Our Culture and Tourism Can't Afford Jay Dardenne as Lieutenant Governor. Elect Caroline Fayard!

Just because Jay Dardenne is a poor Secretary of State is no reason to promote him to the position of Lieutenant Governor.

Dardenne has made a mess of Louisiana's election return system, centralizing precinct reporting in Baton Rouge, making local Clerks of Court personnel little more than equipment collectors, and creating bottlenecks in reporting that have actually slowed the reporting of election returns at the local level. He's also allowed a private contractor (GCR and Associates) with extensive ties to Republican political organizations (like the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority) to manage the state's registered voter database while at the same time providing voter database services to those partisan organizations. It is a situation fraught with ethical questions in view of repeated Republican efforts focused on voter suppression.

The solution for cleaning up Jay Dardenne's mess is not to promote him, but to defeat him at the polls in 2011 when he has to seek a full term.

The state's tourism industry is too valuable to this state to be put into the unimaginative hands of a political plodder like Dardenne. If he follows the path he's taken as Secretary of State, the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (CRT) will be turned into little more than a cash stream for some private company that Dardenne would designate to run the show.

Crony capitalism is the Republican business model and, as Secretary of State, Jay Dardenne has shown himself to be a devotee. Applying that business model to CRT would be the death knell for Louisiana's tourism industry that is already suffering under budget cuts imposed by the Jindal administration. The last thing that department and that industry needs is a sycophant trying to win the favor of our distracted governor.

What CRT needs is a champion. We will have that with Caroline Fayard as Lieutenant Governor.

Democrats have shown that they know how to run this department effectively and efficiently. Kathleen Blanco helped build tourism into an economic powerhouse while serving as Lieutenant Governor for eight years under Governor Mike Foster. When she became Governor in 2004, Mitch Landrieu took over the department and continued to build on Blanco's success, even in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Caroline Fayard gets it. She's seen our state from the inside and from the outside. She's already had a career that has given her extensive connections in the public and private sectors that she can translate into new opportunities for our state. She's bright, articulate, and attractive. She'd be a great 'face' for our state in the tourism industry.

At a time when Louisiana is served by a cynical governor who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, this state needs an independent thinker in the Lieutenant Governor's office. We need someone who will not only work to champion our tourism industry, but will fight to reverse the damage being done to our cultural institutions by the short-sighted policies of the Jindal administration.

As Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, they are the party of the locked-step. They punish those who break with party orthodoxy or who express any kind of independence.

Jay Dardenne is a Republican by choice and by temperament. He will not stand against more cuts, he will stand with Bobby Jindal. He will not object to closing more museums, canceling more festivals, reducing library services, or eliminating more programs. He will fall in line. He will meekly follow. He will obey.

Louisiana's culture and our tourism industry can't afford that attitude. It can't afford Jay Dardenne.

Elect Caroline Fayard Lieutenant Governor in order to save our culture from the mindlessly destructive policies of Bobby Jindal and his fellow Republican cynics.

Jindal's Hack Attacks

Alan Levine was billed as the "Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary" when he appeared at the Baton Rouge Press Club on Monday. But as anyone who caught his presentation (PDF) on the impact of healthcare reform on Louisiana immediately grasped, the cabinet secretary title is a cover for Levine's true role as Jindal's most ardent partisan hack.

From attacking healthcare reform to barring DHH employees from talking to legislators about policy to calling for investigations to try to stifle opposition to privatization, Alan Levine is the tip of the spear on the governor's effort to use healthcare policy to shrink state government and give more power (and money) to private contractors.

Levine is continuing the work that Jindal started as Mike Foster's DHH secretary just over a decade ago. The difference is that Levine actually knows something about healthcare policy (if Jindal knows anything about it, he learned it after he left DHH) and has not (at least not yet) displayed the kind of unbridled political ambition that Jindal personifies.

Still, Levine came to the job after finding his place in Florida politics in Jeb Bush's second administration. He came to Louisiana after taking over a struggling hospital system for Bush, privatized much of it (some of it using no-bid contracts) and rode that success to his job with Jindal.

Man On A Mission

Levine came to Louisiana in 2008 on a mission. That mission was to radically restructure the delivery of healthcare in Louisiana in a way that would help propel Jindal's Republican political ambitions.

First on the agenda was a complete makeover of Medicaid, the jointly funded healthcare program that provides care to women, children and the disabled. Levine had run a pilot program in Florida that set up a managed care approach to running Medicaid there. The idea was to limit spending by restricting access to care. The restriction would come through the management of care by third-party entities who had a similar role in the scheme to that of HMOs. There was a fixed pool of money. The managed care provider would negotiate a package deal with providers to provide care for Medicaid patients. The managed care provider would get paid out of the existing pool of funds.

It is classic conservative Republican approach to policy: make the dollars go further by cutting back on the amount of services delivered and make some company rich in the process.

Levine hit the ground running in Louisiana, but there were complications with the calendar. Jindal and Levine wanted to get a Medicaid waiver approved by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) while the Bush administration was still in office. This should not have been an issue seeing as Jindal had served in that administration and Levine had served in the administration of the President's brother who was the governor of Florida.

There were complications.

The first factor was that the move could not begin until the new state budget for Fiscal Year 2008-2009 was in place. Louisiana fiscal years begin on July 1. It took Levine a couple of months to organize an advisory committee whose purpose was ostensibly to provide input on the development of a Medicaid waiver request.

The panel was barely in place when the first of what has become a seemingly unending series of Medicaid budget shortfalls was discovered in late September of 2008. Shortly after that happened, Levine christened his Medicaid waiver "Louisiana Health First" and the generally genial discussions with the so-called advisory panel continued.

Things blew up when Jindal and Levine announced the plan fully-formed in November 2008 and committed to filing with with CMS in the waning days of the Bush administration. Members of the advisory committee went public with criticism of Levine for a lack of transparency in the process they were allegedly supposed to be participants in. It certainly appeared to the members of that group that they had been used by Levine to provide a patina of legitimacy to a plan that Levine had developed without their input or knowledge.

It was two days before Christmas, 2008, before Levine got his waiver request to CMS — the Legislature had to sign off on it and there were questions. By this time, all the DC Bushies were either too busy packing or had already left the nation's capital seeking new opportunities in what was no longer a Republican town.

Louisiana Health First came to naught, though it did poison Levine's credibility among Medicaid providers — a distrust that informs his relations with them today.

Privatization

The first big challenge for the Jindal administration on the privatization front was the question of what to do with Big Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which had been rendered useless by the post-Katrina flooding.

Governor Kathleen Blanco had somehow convinced a recalcitrant Louisiana Legislature to approve planning dollars for three new LSU hospitals in the wake of the storms of 2005 — Big Charity, Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, and Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville.

The initial impulse of the administration was to scrap all three hospitals, but the pressure to build a new hospital in New Orleans was too important to the post-Katrina recovery narrative for Jindal to ignore. Combined with a commitment from the Veterans Administration to build a new hospital in New Orleans, the project constitutes a nearly $2 billion investment in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Levine became the point man on what became very clearly a quid pro quo between the administration and LSU. The deal came down to this: LSU could get a hospital in New Orleans but it could not get a hospital in Baton Rouge, too. Sort of a "nice hospital you've got there, LSU. It would be a shame if anything happened to it." The new Pineville hospital was dead on arrival.

In the dance that ensued, LSU ended up negotiating a deal with Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center thereby enabling the closure of Earl K. Long. Some of the capacity served by that hospital will be replaced by a large outpatient clinic near Earl K. Long. Our Lady of the Lake agreed to take some of the Medicaid patient load (at a higher-than-average reimbursement rate) and to become home for LSU's medical training program in Baton Rouge. They'll also get a Tier 1 trauma center, courtesy of the state.

Cerise told the Times-Picayune after the deal was struck that the cost of shifting care from Earl K. Long to OLOL will actually drive up Medicaid costs in the Baton Rouge area. So, this example shows that cost savings is not the intent of the Jindal/Levine privatization effort. Instead, the goal is to dismantle public healthcare infrastructure ranging from public hospitals in the LSU hospital system to the state's three mental health hospitals in Mandeville, Pineville and Jackson.

This clearly is privatization for privatization's sake. It will have two immediate impacts. First, it will remove hundreds (ultimately thousands if carried to its end) of workers from the state payroll. Second, it will create lucrative contracting opportunities for private sector firms who move in to operate the remaining operations which is the plan for the mental health hospitals.

The question of the quality of care given to patients was raised in one legislative hearing by a family member of a resident in one of the state mental health institutions. It is apparently not relevant to Jindal and Levine as it is not quantifiable as a budget item.

Jackson: A Deal Too Far

Levine's effort to privatize the state's mental health hospitals has sparked a surprising bi-partisan rebellion in the Legislature against the move. The plan to privatize the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson was apparently the deal too far.

East, as it is known, is located in East Feliciana Parish. The move to privatize jeopardizes hundreds of jobs in that rural parish and that brought employees and the business community together in opposition to the plan. It led to a confrontation in the Legislature where the normally Jindal-friendly House voted to require legislative oversight of the privatization process.

Levine, apparently seeking to crush the rebellion at ground zero, called on the inspector general to review employment records at the three facilities — East, Central Louisiana State Hospital in Pineville and Southeast Louisiana Hospital at Mandeville — to check what he suggested were abuses of the family leave policies at the facilities.

Attacking Healthcare Reform

Jindal and Levine were early critics of President Obama's attempts to reform the nation's healthcare delivery system, and they have not relented since 2009.

Levine was called to Washington by congressional Republicans to deliver highly partisan attacks on the Democratic initiative dating to its infancy. No matter the shape of the reform at any given time during the arduous legislative journey to becoming law, Levine could be counted on to take up the Republican talking points against the plan.

Once the bill became law in April, Levine became the in-state point man of Republican efforts to fight the implementation of the law.

Levine testified before the Louisiana House Insurance Committee on April 20 in support of Representative Kirk Talbot's constitutional amendment to have the state nullify the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Levine, like Talbot, put the fight within the context of states' rights.

Well, any excuse would do, wouldn't it.

In late May, when the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation published a state-by-state assessment of the impact of the Affordable Care Act on extending coverage to low-wage individuals and families, Levine lashed out with a partisan harangue that focused only on the cost side of the law and the analysis. Nowhere in his response could Levine bring himself to acknowledge any benefit being derived —economic, community, social or otherwise — that would result from extending healthcare coverage to a broad swath of Louisiana's large number of uninsured residents.

That inability to acknowledge any positive aspect in a policy or program being opposed is the trademark of an ideologue.

And it was Levine the ideologue who took the podium at the Baton Rouge Press Club on Monday and delivered a presentation that is so blatantly political that it raises questions regarding how public funding can be used to produce such a clearly political document (PDF).

Lies, Damned Lies, and Levine's Statistics

Like Jindal, the only thing that has value in Levine's view of healthcare is money. If a program costs dollars, then it must be bad.

How else can one assess a 32-page presentation on a piece of landmark social legislation that never mentions any social benefit but focuses exclusively on the cost of the program — and inflates those costs to cast the legislation in the worst possible light?

Levine's intent is to show as large dollar costs to the state as he can possibly imagine. He projects 13 years out to come up with a projected increased cost to the state of $7 billion, and he has to use a premise of private sector employers dropping coverage for their workers and dumping them on the Medicaid rolls to get there.

Like Jindal, Levine assumes that state revenues will never increase again. Therefore, the prospect of the state actually having the revenue to pay for he increased costs that the program will actually bring are beyond his capability of imagining. One is left to assume that the idea of state revenues increasing would be considered a nightmare scenario in the world of Jindal/Levine.

Levine completely ignores the reality that the current system of employer based healthcare is not sustainable without reform. The Affordable Care Act maintains private sector insurance, imposes some requirements on companies and requires individuals to buy coverage. It provides tax credits to businesses to provide coverage and it provides subsidies to individuals and families to enable them to afford coverage. It will improve access to care for nearly all Louisiana residents, which will go far to address our chronic disease problems. It will inject billions of dollars into the care provider community, putting hospitals, clinics and individual providers on better financial footing.

Levine cannot bring himself to mention — much less admit — any of this.

This kind of distorted take on healthcare reform could be expected from the kind of partisan hack that Levine clearly is. But, he should stop hiding behind his title as cabinet secretary in his pursuit of his partisan agenda. Alan Levine is a suitable political operative for Bobby Jindal, but he is abusing his office as secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals at this critical juncture in our state's history.

Serving in that capacity involves a public trust. Levine's loyalty should be to his oath and to the public. It is clear that his loyalty is to Jindal and his ideology.

If he had any decency, he'd resign.

Again, if he had any decency.

Myths Die Hard: Can Conservatism Survive the Death of the Self-Regulating Market?

Fishermen, sportsmen and environmentalists are not the only people depressed by what has been happening along the Louisiana coast for the past month. This still evolving economic and environmental catastrophe is going to radically alter the politics in this country because when the final accounting of the BP Gulf Gusher is written, it will have killed more than people (as dear and as important as those 11 workers were to their friends and families), more than birds and fish, and, possibly, industries.

It will have also killed a myth that is at the core of modern conservatism — the myth of the self-regulating marketplace.

The myth was on its last legs before the disaster. The near-death experience of the financial system involving securitized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and pumped up ratings from credit agencies nearly hurled us into a global depression. We're still not out of the woods, but we have not fallen into the abyss.

Wall Street stalwart Goldman Sachs was revealed to have sold products to one set of clients that it was helping other clients bet against. It set up a 'heads we win, tails you lose' scenario that undermined what little credibility the financial community had left in the wake of the Bernard Madoff and Alan Stanford ponzi schemes — and those are merely the largest and best known of a large crop of financial scammers that thrived in the last financial regulatory environment that persisted even after the Enron scandals earlier in this decade.

Toyota — a company that built its brand on quality — sold millions of auto mobiles that had potential runaway acceleration issues, kept it secret from costumers and regulators, and only fessed up after the evidence was too big to deny.

Coalminers for Massey Energy died in one of the largest mine disasters in a quarter of a century and it was revealed that the company had been fighting (successfully) for years to stave off fines for safety violations while keeping the mines operating with unsafe conditions.

Then, of course, there is the energy industry (symbolized today by BP) that had the run of the Department of the Interior during the Bush/Cheney years. The corruption of that department is best illustrated by the way the industry treated the Mineral Management Service as a captive arm of the industry as a direct result of strategy driven by Vice President Dick Cheney to retain a facade of a regulatory structure while waging war on the ability of the Department of the Interior, the EPA and others to provide the kind of regulatory oversight that people expected but Cheney, his fellow conservatives, and the industry detested.

The catastrophe taking place in the Gulf of Mexico and in our coastal marshes and along our shore is the emphatic real world result and consequence of what the ideological struggle so-called free market conservatives have been fighting to achieve for decades. They wanted government off the back of industry. Conservatives didn't get all of what they wanted but it was clearly closer that we, as a society interested in its survival, can any longer afford to allow them to come.
 What these recent disasters have demonstrated is that corporations cannot be left to their own devices to deal with the operation of their individual businesses or their industries. In today's rabid economic environment where the only sacred trust has been how to "maximize shareholder value" things like safety, protection of the environment, the public interest get crammed down the totem of corporate priorities until they just don't matter.

Hard Learned Lessons Unlearned

Previous generations of Americans learned the lessons that this generation is learning now. Specifically, the lesson is that only government can protect the public's well-being in an economic system where profits is king.

The lesson was learned during the excesses of the Guilded Age — an era in the late 19th Century where political leaders were reluctant to get the federal government involved in the operation of the national economy. Coming out of that era which included the creation of monopolies and great wealth along with a the wider distribution of great poverty, the Progressive Movement pressed a series of economic reforms that sought to regulate the economy but also improve product safety in the U.S. It is not possible to describe the complexity of the effort in a blog, but here's a passage that does a pretty good job of it:

By the turn of the century, a middle class had developed that was leery of both the business elite and the radical political movements of farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West. Known as Progressives, these people favored government regulation of business practices to ensure competition and free enterprise. Congress enacted a law regulating railroads in 1887 (the Interstate Commerce Act), and one preventing large firms from controlling a single industry in 1890 (the Sherman Antitrust Act). These laws were not rigorously enforced, however, until the years between 1900 and 1920, when Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921), and others sympathetic to the views of the Progressives came to power. Many of today's U.S. regulatory agencies were created during these years, including the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Muckrakers were journalists who encouraged readers to demand more regulation of business. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) showed America the horrors of the Chicago Union Stock Yards, a giant complex of meat processing that developed in the 1870s. The federal government responded to Sinclair's book with the new regulatory Food and Drug Administration. Ida M. Tarbell wrote a series of articles against the Standard Oil monopoly. This affected both the government and the public reformers. The series helped pave the way for the breakup of the monopoly.

Teddy Roosevelt, for particular scorn. At the heart of the "free market" conservative world view is the belief that the Progressive Era marks a wrong turn in America's development.

This is the era when government intervention in the economy was made legitimate. The accomplishments of this era form the foundation upon which other regulatory efforts were built, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The problem conservatives have with the Progressive Era is that it was this period that established in American law and custom the idea that the public's interest existed and that this interest could override the narrower financial and economic interests of business and individuals. It marked the point in America's development as a nation that conservatives have fought for almost a century now to erase.
The Great Depression drove the lesson of the Progressive Era home anew. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was predicated on the assumption that there is a public interest that trumps economic and financial interests. Neither Theodore nor Franklin Roosevelt were against capitalism. They just recognized that in order for that system to be preserved, the harsher workings of that system would have to be reined in.

It took almost 60 years for the core protections of the New Deal to begin to be eroded. A critical financial reform, the Glass-Steagall Act set up fire walls within banks and financial institutions to ensure that the financial stability of these companies could not be undermined if one segment of the business got roughed up. In 1999 the Act was repealed (Bill Clinton signed the repeal into law) and the basis for the financial funny business that has devastated the retirement plans and pensions of so many people over the past two years was in place. The rules were antiquated, proponents of repeal said. The regulations were not needed any more. The markets are so much more efficient now. Well, the certainly proved to be efficient at wiping out hard-earned wealth.

Fruits of Dick Cheney

When regulators don't regulate, the public suffers. We see the dramatic results today on our coast. But there are other, less obvious ways that regulators viewing industry as their clients negatively affects the public.

Take the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an example. The CDC is the nation's leading public health agency. One of its responsibilities is to protect the public health from harmful things that might get into the air, water and food.

According to congressional investigators, the CDC in the Bush/Cheney era was not particularly vigilant in the pursuit of its duties:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made "scientifically indefensible" claims in 2004 that high lead in the water was not causing noticeable harm to the health of city residents. As terrified District parents demanded explanations for the spike in lead in their water, the CDC hurriedly published its calming analysis, knowing that it relied on incomplete, misleading blood-test results that played down the potential health impact, the investigation found.

The city utility says lead levels have been in the safe range in D.C. water since 2006, after a chemical change to reduce lead leaching. But the House report raises concerns about children in 9,100 residences throughout the city with partial lead-pipe replacements. Their parents may not know CDC research has found that children in such homes are four times as likely to have elevated lead in their blood.

Rather than working to protect any particular industry, the CDC apparently suppressed the lead data so as not cause a flareup of a fight the Bush/Cheney administration had waged (on behalf of industry) not to tighten permissible lead levels in drinking water. Whatever the reason, the health and well being of thousands of DC residents was adversely affected by the CDC's refusal to act as an honest regulator in this incident.

It Is About the Size of Government

When groups like the Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, and others argue for shrinking the size of government, what they are actually calling for is for business to be allowed a free hand in the conduct of their business.

These small government advocates want smaller government, they want less regulation, they want to leave the public at the mercy of the financial interests of corporations. They want us to ignore history, to unlearn lessons that previous generations have learned.

Until recently, they were having a pretty good run.

But, the excesses generated by the very success conservatives have had in loosening regulation have brought us again to the verge of a generational understanding of the need for regulation and restraint of the excesses of business.

A case can be made that government must be large and powerful in order to properly carry out its regulatory functions. Clearly what conservatives have been pursuing is an attempt to create an imbalance whereby business and industry would be too much larger than government for government to effectively regulate it.

At its core, this is what free market, small government conservatism is about — tipping the scales in such a way that regulation is present in form but not in substance, to give the public the illusion of protection when it does not in fact exist. This perfectly sums up the approach that Dick Cheney took in his role in running the apparatus of government during his tenure as — hollowing out the ability to regulate while leaving the facade of agencies in place. This is what Bobby Jindal, who served in the Bush administration, is trying to do in Louisiana.

What Now?

With their core economic beliefs discredited across a broad swath of the economy — finance, energy, insurance, public health — the question now becomes this: is there a future for free-market conservatism in this country?

There is an entire generation of young politicians who have bet their careers on this ideology, ranging from Bobby Jindal to Tim Pawlenty to Eric Cantor to Sarah Palin. In Louisiana, Jindal can probably get away with this for a while because the state Legislature is littered with people who bought this myth hook, line and sinker. Viewed in this light, the resistance to privatizing state mental health hospitals must have surprised Jindal and his staff.

But, Jindal's approach to government is based on the crony-capitalist branch of free-market capitalism. That branch maintains that while it might be too much to hope to dismantle government, conservatives can champion privatization and direct significant financial resources to the owners of companies that will take up the work formerly done by public employees. The only results Jindal and others of his ilk are interested in come in the form of funneling the money to corporations. The quality of the services delivered does not enter the equation.

This explains why such a strong fight against privatization of mental health services has emerged in the Legislature this year. As one lawmaker said, he hadn't heard a word about the quality of services cross the lips of any of the representatives from DHH or the Division of Administration when they were advocating the privatizing of these state hospitals.

That's because the quality of services is not an area of concern for this ideologically driven bunch. It is privatization for the sake of privatization. It is shrinking government for the sake of shrinking government. It is giving the private sector greater control of the resources of the state, including a hand (or two) in the stream of tax dollars.

Gulf Gusher as Game Changer

We are always a bit out of sync with the rest of the country here in Louisiana. However, with the BP Gulf Gusher changing our state and our world on a daily basis, it is hard to see how the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) and others will be able to maintain their deregulation mantras and be taken seriously.

Myths die hard. But, the death of the myth of self-regulating markets could knock the scales from our eyes in Louisiana and make us recognize once again that government has an essential role to play and that role is to position itself as a shield to protect the citizens of our state against the excesses of business and industry.

If that happened, it would be a seismic political shift in Louisiana where the Department of Natural Resources has viewed itself as an enabler of the destruction of our wetlands, where the Department of Environmental Quality has seen its role as providing legitimacy for the continued pollution of our air and water, and where the energy industry has had carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in our state so long as the tax revenue and political contributions continued to flow.

"Facts are stubborn things," Ronald Reagan liked to say (frequently while ignoring them). Facts in the nation and in Louisiana have fundamentally changed. A prominent myth that has served as the foundation for a sizable portion of our politics has died. Repercussions are sure to follow.

The Jindal Way: ‘Every Man an Hourly Employee’

In Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, more people work as cashiers, retail salespeople and laborers than in any other categories of workers. If Jindal had his way, the state’s future will look a lot more like that than, say, the technology and new industry future envisioned by Mike Foster’s “Vision 20/20” (PDF) economic development strategy. (Foster’s strategy was based on an accurate the assessment of Louisiana’s potential, but came too late in his administration to have had a chance to prove itself.)

In Jindal’s personal assessment of Louisiana (informed no doubt by the comments of those many Louisiana businessmen who have handed him campaign checks), our problem is that higher education is not turning out enough skilled workers to satisfy the needs of Louisiana businesses. It’s an odd line of thinking to be held by a Rhodes Scholar biology graduate from Brown University whose adult life has been spent almost entirely as an employee of either the state or federal government.

For some in the state’s business community, converting higher education to a vo-tech program with football teams is a long-held dream.

That perspective gives Jindal the policy justification and political cover for his work of throttling higher education at four-year colleges while proposing that the state’s nascent community college system take up some of the slack — except that he’s cutting them, too. If education was all that four-year institutions did, Jindal’s approach might be more palatable. But, as studies of the economic impact of the University of Louisiana System statewide and LSU’s main campus in Baton Rouge have shown, higher education is big business in Louisiana with a big economic impact on the state as a whole, but especially on the communities where those campuses are located.

University-based research and technology transfer initiatives have been the base upon which strong regional economies have been built in various parts of the country, notably the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, Silicon Valley in California, and in the Austin, Texas, area. Under governors Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana finally got serious about pursuing those development models, committing state dollars to build university research capacity and encouraging the development of university infrastructure to attract researchers, research dollars and private sector support.

These are long-term strategies that require patience and persistence, things that do not come naturally to Jindal. The current fiscal crisis and the national campaign cycle have combined to arrest Jindal’s development of these traits.

It took “the intervention at the Mansion” of four of Jindal’s predecessors last year to keep him from inflicting a $220 million cut on higher education. He pared it down to half of that. Now, with the crisis worsening, Dave Treen is dead, Buddy Roemer has gone all Tea Party on us, leaving only Mike Foster as someone Jindal might heed from among last year’s team. Governor Blanco would offer him sound advice, but as Jindal’s governorship is based on being the anti-Blanco the likelihood of him taking it is almost as remote as his chance of being the Republican nominee for President in 2012.

That higher education is going to get whacked was made certain with the appearance of the newest hole in the state’s budget. Faced with what he knew to be a large budget shortfall but mindful of the damage a responsible call for tax increases would do to his national political standing among conservatives, Jindal’s executive budget for the next fiscal year abandons his previous ironclad rule against using one-time spending to shore up the state budget. He wants to grab money from the Tax Amnesty Program and raid various trust funds to avoid more cuts that are already unpopular with voters.

The problem now for Jindal is that he so effectively sold his previous stance that his former allies like the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and fiscally conservative groups like the Public Affairs Research Council have lined up to oppose him. Even some of his erstwhile allies in the Legislature are aghast at the change of direction.

With the hole in the current fiscal year budget, some of that one-time money might have to be carried back into this year in an effort to avoid late year budget cuts that will force months-long employee furloughs (that is, months without pay!) at campuses across the state, the cancellation of summer school classes, and the halt of construction projects.

Furloughs will have a devastating impact on the families of those working in higher education, ranging everywhere from the administrative level down to janitorial services. People not paid means money taken out of circulation in communities. If bringing jobs to a community has a multiplier effect, taking money out of a community has a negative impact — (a denominator effect?) —that must nearly match that.

The cuts in higher education being contemplated in the last quarter of this state fiscal year (now until June 30) could — by themselves — precipitate what will be known as the Jindal Recession. He will own it because his policies will have caused it.

But, higher education isn’t the biggest sector that Jindal’s policies are wrecking.

That would be healthcare.

The 'Jindal Knows Healthcare' Myth
Saying that Bobby Jindal understands healthcare is like saying used car salesmen understand automobile design and manufacturing.

Jindal earned his chops as Mike Foster’s first secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals. He earned it by cutting spending in the department, particularly Medicaid spending. His ‘success’ there was so brutal that it cost him the 2003 governor’s race.

Jindal has never understood that behind every government budget dollar there are people dependent on the service that dollar delivers. Nowhere is that more true than in the Medicaid program. Medicaid is a safety net program. It exists to provide access to care for those in our society who cannot otherwise get it, particularly the young, those with chronic disease, and the disabled.

That Jindal made his name by cutting cost in Medicaid is to say that Jindal worked to deny access to services and to care. Yes, he eliminated fraud in the medical transportation program, but the bulk of the savings he found came through a redefining of what services were available and who would be eligible for them. To Jindal, these were just budget numbers. To the people who had them, these were services taken away.

Jindal’s approach has not changed after stints with the Bush administration and in the Congress. He brought in Alan Levine from Florida to manage DHH. Levine came to Jindal’s attention after implementing a managed care pilot project in Florida’s Medicaid program. Levine tried to get the Bush administration to sign off on a similar plan in the final days of that administration, but the plan arrived too late to get approval.

The managed care approach to Medicaid combines Jindal’s indifference to human need with a Bush-era style of crony capitalism. The idea is to reduce the state’s Medicaid spending by bringing in a private sector administrator to run the program that would set limits on the types and frequency of care available to Medicaid patients.

That is, the plan proposes to save money by adding another layer of bureaucracy — a private sector hand in the till — Medicaid spending will somehow magically go down. Think about that for a second. That program manager will be expected to take over administration of the program and save the state money in the process.

The only way that can possibly work is by denying services to those dependent upon the program.

But, as former DHH secretary and current head of LSU Hospitals Dr. Fred Cerise revealed recently, privatization of Medicaid service delivery in the Baton Rouge area is going to drive up the cost of delivery of those services.

This is crony capitalism because the real winners in privatization schemes like this are not the consumers of those services or the taxpayers; the real winners are the companies that win those lucrative contracts. If this sounds familiar, then you were either a victim of the Bush/Cheney era approach to FEMA or read the stories about American reconstruction scandals in Iraq.

All of this is obvious to those now fighting Jindal’s attempt to privatize the homes for the disabled across the state. In a recent legislative hearing on the budget, a parent of a disabled child who is a resident at Pinecrest Supports and Services Center near Pineville plaintively told lawmakers, "I have not heard anything about a better level of care for our family.”

No, because the level of care does not figure into the Jindal Way. It’s not a number. In Jindal’s world, numbers are real; people are not — at least not those who might actually need government services.

Hundreds of state workers who deliver the services at centers like Pinecrest and other state facilities will lose their jobs, undermining the economies of the communities where they reside.

The state’s portion mental health services program will be all but eliminated under Jindal’s proposed budget. The state wants to discharge 118 patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals and place them in privately run group homes. Another 138 beds in state-run facilities would be privatized.

Again, privatization is being pushed as a solution to the state’s budget crisis but privatization has not been shown to be a money-saver nor has it been demonstrated that the quality of care will not be affected by the changes.

Next Year, We Take Down 'Charity'

Jindal is committed to taking this a step further in their next budget when he wants to develop and implement a plan to shut down much if not all of the LSU Hospital system (formerly known at the Charity Hospital System).

This has been the long-cherished dream of conservatives and it will be presented as a budget necessity. But, it is nothing but a naked ideologically driven move designed to prop up Jindal’s conservative credentials. The closure of these hospitals has been Jindal’s goal all along. Jindal is now citing the impact of the Affordable Care Act as the justification for the move he craves to make. Jindal says the problem is that the Affordable Care Act will do away with the Disproportionate Share Program of compensating hospitals for providing care to the uninsured.

True enough, but the Affordable Care Act will bring coverage to 800,000 Louisiana adults (PDF)who do not now have coverage so that there will be fewer people without insurance coverage or the ability to pay for care.

In fact, the Affordable Care Act will bring $17 billion in new healthcare funding annually into Louisiana through a combination of tax credits to businesses, subsidies to individuals, and expansion of the Medicaid program. If anything, Louisiana will need more medical capacity, not less.

Typical of an ideologue, Jindal is committed to a course of action and he’s not going to let the facts stand in his way.

When the Revenue Estimating Conference makes their official end of the fiscal year deficit estimate next Wednesday, all of Louisiana will get a much clearer picture of just how far down Jindal is willing to push this state in order to attempt to continue his political climb.

Get ready to feel pretty low on the totem pole, Louisiana.

'Bobby One Term'

You've got to hand it to Governor Bobby Jindal. The man has exceeded all expectations in office.

Deep in the throes of a credibility crisis brought on, first, by his refusal to lead (the Legislature) and then his decision to follow (the right-wing blowhards who paid for his election), Jindal this week turned to pandering to what he must think is his base by issuing a round of budget vetoes that targeted the only Louisiana citizens in deeper trouble than he is — the poor, the elderly, young people in need of mentoring, YMCAs, Boys & Girls Clubs, rural communities, African Americans, museums, community centers. Here's the full list (PDF).

As Kathleen Blanco pointed out in 2003, the man was then all about numbers but not recognizing that there were people behind those numbers when it came to state budgets.

This week Jindal seemed intent on proving his predecessor prescient.

Even Republicans were outraged. Public talk by legislators of "distrust" of Jindal hardly gets to the depth of the animosity he has generated.

Let's summarize what Bobby One Term has accomplished in half a year in office:

Claiming the mantel of 'The Ethics Governor', Jindal has managed to completely shut down the ethics enforcement process in this state by neutering the State Board of Ethics for Elected Officials, then hiding the process from the public in the name of transparency.

Then, his financial disclosure reform forced hundreds of his public-scrutiny shy Republican supporters to flee public boards and commissions less their conflicts — er, uh, — financial interests be disclosed to the whole wide world.

With those two steps alone, Jindal had accomplished more than Edwin Edwards would never have even dreamt of trying.

But, in the Regular Session, Jindal hit his stride right about the time he started getting mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain. The Legislature moved to give itself a pay raise and it passed a budget.

Channeling Earl Long (apologies up front to Uncle Earl, his family and friends) with his "tell 'em I lied" positions on the legislative pay raise, Jindal got caught talking out of both sides of his mouth. He promised legislators he would not veto a pay raise they wanted. Only problem was that he had promised voters he'd veto a raise just like the Legislature gave itself.

Right up until the day before he vetoed the pay raise, Jindal insisted that he would not veto it. When his
legislative liaison, veteran lobbyist Tommy Williams, quit, it was clear just how much trouble Jindal was getting into with legislators. Williams had been around the Capitol for decades. Williams experience must have convinced him that, with trust being the oil of cooperation, that Jindal had torched his own well.

But, it's the line item vetoes of elements of the General Fund Budget that may well have sealed Jindal's fate with the Legislature. Regardless of what else is happening in a Regular Session of the Legislature, the budget (HB 1) is really the main item of business and concern for the governor, his administration and legislators.

With good reason: that's where the money is. This year, there were almost $30 billion in that budget.

Regular Sessions, then, are a three-month long haggling session over the content of the budget. It gets talked about every day, regardless of the formal agenda of the day.

What has angered so many legislators about not just this latest round of vetoes, but others as well, is that the administration never mentioned its opposition to some of the bills that were vetoed. The line item vetoes in the budget bill were insult to injury, coming as they did on the heels of the pay raise veto.

So, Jindal may have sucked up to his supposed base with these vetoes. But, the damage to the intended recipients of the dollars in those vetoed segments is real. So, too, is the damage to Jindal's credibility.

If saving money was the real reason for this performance, Jindal could have started way back in the special sessions when he and his economic development head finagled a way to get GOP heavy hitter Gary Chouest (part owner of the New Orleans Hornets, $100,000 in a day man for the LCRM) $10 million in state money to build a facility so he could build boats that he could sell to another of his companies.

In Jindal Land, welfare is for big contributors. Maybe he did learn something in Washington, after all!

If the Senior Center folks should have cut Jindal a big check in 2007, things would be just fine now.

Ask Gary Chouest.

'Believe in Louisiana (Committee for a Republican Majority)'

The Times Picayune carried an Associated Press story earlier this week on the pro-Jindal gra$$root$ organization "Believe in Louisiana."

Turns out that this group is funded primarily by members of the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM).

Let's let the AP tell the story:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A nonprofit group formed to tout Gov. Bobby Jindal's political and policy plans raised nearly $750,000 since forming three months ago — nearly all of it from 10 big money contributors.

• • • • •

Though the group received contributions from 189 people, $625,000 of the donations came from fewer than a dozen people or companies, including four that gave $100,000 apiece: Lee Domingue, of Baton Rouge; Joseph Canizaro, of New Orleans; Bollinger Shipyards, of Lockport; and Edward Diefenthal, of Metairie. McCollister donated $4,100 himself.

Canizaro is the chairman of LCRM and a $100,000 contributor to that organization over the 2006-2007 campaign cycle. Bollinger contributed $100,000 during that cycle to LCRM via his Bollinger Shipyards company.

Edward Diefenthal contributed nearly the same amount, plus bundled contributions to Jindal's campaign from his LLCs. In appreciation, Jindal appointed Deifenthal to his Ethics Reform Transition Team — right, the one that didn't make any recommendation regarding campaign finance reform. Not surprisingly, the Ethics Governor failed to include campaign finance reform in the call for his special session on Ethics.

Southern Recycling was once owned by Diefenthal, so his involvement could be deeper than the AP reports.

LCRM funder Phyllis Taylor came up with $10,000 for 'Believe.'

When the money is followed, the real story here is not that these people believe in Louisiana; instead, three months into the Jindal administration, they are not yet experiencing buyers' remorse.

Meanwhile, they are spending the big bucks to convince the public that they should ignore those stories about how Jindal is using public dollars to demonstrate his appreciation to his strongest supporters.

"Ignore those stories — and those fat cats behind the curtain!"

Katrina, Rita and the GOP Crony Capitalism

I'm taking part in a two-day NOLA/Gulf Blogathon over at DailyKos. This is my diary from Thursday, April 17.

You can click the headline to go to the DailyKos post.

• • • • •

Hurricane season is about six weeks away. The Mississippi River is very high due to heavy rains in the MidWest. The Bonne Carre Spillway has been opened for the first time in 11 years to let some river water flow through Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf of Mexico.

Things are tensing up down along the Gulf Coast. Less than three years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck and the levees failed in New Orleans, nature is reminding us of what a tenuous hold we have on the lives we've created and are still rebuilding for ourselves down here.

We don't want to — and can't — go through another disaster again. Especially with the current administration in place. Real help will not come.

The hard and, yes, bitter lessons learned along the coast over the past two-and-a-half years are going to come in handy for the rest of the country it focuses on the coming federal elections.

The core lesson is this: Republican crony capitalism doesn't fix anything that's broken. It's all about them taking care of their own while the rest of us are left on our own. The proof is being lived out daily on the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

The federal response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita should tell Americans all they need to know about modern Republican crony capitalism as practiced by the Bush/Cheney administration and its heir wannabe John McCain.

There are three places that illustrate the model and its impact on the recovery: Biloxi and Pascagoula, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Cameron Parish, Louisiana. The better known places show the business model in all its awfulness. Cameron, in a way, demonstrates how far the GOP has lost touch with its roots and its basic decency in less than 20 years.

Katrina was a Category 3 storm when it hit the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana and, later, the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The blows it delivered there were natural disasters — the combined effect of wind and storm surge. The floods in New Orleans were the result of levee failures caused by a relatively weak storm. Winds in Lake Pontchartrain never exceeded 90 miles per hour. As we should all know by now, the cause of the floods in New Orleans were defective levees built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

So, what happened in New Orleans was a man-made disaster.

LET 'EM EAT CHIPS

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has been trying his best to turn the natural disaster of Katrina into a man-made disaster by diverting federal housing money from low income families into projects like improvements at the the Port of Pascagoula that could include luxury condos.

Scandal-plagued HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson granted Barbour's request to use $600 million in money appropriated for low income housing for use at the port instead of on housing. The result is evident. A drive along US 90 on the Mississippi coast reveals freshly repaired casinos standing a parking lot or two away from houses that are still in ruins.

Oh, and one of the scandals helping drive Jackson from office deals with him allegedly giving preferential treatment to a contractor for work on public housing-related contracts in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In a speech to the Delta Regional Authority annual meeting in 2007, Barbour said his wife was his "eyes and ears" on the Gulf Coast in the weeks and months immediately after the storm hit. Other members of his family, it appears, were his wallet. Barbour didn't spend much personal time on the coast, apparently only finding time to travel down there when George W. came looking for a photo-op.

Compare that to (now former) Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, who actually went to the Louisiana Superdome in the first days after the levees broke in New Orleans. She was there. She also took extraordinary measures to ensure that federal dollars sent to Louisiana were used for their intended purpose — disaster relief and the recovery of our citizens.

As Michael "Heck of a job, Brownie" Brown pointed out, Blanco worked under the additional burden of being a Democratic governor seeking help from a highly partisan Republican administration. The storms and their aftermaths eventually cost Blanco her job, or at least made her decide not to seek re-election.

HOOKED ON POWER

Republican opportunism in Katrina's wake in New Orleans arrived in full force about the time the water was finally pumped out of the city (almost 60 days after the storm).

The first hint of what was to come was when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appointed Bush Pioneers Joe Canizaro and Boysie Bollinger to head up his Bring New Orleans Back Commission.

But, the real power grab began in December of 2005 when U.S. Senator David Vitter and his wife Wendy convened a group of Vitter's biggest contributors to a meeting to launch an effort to turn the diaspora of the poor and African Americans out of Orleans Parish into a political transformation of Louisiana politics.

The result of that meeting was the formation of the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM). It was led by Canizaro and funded by a core group of other Republicans (some, though not all, from Louisiana) who committed to raise $2.5 million to try to elect a Republican majority in the Louisiana House of Representatives.

That Canizaro and Bollinger were never committed to the rebuilding of the city was exemplified by Bollinger's decision to shut down his shipyard in Algiers and shift the work and the jobs to other of his operations across the coast. And, he collected recovery money in the process!

Modeled after Tom DeLay's criminal enterprise, Texans for a Republican Majority, the LCRM was raising barrels full of money until Vitter's links to prostitutes were made public in the summer of 2007.

The LCRM did not succeed in winning Republican control of the Louisiana House, although they came close enough for Democrats to hand the speakership to a Republican after Bobby Jindal won election as governor.

The LCRM and its members are committed to defeating Mary Landrieu and will definitely be active fighting to defeat the U.S. Senator who has done more to ensure that the recovery in Louisiana gets the federal financial help it needs.

Again, as in Mississippi, the recovery is viewed as nothing more than an opportunity for Republicans to advance business and political agendas that have little or nothing to do with alleviating the suffering and mitigating the losses that resulted from the disasters that prompted the relief efforts.

NOBLESSE OBLIGE & CONNECTIONS

In Cameron Parish, though, the proof of how far the Republican Party has fallen is evidence by the new hospital there. South Cameron Memorial Hospital was destroyed by Hurricane Rita two weeks after Katrina hit eastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The hospital is located a mile or so off the Gulf of Mexico in what is the community of Creole.

Cameron Parish is the largest parish in Louisiana in terms of area. Prior to Rita, there were about 10,000 residents in this vast parish that is home to fishermen, offshore oil workers, and now liquified natural gas plants.

Knowing that access to healthcare was essential to rebuilding the devastated parish, local officials committed to working to get FEMA and the Louisiana Recovery Authority to support rebuilding the hospital. Both entities provided financing to "restore" what had been destroyed. That meant that no new services could be added; what had been destroyed could be replaced, but there could be no expansion of services.

The federal assistance was also conditional on residents in the parish agreeing to tax themselves to ensure that there was operating revenue for the hospital if it was to be rebuilt. That tax passed overwhelmingly in 2006.

Still, there was a shortage of money to build the hospital, so residents turned to the Bush/Clinton Katrina Fund for help. All of the money raised by the fund was earmarked for Katrina-related recovery and restoration efforts. But, locals made their plea to former President George H.W. Bush who used his personal connections to bring help to the residents of Cameron Parish.

At the hospital grand opening last month, it was announced that Bush Sr. had gotten the government of Kuwait to provide the $2 million needed to complete the hospital rebuilding project. There was nothing in that effort for Bush Sr. And, so far as can be determined, there was no benefit to any of the contractors involved other that the work they were obligated to perform.

Cameron Parish has their hospital back due in no small part because Bush Sr. still has in him that sense of decency and empathy — yes, noblesse oblige — that the current batch of craven Republicans so evidently lack. The decency gap between Bush Sr. and George W. is in itself the story of the core of the story of what has happened to the Republican Party and to this country.

It is evident in the federal response to the credit crisis: bail out the investment banks, the home builders, and other lenders, but leave homeowners and their families to fend for themselves.

In the GOP's America, we are on our own. The rest of the world saw it in the wake of Katrina and Rita. Americans may have forgotten. The people on the Gulf Coast know it now. The rest of the country is getting ready for the refresher course.

Mike Stagg