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Archive for the ‘OGB, Office of Group Benefits’ Category

Was ‘leaked’ Chaffe Report real or a DOA misdirecton ploy?

Posted in Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Transparency on June 20, 2011| 7 Comments »

Last month, LouisianaVoice submitted the fourth in a series of public records requests to the Division of Administration in an effort to secure a copy of the report done by Chaffe & Associates of New Orleans on the financial evaluation of the Louisiana Office of Group Benefits (OGB).

On May 27, we received an email response from Paul Holmes, Attorney 4, Office of the General Counsel, Division of Administration (DOA). Here is his verbatim reply to that specific portion of our request:

“In response to your May 24, 2011, public records request, please be advised as follows.

A report generated by Chaffe & Associates was received on May 25, 2011. The report is privileged as part of the deliberative process and is exempt from disclosure under R.S. 44:4.1 as well as pursuant to Kyle v. Public Service Commission, 878 So.2d 650 (La. App. 1st Cir. 2004) and Donelon v. Theriot, 2011 WL 1733548, (La. App. 1st Cir. 5/3/11).”

On May 31, Paul Rainwater offered much the same testimony before the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, saying that he had received the report on May 25 but that it could not be released because it was “part of the deliberative process,” a well-worn excuse for the Jindal administration to hold back documents from public release.

Even more damning, it was revealed during his testimony that he had not even provided a copy to Scott Kipper, the head man at OGB. Kipper had been appointed CEO of the agency immediately upon the firing of his predecessor, Tommy Teague, on April 15.

Rainwater first promised the committee that he would make a copy of the report available to Sen. Karen Peterson (D-New Orleans) and shortly after his testimony he provided a copy of the report to Kipper. Kipper’s copy of the report supposedly said the only benefit to privatizing OGB would be if the buyer retained the $500 million agency surplus.

Rainwater, apparently because of that language, had a change of heart and directed Kipper not to make the report available to anyone, prompting Kipper to submit his resignation, effective June 24.

As pressure mounted on Rainwater and Deputy Commissioner Mark Brady from the committee and the Legislative Auditor’s office which also wanted a copy, Rainwater finally acquiesced and released a copy to Senate President Joel Chaisson (D-Destrehan) and to the auditor’s office but only after getting senators’ signatures on a confidentiality agreement.

An unnamed senator, however, leaked the report to the Baton Rouge Advocate, which posted the full 42-page report on its web site.

Or did it?

Remember, attorney Holmes and Commissioner Rainwater both said that the report was received by DOA on May 25. Both men are in agreement on that date. Remember that date because it’s important.

The report posted by the Advocate, however, contains a signature page (Page 11) wherein both Jonathan W. Briggs, managing director of Chaffe & Associates, and Jenny E. Day Austin, assistant vice president of Chaffe, signed off on the report.

The report’s signature page is dated June 3. Remember that date because it, too, is important.

So, how is it that both Holmes on May 27, and Rainwater on May 31, claim that the report was received by DOA on May 25 when the Chaffe officials did not sign off on the report until June 3?

Confusing? Yes. It just doesn’t make sense—unless….

….Unless there are two Chaffe reports—one to be “leaked” to the press and one to be withheld from public view.

As far-fetched as that may seem, it’s not unprecedented. It happened at Grambling State University in 1977 and it had repercussions. It cost one long-time employee his job at the university and resulted in a prison sentence for another.

The June 3 report, moreover, contains none of the language about a purchaser retaining OGB’s $500 million surplus.

Finally—and this is most revealing—DOA, like most state agencies has a policy that all incoming documents are date stamped with the time and date of receipt. That includes letters, cards, circulars, packages, and reports. None of the 42 pages of the report contains a single date stamp.

State Sen. Butch Gautreaux was also skeptical of the validity of the leaked report. “(that was) exactly my question when I read the report,” he said of the conflicting dates. “I don’t buy the ‘draft copy’ thing, not for a minute.”

Attempts were made to pose the question to DOA representatives. Neither Brady, DOA Chief of Staff Dirk Thibodeaux, nor Director of Communications Michael DiResto was available and neither returned calls from LouisianaVoice.

Nor was Briggs available at Chaffe & Associates, but Austin was and took our call. When asked about the apparent discrepancy, she first said she could not divulge any information about the report without permission from her client (the state).

When told that we were working on a news story about the conflicting dates and that we wanted to give the company an opportunity to explain the inconsistency, she said she would call officials in Baton Rouge and get back to us.

She never did call back, leaving unanswered the question of how, on May 25, the state could have received a report that its authors did not sign off on until June 3.

As a last resort, an attempt was made to obtain the copy of the report given to Kipper but sources said Rainwater’s office has since retrieved that copy.

Bear in mind, this is a report on the fair market value of OGB, done for OGB, under an OGB contract, the billing for which work will be paid by OGB.

Removing the document from the agency that by all accounts should be legally designated as the custodian of the record only fans the fires of speculation as to the true content of the report.

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You can call him governor, you can call him Bobby, you can call him Piyush…..but don’t you ever call him inconsistent

Posted in Governor's Office, Health Care, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Prison, Privatization, Teague, Transparency on June 16, 2011| 3 Comments »

Consistent: Unchanging in achievement or effect over a period of time; showing steady conformity to character, profession, belief, or custom; dependable, unswerving.

It’s an adjective that’s not been used very frequently in describing Gov. Bobby Jindal. It should be. The governor has been a veritable model of consistency. As ol’ Casey Stengel would say, you can look it up.

Jindal has consistently tried to unemploy state civil service workers in his repeated attempts to privatize their agencies from under them. He started with the Office of Risk Management, a relative small agency ($100 million budget) in the overall scheme of things.

Flushed at the ease with which that was accomplished, he next turned his eyes on state prisons, the Office of Group Benefits (OGB), and Medicaid.

Those weren’t as easy. The prison plan fell through, at least for this year. OGB has met with considerable resistance from judges, state employees, retirees, and legislators. And the Medicaid plan ran into an unexpected hurdle during confirmation hearings for the secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals.

He consistently has been out-of-state on fundraisers, book promotion tours, or campaign appearances on behalf of other Republican candidates when he should have been home minding the store that was fast going broke.

He consistently visits Protestant churches, mainly in north Louisiana, to pass around clipboards with forms for church members to fill out, giving their names, phone numbers, mailing and email addresses for future fundraising solicitation efforts.

The only reason his out-of-state trips and church visits have stopped in recent weeks is because of a law that prohibits fundraising activities during the legislative session.

Jindal also has been consistent in withholding information from legislators, reporters, and even the state auditor. His Office of Economic Development refused to provide records requested by auditors who were attempting to perform a routine state audit of the agency. And the Division of Administration (DOA) simply refuses to disclose anything more than the time of day and more often than not, even that’s a half-hour late.

Then there was the infamous Chaffe Report. Without rehashing old news, Jindal hired Chaffe & Associates of New Orleans to perform a financial overview of OGB with the idea in mind to plug the data into his executive budget. When the budget contained nothing relative to the report, it soon became evident that the report’s analysis indicated privatization of OGB was not a good idea.

The public, press, auditors, and even legislators would never have known that, however, had Rep. Jim Fannin and Sens. Ed Murray, Karen Peterson, and Butch Gautreaux not pressed for the report. Even then, DOA attempted to withhold the document.

Jindal has been consistent in that he brooks no dissenting opinion.

During public hearings on governmental streamlining in October of 2009, Melody Teague, a contract grants reviewer for the Department of Social Services, testified against the administration’s streamlining proposals and was fired the next day. She appealed, but it took about six months for her to get her job back.

Then, on April 15 of this year, her husband, Tommy Teague, was fired as CEO of OGB—and he had not even publicly opposed privatization of his agency. He did, however, take OGB from a $50 million deficit to a $520 million surplus in a period of only five years.

His successor, Scott Kipper, had the temerity to tell the Senate Retirement Committee that if nothing changed at OGB, if there was no sale, no privatization, no third party administrator, there was not a single employee he would lay off at the agency. In fact, he told the committee, he had inherited a staff of excellent, dedicated employees. From that moment forward, his days were numbered.

His boss, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater, had only a few minutes earlier testified that OGB staff needed to be reduced by 149 persons.

Finally, there are the confirmation hearings for Jindal appointees which thus far have been an unqualified—but consistent—disaster for the governor.

First, Rainwater sat at the witness table texting as Kipper was grilled by Murray and Peterson, never offering to come to his rescue by clarifying an answer or volunteering to rescue Kipper who twisted slowly in the wind.

Then, when Rainwater reversed himself on his promise to the Senate and Governmental Affairs (S&GA) Committee, made during that same hearing, to make copies of the Chaffe report available to them, Kipper was caught in the middle. His fate sealed, he resigned, effective June 24. At his final board meeting on Wednesday of this week, he received extended laudatory praise from the board.

The confirmation hearings have been the number one entertainment attraction this session.

That’s because of Jindal’s consistent persistence in trotting out nominees with baggage and expecting them to slip by Murray and Peterson. Invariably, the senators ambush the unsuspecting appointees with pointed questions about conflicts of interest or a lack of that now overused word, transparency.

With Rainwater and Deputy Commissioner of Administration Mark Brady, it was the refusal to come forward with the Chaffe report. With Bruce Greenstein, things took a little nastier turn when he refused to reveal the name of the winner of a 10-year, $34 million-per-year contract for DHH.

As secretary of the agency, he assured S&GA Committee members that he took a decidedly hands-off approach in the selection process for the contractor to install and operate the Medicaid Management Information System for DHH.

Despite that, he refused for more than an hour under withering demands to reveal the name of the contractor. When he finally relented, he revealed that the contractor was CNSI of Gaithersburg, MD., a company for whom he once worked.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, Ed Antie of Carencro, a Jindal appointee to the Board of Regents for Higher Education, took his seat in the witness chair to begin his confirmation process before the S&GA Committee.

Things got ugly early.

Murray started the carnage by asking an apparently innocuous question: “Do you have any outstanding contracts with the State of Louisiana?”

“No,” Antie assured Murray.

“Do you know of a company called Sun America?”

Antie shifted uncomfortably before answering. “I own a company, a holding company that’s dormant, that owns a company that owns a company that owns maybe 10 percent of Sun America. I’m inactive.”

“Have you ever heard of LONI?” Murray asked. LONI is an acronym for the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, a state-of-the-art fiber optics network that connects eight major research universities—LSU, Louisiana Tech, LSU Health Sciences Centers in New Orleans and Shreveport, Southern University, Tulane University, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the University of New Orleans.

“I politicked Sun America to give them a discounted rate for our fiber optics,” Antie said.

“I thought you said you were inactive,” Murray said. “Does Sun America have a contract with the Board of Regents?”

“They may. I was not involved in the negotiations and I have no idea what the contract value is,” Antie said.

“You were given a questionnaire and that question was left blank,” Murray said.

Antie, who heads up Central Telephone, replied, “I didn’t realize that a company from which I was so far removed was relevant.”

“Sun America has a contract with the Board of Regents in the amount of $531,000,” Murray said. “You first said there was no contractual relationship and now there is. Don’t you think that’s relevant?”

“I asked Sexton Gray (Gray Sexton, a Baton Rouge attorney who once headed up the State Ethics Board) and he said to recuse myself from any votes,” Antie said. “I’m not trying to hide anything. I took retirement from the telecommunications industry to serve on this board.”

“Which one of those companies that you mentioned owns Sun America?” asked Murray.

“Central Telephone is my company. It’s just a holding company. Central Telephone owns Network USA, about 30 percent, and Network USA owns Delta Media which owns 10 or 15 percent of Sun America.”

He said Charles Chatelain is the registered agent for Network USA, Delta Media, and Sun America.

“First you said you had no contractual relationship with the state and now we find that your company has a $531,000 contract with the Board of Regents,” Murray said. “You said you didn’t know, but you said you approached Gray Sexton for advice on your apparent conflict.

“In terms of ethics, you may be breaking the law,” Murray said.

Sen. Lynda Jackson (D-Shreveport) observed that Antie claimed that Central Telephone was dormant. “Yet, when you check corporate records with the Secretary of State’s web page, it shows that Central Telephone is in good standing, which means it has filed annual reports,” she said. “Its last report was November of 2010 and it shows that you are the registered agent.”

She said that ethics and conflicts of interest have become a recurring problem of the Jindal administration.

A check by LouisianaVoice also revealed that Antie made three contributions to Jindal’s campaign totaling $5,000. The contributions were made in August of 2007 and in August and September of 2010. His associate, Charles Chatelain gave $5,000 to the Jindal campaign in December of 2009; Network USA gave $5,000 in separate $2,500 contributions in August of 2009 and March of 2010, and Sun America contributed $3,500 to the governor’s campaign in november of 2010.

Jindal appointed Antie to the Board of Regents in January of this year.

At least that’s consistent with Jindal’s legacy of consistency.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Governor's Office, Notable Quotables, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Transparency on June 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

“The governor turned 40 last Friday. I thought as he got older, he’d get wiser. Apparently not.”

—Office of Group Benefits (OGB) board member Kenneth Krefft of Shreveport, on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s determination to privatize OGB despite recommendations to the contrary contained in a report by Chaffe & Associates—the company hired by Jindal to prepare the report.

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Wasted money! Chaffe report fails to support sale of OGB

Posted in Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Privatization, Transparency on June 14, 2011| 4 Comments »

Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater holds a bachelor’s degree in government, a master’s in international relations, and is certified as a local government manager. But there are still things he needs to learn.

For example, keeping a secret at any level of government is about as easy as trying to whisper in a sawmill.

Rainwater, under considerable duress from legislators, including Sen. Butch Gautreaux (D-Morgan City), Sen. Karen Peterson (D-New Orleans) and Sen. Ed Murray (D-New Orleans) finally provided Senate President Joel T. Chaisson, II (D-Destrehan) with a copy of the long sought report on the Office of Group Benefits (OGB) provided by Chaffe & Associates of New Orleans.

Chaffe had been retained in March to produce a financial overview of OGB in time for Gov. Bobby Jindal to plug his anticipated sale of the agency into his executive budget. The budget was submitted on March 19 but with no mention of OGB or the study, leading observers to believe Chaffe’s findings did not support Jindal’s agenda to sell OGB and cut OGB staff by 149 employees.

After negotiations with Goldman Sachs on an initial request for proposals (RFP) fell through (Goldman Sachs submitted the only proposal), a second RFP was issued and proposals were taken from three firms last week. Goldman Sachs again submitted a proposal, one of three firms to do so.

Both RFPs invited proposals from financial analysts to conduct a full-blown financial assessment of OGB and then to assist in marketing the agency on the private sector market.

When Rainwater finally did submit the Chaffe report, after first going back on his word to produce it, he did so with an unusual caveat: that senators refrain from making the report public.

“A critical part of this effort will entail issuing a competitive Solicitation for Offers (SFOs) from health insurance companies, which the financial advisor will help devise,” Rainwater wrote. “It’s essential that we protect the taxpayers’ interest by not prejudicing the outcomes of the SFO process and contract negotiations by giving the Chaff’s preliminary analysis to potential bidders. In other words, we want the best offer we can get.”

Oops. Too late. Remember: you can’t whisper in a sawmill.

An unknown senator released the report late Monday. The Baton Rouge Advocate published the full report on its website on Tuesday.

“Again, we have significant concerns that premature disclosure of the report will prejudice the SFO and negotiation process,” Rainwater said in his letter to Chaisson. “This is not a matter of secrecy, but a basic component of our ability to make decisions that are within our purview, to protect the integrity of a successful procurement, while providing the legislature full details at the appropriate time.”

Not a matter of secrecy? Protect integrity?

What part of integrity does Mr. Rainwater not understand after first promising Sen. Peterson a copy of the report and two days later instructing OGB CEO Scott Kipper not to make the report available to anyone?

What part of integrity does he not get after letting Kipper suffer under the withering questioning of Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee members while he, Rainwater, sat at the same table texting?

Kipper did the only honorable thing he could under the circumstances. He resigned, effective June 24, giving him tenure of just over two months.

Chaisson, for his part, tried to play along. He forwarded the report to Sen. Robert W. “Bob” Kostelka (R-Monroe), chairman of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee. Along with the report, he attached a three-paragraph letter saying the delivery of the report eliminated the need for a subpoena which had been requested by Murray and approved unanimously by the committee.

He also attached a copy of the statute he said protected the document from disclosure. To the layman’s eye, however, the statute seemed to do nothing of the sort.

Both Rainwater’s letter to Chaisson and Chaisson’s letter to Kostelka were initially posted on the Advocate web page along with a copy of the Chaffe report. The letters, however, were quickly removed from the Advocate website.

The report, just as had been speculated, said premiums paid by the state and by state employees would increase should the agency be privatized.

That conclusion flies in the face of Rainwater’s oft-repeated claims that the privatization of OGB would have “no negative effect” on services now provided. Some would consider premium increases at a time when state employee salaries have been frozen for two consecutive years a negative effect.

The report noted that under the current format, the state does not seek to make a profit and OGB does not have shareholders. A private company’s number one objective would be to make a profit for its shareholders.

Another point brought out in the report said that the state does not pay any taxes on its premium income but a private company would be subjected to taxes, forcing it to raise premiums even higher in order to make a pre-tax profit of 4.5 to 7 percent.

Rainwater testified before the Retirement Committee that he would not support a spike in premiums.

The report’s conclusions also appeared to answer a key question: Why would the administration be so determined to prevent the release of the report if its contents supported the position of the administration?

Much of the 42-page report, which was done under a $49,999.99 contract, appeared superfluous. Besides biographical information on Chaffe associates who compiled the report, it contained boilerplate data that could easily be downloaded from the internet. Those included stock market performances, public, industry and statistical information, consumer spending, consumer prices and inflation, business and manufacturing inventory, housing market and affordability, industrial production, unemployment and personal income, and health care industry statistics.

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The best political disinfectant is still a little sunshine

Posted in Civil Service, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, ORM, Office of Risk Management, Prison, Privatization, Taxes, Transparency on June 12, 2011| 9 Comments »

At the risk of being accused of being a one-trick pony because of all or our posts about attempts to privatize the Office of Group Benefits (OGB), we thought we would offer a quick overview of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s policies, of which OGB is but one facet.

Besides OGB, Jindal has already sold off one state agency, the Office of Risk Management. That privatization left many ORM employees years short of retirement age, thus jeopardizing not only their livelihoods, but medical benefits as well.

The sale agreement stipulated that the buyer was required to hire ORM employees for a “minimum” of 12 months. Of course the ORM director was sure to remind his employees who had just had their job security unceremoniously yanked away that he still had his job and, what’s more, would be eligible for retirement in 2012. That must have given everyone there a warm fuzzy.

Jindal tried unsuccessfully to sell several state prisons but was resisted by the legislature. But odds are he will be back next year with another attempt.

A campaign brochure published by candidate Jindal in 2007 touted his love for state employees and his dedication to hard-working civil servants of which, he reminded us, he was one. Maybe so, if you consider Secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals and head of the University of Louisiana System as fitting the description of civil servant.

Nevertheless, in 2010, he tried unsuccessfully to push through legislation to abolish the Department of Civil Service and to dissolve the Civil Service Board, the only protection, such as it is, available to civil service employees.

He was successful in freezing classified (civil service) pay that same year and extended that freeze in 2011. The reasoning was the opposition to the myth of something referred to as “automatic” pay increases. No one bothered to mention that once an employee maxes out at a particular pay level, there are no more raises unless he or she is promoted. Nothing automatic there.

Many of those civil service workers have college-age children and didn’t help when Jindal endorsed an $84 million college tuition increase. Fortunately for them—and for the rest of parents with college kids—that measure died in the legislature.

This year, Jindal, who has taken the ridiculously entrenched position of no new taxes (not even a routine renewal of cigarette taxes, already one of the lowest rates in the nation), nevertheless tried to push a bill down the throats of those civil servants he so loves that would require that they pony up an additional 3 percent of their frozen paychecks to their retirement contributions.

That idea might actually have had some merit if the extra 3 percent would have been dedicated to paying down the state retirement system’s unfunded liability, but it wasn’t. Instead, the money would have gone directly into the State General Fund to help Jindal look like a financial wizard in using the money to close the $1.6 billion gap in the state budget, a situation civil service employees had no part in creating.

But keep in mind the proposals to increase tuition and civil service employees’ retirement contributions weren’t taxes: they were simply fee increases. But when you’re writing the check, the distinction could be difficult to make.

Bear in mind, too, that Jindal did all this while advocating more and more corporate tax incentives (read: exemptions) for well-heeled campaign contributors.

The governor also laments the loss of our best and brightest college and university graduates to other states but when it comes to his own appointees, he doesn’t seem quite as committed to the concept of hiring Louisiana first.

His first Recovery School District Superintendent was Paul Vallas. Vallas came here from Chicago by way of Philadelphia. His replacement, John White, is from New York. [And who could think it was coincidence that two weeks after White was brought in to replace the departing Vallas as head of RSD, State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek resigned and Jindal immediately endorsed White for Pastorek’s job? Who could possibly believe the entire sequence of events was not orchestrated from Jindal’s fourth-floor State Capitol office?]

But we digress. Jindal’s Secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) is Bruce Greenstein of Washington State by way of Maryland.

His Deputy Commissioner of Administration is Mark Brady of New Hampshire and his own press secretary is Kyle Plotkin of New Jersey.

Certainly, there must have been a sufficient pool of Louisiana talent from which to hire for these positions.

But that should come as no surprise, considering his campaign expenses. Of 670 campaign expenditures in 2008, only 219 were paid to Louisiana companies. It seems the governor prefers companies from Virginia, Texas, Maryland, and elsewhere.

And contracts issued to out of state firms throughout the administration number in the hundreds, many of which were issued to campaign contributors. But that’s another story for another day later this week. We promise.

While boasting at every opportunity of his dedication to transparency, openness, and accountability, he saw to it that ethics legislation passed early in his administration would exempt the governor’s office.

When a legislator introduced a bill that would have forced elected officials to publicly report the names of campaign contributors whom officials subsequently hire or appoint, it appeared to have Jindal’s endorsement.

Key administration officials worked the legislator over a period of five months and helped draft the language of the bill, which easily passed both houses.

Jindal promptly vetoed the bill.

Could that have been because Jindal appointed more than 200 contributors to some of the state’s most influential boards and commissions? Those appointees contributed more than $784,000 to his campaign in 2007 and 2008.

While no governor could be expected to appoint political opponents to these positions, the campaign contributions do tend to raise eyebrows. “Appointments to boards and commissions are based strictly on an individual’s experience, recommendations, and suitability for the position,” sniffed Jersey Boy Plotkin.

Jindal’s “transparency and accountability” mantra takes on something of a hollow ring when official actions are examined more closely.

When DHH selected a winner for a 10-year, $34 million-per-year technology contract, DHH Secretary Greenstein did everything possible to resist divulging the name of that contractor to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee that was considering his confirmation as secretary of the agency. Only after 90 minutes of back and forth bantering, did Greenstein finally admit that the winner was CNSI of Gaithersburg, Maryland, a firm for whom he once worked and one that outsources much of its work to its Technology Development Center—in India.

During his repeated refusals to name the contract, he was asked by senators who his boss was, to whom does he answer.

His answer: “The governor.”

Jindal’s Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Economic Development flatly refused to provide documents to the Legislative Auditor’s office during a routine state audit. This, even though state law clearly directs all agencies to provide all requested materials to state auditors so as not to restrict them in their duties.

Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater also attempted to deny auditors access to a report by Chaffe & Associates of New Orleans on the financial assets of OGB.

Rainwater went even further in first approving release of the report to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee member Karen Peterson and then doing an about-face and to instruct OGB CEO Scott Kipper to not release the report to anyone.

Kipper subsequently resigned, effective, June 24, which will give him tenure of a little more than two months after replacing former CEO Tommy Teague, who was fired on April 15.

Rainwater has repeatedly made the claim of “deliberative process” in denying access to the report. The deliberative process term emanates from that same State Capitol fourth floor.

Only one question needs to be asked about the Chaffe report that should put everything in perspective as regards Jindal’s efforts to privatize OGB:

If Chaffe & Associates said in that report things that the governor wanted to hear, that supported his unrelenting efforts to sell an agency with a $500 million surplus, is it even remotely possible that the administration would be attempting to withhold the document?

Put another way, if the report supported Jindal’s desire to sell OGB, what possible reason would he have to keep the report secret?

Put still another way, who among you believes Gov. Bobby Jindal has the best interest of state employees at heart? Indeed, who even believes he has the best interest of Louisiana at heart?

Who believes that all those out-of-state trips to support congressional and gubernatorial candidates in Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin, and other states were for the benefit of Louisiana? Why would he support a Florida gubernatorial candidate who headed a company hit with the largest Medicare fraud fine in history?

That candidate, Rick Scott, incidentally, won election.

Who can stretch credulity to the point of believing his frequent trips to other states to promote his book was for the benefit of Louisiana and its citizens?

Who can believe all those out-of-state campaign fundraising trips were for the overall benefit of Louisiana?

All these, the campaigning, the book tours, the fundraisers, occurred during a time of unprecedented financial crisis at home. And security details and aides who travel with him must be fed and housed on those trips—all on the state dime.

If you are a Louisiana public employee or simply a Louisiana citizen and you don’t stand up right now and defend this state from the encroachments and abuses of this governor, then you are part of the problem.

It should be clear by now that Gov. Jindal is oblivious to the plight of this state’s citizenry. This is your future. This is your government. This is your state. It does not belong to the Jindals, the Pastoreks, the Rainwaters.

It certainly does not belong to those who have been brought in from other states like Mark Brady, Bruce Greenstein, Kyle Plotkin, and Goldman Sachs.

Our governor has no right to operate behind a curtain of secrecy, to push his agenda with no input from the governed. He is answerable to the Legislature and he is certainly answerable to the citizens of this state.

His first responsibility is not to the big dollar contributors.

That distinction rightly belongs to you.

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