In February and March of 2016, ISC Constructors, LLC, the mega-million dollar electrical installation contractor founded and led by Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone and his brother Jerry, asked the U.S. Department of Labor for permission to hire three foreign citizens, each at a base salary of $56,000 a year, through the controversial H1-B visa system, according to public records uncovered by the Bayou Brief. At the time it made the applications, ISC had been in the middle of settlement negotiations with nearly 100 former employees, the majority of whom were Hispanic, who alleged they were not properly compensated for their work hours.
Ultimately, while all three applications were “certified,” Rispone’s company only obtained approval for one of the positions, which was titled Estimation and Projects Coordinator. Every year, the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducts a lottery to dole out a maximum of 85,000 visas to businesses, ostensibly to ensure they can fill jobs requiring a specialized skill.
While companies must assert it will not pay visa holders less than it would otherwise pay an American citizen, critics of the H1-B system assert that it is routinely abused by employers as a way to essentially outsource otherwise high-paying jobs, particularly in STEM-related fields, and that, in some cases, it is a form of modern-day “indentured servitude.” If an employer fires someone with an H1-B visa, that person must immediately return to their home country.
Although the system had been conceived as a way of recruiting “the best and brightest” to America, it became the focus of national criticism in 2016 after it had been revealed Disney had been granted nearly 200 visas for IT employees at DisneyWorld. A growing body of academic scholarship on the system suggests it undermines the U.S. job market and drives down wages.
As he ramps up his campaign for governor and prepares to spend at least $5 million of his personal fortune on advertising, Rispone has placed federal immigration policy, over which governors have very little control, at the center of his message. He has parroted the incoherent promise of Donald Trump’s fantasy border wall that voters had been told Mexico would pay for; he has advanced the patently false claim that Gov. John Bel Edwards turned New Orleans into a “sanctuary city” (the city’s police department is under a consent decree with the federal Department of Justice, signed during the Jindal administration), and he has bemoaned the outsourcing of high-paying jobs.
Two years prior to applying for the three H1-B visas, Rispone predicted to an industry trade publication that he would soon be forced to recruit skilled labor from “other states” due to a construction boom.
“Rispone says recruitment will include contacting those who were born, raised and trained in Louisiana, but who left the state looking for other work during the economic downturn,” writes Daniel Groves of the Construction Labor Market Analyzer.
“We are reaching out to specific individuals to let them know that there is work, that wages are comparable, and that we need them back at home,” Rispone told Groves.
All three cases were settled in mediation, with ISC agreeing to settle for an undisclosed sum.
According to the terms of the H1-B certification Rispone’s company received, the three-year visa expires in only two weeks, on August 15, 2019. The available record does not provide any personally-identifying information about the employee, though as a prerequisite for qualification, the visa holder must have at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent and possess a specialized skill (usually in technology).
Rispone has never publicly explained why ISC could not hire a citizen of Louisiana for the $56,000 a year Estimation and Construction Project Coordinator job or revealed how much his company paid to settle allegations it underpaid employees in Texas.
A pair of stilt walkers charged the City of Alexandria $5,000 to amble around its downtown for 40 hours over the course of three days last May. They were accompanied by a couple of “non-clown balloon artists,” who billed the same rate, $125 an hour, for a combined 36 hours. The quartet were all traveling from Baton Rouge, so they also included a $300 “out of town” fee. That doesn’t account for the cost of their rooms at the Hotel Bentley, $742 in total. It would’ve been $712, but they decided to use the hotel’s valet parking.
The fire breather from Houston sent an invoice for $2,400. He didn’t bill by the hour or add on any travel fee, but he and his assistant both got free rooms at the Bentley as well. They parked their own car.
Alexandria paid the stilt walkers, the non-clown balloon artists, and the fire breather what they had requested, even though it is unclear how they spent their time once the city moved everyone inside on Friday night and then again on Saturday night. They could’ve been downtown, where they planned to be, performing their act at an empty riverfront amphitheater. Sure, it may have been lonely, but the weather wasn’t nearly as bad as people feared it could be.
Photo of the Fire Breather at the Alexandria Red River Festival. Source, City of Alexandria, LA. Edits by the Bayou Brief.
According to a trove of public records obtained by the Bayou Brief, the last-minute decision by the City of Alexandria to replace its “signature event,” Alex River Fête, with an entirely new festival- the clumsily-named Alexandria Red River Festival- cost nearly twice as much than the $100,000 it had budgeted and resulted in a dramatic reduction in attendance.
The Bayou Brief would ordinarily upload the entirety of the records request as attachments; however, the documents provided by the City reveal un-redacted, private banking information for at least one of its vendors. Susan Broussard, the City’s Chief of Staff, refused to answer any questions or provide any comment.
Taken together, the records raise major concerns about what appears to be an extraordinary lack of oversight as well as serious questions about the legality of a substantial amount of public spending.
A contract employee hired as an office assistant in the Community Services Division signed checks and entered into contractual agreements on behalf of the city government. There were significant accounting discrepancies, which appear to vastly understate the cost of hiring the headline musical acts. And when asked specifically to provide copies of any ordinances or resolutions authorizing the Mayor to enter into contracts related to the festival, a city official affixed a handwritten note arguing, erroneously, that permission was unnecessary because the funding had already been “budgeted.”
From the City of Alexandria’s response to the Bayou Brief’s public records request.
A separate review of the minutes from the past year of council meetings reveals that the City never budgeted, requested, or received authorization for spending in excess of $100,000 for the festival. In fact, the City Council didn’t even officially recognize the event. It still hasn’t.
All told, however, the Division of Community Services approved invoices totaling $190,418.58. The records do not indicate how it spent $17,500 to pay a portion of the fees associated with four separate musical acts: Whodini, Jeremy Fruge, Midnight Star, and Jeff Bates. These costs do not include the price of labor from the public works department or police overtime for security, which in prior years amounted to approximately $30,000.
This year, Alexandria spent (or obligated itself to spend) more money on just music and entertainment than it had spent to host the entirety of three of the six previous Alex River Fête events, all of which attracted between two to four times as many people in attendance (and no, we can’t blame it on the rain).
The previous iteration of the festival had drawn in more than 15,000 to 30,000 people a year, rain or shine. This year, even according to the most generous estimate, over the course of three days, the Alexandria Red River Festival was attended by 6,000 people, 5,000 of whom showed up on Sunday.
When Alex River Fête launched in 2013, the City of Alexandria contributed $45,000; in 2015 and 2016, it budgeted and spent $74,000.
If you live in Central Louisiana and haven’t heard of the festival, it’s understandable. Despite the fact the city spent nearly $27,000 in one month on advertising and promotions, primarily for radio commercials (including thousands of dollars for sponsored interviews and paid spots on the AM dial), it may have been too little and too late.
Among other things, it coughed up more than $1,500 to buy the web domain www.RedRiverFestival.com, which never ended up working. The website is dormant, just as it had been for the past fifteen years.
More than 25% of the expenditures- $52,820.57- went to a single company, Kinetix, a local website development and marketing firm.
Put another way, this year, the City of Alexandria paid Kinetix more money to assist in rebranding and marketing the Alexandria Red River Festival than the total amount it spent out of pocket six years ago to launch Alex River Fête, which was attended by twice as many people.
To be sure, some of the expenses from this year included pass-through costs. For example, Kinetix was actually responsible for purchasing that expensive web domain, and it appears there is a good reason they never got around to flipping the switch and turning the thing on: The domain wasn’t transferred to them until May 2nd, a day before the festival began.
Documentation provided by the City of Alexandria, LA. Design by the Bayou Brief.
For the purposes of full disclosure: Eight years ago, when I worked at Alexandria City Hall, I coordinated with Kinetix on multiple projects, and I believe they create exceptional, high-quality work. But they were being asked to rebrand something they had spent six years helping to build, and they were given less than two months and assignments that primarily should have been handled by city staff.
Still, it is difficult to take their effusive characterizations of the event too seriously. In a “media audit” they provided afterward, Kinetix includes a screencapture of a Facebook post they published and then paid to promote on the festival’s page about one of the musical acts, the band Whodini. “Everyone was so excited about seeing Whodini!” they claimed. All told, the post received 182 ”likes.” Not exactly reassuring.
Liz Lowry, the Kinetix employee who managed the project, declined multiple requests for comment.
During the past two months, eight credible sources with knowledge of decisions made concerning the event, all of whom requested anonymity, agreed to provide me with additional information.
Alexandria is a small city.
The decision to rebrand the festival had been made unilaterally and hastily by then-Director of Community Services Von Jennings. According to three sources familiar with the timeline, Jennings did not receive the permission or approval of Mayor Jeff Hall. She named it the Alexandria Red River Festival, they say, without consulting with any of her colleagues or even members of her own office. Hall, who took office in December, is the first African American ever elected mayor in the city’s 200 year history.
Jennings’ decision to spearhead a new event on behalf of Mayor Hall was met with swift public criticism, and on the final night of the festival, she lashed out on Facebook at a local waitress who made the benign and accurate observation that the Alexandria Red River Festival had been poorly attended, calling the woman “a racist piece of shit.” Under immense public scrutiny, Jennings was forced to resign two days later. She has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Six-term Pineville Mayor Clarence Fields (left) and newly-elected Alexandria Mayor Jeff Hall (right) at the Alexandria International Airport earlier this year. Source: City of Alexandria, LA
Notably, at no point during the campaign season did Mayor Hall or either of his two opponents discuss replacing its signature event, though candidate Catherine Davidson proposed changing its dates after New Orleans’ JazzFest.
When Alex River Fête launched in 2013, it was as a “conceptual test event” that could potentially replace Alexandria’s annual barbecue festival, Que’in on the Red, which had become beset by logistical problems and was constrained by its association as a circuit event for the Memphis in May competition. In that first year, the City spent $45,000, which was matched with a $45,000 donation from GAEDA, the local economic development authority. The “hard costs” actually incurred totaled approximately $81,000; the festival came in under budget, and attendance was right on target.
By the time Mayor Hall took office, the two Fêtes- River and Winter- were both on track to be self-sustaining if not revenue-generating events.
In a state in which the number of festivals is in competition with the number of days in a year, Alexandria had done something that had eluded it for decades: It had finally created a pair of brand name regional events that drew in tens of thousands of people, both in the late spring and in the early winter.
Unfortunately, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to pretend as if the Alexandria Red River Festival was just a rookie mistake. Within only a matter of three months, the City burned through more money than it was legally authorized to spend, but more importantly, it burned through the reservoir of goodwill that had taken more than six years to collect.
This year, the new festival failed to attract a single community or private-sector sponsor (though a handful of people who were paid for their services may claim they provided a “discount,” the documents suggest otherwise).
Now, that will be doubly hard to regain.
Particularly because one of the very first things the former Community Services Director did before hitting the reset button: She hit delete, and in an instant, evaporated the social media pages of the River Fête and, along with that, the ability of the City to message a note of apology to the tens of thousands of people who once cared enough to show up.
(Editor’s Note: With qualifying for the 2019 state elections commencing in two weeks, we’ve received numerous requests to republish this Rispone backgrounder, originally presented January 22, 2019, under the title Erector Set: Not So Fast, Eddie.)
Along with his brother, he’s created a successful, respected, mega-million dollar company. He has also tried (and thus far failed) to create both a new city and a new school district.
Now, Eddie Rispone is using some of his personal fortune to run for governor, as he wants to create an “improved” Louisiana.
Louisiana’s last “businessman governor” was Mike Foster – but not for want of other business owners attempting to emulate his success.
Buddy
Leach, president and CEO of Sweetlake Land and Oil Company, ran in
2003. A former state representative, former congressman, he placed
4th
in the open primary, and the race was ultimately won by Kathleen
Blanco.
In 2007, Walter Boasso – a state senator and owner of Boasso America Corporation (sold to Quality Distribution of Florida for $60 million during the course of the race) – made it to the runoff. It was a race notable for Boasso’s ads touting his rags-to-riches tale of starting his business with “a garden hose, a bucket, a brush, and a box of Tide.”
Bobby Jindal won, however.
Another businessman contended in the 2007 primary: John Georges, who ran as an independent. The chairman of Georges Enterprises, who subsequently bought the Advocate newspaper from the Manship family in 2013, placed third in the 2007 gubernatorial primary. There were rumors flying – right up to the close of qualifying and spread by his pollster and business associates – that Georges would run in 2015, as well. He didn’t, and no other “businessman” candidate entered the race last time, either.
And
every few years, buzz begins about a possible political run by Jim
Bernhard, a former chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Though
he has never followed through on the speculations, it’s become a
regular rumor (raised again this past fall), especially since he sold
the Shaw Group to CBI for $3-billion in 2013.
For
2019, Eddie Rispone is the man the Erector Set’s kingmakers want to
enthrone as Louisiana Governor.
He’s the chairman of ISC Constructors, LLC, which he founded with his brother, Jerry, in 1989. (Jerry, by the way, has a son named “Lane.” We can only speculate, but perhaps…in tribute to Lane Grigsby?)
ISC is an industrial engineering and construction company, based in Baton Rouge, with divisions in Beaumont and Houston, Texas and Sulphur, Louisiana. They design and build electrical instrumentation and control systems for large industrial plants, employing approximately 2500 people. As of 2015, ISC was ranked number 19 of the top 50 electrical contractors in the U.S., with annual revenue of $329 million. Since then, the industrial building boom in Louisiana has provided ISC with more work and close to a half of a billion dollars in annual revenues.
Rispone’s wealth is great enough that his family foundation has assets in excess of $12 million, according to ProPublica. And he has thus far self-funded his gubernatorial campaign with $10.2 million of his own money.
Profiting From the System
With no intentions of casting any aspersions on Rispone’s business acumen, or the caliber of work performed by ISC Constructors, there is little doubt that he and his business have benefited greatly from Louisiana’s corporate-friendly tax incentive programs, although it’s difficult to quantify the exact dollar amount.
While
ISC has participated in nearly every major industrial project
constructed in the state over the past decade, they are
sub-contractors. The company designs and installs the electrical
components and control systems that run the machinery in refineries
and chemical plants.
According to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, from 2008-2016, ISC Constructors was a subcontractor on industrial projects that – all told – received more than $750 million in ten-year property tax exemptions under the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP).
Projects at Motiva, PCS Nitrogen, Shell, and Valero Refining created a combined total of 19 new full-time jobs. Other ISC-involved expansions — for Rubicon, TOTAL Chemicals, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon – created no new jobs whatsoever.
That should come as no real surprise because ISC is primarily in the business of installing new computerized technologies and automation equipment that reduces or eliminates the need for human operators. What they do for these industries is, essentially, geared to eliminating jobs.
Sasol, Lake Charles. Photo courtesy Louisiana Chemical Association
ISC has, however, directly benefited from the state’s Enterprise Zone tax credits. For their work on the Sasol project in Calcasieu Parish, they’ve been receiving $2.5 million a year in payroll tax credits since 2014, plus rebates on sales and use taxes for the materials, machinery, and supplies used on the project. At ISC’s main headquarters in Baton Rouge, the addition of a new engineering facility, started in 2013, has netted nearly $3 million per year in payroll tax credits, plus sales tax rebates.
The LED website currently lists both of these as “active contracts”.
Additionally,
Rispone and his wife Linda were the 2010 beneficiaries of $213,484.58
through Louisiana’s film tax credit program. They funded, as
executive producers, a documentary titled “The Experiment” –
about students in New Orleans charter schools.
“Education Reform” Insider
From the initial announcement that he was entering the governor’s race, Rispone’s campaign has pushed the concept that he’s a political “outsider,” while the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association’s Gifford Briggs referred to him as having a “fresh perspective.”
That’s far from accurate.
After all, political outsiders don’t generally fund and operate political action committees (PACs) of their own, nor contribute four, five, even six-figure amounts to candidates or other PACs. Rispone has been doing all of that for the past dozen years.
His entry into the world of political influence can be traced back to 1996, when he began developing deeper connections with the other two men now comprising the Erector Set. That year, Rispone was elected president of Associated Builders and Contractors Pelican Chapter, which Lane Grigsby had helped co-found in 1980. Art Favre served as one of ABC’s vice-presidents. In addition, that year, Rispone was named to the executive committee of LABI’s Board of Directors, on which Grigsby served.
Over
the years, the trio’s companies have all contributed to ABC Pelican
PAC, which Rispone’s son, Thad, now runs. Most recently, the PAC
funded the Louisiana House Republican Caucus’s advertising and
video campaign, through the four 2018 legislative sessions.
Okay,
that’s relatively minor money and influence, especially when
compared to the rest of Rispone’s political story. But it does
illustrate the connections of the Erector Set cabal, and some of the
strategy they’ve employed toward making the move to openly seek
power in this election year.
Rispone’s
first notable taste of political power and influence came after
then-Gov. Bobby Jindal named him to chair the Louisiana Workforce
Investment Council in 2009. That group, comprised of business owners,
public officials, trade and labor group leaders, was tasked with
finding ways to prepare for Louisiana’s future workforce needs.
And that was when they all began talking about the need for business and industry to “step in” and “assist” public education. The opportunity for business to profit – not just by having better-trained workers – but from the money taxpayers put into public education was too good to pass up. (As early as 2001, Ed Next – a publication of the corporately-funded EducationNext.org – had touted the potential in an article titled The Private Can Be Public.)
Louisiana had already made some moves in the direction of “education reform” (as the privatization movement is generally known), primarily in New Orleans, as financial necessity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina facilitated the proliferation of charter schools.
During his first year as governor in 2008, Jindal – a devout Catholic – had pushed for lawmakers to authorize the funding of vouchers, ostensibly so disadvantaged New Orleans schoolchildren could attend parochial schools, with state taxpayers covering the tuition. Jindal hoped to expand the program, officially referred to as “scholarships,” statewide.
Rispone, also a devout Catholic, loved that idea and much of the rest of the “reform” platform. Along with Lane Grigsby, he then engaged in building some of the infrastructure that would help advance comprehensive “education reform” through Louisiana’s Legislature in 2012.
He and his wife Linda put $750,000 into producing The Experiment documentary, released in 2011. Like the more widely-viewed and well-known 2010 film, Waiting For Superman, it became part of the public relations campaign funded by education reformers prior to the 2012 session.
Rispone (2nd from left) and DeVos (center). Photo courtesy ISC Constructors newsletter.
Rispone also started and chaired the Louisiana Federation for Children, a state chapter of the national American Federation for Children, defined by SourceWatch as “a conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues. The group was organized and is funded by the billionaire DeVos family, who are the heirs to the Amway fortune.” (Yes, that would be the same DeVos – current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. And on ISC Constructors’ website, there’s a July 2017 article boasting about a meeting Rispone had with the Secretary and the extent of their work together.)
Rispone was at the helm of the Louisiana Federation for Children PAC during the 2011 push to elect BESE members who would support giving John White the State Superintendent position, and the PAC also funneled money to legislative candidates who had indicated they backed “education reform.” The PAC spent $283,000 on those races.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks at American Federation for Children conference, Thursday May 3, 2012. Photo from LA Federation for Children, via Wayback Machine.
The PAC lay fallow for the next three years, but in the election year of 2015, it started receiving large cash infusions, including contributions from DeVos and the Walton families.
Rispone and his wife Linda each contributed $100,000, and at one point, the PAC had more than $500,000 in cash. It again put money into legislative races, as well as spending more than $122,000 to support three of the candidates for BESE. But the biggest spending came in November 2015, during the gubernatorial runoff. LFC PAC spent over $265,000 on media buys opposing John Bel Edwards.
Shortly after Edwards’ inauguration, the Louisiana Federation for Children ran a TV ad campaign attacking the governor. They were upset over possible reductions to the statewide voucher program, which were being discussed – along with other cutbacks – as options for dealing with the budget mess left for Edwards by the Jindal administration.
At a Republican meet-and-greet earlier this month, Rispone admitted he had personally financed the attack ads.
And in the summer of 2016, Rispone started a second LFC PAC – the Louisiana Federation for Children Action Fund, seeding it with $150,000 of his personal money. Jim Walton contributed another $100,000 to the fund last month, which was Rispone’s last as chairman of LFC, and as the operator of its two PACs. He resigned from the organization in December 2018, due to his gubernatorial campaign.
“God Has Asked Me”
At
the same Republican gathering this month where he confessed he’d
paid for the 2016 ads hammering Edwards, Rispone told those in
attendance his decision to run for governor – like his advocacy for
school reforms – “It’s all about my faith.”
And
as Melinda Deslatte of AP described Rispone: “He chokes back tears
when describing a drive to try to help thousands of children who
attend public schools deemed failing by the state, saying ‘God has
asked me to do something about his kids’.”
That may play well with voters outside the capital region, but those who live in the Baton Rouge area identify Eddie Rispone closely with the “St. George” movement and all its undertones of white privilege. He’s been one of the biggest backers and funders behind the effort to carve out a new city – with its own school district – utilizing the Baton Rouge suburbs.
St. George and the School District Dragon
In 2012, the same year as the push for education reform, there was also a move to create a new school district within East Baton Rouge parish. State Sen. Bodi White filed bills to create Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System, which required a statewide constitutional amendment, plus separate approval by voters in the new district and voters in EBR parish as a whole. He also had a bill to allow creation of future separate school districts without requiring a constitutional amendment.
The new district would have grabbed ten schools, including the three newest schools built by EBR. The measures died on the House floor.
Sen. Bodi White. Photo by Sue Lincoln
In 2013, Sen. White tried again. At the time, I was covering education for LPB, and I asked him about this seeming to be a move toward resegregation.
“We’ve
been through a lot in this parish in the last 30 years, with
desegregation, forced busing. There’s a huge distrust about the
school system,” White said, the added it’s not about race –
it’s about economics.
“Probably
about half of the school-age kids in this parish go to private or
parochial schools. It’s an economic concern. Can you afford to send
your kids to another school? We can pay it, but it’s killing us. I
can’t put any money in my 401K. I can’t put any money in their
higher education fund. I can’t upsize my house. You take $30,000 or
more – cash – for tuition out of our household budget – it’s
crippling us!”
He
was certain a new school district was the answer.
“The
people who live in this area of the parish would love to be able to
send their kids back to public schools.”
Again,
no joy in the legislature for a new school district. So by end of
2013, the movement to create the city of St George was launched.
Albert Samuels, a political science professor at Southern University, observed, “Though the campaign doesn’t talk about it in these terms, a predominantly white and middle-class area of south Baton Rouge is attempting to secede from a school system and a city that is majority African-American. Instead, they have the temerity to say with a straight face that this has nothing to do with race.“
In 2014, Rispone put $100,000 into the Better Schools, Better Futures PAC, which supported the St. George city creation. That PAC was run by Lane Grigsby.
When the St. George initiative failed to muster enough support to make the ballot, Rispone created the Citizens for a Better Baton Rouge PAC with $125,000 of his own, plus more than $83,000 from fellow member of the Erector Set, Art Favre. That PAC ran ads and sent out direct mailings in support of Bodi White’s 2016 run for mayor of Baton Rouge. (White lost.)
Yet Rispone, who now claims his campaign for the governorship is “all about my faith,” has a real bone to pick with the activist church and community-based Together Baton Rouge, blaming them for the first failure of St. George. With a renewed initiative effort underway to create the new city, Rispone started a non-profit organization to counter Together Baton Rouge, called Baton Rouge Families First.
“Together
Baton Rouge opposed a group of parents trying to get a better
education for their children,” he said, when announcing the new
non-profit. “It might have been called St. George, but it was
really about giving children a better education.”
St. George Catholic Church, Baton Rouge
Rispone also admitted that, as a member of St. George Catholic Church, he was perturbed by his church’s membership in Together Baton Rouge’s coalition of pastors and congregations.
Acknowledging that TBR’s opposition to cookie-cutter approvals of ITEPs further incensed him, he questioned that group’s actions as an expression of its members’ faith, saying, “If Together Baton Rouge truly wants to help families you would think they would be working with their ally religious leaders in educating congregants about morals, virtues, independence and family life – the bedrock of a sound society.”
“All about faith”? “Educating about morals, virtues, family life”?
With all due respect, Mr. Rispone, what do your campaign contributions say about how much you truly treasure those values?
You and your company contributed more than $352,000 to David Vitter – his federal and state campaigns, and his Fund for Louisiana’s Future Super PAC – since the revelation and his admission of a “serious sin” in 2007.
From @EddieRispone on Twitter
In addition, you gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory fund, and you are clearly doing your utmost to hitch your campaign wagon to Trump’s star.
You might want to rethink that.
It’s the strategy Angele Davis used in the 2017 state Treasurer’s race, and she came in third in the primary.
Of course, with just three of you in the Governor’s race thus far, you’re guaranteed to at least match her third-place finish.
Hello friends and readers! After a summer vacation, we’re back to talk the 2019 Saints season.
It’s training camp time; Saints rookies reported on the 18th and veterans report on the 25th. There aren’t a whole lot of new faces to welcome to the team, but we’ll get around to highlighting the key new players and departures soon.
First things first, though: The Saints have some big decisions to make on the best players from recent draft classes soon. And having handed out a big (and well-deserved) extension to Cameron Jordan this offseason, there’s not as much immediate money on hand for that sort of thing, although Mickey Loomis’ well-established cap wizardry always finds a way.
The next big target for an extension is wide receiver Michael Thomas. Thomas was the 44th pick in the 2016 draft and immediately stepped in and played at a level only a handful of rookie wide receivers have. Since he was a second-round pick, he doesn’t have the fifth-year team option on his rookie deal that Sheldon Rankins does, so he’ll be an unrestricted free agent after 2019 if the Saints don’t come to an agreement with him.
Thomas is likely looking to become the highest-paid receiver in the league, and as one of the league’s best– and, alongside Odell Beckham and DeAndre Hopkins, the only under-28 players with a legitimate claim to being the league’s best wide receiver– he deserves it and will get it somewhere if the Saints don’t give it to him. The question is, should they? Let’s look the arguments.
Against: The Saints have never paid a wide receiver big bucks in the Payton/Brees era.
The best and most consistent wide receiver on these Saints prior to Thomas’ arrival was Marques Colston. Colston was a reliable performer from the beginning and for nearly a decade, amassing almost 10,000 career yards. The biggest contract the Saints ever gave him, however, was a four-year deal worth a little over $25 million, in 2012. Thomas will cost substantially more.
If we assume Thomas wants to be the NFL’s highest-paid receiver, then we need to consider who is as present. Odell Beckham signed a five-year extension on his rookie deal that paid him $90 million overall, with over $40 million in hard guarantees and $65 million in “practical guarantees” (which includes items like base salaries that aren’t guaranteed, but are early enough in the contract where cutting the player to avoid paying them would be prohibitive). Thomas is going to want more, likely a five-year deal in the $100-110 million range.
That’s an enormous chunk of money and one that may prevent the team from signing other valuable players.
Drew Brees has always been able to run an elite offense without a top-five receiver; there’s no reason to expect that, without Thomas, he would be unable to do so.
For: The Saints have never had a wide receiver this good in the Payton/Brees era.
Thomas deserves that much money because he is unquestionably one of the top receivers in the league and has been from the moment he set foot on an NFL field. He’s just entering his prime, and as suggested by last year’s dominant campaign (leading the league in both receptions and reception percentage, an unprecedented feat), he is continuing to improve even from the high level of play he exhibited entering the league.
The Saints haven’t paid a receiver as much as Thomas is seeking because they’ve never had a receiver like this. Even Jimmy Graham, who was dominant at his peak, didn’t have Thomas’ track record of health, let alone his obscene reliability. Check out this data on Thomas’ catch rate:
Thomas is an ultra-reliable #1 rarely seen in the NFL; his catch rate is a product of that combined with a legendary quarterback with pinpoint accuracy.
Speaking of said legendary quarterback: The other factor to consider is that Drew Brees is 40 this season. The end of the road has to come at some point, no matter how well he cares for himself and avoids injury. And when it comes, it often comes fast– ask Brett Favre. (There’s a reason the Saints were so intent on acquiring Teddy Bridgewater last offseason and keeping him around this offseason.) Nothing could better help a new QB– who simply won’t be Brees; no matter how good he is, it’s impossible to ask anyone to step into the shoes of the all-time leader in passing yards and completion percentage– than having an elite, go-to receiver who is among the most reliable in the game.
Conclusion
For my money (and it’s not my money, but still), I think the Saints should pay Thomas. He’s too good, he has no injury or character red flags, he’s a beloved part of this franchise and city, and you don’t let gems like him go when you find them. Any worries I have about the amount of cap he’ll have tied up are allayed by the fact that he’s a known quantity, a guaranteed superstar, and that you can be confident the money spent on him is money well spent.
Thursday night, a friend in Slidell posted
on Facebook:
“Today at noon, at the Louisiana/ Mississippi border, a caravan of ICE vehicles arrived in our state. At 6:30 pm, I drove by to assess the situation and they were no longer there.
“The ICE raids were delayed because of Hurricane Barry. The arrival of the paddy wagons, signifies the reign of terror that is about to hit our area in force. This is All American Tyranny y’all. True patriotism is standing up to tyranny. If you ever wondered what you would have done in Nazi Germany, or in the slave trade era of our America, you’re doing it now.
“If you can embrace a fascist, tyrannical, theocratic, pile of billionaires bankrupting this country for gluttonous power, personal gain, and unimaginable wealth… you’re not an American at all.”
Friday morning, subscribers to the Times-Picayune were greeted with this full-page ad:
Having long believed you can learn a lot about a person – including political candidates – by taking time to analyze the words they choose to use, let us break down that message from Eddie Rispone, mindful of the fact that he is a multi-millionaire who has – so far – had to contribute $10 million of his own money in order to have enough to fund his campaign for governor.
He addresses “the radical leftists” who “enjoy protesting,” and insists “DONALD TRUMP IS RIGHT.”
Here’s a picture of some of those “leftist” folks attending the “Lights for Liberty” vigil at the state Capitol in Baton Rouge Friday night, where one of the first speakers was Rev. Nathan Ryan, pastor of the Unitarian Church in Baton Rouge.
He said, “My family are some of the people who put Trump in office. And while we can come out here all day and protest, unless we have the courage to talk to our families about this, it won’t change.”
Radical, isn’t it? “Talk to our families.” Just imagine that…
Then again, talking to our families, reasoning with people and building agreement with them is a far cry from the tone of the rest of Rispone’s juvenile rant, the bulk of which can be summed up as, “Just wait till I’m governor. I’ll show you!”
Or as @LindaKocher3 described it on Twitter, “He’s so junior high, isn’t he?”
Rispone says when he is governor, “Louisiana will stand with President Trump to protect ICE, build the wall, and end illegal immigration.”
“Protect ICE” is the Trump 2020 slogan. For just $13.00 (plus shipping and handling), you can buy a yard sign from trumpstoreamerica.com. “Protect ICE” tshirts start at $28, and the black hats (red ones are sooo 2016) are $33.
When Eddie says we’ll “build the wall,” perhaps he’s thinking of a seawall. After all, the only part of Mexico that Louisiana touches is the Gulf of Mexico, and considering our state’s continuing fight against coastal land loss, a seawall is a good and useful idea. Yet I doubt that’s what he meant.
And while we might hope Rispone would take up the cause of ending Louisiana out-migration, his espousal of belief that as governor of a state he could “end illegal immigration” is entirely in keeping with the current legal theories on jurisdictional responsibility over immigration being promoted by the ultra-right.
For example, the Cato Institute, a conservative think-tank that when founded in 1974 was originally named the Charles Koch Foundation, is pushing the idea that since the U.S. Constitution doesn’t enumerate oversight of immigration as a power of the federal government or any of its branches, then the Tenth Amendment must apply: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Photo courtesy: Voice of America
These sophists, who presently advocate for privatizing many facets of government, cite the early days of our nation, pre-Civil War, when “many states enacted laws aimed a preventing a variety of populations from entering the borders of their states,” and then go on to lament that “since the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently backed the federal immigration regulations against constitutional challenges.”
Those lines of thinking are consistent with Rispone’s personal history of involvement with the St. George movement in the Baton Rouge area, and its subliminal purpose.
Eddie promises his governorship will end New Orleans’ status as a “sanctuary city.” Unlike certain cities and counties that have pro-actively passed local laws to welcome refugees and asylum seekers by limiting co-operation with ICE, New Orleans is only regarded as such because of a 2012 consent decree between the U.S. Department of Justice and the NOPD.
Due to previous patterns of civil rights violations, it prohibits local police from inquiring about residency status. And if they can’t ask about immigration status, then NOPD certainly can’t share that information with ICE.
But hey, why let what is essentially a federal court order get in the way of vilifying the state’s top tourism draw, right? Waving that red herring flag has worked so well for state Attorney General Jeff Landry.
Credit: Youtube
Rispone’s vow about other flags, not to tolerate raising the Mexican flag instead of the American flag at governmental buildings, is not alluding to anything that happened in Louisiana. It is a reference to an incident outside the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in Aurora, Colorado. On Friday, July 12, dozens of protesters lowered the U.S. flag flying outside the building, and raised Mexico’s flag on the pole instead.
“When I’m governor, we won’t put up with ANTIFA lawlessness,” Rispone’s ad declares. In this case, he is likely referring to violence that erupted in Portland, Oregon the end of June. Separate demonstrations held by groups from the left and right of the political spectrum erupted in violence when they met up.
Highly hyped by FoxNews, was a clash between the Proud Boys (described as a “far-right neo-fascist organization which admits only men and promotes political violence”) and what they termed ANTIFA (originally a contraction of “anti-fascist,” the term refers to legitimately organized left-leaning protest groups, primarily located in Oregon, but has also become an epithet conservative media uses for those who self-describe as “Progressives” here in Louisiana.)
Screenshot of Ngo’s tweet one day prior to the June 29, 2019 incident in Portland where he was allegedly roughed-up by ANTIFA protesters.
Andy Ngo, a conservative freelance writer who tweeted “Antifa promises violence” days before the incident, was injured during the protests, and his “victimization” gave him Warhol’s promised 15-minutes of fame. FoxNews has embraced him and President Trump has publicly condemned the attack twice. Yet as Joseph Bernstein with BuzzFeedNews observed this week, the new darling of the right-wing media has built “his literal brand on the premise that anti-fascists are violent and loathe him.”
You can’t really blame Rispone for buying into this particular engineered controversy. Just look Ngo’s role model, James O’Keefe, and how many otherwise discerning politicians fell for – and acted upon – O’Keefe’s manipulatively-edited “exposes” of ACORN and an NPR executive.
Most of us in Louisiana wised up to O’Keefe’s tactics and utter lack of trustworthiness after his 2010 felony arrest in New Orleans. He and three others, dressed as telephone repairmen, were attempting to bug the phone lines at U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building. O’Keefe pled guilty to reduced charges, was sentenced to three years’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and required to pay a $1500 fine.
Rispone’s Times-Picayune ad has now built its hyperbole to its bombastic maximum, pledging, “When I’m governor, we will crack down – HARD – on every single criminal illegal and terrorist gang.”
Stop for a moment and consider that this candidate for governor is promising bone-breaking violence – rather than civilized enactment of justice in a court of law – against those he has branded and prejudged to be criminals, illegals, and terrorists.
“So enjoy your protests,” he says, “Because when I’m sworn in…” Although it does not say so explicitly, this is an implied continuation of the threat to “crack down” – in this case, on First Amendment rights to free assembly and free speech.
Photo courtesy ICE
That sentence in the ad goes on to say, “We’re getting tough on illegal immigration the second my hand comes off the Bible.” Perhaps Mr. Rispone should open that Bible between now and then, and meditate on some of the many verses pertaining to immigrants and strangers. For example, he might consider Psalm 146:9, which says, “The Lord watches over the foreigner” (NIV). Or ponder Malachi 3:5, that states, “‘I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against those who…defraud laborers of their wages…and deprive the foreigners among you of justice,’ says the Lord Almighty” (NIV).
There is also Matthew 25:31-46, wherein Jesus promises “eternal fire” and states “you are cursed” when, “I was a stranger and you did not invite me in,” (NIV). The passage goes on to state that what you do for or against any person is as if you were doing it for or against the Lord Himself.
“Crack down – HARD.”
“Get tough.”
“Whatever
you do for one of the least of these, you do for me.”
Rispone’s immigration manifesto concludes with a pair of blatant lies, saying, “Remember, John Bel Edwards is the reason New Orleans is a sanctuary city. With your vote, together, we can change that.”
As explained earlier, New Orleans is designated a “sanctuary city” because of a 2012 consent decree with the USDOJ. In 2012, Bobby Jindal was governor, and John Bel Edwards, from Amite in Tangipahoa Parish – not from New Orleans, was one of 105 members of the Louisiana House of Representatives. It was a federal court order prompted by unconstitutional acts perpetrated by New Orleans police. It had nothing to do with the state Legislature where Edwards served, and nothing to do with his current governorship.
And neither Eddie Rispone nor your vote can undo the consent decree, nor alter that history or those facts.
Five years ago, Edward Lee “Eddie” Rispone of Baton Rouge and current Republican candidate for Louisiana governor published his first and only book, a biography largely informed by the conversations he had with his daughter’s grandfather-in-law, Dr. Louis Antonio Balart, Sr., also known by his nickname, Cucho. Rispone titled the book Cucho: A Journey from Cuba to Freedom, and while he sometimes digresses into hyperbole about the looming danger communism poses to America, for the most part, the book is simply about the inspirational life journey of an extraordinary man.
The cover of Eddie Rispone’s book.
Yesterday, Rispone’s campaign placed a full-page ad in the Times-Picayune that deliberately used incendiary fear-mongering against undocumented immigrants, attacking the City of New Orleans and those who participated in a protest against President Trump’s decision to order Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct sweeps of ten major American cities with the hope of deporting people whose only crime is lacking the proper documentation from a government bureaucracy, an issue that is essentially exclusive to people emigrating from Mexico or Central America.
While the anti-immigration bravado may have some limited appeal among the Republican base in Louisiana, the truth is that Rispone intended this message to be received by only one person: Donald Trump. Since the president’s racist tweets against four women of color, Rispone and U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, the other Republican candidate for governor, have both focused more effort on vying for Trump’s support than the support of Louisiana voters.
Importantly, Louisiana does not hold party primaries; the election in October is commonly known as a “jungle primary.” Accordingly, it seems both incredibly risky and ignorant for the two major Republican candidates to narrowcast their messaging only to the small universe of far-right Trump supporters.
The decisions to double-down on appeals to not-so-thinly-veiled racism and the attempt to frame an off-cycle statewide election as a national, partisan battle also effectively concedes any potential crossover support either man could have received from “fiscally conservative but socially progressive” white voters and eliminates any possibility they had at appealing to African-Americans, who comprise 31% of the population and between 27-29% of the electorate.
The full-page ad Eddie Rispone placed in the Times-Picayune.
Dr. Balart passed away two years prior to the publication of Rispone’s hagiographical book, at the ripe old age of 93. Sadly, his son, Dr. Louis Antonio Balart, Jr., who followed his father’s footsteps into medicine and is credited with co-creating a cure for Hepatitis C, passed away this January.
Rispone claims that from nearly the moment he first met Cucho, he felt an obligation to tell the doctor’s story.
With his brazen attacks on the Freedom of Assembly and his fear-mongering that implicitly targets Spanish-speaking immigrants, Eddie Rispone has betrayed the man he had once celebrated, and perhaps ironically, the hostility he seeks to stoke against men and women who are simply exercising their right to protest their government is one of the reasons Dr. Balart claimed he was motivated to flee Castro’s Cuba.
It may seem impossible to believe but the same man who paid for that ad in the newspaper wrote this only five years prior in the dedication of his book, which I decided was worthy of presenting as if it were a competing campaign ad:
Four days ago, this was how Rispone reacted when Gov. John Bel Edwards called the president’s tweets about four members of Congress, all of whom are women of color, needing to “go back” to the countries they came from, “out of bounds,” urging for the need for more civility.
Chapter Four of Cucho: A Journey from Cuba to Freedom is titled “You Have No Business Here.” Rispone details the outrageous bigotry and xenophobia that Dr. Balart had to confront when he first decided to pursue a career in medicine in Louisiana. He had been the director of a hospital in Cuba and had assumed that medical professionals in New Orleans would recognize his qualifications.
Instead, according to Rispone, the doctor was told by a member of the State Board of Medical Examiners, “You have no business here. Get out of the state of Louisiana because you will never get a chance here in the state of Louisiana to practice medicine. In fact, if you touch the urine of a patient, I’ll put you in jail. You have no business here.”
It crushed him.
“That encounter served Cucho his first bitter taste of discrimination in America,” Rispone writes. “That son of a bitch, (Cucho) thought. He found himself whispering the words again, ‘That son of a bitch.’”
Louis and Isabel Balart. Source: Eddie Rispone.
As I previously mentioned, Rispone’s book about Cucho is primarily biographical, but it also occasionally attempts to be an alarmist polemic about Castro’s Cuba and a warning to American readers about the possibility of our nation becoming overtaken by an oppressive dictator and his family, a scenario he imagines could only occur under a communist regime. Today, some readers may find his speculation ironic and misguided, particularly considering that the protagonist of his book was able to achieve success not only through his own tenacity and intelligence but also because he benefitted from free public education.
But at its core, the book is about the promise America offers to immigrants and refugees. Rispone himself is a direct descendant of Italian emigrants, and when his ancestors arrived in New Orleans, anti-Italian bigotry was brutal and often violent.
In 1891, eleven Italian-Americans were lynched to death in the city, a massacre for which Mayor LaToya Cantrell officially recognized and formally apologized earlier this year, 128 years later. (The name Rispone is a derivation of the Italian word for “responding”). At the time, New Orleans was home to approximately 30,000 Italian immigrants. Today, New Orleans is home to the same number- 30,000- of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America; Baton Rouge is home to around 10,000.
Today, despite what conservative pundits suggest, the proportion of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has decreased by approximately 14% since 2007. However, according to analysis conducted by Pew, Louisiana is one of five states that has seen an increase, and we do not need to speculate about the cause for this uptick.
Indeed, if anyone should be able to explain the real reasons, it’s Eddie Rispone, a man who has made a vast fortune as an industrial contractor. It has nothing to do with Democratic politics, and it predates the current governor (the increase of 15,000 has not changed since 2014). It also has nothing to do with border security or the lack of a “big, beautiful wall.”
The answer should be obvious to anyone who has lived in the state for the past two decades.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush suspended parts of the Davis-Bacon Act and other immigration labor laws in order to facilitate an influx of construction workers to Louisiana. His decision was not without controversy, largely because it enabled major construction companies to avoid the requirement they pay workers the prevailing wages of their respective fields.
By some estimates, 24,000 undocumented immigrants moved to New Orleans as a consequence, taking jobs with many of the same firms that frequently use Eddie Rispone’s company as a subcontractor. There is no question about it: These immigrants were a part of the backbone of the city’s recovery, and while multiple studies confirm that there is no correlation between undocumented immigrants and a city’s crime rate (indeed, as a group, they are far less likely to commit crimes), we also know that contractors (and their subs) who received major government contracts were more than happy to exploit these workers by paying them substantially less and then pocketing the difference in enormous profits.
At the very least, Louisiana voters owe it to these men and women to seriously consider the moral and ethical justification for Eddie Rispone’s attack and fear-mongering.
And Rispone owes it to the legacy and the memory of his friend Cucho, a man that he admired so much, he wrote a book about him.
NEW ORLEANS- In a letter to contributors, Lamar White, Jr., the founder and publisher of the Bayou Brief, announced this morning two new additions to the nonprofit news publication. Cayman Clevenger of New Orleans relinquished his position as Chairman of the Board in order to become the publication’s first Chief Operating Officer, and Lydia Y. Nichols, also of New Orleans, will join the masthead as the Bayou Brief’s Chief Cultural Columnist. The Board previously voted to phase out the position of development consultant following the successful relaunch of its new website.
Yesterday, the publication also launched a merchandise section, which will offer donors a selection of stickers and koozies designed by local artist Brooke Caillouette (who created the the Bayou Brief’s masthead and logo design), magnets based on artwork by popular Louisiana artist Simon, and a rotating selection of rare Louisiana collectibles and memorabilia. Currently, the publication is selling a mint condition collection of Simone D. Fair lapel pins from the 1984 World’s Fair, a first-edition poster of the documentary “The War Room” autographed and personalized by James Carville, and first edition copies of both of Huey P. Long’s books, My First Days in the White House and Every Man a King.
“If you have a rare Louisiana collectible, piece of art, or an item of historic value, such as but not limited to the Deduct Box, we’re happy to accept those as a way of contributing to independent journalism for Louisiana,” said Clevenger, who is also a fine art appraiser specializing in Louisiana art.
In his capacity as COO, Clevenger will be responsible for all contract monitoring, regulatory compliance, and event planning.
“Cayman has been an integral part of the Bayou Brief from the very beginning,” said Lamar White, Jr. “He actually pitched the publication’s name, and he has been advising me and working with our web design and development consultants every step of the way. There seemed to be a unanimous consensus we were spending too much on consultants and not enough on content, and we both understood it would save a significant amount of money to bring all of this in-house.”
Clevenger is a native of Many, Louisiana and attended elementary and high school in Shreveport, where he excelled as an amateur golfer, ultimately earning a golf scholarship from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. After a year in Waco, he decided to transfer to Tulane University and quickly emerged as a leader in student government. Following Tulane, he matriculated into the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University, where he became passionate about legal writing,* international dispute resolution, and animal law. His law review article, “Baby Doe and the LSEA,” received the school’s prestigious Peggy Sue Award.**
After graduating cum laude, Clevenger returned to New Orleans. He is a practicing lawyer and a real estate agent, but he primarily works as a professional art dealer for his company, Louisiana Art (www.louisianaart.com). His wife Sarah is also a lawyer, and together, they have a daughter, Evangeline Marie.
The Bayou Brief is also proud to announce Lydia Y. Nichols will serve as its Chief Cultural Columnist and will become a part of its masthead. Nichols, a New Orleans native, responded to a request for freelance contributors the Bayou Brief distributed prior to Hurricane Barry, and immediately after reading her cover letter and sample work, Sue Lincoln, the Chief Investigative Editor, and Lamar White, Jr. agreed to compensate her for two columns about the storm.
When Nichols sent the first draft of her first column, White decided to offer her a paid position and a prominent role as an opinion columnist. That column, “Listen to the River: A Change is Gonna Come,” quickly went viral and became one of the most acclaimed stories the Bayou Brief has published, garnering an international audience.
“With all due respect to reporters, Lydia is something that requires much more skill and talent and daring. She’s a writer,” White, Jr. said. “She has a sense of lyricism and cadence- the music of prose- that can’t be taught. People were mesmerized. James Carville texted me from across the Atlantic to tel me how much he liked it.”
Bayou Brief had received contributions for coverage of Barry, but after Nichols’ first column, he decided to set those funds aside to pay for her next six columns, “As some may know, I lamented the loss of Jarvis DeBerry to Ohio, and had been actively looking to hire a reporter who could document perspective. But that’s not what happened here. I didn’t find a reporter. I discovered the best damn young opinion writer, white or black, male or female, in the entire state. No pressure or anything.”
Lydia Y. Nichols is an award-winning writer and researcher whose work about contemporary art, literature, culture, and social justice has been featured in 64 Parishes Magazine, The Lens, Pelican Bomb, and The Grio – among other outlets. In 2016, she co-authored a report about the impact of short-term rentals on housing access and affordability in New Orleans that, for better or worse, catapulted the topic into the public consciousness. A fifth generation Uptown New Orleans native, she now hails from Treme where she lives with her toddler son and an addiction to lavender oil.
When you purchase something from our merch site, you’re also automatically making a donation, and over time, as we grow, we will add new products.
We are doing something different too: We’re also featuring an ever-changing rotation of rare, Louisiana collectibles and memorabilia, and we’re always on the lookout for those who have something one-of-its-kind they’d be willing to donate for our online store.
Right now, for example, in addition to purchasing our stickers, you can also buy the complete collection of Seymore D. Fair lapel pins from the 1984 World’s Fair ($600, $100/pin), an original movie poster of “The War Room” signed and personalized by the Ragin Cajun ($1000), and first edition copies of both of Huey P. Long’s books, “My First Days in the White House” and “Every Man a King,” which will be framed in a shadowbox of your choosing ($1750). Visit the new storefront here.
“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” – Mark Twain
Congressman Ralph Abraham, a Republican from Louisiana’s Fifth District and current candidate for governor, should have known better. Before Donald Trump took over the lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it may have seemed impossible to believe that Ralph Abraham, of all people, would ever traffic in the language of white supremacy.
In his first year in Congress, Abraham joined the seven-member Arab-American Leadership PAC, which was comprised of six Republicans and one Democrat and, notably, included three members of Louisiana’s federal delegation: Ralph Abraham, Charles Boustany, and Garret Graves. (Boustany has subsequently left Congress).
It wasn’t the only time in which Abraham had embraced his status as an Arab-American. His paternal grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon, and the traditions and heritage of his father’s side of the family were a critical part of his life.
Yet after Donald Trump argued that four members of Congress, all women of color and three of whom were born in the United States, should “go back” to their own countries, a talking point that has been employed against people of color and immigrants since the nation’s beginning, Abraham got even uglier, offering to pay for the flights of his own colleagues to another country of their choice. We’re more familiar than most with this rhetoric: It is just a variation of the same white supremacist trope that was once employed by people like Leander Perez and David Duke.
Congressman Ralph Abraham (R- LA-05) tweets a white supremacist trope, echoing remarks made by Donald Trump.
In 2015, Abraham was one of the founding members of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on U.S.-Lebanon Relations, which vowed to provide “support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and security services, broaden Lebanon’s capacity to cope with the enormous numbers of refugees from Syria, and protect vulnerable religious communities in the Middle East.”
Since Trump’s arrival, however, Abraham has fully embraced the president’s agenda, even when it targets Arab-Americans and “vulnerable religious communities in the Middle East.” He offered a full-throated defense of Trump’s proposed “Muslim travel ban,” which was repeatedly struck down in the courts as unconstitutional before a different iteration, which included North Korea and Venezuela, was upheld.
One has to wonder what the congressman’s Lebanese grandparents or his father, Ralph Lee Abraham, Sr., would think about his politics.
Wedding Party (Kaliste Saloom, Joe Joseph, Alfred Boustany, Alexander Azar, Camille Joseph Saloom, and Joseph George Hannie) Hammond. Courtesy of University of Louisiana, Edith Garland Dupré Library, Special Collections, University Archives and Acadiana Manuscripts Collection.
From the late 19th century until shortly after the end of the Second World War, Louisiana welcomed more emigrants from Lebanon than any other state in the American South, and those emigrants and the generations that followed them have become an integral part of Louisiana’s culture, its politics, and its history. Today, a visitor to Baton Rouge, for example, would be forgiven for being surprised by the prominence that Lebanese cuisine enjoys in the city’s culinary life; it’s not what most people would expect.
43% of Arab-Americans in Louisiana have “Lebanese roots,” according to the most recent U.S. Census, and there are many reasons to think the total population is significantly underreported.
When A.J. Liebling arrived from New York in 1959 to profile Gov. Earl K. Long, he observed, “Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the Republic of Lebanon.” If he were alive today, he would have also noted that, as recently as two years ago, prior to Charles Boustany’s departure from office, half of Louisiana’s federal delegation in the House identified as Lebanese-American. Graves and Abraham, of course, remain in office. Liebling would probably also note that during his venture with Uncle Earl sixty years ago, he encountered a man who became the most consequential and prominent political leader from Louisiana but with ties to the Republic of Lebanon. Judge Edmund Reggie of Crowley was an early and close confidant and friend of the Kennedy family. His daughter Victoria Reggie is now better known as Vicki Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy. But that’s another story.
While it is true the vast majority of emigrants from Lebanon were Catholic and that Louisiana may have seemed like a prime destination because of preexisting cultural ties with France, there’s also no question that generations of Lebanese-Americans have encountered the same exact type of hateful rhetoric employed by Trump and then amplified by Abraham. It is also true that discrimination and violence against Arab-Americans, regardless of their religious faith, have escalated during the past two decades.
That all said, make no mistake: The language about paying to send people back where they came from, that’s something that predates the arrival of emigrants from Lebanon by nearly a century. It’s perhaps one of the reasons the congressman never considered the irony and the hypocrisy of what he was saying. He may be a member of an Arab-American family from an impoverished corner of rural northeast Louisiana, but Ralph Abraham is not black.
He’s so vain, he has no idea whatsoever this song could ever be about him.
David Duke and Leander Perez
The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the decades-long legislative and judicial battles over school integration, the consequences of party realignment following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the institutionalized discrimination that is baked into our education and criminal justice systems, the practice of de-facto red-lining, and the barriers we’ve erected to minimize minority representation in local, parish, state, and federal elections mean, among many other things, this most critical point: In a state in which nearly 1/3rd of residents are African American, there still has not been an African American elected to a statewide office since Reconstruction.
We also have to remember that less than 30 years ago, holy hell, David Duke, a white supremacist who once pitched a plan to forcibly relocate people of color to a newly-reorganized country. Much like “The Hunger Games,” but without the underlying sense of hope.
Republican politics in Louisiana is dominated by corporate lobbyists who beg for each and every subsidy in the book while also arguing against programs like food stamps and Medicaid expansion that would benefit the poor and working classes, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities. They preach the Gospel of Prosperity and then pretend as if race isn’t something they “see.”
Four years ago, I was the first person to have ever posted this portrait of Bobby Jindal that had been the first thing visitors to his office encountered after the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor. It generated national news, including a response from the governor himself.
“You mean I’m not white?” he joked.
Some readers may be reminded of Steve Martin’s character in “The Jerk;” I was reminded of Clayton Bigsby of “The Chappelle Show.”
********
Yesterday, we also learned that Abraham is reimbursing himself, through his campaign, for the “flight time” on the private airplane he pilots. Thus far, the campaign has given him more than $15,000, but we should anticipate that increasing. He’s been flying in the wrong way the entire time.
