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With π-yush, the word ‘friends’ has become synonymous with the word ‘cash’ when it comes to state board appointments

January 6, 2013 by tomaswell

Never let it be said that Piyush Jindal doesn’t remember his friends. As long as the word “friends” is synonymous with the word “cash.”

Of the seven new appointments and one re-appointment to the University of Louisiana System board, six of those combined to contribute nearly $147,000 to Jindal political campaigns from 2003 through 2011, according to state campaign finance records.

The terms of seven of the 16 member board expired on Dec. 31. The eighth position was vacated when attorney Jimmy Faircloth, Jindal’s former executive counsel, resigned after two years on the board and was replaced by his wife, Kelly Faircloth, a chiropractor.

Faircloth, while serving on the board, recently was contracted by Jindal to represent the State Department of Education in a pair of lawsuits challenging the state voucher system and the teacher tenure revisions, both enacted last year by the state legislature as part of Jindal’s education reform package.

Faircloth contributed $14,000 and his former Alexandria law firm contributed an additional $9,000 to Jindal campaigns in 2003, 2006 and 2010. Of that total, Faircloth and his firm each contributed $5,000 to Jindal on the same date in December of 2006.

Only one of three re-appointees, Jimmie “Beau” Martin, Jr. of Cut Off, contributed to Jindal. Martin, family members and three family-owned businesses combined to contribute $34,278.30, records show.

Jimmy Long, Sr. of Natchitoches and Winfred Sibille of Sunset were also re-appointed to new six-year terms but neither was found to have contributed to Jindal.

The other four new appointees and their contributions include:

• Gary Solomon of New Orleans, chairman of Crescent Bank and Trust (replacing Renee Lapeyrolerie): $35,000 from Solomon and family members in 2003, 2007 and 2008 and another $7,199 from Crescent Bank in 2007 and 2009;

• Mark Romero of New Iberia, executive vice president of Brown & Brown Insurance (replacing Paul Aucoin of Morgan City): $1,000 from Romero in 2008 and $9,000 by his insurance firm in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011;

• Robert Shreve of Baton Rouge, CEO of Gulf South Business Systems and Consultants (replacing Russell Mosely of Baton Rouge): $11,000 in 2007 and 2009 and $1,000 by his firm in 2011;

• John Condos of Lake Charles (replacing Louis Lambert): $20,500 by Condos and his wife.

No one expects any governor to appoint political opponents to state boards and commissions but some elected officials might choose to appoint small-time contributors; appointment considerations with this governor, however, just don’t work that way.

Instead, Piyush has displayed a disturbing propensity to favor the big-dollar contributors in making his appointments and the same old names keep popping up, indicating that his solid core support base may be a smaller fraternity than one might assume.

It’s either that or he simply chooses to bestow appointments on only his biggest contributors and ignore the rest.

Posted in Boards, Campaign Contributions, Commissions, Governor's Office, Louisiana Purchase | 3 Comments »

ATC’s Troy Hebert apparently just a poor innocent victim of a series of unfortunate circumstances and vindictive people

January 6, 2013 by tomaswell

Poor Troy Hebert. He just can’t catch a break.

If he’s not placing a former business partner on the payroll of the Alcohol and Tobacco Control Commission (ATC) but who is not required to report to work, he’s placing a person on the payroll specifically for the purpose of visiting lawmakers in the area.

If he’s not requiring employees to stand as he enters a room and greet him with a cheery, “Good morning, Commissioner,” he’s issuing a new directive prohibiting agents from criticizing other agents to the public and media—a clear violation of the First Amendment.

If he’s not cracking down on state cellphone use by ATC agents—even after explicitly informing them that they were free to use the phones for personal use because of their unusually long working hours across the state (and because the phones come with unlimited minutes), he is putting his agency in such a state of disarray that other law enforcement agencies now exclude ATC from participation in raids—a radical departure from past protocol.

If he isn’t taking off to St. Lucia for a week in December of 2010 without taking leave or leave without pay, he’s using state equipment to haul materials to his home currently under construction in Baton Rouge.

And if he’s not purchasing a $10,000 dog ostensibly for the purpose of sniffing synthetic marijuana even though no drug sniffing canine is qualified to locate synthetic drugs (because the chemical ingredients are constantly changing) and then reassigning the agent who went through training with the dog, then he’s pursuing trespassing charges against a person who rescued an emaciated dog from his vacant, unfinished home.

The latest incident involving the former state senator-cum-highly-paid Piyush Jindal appointee revolves around an 11-month Great Dane that Hebert said he was attempting to nurse through an episode of hip dysplasia—by leaving the animal unattended in a vacant house on Christmas Eve.

Hebert is building a new home on South Lakeshore Drive in Baton Rouge and Angie Brumfield of Denham Springs was walking her own dog around the Louisiana State University lakes with a friend. They stopped at the house which had a sign inviting passersby to photograph the home’s Christmas display.

As they waited for others to finish taking photos, Brumfield looked through a window of the unoccupied home which had no curtains.

Inside, she saw the sick gray-and-white female Great Dane lying on the floor. She described the animal as “emaciated, in distress and with bones protruding where they should not be.”

She said she thought the dog had been abandoned and left there to die.

A photograph by the New Orleans Times-Picayune posted on its nola.com http://www.nola.com/news/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2013/01/sick_dog_found_in_baton_rouge.html
showed an extremely sickly animal lying on a floor, with protruding ribs and hip bones.

She coaxed the dog through a sliding door in the rear of the home but never entered the house, she said. She took the animal home, cared for it over Christmas, looked for lost dog signs, and posted a Cragslist ad in an attempt to locate the owner.

She took it to a veterinarian the day after Christmas and the vet discovered a microchip in the dog which indicated it was owned by Hebert.

Hebert said his veterinarian had given pain medication for the dog and instructed the family to monitor the animal’s progress but the dog, named T-Girl, lost considerable weight because of the illness and was able to walk on only three legs.

Brumfield posted a photo of the dog on Facebook, expressed her distress at its condition and named Hebert and his pediatrician wife Dawn Vick as its owners and that’s when the trouble started.

Hebert, who seems to take undue pleasure at demeaning his employees and criticizing them both privately and in the media, took umbrage at Brumfield’s perceived attack on his reputation. “We have done nothing wrong,” Hebert sniffed. “We’re not going to stand back and allow some stranger who broke into our home, stole our dog and is attacking us on a social website when all we’ve been trying to do is deal with a very sad situation.”

Sure sounds like a vicious crime wave to us.

Sad or not, employees of ATC have confirmed that Hebert regularly brought a Great Dane (it’s not certain if it was T-Girl or another Great Dane owned by Hebert) to ATC last summer and would routinely leave the animal in the back of his pickup truck, exposed to the hot summer sun throughout the day with no food or water.

Now, though, he claims that Brumfield may have harmed T-Girl by moving her and keeping her without medication. “We firmly believe that after she took our dog, it made matters worse,” he said.

Hebert reported the matter to Baton Rouge police and Brumfield and her friend now face misdemeanor charges of unlawfully entering premises and unauthorized use of a “movable.”

Apparently, Hebert can do little more these days than pursue those who attempt to aid an animal in distress now that the Baton Rouge Police Department and the parish Alcohol and Beverage Control Board no longer work with ATC.

Prior to Hebert’s appointment ATC regularly participated in raids with other law enforcement agencies but two recent raids—one in Baton Rouge and the other in Lafayette—were carried out without ATC’s involvement.

A retired ATC agent told LouisianaVoice that Hebert “has destroyed an agency that once took the lead in serious investigations.”

The former agent said that agents spent years building relationships with local, federal and other state agencies. “We constantly worked with the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. marshals, military Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and other agencies,” he said.

“Many of us were integral members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces; we were teaching classes on alcohol and tobacco laws in police academies. We were one of the leading agencies in our field. We conducted compliance checks for sales of alcohol and tobacco to underage customers. We worked with the Louisiana State Police conducting DWI checkpoints.

“We trained and worked with local police departments and sheriffs’ offices to conduct their own operations.

“I think all that has been destroyed,” he said.

Hebert was appointed by Jindal on Nov. 23, 2010 and less than a month later he and his wife vacationed for a week in St. Lucia. He took neither annual leave (because he had not worked long enough to accumulate a week’s leave time) nor leave without pay.

When later confronted by state officials, he blamed a subordinate and was allowed to correct the “error” which, in some quarters, might be considered payroll fraud and grounds for dismissal.

He also hired Sean Magee of Jeanerette, a former business partner in a Hurricane Katrina debris cleanup business (while Hebert was still a state senator), to work for ATC but several agents say he never appears at the Baton Rouge headquarters.

More recently he has hired a legislative liaison whose only duties are to visit with legislators—even as he has reduced the number of enforcement positions which in return resulted in ATC’s becoming ineligible for certain federal grants. The agency also has lost its eligibility for sending agents to the FBI National Academy.

His most recent innovation is to craft a personnel policy expected to be released within the next few days that prohibits agents from criticizing other agents to the public or media.

As the head of a state law enforcement agency, perhaps Mr. Hebert should take the time to familiarize himself with the Louisiana Whistleblower Protection Act (R.S. 42:1169), the Louisiana State Employee Governmental Code of Ethics and the Bill of Rights, particularly the pesky First Amendment which guarantees citizens the right of free speech.

Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, State Agencies | 115 Comments »

Separation of Powers: why does our legislature cede its power to the governor? (LouisianaVoice guest column)

December 30, 2012 by tomaswell

By Stephen Winham ©2012

Because the lines have become so blurred recently, we often forget the reason our founding fathers created three separate branches of government in the 1787 U.S. Constitution. It was simple, really – to protect citizens from an abusive, authoritarian government by spreading and providing checks and balances on power. The separation of powers doctrine implicit in the constitution is applied, in varying measure, by both the U. S. and state governments.

While the judicial branch is responsible for preserving the law and resolving legal issues, the legislature is responsible for actually creating laws, including those making appropriations. The executive is responsible for administering these laws. Though the three branches are considered equal, the legislative branch can easily become the most powerful. If this is true, why is the governor so inordinately powerful in Louisiana?

From my perspective, the clearest example of how the doctrine of separation of powers is disregarded in Louisiana is the way the state’s budget is adopted. In many states the legislature considers budget proposals submitted by the governor (the Executive Budget), but then develops its own proposals, often including a document very much like the one submitted by the governor.

In Louisiana, the Legislature accepts the executive branch budget and the original appropriations bills (which are drafted by administration, not legislative, staff) as submitted. Any changes the legislature makes are by amendments to the bills. This should have the value of making a clear distinction between what the governor is requesting and what the legislature chooses to appropriate for state services. However, to the extent the legislature ultimately rolls over and plays dead, as it has over the last 6 years in ways unprecedented since the late 70s, it has ceded its greatest power – that of appropriation – to the executive branch.

The way the budget is handled is far from the only example of how the executive branch overextends its power via a compliant, and some would say, complicit legislature. Again, why is this so? Is it because the governor actually has extraordinary power by law? No, and remember it is the legislature that makes the law in any event.

I believe the legislature actually enjoys and benefits from being controlled by the governor. No matter what happens in Louisiana government these days, an individual legislator can excuse his/her actions to constituents by claiming s/he could not buck the governor, no matter how hard s/he tried. It’s a win-win situation for the legislature and the governor. The governor continues to wield unbridled power and enjoy positive national press while the legislature can quietly blame him for anything that goes wrong. Both the governor and, ironically, legislators are free to take full credit for anything that goes right.

The governor and members of the legislature are elected to serve the people’s interests. When the bulk of power is in the hands of one person, the value of the separation of powers doctrine is lost, including the extent to which the people’s interests are represented. This was apparently treated humorously when our four previous governors met in a recent forum, but it is no joke.

Posted in Ethics, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators | 9 Comments »

Notable Quotables (in their own words)

December 29, 2012 by tomaswell

“It is extremely satisfying to see a politician being made the rube by just the kind of sensationalism (in this case satiric) that they seem to adept at manufacturing these days.”

—Blogger Hudson Hongo, who latched onto Congressman John Fleming’s Facebook post, remarking on the Louisiana lawmaker’s falling for a satire story on The Onion about the opening of an $8 billion abortionplex.

Posted in Congress, Notable Quotables, Politics | 1 Comment »

Fleming bans critical comments from his Facebook page while posting criticism of satirical story on The Onion

December 29, 2012 by tomaswell

You couldn’t really blame Rep. John Fleming (R-Minden) if he simply canceled his Facebook account after the ridicule heaped upon him for his having fallen for a “story” on The Onion.

For those who still don’t know, The Onion is a web page that offers parodies of news stories.

Of course, Fleming, the all-in-one political reincarnation of Willie Rainach, Leander Perez and John Rarick, isn’t the only public official to fall for a satirical story published by The Onion. Only a few weeks ago the official Chinese People’s Daily English language website picked up the story in which The Onion named North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un as the “Sexiest Man Alive,” http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166293306/the-onion-so-funny-it-makes-us-cry running it verbatim and adding a 55-photo slideshow of Kim.

But when The Onion ran a story in May of 2011 announcing that Planned Parenthood had opened an $8 billion Abortionplex, Fleming swallowed the bait, albeit nearly a year later, giving the story new legs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/06/john-fleming-onion-planned-parenthood_n_1257763.html.

The story provided details of the “sprawling abortion facility,” including more than 2,000 rooms, coffee shops, bars, dozens of restaurants, retail outlets, a three-story nightclub and a 10-screen multiplex theater—“features intended not only to help clients relax, but to foster a sense of community and make abortion more of a social event.”

Last February, Fleming jumped into the fray, posting on his Facebook page, “More on Planned Parenthood, abortion by the wholesale.” http://literallyunbelievable.org/post/17153265749/how-exactly-did-you-get-elected Fleming spokesman Doug Sachteben later confirmed that the red-faced congressman had removed the post but the damage was done.

The blog Literally Unbelievable, which posts Facebook statuses from users who believe Onion articles, pounced on Fleming’s status before it was removed and re-posted it, prompting a few interesting comments:

• “…The Republican Party has become the party of the rich, the paranoid and the simple-minded.”

• “How can he really believe something so patently stupid?”

• “How much of a moron can you be and not be declared unfit for public office?”

• “Since Fleming is clearly brain-dead, can we unplug him now?”

So, not only was the good congressman from Minden gullible, he was also way behind the curve in being so.

Gullible and slow: not a good combination for a member of Congress, but welcomed by The Onion’s editor, Joe Randazzo.

“We’re delighted to hear that Rep. Fleming is a regular reader of America’s finest news source and doesn’t bother himself with the New York Times, Washington Post, the mediums of television and radio, or any other lesser journalism outlets,” he said.

Of course, Fleming loves to post onto his Facebook page, with many of his messages containing vitriolic criticism of political opponents.

He even goes so far as to block comments on his Facebook page from anyone who disagrees with him—a practice that should raise eyebrows considering the fact that he ostensibly represents all citizens in his Fourth Congressional District.

“Fleming threatened to ban/block me from his FB page for a comment I made that was not bad; it just pointed out his hypocrisy,” one of his constituents wrote.

Another, a retired federal employee, said he was accepted as a “friend” on Fleming’s Facebook page. “I had no problem viewing and commenting on anything that was posted,” he said. “At that time, I was often appalled at how demeaning Congressman Fleming or his staff was to some of the people who seemed to present a different point of view.

“If comments were supportive or “atta-boy” comments, he would praise the person and be very complimentary. But if they were contradictory, he would be very critical or condescending of the person,” he said.

After posting occasional comments that took issue with Fleming positions, the federal retiree sometime in early 2012 suddenly found that he could read Fleming’s posts but no longer could submit comments.

“I spent 16 years of my career working with congressional members relative to budget, so I am experienced at protocol, respecting and communicating with representatives and senators,” he said. “When I posted a comment, it might be supportive, neutral or contradictory, but the comment was always professionally worded and backed up with facts.

“As best I could tell, I had been flagged or was not allowed to post comments on anything posted on Congressman Fleming’s Facebook page.

“Hence, as a person who lives within his district, I am not allowed to express a concern or an opinion on his Facebook posts,” he said.

As a footnote to an earlier post, perhaps LouisianaVoice was a bit unfair to Fleming in portraying him as being interested in advancing only the interests of the wealthy by opposing any tax increase on those making more than $1 million per year.

We may have inadvertently made him appear greedy in showing how he obtained his riches first as a physician and then by branching out into other areas such as Subway sandwich shops and UPS franchises.

We may even have been unfair in pointing out the discrepancies in his numbers when he said he only has $600,000 left over after his businesses brought in $6.3 million in 2010 and the remaining $5.7 million had to go to paying 500 employees, equipment purchase and leasing and the purchase of food for his restaurants.

After all, it almost certainly was a misstatement on his part to imply that he was paying his 500 employees at a wage below the national poverty level. ($5.7 million divided by 500 employees comes to $11,400 per year, the approximate national poverty level in 2010.)

Surely, it was unfair to imply that Fleming does not care for the working poor when a search of corporations run by him reveals that he represents Fleming Payday Loans, an enterprise that offers short-term loans to those who need quick cash to tide them over from payday to payday.

Never mind that the annualized interest rate of a two-week loan may be as high as 390 percent.

He’s helping the poor, right?

Posted in Congress | 7 Comments »

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