that 19 bills were filed in the 2014 session seeking various ways of killing the suit. One managed to pass but it was later declared unconstitutional because the Senate had violated its own rules in the manner it handled the bill.
The lawsuit bounced between state and federal jurisdictions before landing in the federal district court in New Orleans where it was struck down. Subsequent appeals upheld the decision.
But, while the rush was on to try to kill the levee board lawsuit, parishes operating in the Coastal Zone — where the damage occurred — started filing suits against oil and gas companies for coastal damages using their standing under the Coastal Zone Management Act. A total of six suits have been filed thus far. More are expected in 2018.
Governor John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal in office and has been encouraging the other 14 parishes in the Coastal Zone to launch similar suits. Edwards deputized the Department of Natural Resources to be his vehicle to input in the suits after Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who campaigned publicly against the suits in 2015, sought to intervene in the suits to displace the parishes.
We’re a ways away from resolving the suits and we’re a long way from saving our coast. But, we will never go back to the days when everybody but the oil and gas industry is asked to do their fair share in what will be an intergenerational, multi-billion dollar effort to stop south Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
We have John Barry to thank for that. And for his great books!
Lily Stagg spent the late spring and most of the summer of 2016 riding with a group of cyclists from South Carolina to Santa Cruz, California, helping to build low-income housing along the way. The ride covered 4,200 miles in 81 days — including 18 days of working on houses.
There were 30 other riders in her group, including four team leaders. Most of the riders had never met each other until they gathered in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (across the bay from Charleston) for a couple of days of preparation before they set out.
Adjusting to all those personalities during a period of extreme physical and mental exertion proved to be the biggest challenge of the adventure, Lily says in the interview.
The experience was intense and transformative. Lily was already a dedicated cyclist before her Bike and Build summer, having ridden as a member of the University of Louisiana Ragin Cajun Cycling team in the spring semester prior to the cross country ride. She had just recovered from a serious cycling accident prior to her collegiate team experience which provided the perfect training regime to at least get her ready to ride across the United States.
This interview was recorded in September, 2016, just over a month after Lily returned to Lafayette from California after completing the SC2SC Route and joining her by then best friends in dipping their wheels in the Pacific.
Since this interview, Lily has ridden another spring season with the UL team and branched out into cyclo-cross during the fall.
In this interview, Lily talks about how cycling evolved from a nice means of transportation into a passion that has her seeking out opportunities to race across the Gulf South.
Michelle Erenberg is co-founder of Lift Louisiana — a non-profit based in New Orleans that advocates for the freedom of women to exercise their reproductive rights. Erenberg is a wife and mother who has been a public policy analyst and advocate for the past 15 years.
In our conversation, Erenberg explains that she started Lift Louisiana to help raise women above the barrage of laws that the Louisiana legislature passes on a regular basis that invariably seek to limit the choices available to Louisiana women when it comes to reproductive rights.
It is clear from the actions of working majorities in the Louisiana legislature that women are viewed as second-class citizens. Many of those same law makers parroted lies about opposing the Affordable Care Act because (they maintained) they opposed allowing the government to come between patients and their doctors. Yet, the anti-abortion laws and regulations enacted and promulgated have had that exact effect — inserting the State of Louisiana into what should be private discussions between women and their doctors.
It’s moved beyond irony into blatant hypocrisy.
Earlier this year, Lift Louisiana launched a statewide media campaign calling for Louisiana lawmakers to pass laws based on facts, not laws based on lies. Erenberg says that is precisely what many of the state’s restrictive abortion laws and rules are — based on lies about science and medicine.
In addition to public advocacy (Erenberg is not an attorney), Lift Louisiana also helps train lawyers in the process of how to represent minors who seek abortions in the state-mandated judicial bypass hearings. They do that as part of the Louisiana Judicial Bypass Project.
While Lift Louisiana has just gotten started, Erenberg says the group will continue to publicly advocate for women’s reproductive freedom as well as full healthcare equality. Judging by their early work, Erenberg and Lift Louisiana are off to a solid start.
Scott Eustis has had a busy mid-2017.
As the Gulf Restoration Network‘s wetlands specialist, he’s been part of flyovers finding chemical and petroleum product releases in the flood waters following Hurricane Harvey’s strike and the flooding that inundated southeast Texas in the wake of the storm. He’s been involved in flyovers in the Gulf of Mexico where pipeline ruptures remain part of the regular cost of business there. And, he’s been flying above the Atchafalaya Basin watching pipeline operators wreck “water quality projects” that had repaired Basin water flow that had been disrupted by earlier pipeline work at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers.
Like a number of environmental organizations in Louisiana, GRN and Eustis are fighting the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline proposed by Energy Transfer Partners. It’s one leg of the network that begins with the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Bakken fields of North Dakota and zig-zags across and down the country into Nederland, TX. Bayou Bridge aims to connect the Nederland operation and a Phillips 66 refinery in Lake Charles to a storage facility in St. James Parish on the Mississippi River.
There are thousands of pipelines in Louisiana. The challenge is making the case that Bayou Bridge is somehow more dangerous than those others.
Eustis talks about the need for an environmental impact study of the Bayou Bridge project in the context of the already significant damage inflicted on the Basin by those other pipelines. The cumulative effect of hundreds (if not thousands) of disruptions of water flow in the Basin threatens its viability as a swamp and estuary.
Eustis and GRN work in five northern Gulf of Mexico states — Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. It’s a broad, culturally, geologically and environmentally diverse. The indifference of the Trump administration to the environment and threats to it has made the work of GRN all the more important. The broad range of outrages that flow from the Trump White House and threaten things from civil rights to climate protections has sparked resistance but also a raft of new organizations, all of which seem to be competing for a fixed piece of the financial real of progressives.
Established organizations have been squeezed as new ones emerge with the resistance strategy of the moment.
The climate and environmental challenges confronting the country grow daily and groups like Gulf Restoration Network have been stretching to respond.
Scott Eustis is on the frontlines watching the problems unfold, documenting the damage done, and chronicling the reckoning that is coming if we don’t find effective responses quickly.
Dr. Willie Parker was born into poverty and Christianity in Birmingham, AL. He became a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. He later joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu.
During his first 12 years of practice, Parker did not provide abortion services for any of his patience. While some of his Christian friends were opposed to it and believed abortions to be immoral, Parker says he avoided dealing with the moral complexity of the issue by not providing the services himself. He did observe other providers perform the procedures, but he kept his distance from the controversial subject by not directly providing services.
Things changed when a change of leadership at the hospital led to the end of providing abortion services there. It sparked a crisis at the hospital and a rebellion among some physicians and nurses who saw the necessity of the legal services.
When some of his peers decided to create a clinic separate from the hospital where they would provide the mostly poor women the abortions they wanted, Parker came to a personal reckoning with abortion.
In this interview, he talks about how listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech, delivered in Memphis, TN, the night before he was assassinated changed his perspective on abortion and moved him to get trained and certified so that he, too, could provide the services for his patients.
The part of Dr. King’s sermon/speech that moved him, Parker says in the interview, was when the Civil Rights leader talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jewish traveler had been beaten and injured while traveling. A priest and a Levite pass him but ignore his needs. A Samaritan (considered enemies of Jews at the time) stopped to help.
Parker says that it was the Samaritan’s perspective of asking what the fate of the traveler would be if he did not stop to help is what swayed him to change his position about performing abortions — “What would become of my patients if I wasn’t willing to help them?”
Parker talks about his decision to leave his faculty position in Hawaii to go to the University of Michigan’s Medical School to get his training and the needs his patients in this interview. The interview was recorded by phone from an airport while Dr. Parker was en route to a speaking engagement about his book which chronicles his life, his faith and his decision to become an abortion provider.
For six years, there has been an epic David v. Goliath battle being fought in Louisiana over the fate of public education in our state. The Goliaths in this fight are members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) who owe their elections to a group of out-of-state pro-charter school billionaires who have bought that board in each of the two most recent election cycles.
The front man for the Goliaths is Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, who has direct personal ties to a number of the billionaires, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
White spent about seven months running the Recovery School District before being named superintendent in January 2012 by the freshly-bought BESE members who won election in 2011. Then-governor Bobby Jindal served as in-state cheerleader for White until the two had a falling-out (real or feigned) over support for Common Core.
The Davids in this struggle have been teachers and friends of public education who see the charters as an attack on teaching as a profession and as an attack on the civic role that public schools play, namely creating citizens.
Among those opposing the store-bought charter advocates are a handful of activist, bloggers, and authors all of whom happen to be directly connected to public eduction and believers in its central purpose.
Mike Deshotels is one of the stalwarts in that group. The retired classroom teacher has been a legal spur under John White’s saddle, having taken the superintendent to court on at least four occasions to force the release of data which Deshotels then used to discredit White’s rose-colored glasses narrative of charters’ alleged success in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans.
Deshotels has won each fight and earned the distinction of being sued by White himself — which drew some national attention.
In this podcast, Deshotels talks about the way White’s Department of Education has manipulated data to spin narratives of success and what that data (obtained through the courts) ultimately revealed.
Mike Deshotels discusses his persistent efforts to de-spin John White’s fairy tales. Check it out.
Jack McGuire met then-Governor Earl K. Long during Long’s 1959 campaign for Lieutenant Governor (in those days, Louisiana governors were barred from seeking re-election to successive terms). McGuire was a senior at Newman High School in New Orleans.
He’d been assigned a paper on the state elections that year, and chose to look at Long despite the fact that Jack’s father David McGuire had been kicked out of LSU in the 1930s (along with six other journalism students) for refusing to apologize to Huey Long for calling for him to stop interfering with the coaching of the LSU football team. By 1959, David McGuire was chief administrative officer for New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison — who had run against (and lost) to Earl Long in the 1955-56 governor’s race (primary elections then were late in one year with runoffs early the next. Governor’s were inaugurated in May then).
“I didn’t think I had too much to learn from the anti-Longs, so I talked to my father about following Earl,” Jack recalls.
They first connected in New Orleans during that campaign. Earl, who’d suffered a breakdown while addressing the Legislature in April of that year, was subsequently committed by his wife Blanche to a mental hospital in Galveston, TX, and then Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville. Jack actually attended the hearing where Earl was released from Southeast Louisiana Hospital after firing the director of the hospital system and then having the new director fire the head of the hospital itself. Earl ran third in the race for Lieutenant Governor. His political career seemed finished.
Uncle Earl, as Long was called, decided that he was not done. He chose to challenge incumbent Democratic Congressman Harold McSween for the Eighth District Congressional seat that Earl’s brother George had held for eight years until his death in 1958.
Earl was all in.
Jack and a couple of high school friends decided to follow Earl on the campaign trail for a couple of weekends during the summer of 1960.
What Jack saw in the desperate campaign that Earl Long waged moved him in a fundamental way. He spent a significant amount of his adult life working to claim Earl’s essence from the sensationalistic, often tawdry press coverage and academic writing that portrayed the three-time Governor and brother of Huey Long as a crazy man.
Jack gathered an incredible collection of articles, photographs, memorabilia, and interviews with people who knew Long and/or were involved in that 1960 campaign, which ultimately took Uncle Earl’s life.
Flooding from Katrina in Mandeville claimed much of Jack’s collection of material on Earl Long. But, because he had shared it with so many people in an effort to get them to write the story of that last campaign, he was able to reassemble his materials and even added to the collection.
It became clear that Jack was going to have to write the book on Earl’s last campaign if it was going to be written.
University Press of Mississippi sent the original manuscript to readers. One liked it; one hated it. UPM said that if Jack would take into consideration the comments from the readers, they would be willing to take another look at it. Jack and the late Water Cowan had written an earlier book on Louisiana governors that UPM published.
Jack turned to me to help him edit the book and get it into shape for reconsideration.
We worked together on it for about seven months in 2014 and 2015. We sent off the revised manuscript in April 2015, the weekend before Jack went in for knee replacement surgery.
The UPM editors loved the new approach and committed to publish the book. Jack left it to me to deal with the New York copy editor UPM chose to work with us, and to track down many of the photos that ended up in the book. Jack’s son Barrett helped cover the cost involved with printing the additional photographs that contribute to much to the quality of the book.
The book, Win The Race Or Die Trying: Uncle Earl’s Last Hurrah, came out in late August, 2016, just ahead of Earl’s birthday.
Shortly after that, Jack conducted a series of book signings and radio interviews across the state to publicize it which stretched into 2017.
In this interview, Jack talks about Earl’s tumultuous last years and the campaign into which Earl ignored doctor’s warnings and poured every last bit of energy he had into it to defeat McSween.
The book has been well received. The interview covers some ground not in the book, particularly dealing with his father David.
Dr. Rick Swanson is chair of the UL Lafayette Political Science Department. He was in the audience for the February 2016 LCG Council meeting when an hours-long public comment session regarding the Afred Mouton that sits in the point of a plaza in front of Lafayette’s International Center.
Swanson was struck by the inaccurate statements made by some defenders of the statue (Mouton was a West Point trained, slave-holding native of Opelousas whose father founded what became Lafayette) made to the council and the public regarding the origins of the Civil War and the nature of relations between blacks and whites in the area.
That launched a still-ongoing research project that sent Swanson scouring the records of the Library of Congress, the Center for Louisiana Studies, and public archives seeking to document the true history of the war and the true nature of the relationship between blacks and whites here.
It’s an ugly tale that the Mouton statue, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1922, both symbolizes and distorts. The statue was one of hundreds the UDC erected across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized segregation in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
As anyone who reads history knows, separate was never equal. It took 58 years before the Supreme Court reversed Plesssy with its Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in 1954. The Civil Rights movement was the culmination of a decades long struggle to reverse the practices and local laws that flowed from Plessy.
Swanson says the Mouton statues and its cousins across the country were always symbols of white supremacy, erected to celebrate the Lost Cause and to reaffirm what whites then believed to be the natural order of the world with them on top and blacks relegated to second-class citizenship.
Recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have driven home for many the connection between these statues and white supremacies and ne0-Nazis, leading some communities to speed the removal of confederate monuments from public spaces.
Swanson is continuing to update his work and hopes to muster a book out of it as his schedule permits.
We discuss the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana and what all those statues symbolized — then, and now!
For the second successive August, Louisiana is getting hit hard by rain. Last year, it was three days of heavy rains that dumped 20-inches of rain or more across much of south central and eastern Louisiana. This year, rains associated with Hurricane Harvey have been soaking parts of the state for days, with more rains predicted as the storm prepares to re-enter the Gulf of Mexico.
The August 2016 floods and the floods developing now might not be directly attributed to climate change, but they separately show the influence of climate change. Both floods are at least partially the result of the warming of the Gulf of Mexico and of the atmosphere. Higher temperatures allow for higher humidity. Water from the Gulf evaporates more quickly filling the higher capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture. That moisture comes down as rain over land.
South Louisiana and south Texas are both flat. We do not drain quickly. Too much rain over too long a time results in flooding.
And here we are. This is the new normal.
Albert Slap is a former law professor and environmental attorney who recognized that there was no readily available means for individuals to make sense of the implications of climate science and the phenomena happening around us. His Florida-based, Coastal Risk Consulting, set out to solve that riddle by combining publicly available science and data resources with detailed elevation tools to help provide risk assessments for residential and commercial property owners.
Florida and much of the east coast of the United States have begun to experience tidal flooding — that is, day-time flooding not associated with storms or even rain. In this interview, Slap says that the late summer and fall are the times when the flooding is most pronounce due to the interplay of prevailing winds and the moon's gravitational effect on tides.
Florida shares with Louisiana the problem of sinking land in the midst of rising sea levels. Mortgage bankers and insurance companies are taking note. Slap posts trade publication stories regularly on LinkedIn about how actuaries in each industry are beginning to change the way they view climate change and the risk and costs that will be associated with it. He believes that in the not too-distant future mortgages will be scarce for properties exposed to climate risk.
As Hurricane Harvey batters Texas, the National Flood Insurance Program is set to expire on September 30 (the end of the current fiscal year for the federal government). As those who weathered any of the disasters that have struck Louisiana and Texas in this century know, NFIP insurance is just about the only chance homeowners have to approach full recovery from these calamities. But, the program is billions in debt due to payouts made from storms here and elsewhere.
What will happen after September 30? Will Congress renew the act, even temporarily? What will happen in the flood next time?
Some in Congress want to attract private insurance companies into the NFIP. Insurance companies deal with risk. Climate change and climate change-induced disasters are taking on the look of certainty, not chance. How does the idea of risk figure into that? How much will it cost to get the coverage (if it's available)? What are people living in coastal areas to do if the coverage is not available when they suffer losses?
Climate change is happening now and getting real for more people — even those who profess not to believe that it is man-made. Albert Slap has seen it coming. He talks about it in this podcast.
Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains not only sheds light on the history of the ideas that have come to dominate the best funded wing of U.S. conservatism (more accurately defined as radical libertarianism), it also sheds considerable light on the ideas behind the Jindal era in Louisiana politics.
MacLean traces the intellectual and political history of James McGill Buchanan. She stumbled across Buchanan's name in footnotes in separate sources on separate issues and her curiosity was piqued.
One of the footnotes referred to Buchanan's role in Virginia's attempted massive resistance against the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Buchanan, it turns out, was the brains behind the idea of proposing the state shut down and then sell all of its white public schools (Brown over turned the separate but equal ruling that came in Plessy v. Ferguson). Buchanan propose the state then issue vouchers to students whose families could then use the money to send their kids to segregation academies which could even buy the schools from the Commonwealth.
Like a number of other ideas put forth by Buchanan over the next 50 years, the idea of getting Virginia out of the public education business was not popular with a lot of people in that state, not the least of which was the business community which had started growing in Northern Virginia. It was a reality that would shape how Buchanan and the people who used his ideas talked about them. They learned that being clear about the intent of their policies would produce public opposition to them. So, a level of language corruption was essential to the promotion and spreading of these ideas.
Buchanan was the leading light in what has become the public choice movement, which uses the concept of choice to undermine public belief in a broader common good and public interest. At the core of his beliefs is the idea that majorities are not to be trusted and that liberty is to be defined and measured in terms of wealth, property ownership and the extent to which the state can tax wealth and make claims on property that run counter to those of the owners. In short, when it came to government's ability to tax and its ability to make policy, Buchanan believed that unanimous decisions were the only ones that could be considered legitimate.
Buchanan's ideas, then, would award political veto power to the smallest, yet most powerful minorities — the rich and the propertied. Buchanan provided intellectual aid and comfort to the 1%. In return, they funded the ostensibly economic but truly political centers he founded using the largesse of donors such as Charles Koch at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason University.
In addition to school vouchers, Buchanan's ideas include cutting taxes, shrinking the size of government, raising the cost of using government services — particularly higher education, removing government from the business of regulating business, and weakening any power that might challenge what businesses or wealthy individuals would do in any sector.
If you live in Louisiana, or Wisconsin, or Kansas, these ideas probably sound familiar it's because governors in those three states (Bobby Jindal, Sam Brownback and Scott Walker – all connected to Charles Koch's money and networks) implemented versions of those ideas in their states.
In order to understand the basic premise of how Bobby Jindal operated while governor of Louisiana, you need to read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. It provides the framework of Jindal's approach to government, starting with the creation of artificial emergencies which opened the way for him to radically reshape Louisiana government in ways that he could not have done without the existence of those emergencies.
Jindal is an intelligent man who was served by smart people. It strains credulity to believe that they never could balance a state budget. The record shows that Jindal used recurring revenue shortfalls as the trigger mechanism to radically change state government in ways that we will be trying to recover from for years to come (think state cuts in higher education funding coupled with rising tuitions and think of the tax exemptions and incentives to companies that his administration threw at companies to get them to locate here).
But, Democracy In Chains shows us were many of Jindal's worst ideas came from and they can traced back to Buchanan and places like the Mercatus Center at George Mason which Buchanan helped found and which consulted with Jindal's Commission on Streamlining Government which operated for about seven months in 2009 and early 2010. This commission was where everything from Jindal's so-called education reforms to the great severance tax razoo of 2010-13. Armed with those ideas (what Milton Friedman called a "tool box") Jindal entered his second term with his ideological guns blazing in what turned out to have been a bone-crushing failure of a presidential campaign.
Jindal came into office with a surplus of $1 billion. By the time the tax exemptions were piled up, the incentives dished out and his administration's general indifference to the fate of state government and its impact on the people of the state, Jindal left office in 2016 as the most unpopular governor in the country (followed closely by Brownback and Walker) leaving his successor John Bel Edwards a $3 billion budget hole to close.
Buchanan, MacLean writes, viewed himself as a theorist in the school of political economy. At none of his three academic centers were economists asked to deal with the actual math of economics. It was visionary work unencumbered by pesky numbers or even facts.
What the records of Jindal, Brownback and Walker show is that Buchanan's ideas are not the kind that successful governments can be built upon. After reading MacLean's book, it's clear that breaking government was the objective — one which Buchanan, his office-seeking acolytes, and his supporters could not publicly reveal.
Americans are accustomed to things just working. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Open a tap and clean water flows from it. But, as investments in essential infrastructure have declined, problems with things like drinking water have begun to crop up more frequently.
The problems with lead contamination of the Flint, Michigan, water system persist even as the headlines have faded. Louisiana has not been immune to these issues. The state of Louisiana rescued the St. Joseph water system from problems. Baton Rouge is plagued by salt water intrusion as ExxonMobil and Georgia Pacific continue to suck huge amounts of water from the Southern Hills Aquifer for use in their industrial processes (while other companies use river water). Water systems in several Louisiana parishes have been found to contain brain-eating amoeba (a problem that can usually be cleared up by increasing the amount of chlorine added to the system).
Lafayette Utilities Systems' main water well field is located on what was once the north side of the town — just across the railroad tracks around Mudd Avenue and Simcoe Street. That area abuts an abandoned railroad yard that included a roundhouse and train cleaning and repair facility. For seven decades or more, solvents and chemicals of various kinds were used to degrease engines and apparatus, much of it being allowed to spill onto the ground where it was absorbed.
Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance says the contamination from that now-abandoned rail yard poses an imminent threat to Lafayette's water system as traces of contaminants from the rail yard have turned up in samples taken from the nearby LUS wells. In any given day, LUS draws about 20 million gallons of water from the wells in that field.
Two other factors add urgency to the situation.
The first is that recent studies have found that the Chicot Aquifer (the primary groundwater resource in south Louisiana) rises very near the surface of the ground near the rail yard. In some spots, the aquifer is as little as 30 feet below the surface. That would indicate that any chemicals in the abandoned rail yard don't have far to travel before they have reached the aquifer.
The second factor is the proposed plan to build the I-49 Connector through downtown Lafayette. An elevated segment of the road would run directly through the rail yard, resulting in hundreds of pilings being driven through the site and possibly into the aquifer, driving contamination toward the aquifer in the process.
Beyond the public health threat, the contamination near the water well field could force LUS to relocate its wells and go through the expense of having to reconfigure the structure of the water system.
Kim discusses the problems with the rail yard, the lack of any comprehensive study of the extent of the contamination of the site, and the kinds of threats these pose to Lafayette's drinking water.
Abita Springs is nestled in the piney woods of St. Tammany Parish, just east of Covington and north of Mandeville. The town has a well-earned reputation for clean are and sparkling clean artesian well water. St. Tammany has a reputation for being one of the most conservative parishes in Louisiana, yet in Abita Springs the Republican mayor and town aldermen have committed to move their town to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.
The town is one of just over 100 U.S. municipalities who have signed onto the Sierra Club’s “Ready for 100” pledge to pursue full renewable energy for their communities. The group made a splash at the recent U.S. Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Miami, where tidal flooding has become a reality even while some political leaders profess to be climate change skeptics.
LeAnn Magee, founder of Abita Committee for Energy Sustainability, attended the Mayors’ Miami meeting with a small delegation of her co-horts. Abita Springs Mayor Greg Lemons is, it turns out, a long-time Sierra Club member and, MaGee says in the interview, enthusiastically embraced the idea of the town making the commitment to sustainable energy.
Some of the town aldermen were skeptical but were won over when they learned that one of elements of the program was conducting an audit of public building energy usage. Helping the town reduce its cost of operating by reducing what it spends on energy had great appeal and the town was off and running.
Magee comes by her environmentalism honestly (she’s originally from Oregon but has been a St. Tammany resident for all of this century). Others came to the cause as a result of the anti-fracking fight in St. Tammany that flared over a three-year period when Helis Oil sought to frack in the parish.
As a result of that long fight (no fracking occurred after a test well was drilled), some in the St. Tammany anti-fracking movement were looking for something positive to get behind. They found it in the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 movement. Abita Springs is the first Louisiana municipality to sign up for the program.
For the naysayers out there, it’s worth noting that having a goal does not mean you’ve accomplished it, but having a goal is essential to accomplishing it. Abita has aimed high, setting a standard that other Louisiana municipalities in this climate change threatened state would do well to emulate.
We talk about Abita’s commitment and the thrill of environmentalists advocating for positive change.
Louisiana lost a great friend just before the Fourth of July when Ezra Boyd died.
Ezra helped as many people and organizations as he had talents. He was a scientist with a political science degree included in the mix. He brought a heightened social awareness to the issues that he worked ranging from disaster preparation to response to recovery. He worked with public agencies, environmental groups, communities and individual citizens.
His DisasterMap.Net provides real-time data that anyone caught in a disaster or who knows people who are caught in disasters can use to provide critical information. In the floods of August 2016, Ezra helped scores of people across south Louisiana find their way to safety or help guide them back home in those tortuous days after the rains stopped but flood waters remained.
He brought static information to life combining his grasp of data and his skills as a cartographer and programmer.
His passing leaves a void in our community that will be difficult to fill. He had so many skills which he used so well.
This interview initially ran in April of this year. Ezra drove to Lafayette to be in the studio to record it. We knew each other for a few years. I had helped him with press releases about some of his projects. We considered each other friends. It was my honor to be considered his.
Calling Louisiana’s finances over the past decade a train wreck is an insult to trains and the calamities that sometimes engulf them.
Bobby Jindal inherited a $1 billion surplus from Kathleen Blanco when he took office, plus a flood of federal and private sector disaster relief and recovery money, and — with the help of a pliant/intimidated/indifferent legislature, burned through all that and an additional $2 billion dollars before he shuffled off the podium at the Capitol in January 2016 to the great relief of just about everyone.
John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal and has spent the first two years of his term trying to dig the state out of the hole Jindal left in his wake — despite the best efforts of the House Republican majority to keep us there by refusing to vote for the taxes needed to enable the state to deliver essential services needed by our citizens.
Jan Moller has been observing this entire process for the past decade from front row seats. First, he was a Capitol beat reporter for the Times-Picayune back in the days when they were a daily newspaper. For the past five years, he’s been the leader of the Louisiana Budget Project, an organization whose focus is to provide analysis of state budget and spending policies for the good people of our state who would like to be informed.
With the state’s long-standing ‘good guv’munt’ organizations reliant on conservative funders for their existence, the Louisiana Budget Project (which is part of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) has brought a unique perspective (as in not dominated by corporate interests) to Louisiana’s budget discussions.
In the podcast, Moller and I discuss the budget that just emerged from the regular and special sessions of the Louisiana Legislature, the role of Medicaid expansion in helping economic development in Louisiana, the prospective impact of the first Trump budget on Louisiana as well as what may or may not be the impact of the American Health Care Act which has had more false starts than are allowed in track meets.
It’s a wide-ranging conversation that I think you’ll find worth you while. Jan knows his number!
Accountants took down the gangster Al Capone. If the corporate education reform movement in this country is brought down it will likely be by a statistician like Mercedes Schneider.
The Slidell English teacher got engaged in the public education debate after one of the early leaders of the reform movement Diane Ravitch broke with the reformers. The former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education renounced her earlier support for high-stakes testing. Schneider started blogging her own opinions on public education not much later and has been steadily at it ever since. She also writes at Huffington Post.
Schneider's authored three books on aspects of the education reform movement, in addition to the blogging and her teaching, which she has not stopped.
As a practitioner and a statistician, Schneider brings unique tools to the table when she's discussing what works or doesn't work in education. And, she's been particularly adept at busting the manipulation of student performance data in Louisiana by Superintendent John White.
Schneider pulls no punches. She's plainspoken, authoritative, patient and relentless.
In this podcast, Schneider talks about the reformers in Louisiana and across the country, John White's record of data manipulation, and the impact that high stakes testing has in the classroom and how testing came to be a central element in the reform movement.
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