Louisiana Voice

I suppose it takes some real brass to publish this on the heels of the post immediately below this one but LouisianaVoice is in the final three days of its Spring fundraising push and like most everyone else, we’re feeling the sting of inflation.

It costs more to run up and down the state in pursuit of interviews, records, documents and evidence to validate what we write. It costs more for gasoline, for Whopper meals, for the records themselves and for various other incidentals that make our work possible.

So, please, if–and only IF–you can see yourself able to do so, any contribution you could make to support our efforts to bring you the stories behind the stories is appreciated more than you know.

I’m not going to make a belabored pitch. Instead, I will just ask that you go to this link, scroll down and click on the yellow retangular “KEEP US INDEPENDENT” button and follow the directions to make a ONE-TIME contribution. Those contributing $50 or more will received a signed copy of my newest book, The Dinosaur Club.

Thank you for the years of support.

Remember a couple of weeks back when I wrote about how the so-called Christian, family-values Repugnantcan party had kicked working Louisianans in the teeth by REFUSING TO INCREASE the minimum wage?

Remember how I pointed out that 2009 was the year the minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour and has not budged a cent since then in Louisiana?

Remember how Rep. Roger William Wilder III (R-Denham Springs) bellyached about how increasing the minimum wage would create an undesired ripple effect?

Wellll, by golly, that ripple effect didn’t seem to matter too much to the Committee on House and Governmental Affairs which voted unanimously to report HOUSE BILL 1201 favorably.

HB 1201, by Rep. John R. “Big John” Illg, Jr. (R-Harahan), awards state elected officials with HEFTY PAY RAISES, including a whopping 40 percent bump for the governor while other statewide officials (lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, insurance and agricultural commissioners and state treasurer) would get increases of 35.7 percent. College and university presidents would get 35 percent increases.

Rep. John R. “Big John” Illg, Jr.

All those, I would remind you, come on the heels of a refusal to even allow an increase in the minimum wage to get out of committee. Dead on arrival.

Now, you certainly don’t need me to remind you that’s just not a good look. You don’t need me to remind you that you’re hurting right now. You are already reminded every time you fill up at the gas pump, pay a utility bill, buy weekly groceries—not to mention other incidentals like car repairs, college tuition, clothing, housing—you know: the little things we need to survive.

Now, imagine you don’t make your current salary but instead, are trying to get by on $7.25 an hour…

Thom Hartmann, a political writer on a much larger stage than mine, posed a question to his national audience some 20 years ago. The question was this:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, he said in a column published today (April 28), “nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.”

Meanwhile, he says, “Since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.”

When Hartman posed the seemingly rhetorical question of why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years, he provided several reasons:

• Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies
• Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street
• Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers
• Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers
• Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations
• Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA
• Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations

“Until we get big money out of politics and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors,” he concluded, “the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly-owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself—except to simply add the Repugnantcans don’t give a damn about working Americans and that’s the unvarnished truth of the matter.

A big hoo-ha was made by Louisiana State Police last week over the arrest of four men in Covington for the MURDER  of a 16-year-old St. Tammany girl near the parish fairgrounds 44 years ago.

And certainly, law enforcement is to be commended for the apparent solving of the 1982 rape and murder of Roxanne Sharp. Cold cases are, after all, difficult to work as evidence gets packed away in boxes and forgotten until some enterprising detective reopens the case.

But a murder of another teenage girl in north Louisiana occurred a year earlier than that of Roxanne’s and it remains unsolved with little prospects of obtaining justice for the victim or her family.

Could it be because Roxanne came from an upscale community and Carol Ann Cole was a runaway from a girls’ home in Arcadia in Bienville Parish where “troubled” girls were sent by parents to get them right with Jesus but instead found themselves banished to lives of living hell at the hands of a fundamentalist preacher who meted out beatings and is alleged to have sexually molested some of the residents?

New Bethany was the subject of several posts by LouisianaVoice and stories told by survivors of the home related horrendous treatment at the hands of Rev. Mack Ford and staff members.

Survivors told of being banished to Ford’s “LTI,” a darkened room where girls were handcuffed to beds, given only a bucket for a toilet, allowed only two or three squares of toilet paper, fed only minimally and forced to listen to tapes of Ford full gospel sermons that played on a loop 24/7. Beatings were routine, some said, with one girl having been administered more than 100 licks with a board paddle.

Because Ford invoked the separation of church and state, authorities took a hands-off approach to oversight of the home before it was finally shut down in 2001.

On Jan. 28, 1981, the body of a female estimated at between 15 and 20 years of age was found in Bossier Parish, two parishes west of Bienville, a distance of about 50 miles or so.

Linda Phelps, living in Michigan, fearing her sister may have met with foul play after she ran away from New Bethany Home for Girls, filed a missing person report when Carol Ann’s letters to her family stopped in late December.

Police learned that Carol, who was staying at a Shreveport residence at the time, had left to attend a party but never returned.

Phelps suspected that the victim might be her sister, who she believed spent time at New Bethany between October 1980 and sometime prior to her death. She said a photo taken at New Bethany around the time of her sister’s disappearance depicted a group of girls seated in church pews (there was a small church in the New Bethany compound). One of the girls bore a strong resemblance to Carol, Phelps said.

Moreover, another women who said she also spent time at New Bethany with a girl who looked like Carol but she was unable to recall her name.

The victim was wearing jeans, a shite, long-sleeved shirt with pink, yellow and blue stripes, a beige sweater with a hood, white socks, shoes and white boxer briefs. She had been stabbed nine times and a knife found in the soil near her remains was believed to have been the murder weapon.

Most of the evidence recovered from the scene, however, was destroyed in a 2005 fire in the facility in which it was stored.

That raises the question of why was the evidence allowed to remain unexamined for DNA for 24 years before fire struck?

DNA technology hadn’t come into play in investigations during much of the time, true enough. But by 2005, it certainly had. Yet, the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office had not pursued that evidence.

At any rate, a decade later, in February 2015, the sheriff’s department finally got around to opening a Facebook page in an effort to learn the victim’s identity. An artist’s drawing and a profile alerted a woman who notified authorities that she had seen a Craigslist photo of Carol Ann that had been posted by a friend of Phelps.

Comparisons were made between the victim’s DNA and that of her parents and it was positively determined that the victim who had been known only as “Bossier Doe” was Carol Ann Cole.

No arrests have been made 45 years after her murder. Ford died in February 2015.

You remember the saga of the F-bomb hurling school board member?

You should. It’s been less than a week since LouisianaVoice reported on St. Tammany Parish School Board member CHARLES HARRELL muttering “Go f**k yourselves” into a hot mic following a board vote last week that extended the collective bargaining agreement with employees that resulted in the crowd erupting in applause.

Well, the upshot of that little display of petulance has resulted in an official call for a special meeting of the board tomorrow (Tuesday) at 6 p.m. to consider a resolution of censure “pertaining to school board member District 5.”

As you may or may not know, there is only one District 5 school board member: Charles Harrell.

The meeting is to consider CENSURING Harrell for his outburst and the proceedings may be seen live on STPPS, the St. Tammany Parish Public School online feed.

The numbers vary, but the core facts remain the same.

The State of Louisiana, through the University of Louisiana Board and Louisiana Tech University are concealing the expenditure of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds in order to finalize a settlement between Tech and Conference USA, a settlement which clears the way for Tech to exit CUSA and move into the Sun Belt Conference.

Front Office Sports online news service puts the fee for departing CUSA after 13 years north of the $8 MILLION that UTEP paid CUSA in order to leave for the Mountain West Conference.

The numbers are confusing because CUSA first said it should cost as much as $5.5 MILLION to leave early and Tech opened the bidding at a lower amount.

Of course, the numbers would be crystal clear if the agreement had not contained the dreaded NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that shrouds the final dollar amount in secrecy.

It’s the explosion of confidential settlements that concerns me. This is taxpayer money that’s being bandied about as a bargaining chip in this comedic custody battle.

Want to know why it’s laughable? Get this official statement released by Tech: “The move to the Sun Belt Conference in July is one that will benefit the health and well-being of our student athletes, the fiscal stability of our athletics department and the economic vitality of our entire region.”

Really? A multi-million-dollar payout to jump from one conference to return one you were a member of a few years back and left for the Western Athletic Conference is going to somehow contribute to better health for student athletes? Or their well-being? Is that some sort of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. MAHA gimmick?

If you sincerely have their health and well-being in mind, you might consider backing off on scheduling the big boys who routinely beat your players’ brains out. You’re just not ready for the SEC or the Big Ten or ACC level of play. I love Tech, but hey, I’m a realist. I know you do it for the bucks and not the glory, the athletes be damned.

As for the fiscal stability and economic vitality, I pretty much covered those in the previous paragraph. Actually, the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

And with the exception of maybe one or two well-heeled alumni (I’m a Tech alumnus, but not a wealthy one), there is no TAF from which to draw a seemingly endless pool of cash to lavish on coach buyouts. Any major expenditure of $8 or $5.5 million—or whatever—is taxpayer money and the school should be held accountable for any such expenditure.

Yeah, I know, Tech is claiming the move will save millions in travel expenses. But it didn’t seem to mind shelling out travel expenses when it jumped from the Sun Belt to the WAC where it had to play games in Nevada, Idaho, California and Hawaii. That took a pretty good chunk of change and Tech made that move without batting an eye, as I recall.

LouisianaVoice REPORTED LAST MONTH that litigation had been initiated over the proposed move. That was after both CUSA and Sun Belt released football schedules for 2026 and both had Tech playing a full slate of games—more than two dozen combined. That would be enough to wear just about any team down.

But signing onto multi-million-dollar confidential settlements is enough to wear down the tax-paying citizens of Louisiana.

And of course, there are the God-know-how-much in attorney fees spent on flinging motions, countermotions, requests for information, interrogatories, denials, depositions—all of which eventually led to negotiations and maybe mediation before agreeing in principle to in all likelihood, a predetermined outcome.