Louisiana Voice

“I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” 

—Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, in 2012 on his unconditional opposition to abortion (he lost; maybe God intended that, too)

“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.”

—James Freeman Clarke (U.S. Rep., 1871-1975)

“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

—Will Rogers

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?”