Louisiana Voice

2009

That’s when the minimum wage was last raised to $7.25 per hour.

As of January, 30 states have minimum wages that exceed $7.25.

That means 20 states still pay $7.25 per hour minimum wage after it was first set at that rate 17 years ago.

Louisiana is one of those 20 and apparently, will remain so for at least another year after the House Labor and Industrial Relations danced all around the real issues of inflation and defeated HB 353 by State Rep. Tammy Phelps (D-Shreveport).

The committee, as might be expected, voted along party lines as seven Repugnantcans voted not to report the bill favorably while five Democrats, the true representatives of working America, voted in favor of raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour in 2027 and $15 per hour by 2029.

Yes, that’s a 52 percent increase, but think about it. Spread over the past 17 years, that represents an average yearly increase in the low single-digits—something less than 2 percent per year.

And keep in mind just since March 1, gasoline has increased 21 percent on average while the cost of housing, groceries, clothing, health care, goods and services, travel and other living expenses, have risen as well.

And a person is supposed to survive on $7.25 an hour.

One of those who voted no on the bill, Rep. Brian Leonard Glorioso (R-Slidell) found it so easy to say we should raise pay but instead, let’s train workers to qualify for higher wages. Sounds good in theory but workers making $7.25 an hour for the most part have two, sometimes three jobs just trying to survive. That doesn’t leave much time in the day for training, now does it, Mr. Repugnantcan Glorioso?

Likewise, Rep. Roger William Wilder III (R-Denham Springs) was equally snobbish and out of touch when he pissed and moaned about how increasing minimum wage would create an undesired ripple effect. “If you’re a Walmart manager making $4.50 an hour more than a minimum wage worker and the minimum wage is raised to bring that employee to within $1.50 of your salary, are you going to continue to be motivated?”

Aw, gee, Mr. Wilder III, you got us there. Except you might want to consider raising that manager’s salary as well. Anyone taken a look at Walmart earnings lately? I believe they could afford a little largesse with their employees.

You see, that’s the damned problem with these Repugnantcans. They want above all else to keep salaries of working stiffs as low as possible while paying their CEOs like they were an LSU head football coach. Let’s be realistic here. I don’t recall the manager of a Walmart ever once helping me find an item in the store. Nor have I ever witnessed a manager stocking shelves. And that, after all, is the bottom line for Walmart: keeping shelves full of products for you and me to buy and those low-paid employees are making obscene money for the Walton family.

The Repugnantan opposition was so predictable that committee member Tehmi Jahi Chassion (D-Lafayette), a support of the bill, even called the outcome to the exact 7-5 vote in advance. It’s just that easy to see right through Repugnantcans and their agenda.

And lest anyone think I’m picking on Walmart, they’re not the only corporate entity perfectly willing to screw over their employees and if they can get a bunch of fat and happy Repugnantcan lawmakers to hold the minimum wage down, so much the better for those at the top of the food chain.

I’ve never yet seen a suit get down and dirty to produce consumer goods, though I have seen a lot of low-paid individuals struggling to put food on the table and clothes on their children’s backs doing so.

Here’s a thought: Let’s let Labor and House Industrial Relations Committee members Raymond Crews (R-Bossier City), Dodie Horton (R-Haughton), Glorioso, Dennis Bamburg (R-Bossier City), Michael Melerine (R-Shreveport), Phillip Eric Tarver (R-Lake Charles) and Wilder try to subsist for one month—just one month—on $7.25 per hour.

And I don’t mean do it the way that congressman did a couple of years back. He accepted the challenge to live for a month on minimum wage but before embarking on that challenge, he made sure his larder was fully stocked with food, utility bills were already taken care of, etc. In other words, he took care of all his living expenses in advance and only then did he begin his minimum wage dog and pony show.

Oh, and by the way, there was one other committee member who took a walk and didn’t vote. Rep. Michael Echols (R-Monroe) must’ve been out on the campaign trail running for Julia Letlow’s U.S. Representative seat.

Just for the fun of it, you want to see some of the other $7.25 states?

Well, there’s Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas, to name a few. Hell, even Arkansas has a minimum wage of $11 per hour.

For the complete list, go HERE. Notice anything most of them have in common? Yep, they are almost all decidedly blood-red Repugnantcan states—greedy, self-possessed, Scrooge-descendant Repugnantcans.

Don’t try to tell me Repugnantcans are of the Christian, family-values party.

They’re neither.

Guest column by Paul Spillman

Lo and behold, Jeff Landry puts his foot in his mouth again on the day LouisianaVoice publishes my first contribution to the blog. I couldn’t let that pass without comment.

Landry was speaking earlier last week in an exclusive interview conducted over the phone with sports columnist Jeff Duncan. Landry again made a public display of his ignorance of the issues or at least his willingness to be ignorant of the issues. But his greatest ignorance is he seems to be oblivious that a sitting governor should not be involved in hiring or firing coaches at LSU. He obviously thinks of LSU athletics as his personal brand. In his comments he used “we” and “our” a lot. He bragged about trading texts with Lane Kiffin during spring practice. He didn’t say a word about coaches’ salaries or the Athletic Directors who have to be fired for negotiating such bad deals but he was quite open about being close to Will Wade and being “irritated” Wade wasn’t hired last year and that’s why there’s a “big change in leadership over there.”

Landry also spoke about the hiring of Kiffin, the Saints, and other sports related issues. But it was his comments on the current state of college athletics that irritated me most of all. A governor should know better. Unless it’s his intent to obfuscate.

Among his many problem comments was this gem, “Right now, the only focus in college sports is a loyalty to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill, rather than the loyalty to the teammates and to the coaches and to the programs. But I didn’t get to write those rules — I had to play by those particular rules. And the only way to get Lane Kiffin was to do what we did. I didn’t like it. I don’t think it was fair to his players. It wasn’t fair to him, but hell… Again, Congress needs to get off their tail and fix this thing.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. I addressed the issue of “greed” in my post which Landry, an attorney, should have some grasp of. He also invokes the old trope of “loyalty” which doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t a two-way street. Then he says he didn’t write the rules, but there are no rules and that’s the problem. The NCAA cannot enforce rules limiting or prohibiting an athlete’s opportunity to earn money at the school of his choice because they are not exempt from antitrust law. And there were certainly other hiring timelines for Kiffin but they would have come at the expense of LSU so the “we had no choice” excuse is invoked since principles aren’t a real thing anyway. Finally, Landry caps it all off with “Congress needs to get off their tail and fix this thing.” The NCAA could “fix this thing” right now if it wanted to. Congress wouldn’t have to do a thing. All the NCAA would have to do is reorganize into enough divisions that strict rules could apply for each division and each division only. That would probably get them the antitrust exemption they need to enforce regulations. But as it has been 12 years since the NCAA has known that and has done nothing. I doubt the NCAA has any desire to “fix this thing.” But Congress getting involved is “a” solution, certainly not the best or even a desired solution. Once something becomes “the law” then you are bound by it. I distrust Congress to make a law that binds college athletics and won’t have some unintended and negative consequence. Personally, I believe breaking away from the NCAA is the only workable solution but I understand that’s both controversial and debatable.

Landry isn’t alone in his ignorance of the problem, on college athletics or any number of other issues. Nor I suppose is it surprising someone out of their depth would nevertheless be elected to higher office. But it is still disappointing when the governor of your state insists on getting involved with your favorite teams, because he can, even though he can’t be bothered to understand the current issues. It’s bad enough Landry is hiring and firing coaches and administrators without also contributing to the misinformation running rampant concerning college athletics.

But maybe it’s just a sign of the times. This isn’t just a problem with the current state of college athletics. Misinformation and the willingness to believe it – and repeat it – is running rampant everywhere. Nothing can be taken at face value anymore. Knowing the facts requires a little more effort than turning on the evening news. If you or I won’t put in the effort that’s lazy. But when leaders won’t put in the effort that’s dangerous. We should all pay more attention to the danger of intellectual laziness in the people we elect.

The full text of Duncan’s interview with Landry can be found here:

The late comedian Brother Dave Gardner once said (in jest, it’s presumed), “If a man’s down, kick him. If he survives it, he has a chance to rise above it.”

A corollary to that might be the expression no good deed goes unpunished.

And you couldn’t blame Calvin Duncan if he felt a little put upon about now.

Calvin Duncan is one of those featured in my book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana.

You see, Duncan was convicted in January 1985 of the first-degree murder of David Yeager during an armed robbery more than three years earlier.

The only thing was, he was innocent. Then Assistant District Attorney (later the Orleans Parish district attorney) Leon Cannizzaro suppressed exculpatory evidence (even lied about it), a hostile judge erected obstacles for Duncan’s defense counsel, refusing Duncan permission to examine a supplemental report by an Oregon police officer who’d outright lied to Duncan during questioning following his arrest in that state and six months later pled guilty himself to illegal wiretapping.

On Feb. 2, 1984, assistant prosecutor Bruce Whittaker wrote that there were problems with the Duncan case. He recommended that prosecutors attempt to cut a deal and convince Duncan to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Despite the doubts and because of the withholding of evidence that would’ve proved helpful to him, he was convicted of first-degree murder.

It wasn’t until January 2011, after spending nearly 30 years in prison for a crime he never committed, he was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and attempted armed robbery in order to gain his release for time served. That’s called an Alford, or “best interest” plea and is nothing more than a process by which to protect prosecutors from legal liability because an exonerated defendant is not eligible to collect damages unless he is granted a full declaration of innocence.

But Duncan was that rare individual who, even though incarcerated, worked to better himself and finally, in 2018, he graduated from Tulane University. He then continued with his education, attending the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.

But there was a hitch. Because of his conviction, he was not allowed to be admitted to the bar after his graduation from law school. Another hitch, this one in his favor: he had been convicted by a non-unanimous vote of the jury. After finally obtaining his freedom and a law degree, he began the fight to clear his name and to help Louisiana become one of the last state abolish non-unanimous jury decisions (Oregon was the only other one that recognized non-unanimous verdicts).

He, along with Southern University law professor Angela A. Allen Bell, played a critical role in assisting attorneys to gather evidence and frame arguments for a challenge to Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous juries. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 barred such verdicts.

So, armed with an exoneration for having lost three decades of his life and with a law degree in hand, he launched the next phase of his life: he ran for and was elected to the office of clerk of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court, vowing to reform the justice system, using his own experience as the basis for his efforts.

He won that race last November with an astounded 68 percent of the vote.

Then came the Louisiana Repugnantcan Party to RIP AWAY any vestige of decency and human kindness, characteristics for which the party, on both the state and national level, is becoming infamous for its dearth.

The Louisiana State Senate on Wednesday VOTED 25-11, with three members taking a walk, to  pass Senate Bill 258 by State Sen. Jay Morris (R-West Monroe), which has the effect of ripping from Duncan his duly-elected office by abolishing the office as part of a proposed streamlining of the New Orleans judiciary.

(It’s somewhat curious as to what a legislator from West Monroe would know about the New Orleans courts, some 300 miles away.)

The senate even defeated an AMENDMENT by Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans) by a nearly identical vote (24-12) that would have allowed Duncan to serve his term. You can see that vote HERE.

No one is saying the Orleans judiciary couldn’t use some restructuring, but it’s not just in Orleans Parish. Several stories have been posted by LouisianaVoice about judicial misconduct in Monroe, Shreveport, Alexandria, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Covington and Houma, as well as Orleans, and ineptness and corruption literally abound in district attorney offices throughout the state so, to home in on Orleans to the exclusion of every other judicial district in the state is disingenuous at best and outright deceptive at worst.

Duncan hasn’t even been sworn in yet. That ceremony is scheduled for May 4 but the Repugnantcan establishment in Louisiana just could not wait to extract their pound of flesh.

Duncan might be excused for believing that he’s being retaliated against by state officials who having long denied his innocence, are somewhat pissed at being shown the error of their ways.

Repugnantcans sniff that it isn’t personal and that the move is simply a step toward government efficiency.

Seems like we’ve heard that somewhere before—and it didn’t turn out too well then, either.

Gov. Squeaky Toy Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, aka Hand Puppet, point to Duncan’s having accepted the 2011 plea deal for manslaughter and armed robbery as if any man alive would not grasp at a straw like an Alford Plea that might free him after three decades in prison. Given only the choice of remaining in prison for the rest of your life or walking free in exchange for pleading guilty to a lesser charge, it’s a no-brainer.

“The Attorney General made it clear during the election that if I continued to accurately speak about my innocence and exoneration that I would face consequences from her office,” Duncan told The Associated Press. “We are seeing those consequences today.”

Such is the Repugnantcan take on freedom of speech.

Please don’t take this as badgering or begging, because the last thing I want is to appear like some despicable televangelist trying to convince viewers that he/she will receive a blessing for sending their last dime to him. That’s just morally wrong.

But what I will do is simply remind you that our Spring fundraiser is in process and IF YOU CAN DO SO, your contribution to dedicated journalism would be appreciated. I’m fully aware there are other concerns far more deserving of your assistance than I. (Your local food pantry comes to mind. So do other charities.) But if it’s feasible and practicable in the wake of skyrocketing prices on everything, any contribtution would held and would be so much appreciated.

And anyone contributing $50 or more will receive a signed copy of my upcoming book, The Dinosaur Club–a historical novel about a group of retired newspaper reporters to undertake one last assignment to take down a child sex trafficking operation. In addition to the book’s fictional plot, it also contains many, many actual facts about child sex trafficking by churcn and religious leaders, police, judges, foster homes and politicians. At any given time, there are as many as 600,000 children being trafficked worldwide, not only for sexual purposes, but for labor, drug smuggling and other activities. And one of the main arteries for child sex trafficking in the U.S. is the I-10 corridor between New Orleans and Houston.

Click on the yellow “KEEP US INDEPENDENT” icon to the right of this post and follow the instructions to make a ONE-TIME payment by credit card.

You would think that with all the nut cases running around out there, a person would think twice before making an overt threat against a school.

But you’d be vastly overrating the intelligence of those ass-hats who are prone to put mouths in motion before having their minds in gear.

Some idiot forced a lockdown at Live Oak High School this morning because (apparently) he had nothing better to do than to shoot off his mouth by threatening to come onto campus—though thankfully, it appears it was an empty threat.

Nevertheless, it forced the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office and the school to take the threat seriously and to put the school into lockdown.

“Out of an abundance of caution, the LOHS campus is on lockdown,” a blast text to parents said. “All students are safe and in a classroom. Parents will be notified when the lockdown has been lifted,” the text said.

A follow-up text said, “We are continuing in lockdown while the LPSO (Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office) conducts a full sweep. There is NO evidence of a credible threat but we continue to take it very seriously…All students continue to be safe and locked down in classrooms.”

I’m at a loss to try and understand the mentality of some ass-clown doing this. Whether credible or not, this is indicative of some troglodyte mindset, an action of some mentally deranged individual who apparently believes the world revolves around him.

But I have a news flash for this person: You are not important enough nor are you even remotely entitled to disrupt an entire school over your petty grievance, whatever it might be.