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Difference in Jindal’s 2012 retirement ‘reform’ and these retirement gigs brings double standard into sharp focus

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Boards, Civil Service, Congress, GOHSEP, Governor's Office, Health Care, House, Senate, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, Transparency on August 10, 2013| 13 Comments »

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—You may recall Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ill-fated retirement “reform” bills of 2012, all written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and introduced individually by Jindal’s lackeys in the House and Senate.

An example of how those “reforms” would have worked if passed can be found in the case of a single state employee whom we know but who is representative of thousands of state civil service workers.

In her case, she was (and still is, given that no civil service pay raises have been approved for five years now) making $52,000 per year and had 20 years’ service in 2012 (21 now). Her plan was to put in 30 years and retire. At her current pay, with no pay raises for the remainder of her career (which appears more likely with each year of the Jindal administration), she would retire at $39,000 per year. With inflation and no raises taken into account, $39,000 a year won’t go very far.

Had Jindal’s “reforms” passed, however, her annual retirement would have been reduced to $6,000 per year—a $33,000 per-year hit. And state employees do not pay into nor do they receive Social Security benefits. Six thousand dollars per year for 30 years’ service. Period.

And she was not an anomaly; stories like this would have been the case throughout state government.

Jindal claimed his retirement package was aimed at restoring the various state retirement systems to some semblance of stability by reducing the unfunded liabilities. But rather than continue to pay the state’s share of contributions to the systems those payments were actually reduced.

The bottom line is Jindal has complete and total disdain for the plight of those in the trenches—the ones who actually make state government work by showing up for work each day (which is certainly more than he does, given his extensive travel itinerary) and listening to the complaints of hostile citizens who don’t understand why they have so much difficulty getting the services they need—from road repairs to college and university infrastructure repair to services for the developmentally disabled where the waiting list is 10,000 persons—and growing. http://theadvocate.com/news/6739937-123/la-officials-try-to-shrink

And he’s made their job much harder by laying off rank and file employees while fattening the unclassified (appointed, non-civil service) payroll.

At the same time, he has been careful to take care of favored legislators with six-figure, do-nothing jobs which serve only to beef up their retirement benefits, some by more than tenfold.

LouisianaVoice, with the information available, did a before and after calculation of retirement benefits for several of those washed up legislators and local politicians. All calculations were based on the assumption they will remain in their new lofty positions at least three years. Here is what we found:

  • Former Rep. Jane Smith, by virtue of her appointment by Jindal to Deputy Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue at a yearly salary of $107,500, saw her retirement benefits climb from a modest $6,700 a year to $56,400 annually.
  • Former Rep. Kay Katz, appointed to the Louisiana Tax Commission at a $56,000 yearly salary will go from $6,700 per year to $29,400 a year in retirement benefits.
  • Troy Hebert who left the House to assume directorship of the State Alcohol and Tobacco Control Board, went from $4,500 to $37,500.
  • Lane Carson, who recently retired as Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Veterans Affairs at $130,000 after five years on the job will retire at nearly $64,000 instead of about $7,500 on the basis of his service in the legislature.
  • Former St. Tammany Parish President and now Director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) at $165,000 and former St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro, now the $150,000 Director of Hazard Mitigation and Recovery are only guesses. Because we are unsure of their previous salaries or their tenure in office, we have arbitrarily given them 15-year tenures (including their current positions) which put their retirement at $85,000 and $75,000, respectively—estimates both.
  • Former State Sen. Robert Barham saw his modest $7,500 legislative retirement balloon to $84,500 on the basis of his $124,000-a-year position as Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Wildlife and Fisheries.
  • We already wrote about Congressman Rodney Alexander who is leaving Congress to accept Lane Carson’s former position as Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Veterans Affairs at $130,000, a comfortable position that will boost his retirement from 15 years in the Louisiana Legislature prior to his election to Congress from $7,500 to $83,500.
  • But the grand prize goes to former State Rep. Noble Ellington. His 16 years in the House earned him a pension of about $8,900 but his hiring by Commissioner of Insurance Jim Donelon (at the behest of Jindal—his fingerprints are all over this appointment) as Deputy Commissioner of Insurance brought his retirement to almost $100,000 ($99,750).

Smith, Katz, Hebert, Carson, Barham, Alexander and Ellington qualify or will qualify for a combined retirement of more than $455,000 per year—an increase of $395,700 (667 percent) over their pre-Jindal appointment collective annual legislative retirement incomes of $59,300.

Now we harken back to Jindal’s aborted retirement “reform” which would have reduced our friend’s retirement from $39,000 to $6,000. On contrasting the two scenarios, one must ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

What is wrong is we have a governor who is just as slick and oily with the filthy ooze of dirty politics as any governor in the history of this state—while cloaking himself in the mantel of righteousness.

What is wrong is we have a governor who knows how to enrich his friends and stick it to everyone else—while pretending to act in the best interests of the state.

What is wrong is that we have a governor who entered Congress in January of 2005 as a man of modest means but emerged three years later as governor a multi-millionaire—and no one has asked how that happened.

What is wrong is that we have a governor who has demonstrated repeatedly that he has no compassion for the sick, the elderly, the developmentally disadvantaged, the mentally ill, state workers—and certainly not Louisiana citizens in general.

And what is wrong is we have a governor who does all that while hiding behind a façade of honesty, integrity, transparency and a “gold standard” of governmental ethics.

And now that same governor is attempting to call the shots in the election to fill the unexpired term of Rodney Alexander by promoting his puppet State Sen. Neil Riser (R-Columbia) for Congress. He did this by manipulating (a) the timing of Alexander’s retirement, (b) his immediate offer of a cushy job to Alexander, (c) turning over former Chief of Staff Timmy Teepell and chief fundraiser Allie Bautsch to work on Riser’s behalf, and (d) sewing up endorsements from State Sen. Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe) and a host of Louisiana Republic congressmen, including former Payday Loan magnate John Fleming of Minden.

We in Louisiana are used to being conned by crooked politicians but they did it with so much more class than Jindal and his gaggle of sycophants.

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Jindal mainstays Teepell, Bautsch said to be going to work on behalf of State Sen. Neil Riser’s Congressional campaign

Posted in Congress, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Uncategorized on August 9, 2013| 12 Comments »

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—The word out of Baton Rouge is that OnMessage, the political consulting out of Alexandria, VA., that made Timmy Teepell head of its newly established Southern office, is a little disenchanted with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s alter-ego.

Teepell was hired after Jindal won his re-election in 2011 to drum up business for OnMessage and he immediately signed up Congressman Bill Cassidy who subsequently fired Teepell before paying him or OnMessage a dime.

Teepell was supposed to be the Grover Norquist of Louisiana—able to get his candidates to leap tall political polls in a single bound and to attract money like vultures to a rotten meat wagon (a somehow appropriate analogy).

But something no one counted on occurred: Jindal’s poll numbers tanked and suddenly Teepell couldn’t scare up any bidness for the partners back in Virginia and things began to get a little testy.

Of course it’s difficult to be a rainmaker when you spend all your time on the fourth floor of the Capitol, controlling Jindal’s every move and mood.

Coinciding with the rumored parting of the ways in the future between Teepell and OnMessage is the Rodney Alexander exit from Congress. Enter State Sen. Neil Riser in one of the most transparently-orchestrated political moves in recent history. Oh, sure, spokespersons for both Alexander and Riser (and Jindal, for that matter—if one could ever pen them down long enough to get them off Twitter) will deny that the fix was in but, c’mon, we may have been born at night but it wasn’t last night.

Of course Alexander had to have something to fall back on; he couldn’t be expected to make it on his congressional pension and social security.

The fact that Jindal was waiting in the wings to offer Alexander that $130,000-a-year job as Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Veterans Affairs that could bump his state retirement from about $7,900 to $81,900 per year was just a little too coincidental. Our friends at another blog, The Daily Kingfish, pointed out that the skids had been greased some time ago by State Sen. Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe) and Alexander’s fellow Congressman John Fleming. (Walsworth, you might remember, was the one who asked a teacher during a committee hearing if her class was growing humans from cultures in her science lab.)

Now, word is, both Teepell and Jindal’s chief fundraiser, Alexandra “Allie” Bautsch, will be working on Riser’s behalf for the next couple of months until the election—but for her firm The Bautsch Group (which is still in good standing with the Secretary of State) and not OnMessage. That should sound the death knell for the Teepell-OnMessage partnership. You can probably expect the announcement of their transfer to Riser’s campaign any Friday now. Jindal prefers making those kinds of announcements late on Fridays so as not to attract too much media attention.

Bautsch at one time held the dual role of chief fundraiser for Jindal and treasurer of the Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children.

She apparently is more proficient at fund-raising than Teepell is at attracting new clients. Since Jindal’s re-election, she has pulled in more than $1.2 million—and this for a lame-duck governor who insists he has no aspirations to higher office.

Of course, Jindal could, if he wishes to do so, pour much of that money into the campaign of a preferred candidate—like Riser.

So, with the Jindal crowd actively working on behalf of Riser, better known for his whack-o gun rights bills than anything else he’s ever done in Baton Rouge (a conflict of interest, we might add, given that he runs a couple of funeral homes), it would appear that he might be a shoo-in for the position, right?

Maybe not.

There is also word that Monroe’s Harris Brown might challenge Riser. The former President of the Tensas Basin Levee District, Brown is a capable politician who has—and can raise—money, is likable and who knows his way around well enough to be a viable opponent

There are other potential candidates as well—one, Louisiana Tech alumnus Adam Terry, who would have the important backing of Ruston’s James Davison who is a former Jindal ally but who became disenchanted when the governor stopped taking his phone calls.

Terry is Alexander’s chief of staff, so he ran and won, he would enter office already knowing the important contacts inside the Beltway.

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Never let anyone say Gov. Jindal isn’t green; no one is better at recycling old politicians into cushy retirement positions

Posted in ATC, Congress, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Politicians, State Agencies on August 8, 2013| 19 Comments »

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—Gov. Bobby Jindal is green and we can prove it.

He must have the welfare of the environment uppermost in his mind. He is all about recycling. The man was born to recycle. Just examine this list:

  • He recycled defeated State Rep. Jane Smith to Deputy Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue at $107,500.
  • He recycled former State Rep. Kay Katz to the Louisiana Tax Commission ($56,000).
  • He recycled former St. Tammany Parish President and defeated lieutenant governor candidate Kevin Davis to Director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness ($165,000).
  • He recycled former Slidell police chief and mayor Ben Morris into a position at GOHSEP (unknown salary).
  • He recycled former House members Rickey Hardy, Tank Powell and Mert Smiley and former Grant Parish Sheriff Leonard Hataway to the State Pardon Board ($36,000 each).
  • He recycled former State Rep. Noble Ellington to Deputy Commissioner of Insurance ($150,000).
  • He recycled defeated St. Barnard Parish President Craig Taffaro as the new Director of Hazard Mitigation and Recovery ($150,000).
  • He recycled term-limited State Rep. Troy Hebert as Director of the Alcohol and Tobacco Control Board ($107,000).
  • He recycled former State Sen. Nick Gautreaux to Commissioner of the Office of Motor Vehicles (no salary available, but it doesn’t matter; he was forced out after a few months).
  • He has recycled former executive counselors Tim Barfield and Jimmy Fairchild more times than we can count and Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols has been recycled a few times in her own right.
  • He recycled former State Rep. Lane Carson to Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs ($130,000).
  • And now that Carson is retiring after four years on the job, we get word that Jindal is recycling Congressman Rodney Alexander to fill Carson’s post.

No sooner did Alexander announce on Wednesday that he was retiring from Congress because of his stated dissatisfaction with partisan gridlock than Jindal made the offer.

Major League Baseball’s managerial revolving door has nothing on Jindal when it comes to running the same tired old names through the system, allowing them to fatten their retirements even as Jindal is laying off state employees who need their jobs—and who actually perform work as opposed to these appointees who only occupy a desk and suck on the public teat.

It just seems to us that there are others out there who are equally—or more—qualified for these positions and it gets more disgusting with each appointment of the same fat cats to these six-figure jobs.

Of course, we know the underlying reason for recycling all these washed-up legislators: it’s to bump up their retirement benefits—at the expense of you, the taxpayer.

You see, legislators don’t really make that much in outright salary, so their retirement benefits aren’t that much—unless they can secure a six-figure job and remain in it for three years. Retirement is computed at 2.5 percent of one’s highest three years of average earnings times the number of years of service. Thus, 2.5 percent of $130,000 is considerably more than 2.5 percent of $16,000 or so.

Now with Alexander, it’s different: he already has a federal pension from his tenure as a congressman. But now, even though he cashed in his legislative retirement from his days in the legislature, he can buy all that time back and draw a state pension based on his $130,000 salary for the final three years of Jindal’s administration.

Nice gig if you happen to have the stroke to get it and of course there’s nothing like being governor and having the power to screw the taxpayers while running around preaching fiscal responsibility and laying off state workers.

Granted, we are a bit jaded and cynical from covering this administration, but if someone can convince me that fix wasn’t already in on this retirement/appointment, we’re willing to listen.

We can’t help but wonder what Alexander’s duties will entail, duties that someone else was not qualified to perform—especially since Jindal already gave out all those veterans’ medals before his 2011 re-election.

Thanks, Bobby and thanks, Rodney, for all that “good, ethical government.”

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Congress, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, Taxes on January 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

“I don’t think we have politicians with the guts to ask ’em to pay their fair share. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to the oil companies. We don’t have a congressman who’ll do it. Mary Landrieu won’t do it. David Vitter is Joined at the hip with them. He absolutely won’t do it. You haven’t heard Mr. Jindal say one word about Exxon paying its fair share and you won’t because he’s in their back pocket.”

—Louisiana Public Service Commission Chairman Foster Campbell during an interview on Jim Engster’s show on Baton Rouge public radio station WRKF on Tuesday. Campbell called Jindal’s proposed 3 cent state sales tax increase a bad idea that “won’t work,” and instead, called for a 3 percent processing fee on oil and gas, a move he said would generate $3 billion per year for the state.

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π-yush’s alter-ego Timmy Teepell denies knowlege of ALEC agenda while Foster Campbell rips his boss for tax proposals

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Budget, Campaign Contributions, Congress, Economy, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Lobbyist, Politicians, Revenue, Taxes, Vitter on January 23, 2013| 3 Comments »

Last March, Piyush Jindal’s alter-ego Timmy Teepell (or would it be the other way around?) was a guest on the Jim Engster’s Show on Baton Rouge’s public radio station WRKF and in the course of that interview he denied any knowledge of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) agenda.

Another guest on Engster’s show, Public Service Commission Chairman Foster Campbell, this week took Jindal, the legislature and the entire Louisiana congressional delegation to task for not displaying sufficient backbone to back Jindal down on his proposals to eliminate the personal and corporate income taxes in favor of a 3 cent state sales tax increase.

Campbell instead called for the passage of a 3 percent processing tax on oil and gas which he said would generate $3 billion a year “and let the people who can afford a tax pay it.”

When one reads ALEC’s 5th anniversary edition of Rich States, Poor States http://www.alec.org/publications/rich-states-poor-states/, one has to wonder at the veracity of Teepell’s claim. The annual report devotes 15 of its 125 pages to demonstrating how bad personal income taxes for states’ economies—and that’s before it even gets to the five-page chapter entitled Policy #1: The Personal Income Tax.

Even after that chapter, state personal income taxes are mentioned at least once on 64 of the next 75 pages.

Likewise, corporate income taxes are also discussed on 10 separate pages before Policy #2: The Corporate Income Tax, another five-page chapter. Corporate income taxes are then mentioned on 56 of the remaining 80 pages.

As if that were not enough, Rich States, Poor States also zeroes in on its favorite tax, the sales tax. “We find that sales taxes have a neutral effect on state economies and therefore are a far preferable means for a state to raise needed revenue,” it said in the first paragraph of Policy #3, entitled (you guessed it) The Sales Tax.

In all, sales taxes are invoked on no fewer than 74 of the 125-page report which boasts that ALEC’s tax and fiscal policy is “to prioritize government spending, to lower the overall tax burden, to enhance transparency of government operations, and to develop sound, free-market tax and fiscal policy.”

And Teepell is unaware of this agenda. Really?

“When policymakers choose the levels and types of taxes for their state, they must confront not only the possible effects on the state economy, but the volatility of tax receipts as well,” the report says. “When tax receipts are volatile, that usually means an abnormally large shortfall of revenues when times are tough and spending needs are the greatest.”

Incredibly, the report claims that revenue generated from sales taxes “is the least affected by the boom and bust cycle—in fact, sales tax revenue changes only half as much as revenue from personal and corporate income taxes do.

“Not only does the sales tax do less to inhibit growth, it is a steady revenue source even during a recession,” says the report.

Then, ripping a page right of the Milton Friedman playbook, the report says, “Progressive corporate and personal income taxes do far more damage to the economy than do other taxes such as sales taxes, property taxes and severance taxes. In addition, they (income taxes) are substantially less reliable than those other taxes. How’s that for sound tax policy?”

Well, certainly inflicting a regressive sales tax on Louisiana’s poor is considerably more reliable than corporate income taxes when one considers all the tax breaks, exemptions and rebates this administration hands out to the tune of about $5 billion a year to corporate contributors.

But to address the sophomoric question, “How’s that for sound tax policy?” we turn to another publication entitled Selling Snake Oil to the States: The American Legislative Exchange Council’s Flawed Prescriptions for Prosperity.

A joint publication of Good Jobs First and The Iowa Policy Project, The November Snake Oil report takes ALEC to task for its Rich States, Poor States publication which, as might be expected, is heavily weighted in favor of its corporate membership.

“We conclude that the evidence cited to support Rich States, Poor States’ policy menu ranges from deeply flawed to non-existent,” Snake Oil says. “Subjected to scrutiny, these policies are revealed to explain nothing about why some states have created more jobs or enjoyed higher income growth than others over the past five years.

“In actuality, Rich States, Poor States provides a recipe for economic inequality, wage suppression and stagnant incomes and for depriving state and local governments of the revenue needed to maintain the public infrastructure and education systems that are true foundations of long term economic growth and shared prosperity,” it said.

The Snake Oil report said that results actually reflect just the opposite of the ALEC claims. “The more a state’s policies mirrored the ALEC low-tax/regressive taxation/limited government agenda, the lower the median family income; this is true for every year from 2007 through 2011.”

Jindal was elected in 2007 and took office in 2008 and his policies, Teepell’s denial notwithstanding, have certainly mirrored the ALEC low-tax/regressive taxation/limited government agenda and the state’s infrastructure and education systems just as certainly have suffered under staggering budgetary cuts.

Louisiana’s average median household income of $42,423 for 2010 was the nation’s 10th lowest and 29 percent of Louisiana’s children live in poverty, second only to Mississippi’s 32 percent.

The state’s working poor already pay little or no income tax, so elimination of the state income tax would have no effect on them. A sales tax increase, however, would hit the poor the hardest because they would be paying the same taxes on diapers, clothing, cars, gasoline, appliances and automobiles as the wealthy. Accordingly, they would be paying a much larger percentage of their income in sales taxes than higher income families.

Campbell, a former state senator and an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 2007, was elected chairman of the Public Service Commission last year.

Accustomed to being a political lightning rod for his candor, Campbell was in rare form on Engster’s show on Tuesday, saying that Jindal typically works for the benefit of big companies and corporations. “He’ll do anything he can to help those at the top end of the income bracket.”

Appearing to consciously avoid referring to Jindal as governor, he said, “Mr. Jindal knows the solution. When I ran for governor, I wanted to get rid of the income tax which I still think we ought to do. Progressive states like Florida and Tennessee don’t have state income taxes and neither does Texas. They seem to be doing better than us. But you have to replace it with something and Mr. Jindal knows what to replace it with but you couldn’t get him close to it.

“Mr. Jindal wouldn’t touch the oil companies and that’s where to get the money. We just need some politicians with some plain old-fashioned guts to ask ‘em to pay their fair share. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to the oil companies. We don’t have a congressman who’ll do it. Mary Landrieu won’t do it. David Vitter is joined at the hip with them and he absolutely won’t do it.

“Mr. Jindal would run out of the Capitol screaming if you asked him to touch Exxon with a tax,” Campbell said.

Campbell, a Democrat, then heaped praise on Louisiana’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

“The most honest governor by far, who tried to do the right thing, was Dave Treen. When he ran against Louis Lambert (in 1979), business and industry supported him but when he went after the oil companies, they all turned on him and put Edwards back in,” he said.

“He was absolutely right when he had the Coastal Wetlands Environmental Levy (CWEL) and he wanted some kind of fee from the oil companies for tearing up our coast.

“I like oil companies for furnishing jobs,” he said. “That’s great. But we have let the oil companies absolutely take over our state, damage our coastline and never asked them to pay for it.

The BP spill, bad as it was, was miniscule compared to the damage oil companies have done to our coastline and all our congressional delegation wants to do is go ask Obama to pay for the coastal restoration and Mr. Vitter (U.S. Sen. David Vitter is the leading cheerleader for that. The government didn’t drill the wells and Mr. Vitter knows that but he doesn’t want to ask the people he’s close to to pay for the damage. And neither does Ms. Landrieu. You see the ads on TV praising Ms. Landrieu. Do you know who’s paying for those ads? The oil companies.”

“We need to ask the oil companies who are making billions to pay something rather than asking the people of Louisiana which has (one of the) poorest populations in the nation. Rather than asking people at the bottom to pay the big end of the tax, why doesn’t Mr. Jindal ask companies like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell to pay their fair share? Fifty percent of the coastal erosion in this state is caused by offshore activity.

“In 1926, when we put it into the constitution, we could tax only domestic oil. That was fine back then when 95 percent of our oil was domestic. Today, it’s 96 percent foreign and 4 percent domestic.

“We have to tax oil and gas coming into the state of Louisiana,” he said. “I agree with Mr. Jindal that we need to eliminate the severance tax because it has been dwindling anyway since the ‘80s. Instead of the severance tax, charge a simple 3 percent processing tax which would raise $3 billion a year.

Campbell said former Gov. Buddy Roemer wants to tax oil that’s still in the ground. “That won’t generate the money. I asked Roemer, Edwards and (Mike) Foster (about the 3 percent processing fee) but they wouldn’t help.

“I guarantee you it would pass by 80 percent. Mr. Kennedy (State Treasurer John Kennedy) knows that, Mr. Roemer, Mr. Jindal and especially Mr. (Dan) Juneau, the head of LABI (Louisiana Association of Business and Industry), know it. Mr. Juneau cannot stand a processing tax because the people who pay his bills don’t want it.”

Campbell said, “It’s the LABIs of the world who represent the big companies doing business up and down the Mississippi. LABI is not worried about the Mindens, the Homers, the Farmervilles, the Ringgolds, the Mansfields or the Rustons of Louisiana. They’re worried about the Chevrons, the Dows, the Exxons. Those are the people who put up the big money.

“Legislators who consistently vote with LABI are not representing their districts because LABI could care less about them.

“That’s who Mr. Jindal is dancing to. That’s why he wants to raise the sales tax on the people. Don’t put it on the oil companies that make billions,” he said in mocking the administration line. “They can’t afford it. They might leave the state.

“How are they going leave the state when they have 50,000 miles of pipeline that deliver oil and gas all across America? And they have the Mississippi River! They can’t leave the state. We need politicians with backbone who’ll say, ‘Now listen, you’ve had a great day in Louisiana, but it’s over. We have crumbling roads, poor education, pollution, a torn-up coast and now you’re gonna pay your fair share. Now get out there and start crying that you’re gonna leave the state and we’ll see what the people believe.’”

At that point, Engster finally got to ask, “Are you a member of LABI?”

“Absolutely not. They don’t represent small business. They say they do but they represent the big boys. Never forget that. Mr. Juneau takes his orders from the boys that put up the most money. They don’t worry about the hardware store in Mansfield. They say they do, but they’re fooling those people. They represent the biggest of the big, nothing more, nothing less.

“That’s who Mr. Jindal represents. Look what he’s doing: raising the sales tax on the poorest people living in America—and make sure, by the way, to get rid of corporate taxes.

“You haven’t heard Mr. Jindal say one word about Exxon paying its fair share and you won’t because he’s in their back pocket.

“Mr. Vitter won’t say anything about fixing our coast because he’s in their back pocket.

“Ms. Landrieu won’t say that because she’s in their back pocket.”

LouisianaVoice did a quick check of campaign contributions and found that Campbell may have been onto something when he talked about a lack of courage by the legislature and the congressional delegation and Jindal’s being beholden to the oil and gas industry.

Oil and gas interests contributed more than $1.5 million to 143 state candidates, including legislators and statewide elected officials since 2003, including Jindal, Kennedy, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, former Lt. Gov. and current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and former Secretary of Natural Resources and current Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle.

Moreover, oil and gas contributed more than $1.75 million to six of Louisiana’s seven congressmen since 2002 and $1.99 million to the state’s two U.S. senators since 1996.

The breakdown for the congressional delegation, with the dates each was first elected in parentheses is as follows:

Senate:

• Mary Landrieu (1996)—$940,174;

• David Vitter (2004)—$1.05 million’

House:

• Steve Scalise (2008)—$257,785;

• Charles Boustany (2004)—$641,605;

• John Fleming (2008)—$405,450;

• Rodney Alexander (2002)—$254,559;

• Bill Cassidy (2008)—$194,300;

• Cedric Richmond (2010)—$0

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