Louisiana Voice

Yesterday’s announcement by Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley that there were no plans for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to “indoctrinate” students by teaching them about this country’s history of slavery or Jim Crow or the civil rights struggle of the 1960s falls right in line with a LouisianaVoice story of last July 24.

In that story, I quoted State Rep. RAY GAROFALO (R-Chalmette) who said, “There is no reason to make students feel guilty. We should teach the good things about this country.”

To paraphrase the late comic Brother Dave Gardner, “Dear hearts, that ain’t education, that’s propaganda”

I wrote in that July post that Garofalo would forbid the teaching of the Trail of Tears, or that women in this country weren’t allowed to vote until the 20^th century, or that enslaved blacks were considered 3/5 of a person. That last provision, by the way, was embedded in the US Constitution in Article I, Section 2 despite the Declaration of Independence insistence that “all men are created equal.”

That’s the same Constitution, by the way, that Rep. Lauren Boebert seems to think does not EVOLVE.

But back to the issue of what can and cannot be taught in Louisiana’s educational system and how Louisiana ranks in education achievement.

Out of 51 systems – 50 states and the District of Columbia – Louisiana ranks 50^th in quality of education, ahead of only New Mexico, according to a WALLETHUB survey released last July.

WalletHub’s ranking of educated states had up just a nudge at 48^th, ahead of only Mississippi and West Virginia among the 50 states.

Louisiana was 47^th in the percentage of population with a bachelor’s degree (the next three were Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia), and 47^th again in the percentage of graduate or professional degree holders (ahead of Arkansas, West Virginia, and North Dakota). Louisiana ranks 48th for Educational Attainment and 44th for Quality of Education.

The metrics for WalletHub’s rankings included adults 25 and over with a high school diploma; with at least some college; with a bachelor’s degree, and with a graduate or professional degree.

Louisiana has a dropout rate of 21.9 percent despite a per-student expenditure of $11,038. The state’s student to teacher ratio is 14.8:1 And while Massachusetts, the highest-ranked state, has a student to teacher ratio of 13.32:1, which is comparable to Louisiana, that state spends $15,593 per student and has a dropout rate of 11.7, 10 points lower than Louisiana’s.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks Louisiana 48^th overall of the 51 systems, including the District of Columbia. The only states with lower rankings, in order, are South Carolina, Mississippi and New Mexico.

That survey has Louisiana ranked 48^th in academic performance, 47^th in bachelor degree rates and in high school graduation rates.

So, bottom line, it’s fine for Louisiana to wallow at the bottom of the pile in education attainment so long as we don’t tell students about slavery, genocide of Native Americans, the denial of the right to vote for women and blacks, and probably the Holocaust.

Hell, we may as well burn a few books along the way.

Ever had problems with the IRS? If so, you don’t have to be told how unfair and unreasonable they can be with their assessments and threats of liens and seizures. One person was hit with interest and penalties totaling thousands of dollars when his tax payment was a penny short. The agency is ruthless when it comes to extracting its pound of flesh.

That’s why I wrote It’s All TheIRS. While the central plot and the novel’s main characters are fiction, the stories of IRS abuses that I cite are not. They are very real and many of them destroyed businesses, lives, and families and even led to suicides in some cases.

It’s All TheIRS is the story of a man who gets hit with a wrongful assessment of $600,000 and decides to fight back. Resisting the IRS is not to be undertaken lightly. The average citizen might have a few thousand dollars to combat the bottomless resources of the US Treasury and Justice departments. It’s a stacked deck and that’s the reason why the IRS comes after the typically defenseless middle-class taxpayer as opposed to the corporate behemoths like IBM, Exxon/Mobil or Amazon.

You can order your signed copy by clicking on the DONATE button in the column to the right of this post and paying $25 by credit card or you can send a $25 check to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.

I’ve been on the watch for the pre-filing of bills for the upcoming legislative session that would attempt to make it illegal for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to teach about this country’s history of slavery or of the genocide of the Native Americans.

Cade Brumley saved legislators the trouble today.

The State Superintendent of Education said there was nothing in his plans for the state’s social studies standards that would “indoctrinate” students on the nation’s radial history.

I can draw one of only two possible conclusions from that: he is either in bed with the radical Repugnantcan Party or he is scared of them and afraid of losing his job.

Either way, it was a cowardly position to take. The Civil War is the darkest chapter of our history and the cause of that war, denials in some quarters notwithstanding, was the issue of slavery.

We can close our eyes to the shameful practice of enslaving other human beings and we can ignore the fact that we at one time we considered enslaved black people as only 3/5 OF A HUMAN but we cannot erase the fact that it happened.

We cannot change the fact that an estimated 5 million to 15 million Native Americans were killed in the name of westward expansion, the so-called Manifest Destiny.

President Andrew Jackson instituted the policy of Indian removal and his successor, Martin Van Buren ordered the roundup and imprisonment of Cherokees in a similar manner in which the Nazis rounded up the Jews in the Warsaw Ghettos a century later. Some 16,000 Cherokee were marched from Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama to Oklahoma. Along the way about 3,000, nearly 20 percent of the total number, died, giving birth to the TRAIL OF TEARS.

Will there be no mention of how Japanese-Americans were rounded up and forced to live in internment camps during WWII?

That won’t be taught because, as they say, the winners write the history books. But it ain’t history, it’s propaganda.

Now since Brumley is so set against the so-called critical race theory concept, public school kids probably won’t learn about the Holocaust, either, though I’d wager the Battle of the Alamo will continue to be taught.

But never mind all that. Like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis says, we don’t want white folks to feel uncomfortable about being white – let’s just make black folks and brown folks uncomfortable about their skin tones. Jesus! DeSantis is hellbent on becoming Donald Trump 2.0 and now our spineless education superintendent is pandering to that same milquetoast mindset.

What have we become in this country, this state? Are we so feeble-minded that we are afraid to expose our foibles? Are we so shallow that we must constantly look over our shoulder to see what Big Brother is thinking of our actions? Why are we so intimidated by the likes of Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gym Jordan, Ron Johnson, Donald Trump, DeSantis, et al? Why wo we continue to elect people like John Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, and Clay Higgins?

It’s a damn shame when we cannot face ourselves in the mirror of history.

“I have been clear about this for some time that CRT would not be included in our standards,” Brumley sniffed. “[W]e would be cognizant that nothing in the standards could open the door for any form of indoctrination,”

What the hell is he talking about? Indoctrination? Seriously? This is history, man, and you cannot change history. It happened and ignoring it will not change that.

You want to really piss off African Americans? Pretend they don’t matter, that they were never beaten, whipped, and yes, enslaved.

I’m lily-white, so I don’t presume to understand how they must feel toward us. But I can say with certainty that had my ancestors been held in bondage and considered 3/5 of a human being, I might well harbor some resentment towards the ones whose ancestors enslaved them – especially if today, they ignored that part of history, if they continued to try to take away my right to vote, if they used fire hoses and attack dogs on me when I marched for my rights, if they tried to shut me out of educational opportunities, out of meaningful jobs, out of society itself.

You cannot ignore 12 percent of population. You cannot run them through the LSU football and basketball programs, cheer for them as heroes, and then discard them like yesterday’s news when their eligibility is up.

You have to treat people with some dignity whether you like it or not.

My grandfather drilled into me the conviction that you can take a lot of things from a man, but never take his dignity.

Cade Brumley, with Tuesday’s pronouncement, has thumbed his nose at the dignity of African Americans, Native Americans, and, if his moratorium extends to the Holocaust, Jews.

We should be reminded of that callousness every day because it resides in every member of our congressional delegation but one. It will be a dominant issue in this year’s legislative session, it already permeates the U.S. Congress and if allowed to fester, it will destroy this country from within like a cancer.

There were some initial problems in subscribing to my new blog, injustice4all.net but they’ve been corrected.

The new blog will be dedicated to tracking abuses by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges.

Se will be doing this on a national basis because, like the no-knock shooting in Minneapolis by cops, the wholesale funneling of juveniles into a facilitiy in which judges had a financial interest, and the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors.

While the vast majority of these public servants protect the citizenry and administer justice the way it should be done, misconduct by cops, judges and prosecutors is prevelant enough to warrant attention.

And it’s not a local problem. No state or municipality is unique; it’s a national problem and it’s growing. Orleans Parish’s own former District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. was notorious for withholding exculpatory evidence and he sent John Thomas to death row for 17 years by that method.

Injustice4all.net is up and running and you can subscribe for $5 per month or $50 for a year.

It’s All TheIRS is my latest book about what happens when the IRS picks on the wrong person.

It’s fiction, of course, because no one in his right mind will take on the IRS, which has the resources of the Treasury Department and the Justice Department on its side to put down any protest from an average American citizen.

The IRS never seems to go after the large corporations with the same zeal it does with the typical American taxpayer. That’s because the corporate giants have the financial resources and the legal minds to fight back. Ordinary citizens don’t have these weapons at their disposal. But Scott Tanner is no ordinary citizen. He’s a former investigative reporter for a Fort Worth newspaper and he knows how to start a grassroots movement.

With the help of the newspaper, social media, and an unexpected source from within the IRS, he launches a real tax rebellion – not a TEA Party – that produces real results.

It’s All TheIRS, while fiction, is frighteningly realistic in that it draws upon actual events involving the IRS to show the methods the agency can – and will – use and just how far it is willing to go to destroy lives.

You can get your copy by clicking on the yellow DONATE button in the column to the right of this post and paying $25 by credit card or you can mail a check for $25 to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.