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Jindal, not content with just attacking Washington, goes international with unsolicited advice to French President

June 8, 2014 by tomaswell

Have you ever wondered why Gov. Bobby Jindal writes all those op-ed pieces for the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Heritage Foundation, and Politico and not for Louisiana publications?

Could it be for the same reason that he doesn’t hold press conferences that aren’t tightly managed and/or staged? Could it be because the ones who read those publications are, for the most part, not from Louisiana so he can get away with his half-truths and outright prevarications (a polite word for lies)? What he says in those publications would simply never fly in Louisiana and he knows it—because we know him.

His ruminations can best be described as the artful practice of creative license because his ideas rarely are grounded in reality. They are more suited to one of those inane, shallow plots from The Brady Bunch, from which, coincidentally, he took his first name Bobby.

But now, in his ubiquitous quest for the presidency, he is taking his unsolicited opinions global and the powers at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are probably quaking in their boots.

Our governor, who, in his six years in office, has yet to present an executive budget that wasn’t held together with Bondo, baling wire and duct tape, has offered President Barrack Obama and French President Francois Holande the benefit of his vast economic knowledge in his latest op-ed for The Heritage Foundation. And he even managed to invoke the memory of D-Day in doing so.

Perhaps we subconsciously plagiarized Jindal who in his op-ed piece criticized Obama and Hollande for their “pretensions to economic knowledge vastly exceed their capacity to make smart policy choices.”

Would that be smart choices like your school voucher plan? Or like your ill-fated state retirement reform plan? Or would it be more like your income tax reform plan of last year that was dead on arrival? Or perhaps it was your visionary plan to build those $250 million disappearing berms to stem the flow of oil from the BP spill? What about your rejection of an $80 million federal grant to provide Broadband internet services to the state’s rural areas? Or even your inspirational plan to trick the feds into matching its own federal funds with more federal funds in your infamous hospital privatization plan through advance lease payments? Or maybe the health insurance premium reduction that resulted in that historic drawdown of the Office of Group Benefits reserve fund from half-a-billion dollars to something like $60 million or so? And there’s that $5 million contract with Alvarez & Marsal to cut state spending by, among other things, cutting Medicaid fraud and having Medicaid Mamas birth their babies at home. But then it could be your going against the advice of a dozen or so legal scholars and Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to sign SB 469 that kills the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPA-E) lawsuit against those 97 oil companies that wrecked our coastline and marshes but which contains language that might also kill ongoing claims by local governments for damages inflicted by that BP spill. It’s not, after all, like his own legal counsel is batting a thousand in these matters.

No matter. We can readily see there is a plethora of examples of stellar economic wisdom flowing from the fourth floor of the State Capitol.

Why, you are so full of wonderful economic ideas that you even supported the rejection of Senate Concurrent Resolution 142 by Sen. Rick Gallot (D-Ruston).

I mean, let’s be reasonable. Gallot wanted to pass a resolution asking that the Department of Revenue to take whatever action is necessary to ensure that all oil and gas severance taxes due the state from oil companies is paid in accordance with state law.

Gallot, in his frenzied call for heavy-handed governmental control, actually wanted the Department of Revenue and the Legislative Auditor to work together to determine the accuracy of self-reported (as in no oversight) data from oil and gas companies to determine the amount of severance taxes owed as well as the accuracy of tax refunds claimed on those severance taxes.

Gallot also wanted to take the oppressive hand of state government even further by having the two state agencies “review and conduct yearly audits of all who may owe mineral royalties to ensure that the state receives complete, accurate, and timely payments.”

Really? We wouldn’t just want to continue to take the word of the oil and gas companies?

The State Senate, apparently caught unaware of Gallot’s Gestapo-like tactics, approved the resolution by a 35-0 vote with four absences (Conrad Appel, A.G. Crowe, Jack Donahue and Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb) but the House, much more alert to threats to members’ generous campaign contributors, defeated the measure by a 48-44 vote with 12 absences—22 votes short of the required two-thirds needed.

Here is the House vote on SCR 142:

YEAS

Anders

Arnold

Badon

Barrow

Billiot

Broadwater

Burns, H.

Burrell

Chaney

Connick

Cox

Dixon

Edwards

Fannin

Franklin

Gaines

Gisclair

Guillory

Harrison

Hazel

Hill

Honore

Hunter

Jackson

James

Jefferson

Johnson

Jones

Landry, T.

LeBas

Leger

Montoucet

Moreno

Morris, Jay

Norton

Ortego

Pierre

Ponti

Price

Reynolds

Richard

Ritchie

Shadoin

Smith

Thierry

Williams, A.

Williams, P.

Woodruff

TOTAL: 48

 

NAYS

Adams

Barras

Berthelot

Bishop, S.

Burford

Burns, T.

Carmody

Carter

Champagne

Danahay

Dove

Foil

Garofalo

Guinn

Harris

Havard

Henry

Hodges

Hoffmann

Hollis

Howard

Huval

Ivey

Lambert

Landry, N.

Leopold

Lopinto

Lorusso

Mack

Miller

Pope

Pugh

Pylant

Robideaux

Schexnayder

Seabaugh

Simon

St. Germain

Stokes

Talbot

Thibaut

Thompson

Whitney

Willmott

Total – 44

 

ABSENT

Mr. Speaker

Abramson

Armes

Bishop, W.

Brown

Cromer

Geymann

Greene

Hensgens

Morris, Jim

Pearson

Schroder

TOTAL–12

 

After all, who needs another layer of government bureaucracy to ensure that the state receives the money due from the oil and gas companies? They already have folks on staff to make certain that the ordinary citizen pays his taxes so why do we need to duplicate that effort with the oil and gas companies? After all, we killed that pesky lawsuit against the oil companies.

And now Jindal, the financial wizard of Louisiana, writes an essay critical of…France’s revenue shortfall.

While saying America’s labor force participation rate is at a 36-year low (could be because American corporations ship jobs overseas for cheap labor, thus robbing Americans of decent jobs?), Jindal claims that Obama’s proposed minimum wage increase could cause as many as a million Americans to lose their jobs. Apparently, he would prefer that we revert to the dollar-an-hour minimum wage of the ‘60s and McDonald’s would love nothing better than to outsource its hamburger flipping jobs to Bangladesh if it could find a way to do so.

Jindal also was critical of France’s 11 percent unemployment rate, contrasting it with Louisiana’s 4.3 percent jobless rate.

But as Baton Rouge/New Orleans Advocate reporter Mark Ballard, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, pointed out, France’s unemployment is the result of the country’s practice of giving government aid to students to help them complete their education as opposed to American students who work, but at low-paying jobs to pay their way through school. At the same time, Ballard, again citing Krugman, said that French adults “in their prime working years…are substantially more likely to have jobs than their American counterparts.”

But here’s the kicker: Jindal, with his smoke and mirrors economic policy, believes dealing out tax breaks, exemptions and other incentives to rich corporations like so much Halloween candy leads to employment for the poor. It’s a classic example of misdirection and precisely the reason he prefers to write for publications outside the borders of Louisiana.

“But in Louisiana,” he writes for The Heritage Foundation, “we’ve tried to show that there is a better way—one that leads to quality jobs and robust economic growth.” That growth, it should be obvious to those forced to sling burgers for a living, is why our tax base continues to shrink instead of expanding, his sage advice to the French president notwithstanding.

“While Obama raised federal taxes by more than $1 trillion, we passed the largest income tax cut in state history,” he writes. “As a Democratic Congress rammed through trillions in new spending for Obamacare, we cut the state budget by 26 percent. And even as the EPA proposes new regulations that could decimate critical portions of our energy sector, we’ve worked to create a more predictable legal environment for energy companies in the state,” he said.

Well, there is certainly no disputing that last statement as witness the Jindal-led successful effort to kill the lawsuit by the SLFPA-E litigation.

But we do have a question: how is it that our governor can spend more time writing his self-serving op-ed pieces for the national publications than he spends at the job for which he is paid? Perhaps someone will ask him that if he ever holds a real press conference in Louisiana.

 

Posted in Economy, Governor's Office, Jobs | 23 Comments »

Lawsuit claims State got cart ahead of the horse in closure of Huey P. Long Hospital in Pineville, layoff of 100+ employees

June 7, 2014 by tomaswell

Did the Jindal administration get the cart ahead of the horse when it announced the layoff of more than 100 state employees at a state hospital in central Louisiana?

As if Gov. Bobby Jindal did not have enough on his plate with his attempts to gain approval form the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for his hospital privatization plan, now the battle over the closure of one hospital has moved into the courts.

Brad Ott of New Orleans and Ed Parker of East Feliciana Parish have named the Louisiana State Senate, the State of Louisiana and the LSU Board of Supervisors in their lawsuit filed in 19th Judicial Court in Baton Rouge.

Their petition claims that the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare violated the state’s open meetings law in approving the closure of Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville.

Moreover, the petition says that while more than 100 classified employees are due to receive layoff notices effective June 30, the State Civil Service Commission is not scheduled to consider the LSU layoff plan until early July.

Wait. What?

Did the LSU Board of Stuporvisors really notify 100-plus employees that they no longer had jobs—before getting formal approval of the layoff plan from Civil Service?

Surely not.

The Rules of Order of the Senate, Rule 13.73, entitled “Notice of committee meetings during session,” provides in part: “Such notices shall be posted for each meeting as soon as practicable, but not later than 1 p.m. of the day preceding the meeting day.”

Rule 13.75, entitled “Meetings prohibited without notice,” provides in part: “No meeting of a committee, regularly scheduled or otherwise, shall be held unless there is full compliance with the requirements of Louisiana Senate Rule 13.73…”

The lawsuit says the notice for the April 2, 2014, meeting of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare was revised on April 1 at 4:04 p.m. to add the consideration of SCR 48 by Sen. Gerald Long (R-Natchitoches).

SCR 48 was the Senate Concurrent Resolution that called for the closure of Huey P. Long. The resolution passed in the House Health and Welfare Committee by a 10-8 vote after nearly three hours of debate. By contrast, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee took only 10 minutes for unanimous passage.

Both petitioners say they had planned to testify in opposition to the resolution before the committee but that they were not notified that the committee would be taking up SCR 48 on April 2 because of the last minute revision to the notice of the meeting. “Consequently, both of the petitioners were effectively prevented from observing the deliberations…and expressing their concerns,” the petition said.

Wait. What?

Would a Louisiana Senate committee really do an end run around opponents to a controversial resolution in violation of the open meetings law in order to slip the resolution through?

Surely not.

But with the administration desperate to ram its hospital privatization through despite questionable funding methods, anything is possible. Jindal, in fact, has clearly demonstrated that he will go to any length to move his agenda along.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys J. Arthur Smith and Adrienne Rachel are seeking a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief subject to the state’s open meetings law, an injunction prohibiting the state from implementing provision of SCR 48, monetary damages for violations of the state’s open meetings law, and attorney’s fees.

Smith is a relative newcomer in litigation against the state but he has sent out notice that the old ways of doing business may be changing. He has already won one battle with the Department of Education over the department’s reluctance to comply with the state’s public records laws and currently has other suits pending against the Department of Agriculture and the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control.

Posted in Civil Service, DHH, Health Care, House, Senate, Lawsuits, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization | 9 Comments »

Notable Quotables (in their own words)

June 6, 2014 by tomaswell

“…My purpose is to dismantle the dismantlers. As such, my words are not kind. My words expose, and that exposure is harsh. The individuals and organizations profiled in this book have declared war on my profession, and I take that personally.”

 

—Mercedes Schneider, writing in the introduction to her book A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education.

Posted in BESE, Book Review, Education, Media, Notable Quotables, Privatization | 1 Comment »

Schneider’s Chronicle of Echoes a must-read for anyone concerned about public education (Jindal, White, Not!)

June 6, 2014 by tomaswell

 

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A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of America’s Public Education (Information Age Publishing, 404 pages) is a new book by St. Tammany Parish high school English teacher Mercedes Schneider that should be required reading by both proponents and opponents of the current drift in education from public to private, from non-profit availability to all students to for-profit institutions available to the select few.

Before we get too far into our review of this book, there are two things you should know about Mercedes Schneider:

  • The emphasis is on the first syllable of Mer’ Ce-deez; she’s not a car, nor was she named for one.
  • Don’t ever make the mistake of trying to schmooze her with B.S., especially when it comes to issues involving public education. She will call you out the same way she called out an ill-prepared Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President (BESE) Chas Roemer following his debate with Diane Ravitch in March of 2013. Ravitch had already run circles around Roemer in their debate and he was simply no match for Schneider in the question-and-answer session that followed. It would have been comical had it not been for the position of such serious responsibility conferred upon Roemer by voters in his BESE district.

And when she does call you out, that caustic and at the same time, delightful St. Bernard Parish accent comes shining through like a lighthouse beacon slicing through a foggy night.

The publisher of an education online blog called At the Chalk Fence, She has moved her debate from her ongoing fight with Gov. Bobby Jindal and Superintendent of Education John White to a national forum and is now calling out such self-proclaimed education experts as former New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein, whom she calls “the viral host of the corporate reform agenda,” Teach for America (TFA) founder Wendy Kopp, disgraced Washington, D.C. school chancellor and later founder of StudentsFirst Michelle Rhee, vagabond school reformer and former Superintendent of Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD) Paul Vallas, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the “Big Three Foundations: Gates, Walton and Broad.”

A thorn in the side of Jindal, White, and Roemer of long-standing, she turns her attention to the national educational debate in Chronicle. With an appropriate nod to Ravitch as her mentor and the one who was always available when needed for advice, Schneider peppers her targets with a barrage of statistics that refute the unrealistic theories advanced by the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and TFA who insist meaningful education reform can be accomplished with inexperienced teachers and administrators, for-profit charters, vouchers, and the idea that throwing money at a problem is not the answer (despite their propensity to pour billions of dollars into their own idealistic agendas—at best, a philosophical oxymoron).

A product of the St. Bernard Parish public schools (P.G.T. Beauregard High School), Schneider’s attempt to drop out of school at age 15 somehow morphed into a B.S. in secondary education (English and German), a master’s degree in guidance and counseling from the State University of West Georgia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Northern Colorado.

She taught graduate-level statistics and research courses at Ball State University. It was at Ball State that she first took on the task of challenging the issues related to No Child Left Behind, teaching students “how bad an idea it was to attempt to measure teacher performance using student standardized test scores.”

In July 2007, only months before the election of Jindal as governor, she returned home and began a new job teaching high school English in St. Tammany parish.

Her introduction contains a brilliant metaphor for the corporate destruction of public education: she describes what she calls a “detailed image” of an abandoned building being imploded and collapsing upon itself. She envisions the building (public education), “not ornate, not without need for repairs, but sturdy,” as men in yellow hard hats (corporate reformers, we are told) watch, knowing what is about to transpire “because they have orchestrated it from the inside.” She describes the men as “responsible for the impending structural failure” and “who have planned the failure but are removed from its consequences.”

In her blog, she recently launched a withering attack on White’s embargo of the LEAP summary public report, saying the state superintendent had “apparently found himself in an unfamiliar fix regarding his characteristic ‘water muddying.’” She accused White of “collapsing” categories within the LEAP grading system in order to conceal variation through report “groupings” that she said concealed the precision of the standard five levels of LEAP achievement (unsatisfactory, approaching basic, basic, mastery, and advanced).

“Collapsing ‘basic,’ ‘mastery,’ and ‘advanced’ into a single, generic ‘passed’ serves to conceal achievement nuances that might make Louisiana Miracle RSD appear to be ‘less than’ locally-run districts—the ones operated by those pesky, traditional local school boards,” she said.

“After all, a test-score-deficient ‘miracle’ is harder to sell,” she said. “If the data reflect poorly on privatization, then the troubled corporate reformer could alter the data, or alter the reporting, or alter access to the reporting, or employ some combination of the three. Gotta love corporate reform ‘transparency.’”

Jindal, White and Roemer may heave a collective sigh of relief that they have been spared the glare of the spotlight in Chronicle as she concentrates her argument on the glaring weaknesses of the major education reform movers and shakers at the national level.

But perhaps they should not be too comfortable at being spared just yet.

After all, certain matter, they say, flows downhill.

A Chronicle of Echoes is a must read for anyone who is or ever claimed to be concerned about the perpetual political tampering with public education in America—by those least qualified to do so.

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Book Review, Charters, Education, Governor's Office, Privatization, Recovery School District, Vouchers | 7 Comments »

Another timely (and spot on) offering from our anonymous cartoonist friend; lampoons the $5M Avarez & Marsal study

June 5, 2014 by tomaswell

 

From our anonymous cartoonist (with our eternal gratitude)

From our anonymous cartoonist…(Click on image to enlarge).

Posted in Cartoon, Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, Waste | 9 Comments »

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