In the late evening of Sunday, Oct. 20th and the early morning of Monday the 21st, a group of lawyers ironed out an agreement that potentially puts an end to a case that has major consequences for one of the most profitable industries in the world. The evidence was overwhelming. They had deceived the public, marketing a product that resulted in crippling dependency, devastating entire communities.
I’m referring, of course, to the tentative $260 million settlement reached in Cleveland between lawyers representing the state government and three manufacturers of opioids.
Because the opioid epidemic has affected small towns and big cities across the entire country, the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured, marketed, and distributed the drugs have been forced to confront their own negligence and held to account by state attorneys general, governors, and plaintiff lawyers throughout the United States. The $260 million settlement in Ohio is one of several cases that have recently resulted in similar, high-profile agreements, including one involving the state of Louisiana and Attorney General Jeff Landry.
A month ago, another nine-figure settlement was reached in another protracted case involving a company accused of violating the law and destroying entire communities, all while making a vast fortune selling their product, and arguably, that case is much more consequential for Louisiana than any share it receives from the opioid litigation.
In late September, the mining conglomerate Freeport-McMoRan agreed to a $100 million settlement with a dozen parishes on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, an implicit recognition of its liability in contributing to the rapid loss of land. There is already a broad scientific consensus that the aggressive drilling by oil and gas companies is partially to blame for the destruction of an area that is now among the most vulnerable in the world, and many of these companies have internally acknowledged that some of their activities in Louisiana were conducted illegally and without acquiring the requisite permits.
Despite this, however, the industry has been reluctant, if not downright hostile, to any attempts to hold companies accountable for their negligence and, in recent years, has spent tens of millions on a multi-pronged campaign to disingenuously convince the public and elected officials that the litigation against them is nothing more than a shakedown by “trial lawyers” and Democrats. The message of denialism has resonated in a conservative-leaning state that produces 7% of the country’s natural gas and 3.3 million barrels of oil every day, and industry lobbyists have been largely successful in obscuring the truth about the astronomical wealth and profitability of the oil and gas companies that dominate Louisiana, attempting, instead, to misrepresent positive economic data (which undermines their specious claims that the mere “threat” of litigation has been ruinous for Louisiana) and completely distorting the truth about their own culpability in the environmental devastation.
Freeport McMoRan owned an offshore drilling operation in the Louisiana Gulf Coast until four years ago.
No one agrees to pay $100 million unless they believe it’s possible they’ll be found guilty of owing much more, and a mega-billion dollar company like Freeport-McMoRan can’t plausibly claim that they were just pushed around. The law is fairly straightforward.
According to John Carmouche, the lawyer who represented the 12 coastal parishes, $100M represents approximately 4% of the total damages attributable to illegal dredging. That’d mean oil and gas companies are responsible for around $25 billion, one-half of the expected cost of the state’s Coastal Masterplan.
“It’s a big deal because we have been fighting for five years and an oil company has finally validated the claims and is willing to be involved in a business solution to solve the real and provable damages caused by the oil companies,” Carmouche said. “And there’s a lot more to come.” Practically all of the money will be spent on coastal restoration projects.
Still, after news of the settlement broke, industry lobbyists and apologists hewed to the same tired line about being bullied by lawyers. (The President of Freeport-McMoRan, Gerald J. Ford, is an accomplished lawyer himself and one of my law school’s most successful graduates; the football stadium at SMU is named after him, not the other, more famous Gerald Ford).
“This is just the latest chapter in the trial lawyers’ playbook to shake down Louisiana oil and gas companies for legally conducting production activities, which were encouraged by state incentives and carried out under rigorous state and federal regulations many decades ago,” the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA) and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA) declared, incredulously, in a joint statement. Freeport-McMoRan is an Arizona-based company.
The extent to which Big Oil has attempted to make the dispute about the lawyers and not the lawbreaking is remarkably cynical, though perhaps not as cynical as the ways in which paid lobbyists for the most profitable companies in the history of humankind have attributed decisions motivated by their own greed as financial necessities caused by the threat of being held legally responsible for what amounts to a few days worth of profit. If the global price of oil plummets, it’s somehow due to the specter of coastal lawsuits in Louisiana.
Louisiana has long maintained a dysfunctionally codependent relationship with Big Oil, and the state relies on the jobs the industry provides represents a major component of the state’s economy. But what good are those jobs if the land disappears?
It remains to be seen whether heavy-hitters like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Shell take any of this seriously, but either way, thanks to Gerald Ford for “ponying up.”
Featured image: Lugger in the Barataria Estuary, 1893. Credit:Donald W. Davis Collection, Louisiana Sea Grant Digital Images Collection.
The unearthing of the common existence of black schooner captains and crews throughout the 19th Century has profound effects on the history of the Gulf Coast. In the second of three installments, author Troy Gilbert looks into the unnamed hurricane of 1893, made famous by Kate Chopin in her book The Awakening, and identifies that many of the schooners and luggers that sank in the storm were crewed by black watermen and captains.
Captain William Delavier was at the helm of the double-masted schooner Alice McGuiggin, used by the Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company of Pearl River, Mississippi to train up young African-American sailors in the handling of lumber and schooners. He and the novice sailors under his command would meet their terrible fates along with over 2,000 others in the Category 4 storm that slammed into Grand Isle and Cheniere Caminada in 1893.
Westwego Canal, 1893.Credit:Donald W. Davis Collection, Louisiana Sea Grant Digital Images Collection.
With his brother-in-law surviving to recount his premonition, fisherman Andre Gilbeaux uttered these words as he raised a glass to toast friends and family at his dinner table as the first squall lines of a Category 4 hurricane walked over his home at sundown on the Louisiana barrier island of Cheniere. By the next morning of October 2, 1893, Gilbeaux had in fact drowned along with most of his family and over 2,000 other souls in southeast Louisiana.
Before hurricanes were named and terms like “cone of uncertainty” became common parlance in the South, there were no early warning systems for these storms – they simply happened to the people in their path. On the sandy barrier islands of Cheniere and Grand Isle, immortalized by the literary works of Kate Chopin, the storm that battered Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula three days earlier and now churning north in the Gulf of Mexico was about to simply happen to the 1,471 residents of the barrier island.
779 of these men, women, and children succumbed and perished on the island, but lost in the legacy of this hurricane was the foundering of schooners and luggers as their crews, many African American, sailed the muddle of shallow lakes and bays interconnected by narrow passes through the Louisiana marsh and coastal Mississippi. Unaware of the hurricane’s approach until their boats heeled over as the breeze freshened from the east and the first squall lines appeared on the horizon, most of these men under sail wouldn’t know that evening’s sunset on the water would be their last.
Grand Isle, Louisiana ca. 1900. Source: Louisiana Digital Library.
In 1893, the majority of vessels were powered by sail as they plied the lake trade through the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, and the Mississippi Sound, transporting cargo or seafood to the markets of New Orleans or east to Mobile. One of nearly fifty underway as the storm neared the coast, the double-masted schooner Alice McGuiggin, used by the Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company to train up young, teenaged African-American sailors in the handling of lumber and schooners under experienced black captains, prepared to make way.
Captain William Delavier and a first mate directed his four young charges to free the docklines, and they sailed from the Pearl River lumber yard in Mississippi. Carrying a cargo of 35,000-square feet of lumber destined for New Orleans’ West End and oblivious to the monster storm to their south, the Alice McGuiggin and her inexperienced crew made way slowly in the light air of the morning.
First-hand accounts from that early Sunday morning describe the weather as still and quiet with a light breeze and glassy waters for much of Southeastern Louisiana. Reports from the schooner Two Brothers under the command of Captain Worley confirm slow headway through Lake Borgne towards the Rigolets Pass that leads into Lake Pontchartrain. Over 50 miles away to the southwest and only miles from the storm’s eventual landfall, the 100’ steamer Joe Webre was tied up at the wharf on Grand Isle with Captain McSweeney and his crew of six onboard. Normally transiting vacationers and beachgoers from New Orleans to the Cheniere and Grand Isle resorts, October was the start of the slow season on the islands and the Joe Webre was quiet with her crew relaxing on this Sunday.
With a hurricane making landfall in Louisiana from the southwest, the first winds and squalls would push in and stream from the east or southeast with the storm’s counter-clockwise rotation. This has the effect of piling up water directly and rapidly into the marshes, bays, and lakes that open onto the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico. Tides had been running slightly above normal the previous day, but “unusual tides” were reported and documented by the watchman at the maritime quarantine station in the Rigolets Pass by late morning on Sunday.
Not long after, dark clouds filled the sky to the south and the residents of the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts quickly realized that this was not simply a nasty squall line, but it bore the telltales of a massive hurricane.
The Bayou Brief restored this photograph documenting damage fromthe unnamed hurricane of 1893.
Rose C. Falls perhaps described it best in her accounting of the approach of the storm in her book Cheniere Caminada: The Wind of Death. “Sunday the rain had been coming down, with now and then a temporary cessation for a few moments; but the falling rain did not seem to lighten the burden of the clouds which hung low above the city as the day drew to a close, and as the darkness of night began to steal through the gray of the weeping day, the wind came moaning down across the waters of Pontchartrain, driving before it a great window of inky clouds across a background of solid lead color, a phenomenon which boded no good for those caught in the track of the storm of which it was the forerunner and prophet.”
Pere (Father) Grimaux, the Roman Catholic priest who ministered to the people of Cheniere and who would be one of the rare survivors, described that afternoon under the bullseye of a major hurricane to the newspapers. The height of the waters mentioned by him would have easily overwhelmed the barrier islands that at best, rise only a foot or two above sea-level.
“Everyone apprehended that something terrible was about to happen. The fishermen foreseeing that a serious storm was evident, hastened to beach their craft near their houses. But those precautions availed not, for the wind blew in fitful gusts, increasing in strength and velocity every minute, coming from the south,” he recalled. “At 7:30 pm huge waves were madly lashing the shore, and in a few minutes they had attained a height of six feet, and soon after eight feet.”
As the wind grew through the rapid succession of squalls blasting onto Cheniere and her neighbor, Grand Isle, the crew on the steamer Joe Webre secured their vessel to pilings with extra lines and eventually 8.25″ hog chains. As the height of the most devastating northeastern quadrant of the storm came ashore, Captain McSweeney powered up the vessel’s boiler and, while still secured at the wharf, ran his boat at full steam into the wind in an attempt to relieve the growing strain on the lines and chains.
The young crew of the Alice McGuiggin with her heavy load of lumber heading to New Orleans made good time in the building wind of the afternoon and should have nearly cleared the Rigolets and entered Lake Pontchartrain. They were gaining good experience in the brisk winds; however, by dusk, as the weather soured, the winds forced her back down the pass towards Lake Borgne, and Captain Devalier had his hands full directing his inexperienced crew from behind the wheel.
In the squalls, he would have had to scream to instruct his young, frightened sailors through reefing and eventually dropping sails as well as tying a line underneath the hull from her port to starboard sides in event the schooner pitchpoled. With a slick wooden bottom covered in algae and marine growth, it would be impossible for them to scale the massive hull of an overturned schooner. Without something to grasp, their only fate would be to drown in the angry water.
It is likely that during the day the crews of the schooners Alice McGuiggan and Two Brothers spotted each other as they sailed through the Rigolets towards New Orleans from the Mississippi Coast. As the hurricane progressed over the marsh, the two schooners and many others were in the same predicament in the narrow pass and all would have tried to anchor in a lee shore offering very little protection and attempt to ride the storm out.
Throughout the night, the men of the Alice McGuiggan and Two Brothers fought for their lives – and would meet very different fates.
An enormous oak tree uprooted in the unnamed hurricane of 1893. Source: Louisiana Digital Library.
A scarce few miles can make the difference between life and death with the thick, ranging marsh of southern Louisiana acting as a sponge that sucks the energy out of a hurricane, but the sandy barrier islands have no such protection. By nightfall on Cheniere and Grand Isle, the small fishing villages were consumed by the watery chaos of the Gulf of Mexico.
Entire families were fighting for their survival – and losing. Raised houses, thought to be shelter, were washing off their foundations and breaking apart in the heavy surf and estimated 15′ surge. In the black of the night, there was no light save for periodic homes engulfed in fire from disturbed oil lanterns, crashing about like strange bonfires before they sank into the waves. Harrowing screams seemed to come from everywhere above the storm’s din. Witnessing all of this, the crew of the steamer Joe Webre was frantic and fighting to keep the vessel secured to the pilings, afraid to be loosed into the sea. They described great frothy wave crests with steep dark troughs between that were alive and sparking with intense bioluminescence, as if each time the boat crested, they were about to “plunge into an abyss of fire.”
As the coast was ravaged and drowned and the hurricane crawled inland, the more protected city of New Orleans and nearby inland lakes and passes began to feel the real force of the storm. Oyster and fishing camps and hunting clubs along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Catherine succumbed, many with oystermen or New Orleans businessmen trapped inside, unable to evacuate in their sailing dinghies after their fateful fishing weekend away from work and home. The lakeshore resorts of New Orleans – West End, Spanish Fort, Milneburg and Little Woods – were quickly inundated with boathouses, restaurants, piers, camps and summer homes lost. Schooners and dinghies at West End foundered or smashed into splinters on pilings, while the Southern Yacht Club lost every building save for their clubhouse.
In the Rigolets Pass, the schooner Two Brothers was ripped from her anchorage, unmanageable with no steerage and at the mercy of the winds and currents. Surge poured into the lakes and marshes, and she was carried to the west, deep into Lake Catherine and eventually over miles of marsh where no vessel had ever sailed and slammed into the raised L&N railroad. Badly damaged and sinking and having lost three crewmembers overboard, the remaining sailors climbed to the higher ground of the railroad tracks and rode the storm out.
Digitally-enhanced photograph of a home damaged in the unnamed hurricane of 1893. By the Bayou Brief.
Hurricanes are unique in their destructive abilities; they linger and apply their destruction over massive swaths of geography. Using both wind and water, these storms move depending on upper atmosphere steering currents and the effects can easily last for over 24 hours. By contrast, tornadoes are rapid events that leave horrific destruction in a very small footprint; hurricanes spit off tornadoes from their squalls like an afterthought. The crew of the Joe Webre on Grand Isle was battling all of these elements and about to endure the storm’s eyewall.
The few survivors from Cheniere and Grand Isle all described a massive tidal wave that struck before the relative and brief calm of the hurricane’s eye. This is the same wave that broke the hog chains and ripped the Joe Webre free from her moorings and loosed her and her crew into the wilds of the hurricane. The ship’s steam engineer, George Rolf, Jr. described this moment to New Orleans journalists. “The hogchain parted speedily under the strain, and then we took refuge beside the ice box,” he said. “A wave swept the deck and soon carried the latter protection from us. The wind then suddenly calmed, and we took shelter in the pilot house.”
Free now to the whims of the storm, the Joe Webre was pushed north over the oystering grounds of Barataria Bay and the boat disintegrated as it was lashed by floating debris from homes, boats, drowned cattle, and everything else that makes up a town. In a momentary lull in the howling wind, the crew recounted hearing cries from people drowning in the stormy, dark flotsam. Completely unable to deliver aid let alone see them in the darkness, all they could do was fight for their own survival and hold on.
Captain McSweeney understood that the Joe Webre was foundering, and he ordered all aboard into the steamer’s dinghy. The eye of the hurricane was passing over them, and this was likely their only chance. As the first breeze brushed their wet faces from the northwest, the storm roared back in full throat. Moments later they watched the pilothouse explode in a terrific wind gust. The Joe Webre then foundered and slipped beneath the waves of Barataria Bay.
The wind direction changed with the passing of the eye and water that had pushed over the islands and into the marsh, suddenly forced its way back into the Gulf of Mexico – carrying along with it everything that floated.
As their dinghy passed back over the island with the dark tide, the crew paddled towards the upper tiers of an oak tree that rose above the water and grabbed hold. One by one, they climbed into the canopy, but the ship’s chambermaid was a 300lb black woman, and as the dinghy sank, the men ran lines under her arms and used shear force to pull her up into the boughs. Together they survived, hunkered up in the giant oak tree with raccoons and other critters, all waiting for the storm to run its course.
The hurricane and floodwaters eventually receded and left behind a level of devastation and loss of life that in its pure terror, almost surpasses any natural calamity for the United States – including Hurricane Katrina. For days afterwards, survivors pulled their rotting family members and neighbors from the marsh and beach surf. Without water or food, nearing exhaustion and emotional collapse, these lonely few were forced by necessity to dig mass graves and eventually funeral pyres using the lumber from their homes washing back ashore.
The first relief boats from New Orleans arrived on the third day after the storm and were mostly luggers and schooners whose homeports were Cheniere and Grand Isle. Having sailed days before the storm to the city by chance, they were now packed with ice and supplies and clueless as to what they were about to experience. These sailors landed and found their homes, families, and lives washed away, with only ragged neighbors sitting on the beach in the heat, withered and miserable. It was a rare occasion for these rescuers to find their wives or children. Out of a population of 1,471 on Cheniere, 779 were lost, and many were never found.
For days afterwards, survivors were discovered washing up on shorelines all along the coast or making their way slowly through impenetrable marsh. One mother was spotted from a train as she waded through chest high water filled with storm-disturbed critters. She carried with her two children under her arms and a baby in swaddling clothes that she held by her teeth. Vessels and their crews consistently found others who had been less lucky, clasping doors and debris turned into make shift rafts out in the Gulf, some as far away as Pensacola, Florida – having survived the storm only to then perish from a lack of water and the elements at sea.
For Captain Delavier and his young crew aboard the Alice McGuiggan, their harrowing tale of battling the storm will never be fully known, nor would their bodies be recovered. The Alice McGuiggan was eventually discovered by a mail boat, mast-downward in Lake Borgne, only three miles from the pier she left on the Pearl River that fateful morning; the storm had tried to pull her out to sea. All told, at least 17 other schooners and luggers went down on the Gulf Coast, with many of their captains and crews never to be found.
The sad legacy of this storm is that the barrier island of Cheniere, with her graves and monuments to those lost, is nearly no more. As with all of Louisiana’s coastline, barrier islands, and marshes, it is rapidly eroding into the Gulf of Mexico and leaving millions of residents and towns, including New Orleans, as the new unprotected frontline for a hurricane’s wrath.
As Lee Atwater, the Republican political prodigy who is largely remembered for creating the most notorious campaign commercial in modern history, approached death, having been ravaged by brain cancer at the age of only forty, he began making amends, trying his best to atone for the sins he had committed during his short but extraordinary life.
Atwater was a proud Southerner, born in Atlanta, raised in South Carolina, and his ascendance into national politics was due to his reliance on a more insidious iteration of the Southern Strategy, which he spoke about in an anonymous interview in 1981 with political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. At the time, Atwater was working in the Reagan White House. A recording of the interview surfaced 31 years later after it was discovered by James Carter IV, grandson of former President Jimmy Carter. And there is one exchange, in particular, that still managed to stun the nation. Quoting (Fair warning: This contains offensive language):
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don’t have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he’s campaigned on since 1964, and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone.
U.S. Sen. Stom Thurmond and Lee Atwater.
Atwater had crudely and succinctly summarized the modus operandi that continues to animate Republican politics, particularly in the Deep South. He threw out any pretense of plausible deniability and explained what was at the core of the party’s message to white voters.
Seven years later, he masterminded the infamous Willie Horton ad, which sought to blame Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis when an African American inmate, William Horton, who was serving a life sentence for first degree murder, raped two women while on a weekend furlough. Gov. Dukakis did not create the furlough program; he actually ended it. Weekend furloughs had been in practice in Massachusetts since 1972. But Atwater’s decision, made with the enthusiastic approval of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, was to blame Dukakis for the rapes Horton had committed. That alone, however, wasn’t what made the commercial so outrageous. The ad prominently featured Horton’s menacing mugshot, and the campaign decided to give him a new name. Instead of William, he was Willie.
“The fact is, my name is not ‘Willie.’ It’s part of the myth of the case. The name irks me. It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, black — ‘Willie’. I resent that,” Horton later told The Nation. ”They created a fictional character — who seemed believable, but who did not exist. They stripped me of my identity, distorted the facts, and robbed me of my constitutional rights.”
At the end of his life, Atwater wasn’t apologetic over his belief in negative campaigning, but he had two specific regrets about the Willie Horton ad. ”In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not,” he said. ”Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”
Today in Louisiana, Republican gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone, alongside his mentor and self-proclaimed kingmaker Lane Grigsby, is running what is arguably the most mendacious and cynical campaign in recent history, an ignoble distinction considering the competition, and it is difficult to imagine either man ever apologizing for sounding racist or for being cruel.
Rispone’s new commercials all feature footage of President Donald Trump appearing at a campaign rally in Lake Charles on the eve of the jungle primary.
This weekend, Rispone released a quartet of attack ads against his Democratic opponent, incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, all featuring footage of President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lake Charles on the eve of this year’s jungle primary.
But Trump, whose brief statements about the election were clearly culled from a Louisiana GOP talking points memo, has nothing to do with why the ads are egregious, misleading, and, in the case of three of the four, cruel. The Rispone campaign, apparently unable to find any legitimate opposition research with which to level against Edwards, decides, instead, to just make stuff up.
When the Trump White House Got Caught Telling the Truth:
All four ads begin with the same clip of Trump claiming Louisiana had been “losing jobs” under Edwards; earlier in the day, Trump had made the exact opposite assertion, seeking to claim credit for the state’s economic rebound in the aftermath of the Jindal administration.
Indeed, the Trump White House managed to step all over Rispone’s message, which is the subject of his first ad, “Jobs,” before the rally even got underway, publishing a series of tweets and Facebook posts touting Louisiana’s economy.
Of the four commercials, “Jobs” is perhaps the least offensive, because it struggles to make a coherent argument.
“Liberal John Bel Edwards, the only governor in America losing jobs,” the narrator intones. But the commercial actually cites numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing job growth.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. – Romans 12:13
The other three ads are all variations on the same theme: Stoking hatred against immigrants and asylum-seekers. It’s a message that Trump exploited from the moment he glided down the escalator at Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president, and more than any single other issue, it has become the crux of Rispone’s campaign for Louisiana governor.
Indeed, Rispone recently claimed that, if elected, he would help Donald Trump build a border wall that voters had been told would be paid for by Mexico, notwithstanding the fact that Louisiana isn’t even on the border.
The extent to which Rispone has cynically attempted to scapegoat immigrants in order to win office should be alarming to any person of conscience; it is a bigoted attack that is squarely directed against the very community that rebuilt Louisiana after the devastation of Katrina and Rita and the Federal Flood, people who were disproportionately victimized by violent crimes and financial exploitation. It also reveals Rispone’s true character. As we have previously reported, after Rispone settled three different class action lawsuits filed by 96 of his former employees, the overwhelming majority of whom were Hispanic, he applied for applications under the H1-B visa program so his company could hire foreign workers.
It may be difficult to believe this is the same man who wrote the following dedication in his one and only published book:
All three of these ads feature the same talking point, a claim that John Bel Edwards provides $16 million in ”welfare” for “illegal immigrants.”
To borrow one of Donald Trump’s new favorite words, it’s bullshit.
Rispone’s ad references the testimony of Republican state Attorney General Jeff Landry, who himself was just referencing a shoddy ”report” on “sanctuary cities” by a “task force” that state Rep. Valarie Hodges had assembled nearly four years ago. You may remember Hodges. She’s the same intellectual heavyweight who rescinded her support of Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program not because it was a wasteful failure but because schools founded by Muslims weren’t banned from participating.
Notably, Rispone didn’t actually cite the report itself, only Landry’s book report on it, which included a line about $16 million in Medicaid spending during the last year of the Jindal administration associated with illegal immigrants. That’s it. At the time, it would have been 0.05% of state Medicaid spending, and it’s clear the number is nothing more than an actuarial estimate, as is the estimate that an outmoded eligibility system (which would have already been overhauled if not for a corrupt contracting process during the Jindal administration) may have resulted in $85 million in improper payments to providers, not patients.
There’s no secret “welfare” program that Edwards has been distributing to illegal immigrants. Again, the Rispone campaign just made it up.
The other two commercials include the outlandish assertion that Edwards released “hundreds” of “dangerous criminals” from prison, an echo of Atwater’s “Willie Horton” ad. However, if you bother to check Rispone’s notes, you’ll discover he is actually referring to around 120 pardons and commutations given at the recommendation of the state’s Board of Pardons and Parole to elderly men who have served decades behind bars.
But Eddie Rispone is hoping that no one will worry about checking his notes. He’s spent a vast personal fortune on his campaign, banking everything on the belief that fear and hate are easier to sell than compassion and understanding.
In mid-February of 2017, Baton Rouge businessman Lane Grigsby, founder of the construction behemoth Cajun Industries, decided to get into the nonprofit news business. He recruited his friend Dan Juneau, the former top boss of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), as its secretary and Kelli Bottger, the head of the Louisiana Federation for Children, a pro-school privatization group, to be its executive director. Allee Bautsch Grunewald, who had overseen Bobby Jindal’s campaign coffers, was hired as the 501(c)(4)’s fundraising consultant. Within a month, Grigsby claimed to have raised more than $1 million for the start-up, though it’s likely he had made Grunewald‘s job easy by just handing her a blank check.
While it presented itself as an online media organization, the truth about Truth in Politics is that it was merely an extension of Grigsby’s empire, his own “fake news” outfit and a way to deceive the public into believing his partisan propaganda was actually objective journalism. There were a few problems though.
No one wanted to put their name on the byline. The ”news” on their website is entirely anonymous, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their credibility. And if readers dug a little deeper, they’d discover the site was really about trolling one man, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a fact that brazenly violates the laws regulating the activities of 501(c)(4) nonprofits, which are not required to disclose their donors but are prohibited from using the bulk of its resources on electioneering.
Shortly before the jungle primary, Grigsby, through Truth in Politics, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to air a commercial featuring Juanita Bates-Washington (a.k.a. Juanita Bates, a.k.a. Juanita Stafford, a.k.a. ”Dr.” Juanita Bonds), a former state employee who received a settlement for $108,000 two years ago after alleging she had been sexually harassed by a deputy aide, Johnny Anderson. In the commercial, Bates-Washington asserts that she had been physically assaulted by Anderson and implies she was terminated by Gov. Edwards after reporting the abuse.
Anderson had indeed engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Bates-Washington, and lurid text messages that were entered into the public record by Bates-Washington’s attorney reveal she and Anderson had been involved in a months-long affair that both sought to keep private. However, importantly, Bates-Washington had actually tendered her resignation a full month before making any allegations against Anderson, who was immediately forced to resign. She did not lose her job in retaliation. After Grigsby’s organization began airing the commercial, Bates-Washington’s attorney, Jill Craft, publicly endorsed Edwards, praising him and his administration for the way they responded. Both the commercial and subsequent statements made by Bates-Washington are demonstrably false.
Eddie Rispone.
Grigsby was deliberately attempting to manufacture outrage, all with the aim of helping his friend Eddie Rispone. It’s difficult to believe he was ever seriously alarmed by Bates-Washington’s claims against Johnny Anderson, considering he also donated $2,500 to former Congressman Cleo Fields’ campaign for state Senate (Anderson is a very public member of Fields’ political operation).
The Grift that Keeps on Grifting
Lane Grigsby may be able to spend a vast fortune to influence elections, and, as he has repeatedly demonstrated, that has sometimes required him to engage in morally or ethically bankrupt activities.
It’s something he recently underscored after allegedly attempting to bribe Republican state Senate candidate Franklin Foil to drop out of the race in exchange for an offer of financial support for a future run for the judiciary, thereby allowing another Republican candidate a clearer path in what, as of this writing, appears to be an unusual three person run-off.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Grigsby, alleging that he had illegally claimed $779,000 in tax credits, money that should have gone to Uncle Sam. Grigsby has proclaimed his innocence, whining that he was being railroaded because of his support of conservative political causes and Republican candidates, presumably without any hint of irony.
The charges were brought by the Trump administration.
Similarly, after outgoing state Sen. Dan Claitor, a Republican from Baton Rouge, confirmed that Grigsby had asked him to pass along a pledge for future financial support to Foil, Grigsby doubled down.
Claitor, an attorney by trade, believes the offer was “possibly illegal.” “I am not Mr. Grigsby’s errand boy,” he said.
At the same time he was launching Truth in Politics, one of nearly three dozen political groups registered under his name, Grigsby was also working with his close friend Eddie Rispone to recruit someone willing to run against Edwards in 2019.
Four years ago, Rispone and Grigsby had realized, early on, that there was little chance David Vitter would win the governor’s race, so instead, they focused on electing a roster of candidates to the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). In years past, BESE elections hadn’t attracted much attention or money, but 2015 was different. All but one of their chosen candidates won their races.
The entrance to Cajun. Industries in Baton Rouge.
Rispone and Grigsby already knew their money could be used to reshape state government. Both men had been playing the game for nearly two decades.
Still, after two years on the prowl, they struggled to find someone- anyone- who would be willing to run against Edwards under their banner. That was resolved when, according to Rispone, he woke up one morning after God Himself told him he was the Chosen One. (God had also apparently told U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins that Ralph Abraham was His anointed candidate, which is all very confusing, but the Lord works in mysterious ways).
Louisiana has never been in short supply of politicians with Messianic delusions. When Bobby Jindal first ran for governor in 2003, he claimed that Christ found him, not the other way around. And when an exuberant Eddie Rispone took the stage inside of a Baton Rouge casino last Saturday night, he told the audience that they had answered ”God’s prayers.”
But the truth in Rispone’s politics, the deus ex machina of his campaign, the prime-mover of his entire operation- indeed, the reason he found success in business- is all attributable to a man he calls his “mentor,” Lane Grigsby.
If Rispone is elected next month, it will have far less to do with God answering anyone’s prayers and much more to do with Lane Grigsby throwing money to smear anyone who gets in the way of the most ambitious construction project of his entire career: His very own shadow government.
“I’m not a kingmaker, and I don’t want to be,” he told the Town Talk only four years ago (emphasis added). ”My mom used to tell me to try to do what’s right.” At the time, he had spent untold millions to influence Louisiana government and the men and women elected to serve in our government, but he had never come close to where he is today. With the governor’s office finally within his sights, Merice “Boo” Johnston Grigsby’s boy could soon become the most powerful person in the state, even if it means ignoring Boo’s advice to her son about doing what’s right.
Sue Lincoln has already reported on Grigsby’s early career in business; he is one of a handful of construction company executives that belong to a select club Sue refers to as “the Erector Set.” But not much has been reported about his early life.
After dropping out of West Point, Lane Grigsby returned to Louisiana, where he studied engineering at LSU.
Boo’s Son:
Leonard Lane Grigsby and I were both born and raised in Alexandria, though he left town before I was alive.
His great-great-grandfather founded the Methodist Church we both attended as children. My great-great-great-grandfather founded the other big Methodist Church of its day, a few miles down the road in Cheneyville. My late grandmother was his high school history teacher. He may have been long gone, but I remember his aunt and his mother Boo.
He got the name Leonard from a maternal uncle and Lane from a paternal grandmother. There had been another famous Lane Grigsby in Louisiana before him, an older cousin, Bettye Lane Grigsby, a classically beautiful singer from Shreveport.
His father, James Pruitt Grigsby, left when he and his sister were both small children, and their mother Boo (Merice) and their aunt Alice raised them in a rambling, two story home on Thornton Court. Boo worked for two decades as the Deputy Tax Assessor of Rapides Parish. His mother’s family were Johnstons, a name that carried some weight in town.
When he was a kid, he couldn’t do anything without attracting the attention of the local newspaper, the Town Talk. They reported on when, at the age of fifteen, he and two friends headed down to Twin Bridges Road to shoot a gun and how one of his friends had given himself a good scare and a couple of superficial injuries after the gun misfired. They kept track of him when he was serving abroad in the Army, when he returned home, when he enrolled at West Point, and when he finally brought his girlfriend Bobbi back to meet his mama.
In 1962, when his estranged father passed away, however, no one paid much attention; the paper didn’t even bother to run an obituary.
Grigsby at West Point.
Grigsby had to drop out of West Point. He and Bobbi had eloped, and suddenly, she was pregnant. Life was coming at both of them fast.
His story, of course, doesn’t end there, because Boo’s son was hungry; he had something to prove.
His mother stayed in Alexandria, occasionally hosting get-togethers at her home, remaining active in the Methodist Church, and taking a leadership role in the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
But Lane made his way to Baton Rouge, transferred to LSU, finally got his engineering degree in 1967, had three more children, and embarked on a career in construction that would eventually make him and his family extravagantly wealthy.
In August, his mother’s old home on Thornton Court sold for $110,000.
Grigsby’s childhood home at 2219 Thornton Court in Alexandria’s Garden District.
It would be an all-around great, feel-good story. But Lane Grigsby, after making his fortune, trampled into the world of Louisiana politics, and because he had so much money, no one dared to tell him that the same dispassionate, obsessive mind that had built him a fortune could easily become his greatest liability. Money can go a long way in politics. It can buy you access and name-recognition, but to paraphrase the great Paul McCartney, “money can’t buy you love.”
Lane Grigsby decided to get into politics to help ensure people like Lane Grigsby remain wealthy.
Specifically, that means retooling the state government to meet the whims and desires of construction companies: Codifying a suite of tax exemptions and limiting oversight to a select group of hand-picked allies; transforming the state’s higher education into a system that prioritizes vocational and technical training above everything else; privatizing elementary and secondary education and allowing the wealthy to subsidize it in exchange for a tax break; blowing up unions, and eliminating social welfare programs that don’t generate a monetary return on investment.
Government designed by engineers who never took a class in the humanities: Utilitarian, amoral, and entirely divorced from the everyday reality of ordinary people. The end user of this system aren’t those in need; they’re those with means.
It’s the kind of government that professes to be moral, even religious, but fails to understand what is ethical.
It’s cold, joyless, intolerant, and doomed.
And this year, in the personage of Eddie Rispone, it’s on the ballot. Because Eddie Rispone owes much of his career and almost all of his new-found life in politics to Lane Grigsby.
It was Lane Grigsby who advised him to quit his old job before the shit hit the fan. Sell his shares. Start his own company. Lane Grigsby encouraged him to run for governor too, and sure, Rispone has put his own money into his campaign. But behind the scenes, through a shadowy network of PACs and 501(c)(4)s, Lane has been spending just as much.
This year, in addition to the veritable fortune he spent to launch the fake news site Truth in Politics and to air a grossly misleading commercial featuring Juanita Bates-Washington, he was also pouring $100,000 to pay for radio ads in support of an obscurely-known African American Democrat campaigning for governor, Omar Dantzler. The ads aired exclusively on urban radio across the state, and incidentally, before Dantzler had even qualified to run for the office, his candidacy was first revealed on a conservative blog.
Make no mistake: The public may believe that Eddie Rispone is running for governor because his name appears on the ballot, but for the Great Grigsby, this election is merely furniture shopping.
Saturday, October 12, 2019 was destined to be a memorable day because it was election day in the Gret Stet of Louisiana. The events of the day were so bizarre that I considered calling this column Screwy Saturday a la Freaky Friday or Manic Monday. But since one incident was fatal, that title struck me as inappropriate even if there are still jokes in this piece. That’s why I borrowed a title from an old Tom Waits song:
The events of last Saturday will haunt us for years.
There was some good news amid the destruction, electoral uncertainty, and crappy infrastructure: the LSU Tigers defeated the hated Florida Gators 42-28. Instead of focusing exclusively on the election results on WWL-TV, I hopped back and forth between Clancy DuBos and Coach O. I kept expecting Ed Orgeron’s gravelly Tom Waits-like voice to come out of Clancy’s mouth…
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this week’s four-headed (headered?) column with a three-headed look at Saturday’s primary election. I suppose I should call it a jungle primary but that makes me think of Tarzan and Cheetah, George of the Jungle, and other cheesy pop culture artifacts.
Cheetah was my jam when I was a kid:
I wrote this before reading Lamar’s analysis because I like flying by the seat of my pants. I hope I don’t blow it like Cheetah; not that I’d ever chew gum. Nasty stuff even without the chimp breath.
The Case Of The Missing Majority:
I was among those who thought Governor Edwards had a good chance at winning outright in the primary. It’s what incumbents do. Instead, he ended up just shy of 47% and landed in a run-off with Eddie Rispone whose slogan appears to be TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP.
Some observers believe Edwards is doomed but I think if he ups his turn-out game, he can win. He’s about where Mary Landrieu was in 2002 when she won the run-off and ahead of where she was in 2014 when she lost. I suspect that some Abraham supporters are the sort of educated suburban voters turned off by President* Pennywise. Even in conservative Louisiana, they’re out there. It’s why Edwards did better in Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes than past Democrats running statewide.
A bigger problem for Edwards is this question: Who is his base? If Rispone succeeds in nationalizing the campaign, JBE is in trouble. The Governor’s timorous approach towards Donald Trump doesn’t help him with those of us who are liberal national Democrats. Even in conservative Louisiana, we’re out there. The more sophisticated among us are supporting the incumbent because he’s better than Phony Rispone, but we’re not his base. It’s a marriage of convenience on both sides. Who is his base? Beats the hell outta me. Eddie Rispone knows who his base is: rural white voters and assorted Trumper peckerwoods.
The model used to elect conservative Democrats in the past- get 95% of the African American vote and 33% of white folks- seems to be broken. It worked in 2015 because JBE was the perfect contrast to the odious and morally compromised David Vitter. If the model still worked, I’d be writing about how Edwards won in the primary.
A festering problem for Gret Stet Democrats is the continuing ineffectiveness of the state party. There were brave words from Karen Carter Peterson in 2015 about building on Edwards’ victory. Instead, the GOP won a super-majority in the state Senate in 2019. It’s time for a change.
Let’s change venue and visit Jefferson Parish. I wrote about the Sheriff’s race in my second 13th Ward Rambler column. It went as expected: incumbent Joe Lopinto pantsed John Fortunato, 62% to 34%. This time we’ll look at the parish president’s race.
Cyanide Cynthia:
I expected the contest between councilmember-at-large Cynthia Lee Sheng and former parish president John Young to be close. I was wrong. It was a 20-point blow-out and Lee Sheng was helped by Lopinto’s support: their signs were coupled in many yards throughout JP. The incoming parish president backed the right horse in that race and Johns Fortunato and Young took it on their respective chins. Unfortunately, losing didn’t wipe the smirk off Young’s face. I think it’s permanent.
It’s time to explain the segment title. Team Young ran some negative ads about Lee Sheng’s alleged support for a cyanide factory in JP. The TV ads were relatively sedate, but the radio ads called Lee Sheng, Cyanide Cynthia. Nice. #sarcasm
I should have known Cyanide Cynthia would win. I got my haircut on Friday. My barber works in the Quarter but lives in Metry. He told me that the Cyanide Cynthia ad knocked him off the fence,
“That’s some ridiculous shit, man. John Young is a dick.”
I enjoy hearing about negative ads backfiring even if the evidence is strictly anecdotal. Repeat after me: always trust your barber or hairdresser.
The Return Of The Bad Shepherd:
Back in the heyday of the NOLA blogosphere, one of our favorite local targets was smarmy state Senator Derrick Shepherd. He proposed a ridiculous bill in the lege targeting baggy pants back when that was a thing. That led to much ridicule among internet smart asses as well as the nickname, The Bad Shepherd.
The Bad Shepherd challenged Dollar Bill Jefferson in 2006; finishing third in that Congressional primary behind Dollar Bill and Karen Carter Peterson. Then Shepherd got involved in a money laundering scheme with one of Dollar Bill’s cronies, which confirmed that hoary adage about politics and strange bedfellows. The Bad Shepherd was sentenced to three years in jail for being a corrupt dumbass. Don’t do business with your enemies, dude. They’ll flip on you in a heartbeat.
Shepherd re-entered politics thanks to a change in state law allowing convicted felons to run for state or municipal office within five years of the end of their sentence. It could be called the “There But For The Grace Of God, Go I” law. Members of the lege like to keep their options open.
The Bad Shepherd ran for the district B seat on the Jefferson Parish council. He finished first in the primary with 24.8% of the vote. Holy unwelcome comeback, Batman.
It’s time to depart the realm of electoral politics and cross the parish line.
TFC:
Every time something goes haywire in New Orleans, I mutter to myself TFC: This Fucking City. I love New Orleans but sometimes this town dances on my last nerve. Saturday October 12, 2019 was such a day.
On Saturday morning, we were greeted with some horrifying news from a construction site at the corner of Rampart and Canal. The future Hard Rock Hotel collapsed and as of this writing there are 2 dead, 1 missing, and 20+ injured. The building is unstable, so the area remains cordoned off as I compose this column. You can see why from the video below:
After the collapse, conspiracy theories were flying on social media. Among the instant experts on Twitter, the conventional wisdom is that the accident was caused by pay-offs and grifting. After speaking with a friend who knows more about the local construction scene than I do, I’m skeptical. A more likely cause is ineptitude, carelessness, and/or the use of substandard materials. When in doubt, go for the simplest explanation. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I prefer evidence to speculation. One thing I know for sure: lawyers are the most likely beneficiaries of this horrible accident.
Condolences to everyone affected by the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel.
There was a lesser, non-lethal TFC moment last Saturday as well:
The broken pipe was located at Panola Street in my former neighborhood. It was 111 years old. I considered stealing the joke in the tweet below but decided not to. It’s bad karma to pilfer puns:
It’s the latest in a series of TFC moments involving the Sewerage and Water Board. Its name should be changed to the Sewerage and Breakage Board. This busted pipe led to yet another boil water advisory for much of New Orleans. We’re getting sick of this shit, y’all. TFC.
We need to flip this soggy mess on its head by devising a new city slogan: Boil Crawfish, Not Water. Beats the hell out of the City of Yes.
Repeat after me: This Fucking City.
That last segment left me boiling mad. Let’s cool down by giving Tom Waits the last word with a song that I failed to include on my Louisiana Tunes list earlier this year. It’s time to rectify that omission:
I know this is not a good time in the news cycle; after all, there’s a runoff election a month from today, which will determine the governorship of Louisiana for the next four years. However, I don’t believe I presently have anything relevant to add to the discussions or your decision-making. The past several years – and the past six months in particular – have thoroughly drained my mental, emotional, and spiritual batteries.
Beginning in 2016 and for two years in a row, there were a trio of contentious legislative sessions, followed by a third year of four more of the same. At that point, I’d not had what could be deemed a “real vacation” for seven or eight years, but plans were in the works to remedy that once the cycle of sessions ended. Yet in August 2018, my husband’s health – which had been slowly deteriorating for four years – took a sharp downward trajectory. Care-giving became my full time job, and my writing for y’all was one of the few ways I could mentally escape the omnipresent worry about him.
As
you all know, it didn’t end well. Don contracted MRSA
(Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as the
“super-bug”) while hospitalized to eliminate the fluid build up
in his tissues stemming from another bout with congestive heart
failure. In early May of this year, the infection killed him.
Since
then I’ve genuinely struggled to write to you and for you. How can
I persuade you that something is important to you, to your future,
when right now I don’t give a flying…duck? And it seems I’m not
the only one with a fore-shortened outlook. Heck, candidates
themselves have been decidedly averse to iterating any vision for
Louisiana’s future past election day, with their only desire being
you casting your vote for them.
Past
candidates – first Bobby Jindal and then David Vitter – promised
you could read all about their detailed plans for Louisiana if you
simply went to their campaign websites (where you’d have to get
past layers of popup ads begging for campaign donations). And four
years ago, while Vitter avoided giving actual answers to questions
about his policy prognostications by saying, “It’s all on my
website,” John Bel Edwards did speak about his agenda, complete
with supporting arguments showcasing the foundations of those
proposals.
This
time, the campaigns of both Eddie Rispone and John Bel Edwards have
been run primarily on litanies of personal beliefs coupled with
resumes of past accomplishments. That’s fine at first, but now
we’re being asked to select one man or the other as chief executive
officer of this state for the next four years. Before I step away
from this fray for the next couple of weeks at a minimum, let me make
one last plea to Eddie and to John Bel.
Gentlemen, please tell us what you plan or hope to do about diversifying Louisiana’s economy. About making higher education affordable for the entire Louisiana populace. About paying all workers what their efforts are worth.
How do either of you propose to improve the quality of life for Louisiana residents over the next four years? We know all the lists say we fail those quality of life measurements. Now give us suggestions on real ways to turn that around. I’ve actually got some ideas I’d share with you. Just ask.
In the meantime, please stop with “the answer is jobs” song and dance. We’ve heard that tune ad infinitum, ad nauseum, adsumptivus. Let me ask you guys a solid question: The largest generation is leaving the workforce, as baby boomers are retiring (and even dying). Who is going to fill all the jobs they have been doing?
What
about your vision of possibilities for Louisiana’s next generation?
Please don’t just keep paying lip service to “making Louisiana better for our children and grandchildren.” Instead, give us some concrete examples of what that could look like, and let’s all start talking about how we get there.
Give
us reasons to hope in the future for Louisiana, because you have
already imagined it. Invite us to share your vision as something good
to aim toward.
In
the meantime, I’m going to snuggle into my armchair and immerse
myself in the stack of books that’s been calling me to lose myself
in their pages. I’ll also be loading up my tent and other camping
gear and heading off to live in the woods for awhile. There I will
hug trees and get grounded again, as I sleep lying directly on the
bosom of Mother Earth. My family will gather around the campfire with
me, and we’ll hoist many glasses in toast to Don.
I’ll do most of this recharging unplugged from the internet and most particularly from social media. I do, however, intend to check in now and again, and eventually, I’ll return. And if by chance Gov. Edwards and/or Mr. Rispone should take my plea to heart and start articulating visions for the future, why then I’ll have something to come back for more quickly, something to write about, and something for which we can all start planting seeds and nurturing growth – together.
Months before Republican Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone launched an “attack ad” against fellow Republican challenger Ralph Abraham, a decision that angered conservatives like talk radio host Moon Griffon and U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a pair of reports critical of Abraham materialized on the website Conservative Intel. According to campaign finance reports filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration, Eddie Rispone’s campaign spent $278,114.60 with a company owned by the same man who the web publication.
“The Rispone campaign said that an Advocate reporter’s tweet was the first he had seen of the anti-Abraham posting but that Conservative Intelligence is one of several email vendors the campaign has used,” Crisp reported. ”The campaign sent out a ‘news alert’ linking to the conservative blog’s post after seeing it on Twitter. Fundraising emails linking to the Rispone campaign’s website also have been sent from addresses on the conservativeintel.com domain.”
The two reports, both of which do not list the name of their author, were published on Feb. 28 and March 20 of this year, and they both attempt to characterize the three-term Republican congressman as an advocate of the “#NeverTrump” movement, calling attention to comments Abraham had made when Trump was still seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
Although the posts still appear, as previews, through a search of the site’s archives, the actual articles haven been removed.
The site is owned by Michigan Republican political operative John Yow, who also owns a portfolio of companies that provide various services for conservative candidates. The Detroit News first revealed Yow’s connections to the website in 2017, raising concerns about the integrity of Yow’s “news outlet” and the ethics of political candidates who may be paying for news articles without disclosing their involvement.
In her report for the Advocate, Crisp mentions news and fundraising emails sent on behalf of Rispone’s campaign by Conservative Intelligence. However, despite the Rispone campaign’s claims of ignorance and assertions about the company merely being “one of several email vendors,” the campaign never actually paid that particular company for email or fundraising services.
Instead, it paid yet another company owned by Yow, Victory Phones, LLC, which allegedly provides auto-dialing resources for surveys and polls.
According to consultants familiar with the industry, the expenditures raise significant questions, particularly considering Rispone also retained the services of a pollster, who has, thus far, been paid nearly a half of a million dollars by the campaign, including for services that appear to be duplicative.
Featured image: John Yow. Screenshot of Fox News. Edited by the Bayou Brief.
You don’t need to tell Eddie Rispone that you own a cat or that you have diabetes or that you’re a stamp collector. There is a chance he already knows this about you, but even if he doesn’t, one of his campaign consultants probably does.
For most candidates, retail politics means attending small events with potential voters in order to get to know and connect with them personally, but for Rispone and a dozens of other Republican candidates across the country, it could just as easily refer to a campaign’s use of consumer data, demographic information, and insight gleamed from social media profiles in order to shape strategies on which issues to emphasize and which persuadable voters to target.
Campaigns have relied on sophisticated online technology to help them identify their most likely voters for more than a decade, but usually, that technology is built on the voter file from their political party and voluntary surveys. The Rispone campaign, however, appears to be at least partially relying on a controversial service provided by i360, a company affiliated with mega-billionaire Charles Koch.
The company boasts a database that contains information on 89% of Americans, and it sells access to Republican candidates through expensive monthly subscriptions.
“i360’s voter file identifies ‘more than 199 million active voters and 290 million U.S. consumers,’ and provides its users with up to 1,800 unique data points on each identified individual,” explains Calvin Sloan of the Center for Media and Democracy. ”As a result, i360 and the Kochs know your vitals, ethnicity, religion, occupation, hobbies, shopping habits, political leanings, financial assets, marital status, and much more. They know if you enjoy fishing — and if you do, whether you prefer salt or fresh water. They know if you have bladder control difficulty, get migraines, or have osteoporosis. They know which advertising mediums (radio, TV, internet, email) are the most effective. For you.”
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump rolled back a series of consumer information privacy regulations, making it easier for companies like i360 to monetize your personal information, without your knowledge or consent, and sell that information to political candidates.
Source i360
According to campaign finance reports filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration, Eddie Rispone loaned his campaign $11.55 million, and by Election Day last Saturday, he had likely spent every last penny (The final Election Day report from the jungle primary has not yet been disclosed).
Over the course of five months, from April to August, Rispone spent $35,130.20 with i360, exponentially more than any other Louisiana candidate has ever paid the company.
Source: Louisiana Ethics Administration
What did Rispone do with that data?
Nearly the same thing as another one of i360’s clients, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee: He used it to spread racist and anti-immigration propaganda.
“The path to one Republican’s successful 2018 Senate run is detailed on i360’s website. Then-Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn aired at least four different television advertisements and a wave of social media advertisements focused on immigration, often with false or inflammatory language,” Lee Fang of The Intercept recently reported. ”She ended up beating out Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who had been leading in the polls for months.”
A caravan of 14,000 illegal immigrants is marching on America, but Phil Bredesen? He says it’s “not a threat to our security.” pic.twitter.com/NvdGyagwCg
Sound familiar? Here is Rispone’s most recent digital ad on the subject:
Under John Bel Edwards: murder is up 20%, thousands of dangerous criminals released, and New Orleans is a sanctuary city mecca. When I’m governor, I’ll ban sanctuary cities and leave the forgiveness to God, not government. #LAGovpic.twitter.com/ct4XsWRQhL
Even if you live in Louisiana, there is a good chance you hadn’t seen Rispone’s ad until just now, and that’s because his campaign hired other consultants to ensure the commercial reaches its intended audience. (We’ll introduce other members of Rispone’s team in subsequent reports).
Rispone’s claims about immigration enforcement and policy are fake news, deliberately misleading voters into believing that the issue is under the purview of the governor.
New Orleans-based immigration attorney Kathleen Gasparian explains.
“In one of his campaign ads, Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone promises to end sanctuary cities in Louisiana, ‘end taxpayer benefits for illegal immigrants,’ and he says he ‘supports President Trump’s wall 110 percent.’ These claims represent Rispone signaling that he aligns himself with Trump because the state doesn’t have jurisdiction in them,” Gasparian writes (emphasis added). ”What happens in New Orleans immigration court is similarly determined in Washington, D.C. and not Baton Rouge because for the most part, immigration is a federal matter. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 codified immigration as a federal issue, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 reiterated it while stating among other things that undocumented immigrants are not eligible for welfare—a Rispone plank that is already law.”
Similarly, Rispone has campaigned on his support for Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico. He’s either hoping voters don’t realize that there is absolutely nothing the governor of Louisiana can do about a border wall or that they’ve never looked at a map.
Regardless, when a gubernatorial candidate decides to campaign on issues he couldn’t do anything about, it’s probably because he’d rather not defend the things he actually intends to do.
The LSU Tigers beat the Florida Gators. Ralph Abraham was vanquished, and despite a better-than-expected showing in both East Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parishes, John Bel Edwards was unable to secure an outright win in yesterday’s jungle primary. The incumbent governor finished three points short of the magic number and will face Republican Party mega-donor and political insider Eddie Rispone in a runoff election on Nov. 16th.
As expected, Edwards dominated the six-person field but stopped short of an outright victory, which is at least partially attributable to anemic turnout (38.4%) in the Democrat-heavy Orleans Parish, which had been rattled earlier in the day after a skyscraper hotel under construction suddenly collapsed, killing at least two (as of this writing, one person remains missing) and leaving a field of dust and debris in the heart of downtown New Orleans.
Edwards had been scheduled to appear at a campaign event in New Orleans shortly after the building’s collapse; instead of campaigning, he spent much of the mid-morning coordinating with first responders. By comparison, turnout in East Baton Rouge Parish had been ten points higher.
As election returns began pouring in, Rispone quickly grabbed onto second place against Abraham and narrowly held on for the remainder of the night, ultimately finishing ahead by three points (or approximately 51,000 votes).
According to campaign finance reports, Rispone spent at least $8 million of his own money on the campaign, and his close friend Lane Grigsby likely spent millions as well, blanketing urban radio stations across the state with ads supporting the candidacy of Omar Dantzler, an African American school bus driver from Hammond whose campaign was otherwise nonexistent. Because candidates appear on the ballot in alphabetical order, Dantzler was the first Democratic candidate listed.
Rispone, a first-time candidate, had not been widely known until this year’s election, though he has been a powerful political insider and prolific donor to conservative candidates and organizations for more than twenty years. Since 1998, Rispone has contributed more than $1.6 million to influence elections, and during the Jindal administration, he championed a tax loophole that treated his donations to a Catholic voucher school as if they were state income taxes.
To most, Rispone’s ascendance into second place would have seemed improbable when he announced his candidacy shortly after Labor Day last year, but for a small cabal of wealthy construction magnates and political insiders, the most surprising aspect of the jungle primary was how Ralph Abraham had managed to hang on until the very end.
Gov. John Bel Edwards addresses supporters after the 2019 jungle primary. Photo by Lamar White, Jr.
Shockingly, Donald Trump Is Lying About His Own Importance
There have been eleven jungle primaries for Louisiana governor since its debut during Edwin Edwards’ first term in office. Edwards is still the only Democratic gubernatorial candidate to win outright in the jungle primary, when he ran for reelection in 1975, and only Bobby Jindal has won election and reelection without a runoff. Mike Foster had also managed to win outright during his reelection in 1999.
It’s an unwieldy and unpredictable system, and because Edwin Edwards remained such a singular force in Louisiana politics for more than 30 years, any political science on the subject has to consider the Edwin factor. That said, in other races, it’s not unusual for a Democratic incumbent to fall short in the jungle and win in the runoff. It happened to John Breaux, and Mary Landrieu won two of her three elections to the Senate outright. She beat John Kennedy in the jungle primary in 2008.
By the time Donald Trump strode into an arena in Lake Charles on Friday night, packed to the brim with 7,500 red hats, nearly a quarter of votes had already been cast. At the same time the MAGA crowd were being whipped into a frenzy, Edwards was holding a tele-town hall. 16,000 people dialed in, more than double the number that attended Trump’s rally and the most-ever for an event of its kind.
It had appeared, albeit briefly, that Edwards may have taken the whole election in the jungle primary, but the Republican Governor’s Association and Lane Grigsby both decided to air the attack ads they had hoped to hold until a runoff, just to stem the tide and buy some time.
It ended up working, barely. Edwards’ 47% share is in line with what polls had been suggesting all along. This morning, Trump boasted that his appearance in Lake Charles had resulted in Edwards plunging from 66% to 47%; it was utterly divorced from reality.
While it’s undeniably true that Trump remains popular in Louisiana, when you’re only looking at his approval rating, you’re missing the more significant number: Net approval over time, and it ain’t good for the Donald.
Source: Morning Consult.
It remains to be seen how Rispone and his allies will proceed during the next month; the decision to preemptively strike with their attack ads leaves them without any fresh material during the runoff, and Rispone still has to introduce himself. More than 70% of voters supported someone else, and simply affixing himself to Trump’s brand allows his opponents to reinforce the notion that he is phony, an empty suit who has emptied his pockets to purchase the governor’s office for himself and his wealthy friends.
One thing is for certain: We’re in for a wild month.
On the eve of Louisiana’s jungle primary, the state’s two leading Republican gubernatorial candidates are hoping that a last-minute push by President Donald Trump can catapult one of them into a runoff against incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards. But while a beleaguered Trump remains popular among Louisiana’s conservative base, partisan politics may only go so far in a state finally emerging from the disastrous and divisive leadership of Bobby Jindal.
During the past year, no other news organization has published more exclusive, in-depth investigative reports about the two Republican challengers, Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone. Veteran political reporter Sue Lincoln traveled to Richland Parish to get a first-hand perspective and insight into the sparsely-populated pocket of northeast Louisiana that Rep. Ralph Abraham calls home. She camped out at the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office during qualifications, and she questioned the candidates during a recent forum. Meanwhile, I took a deep dive into public records, archival material, financial reports, and even genealogical research. I may not be the only writer in the state who actually read Eddie Rispone’s first and only book, but I am definitely the only person who bothered to write a book review about it.
Together, Sue and I provided much of the research and information that would become critical components of the public discourse, but because we began publishing much our work several months ago, I have compiled this final, comprehensive report that contains our most significant findings, with the intention of helping voters in Louisiana become better informed about the choice they need to make tomorrow.
Image by the Bayou Brief.
Lest Ye Be Judged
“I don’t judge people. I just don’t do that,” Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone replied during the third and final debate ahead of Saturday’s jungle primary election. Rispone is diminutive in stature and speaks in a high-pitched, adenoidal tone with a faint Cajun accent. When he announced his candidacy shortly after Labor Day last year, he’d been completely unknown outside of the business elite in his hometown of Baton Rouge and a small circle of conservative political operatives. But he’s spent millions of dollars from his own bank account on a quixotic bid for governor, drawing comparisons to Ross Perot, the self-made billionaire from East Texas who became a household name during his run for president in 1992, and as a result, he is now locked in a statistical tie for second place with fellow Republican Rep. Ralph Abraham.
Rispone’s campaign has run the most inflammatory ads in an already-heated election. “Dangerous, sick, violent, John Bel Edwards put them back on our streets where they robbed, attacked, murdered,” the narrator intones in a commercial smearing the governor for championing a package of criminal justice reforms in 2017. Among other things, the reforms, which sailed through the Republican-dominated legislature and won the praise and support of the state’s most influential Christian conservative organization, the Louisiana Family Forum, allows for the early release of a select number of people convicted for non-violent offenses. Rispone’s commercial may have been grossly misleading, but it is central to a playbook that has sought to stoke fear and resentment against racial minorities.
When Edwards was elected in 2015, Louisiana incarcerated more people, per capita, than any other place in the world.
“Louisiana’s incarceration rate of 816 inmates per 100,000 residents is almost twice the national average, three times Brazil’s, seven times China’s, and ten times Germany’s,” Loyola University’s Dr. Sue Weishar wrote in the 2017 report Prison Capital of the Universe. ”The impact of Louisiana’s bloated and costly criminal justice system on African American communities has been particularly devastating. One in 20 African American adult males in Louisiana is incarcerated, a rate exceeded by only six states. Although only 32 percent of Louisiana’s population is Black, 67.8 percent of its prison population is Black, the second highest proportion of Black inmates in the U.S.“
As a direct result of criminal justice reform, the state no longer leads the world; that inauspicious title now belongs to Oklahoma. However, all those jail cells emptied by the state criminal justice reforms aren’t lacking for tenants, because the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has refilled them to overflowing, making Louisiana the new hub for ICE detentions, with approximately 8,000 of the nation’s 51,000 detainees being held at facilities within Louisiana’s borders.
Edwards isn’t the only candidate who has drawn criticism from Rispone. In late September, Rispone’s campaign broke its promise and launched a full-scale assault against Abraham, angering Republican officials like U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins and conservative talk radio host Moon Griffon. During the third debate, after declaring that he didn’t “judge people,” Rispone called Abraham a “liar.”
His comment about judging people was actually about one person in particular, Donald Trump. In his very first campaign commercial, Rispone spent so much time heaping praise on the president that many viewers never picked up on his name or even what office he was seeking. There was little chance he was going to be baited into saying anything negative against Donald Trump, even in response to a question about whether there were any moral disagreements he had with a thrice-married adulterer who was once caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault and who illegally paid porn star and Baton Rouge native Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the sexual affair they had shortly after his wife Melanie had given birth to their son Baron.
Nope, no moral disagreements whatsoever from Rispone, a conservative Catholic whose campaign had recently run a commercial featuring the candidate seated next to an oversized cross while talking about his belief in the power of prayer and how he intended to follow God’s guidance if elected.
To be sure, Ralph Abraham, the country doctor who, prior to his election to Congress, believed that nearly half of his Medicare patients needed a prescription to an opioid he was selling at his nearby pharmacy, is also hoping that voters care more about his allegiance to Trump than about his vision for Louisiana. Both men have calculated that rigid loyalty to the president is a sign of strength, but as candidates hoping to become the chief executive of Louisiana, blind fealty to the head of the federal government looks weak and lazy, regardless of who is occupying the Oval Office.
And while voters may not judge the moral decisions of a candidate they ship off to Washington, D.C., they do care about the character of the person they send to the Governor’s Mansion.
During the past year, the Bayou Brief has published dozens of reports about incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards’ two leading Republican challengers, because much like Edwards had been four years ago, both Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone were largely unknown prior to this year’s election, despite the fact that Abraham has served three terms in Congress.
But before we explore the most significant aspects of our coverage, some of which have been referenced by others in television commercials, direct mailers, and news reports, let’s consider the cautionary tale of the candidate who had seemed all but certain to become the state’s next governor only four years ago.
The day after David Vitter’s 2007 press conference in Metairie, Stephen Colbert coined the word “victimcrite” to describe Vitter, who had attempted to depict himself as the target of partisan harassment.
Victimcrite
David Vitter had gone into hiding for a week, but the story wasn’t going anywhere.
It was one of the biggest political scandals in recent memory, when the nation became first acquainted with Deborah Jeane Palfrey, better known as the “D.C. Madam.” Palfrey possessed a Rolodex of clients that allegedly included some well-known names.
On July 9th, 2007, we finally learned on one of those names: David Bruce Vitter, the Louisiana Republican who had first arrived in Washington after winning the House seat vacated by Rep. Bob Livingston, a man who was once on track toward the speakership until his own extra-marital affair was revealed. Vitter quickly distributed a statement, admitting and apologizing for committing ”a serious sin,” and then he disappeared for a week.
The story about Vitter broke at the worst time possible for at least two other people.
Rudy Giuliani had been assembling a team and lining up endorsements in preparation for his 2008 presidential campaign, and already, he was off to an inauspicious start. He was on the verge of naming Robert Asher, a Pennsylvania businessman, to lead the campaign’s efforts in the Keystone State before discovering that Asher had previously been at the center of a massive public corruption investigation. A month before, his point person in South Carolina, State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, was convicted of distributing cocaine, a charge that carried a maximum of twenty years behind bars. And then there was Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief that Rudy had recommended for Secretary of Homeland Security to President George W. Bush and who had just been sentenced to prison for federal tax evasion.
So, the Giuliani campaign already had been associated with a corruption scandal and a drug scandal. David Vitter, the campaign’s Southern Chairman, would link them to a prostitution scandal as well. Rudy’s campaign, which then-Sen. Joe Biden had characterized as “a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” was screwed.
Vitter came out of hiding on the 16th, holding a press conference at the Sheraton in Metairie. He was angry, strident, refusing to take any questions and quickly disabusing any speculation that he would be resigning from the Senate. His wife Wendy stood at his side, scowling at the press, and once her husband finished speaking, she took the podium. “To those who know me, are you surprised that I have something to say?” she asked. You didn’t need to know her; it was obvious from the moment she strode into the room.
David Vitter’s press conference streamed live across every cable news network in the country, and every major media organization in Louisiana, from Shreveport to Monroe to Acadiana and Baton Rouge, had sent someone to the Sheraton in Metairie.
The state media was supposed to have been at a different event that afternoon, right down the street. It’d been on the schedules of several in the press until the very last minute, when it became clear that David Vitter was a bigger story than Congressman Bobby Jindal’s announcement that he would be running for governor again.
It is impossible to understand the past dozen years of Louisiana politics if you’re unfamiliar with the Grand Organizing Theory of the Grand Old Party: Bobby Jindal and David Vitter can’t stand one another. Even today, they each serve as the titular heads of two competing political machines, though parts of Jindal’s machine were sold to Florida’s former governor and current U.S. Senator, Rick Scott.
Vitter, of course, had initially survived the 2007 D.C. Madam scandal, and when he stood for reelection in 2010, he trounced the Democratic candidate, Charlie Melancon, by 19 points, the same margin by which Trump would carry the state six years later. It had appeared nearly inevitable that Vitter would end up taking over the Governor’s Mansion once term limits sent Jindal packing for Iowa.
But Team Jindal would not go quietly. Those who didn’t join the “Louisiana mafia” in Rick Scott’s Florida coalesced around another Republican challenger in 2015: Former Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle.
Angelle and another Republican candidate, Jay Dardenne, who had replaced Angelle as Lt. Governor, would make it nearly impossible for Vitter to secure the majority he needed to win outright in the jungle primary. But Team Vitter made a strategic error; right out of the gate, they decided to spend a fortune pillorying the two other Republicans, torching whatever potential goodwill that could have existed.
Vitter would finish second in the jungle primary, behind Democrat John Bel Edwards, and during the general election, Scott Angelle decided to stay quiet; Dardenne, however, endorsed Edwards. Vitter was toxic; the prostitution scandal, after going dormant for the previous eight years, made a surprise move out of retirement.
Edwards clobbered Vitter by more than 12 points. Character mattered.
U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham. Image by the Bayou Brief.
Dishonest Abe
Two days before Donald Trump’s arrival for a campaign rally in Lake Charles, ostensibly with the intention of somehow unifying voters behind both Republicans running for Louisiana governor, one of those candidates called the other a liar and a typical politician on live television in front of a statewide audience.
Eddie Rispone may have his own difficulties with the facts, but he wasn’t incorrect when he pointed out that Ralph Abraham was simply not telling the truth when he claimed that he has donated all of his salary as a member of Congress to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and a charity that provides services and medical devices to wounded warriors, something he had pledged to do during his very first election in 2014.
In fact, earlier this year, after a member of his congressional staff unwittingly disclosed that Abraham would continue to draw his salary during a protracted government shutdown, he was forced to reluctantly confess that he had broken his promise years before. It’s not even clear he ever kept it in the first place; he has yet to provide any proof whatsoever of any donations.
At the very least, Abraham should have contributed $348,000 to the two charities, an irony not lost on his opponents when he recently loaned his campaign $350,000.
It’s difficult to imagine how any other elected official in the state could survive a broken promise as egregious as one involving hundreds of thousands of dollars for children with cancer and veterans who lost a leg or an arm due to a combat injury, and to be clear, when voters in Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District sent Abraham back to Washington last year, they didn’t know Abraham had long since abandoned his pledge.
At first glance, it may seem insignificant, but considering the enormous influence the oil and gas industry has in Louisiana, it is also remarkable that Abraham has actually sued a pipeline company for damaging his land.
Ralph Abraham has learned how to wear his toothy grin as a shield, a way to deflect pointed questions and dismiss his critics, but he also carries himself with the awkward slouch of a teenager embarrassed by a sudden growth spurt. He speaks with the kind of lilting drawl that more skillful politicians can use to demonstrate both their relatability and their authority, but for Abraham, it only seems to exaggerate arrogance thinly-disguised as aloofness.
Prior to his election to Congress, he’d spent most of his career as his town’s only doctor, a role that immediately imbues a person with respect and a sense of entitlement, regardless of whether it is rightfully earned. And before became a medical doctor, Abraham had been a veterinarian. On the campaign trail, he claims to treat both farm animals and farmers, but Abraham hasn’t been licensed to practice veterinary medicine since Sept. 30, 2001.
He can be forgiven for creating the impression that his office was once a one-stop-shop for people and their pets; it’s provided him with more than a handful of clever punchlines, and ultimately, it’s harmless. He did, after all, graduate from veterinary school and medical school.
But his pledge to donate his congressional salary to charity isn’t the only promise he has broken.
During his first campaign, he vowed to shut down the small medical practice he had established in the tiny town of Mangham in Richland Parish. He’d made good money, he said, and he understood that serving in Congress was a full-time job. By law, physicians are required to provide their patients with at least 45 days advanced notice before they decide to end treatment or retire, but as the Bayou Brief exclusively revealed in July, Ralph Abraham never actually ended his medical practice, despite his claims to the contrary.
This year, on Father’s Day, Abraham shared a Facebook post from his daughter Ashley Abraham Morris. ”In recent years, my dad’s job has changed,” Morris wrote. ”He gave up a thriving medical practice to serve his country. It hasn’t been the easiest for our family. We’ve all had to make sacrifices.”
While it is true that a year after taking office, Abraham claimed his income from his medical practice had gone from nearly $350,000 to less than $13,000, both he and his daughter knew she wasn’t being entirely honest about the ”sacrifices” her dad had made in order to serve in Congress.
In reality, after waiting a couple of years, Abraham simply moved his practice a few miles up the road, opening a new clinic in May of 2017 in the nearby town of Rayville. Notably, according to documents filed with the Louisiana Secretary of State, the new clinic lists Abraham’s wife Dianne and daughter Ashley as its registered agents, but in financial disclosure reports, Abraham claims a 50% ownership share in the clinic. Neither his wife nor his daughter are licensed medical professionals; Ralph Abraham is the only medical doctor associated with the clinic, which employs two nurse practitioners under his supervision.
Moreover, Abraham never fully divested from his office in Mangham; he turned over operations to Affinity Medical Group and retained a 50% interest in the real estate, which somehow earned him between $50,000 to $100,000 in 2017, the same year his new clinic opened in Rayville. It was a staggering amount of money- presumably in rental income- for a small office building in a remote rural town home to only 638 people.
And none of this includes the income he has continued to earn from his pharmacies, something he conveniently forgot to mention when he campaigned for a seat in Congress. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the pharmacies soon.
Abraham’s decision to continue his medical practice, despite his attempts to disguise it as investment income or capital gains, isn’t a trivial detail. By all accounts, it is a flagrant violation of Congressional rules, which require members who are licensed to practice medicine limit their treatment of patients to charitable purposes or charge only the costs of their out-of-pocket expenses. In other words, once you’re elected to Congress, you’re not supposed to continue earning a profit from practicing medicine.
The reasons for this should be obvious: A physician cannot guarantee their ability to provide ongoing care for a patient if they also solemnly swear to “protect and defend and Constitution of the United States against enemies, both foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Medical doctors are singled out for a reason: Human lives are often at stake. It’s impossible for a physician to provide ongoing care when they also are bound by their obligations under the Constitution.
If a member of Congress decides to continue practicing medicine, neither their patients nor their constituents can command their full attention, something that Abraham has repeatedly illustrated, particularly during the past year.
Currently, Abraham’s congressional attendance record ranks dead last in the country. No other member has missed as many votes, an embarrassing fact for someone who flies his own airplane. And by his own admission, many of his missing votes, including a series of votes on the reauthorization of the critically important federal flood insurance act, weren’t due to his commitments on the campaign trail; instead of being in Washington D.C. to do the job he was elected to do, Abraham was back home in Richland Parish treating patients out of a medical practice he and his daughter claimed he had given up in ”sacrifice” to public service.
Make no mistake, though: He also missed important votes to attend fundraisers, even before he had announced his candidacy.
It’s still unclear why exactly Ralph Abraham wants to be governor or, for that matter, why he ever wanted to serve in Congress, but he embarked on a political career after being recruited by members of then-Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign machine to run against an incumbent Republican, U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister, a man who became nationally-known as “the Kissing Congressman.”
U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister invited Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson as his guest to the 2014 State of the Union address. Credit: RQ/Roll Call. Design: Bayou Brief.
The Missing Congressman vs. the Kissing Congressman
Republican Party leaders publicly claimed they wanted to oust McAllister because he had been caught on video tape planting a passionate kiss on a staff member with whom he had been having an affair, but the truth is even sleazier: Someone had been spying on McAllister, and a camera had been hooked up to the office’s surveillance system with the deliberate intention of catching him in the act. Once they got the goods, it was handed it over to Sam Hanna, an outspoken conservative and the publisher of The Ouachita Citizen, an obscure outlet in northeast Louisiana. A year and half before the story of the “Kissing Congressman” went viral, Gov. Jindal had granted a pardon to Hanna, wiping away a criminal record that included four DWIs.
McAllister hadn’t earned their ire because of his extramarital affair. Instead, it was because McAllister, a self-made millionaire, came out of nowhere and defeated state Sen. Neil Riser, a key ally of Gov. Jindal, by emphasizing his political independence and his support for certain components of Obamacare, an unpardonable sin for the GOP establishment.
In Ralph Abraham, Republican operatives found millionaire physician who could speak with authority about his opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, notwithstanding his obvious ignorance of the law.
There was only one obstacle in his way.
Vance McAllister had also been boosted by the endorsement of the region’s most famous native son, Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame, but because of his scandal, McAllister was now off-brand for the star of a reality television show that emphasized wholesome family values.
Zach Dasher, like his more famous cousins, marketed himself as a traditional, Christian conservative, but it didn’t take long to realize some of his beliefs were in a word… well… eccentric. He was 36 at the time, a married father of four small children, and after he dispensed the standard Republican talking points about God and guns, Dasher was prone to extended digressions about Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and his vague understanding of “natural law.” You know, the bread and butter issues for the voters of Louisiana’s Fifth District.
I remember the election well, because at the time, I was living and working in Alexandria. (For some reason, the only thing I ever wrote about Dasher on my former web publication, CenLamar, was a ridiculous, juvenile story about the cartoon character Darkwing Duck, which is unfortunate because Dasher proved to be a much more interesting character).
Even though they were both Republicans, Dasher wasn’t competing for the same votes as McAllister. Vance had gotten elected by cobbling together a coalition of working-class Republican moderates and African American Democrats in Ouachita Parish. There are compelling reasons to believe McAllister, despite the scandal, would have coasted to reelection if Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo hadn’t entered the field. Instead, he presented the biggest threat to Dr. Ralph Abraham.
There is a reason Zach Dasher’s unsuccessful campaign in 2014 remains relevant today. For one, Abraham likely would have never been convinced to promise his salary to charity once he took the Oath of Office, but if you’re an astute political watcher, you may have seen the two ads Eddie Rispone’s campaign is now airing featuring Willie Robertson. In the first ad, Willie revealed he had no idea how to say Rispone’s ‘last name,” so in the next ad, he refers exclusively to his friend “Eddie.”
The title was the second ad was “Beard,” and while it is clearly a reference to Willie’s grooming decisions – or lack thereof – there’s a certain irony in the fact that word is also used to describe the opposite sex partner of a gay man.
It’s been five years since this election, and if you’re a really astute political watcher, you’ll know the answer to this question: How did Eddie Rispone earn an endorsement from and two television commercials with Willie Robertson instead of Ralph Abraham, who represents the Robertson in Congress?
I am not in the business of speculating about anyone’s private life, but I imagine the hostility has something to do with how the Abraham responded after reading this article.
Regardless of who first circulated a smear campaign against Dasher, but it doesn’t take too long to surmise what the Robertson family truly thinks about Ralph Abraham.
Image by the Bayou Brief.
Welfare King
In 1980, the same year he became a veterinarian, the congressman’s father, Ralph Lee Abraham, Sr. passed away, leaving his 26-year-old son a sizable interest in the family’s 600-acre farm business. Although he sometimes downplays the farm’s success, it represents the single most valuable and most profitable asset in his portfolio.
According to Open Secrets, an organization that analyzes money in politics, Abraham is currently the 47th wealthiest member of the 435 member U.S. House, with an estimated net worth of $12 million. Without the farm he inherited from his dad, it’s unlikely Abraham would have ever become a multi-millionaire, and without the generous tax subsidies from the federal government, it’s unlikely the farm, which harvests soybeans and corn and grows cotton, would have never been able to stay in business.
Abraham, it’s worth noting, likes to call himself a “farmer,” but he has long since delegated those responsibilities to his son-in-law Dustin Morris, the husband of his daughter Ashley.
His congressional district ranks as the 10th most impoverished in the nation, and along with agribusiness, the region’s other economic engine is the private prison industry. There are very few opportunities for upward mobility, since someone else has already cornered the lucrative duck call sector.
When he was elected in 2014, nearly one out of four people in the district were uninsured, a fact that he dismissed when he declared his opposition to Medicaid expansion. During his first term, newly-elected Gov. John Bel Edwards reversed the decision of his predecessor, Bobby Jindal, and availed Louisiana of the $1.6 billion the federal government had set aside for the state to expand Medicaid, using a provider fee as a tax-neutral instrument to pay for the state’s match.
Since then, no other congressional district has benefited more from Medicaid expansion than Abraham’s, no thanks to him whatsoever. The district has experienced a double-digit decrease in the percentage of uninsured residents, and its local hospitals, some of which had been teetering on the verge of insolvency, have been stabilized; again, no thanks to Abraham whatsoever.
Abraham preaches from the Gospel of Bootstraps and the Epistle of Trickle-Down Economics, a set of beliefs that requires blind faith because there is no evidence it has ever worked in practice, despite its effectiveness as a talking point.
His proposals have never amounted to serious policy prescriptions; they are mean-spirited gimmicks that appeal almost exclusively to his fellow white conservatives, and in a district in which more than one-third of residents are African Americans, they may not be a duck call, but they’re definitely a dog whistle.
They are also brazenly hypocritical, because not only did Ralph Abraham inherit the bulk of his wealth and grow up with the privileges often necessary simply to be admitted into veterinary school and medical school, both he and his family have collected more than $2.6 million in federal farm subsidies, the kind of program that, when provided to the working poor, is known as a government handout or welfare.
Late last year, after Donald Trump imposed a series of tariffs on Chinese products, China retaliated by implementing tariffs on, among other things, soybeans harvested in the United States, which just so happen to be one of the most important crops for Abraham Farms.
This year, we published more investigative reports on Abraham than on anyone else, and we were continually surprised by the seemingly endless supply of alarming and previously unreported information we unearthed. While the story about his broken promise to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and a veteran’s charity was first reported by the Advocate on Jan. 17th, I had been provided the same tip a week prior and had written a report on Jan. 16th that languished in the Bayou Brief’s draft folder when a news alert appeared on my phone.
A few months later, though, I uncovered what, to me, is the most significant story of the year about Rep. Abraham, one that didn’t originate from a tip but from a simple question I asked a friend: Will you check Richland Parish?
The Bayou Brief has, on occasion, reached more than 120,000 readers a day (and earlier this year, reached a half a million in a 24-hour time period), but the Advocate is Louisiana’s largest paper, and, with the recent purchase of the Times-Picayune, its reach is unrivaled. This was a big story; it deserved the biggest audience possible. To be sure, once I was confident that I had the story, I wasn’t going to stand by and wait for permission. I could only hope that the paper wouldn’t make the same mistake it had in 2014, when its editors decided to kill a report about U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, who running for Senate against three-term incumbent Mary Landrieu, failing to account for his time working as a physician at the old Earl K. Long charity hospital. I picked up on the story they had refused to run, and it generated national news and triggered an internal investigation by LSU. At the time, the paper’s editors claimed they were concerned that releasing a sensational story so close to the election would be perceived as election interference, which, in my opinion, was a specious assertion. Not publishing a story is much more egregious, because it deprives the public and voters the ability to be fully informed.
That being said, before we consider the information about opioid prescriptions, it’s worth noting that prior to our series “Pharmland,” only a small handful of people knew Rep. Ralph Abraham owns a pharmacy in Mangham and retains an ownership interest in another pharmacy in nearby Winnsboro. It isn’t exactly something he ever boasted about, and he had managed to keep his involvement in the two businesses out of the paper, even though both businesses are listed, plain as day, on his personal financial disclosure reports.
So, after publishing my first report, one of the questions I received most frequently was, “How can a doctor own a pharmacy? I thought that was illegal.” The short answer is: While it presents all sorts of obvious ethical dilemmas, it’s not illegal. Maybe it should be.
In the first report, I specifically looked at the total number of opioid prescriptions that had been filled at Abraham’s two pharmacies and the total population within a 10-mile radius of each. I would later refine my methodology in order to draw more direct comparisons.
In Part One, we unpacked the basics that can be easily ascertained by consulting’ DEA’s database. For my first report, I relied on data uploaded to the Washington Post from the DEA; I subsequently learned of a more up-to-date database, and unfortunately for Abraham, the numbers were only increasing.
Based on my calculations, from 2006-2012, the seven years at issue in the DEA’s database, Abraham’s pharmacies ordered nearly 1.5 million doses to service an area of approximately 6,000 potential customers.
While most readers had been rightfully shocked by the enormous volume of these high-octane painkillers, others were more interested in attempting to complicate these basic, incontrovertible findings by introducing easily disprovable speculation (i.e. a resident’s lack of access to other pharmacies; the notion that 1.5 million doses, when divided by a larger denominator, didn’t sound as bad; and the belief that an abundance of opioids could be offset by a massive supply of all other types of medication.
I tackled those concerns in Part II, taking a wide-angle lens at the opioid epidemic and specifically looking into Abraham’s own words about the drugs, During a Congressional primary debate, Abraham was asked directly whether he supported the medicinal use of marijuana. No, he did not, he explained, and then he swiftly pivoted to extol the incredible wonders of opioids. It was impossible not to wonder whether or not Abraham enjoyed a close, professional relationship with pharmaceutical reps.
Considering he has constructed much of his public persona and his campaign around his identity as a medical doctor (his campaign staff rebranded him this year as “Doc Abraham” and he ends nearly every public gathering and every tweet with the line, “Help is on the way”), voters may be surprised that Abraham, for some reason, decided not to pursue a year-long residency after graduation from medical school. Instead, he accepted an internship. It was not a minor decision. By forgoing a residency, Abraham also relinquished any chance he may have had to become board-certified. He would never become a specialist in any field.
It is also important to note that we can reasonably surmise that a significant number of the prescriptions he wrote were distributed and purchased through the pharmacies he owned. And while he may be capable of earnestly arguing that he has never written a prescription that he knew was unnecessary, it’s impossible see this arrangement as anything less than a perverse incentive for profitability, one ripe for abuse.
I recognized the methodology I employed in the first report left some readers confused, so in Part III, I decided to make a much easier and more direct comparison. Instead of combining the volume in both pharmacies and attempting to divine the boundary lines of the two pharmacies’ service areas, I would look at only one of Abraham’s pharmacies, the one in Mangham, and I would compare it directly to the other pharmacy in Mangham, which was slightly more than a half of a mile down the street. An apples to apples comparison.
There was no way to argue with this analysis. Both pharmacies served the same community; there were around the same age and size, and they ordered the same medications.
I have been told this is the ugliest infograph in human history, but it makes all of the main points much more concisely than I can:
Credit: Lamar White, Jr.
Finally, several people asked if there was any evidence of Abraham’s profligacy as an opioid prescriber. As a matter of fact, there is.
Because of HIPAA, it’s impossible to get a complete picture of Abraham’s prescribing practices, but the government does collect and share information on a physician’s Medicare Part D patients, which offers a snapshot.
The data set begins in 2013, a year after the DEA’s data ends and a year before Abraham joined Congress. That year, Abraham doled out opioid prescriptions to a staggering 41% of his Medicare Part D patients, ranking him as the eleventh most prolific opioid prescriber among family doctors in Louisiana. Among family doctors, he was also the third most prolific prescriber of all medications. Remember, Medicare is only for those 65 years old and over, and for those determined to be eligible for social security disability.
By 2013, a growing consensus of medical researchers and professionals had acknowledged that prescription opioids were a leading cause of an emerging epidemic, Ralph Abraham paid them no attention, nor did he pay much attention to any of the medical breakthroughs being made with marijuana in pain treatment and palliative care. He was still all-in for OxyContin.
I do not believe Dr. Abraham truly understood the inherent risks involved in overprescribing powerful opioids. Instead, I’m left with the impression that he simply never did his homework. He may be a little lazy sometimes. Then again, what should one expect from a person who makes his living by taking a check from the government and from a farm he inherited from his daddy when he was 26? Discipline? Humility? Empathy? Self-awareness?
He may have complained about people who vote for a living, instead of working, but ironically, he is one of a small group of people who are paid to vote for a living, and he doesn’t care enough to show up for work.
Baton Rouge businessman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone. Image by the Bayou Brief.
Phony Rispone
In early July of 2018, a friend of mine in Baton Rouge passed along some gossip he had recently overheard. “Apparently, someone named Eddie Rispone is thinking about running for governor, but he hasn’t gotten the green light yet from his wife and family,” he said.
“I don’t know the guy,” my friend said. “I’m just telling you what the word on the street is.”
At that point, more than a year before qualifying began, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans would field a well-known candidate to challenge Gov. John Bel Edwards, the incumbent Democrat, but even though Rispone was obscure to me, GOP insiders knew him as an influential, behind-the-scenes powerbroker.
During the previous twenty years, he had contributed approximately $1.6 million to Republican candidates and political action committees, $1.1 million to influence state elections and $590,000 on federal races. In 2015, Rispone and his businesses had dropped a total of $170,000 in support of David Vitter’s unsuccessful campaign for governor.
Sure, he didn’t possess a household name, but he had more than enough money to buy one.
He made a mental note to keep him on my radar.
On August 9th, journalist Jeremy Alford sent an email to the paid subscribers of his publication LaPolitics: “RISPONE EYES GOVERNOR.” He would make it official shortly after Labor Day, though, at the time, the attention of the state’s political reporters had been almost entirely focused on the upcoming Congressional midterm elections.
Neither Sue nor I coined the nickname “Phony Rispone,” though I wish we had, even if it doesn’t neatly fit. Rispone is less of a phony than he is someone in possession of more money than common sense. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t know a damn thing about governing, despite his proximity to power.
It is possible, though, to be earnestly, even self-righteously, ignorant.
During the final debate, in a response to a question about whether he believed the law should be changed to prohibit campaigns from text messaging voters (one of the most asinine questions of the year and further evidence that Louisiana needs a debate commission), Rispone said he would leave that up to the F.A.A., though perhaps they should wait until after the Boeing 737MAX issues are all resolved. Perhaps he meant the F.C.C.? Or maybe he meant to say the F.E.C.? Either way, the answer revealed a confusion about the differences between state and federal authority.
But that was harmless fun.
What was far less amusing was when he vowed to completely freeze new enrollees to Medicaid, which would be catastrophic for thousands and thousands of families.
Rispone so thoroughly misunderstood the issues the state had faced with its antiquated Medicaid eligibility verification system- the result of a complete dereliction of duty by the outgoing Jindal administration- he convinced himself, seemingly on a whim, that, despite the problem being solved and the system being modernized, the entire program needs to grind to a halt. If he had his way, it’d be an economic and humanitarian disaster.
While he may not have much of a clue about what government actually does, to his credit, Rispone has some vague notions of what he would like for it to do, almost all of which would inure to the benefit of his company and the company of his friend, the man behind the campaign’s curtain, Lane Grigsby.
It is impossible to understand Rispone’s candidacy without first understanding the Deus ex machina, the would-be kingmaker, though, many familiar with the dynamic prefer another term: Puppet-master. But we’ll save the Great Grigsby for another day.
For now, the most important takeaway is that Rispone and Grigsby are both central cast members of a troupe that Sue Lincoln dubbed “the Erector Set.” Why the Erector Set? Because they are Baton Rouge-based construction magnates who play with the government as if it’s a toy.
Sue has written extensively about Rispone, and recently, she revisited some of her older reports and republished them in time for the election. There’s no need for me to retread or recapitulate her work, but if you haven’t read it, I encourage you to.
And his Machiavellian scheme to avoid state income taxes by changing the law to count the donations he makes to his own favorite Catholic voucher school instead:
If you live in Louisiana and watch television, there is a chance you’ve heard references to one of these reports.
John Bel Edwards. Photo by Lamar White, Jr.
Geaux Vote
Four years ago, most Louisianians were introduced for the very first time to a state representative from Amite who offered a breath of fresh air and a way out of the calamity left in the wake of the most unpopular governor in modern state history. Today, even though people can’t figure out whether or not his middle name is a part of his first name or his last name, the state government is finally clearing out the pond scum that poisoned our politics and nearly bankrupted our bank account.
“One day, the people of Louisiana are going to get good government,” Earl K. Long once quipped, “and they won’t like it.”
Uncle Earl was only half-joking. Louisianians do, in fact, want good government, but the state historically has put a premium on the business of politics instead of the business of governing. Edwards may not be the state’s most colorful or eccentric political leader, and right now, both in Louisiana and across the nation, that’s a good thing. He didn’t show up in Baton Rouge as a way of catapulting himself into national fame or simply to grandstand. He isn’t running a perpetual campaign, much to the dismay of some of his supporters. He asked for the job, because he thought he could do the job. He wanted to do the job.
Frankly, I have been following this election cycle more intently than almost anyone I know, and I still have no idea why Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone are running to become governor. They both seem to represent the remnants of an intra-party battle first led by men who cared more about the accumulation of political power than about protecting and serving the people of Louisiana. They haven’t presented a single original idea, a single compelling argument or policy prescription; they’ve both trafficked in fear and xenophobia and the well-trod roads of racial resentment. And in Louisiana, unfortunately, we’re familiar with the playbook.
Edwards is a Democrat, but he is not the hero of the left that some wish he would be. He never pretended to be, though. He’s trying to do something very few others have been able to pull off. He’s trying to turn the state back around from the arsonists who ransacked it. And even though changing the government is like moving a ship with a feather, our compass is finally working again.
