Businessman Eddie Rispone was fortunate to have a friendly crowd last Thursday, as he started making the organizational luncheon circuit in his gubernatorial campaign. Speaking to the East Baton Rouge Republican Women, the 70-year-old Republican remarked, “I have to remember I’m speaking to conservatives, ladies, Republicans, and half my family is here today. So I can say what I want about our Governor.” And he generated some appreciative laughter from the luncheon group.
He was fortunate to have that uncritically receptive partisan audience, for his campaign platform – at least as he’s iterating it now – boils down to “the Governor ticked me off by not doing what my friends and I want, so we’re going to replace him.”
Campaign Content: A Big Goose Egg
It was an unexceptional speech; light on policy proposals, though heavy on the sense of being slighted by – and unappreciated by – the current resident of the Governor’s mansion.
Rispone said his first major problem with John Bel Edwards was when “the governor, in his first session, tried to cut $4-million out of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.” Having been a huge supporter of former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reforms, and the voucher program in particular, Rispone admits he took it personally.
“That’s not a governor that’s going to put the children first,” Rispone said in his speech. “Mothers were so upset that several of them went on TV in New Orleans and Baton Rouge to say, ‘Governor, you lied’. And God taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Hey, Eddie, what are you going to do about the children? What about them?’”
What Eddie did, of course, was arrange and pay for the ads that put those moms on TV. He didn’t mention that part to the lunch crowd, though, nor that – ultimately – the voucher program’s funding has remained intact.
“Eating the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs”
Bad enough that the governor messed with what Rispone believes to be his mission from God, but then John Bel messed with Eddie’s business and his buddies’ businesses – without seeking their permission first.
“Over a year ago, the governor came out with an executive order, completely throwing ITEP into chaos,” Rispone said. “Complete chaos – jobs delayed, expansions delayed. We lost like 400 jobs in just my company.”
“He had met with the president of the Louisiana Chemical Association the day before, and he never mentioned it to Greg Bowser – never mentioned it! He didn’t sit down and talk it over with any of us first,” Rispone said, clearly referring to his fellows within the Erector Set, and their extended affiliations via LABI and Associated Builders and Contractors. “That’s a governor who does not appreciate job creators! He takes us for granted. Well, I’m going to tell you, that’s like eating the goose that lays the golden eggs!”
Then he quipped, “John Kennedy would be proud of me for that one!” before he continued his complaint.
“Job creators have to know their governor listens to them and appreciates them. I won’t be a governor who changes things like ITEP, based on what a socialist group – like Together Louisiana, Together Baton Rouge – wants.”
Later on, in a question-and-answer session following the speech, Rispone returned to this theme three more times. At one point he stated, “The governor is a career politician. They don’t think like we do, guys. For people like him and those in groups like Together Louisiana, it’s all about, ‘How can I get more votes and how can I feed more people?’ That’s not a governor that we want to have.”
Let’s pause a moment here, and reflect on the apparent disconnect. Rispone says God speaks to him, and there’s the New Testament story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes. Yet Rispone implies that feeding more people is a negative thing, and not something “we want” a governor to try and do.
Silly Goose
There’s another major disconnect, as well: Rispone addressing the crowd comprised primarily of Republican women as “guys”. In and of itself, not a major faux pas – but here’s what else he did and said along those lines…
“The women in this state are going to elect the next governor,” Rispone stated in his speech, adding, “Particularly the Republican women!”
For this, he received applause. And the first part of his statement certainly has the potential of truth. Fifty-four percent of all registered voters in Louisiana are women.
Yet while he acknowledged women’s strength of numbers for the voting booth, in the next sentences, he characterized women as weak, albeit in what seemed to be a nice request.
“Now I’m going to ask you to keep Linda (his wife), our daughters, and our grandchildren in your prayers. This is a lot to ask of them, because they’re going to hear some things about me that are not kind or true. I’m fine. I have thick skin after more than 40 years in business. But keep them in your prayers,” he asked.
Bless your heart, Eddie.
And when they opened things up for questions from the audience, made up of 95% women, would you like to guess who Rispone called on first, and most? That’s right – the dudes in suits. Five of the eight questions allowed were from men in the audience, and Rispone answered them expansively. He even called on each of the men by name: two were East Baton Rouge Metro Council members, two were from LABI, and one was disgraced former Secretary of State Tom Schedler, who resigned under the cloud of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
(Schedler’s question, about Rispone’s stance on Medicaid expansion, generated this response: “I don’t know the details, but I’m looking into it. I do know that when it was put in place in 1965, it was for the elderly – who could no longer work – and the handicapped, who couldn’t work at all.” [That’s MediCARE, Eddie.] “But we just keep expanding it, for all the wrong reasons.”)
Two of the questions from women were met with the same answer: “I don’t know where to start with that, but you can start by going to my campaign website.”
The last question, from a lady, did get a more elaborate response, as she asked, “Where do you fit with President Trump?”
Get a Gander at This
“A handful of us supported President Trump in a very large way when he was a candidate. I’ve met with him, and his policies and my policies are right on track with each other – right on track,” Rispone said. “Our style might be different – a little.”
Not necessarily.
Rispone’s policy plans, as stated at this event, are thin on substance, but sound very much like what we heard from Trump on the campaign trail, and have seen implemented during his time in the White House.
“We are going to recruit the best talent we can find to head up these agencies. We’re going to get the talented people,” Rispone says. “We’re going to get people in there to work with me, to do it right, to be effective and efficient.”
And, he says, he intends to – in essence – get what he’s been paying for all these years.
“For the last 25 years, I’ve put plenty of resources and effort in electing good conservative legislators. I’ve never asked anything of them other than to do what’s right. Now I’m going to work with them to make some changes in the laws and also in the constitution.”
In other words, if elected, they — and we — will do it his way.
Publisher’s Note: This article originally appeared in Country Roads Magazine on Dec. 29, 2009 under the title “Clementine Hunter Fakes.” Its author, Ruth Laney, has teamed up with The Bayou Brief and has provided permission to republish her original report. We have made minor edits for the purposes of clarification, continuity, and context.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then three years after the publication of The Joyous Coast in 1971, Clementine Hunter, who was already in detiortating health, had officially arrived as painter. “In 1974, Hunter’s reputation had grown so- and with it, the price of her works- that the inevitable occurred: a forgery scare,” James L. Wilson documents in his book Clementine Hunter, American Folk Artist.
“Rumors that either a grandson or a nephew was grinding out Hunter copies and selling them began to fly. And in New Orleans, an artist was charged with copying her paintings and trying to sell them as Hunter originals.”
The Town Talk, Aug. 22, 2007
Hunter was working as a cook at Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches when she picked up discarded tubes of paint and “marked a picture” on a window shade. A folk artist was born.
Clementine depicted scenes familiar to her—weddings, baptisms, cotton picking, fights at a juke joint. At first she sold them for a dollar or less, but by the time she died in 1988 at 101, her paintings commanded thousands of dollars when sold by dealers.
In September of 2009, the artist’s work became the center of a scandal when the FBI raided the Baton Rouge house of William and Beryl Toye, who are suspected of selling about $100,000 worth of fake Hunters. Armed with a search warrant, agents swarmed the Toyes’ house for five hours, hauling away paintings, art supplies, computers, typewriters, and documents.
An original Clementine Hunter, depicting Melrose Plantation.
FBI documents say the Toyes and New Orleans antiques dealer Robert Lucky, Jr. (who has since died) “engaged in a conspiracy and a scheme to defraud several victims [in] Louisiana and in other states . . . [and] knowingly sold forgeries as original, authentic works of art by Clementine Hunter.” They are suspected of conspiracy and mail fraud.
Newspaper accounts show that William Toye was working as an artist in New Orleans by the 1960s. In 1969, he told police his apartment had been broken into and fifty paintings by him had been stolen or vandalized.
William Toye (Photo by Ruth Laney)
In 1974, Toye was arrested on twenty-two counts of forgery for making and selling “Hunter” paintings. The case was never prosecuted.
In 1996, the Toyes consigned paintings to the Louisiana Auction Exchange (LAE) in Baton Rouge. Ultimately a number of the works, including a “Matisse” and a “Degas,” were determined to be fakes. Toye, listed in LAE catalogs as Dr. W. Geoffrey Toye, accused LAE owner Ronald Causey of counterfeiting the works. Toye filed complaints against Causey with the Louisiana Auctioneers Licensing Board, stating that Causey had failed to pay Toye for paintings sold at auction. The board did not suspend the license of Causey, who died in 2004.
Toye has told several people that he and his wife were left destitute when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005. He claimed that a warehouse where he stored opera sets he designed was flooded, leaving him without a source of income.
Robert Lucky, Jr.
Around 2000, Robert Lucky, Jr. moved from Natchitoches to New Orleans. According to FBI documents, about this time new Hunter forgeries appeared on the market. Lucky sold fifty to a hundred paintings for the Toyes to buyers in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and New York and misrepresented the provenance of the paintings, telling buyers “that the sources of his paintings were other Hunter collectors, not the Toyes.”
Although Lucky is named along with the Toyes in FBI documents, he had not been subject to a search and seizure as of mid-December. Contacted by phone, he said he was “not allowed to discuss” the case. He has engaged a criminal defense attorney.
A longtime resident of Natchitoches, Lucky owned an antiques shop there where he sold paintings. In 1991, he reported the theft of thirty-two Hunter paintings from his shop. Lucky told the local newspaper that the $80,000 loss was covered by insurance.
Lucky owned and operated Carriage House Market in Natchitoches, Louisiana
In 1999, Lucky was arrested in Shreveport on felony theft charges for failing to deliver three Hunter paintings to a buyer who had paid him $21,000 for them. He was later released on bond.
In 2000, Robert Ryan, a New Orleans physician who was selling part of his large collection of Hunters, obtained a judgment against Lucky for $12,000, payment for paintings Lucky had sold for him. Lucky was by then working for a large French Quarter antiques shop. According to court documents, Ryan successfully sought to have Lucky’s wages garnisheed, collecting the final payment in 2005.
In November 2005, William Toye met Don Fuson, a Baton Rouge businessman and art collector. Although Fuson was not interested in Hunter’s work, he said he felt sorry for Toye, who told him he had “lost everything” in Katrina and was forced to sell a collection of Hunter paintings his wife Beryl had collected since the 1960s.
Fuson bought several pieces from Toye for $30,000 and sold some to friends. A month or so later, one of the buyers called and told Fuson he had shown his Hunter to experts who labeled it a fake.
Fuson went at once to the Toyes’ house, told them he believed the paintings were forgeries, and asked for his money back. Beryl Toye told Fuson she had bought the paintings directly from Hunter. Within a few days, she sent Fuson a letter stating, “The onus is not upon us to prove that [the paintings] are real[,] it is upon you to prove that they are not.”
Fuson met with William Toye and painting conservator Margaret Moreland, who had cleaned several of the paintings for Toye. A respected conservator in business for twenty-five years, Moreland said she has cleaned many paintings for Toye. After Katrina, Toye took several purported Hunters to Moreland for cleaning.
Toye forgeries of Hunter’s work.
“He kept asking me ‘Do you think these are real? I don’t want people to think they’re fake,’” said Moreland, who attached a condition report to each painting she cleaned. She now believes Toye showed her condition reports to potential buyers as proof of authenticity. “There is no way I certified them,” she said. “These are just notes I make for myself, to keep track of them.”
Janice Delerno, who sells art at her Baton Rouge frame shop and gallery, bought five Hunters from Toye but soon questioned their authenticity. “I started getting suspicious of him,” she said. “He had this unending collection of paintings with anything you could possibly want. You could name the subject matter and size. I just started wondering what was going on.”
Delerno took her paintings to a Hunter expert who told her they were fakes.
Source: James L. Wilson
Shannon Foley of New Orleans was another dealer who bought from the Toyes and one of the few who went to their house. “It was dirty,” she recalled of the room where the paintings were displayed. “There was dust everywhere. Three, four, maybe five cats were around. I was pregnant, and the stench of cat urine hit me in the face. I thought, ‘Omigosh, this is crazy.’ I had to get out of there.
“You meet a lot of eccentric people in the art world who live in bizarre conditions and yet have valuable things,” said Foley, who bought five paintings that day. She quickly sold four of them and bought fourteen more by mail. In all, she paid $44,000 for nineteen paintings.
Foley put some of her Hunter paintings up for sale on an art Web site and at an auction house in New Orleans. Within days she learned that they were thought to be fakes. She called the Toyes and requested her money back. “They said all these people were jealous of them, that other people were the forgers,” said Foley.
Antiques Roadshow in Baton Rouge
Foley filed suit against the Toyes. Like Fuson, who also sued, Foley has never been able to have them served with papers. “They hide and won’t answer the door,” said Fuson.
Stephanie Hardie, owner of a Baton Rouge financial-services company, said William Toye approached her in 2006 or 2007 for a loan. When she turned him down, Toye offered to put up some Hunter paintings as collateral. Hardie, who said she likes primitive art, offered to buy five of them. She balked at Toye’s asking price of $7,500, and he lowered it to $2,500. “Some were rare ones, like a Christmas tree,” she said. “When I asked what else he had, he gave me a spiral-bound notebook with Polaroids of the paintings. He told me, ‘I can get you any of these you want in lots of sizes.’”
Pasted inside the notebook was a letter dated 1973 from Marc Antony of the 331 Gallery in New Orleans, a business that closed in 1966, according to FBI documents. The letter stated that the Toyes owned 438 Hunter paintings worth approximately $45,000. (Toye gave copies of the letter to Delerno and Foley as provenance for the paintings.) Hardie gave the notebook to the FBI, which describes it as containing photographs of sixty works of art.
The FBI investigation reaches beyond Louisiana to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. “The FBI took photos of all thirty-eight of our Hunters,” said museum director Lyndel King. “Last March we heard that five of them might be forgeries.” King said the paintings were donated to the museum by a local collector and his family.
Toye, 78, said he is not concerned about a possible indictment of him and his 68-year-old wife. He accused dealer Robert Lucky of forging the Hunter paintings. “He was probably taking photographs of them and duplicating them,” said Toye, who also accused the FBI of bringing fakes to the raid on his house. “They had a painting, supposedly a Clementine, that I had never seen before,” he said. “They had to have brought it with them. We didn’t even know it was there.”
Those who bought from the Toyes said their modus operandi is to accuse the accuser. “[William Toye] turns it around and accuses the person he sold the art to of copying it,” said Delerno. “It’s ludicrous.”
Said Foley, “It’s like they’re scripting their own reality.”
Fuson is angry about possible damage to Hunter’s reputation. “Clementine was a poor black woman who painted for pennies and nickels,” he said. “These people copy her work and sign her name to get thousands of dollars for something she’d have gotten thirty dollars for. She is the person most violated by this.”
Postscript: This 2012 presentation explains, in great detail, how to best authenticate a Hunter original.
On Thursday, Dec. 5, 2014, the day before Louisiana held its runoff elections for U.S. Congress, Jim Engster, who we have previously described as “the inveterate Louisiana talk radio host, historiographer, and pantomath of state politics,” began his show with a respectful and friendly conversation with then-State Treasurer John Neely Kennedy. Kennedy’s job was already secure, and he was already looking ahead, openly confessing that he was considering a 2015 bid for governor.
That, of course, never materialized. Kennedy ultimately deferred to U.S. Sen. David Vitter; Vitter lost the race in a spectacular fashion, surprising the entire state during his concession speech by vowing not to seek another term in the Senate the next year. State Treasurer Kennedy won Vitter’s seat in the Senate, and Vitter is now a registered lobbyist for a Russian conglomerate, likely making more money than he ever has in his entire career.
U.S. Sen. John Neely Kennedy, less than two years after his victory, once again began flirting with a run for governor, but, once again, he decided to stay put.
As luck would have it, Engster’s next guest that Thursday afternoon in 2014 was a relatively unknown physician from Alto, Louisiana who had become the surprise frontrunner for the Fifth Congressional District and is now the only Republican elected official challenging Gov. John Bel Edwards’ reelection campaign.
“State Treasurer John Kennedy (discusses) his political future and thoughts on the election tomorrow,” the show’s website summarizes. “We are then joined by Dr. Ralph Abraham, Louisiana Congressional District 5 candidate. Dr. Abraham says if he wins tomorrow he will donate his Congressional pay to St. Jude” (emphasis added).
Abraham issued a statement the next day, full of bluster but empty on facts. “I donated my entire first term’s salary to charity, honoring a commitment I made in that race. I gave the money away without fanfare because I believe in helping people because it’s the right thing to do, not for the publicity.” he tweeted. Incredulously, he then attempted to blame his empty promise on the media. “Despite the Advocate’s attempt to criticize me for those donations, I will not let them or anyone else deter me from continuing to help people who need it. #FakeNews”
No one has criticized Abraham for making donations, because Abraham has not disclosed anything except that he didn’t keep his word.
Thus far, they have asserted Rep. Abraham’s pledge was intended to only be valid for his first term, which is belied by the fact that his pledge remained a prominent part of his platform on his website during his reelection campaign.
“Unlike many other Republicans across the state, I rarely hear anything negative about you, Dr. Abraham,” Engster tells the candidate by way of introduction.
“Now tell me if this is an accurate quote,” Engster asks. “You say: ‘It should be an honor and a privilege to serve your country and not a paid position. If law dictates a salary I will donate the 174,000 thousand dollars a year salary to charities St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Independence Fund. You should not pay a penny for my representation.’ Is that an accurate quote?”
Abraham’s answer is straightforward. Quoting (emphasis added):
“That is accurate, Jim. I’ve been very blessed in my life to have some businesses do okay and I’m not anywhere close to one of those very rich multi-millionaire doctors you see on TV.
Diane, my wife and I are very frugal about money and we have been fortunate enough to have a little bit.
So I am of the opinion that on the federal level, you know it used to be back if you read history and I read a lot of it, that our representatives got paid eight dollars a day to go to Congress and that was mainly to provide for their meals and probably for their horses meals.
But things changed very quickly after the turn of the century and the salary has just gone exponentially up.”
Campaign spokesman Cole Avery, in response to The Advocate‘s questions about why the good doctor had broken his word, explained Rep. Abraham simply could not anticipate the financial burden he would endure as a consequence of scaling back his medical practice. “Because of the loss of income, it was not a pledge he could continue beyond the first term,” Avery, a former journalist, told Tyler Bridges. “There’s the belief that something should be one way and then there’s the reality.”
Avery should have first listened to Abraham’s interview with Engster, who, after a short commercial break, posed a question from one of his listeners.
“Now a question from Tracy at the Capitol here in Baton Rouge asking Dr. Abraham that if elected will you continue to practice medicine?” he asked.
Abraham responded (emphasis added):
“What I’ll have to do is certainly the congressional seat will take priority over everything, it is certainly a full-time job, you know if I could slip back into the clinic every blue moon and see a patient here and there I would love to do that. To answer the question the congressional seat will be a full-time job and we’ll have to surely put time and treasure into that 100 percent.”
At the very least, it should be difficult to trust the veracity of a congressman who spent the last day before his election on statewide radio touting his pledge to charity and who now asserts, in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign, he was never seeking any fanfare.
On Jan. 10th, inside of a courtroom in the 19th District Court in downtown Baton Rouge, Judge William Morvant presided over what may have seemed, at first glance, like a routine public records lawsuit — but even before it was heard, the case had already attracted significant media attention. The interest had very little to do with which records were in dispute; the concern was about the argument raised by the defendant, Louisiana state Attorney General Jeff Landry.
Unbeknownst to anyone in the audience of Judge Morvant’s courtroom, there was another person interested in the proceedings. His name was one of several on the plaintiff’s witness list and had been disclosed more than a month before the hearing, but Landry’s legal team didn’t seem to think much about it.
They certainly didn’t anticipate the man would drive back to Louisiana on his own dime just to be there, waiting in a nearby room just in case he got called to the stand.
Treading in deepwater.
More than two years ago, on Sept. 30, 2016, Scarlett Martin, a Tulane graduate who had once worked as an organizer for the Gulf Restoration Network in the aftermath of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil spill, requested all correspondence between state attorney general Jeff Landry and several of his key staffers with Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA), Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), Bold Strategies, and Chester Cedars, among others.
In the immediate aftermath of the worst environmental disaster in American history, during his first and only term in Congress, Landry made national news when he held up a sign in the middle of President Obama’s State of the Union address; the sign, which read “Drilling = Jobs,” was a protest against the administration’s temporary moratorium on new permits for offshore drilling.
While the communities he represented were still reeling from a mega-billion dollar environmental catastrophe, while fishermen saw their businesses collapse, and while children became sick because of contamination, their congressman, in a breach of decorum, demonstrated to the entire country that he was more worried about the profit margins of the wealthiest industry in human history.
All told, fewer than 350 people filed for temporary unemployment benefits as a result of the temporary moratorium on granting new drilling permits. The Deepwater Horizon explosion resulted in 4.9 million barrels of oil spilling into the gulf; 11 people had been killed and 17 were injured; the economic costs of BP’s negligence are still difficult to calculate precisely, though it is easily in the tens of billions of dollars.
The moratorium, on the other hand, had the equivalent effect of a single Walmart closure on state unemployment rates.
Scarlett Martin had ample reason to be interested, if not suspicious, about the attorney general’s cozy relationships with Big Oil and the petrochemical industry. It should not be too surprising that Landry’s office wasn’t exactly in a hurry to turn over those requested records, even if it meant breaking the law.
Martin filed two separate requests on Sept. 30, 2016. Her first request was for travel records, contracts with attorneys, and vehicles purchased.
Martin’s other request from Sept. 30, 2016, however, was at the center of the lawsuit she filed 175 days later.
Wow.
Incidentally, more than a year after Martin made her request, The Bayou Brief also filed a more specific request for correspondence the Attorney General’s office had with Shane Guidry. Guidry, the multimillionaire CEO of Harvey Gulf, was not only a mega-donor to Louisiana Republican candidates and PACs and Landry’s primary political benefactor, he was also named as the head of Landry’s “Criminal Investigations Unit.”
After a diligent search of our records using the search terms you provided, our office has identified 37 pages of responsive records for the first portion of your request (which asked for Guidry’s e-mails) and 176 pages of responsive records for the third portion of your request (which asked for records containing my name; I was interested in how my records requests were being handled). Copies of these records are attached to this correspondence.
Furthermore, 311 pages of intra-office email records will be withheld under the deliberative process privilege and six (6) pages of email records will be withheld under the attorney-client privilege. The deliberative process privilege protects confidential intra-agency advisory opinions, disclosure of which would be injurious to the consultative functions of government. Accordingly, it is this office’s position that these 317 pages of records are not subject to disclosure.
The Louisiana Department of Justice supplied only a single email with a single word from Shane Guidry: “Wow.” It was, ironically, a response to yet another public records request filed by The Advocate.
Earlier this month, the Bayou Brief was in Judge Morvant’s courtroom, not only because we were interested in how Landry’s office would defend its actions but also because we hoped the case would expose what we had considered to be an open secret: Landry’s office routinely refuses to comply with public records requests that it determines to be politically — not legally — problematic.
According to Landry, in this particular case, his failure to comply with public records law was irrelevant, because the plaintiff, Martin, now lives in Indianapolis. Therefore, Louisiana law doesn’t apply to her, which is, in many ways, the same basic argument oil and gas companies are using to avoid paying for damaging the state’s vulnerable coast.
Jeff Landry’s defense was so comically absurd, the judge barely entertained it, sparing him civil penalties but still ordering he cover all of Martin’s legal costs, approximately $25,000. In doing so, however, Judge Morvant ensured the public would never hear the testimony of the man waiting in a back room.
The computer guy.
That morning, while people were shuffling into the courtroom, Landry’s lawyers, were frantically drafting a second motion in limine to prevent the judge from ever hearing the sworn testimony of a man who they feared would be capable of unraveling their entire defense. Their motion actually refers to two witnesses, but they were only truly concerned with one: Etienne O. Carriere, a former top-level employee of their IT Department.
According to his LinkedIn profile, for more than six years, Carriere was “solely responsible for all areas of the EDRM (electronic discovery recovery model)/ Information Governance relating to the Louisiana Department of Justice’s Electronic Discovery requests and responses for major litigation’s both Civil and Criminal pertaining to the state.”
No one knew more about how Landry’s office managed public records requests than he did.
Landry’s attorneys threw the proverbial kitchen sink at Carriere, accusing him of stealing information, breaking multiple confidentiality agreements, and violating attorney-client privilege.
It is important to remember: This was a case about public records, and despite the protestations about not having enough time to conduct depositions or discovery, they were provided more than thirty days notice.
You do not need to be a lawyer to recognize that the confidentiality agreements were not only unconscionable, they were also a brazen attempt to prevent a government employee- even a former government employee– from answering- under oath in a court of law- questions of fact. It is also absurd for the so-called Solicitor General (a job that does not exist in Louisiana law), to claim she had a perpetual attorney-client relationship with a former IT staffer.
The Bayou Brief made multiple attempts to contact Carriere for comment, but as of publication, he has yet to respond.
Yet the record speaks for itself, and the public has a right to know why Jeff Landry’s office was so terrified about what Carriere could have said, if he’d been given the opportunity.
The Deliberative Process of Delay.
The Louisiana Public Records Act (LPRA) is one of the few aspects of Louisiana law lauded across the country as a model for ensuring fairness and accountability. In Louisiana, the right to access public records is considered “fundamental,” though the sanctity of that right had been severely but temporarily weakened under the Jindal administration.
During his first term in office, as a part of his so-called “gold standard” of ethics reform, former Gov. Jindal snuck in a statutory exemption that shielded his office from turning over practically anything they didn’t want to disclose. They called it the “deliberative process exemption.” Citizens were not allowed to access public records the governor deemed to be under his review, a distortion and expansion of the work product privilege that attorneys can claim in discovery. Jindal, though, interpreted the exemption to also apply to documents his administration had possessed, even after he had concluded his “deliberation,” as long as he claimed those documents didn’t actually play a role in crafting policy.
With Jindal out of office, the newly-elected state attorney general was keen to revive the exemption and its interpretation.
Between September 30, 2016, the day Martin filed her request, and March 24, 2017, the day she filed her lawsuit, Landry’s office resolved that the public records would begin to be provided Martin on four separate occasions, but each time there was no follow-through.
Internal correspondence confirms that there wasn’t much of a concerted effort to produce the requested documents in the timeframe provided by law. Although they acknowledged the request, the relevant records did not begin to be provided to Martin until after she filed suit on March 24, 2017.
As stated earlier, Landry filed a “no right of action” motion, arguing that because Martin was not domiciled in Louisiana, she had no right to acquire Louisiana public records.
Judge Morvant, a conservative, rebutted this argument as “novel.”
“(You) should be making that argument at the big pointy building down the road,” Morvant dismissively told Landry’s counsel, referring to the state Capitol.
The legislature had opportunities to explicitly limit the right to Louisiana citizens only, he explained, but this explicit limitation was nowhere to be found.
Here sits Louisiana, a place long notorious for political corruption, with a rare provision that does what it is supposed to do (to hold government accountable), and the attorney general hoped to drastically restrict its interpretation. What would have that argument’s acceptance spelled for out-of-state academics, journalists, and researchers? Fortunately for Martin, that argument did not stick and she was able to walk away with her litigation fees covered, estimated around $25,000.
Although Judge Morvant ruled that Landry’s office did not arbitrarily or capriciously fail to provide Martin notice of what documents would be exempt or privileged because of the great number of documents that were found by the search, that argument is directly contradicted by the evidence the court never considered and the testimony of a witness it never allowed to take the stand.
What was the state attorney general’s office doing between Sept. 30, 2016 and March 24, 2017 to respond to Martin’s request?
There’s a reason Landry’s office referred to “documents that were surreptitiously removed (by Etienne Carriere)” in its last-minute, second motion in limine.
The Damn (and Damning) Emails.
These are the emails “Solicitor General” (a phony title that does not exist under Louisiana law) Liz Murrill did not want the judge or the public to consider, and they clearly, unequivocally demonstrate the Louisiana Department of Justice never bothered to even consider Martin’s second request until after she filed suit, 175 days later.
Liz Murrill, in correspondence with others responding to the litigation, began working to coordinate how the system search for documents would be conducted, and she made it abundantly known that she hoped to make and support an argument that the sheer volume of responsive records meant the request itself was overly broad, even though they had waived that exemption months ago. Murrill, by the way, had been one of the chief architects and enforcers of the Jindal-era “deliberative process” exemptions.
Of course, the mere fact that a request produces a large number of records does not mean the request is overly broad, and the notion that Landry’s office attempted to quash documents, under the pretense of a confidentiality agreement and attorney-client privilege, could be considered probative of a pattern and practice of deliberate noncompliance and wanton disregard for the law.
A Postscript: Cocaine and the Gestapo.
For readers who have followed Jeff Landry’s political career, the headline- “Jeff Landry Has Something to Hide”- may seem like an obvious tongue-in-cheek reference to a part of his biography that he cannot escape. When he first ran for Congress, Landry claimed to have been a veteran of the Gulf War, until he was politely reminded that, in fact, he never left the United States or traveled to Iraq or Kuwait. It was an embarrassing and, to some, inexcusably disrespectful mistake, but it was overshadowed by an even wilder story.
When Landry was 23, he worked in the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department as a deputy and shared a home in St. Martinville with a friend and fellow deputy, a man who, astonishingly managed to smuggle at least $10,000 worth of cocaine and stash it underneath their home. Once his colleagues caught onto the crime, the police executed a search warrant; Landry pleaded ignorance. His home was searched, and although it’s unlikely Landry even needed to consent to the warrant, he did so. His roommate lost his job and spent some time behind bars. Landry turned in his own badge three or four months later. Every now and then, the story resurfaces, usually by satirical publications like The Red Shtick.
On Sept. 2, 2010, seventeen full years after the incident, Landry promoted an exculpatory letter from an assistant district attorney in St. Martin Parish.
If the author’s name, Chester Cedars sounds familiar, scroll up to the very first email. Chester Cedars is now an assistant AG with the Louisiana Department of Justice..
There is one other thing worth mentioning: In the aftermath of the BP oil spill and the temporary permitting moratorium, then-Congressman Jeff Landry showed up without an appointment or any fair warning to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (or BOEMRE), indignantly demanding an immediate meeting with the bureau’s chief.. Outrageously, he had to wait for twenty minutes. He was livid. According to The Times-Picayune, Landry could not believe how disrespectfully he was treated (emphasis added):
But in an interview after his questioning of Bromwich, the freshman Republican accused BOEMRE of acting “like the CIA and Gestapo” as he recounted how he was recently blocked from visiting the bureau’s New Orleans office.
Landry said he had to wait 20 minutes in the lobby for an agency official to come down and inform him that the top officials in the office weren’t in the office and that he would have to return another time. Landry said he wanted to learn about some stalled permits brought to his attention by a constituent.
He said he wasn’t given access to the employee overseeing the permits. Landry said he eventually received a copy of the agency’s staff telephone directory, but only after he threatened to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Publisher’s Note: This Friday, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association will vote to amend Rule 1.5.1, which would prevent public schools from illegally discriminating against immigrant students. We are republishing this report by Casey Parks, a contributing editor for the Bayou Brief. This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Parks’ report was originally published on November 7, 2018 under the headline, “Immigrant students find hope in soccer, but some states won’t let them play.” Those two states are Louisiana and Mississippi, and her report focuses specifically on schools and students in the Greater New Orleans area.
Carlos Chirinos-Padilla has dreamed of playing soccer since he was little. But his neighborhood in Honduras was too dangerous, he said. Boys squared off in street matches, but he never joined a real team. The first time he slipped on his Cohen uniform, he said, “was a feeling único,” one-of-a-kind. Finally, he felt a part of something. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
NEW ORLEANS — In Honduras, Carlos Chirinos-Padilla said, it was too dangerous to run. Soccer games were short and confined to the street in front of his house. Drug cartels roamed the neighborhood, he said, sometimes forcibly recruiting his neighbors, sometimes murdering them. Carlos and a group of other boys stole space and time when they could, but the violence left little room for dribbling.
When he fled Honduras for New Orleans two years ago, Carlos, now 16 and a high school junior, hoped for just two things: a quiet place to live and an opportunity to play real soccer on a real team. A high school squad, he thought, would be the best place to start.
Carlos enrolled at Cohen College Prep, a small high school in uptown New Orleans. For nearly 70 years, Cohen had been largely African-American, but Carlos’s arrival coincided with a demographic shift at the school. Five years ago, the school had no Latino students. Teenagers whose first language is Spanish now make up more than a quarter of the 350 students enrolled. Statewide, the number of Hispanic students has tripled over the past decade, from 17,000 in 2008 to 50,000 this year.
“What I saw a lot is these kids were isolated … There’s nothing tying them to the school, nothing bringing them into the community.” –
Crescent City Soccer president, P.J. Lynch
Almost as soon as the new students arrived, teachers said, they started asking to play soccer.
Cohen teachers wanted to create a team. Research shows that sports improve a teenager’s grades and behavior — benefits the teachers believed their new students needed. Many had seen their schooling interrupted by the chaos back home; some had experienced gang violence or human trafficking. But it looked like the teenagers would have to do without the advantages sports participation could bring: The nonprofit that governs Louisiana’s high school sports won’t allow most of the Central American students to play. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association requires all student-athletes to present some proof of age — a birth certificate or official immigration papers — along with a social security number. Though some of the Central American students are in the country legally or have temporary visas, most do not have the required documents.
Frustrated, Cohen teachers and administrators decided this fall to try something different. They started an unsanctioned team.
Someone to play with
The New Orleans public school system is unlike any other in America. All but a few of the 80 public schools operate as charters, which private organizations run using public funds. Students can apply to any institution in the city — no matter where they live.
Few New Orleans high schools employ English Language Learner (ELL) instructors for students new to the language. When the first few Central American students applied to Cohen, the high school drafted its Spanish instructor to teach them. By 2015, the number of Spanish-speakers grew too large to be handled by one teacher, and the school hired specialists in teaching English as a Second Language. Soon after, the number of Central American students at Cohen shot up, even though the majority of New Orleans high schools still had few, if any, Spanish-speaking students.
Carlos, a lanky teen with chestnut skin and a high-fade of well-coiffed curly hair, considered a few schools before choosing Cohen. They were all closer — Cohen is five miles from his shotgun house in the Fairgrounds neighborhood — but none seemed as relaxed as Cohen, he said.
Like the tens of thousands of other children who have arrived from Central America in the last four years, Carlos came alone when he traveled from Olancho, Honduras. His home was one of the most violent states in a country that, until recently, posted the world’s highest homicide rate.
By United States standards, the new home he escaped to is also dangerous: For three decades, Louisiana has had the highest murder rate in the country, and New Orleans is the state’s most violent city. Nationwide, only Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit have higher murder rates.
Cohen students watch as the school’s boys team squared off against KIPP Renaissance in late September. Neither school has an officially sanctioned team, so they play six-on-six matches in a club league every Saturday. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
Still, to Carlos, it feels comparatively peaceful here. He liked Cohen, even if teachers assigned more homework than he’d had in Honduras. After class, he retreated home, where he lives with his mother and sister, to a street so quiet he was sure he could spend all evening outside playing soccer. There was just one problem: He didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood.
“I didn’t have anyone to play with,” he said. “Imagine that.”
So last year, Carlos and others asked the new English Language Learner coordinator, Ann Holleman, if they could start a school squad.
Few New Orleans high schools have soccer teams. When charter organizations took over the public schools after Hurricane Katrina, most didn’t even offer football — a much more popular sport in south Louisiana — for another decade, preferring to focus on academics. Initially, teachers encouraged the Central American students to try football and volleyball, the sports the school had slowly added since the storm, but most didn’t know how to play, and found it hard to follow new rules and the shouts of their coaches in English.
“I think it was hard for them to see athletics in school and feel like they couldn’t participate,” Holleman said. “They didn’t understand why we didn’t have soccer. It’s the most popular sport in the world.”
Cohen teachers saw in soccer an opportunity to help the Latino teens see themselves as part of a community, and help turn around often lackluster academics. Many of the Central American students seemed unmoored, sleeping through class, landing in detention and often dropping out early, believing that they’d never meet state benchmarks.
“They had no motivation to make good grades,” said Erik Zavala, an English Language Learner teacher. “A majority of them feel like they won’t have an opportunity to go to college. They’ll just work, they assume. They think it’s not possible for them at all.”
An incentive, teachers thought, might help. Holleman wrote to the Louisiana High School Athletic Association and asked to create a sanctioned team. Holleman said she was surprised to learn that the nonprofit requires students to submit a social security number and other documents some Central American students who arrived as unaccompanied minors might not have.
The number of Hispanic students in Louisiana has tripled over the past decade, from 17,000 in 2008 to 50,000 this year.
“We were told, in no uncertain terms, that it would be almost impossible to have soccer because none of our kids would qualify, which was making broad assumptions about a diverse group of students,” Holleman said.
Since 1982, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plyler v. Doe, ordered the Tyler, Texas, school district to allow undocumented students to enroll, federal law has required public schools to educate all students, no matter their immigration status.
But high school athletics associations each have their own rules. Louisiana’s is one of the most restrictive. Florida requires immigrant students to present official U.S. Customs forms, and Mississippi only allows students who aren’t U.S. citizens to play if they are official foreign exchange students. Those policies could violate Plyler, some education advocates say, or create school climates in which some students feel unwelcome.
“From an educational perspective, no possible good is served by creating this kind of caste system in schools,” said Bob Farrace, a spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “Participation in sports and activities builds a stronger connection to the school, leading to higher achievement and a positive school climate. Denying undocumented students the right to participate in activities contradicts everything we know about the crucial task of building a school culture where every student feels known and valued.”
Louisiana’s eligibility director did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but officials in other states say strict eligibility rules help prevent cheating in sports susceptible to loopholes. Birth certificates ensure that the student-athletes are teenagers — and not 20-something ringers. “Proof of bona fide residence,” which several states require, along with strict transfer policies, prevents school officials from recruiting outside their attendance zones.
Few states have explicit rules concerning undocumented student-athletes, but several allow students to play, whether they’re U.S. citizens or not. In some, including South Dakota, Washington and Georgia, students who are eligible for school are eligible for sports, provided their grades are good enough.
Cohen students cheered and shook homemade noisemakers at a September match against a KIPP Renaissance club team. Cohen won, 9-1. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
“In terms of undocumented or refugee children, we would treat them the same as any other child,” said Dan Swartos, the executive director of the South Dakota High School Activities Association. “They’d be eligible at the first school they enroll at following the move to the community.”
Others states allow students arriving from other countries to play after a yearlong waiting period; they can request hardship waivers to compete sooner.
Cohen teachers wanted to appeal the Athletic Association decision, but said some school officials worried a soccer program might attract even more English Language Learner students — and cause Cohen to slide in state academic rankings.
The Louisiana Department of Education issues these rankings based, in part, on how well students perform on state tests. When the charter management organization New Orleans College Prep took over in 2012, it inherited a troubled school. Just four years earlier, National Geographic had deemed Cohen “America’s Toughest High School,” home to gang and drug violence. Cohens’ leaders had worked hard to build up the school’s reputation and student achievement, raising the school’s performance score from an F in 2012 to a B in 2016, a jump that prompted a visit from then-Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr., who served under President Barack Obama.
But Cohen fell to a C last year, a drop some alumni say led to declines in the school’s enrollment — and consequently its budget — this year. College Prep cited these budget troubles in September when it laid off some Cohen social workers and college counselors. If a school’s ranking drops too low, as happened at another College Prep high school last year, the state can revoke the charter or shutter the school entirely. The school was not ready to add soccer.
Resigned, a few Central American students tried volleyball. Carlos just went home after school and slept most of his afternoons away.
A real team
When classes resumed this fall, students again asked Holleman about starting a team. She decided to contact the owner of an adult league. Few teenagers played in Crescent City Soccer, but the company’s president, P.J. Lynch, had helped create a club team for an alternative high school, ReNEW Accelerated High School, the year before. Most of the students at ReNEW were either over the age limit or academically unqualified to play state-sanctioned sports, but they still needed an outlet, Lynch said. ReNEW leaders credited the club team with improving players’ grades and attendance.
Holleman asked Lynch if he could create something similar for Cohen. Lynch liked the idea, but, he said, the Cohen students would need more opponents of the same age — so he approached other New Orleans high schools, both public and private, none of which had a sanctioned team. Most had at least a handful of kids from Central America.
“What I saw a lot is these kids were isolated,” Lynch said. “They don’t speak English as well. They’re not going to basketball games or football games. There’s nothing tying them to the school, nothing bringing them into the community.”
Girls Coach Katie Lucky-Heard (left, white shirt) delivered a half-time pep talk to her team. “Tú puedes,” she said. You can do it. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
Lynch persuaded nine schools, including some private parochial institutions, to join. Although there were 3,814 Hispanic students enrolled in schools in Orleans Parish in October 2017, according to the state, most schools didn’t have enough players to field a full 11-player team, so he created a six-on-six league, a modified club version played on a smaller field with fewer set positions and formations. Few of the schools created female teams, so Lynch found adult competitors willing to play Cohen’s girls. His business is for-profit, but he held fundraisers to help subsidize the cost to rent a field every Saturday. The schools each chipped in $750 to pay for referees and uniforms.
At Cohen, special education teacher Katie Lucky-Heard agreed to coach the girls, and Zavala, a 23-year-old who’d come to New Orleans with Teach for America, said he’d help the boys. Neither had coached before, but they possessed a skill few Cohen teachers did: They both spoke Spanish.
School leaders announced tryouts in August — with a caveat. To join the team, a student had to stay for tutoring and couldn’t land in detention more than a handful of times. After the school secretary finished announcing the rules over the intercom — in English and in Spanish — one girl stood up in class.
“I’m going to be on that team,” Shayna Muñez said. The teacher told Shayna her grades weren’t good enough, but the sophomore announced she’d do anything to get up to the 2.0 cutoff.
“I am going to be on that team,” she told the class.
Half the Central American kids wanted to be on the team. One boy, who works overnight from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., showed up at tryouts, and the coach worried. Teachers already complained that the student — who arrived at school every morning by 7:30 a.m. — slept through class. If he joined the team, he might be even more exhausted. But the boy begged.
Three years ago, Cohen College Prep had only a few students from Central America. This fall, nearly 100 students from Central America enrolled, comprising more than a quarter of the student body. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
“Please, mister,” he said. “It’s my passion, the only thing good.”
That boy, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy, joined Carlos and a few dozen other kids to stay after school for the first practice. The new athletic director brought a box filled with green and white Crescent City T-shirts. Paired with the school-issued P.E. shorts, he explained, they had a uniform.
Carlos pulled a white T-shirt over his skinny frame, then smiled.
“It was a feeling único,” he said. Like nothing he’d felt before.
Within a week, Zavala said, his students seemed transformed. Because the soccer players stayed after school for tutoring, other Central American kids did, too. Soon, everyone’s grades improved, Zavala said.
Shayna did pull her grade point average up to a 2.63, but she skipped practice once, and the coach took her off the team’s text-messaging thread — a punishment that worked far better than several rounds of detention ever had for the girl. That thread had become a lifeline for girls whose conversations started with soccer plays and evolved into more personal talks about boys and family struggles. The coach added Shayna back to the thread, and the girl hasn’t skipped practice or tutoring since.
At a September match against a De La Salle High School club team, Cohen players moved the ball down the pitch quick and smooth. “Nothing we can do to defend that,” De La Salle Coach Marie Bookman said. Photo: Casey Parks/The Hechinger Report
In late September, the two boys’ squads ran drills after school on the field they share with the football team, almost all of whose players are African-American. Around 5 p.m., the football team’s kicker, an African-American student who didn’t speak Spanish, sprinted over. His squad had lost its last three games, and he was lagging, he thought, playing both offense and defense.
“I wouldn’t mind some help,” Andrew Green told the soccer coaches. “Maybe an upgrade at kicker.”
He pointed to Carlos, who was juggling the soccer ball between his head and his knees.
“Let me see you kick,” Andrew said.
Andrew tossed Carlos the football, then mimed punting. Carlos took a deep breath, kicked, and the football sailed long and low. He scrunched up his face in embarrassment, but a few football players clapped. One threw the ball back, and Andrew urged Carlos to try again. Andrew lingered a while, watching as Carlos and other boys tried to swing their legs to get enough lift. With each kick, the ball flew longer and higher.
“That’s a field goal,” a football player called as the ball soared downfield.
“Any time y’all want to join us,” Andrew said, slapping hands with Carlos, “we’re ready.”
Homecoming
Both Spanish- and English-speaking students showed up in late September to cheer on Cohen during its homecoming soccer matches. Teachers set up a buffet of croissants, chips and salsa. Students shook noisemakers they’d fashioned out of water bottles and small rocks.
“I think it was hard for them to see athletics in school and feel like they couldn’t participate. They didn’t understand why we didn’t have soccer. It’s the most popular sport in the world.” English Language Learner coordinator Ann Holleman
Carlos was recovering from the flu, but he warmed up on the pitch anyway. Lynch could only schedule seven regular games, plus a two-day championship tournament in mid-October, and the homecoming game was one of the team’s final matches of the year. The Louisiana Athletics Association prohibits club teams from competing during the sanctioned soccer season, which begins at the end of October. Crescent City would stop hosting matches until February, when the state league crowns a champion.
The girls played first that morning, a grueling battle against an adult team.
“Tú puedes,” their coach, Lucky-Heard, called over and over again from the sideline. You can do it.
Several dozen spectators spent hours watching the games, though the elementary school pitch Crescent City rents does not have bleachers. They sat on steps or stood along the mesh fence, some carrying umbrellas to block the New Orleans sun. No one in Carlos’s family had ever seen him play. His fans were teachers, adults who spent their day off sweating on the sidelines just to cheer for him.
After the girls lost, Carlos’s team played against a team from De La Salle High School. The private Catholic school fields a team during the regular season, but some students joined Crescent City to get in shape before facing statewide competition.*
Carlos and his teammates passed and dribbled swiftly down the pitch. When the opposing team stole the ball, their coach, a parent volunteer named Marie Bookman, shouted for her team to try passing the ball, like the Cohen team, but Carlos snaked through their formation, stole it back and passed to a teammate, who kicked it in.
“Nothing we can do to defend that,” Bookman said, to no one in particular. “They’re getting to the goal quick and good.”
Cohen defeated De La Salle, 12-2, and a team from KIPP Renaissance High School arrived to play the second match at 11 a.m. KIPP’s team was small — only nine players, compared to Cohen’s few dozen — but diverse. A few were Latino students, one was Vietnamese, and the others were African-Americans just trying soccer for the first time. Cohen won 9-1.
Carlos danced on the sidelines, but paused to remind himself that winning didn’t really matter. Eventually, his team would lose, he said, and he would still love playing, even in defeat.
Winning was a temporary triumph. Though his team would go on to win the championship in late October, what Carlos really cherished, he said, was the space, the freedom to run.
In the summer of 2017, the Dead Zone – an area of low oxygen that develops annually in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana’s coast – was the largest ever measured. At 8,776 square miles, it covered an area the size of the state of New Jersey.
2017 Dead Zone map. Courtesy: NOAA
In 2018, the measured Dead Zone was much smaller – only 2718 square miles. Yet this past summer, east of Louisiana, Florida’s Gulf Coast beaches were plagued with that state’s worst-ever poisonous red tides, some of which persisted into early December.
In 2017, 1000 miles to the north, more than 700 square miles of western Lake Erie turned pea-soup green, emitting the stench of sewage. The prior year, Ohio’s governor had declared Lake Erie waters “impaired for recreation.” In 2015, there were 15 incidents of toxic algae blooms in the lake. And in August 2014, residents of Toledo were without water for three days, when the toxic cyanobacterial algae bloom on Lake Erie got drawn into the city water system.
The primary cause of massive algae blooms that turn areas of the Great Lakes green, Florida beach waves red, and kill vast swaths of the Gulf is fertilizer runoff. The chemical nutrients that feed the crops that feed our country’s people, are also feeding the algae that are killing freshwater and saltwater marine life – and could kill us.
An ordinance, on the February 26, 2019 city ballot in Toledo, Ohio, dials into these problems.
LEBOR
The Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) – put on the ballot by citizen initiative – would, if passed, amend the Toledo city charter to acknowledge that the Lake Erie watershed has legal rights “to exist and flourish,” and would enable citizens to legally defend those rights on behalf of the world’s 11th-largest body of water.
Toledo is not the place most of us would expect to be considering a “Rights of Nature” ordinance. It’s not a “Left Coast” enclave of New Age thinkers, or progressive tree-huggers. It’s a Rust Belt city in America’s heartland, bordered by the state of Michigan to the north, Lake Erie to the east, and sprawling miles of fertile farmland rolling away to the south and west. And it’s been far from easy for Toledo’s concerned community members to get this issue on the ballot. They’ve had to fight “the system” every step of the way.
Markie Miller leads the community group, Toledoans for Safe Water. In 2014, she was a graduate student, majoring in environmental studies when – as she puts it – “Toledo lost its water.” She already knew, from her classes, that environmental regulations and the majority of the environmental movement pushing for those regulations was about “the best way to compromise.” And the aftermath of the Toledo water crisis did nothing to change her sense of the system, or the system itself.
Not a smoothie: Lake Erie water sample, 2017. Courtesy: NOAA
“The state had been tracking the things that lead to the algae blooms for years,” she says. “And all they proposed for the future amounted to more voluntary tracking, or updates of water treatment facilities with an arsenal of more chemicals.
“Yet if there’s a problem to be treated, then there’s a problem to be solved,” Miller explains. “And what we wanted was someone to hold accountable. All they offered was more of the same – the same people who had been tracking and following what was going on but not doing anything to prevent it. We recognized, finally, that we had to be responsible for ourselves, and started trying to figure out how we could do that.”
In the spring of 2015, Miller contacted Tish O’Dell with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). O’Dell and CELDF work with communities to enact ordinances, using local democracy to protect the local environment. Concerned community members formed Toledoans for Safe Water, and joined the Ohio Community Rights Network (OHCRN). Most importantly, Miller says, members of their group embraced the concept that, “The solution is not about ownership, but about stewardship.”
Markie Miller plants LEBOR campaign sign. Courtesy: Toledoans for Safe Water on Instagram
After gathering 10,500 signatures (twice the number required to get it on the ballot), they presented the initiative petition to Toledo’s City Council and got it certified. The next step would be getting it vetted by the Lucas County Board of Elections, and that didn’t go well at all. On August 28, 2018, the three-member board, appointed by the Ohio Secretary of State upon the recommendations of local political parties, unanimously rejected placing the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) on the November ballot. They said LEBOR – as well as a second community initiative to keep the jail in downtown Toledo – “exceeds the scope of what Toledo city law can enforce.”
The community members challenged that decision, but the Ohio Supreme Court upheld it, as they did with the jail initiative. Proponents of the downtown jail measure then asked the City Council to allow a vote anyway, and the council agreed. LEBOR’s advocates asked for the same reconsideration, and finally – four days before Christmas – they got the go-ahead from the Board of Elections, though one of its members stated, “It pains me to do this because I still believe the proposal is on its face unconstitutional and unenforceable.”
Both initiatives are on the February 26th ballot, but the Lake Erie Bill of Rights advocates know they’re now fighting the power and wealth of the entire agribusiness industry.
Where Nature and Science Meet
According to the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, of the 4.9 million acres in the Western Lake Erie Basin, 4.2 million acres of the 4.9 million total acres in the western Lake Erie Basin are in the Maumee River Watershed. 71-percent of those 4.2 million acres are used for agricultural purposes, and 85-percent of the total phosphorus delivered to the lake by the Maumee River comes from farm fertilizer and manure.
Mississippi River waters meet the Gulf. Courtesy: NOAA
Fertilizer runoff is also what causes the Gulf Dead Zone off Louisiana’s coast. Nitrogen and phosphorus from the entire Mississippi River watershed drains into the Gulf, feeding algae blooms which then die and decompose, dropping deeper into Gulf waters and creating areas of low oxygen – hypoxia – that kills marine life, such as fish, shrimp, and crabs.
In the late 1960s, the pollution of the Lake Erie watershed was so massive that national media perpetrated the phrase “Lake Erie is dead.” Fish kills littered the beaches, and the Cuyahoga River, flowing to the lake through Cleveland, caught fire. In 1969, Time Magazine described Lake Erie – the shallowest of the Great Lakes – as a “giant cesspool,” due to the quantities of industrial and municipal sewage flowing into rivers that fed the lake and even direct dumping into the lake itself.
Cuyahoga River on fire, 1969. Courtesy: Newseum
In 1972, Congress passed a revamped Federal Clean Water Act along with the international Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which set up water quality guidelines and regulatory measures. By the 1990s, these efforts achieved a 60-percent reduction in lake levels of total phosphorus and the disappearance of harmful algal blooms.
But while total phosphorus went down by the 1990s, dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP) started going up, which made the algae happy. For algae, DRP is more “digestible.”
What caused the change? Farming got more “intensive,” and as more fertilizer was spread to make each acre more productive, the amount of DRP in the soil increased. Additionally, much of the Midwest moved to a “no-till” philosophy of land management, keeping the applied fertilizers on the surface of the soil, and increasing the amount of DRP running off into the watershed.
Add in “Roundup” – glyphosate. “No till” meant weeds weren’t turned under, and they proliferated. Agribusiness behemoth Monsanto released Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996, followed by Roundup Ready corn in 1998, and farmers added Roundup spraying to their routines.
Glyphosate and phosphorus compete for the same sites on a soil particle, and glyphosate can make the soil release its phosphorus, meaning more of the nutrient can be washed away.
Working to save a red tide-impacted manatee, summer 2018. Courtesy: Florida Wildlife and Fisheries
Clean Water Act Rollbacks
When President Trump addressed the American Farm Bureau’s annual convention in New Orleans on Monday, January 14, 2019, he called federal protections for wetlands and waterways “one of the most ridiculous regulations.”
Touting his February 2017 executive order for a rollback of Clean Water Act regulations, Trump promised, “We’re going to keep federal regulators out of your stock tanks, your drainage ditches, your puddles and your ponds!”
Farmers and agribusiness representatives in attendance at the convention took to their feet and cheered wildly.
Those are the same folks, back home in Ohio, who are pouring their money and energies into opposing passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The Ohio Farm Bureau, along with the state’s Agribusiness Council, Cattlemen’s and Dairy Producers Associations, the Pork Council, Poultry Association, Soybean Association, Corn and Wheat Growers Association, and the Sheep Improvement Association – plus the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and the Ohio Chemistry Technology Council – each signed onto the lawsuits taking LEBOR before the Ohio Supreme Court.
They’re backing the latest court challenge to the initiative, filed by Josh Abernathy, a Toledo resident and member of the Northwest Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, a coalition of labor unions. The premise of Abernathy’s complaint to the Ohio Supreme Court is, basically, “You already said no. Don’t change your minds now.”
The court decision is expected right about the date of the election.
(And, by the way, there’s been no similar last-ditch challenge to the jail initiative, though it’s had a similar history and is on the same ballot.)
Meanwhile, the industry groups, including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce (the equivalent group to LABI – the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry) are running ads and making robocalls against LEBOR, using the ”it’s going to hurt jobs” argument.
Another community group, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, has been countering that same-old, same-old “jobs” argument by noting that “protecting the environment not only sustains the systems that support life, it also creates jobs.” Citing construction projects on Toledo sewage infrastructure as examples, the group’s counter-argument says, “Similarly, upgrades at local refineries and manufacturing plants are often driven by environmental requirements, as well.”
What If…
You may be asking, “Why should I care what they’re doing in Toledo?”
But what if we upended the premise, and made it (as Markie Miller says) “not about ownership, but about stewardship”?
What if we declared and embraced a declaration of rights for the Gulf of Mexico, acknowledging that its entire ecosystem has intrinsic rights to exist and flourish?
In Sarasota, August 2018, veterinarians prepare for necropsies on dead sea turles washed ashore by red tide. Courtesy: FL Dept. of Wildlife & Fisheries
What would that look like for endangered sea turtles, for dolphins, for redfish and shrimp, oysters and crabs?
What might it look like for those who’ve been battling to restore Louisiana’s vanishing coastline?
What might it look like for the oil and gas industry, and for the chemical and plastics manufacturers, whose production and products are major contributors to harming the Gulf’s health?
Most problematic, of course, is what it might look like for the Mississippi River watershed, which feeds the Gulf…
It took us both a couple of days to process and organize our commentary on what national sports reporters have characterized as the worst missed call in NFL history. That, of course, will always be an opinion, but it is impossible to deny the consequences of the officiating crew’s negligence and the unforgivably incompetent leadership of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Super Bowl 53 in Atlanta this year will not have a legitimate winner, which is unfortunate for the City of Atlanta (which invested an absurdly wasteful amount of money), both of the teams, their players, their coaches, and their fans. The NFL, in its infinite wisdom, designed the logo like they usually do, with Roman numerals, which is befitting. 53 in Roman numerals is LIII, but because they added the Lombardi Trophy in the middle, it incorrectly appears as LIIII. Either way, phonetically, the next Super Bowl is pronounced “lie.”
During the past three weeks, the City of New Orleans has hosted a series of community events, lectures, and volunteer drives, all in preparation for yesterday. Last morning, New Orleans hosted a parade in honor of a man who meant so much to the people of New Orleans that we built two statues in his honor. 61 years ago, inside of the New Zion Baptist Church in a neighborhood known as Central City, he joined nearly 100 people from across the country to launch a new organization: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Its members elected him as their first president.
He was a young preacher from Atlanta named Martin Luther King, Jr.
A memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in New Orleans.
He befriended one of New Orleans’s most influential gospel singers, Mahalia Jackson, and six years later, she read drafts of the speech he was preparing on behalf of the SCLC for the March on Washington.
With the cameras rolling, in front of the largest audience he had ever addressed, under the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, Jackson yelled out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin! Tell ’em about the dream!”
And as if struck by a bolt of lightning, King delivered some of the most memorable and consequential speeches in history. The lines that are etched into our collective memory and in monuments across the country weren’t actually in his prepared remarks; Dr. King was riffing off of a sermon he had recently given, and perhaps Mahalia Jackson understood its jazz– its cadence and its profundity– in a way he didn’t entirely appreciate.
There was a football game on Sunday in New Orleans, and with under two minutes to play, analysts at CBS Sportsline pegged the New Orleans Saints with a 98% chance of winning. The team was almost guaranteed a trip to the Super Bowl.
By now, even if you don’t follow football, you know what happened next.
Fans of the Falcons, the Saints’s long-time divisional rival, gloated online. Saints fans have been taunting them for blowing a 28-3 lead against the New England Patriots midway through the third quarter two years ago in the Super Bowl. Not all football fans are created equal, and there were more than a handful of people from Atlanta who took the shocking loss hard. Others were more sensible; it’s justa game, after all.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms
When asked which teams she hoped to play in the Super Bowl, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, “Anybody other than the Saints. Just anybody other than the Saints. I know there’s going to be a bounty on my head for saying that.” She subsequently walked back her comments, which were clearly intended to be funny but also beneath the dignity of her office.
At least one national sports commentator, who cares for neither team, had expressed public concern over the prospect of a Saints Super Bowl win in Atlanta, worried it would increase the number of fights and assaults.
“I’m sorry she feels that way. We would welcome them here. At the end of the day they shouldn’t be mad at us that they suck.”
New Orleans City Councilman Jay Banks
No doubt, there were Saints fans who should have been less cruel to their friends from Atlanta, but the Falcons collapse was not caused by horrific officiating. The consensus is nearly universal, and once hardcore Falcons fans get over the schadenfreude, they will be able to acknowledge: What happened in New Orleans on Sunday is incredibly damaging to a league and, particularly, to a commissioner whose credibility is already in free-fall.
There is such a thing as a healthy or good-natured rivalry; it’s a part of the myth-making that all professional sports leagues rely upon, recurring dramas that construct the narrative to sell more tickets, merchandise, and sponsorships. At its best, it also can build a sense of community.
But at its worst, it alienates and isolates like-minded people in politically and economically marginalized communities from maximizing their collective potential. It’s a real phenomenon. New Orleans and Atlanta are both majority-minority cities in the Deep South; they’re both enclaves of progressive politics surrounded by conservative suburbs, and the NFL, in particular, plays a prominent role in each city’s culture.
More than a few Falcons fans gloated: New Orleanians will be miserable over this for a long time. They’re right. Sort of.
A monument in New Orleans honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
Because yesterday, New Orleanians began planning a parade for their football team and actually held a parade for a preacher from Atlanta.
It’s hard not to wonder what Dr. King would have made of the corporate religion of American professional football and, according to multiple peer-reviewed studies, the ways in which social media has exacerbated and encouraged hostilities between friends and family members who root for opposing sports teams.
Meanwhile, Jerry Jones’ team, the Dallas Cowboys, which has not won a Super Bowl in 23 years, received more than $320 million from the government and is now the most valuable sports franchise in the world, worth a staggering $4.8 billion. They play in a tax-payer subsidized shrine to its owner, a stadium that is nearly thirty miles away from Dallas, and the whole game-day experience can easily cost a family of five $1,000 for mediocre seats and a parking nightmare.
They still call themselves “America’s Team,” which is not only because they’ve out-priced their local, working class fanbase, but because Jerry Jones is the only owner who controls his team’s merchandising. Sure, they’d like to win, but it’s ultimately unnecessary. In 2017, they took in more than $840 million and made more than $350 million in profit. They didn’t make the playoffs, as if it mattered.
II. The NFL’s Worst Nightmare.
“Monday morning quarterbacking”– a euphemism for those who specialize in second-guessing every decision made during the course of an entire game– is usually a pointless exercise in understanding the meaning of causality, the Butterfly Effect applied to football.
Sure, the Saints could have sealed up the NFC Championship game against the Rams a lot sooner than they did, with some better play-calling down the stretch, a defensive stop somewhere along the line, and Drew Brees in particular not making some inexplicably bad throws. (The final interception stands out the most, but the Saints might have ran the clock out on the Rams if he hadn’t thrown a slant to Michael Thomas low, and he badly missed an open Ted Ginn downfield on a third down pass earlier in the fourth quarter.)
Of course, all of those mistakes pale in comparison to a referee call– or lack thereof– that kept the Saints from sealing the game away and gave the Rams another chance:
Here, Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman blatantly commits pass interference on Tommylee Lewis– and, to boot, hits him with a helmet-to-helmet hit that should also draw a flag. The referees, of course, call nothing.
The Saints should have the ball on first and goal with 1:41 left and the Rams with only one timeout. If the Saints even just took a knee for three straight plays, they could kick a short field goal and leave the Rams with 5-10 seconds left on the clock. Instead, they have to kick the field goal now, and the Rams get the ball back with enough time left to drive to tie the game with a field goal, then winning in overtime with a preposterous kick on a 57-yard attempt by Greg Zeuerlein, one that might have been good from ten yards further out.
The Saints could have done a lot differently throughout the game and down the stretch, but all that will pale in the discussion about this game, and the historical record thereof, to the no-call on Robey-Coleman’s pass interference. It wasn’t even the first no-call on a helmet-to-helmet hit of the game:
After the above play, the referees determined that Hill was staggered enough that he needed to be taken off the field for concussion evaluation– but apparently the helmet-to-helmet hit that caused that wasn’t worthy of a penalty.
Nickell Robey-Coleman himself admitted the penalty should have been called. The NFL admitted it to Sean Payton immediately after the game.
Ultimately, Roger Goodell was satisfied with the result. Remember, the primary objective of the 2018 season was to bring football back to Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest market. Serendipitously, the Rams were able to make it all the way to the Super Bowl, and as an added bonus, his referees stuck it to the team he’s had it in for almost ever since he got unilateral disciplinary powers.
Make no mistake: Despite the beneficence of Tom Benson to the league, Roger Goodell, no matter what he says in public, hates the New Orleans Saints, the minor market franchise in an impoverished and vulnerable part of the country.
Tom Benson and Roger Goodell
Years ago, after the Saints win the Super Bowl, Goodell needed a high-profile scapegoat in a small market to demonstrate to the American public he was finally interested in taking medical research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy seriously.
The media called it Bountygate, and it was a farce from the beginning (more later in the report).
The NFL made a big deal about improving their officiating this year, even hiring full-time officials for the first time. Somehow this has resulted in even worse and more inconsistent officiating.
The NFL also made a big deal about player safety this year, even to the point of calling a number of specious roughing-the-passer penalties early in the season (mostly on Green Bay’s Clay Matthews). Yet somehow the referees missed two helmet-to-helmet hits against the Saints.
What else do you say about this? What do you say to all the fans whose tax dollars go toward team and stadium incentives, that the league can’t even deliver the fair and honest competition it promises in return? John Oliver has perhaps the best snd most disturbing commentary on the subject.
The New England Patriots won the AFC Championship Game in overtime.
If the referees call the NFC Championship Game correctly, we would get, at last, a matchup of the two longest-lived dynasties in the NFL today. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are the only QB-coach combo in the NFL with a longer tenure than Sean Payton and Drew Brees. With the firing of Mike McCarthy and the resignation of Marvin Lewis, Belichick and Payton are the two longest-tenured head coaches.
Brady and Brees are the oldest starting QBs in the NFL, the only two in the league over 40 (as of last Tuesday, when Brees turned 40). The Patriots and Saints have never met in the Super Bowl. A dynastic matchup between those two franchises, in what could possibly be the last time around for both quarterbacks, would have been a fine summit for this NFL season, a fine way to put a capstone on the era of the last generation of QBs, before players like Patrick Mahomes and Jared Goff take up the mantle for the new generation.
It’s a shame we won’t get that now. It’s a shame we won’t get that directly due to bad officiating and negligent leadership.
III. The Most Exclusive Club in America.
The lobby of the Ballyntine Hotel
There are 32 owners or representatives who gather a few times to discuss the business of the National Football League. It is the most exclusive club in the nation, and today, there are essentially only three ways to join: You either need to be billionaire waiting for another billionaire to die, an heir to a current owner, or the spouse of an owner.
Roger Goodell is the Commissioner of the National Football League, but he’s really just a consigliere for a couple of dozen billionaires and families with multi-generational wealth– namely, 31 of the 32 owners or ownership groups of a National Football League franchise: The granddaughter of the Firestone Tire fortune who married the grandson of Henry Ford, the brothers Mr. Johnson and Mr. Johnson, the husband of a Walmart heiress, a handful of self-made billionaires, and a roster of spoiled, overgrown children. Oh, and the nonprofit shareholders of the Green Bay Packers, an ownership model that they will never allow again.
21 of the NFL’s stadiums were built with taxpayer subsidized money, which has made those franchise owners even wealthier.
In May of 2016, the ownership club met in Charlotte, North Carolina at the luxury Ballantyne Hotel to vote which cities would win the opportunity to host the 2019, 2020, and 2022 Super Bowls.
According to contemporaneous reports, New Orleans was expected to win their bid for 2019, because they had narrowly lost out on hosting in 2018 and because they could not also compete for 2020 or 2021 due to conflicting events. 2019 would be their only shot.
The Big Easy easily made it into the top four.
Then, it made it into the finals against Atlanta. They were promising to spend a ton of public money and would be in a brand-new stadium.
Atlanta announced their win with a video featuring an inordinate amount of concrete and traffic.
They quickly decided the locations of the next two years: 2020 in Miami and 2021 in Los Angeles. Goodell was pushing for L.A. so enthusiastically that it didn’t matter there wasn’t a team or a stadium yet.
Eventually, they had to move the date back to 2022 because of construction delays, Tampa gets the Super Bowl in 2021 instead.
Roget Goodell says his job is to “protect the shield,” which is a reference to the league’s logo, but behind the shield aren’t fans or players or employees. The shield protects the wealthy owners who pay him $35 million a year to manage their family fortunes and leverage as much as he possibly can for them through the perfectly legal extortion of state and local governments.
“My job is to protect the integrity of the NFL and to make sure the game is as safe as possible,” he claimed in 2010, presumably with a straight face.
Steve Gleason’s punt block thirteen years ago isn’t remembered because the Saints were playing our main division rivals; it was a small symbol of the city’s redemption and worth.
IV. Don’t Wait on Goodell.
The NFL’s logo for this year’s Super Bowl, appropriately, is phonetically pronounced “lie,” spelled in Roman numerals. The Lombardi trophy’s placement makes it appear as Super Bowl 54, which is correctly spelled as LIV.
Notwithstanding the enormous amount of money you need to own any sports franchise– particularly a football team– there is a reason the wealthy hold on to their teams as long as they can, sometimes through multiple generations: It’s a legitimately fun job, one that allows you to travel across the country, insulates you from employee criticism (thanks to the overly broad “personal conduct” clause in the Collective Bargaining Agreement), and generates enormous profits. It’s virtually impossible to lose money as the owner of an NFL team, no matter how bad the product on the field or the news off the field is.
When Saints won the Super Bowl for the first time in 2010, there were no legendary curses that had finally been broken; the whole region had always seemed cursed. But the victory was cathartic and unifying– at least for a few days– for a region bitterly divided by politics, haunted by the original sins of slavery. The poorest, most exploited, most polluted, most incarcerated, and least educated region could win the biggest prize in American sports.
After the Saints won, an entire region– and particularly the city of New Orleans– went outside and embraced one another; grown men cried– out of joy and gratitude, yes, but also out of sadness for their fathers and friends who had passed away and who never believed something like this could ever happen, in the same way fans of the Boston Red Sox lit up cemeteries with their flashlights on the night the team finally broke the Curse of the Great Bambino.
Less than three months after the Saints won, a rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and killed eleven people. Oil spilled and spilled and spilled for five months, the largest man-made environmental disaster in American history.
And then a wealthy white man, the son of a right-wing U.S. Senator, tried his best to invalidate the one unifying and uplifting thing that we had celebrated as a region: The legitimacy of the Saints Super Bowl win.
On Sunday, ignoring a rule that provided him with the requisite authority, ignoring the assessments of his own executive-level officiating staff, and ignoring the open confession of Robey-Coleman of the Rams, Roger Goodell made this year’s Super Bowl illegitimate. He had the time, technology, and authority to correct the mistake; it is precisely why such a rule exists.
There is a mountain of evidence, much of which is unknown even to the fiercest Saints fans, that Roger Goodell was motivated by a personal animus against Sean Payton. Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, was called into arbitrate, and he cleared every single player who was punished by Goodell.
Gsyle Benson and Roger Goddell
We understand the media’s impulse to praise Gayle Benson for issuing a strongly-worded letter essentially demanding a rule change. But that is not satisfactory. If she can, she should sue for breach of breach of contract, loss of economic opportunity, and demand Goodell finally be held accountability for his negligence and hypocrisy.
If this had occurred to Jerry Jones or Robert Kraft, a lawsuit would’ve been filed.
Louisiana’s last “businessman governor” was Mike Foster – but not for want of other business owners trying 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 fourthin 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) – came in second in the primary. 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, with 54% of the primary vote.
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 in 2013, placed third in the 2007 gubernatorial primary. There were rumors flying – right up to the close of qualifying – 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, TX, and Sulphur, Louisiana. They design and build electrical instrumentation and control systems for large industrial plants, and employ 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-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 stated he’s willing and able to self-fund his gubernatorial campaign with $5-million.
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 actual 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, rather than building the structure itself.
According to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, from 2008-2016, ISC Constructors was a subcontractor on industrial projects that – combined — 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 total of 19 new full-time jobs between them. 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 what ISC does is primarily installation of 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.
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 getting $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”. Houma Today branded him as such in the story headline about his filing to run, 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. In 1996, Art Favre served as one of ABC’s vice-presidents. In addition, Rispone was named to the executive committee of LABI’s Board of Directors, on which Grigsby served, that same year.
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.
That was where 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. Financial necessity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina encouraged the proliferation of charter schools. Additionally, in his first year as governor in 2008, Jindal – a devout Catholic – had pushed for lawmakers to authorize the funding of vouchers, 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. He then, along with Lane Grigsby, engaged in building some of the infrastructure that would help advance comprehensive “education reform” through Louisiana’s Legislature in 2012.
Rispone and his wife Linda put $750,000 into producing The Experimentdocumentary, released in 2011. Like the more widely-viewed 2010 film, Waiting For Superman, it became part of the public relations campaign put on by education reform advocates prior to the 2012 session.
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 bragging about a meeting Rispone had with the Secretary, and the length of their work together.)
Rispone (2nd from left) and DeVos (center). Photo courtesy ISC Constructors newsletter.
Rispone ran 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.
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 Waltons. Rispone and his wife Linda each put $100,000 in, and at one point, the PAC had more than a half-million-dollars available to spend. 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 governor race 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, putting $150,000 of his personal money into it. 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 – is “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 underpinnings 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 would have 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 10 schools, including the three newest schools built by EBR. The measures died on the House floor.
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.
Sen. Bodi White
“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, then 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 the 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, calling it “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
Rispone also admitted that, as a member of St. George Catholic Church, he was perturbed by St. George’s membership in the coalition of church pastors and congregants.
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.”
With all due respect, Mr. Rispone, what do your campaign contributions say about how much you truly treasure faith, morals and virtues?
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 2007 revelation and his admission of a “serious sin”.
In addition, you gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory fund, and – based on your recent tweets – are looking 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 are guaranteed to at least match her third-place finish.
On Oct. 26th, 1939, he boarded a train out of Penn Station in his native New York and headed toward a new life in Melrose Plantation outside of Natchitoches, Louisiana. In their book Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art, Art Shriver and Tom Whitehead describe the New Yorker’s arrival as the “second most important event” in Hunter’s life, with the first being her own move to Melrose as a child.
Melrose Plantation, 1940.
Hunter never knew him as Frank VerNooy Mineah, his real name. She had met him two years prior, during a visit to Melrose with a French man, Christian Belle, presumably his lover.
The perennial writer-in-residence, Lyle Saxon, introduced Hunter to the new guest. He said his name was François Mignon, also of Paris, France.
Lyle Saxon at Melrose
Frank VerNooy Mineah had invented an entirely new life for himself in Natchitoches, where he had planned on remaining for only six weeks but ended up staying until he died in 1980. In many respects, Mignon was a complete fraud, but according to those who knew him best, his genius was still unquestionable. He could be forgiven for scripting a new name, a new history, and a new future, and more than any other singular figure, François Mignon is responsible for championing the artwork of Clementine Hunter.
To understand Hunter, you must understand her relationship with the mysterious and eccentric François Mignon, a pathological liar who also recognized the truth of her art, but, more than anything else, you must understand Hunter’s muse, Melrose Plantation, a place every bit as complex and contradictory and conflicted about its past as Mignon.
François Mignon discusses Clementine Hunter in 1978 (Source NSU).
Hunter and Mignon in 1955.
And to understand Melrose, you have to begin with a relationship between another black woman from Natchitoches Parish and a white man who actually was from France, Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer. The two got married. They named their youngest son François.
II. Marie-Thérèse Coincoin:
The true story about Melrose Plantation will likely challenge some of what you probably believe about the antebellum South, because the area once named La Grande Côte, a bend in what is now known as the Cane River, was a unique enclave with a distinct culture. Eight miles north is the town of Natchitoches, the oldest French settlement in the United States and the oldest permanent European settlement in the vast Louisiana Purchase.
The town is named after a local indigenous tribe, a word that scholars believe translates as “land where the dirt is red.” Today, in nearby Kisatchie National Forest, there is a protected section of 38,000 acres of rugged terrain known as the Red Dirt National Wildlife Management Preserve.
In 1714, four years before Bienville settled New Orleans, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis established Natchitoches, which was essentially just a small fort intended to thwart Spanish expansion. St. Denis spent the next few years wandering, eventually making his way into Mexico, where he fell in love with the step-granddaughter of a Spanish commander. Eventually, he and his wife were able to talk their way back to Natchitoches.
St. Denis died in 1744, leaving behind five children and his wife, who, according to local folklore was the wealthiest woman west of the Mississippi River. (He has one living direct descendant, Monseigneur Jefferson DeBlanc, Jr. of Church Point, Louisiana).
At the time of the patriarch’s death, St. Denis’s window, now Madame de Soto, owned numerous slaves, including husband and wife François and Marie Françoise, parents of a two-year-old daughter Marie-Thérèse Coincoin.
By the age of 36, Marie-Thérèse Coincoin became the matriarch of one of the most powerful and influential families in Louisiana, a family that remains synonymous with the region and with Creole culture: the Métoyers.
When she was still young, Marie-Thérèse became the concubine of a white Frenchman, Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, who, by then, had surpassed the St. Denis descendants in wealth.
Presumably, the two fell in love; they wanted to have their own children, but the church would not give its blessing. Marie-Thérèse was still a slave, which meant Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer would have to pay for her manumission. She already had five children before their marriage, at least two of whom were fathered by another man, and another eight children during their marriage, all of whom were raised as Métoyers.
All told, Marie-Thérèse had thirteen children, though the oldest three of them had never been manumitted.
In 1788, the couple divorced, but Métoyer gave his ex-wife a sizable tract of property, and Marie-Thérèse became one of the most consequential free persons of color in antebellum Louisiana. Together with her children, she founded Isle Brevelle, one of the nation’s first communities for free people of color. She tasked her oldest son Augustin with building the nation’s first church for free people of color; another son, Louis, was tasked with building it.
Ironically, despite her support for emancipation and her wealth, she owned slaves herself and wasn’t able to pay for the freedom of some of her own children and grandchildren. At one point, the Métoyer family was estimated to have owned at least 8% of all slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Historians largely agree that Marie-Thérèse was a complicated but ultimately a fundamentally decent and enormously accomplished woman.
Coincoin, her biographer writes, “was born a slave … and became an independent black woman in a world dominated by white men. She adapted successfully to all the situations that life presented to her; from being the concubine and housekeeper of a rich white man, she became a profitable farmer and businesswoman in her own right.”
Her son Louis did not only build a church. A dozen years after his mother’s death, he also built the big house at Melrose Plantation, which he founded in 1796. Upon his father’s death in 1815, Métoyer granted Coincoin and their children freedom property.
Louis, unfortunately, died a year before home’s completion in 1833; his son Jean-Baptiste finished it though, branding the family name on the floor near the fireplace.
Louis’s sons operated Melrose after his death, but by 1847, his son Theophile lost the property. A woman from New Orleans purchased it, though it is unclear how much she actually cared for the estate. After the Civil War, Melrose sat vacant and derelict.
In 1884, a successful Irish immigrant named Joe Henry bought his son John Hampton a plantation in Gerry on his 21st birthday, though he did not transfer title to his prized possession known as Melrose Plantation until his death in 1899. John and his wife of six years, Cammie, moved in, and she and her husband raised their eight children- seven boys and one daughter- in the home.
In 1918, John Hampson Henry, Sr. died unexpectedly from a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and his 46 year old widow decided to do something radical with the old plantation.
III. Cammie’s Colony:
Cammie Henry, Lyle Saxon, and J.H. Henry during a rare snow day at Melrose in 1930.
Carmelite “Cammie” Henry was less interested in operating a plantation than she was in creating an artist colony. “(She) opened her home to the students and instructors, enabling them to paint the Melrose landscape. She also become interested in traditional weaving techniques and bookbinding, often sharing her skills with others in the community,” Lucy Gutman of 64 Parishes wrote. Still, Melrose remained a working plantation.
It is difficult to know the relationship she had with her late husband, but it is impossible to ignore the ways in which she completely changed her life after his death, poring herself into becoming a true patron of the arts.
Clementine Hunter on the grounds of Melrose. 1930s.
“Having converted some of the plantation buildings into studio spaces, Henry invited artists from across the nation to visit, work, and even live at Melrose. In addition to Lyle Saxon and Alberta Kinsey, her visitors included Harnette Kane, Rachel Field, and Ada Jack Carver,” Gutman writes. “Saxon, perhaps her most frequent visitor, wrote most of his novel, Children of Strangers, while in residence. Because of Henry’s efforts, Melrose became an important artistic and literary community during the Southern Renaissance—a period of intense literary production by southern writers between World War I and the end of World War II.”
Photographer Richard Avedon also spent time at Melrose.
In late 2018, author Patricia Austin Becker published a book about Cammie’s Melrose, appropriately titled Cane River Bohemia.
The most talented and legendary artist to ever emerge from Melrose Plantation didn’t travel far, of course. She didn’t even realize she was an artist until she began painting in her fifties, with the encouragement of Cammie Henry but particularly because of François Mignon.
Cammie Henry passed away in 1948, decades before a woman she knew primarily for her cooking had become a true celebrity American folk artist. However, it is hard to imagine how Hunter’s talents could have been cultivated without Cammie Henry’s vision for building an artistic community, and Hunter, throughout her long life, never uttered a single criticism of her former employer.
But there is a reason she signed her initials “C.H.” in reverse; it was to distinguish herself from Cammie Henry.
By 1971, Hunter was becoming a national phenomenon. That year, she illustrated a book by James Register called The Joyous Coast. It was a surprise bestseller.
Throughout the book, Hunter painted a series of ducks she called “Qwah-Qwah.” It was an homage to a woman who fundamentally reshaped the history of her home: Marie-Thérèse Coincoin.
More than 24 hours after the reports surfaced that Rep. Ralph Abraham (R- LA05) reneged on his pledge to donate his government salary to charity during his second term, the congressman and gubernatorial candidate, along with members of his campaign team, are scrambling to provide any reasonable explanation or proof that refutes the reporting, first made on The Advocate and then followed up with additional research by The Bayou Brief.
Abraham’s campaign had been aware of media inquiries into the issue for several days, which provided them with ample time to produce relevant tax and banking records and grant permission to the two charities to which he made the pledge, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, which provides free medical care to children with cancer, and the Independence Fund, which offers services to double-amputee combat veterans, to disclose his alleged donations, which are required by law to be filed with the IRS on their 990 Section B reports.
Both organizations are legally allowed to disclose the identities of their donors to the public, and many other 501(c)(3)s, as a matter of policy, voluntarily disclose donors. Importantly, these disclosures would establish Abraham’s repeated claim that he donated $348,000 to the two charities. Currently, because of his failure to offer any documentation, there is no way to objectively verify the congressman’s statements.
Abraham’s campaign spokesperson Cole Avery asserted the congressman had not been aware of the constraints the government imposes on members of Congress from receiving outside income, including income to physicians like Abraham.
Avery’s assertion is dubious and easily disprovable, however. During the 2014 campaign, the congressman was well-aware of those constraints, which were repeatedly raised by his Democratic opponent, Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo, and became the subject of an internal investigation into payments made by LSU to then-congressman Bill Cassidy.
Yesterday, in response, Abraham issued a two-tweet response, disingenuously framing himself as someone who did not seek “fanfare” for his donations, despite the fact that it was a major part of his campaign platform, and falsely asserting he had been criticized for donating to charity, ending his tweet with the hashtag “fakenews.”
The reporting did not criticize Abraham for donating; it accurately uncovered the fact that he deceived voters by continuing to campaign on a “No Salary” platform in 2016 as well. By his staff’s own admission, Abraham did not donate his salary during his second term.
In an attempt to defend Abraham, his campaign has accused incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards for raising taxes, which is both an implicit admission of the congressman’s culpability and a distortion of the budgetary process and the ways in which the Republican-led legislature is both responsible for passing a balanced budget and for refusing to negotiate any good faith plan to rescue the state from the edge of the “fiscal cliff” by rolling back exemptions given to business and industry.
Former Gov.. Bobby Jindal and his Republican allies in the legislature left Edwards with a structural deficit of nearly $1.6 billion, and they championed a temporary sales tax increase to insulate big businesses from losing massive giveaways that, according to data, offer a negligible return on investment and often result in job losses.
Abraham’s team may have been unprepared for responding to the scandal, but Democratic organizations and allies of Gov. Edwards were immediately prepared.
The organization American Bridge had produced and published a digital ad within hours of the story.
On the condition of anonymity, one well-known Republican political consultant acknowledged to The Bayou Brief that Abraham’s broken promises and his campaign’s incompetent response will likely do permanent damage to his gubernatorial ambitions.
“Unfortunately, it permanently tarnishes his reputation,” the person said, adding that Abraham has only himself, and not the media, to blame.
Indeed, it seems likely Abraham’s integrity will remain in doubt, considering this was his campaign platform.
