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Archive for the ‘Transparency’ Category

π-yush has the job he wants–again: absentee governor will serve as ‘leader’ of nation’s Republican governors in 2013

Posted in Budget, Campaign Contributions, Economy, Education, Governor's Office, Health Care, Legislature, Legislators, LSU, Transparency on October 15, 2012| 6 Comments »

Gov. Piyush Jindal had barely recovered from the bitter disappointment of being snubbed for a spot on Mitt Romney’s ticket than he was off and running for yet another national office—that of president.

His preference these days seems to be anything to avoid addressing the real problems that face Louisiana.

For a man who insists that he has the job he wants, he certainly seems to devote a minimal amount of time doing it.

Jindal’s travel miles this year alone have surpassed those of the James Brown extended post mortem farewell tour of a few years back.

Piyush is on the road again more than Willie Nelson.

His campaign appearances rival in number those of President Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney combined—and he’s not even an official candidate for anything. Yet.

He has the job he wants, which apparently is making more public appearances than the Harlem Globetrotters.

He’s more difficult to locate than Sasquatch.

When it comes to answering reporters’ questions, Jindal makes the late Marcel Marceau seem like a chatterbox.

So now, with the sound and fury of the vice presidential selection process behind him, he goes and gets himself picked to head up the Republican Governors Association next year—a job that will no doubt necessitate his absence from the state even more, if that’s possible.

The position is a plum in that it theoretically gives him a leg up on the Republican president nomination in 2020 (or 2016, should Romney lose in November).

He will chair the organization in 2013 and will be followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie the following year. The post is considered a springboard to higher office. Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry each served as chairman prior to launching their presidential campaigns.

The Associated Press speculated that the position could help Piyush gain momentum and support for a future White House bid, “if he’s interested.”

If he’s interested?

That’s like saying a hyena will attack a wildebeest if he’s hungry.

The same AP story notes that in five-plus years as Louisiana’s absentee governor, he has promoted his book, given campaign speeches, attended fundraisers and Republican events in 39 states and the nation’s capital. He has managed to pop up in key presidential primary or caucus states like New Hampshire and Iowa on numerous occasions—sometimes even being asked by the locals to leave. Quickly.

More than a third of his 160 or so out-of-state trips have taken place since January.

Ironically, most of his travels have been to support state candidates or Republican causes and to collect campaign contributions for Piyush Jindal.

His campaign trips on behalf of Romney, on the other hand, are merely an afterthought.

Rather like his occasional attention to matters in Louisiana—little insignificant matters like budget shortfalls, cuts to state hospitals, litigation over his education and retirement reform packages in Louisiana and growing resentment on the part of legislators over the closures of prison and health care facilities.

So basically, he believes he received a mandate in last year’s underwhelming re-election vote of 67 percent of 20 percent of the voters—against only token opposition, no less.

Piyush may want to consider the fact that 80 percent of the voters yawned their way to a state of languid indifference on the question of whether or not he should be awarded a second term.

And he’s going to try and parlay those results into becoming leader of the free world?

But he must first prove himself a leader of the nation’s Republican governors.

If his leadership of Louisiana is an indication of his capabilities, it should be fun to watch—if you like watching a delusional political wannabe.

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π-yush obsession with secrecy, loyalty comparable to aura of paranoia that permeated darkest days of Nixon White House

Posted in Boards, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, LSU, Public Records, Transparency on October 15, 2012| 5 Comments »

In the past we’ve compared Piyush Jindal to Richard Nixon, primarily in the context of Jindal’s desire for absolute power and his intolerance for dissent. For the most part those comparisons were tongue-in-cheek, intended to show the governor’s absurd propensity toward micromanagement.

The comparisons were metaphors as much as anything else and not to be taken literally.

That was then.

Now, less than a year into his second term, Jindal, much like Nixon, is becoming more and more obsessed with secrecy.

Nixon’s attempt to conceal public documents behind a cloak of “executive privilege” has been supplanted by Jindal’s even vaguer term—something called the “deliberative process.”

Jindal demands complete and total loyalty from his minions with no room for dissent.

He is certainly entitled to expect—and demand—loyalty from his appointees. That is his right.

But his problems run much deeper; Jindal’s administration, much like that of Nixon’s is being permeated with the destructive mentality of paranoia.

That is, without question, the most serious and debilitating characteristic that can plague any elected leader and whether one likes Jindal or despises him, it is both sad and disturbing to watch the slow unraveling of what could have been. The realization that his mistrust of anyone who might pose a question about any of his decisions is slowly starting to paralyze the state he was elected to serve. The story of his administration will read not as history as it should, but more like a Shakespearian tragedy.

Now we have proof that he, like Nixon, is not beyond concocting outright lies to conceal his real intent and to advance his agenda. We have known this all along but now we have written documentation and, strangely enough, LouisianaVoice was the catalyst in this new, unfolding drama.

But this isn’t about LouisianaVoice.

This is a much larger and more important issue.

It’s about trust and credibility.

Jindal has steadfastly maintained that he has taken a “hands-off” approach to the day to day operations at LSU, even to the point of the governor’s executive counsel Elizabeth “I didn’t know there was a State Constitution” Murrill’s outright denial on Oct. 9 that she instructed LSU to hide behind the deliberative process privilege.

But nearly two months earlier, on Aug. 16, LSU attorney Shelby McKenzie wrote LSU Interim President William Jenkins that Murrill had specifically asked to review documents requested by LouisianaVoice.

The documents were also shared with Lee Kantrow, a private Baton Rouge attorney who serves as legal counsel to the University Medical Center board.

It seems they were shared with virtually everyone but the media which had requested the information in the first place.

Murrill, along with the rest of the governor’s office, of course, have employed the bunker mentality as they hunker down and now refuse to comment publicly on their being caught in the big lie.

Deliberative process is a legal term that never existed before Jindal took office in 2008.

It powers the process of deciding what qualifies as public record and what does not in that it protects deliberations in the governor’s office as well as in recommendations to the governor by agency officials.

A 45-page report by the Louisiana Law Review at the LSU Law School says of the deliberative process:

• The statutory deliberative process privilege allows the governor to fight the disclosure of any government record (emphasis ours) used in his decision-making process, even if that record is located outside the governor’s office. Some scholars criticize the very concept of the deliberative process privilege as eroding the “power and effectiveness of the citizens who we regard as sovereigns.” By adopting the phrase “deliberative process,” the legislature has attempted to implicate a body of law interpreting a particular exemption under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But it is not quite the clean fit the legislature might have envisioned. Left unsettled is whether Louisiana courts will or should embrace all the various intricacies in FOIA jurisprudence or craft solutions more faithful to Louisiana’s historically liberal public records doctrine.

• Under Act 495, the governor will also be able to deny access to “intra-office communications” between himself and his staff. Courts will have to decide just what types of communications qualify for this exemption, as a broad interpretation will result in this “new” addition to the statute amounting to little more than a smaller version of the governor’s prior custody-based exemption.

• Finally, Act 495 raises an interesting dilemma: are governors now required to archive records, rather than shred them upon leaving office? One reading of the new law seems to allow governors to shield forever the documents that they independently deem as revealing of their deliberative process, denying potentially valuable and enlightening information to historians and future generations.” (emphasis ours)

Apparently, all an agency head has to do to protect public records from scrutiny is to couch them in the form of recommendations to the governor.

To be fair to McKenzie, he apparently recognized the legal problems of hiding behind the deliberative process shield and attempted to straddle the issue with his letter. “The express provisions of the statute are not broad enough to apply to the current public records request,” he said. “An argument could be raised that the privilege is grounded in constitutional principles (oops! Just lost Murrill) “of separation of powers and personal freedom of expression,” adding that a resolution of the issue “is a genuine legal dispute” that only a court could resolve.

He said that because the deliberative process is being invoked by several state agencies, “it is unlikely that LSU will be the target of any legal attack on the privilege.”

So, while the prevailing philosophy seems to be to employ the deliberative process so liberally and so often that those seeking information to which the public is entitled become so confused and exhausted in their efforts that they will give up.

Don’t count on it.

Nixon did.

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Defunct Abramson sister school continues operations; Kenilworth exec solicits funds with old business card

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Ethics, Governor's Office, Privatization, Recovery School District, Transparency, Uncategorized, Vouchers on October 14, 2012| 6 Comments »

LouisianaVoice has learned that despite serious deficiencies that included widespread cheating that closed the Abramson Science & Technology Charter School in New Orleans last year, its sister school in Baton Rouge continues to operate with the blessings of the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE).

At the same time Abramson’s problems were surfacing more than a year ago, reports of wrongful firing of teachers and student mistreatment at Kenilworth Science & Technology School in Baton Rouge finally came to light when it was learned that DOE had launched an investigation of Abramson.

Both schools are run by a Texas company affiliated with the Gulen movement, a Turkish offshoot of the Islamic faith.

The problems at Abramson were first reported by state education employee Folwell Dunbar. Dunbar and his supervisor, Jacob Landry, who was director of the DOE charter office, were promptly fired after reporting the abuses that included sexual misconduct, neglect and missing files.

In a cover-up that has become indicative of the manner in which DOE is run under the Piyush Jindal-John White administration, a 72-page report on an investigation conducted by DOE was generated. That report included a five-page cover letter by then-acting Superintendent of Education Ollie Tyler to Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Penny Dastugue that claimed DOE first learned of the allegations surrounding Abramson on July 14, 2011, even though Dunbar and Landry had warned of problems at the school more than a year before.

To be fair, the report was compiled and released prior to White’s being named superintendent but he has taken no apparent steps to alter the situation at Kenilworth subsequent to his takeover of the department.

The claim that the department had no knowledge of wrongdoing at the school only served to discredit the entire report.

Dunbar, in a memo to department colleagues in 2010, said that Inci Akpinar, vice president of Atlas Texas Construction & Trading, the Texas company with ties to the Gulen movement, told Dunbar during a discussion of the school’s problems, “I have $25,000 to fix this problem: $20,000 for you and five for me.

A state audit conducted well in advance of the report’s publication also cited the school for having classrooms without instructors for weeks or even months at a time and of students who claimed their science fair projects had been done by their teachers.

Abramson’s charter was subsequently revoked but Kenilworth has continued to operate and last week, the school’ superintendent was calling on businesses in Baton Rouge in an attempt to raise funds for a science fair at the school.

Dr. Tevfik Eski, chief executive officer of Pelican Education Foundation in New Orleans which ran Abramson until its charter was revoked, was handing out business cards that contained the names of both Abramson and Kenilworth Science & Technology Charter Schools, only the word “Abramson” had been scratched through with blue ink and the letters “CMO” scribbled in over the word “Technology.”

CMO stands for “Charter Management Organization” and Pelican Education Foundation contracts with Cosmos Foundation, the CMO that runs the Harmony School Network in Texas, with which Abramson and Kenilworth were affiliated through Atlas Construction.

Click on image to enlarge:

If all that sounds terribly convoluted, it’s for a reason. Because of its organizational structure the Texas Education Authority (TEA) reported last year it had no knowledge of the problems with Abramson and Kenilworth even though the Cosmos Foundation operates more than 30 such schools in Texas.

In addition to his Baton Rouge address, Eski’s business card also contained the telephone and fax numbers of Pelican Education Foundation, his email address at Kenilworth and the web address of Pelican Education Foundation. In addition, he had written (also in blue ink) his Baton Rouge cell number.

One would think that a year after Abramson had its charter yanked, Eski would spring for new business cards but give him points for austerity.

In addition to the deficiencies already mentioned, the 72-page report by DOE also noted that Abramson students who were failing in English and math and who would not graduate from Abramson on time were being accepted en masse to North American College in Houston.

Then-Abramson principal Cuneyt Dokmen cited the acceptances as proof that Abramson was successful but the DOE report noted that Dokmen was scheduled to work at North American College in the fall of 2011.

North American College is a private, non-profit, four-year institution founded in 2010 that offers only three bachelor degree programs—education, computer science and business administration.

So what we have here is a dysfunctional DOE that shoots the messenger when it hears bad news from its own, generates lengthy investigative reports that deny knowledge of information that in fact the department had for more than a year, and allows one of the charter schools to continue operations with no accountability required.

Bottom line: can we believe anything that comes out of the Louisiana Department of Education’s administrative offices?

No wonder John White thinks he needs that $144,000 public relations mouthpiece.

The inmates are truly running the asylum.

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House members stick around for per diem but leave before adjournment of Joint Committee studying hospital closures

Posted in Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, LSU, Politicians, Transparency on October 5, 2012| 5 Comments »

Thursday’s meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on Health and Welfare was a critical meeting in that committee members were considering massive cutbacks to the LSU healthcare system and the impending layoffs of nearly 1500 employees at seven of the 10 hospitals in the LSU system.

One might think that a meeting such as this might important enough to merit the testimony of Bobby Yarborough, member and former chairman of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

One would be wrong.

Yarborough, who also served as campaign finance chairman for Jindal’s re-election campaign last year (he’s a busy man), might also have spoken up in his capacity as chairman of the University Medical Center Management Corp. Board.

But he did not.

Nor did anyone from the administration of one Piyush Jindal appear to justify cuts of more than $300 million that will necessarily cause significant reductions to the availability of health care to Louisiana’s uninsured poor—and even insured Louisiana residents who are geographically depending on facilities such as Bogalusa Medical Center, one of those slated for cutbacks.

Instead, Dr. Frank Opelka, chief of the LDU system health care, was left to defend the cuts and to withstand withering questioning from members of the joint committee.

It might also be expected that for a meeting as important as this one was, all members would be in attendance, but that also was not the case.

Absent from the entire four-hour session were Sens. Dan Claitor (R) and Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb (D) of Baton Rouge and ex-officio member Rep. Walt Leger (D-New Orleans).

House members attending the meeting included committee Chairman Scott Simon (R-Abita Springs), Frank Hoffman, vice chair (R-West Monroe), John Anders (D-Vidalia), Kenny Cox (D-Natchitoches), A.B. Franklin (D-Lake Charles), Lance Harris (R-Alexandria), Kenneth Havard (R-Jackson), Bob Hensgens (R-Abbeville), Dorothy Sue Hill (D-Dry Creek), Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe), H. Bernard LeBas (D-Ville Platte), John Morris (R-Monroe), Rogers Pope (R-Denham Springs), Lenar Whitney (R-Houma), Patrick Williams (D-Shreveport), Thomas Willmott (R-Kenner) and House Speaker Chuck Kleckley, ex officio (R-Lake Charles.

Senators present on Thursday included Chairman David Heitmeier (D-New Orleans), Fred Mills, vice chairman (R-New Iberia), R.L. “Bret” Allain, II (R-Franklin), Sherri Smith Buffington (R-Keithville), Dale Erdey (R-Livingston), Elbert Guillory (D-Opelousas), Ben Nevers (D-Bogalusa), and Senate President John Alario (R-Westwego).

Even more difficult to understand, however, was the early exit of many of those who did attend. Several were there long enough to qualify for their $149 per diem checks, plus 55.5 cents per mile (round trip) for travel, but were not present near the conclusion of the session when Nevers attempted to push through a resolution requesting the LSU Board of Supervisors and Dr. Opelka to delay implementation of any cuts until all plans have been finalized and presented to the legislature.

While there was a sufficient contingency of senators to mount a quorum, more than half the House members had departed, leaving Simon with no choice but to disallow any vote on Nevers’s motion under House rules.

Rep. Rogers Pope (R-Denham Springs), one of those who stayed until the end, said he could not speak for those who left and did not know the reasons for their departure. “They may have had things to do but you know, this is an important issue and we were elected to look out for the best interests of our constituents. I took an oath of office and I felt obligated to remain until adjournment.”

Pope said he is fully aware of the budgetary crisis, but said health care for the poor is imperative. “There are going to be cutbacks in services rendered but we need to make wise decisions on what is cut and where.

“I don’t like a lot of things this governor is doing,” he added. “I especially do not like what he has done and is doing to education in this state.

“Sure, we have problems in education, but you don’t scrap the whole system. We have bad governors in this country, too, but we can’t just throw them all out and start over. It’s not that easy. You work within the system to improve it; you don’t destroy the system.”

Pope said he was aware that Jindal does not like criticism. “But I’ve criticized him in the past so I know I’m among those on the outside.”

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, Health Care, House, Senate, Jobs, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, LSU, Politicians, Transparency on October 5, 2012| 2 Comments »

“I would like to make a motion that the Joint Health and Welfare Committee urge and request the LSU Board of Supervisors and Dr. (Frank) Opelka (head of the LSU Health System) to delay implementation of any cuts to the LSU hospitals until plans have been finalized that will ensure patients of the LSU hospital system that they will continue to receive services and where they (services) will be administered.

“I think we all deserve the plan and they should hold up on the cuts until such time as they present the plan.”

–Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, at the conclusion of the four-hour hearing by the Joint Legislative Committee on Health and Welfare on Thursday, held to consider proposed cuts and closures of parts or all of seven of the 10 hospitals in the LSU system.

“Mr. Chairman, I would like you to consider allowing the senators to vote on the motion even though there’s not a quorum. We have a quorum of Senate members; they’re here and ready to do business.”

–Nevers again, on being told that House rules prohibited the committee’s voting on the motion. (Committee Chairman Rep. Scott Simon, R-Abita Springs, again refused, citing House rules. There was no explanation as to why House members vacated the committee meeting before its conclusion.)

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