Louisiana Voice

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

—Donald Trump, January 22, speaking of the coronavirus epidemic.

“We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment—five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

—Trump, on January 30.

“Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

—Trump, in a February 2 interview with Sean Hannity.

“We have [coronavirus] very much under control in this country. We had 12 [people with the disease], at one point.  And now they’ve gotten very much better.  Many of them are fully recovered.”

—Trump, on February 23.

“We’re going down, not up.  We’re going very substantially down, not up. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”

—Trump, on February 28.

“We have an invisible enemy. This is a bad one. This is a very bad one.”

—Trump, on March 16.

“I’d rate it a 10. I think we’ve done a great job.”

Trump, on March 16, in response to a reporter’s asking how he would rate the response to the coronavirus crisis. [Trump, of course, disbanded the White House office specifically dedicated to preparing for a pandemic shortly after taking office.]

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“If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didn’t do testing like this. And actually, they lost approximately 14,000 people and they didn’t do the testing. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late.”

—Donald Trump, as usual, attempting to deflect attention away from his failure to act promptly to the coronavirus outbreak. And as usual, he is wrong—or worse, lying. The CDC did focus on testing — conducting 5,000 tests in the first month and sending out a million tests in the first five months of the outbreak.

The virus was first detected in the US on April 15, 2009. The CDC informed the World Health Organization about initial cases three days later, on April 18. A test to detect this strain of swine flu was developed by the CDC and cleared for use 10 days later, on April 28, and the CDC started shipping tests across the US and around the world on May 1—only two weeks after first detecting the virus.

Over the next four months, more than a million tests “were shipped to 120 domestic and 250 international laboratories in 140 countries,” according to the CDC’s report. By May 18, one month after detection of the virus, 40 states were authorized to conduct their own 2009 H1N1 testing, with eight states having multiple laboratories that could process the tests, the report says.

Between April 12, 2009 and April 10, 2010, the CDC estimates that the swine flu killed 12,469 people in the US.

The first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the US on January 20 of this year. As of Wednesday, almost two months later, 11,079 specimens had been tested in the US.

Of course, Trump has neglected to mention—and he will never acknowledge the fact—that one year after taking office, he abolished the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, initially established to prepare for pandemics like covid-19.

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Baton Rouge attorney Tim Hardy says that contrary to reports out of Shreveport, he has not “fired” the city as a client, nor does he represent the city on environmental matters.

It’s not uncommon for a client to fire his attorney, but for an attorney to fire his client?

Pretty rare, especially if that client is a fairly large municipality paying significant fees. For law firms putting a fair amount of emphasis on rainmaking (legal parlance for bringing in clients), it’s practically unprecedented.

But in the case of the City of Shreveport, LouisianaVoice was told that’s exactly what happened. Shreveport has been mired in decades-long battles with the Environmental Protection Agency over illegal sewerage discharges, but Hardy said his work with the city was not involved in matters concerning the consent decree over illegal discharges into the Red River.

TIM HARDY

“I will say this,” Hardy told LouisianaVoice, “there likely will be discussions going forward concerning my representation of the city in other matters. But I have not ‘fired’ the city, nor has there been any communication between me and the city regarding anything of that nature.”

A source close to the city informed LouisianaVoice on Saturday that Hardy had severed his relationship with the city and that the dispute was over the ongoing controversy surrounding the consent decree.

Having already paid a $650,000 fine to the EPA, while agreeing to the 146-page CONSENT DECREE entered into under the administration of former Mayor Cedric Glover in 2014, the city saw the cost of compliance mushroom from $350 million to $1 billion.

A year ago, Mayor Adrian Perkins appointed Burns and McDonnel/Bonton to oversee compliance and Hardy, a Shreveport native and a partner in the Baton Rouge law firm  BREAZEALE, SACHSE & WILSON was retained for legal representation in other matters, Hardy said.

The consent decree was entered into after the city was cited for violations of the Clean Water Act in the form of discharges of untreated sewage into the Red River, according to an online EPA POSTING of the settlement agreement.

The city also posted its own VERSION of the agreement.

A state AUDIT of the city for the year ended December 31, 2017 addressed the ongoing problems with wastewater problems experienced by the city:

“A consent decree, with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), relative to wastewater improvements in Shreveport was officially filed in early 2014. The consent decree will require the city to make various wastewater treatment plant and sanitary sewer infrastructure improvements in order to reduce sanitary sewer overflows in the sewer collection system and meet wastewater discharge permit requirements under wet weather conditions.

“To fund the sewer improvement program, the City Council approved rate increases over a 10-year period. The first of those increases went into effect October 1, 2013. A 15% increase in sewer rates went into effect January 1, 2017. The Water & Sewerage department continues to work with the EPA to make sure the project stays on schedule. With most of the Phase 1 projects completed the City has started on Phase 2 projects while laying the ground work for Phase 3. To help fund that work an additional $120 million of Water & Sewer revenue bonds were sold in 2017.

“The City continues to pay off General Obligation Bonds; the City will pay off all but the 2011 and 2014 GOB debt in the next 3 years. Increases in Water and Sewer rates will fund the additional debt required to complete the project required by the consent decree. With most revenues flat, continuing services at current levels will be a challenge without additional revenues.”

Sewage discharge apparently isn’t the only environmental issue facing the city. An online report by Epic Water Filters cited a laundry list of contaminants found in Shreveport’s drinking water.

But whatever the problem with the sewage discharge, the city apparently was not heeding the advice of its legal representation and a frustrated Hardy finally called it quits on Friday.

LouisianaVoice attempted to contact Hardy for a comment, emailing him on Saturday, asking that he call us but did not respond until Sunday. “I didn’t call you back because I didn’t know who you were,” he said, adding he had never read LouisianaVoice.

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“The buck stops here.”

—Sign on the desk of Harry S Truman

“Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”

—Donald Trump tweet, November 8, 2013.

“I don’t take responsibility at all.”

—Donald Trump, at a press conference Friday during which he blamed Barack Obama for the lack of widespread access to testing for coronavirus.

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Donald Trump proclaimed at a campaign rally in Wisconsin in November 2015 that, “THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD.” Some areas of the nation, particularly in the south, would find it difficult to argue with that assertion.

Of 50 American counties where the “American Dream” is said to be dead, 36 (72 percent) are located in the Deep South, according to 24/7 Wall Street, the survey company that tracks statistics on poverty, obesity, health, corruption, and myriad other subjects.

Three of those are in Louisiana, including Orleans Parish, rated the sixth most hopeless place to live in the U.S., East Baton Rouge Parish (44^th worst), and East Carroll Parish 35^th worst).

But Louisiana fared well compared to Mississippi with 13 counties, Georgia with seven, and North Carolina with five. Combined, the three states accounted for half of American counties where hopes of a better life have been all but extinguished by crushing poverty, unemployment and lagging earnings.

To identify the counties where the American dream is dead, 24/7 Wall Street reviewed the effect on household income earned in adulthood for every year of childhood spent in nearly 3,000 U.S. counties and county equivalents.

Population figures, poverty rates, educational attainment, income inequality for each county came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey and are 5-year averages.

“The American Dream is the idea that through sacrifice and hard work, a person from any background can attain success — typically characterized by upward economic mobility,” the report said. “While millions of Americans are a living testimony that the American Dream is still alive, there are parts of the country that tell a very different story.

“Conceptually, the American Dream is based on the assumption that success depends on one’s choices. However, broader conditions related to the community and environment — particularly during one’s childhood — can also play a considerable role.

A 26-year-old who grew up in a low-income household in one of these counties earns an annual income of anywhere from $201 to $484 less for each year of childhood spent there than the national income per capita among 26-year-olds. Depending on how many years and the average annual loss, this can amount to thousands of dollars in lost income every year.

Statistically, the worst county in America was Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota where the average annual income loss per year of childhood residence was $484, where per capita household income was $13,647, where the poverty was a staggering 49.3 percent the unemployment rate for December 2019 was 10.0 percent.

Orleans Parish, by comparison, had an average income loss per year of $276, a per capita household income of $31,246, a poverty rate of 24.6 percent and an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent.

For East Baton Rouge Parish, the average annual income loss per year was $203 while the per capita household income was $35,064. The EBR poverty rate is 18.3 percent and the unemployment rate in December was 4.4 percent.

It’s uncertain how East Carroll Parish ranked 35^th worst in the country to Orleans Parish’s 6^th worst ranking. The only statistic that was worse than Orleans was the average income loss per year of childhood residence ($210). Otherwise, the house per capita income of $18,062, the 48.6 percent poverty rate and the 11.7 percent unemployment rate were all considerably worse than Orleans.

East Carroll also is one of the worst, statistically speaking, for the percentage of children living with single parents (73.3 percent, compared the national share of 33.0 percent).

Mississippi counties and their rankings included Grenada County (31^st worst), Washington County (28^th), Oktibbeha County (26^th), Bolivar County (25^th), Sunflower County (24^th), Tallahatchie County (22^nd), Hinds County (17^th), Leflore County (16^th), Claiborne County (13^th), Tunica County (10^th), and Humphreys County (9^th worst).

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