Louisiana Voice

Gov. John Bel Edwards should never play poker or negotiate. He has demonstrated beyond all doubt that he is unable to bluff or mediate.

In fact, he has just shown a weakness in representing the interests of workers in Louisiana by opting out on the $300 per week unemployment benefits (about $1200 per month) in favor of accepting an whopping increase of $28 per month on their behalf.

I’m certain the Repugnantcans will love him for that. Below is a little illustration of how Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have fared over the last 12 years compared to minimum wage workers in America:

Repugnantcans have bitching for some time now that restaurants and other low-wage businesses have been experiencing trouble hiring workers who prefer to stay home and collect unemployment rather than earn a living.

It’s a valid argument on the surface of it but if you choose to dive just a bit deeper, you can see some rationale to the reluctance of workers to subject themselves to the abuses of rude customers and impatient managers. At a whopping $7.25 an hour, a worker would make $290 per week for a 40-hour week. That’s before paying for child care and gasoline to and from work.

And how many $7.25-an-hour employees work a full 40-hour week? Not many. They’re virtually all part-time workers with no health care insurance, no vacation pay, no sick pay.

By opting out, Gov. Edwards will force unemployed Louisianans back to their status as recipients of the lowest unemployment benefits in the nation.

Let’s hear it for the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), to whom it now appears that Edwards has sold out.

This isn’t some pitiful advocacy for socialism; it’s just a plea to do the right thing by Louisiana’s minimum wage workers. If Edwards had been any kind of bargainer at all, he would’ve insisted on a significant increase in the minimum wage as a trade-out for dropping the $300 per week federal unemployment benefits.

Opponents howl that increasing the minimum wage is inflationary. Well, so is the cost of lumber, used trucks, and just about anything else for which the costs have skyrocketed in recent months. Lumber has increased by an average of 200 percent but the minimum wage is still locked in at $7.25 per hour in Louisiana – right where it’s been since 2008 – that’s 13 years for Repugnantcan legislators who don’t seem to be able to understand that you can’t support a family on $7.25 an hour.

Give John Bel Edwards credit where it’s due. He handled the Covid pandemic magnificently and kept Louisiana’s infection rate at a manageable level. And while the state’s vaccination rate remains far too low, he can’t be blamed for citizens’ ignorance and stupidity.

But he dropped the ball in protecting the interests of minimum wage workers in Louisiana and he owns that blunder.

“There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen and never enough US congressmen.”

—Anonymous

“Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.”

—Winston Churchill

“[M]y fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

—US Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia), on his concern over stationing an additional 8000 Marines on Guam

“I think gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.”

— Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger during the 2003 California gubernatorial election campaign (he won)

“Thank God, I’m still alive. But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.”

—US Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-California), on the 1988 San Francisco earthquake

“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos and pictures You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

—US Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia)

“[B]ecause I knew that even though those thousands of people that were marching the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that loved this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law, and so I wasn’t concerned.

“[H]ad the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”

—US Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin)

“Where did all those tourists come from?”

For those who might believe the official story that a controversial lawsuit in 4^th Judicial District Court in Monroe was sealed by human error, you probably also believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and that Trump won the election.

Anyone who thinks anything done in 4^th JDC court is by accident, or “human error,” is only fooling himself. The 4^th JDC, which encompasses the parishes of Ouachita and Morehouse, is quite likely the most duplicitous, most secretive public body this side of Louisiana State Police.

How secretive? Well, the court even sued a local newspaper for making public records request, a tactic Attorney General Jeff Landry would later employ against the Baton Rouge Advocate for the same transgression.

The Ouachita Citizen newspaper in West Monroe is, for all intents and purposes, the only publication (other than LouisianaVoice) actively covering the exploits of the 4^th JDC and credit where credit is due, The Citizen has done a far better job than anyone else, including LouisianaVoice.

The larger daily (I’m guessing it’s larger, though The Citizen may well have surpassed it in circulation numbers) Gannett paper, the Monroe News-Star, just doesn’t have the time to cover the 4^th JDC’s mischief what with its devotion to covering the duck commanders, aka the Robertson family. But then, Allyson Campbell was a gossip columnist for the News-Star, so no one really expected that publication to wave the First Amendment banner too highly on that story.

Campbell is the SISTER of prominent Monroe personal injury attorney Catherine Creed and is married to her law partner, Christian Creed who contributed $5,000 to the 2015 campaign of Attorney General Jeff Landry.

Last Wednesday, The Citizen had another interesting STORY about a lawsuit that’s been hanging over the court like a dark cloud for six years now and which has been the source of much of the 4^th JDC’s consternation.

“Stanley Palowsky III is su[ing] law clerk Allyson Campbell and accused her of concealing or destroying court documents he filed with the Clerk of Court’s office in a separate racketeering lawsuit against a former business partner,” The Citizen REPORTED. “Palowsky also sued five Fourth Judicial District Court judges, claiming the five elected officials conspired to protect Campbell and cover up her alleged shenanigans.”

So, just what did Campbell do that was so awful?

Palowsky’s suit alleged the Clerk of Court could not locate as many as 52 different writ applications which had been “missing” for over a year and that Campbell “who was clerking for Defendant Sharp at the time, had used the applications as an end table in her office.”

An end table? Yep, an end table.

Here’s the LINK a story that the late Ken Booth wrote for LouisianaVoice way back in May 2016 that gives all the sordid details.

The clerk of court’s office, it seems sealed the record for more than three weeks before claiming it had been sealed by one of her employees by mistake.

Clerk of Court Dana Benson said deputy clerk Janae Madison inadvertently sealed the lawsuit. Madison’s mother-in-law once served as the judicial assistant to 4^th JDC Judge Carl Sharp, one of the five defendant judges in the Campbell lawsuit.

But on June 1, Benson told The Citizen that the record was sealed under an order by retired Judge Jerome “Jerry” Barbera of Thibodaux who has presided over the lawsuit as an ad hoc, or special appointed, judge since 2015 because the suit named the five judges in the 4^th JDC as defendants, along with Campbell. Benson said at the time that Judge Barbera had signed the order and that it was filed.

But Benson’s staff was unable to produce any court orders that the record be closed from the public.

This entire matter got so complicated that the Louisiana Office of Inspector General (OIG) and Louisiana State Police (LSP) got involved in an investigation but the two agencies apparently didn’t talk much to each other.

When LouisianaVoice made PUBLIC RECORDS REQUESTS for investigation reports, the LSP dug in its heels and refused to release the information, saying the investigation was ongoing but the OIG did provide a two-page summary that said the matter was over and done.

The Baton Rouge Advocate even got involved, saying in an editorial in January 2019 that the court was dragging its feet on the case and that it was “little wonder that public cynicism about important government institutions runs so deep these days.”

That was two and one-half years ago and the matter is still stalled and someone in the 4^th JDC didn’t want the lawsuit to become public record but apparently had no problem with it serving as Allyson Campbell’s end table.

Oh, wait. It was sealed by “human error.”

Of course it was.