Where the Alligators Roam

John DeSantis is a reporter based in southeast Louisiana. He uncovered a story about the violent end of a sugar cane labor strike in the nearby town of Thibodaux that occurred in 1887. He wrote about what little he could find of the record of the events which, according to the official count, resulted in the deaths of eight people ” all of whom were black sugar cane workers.The story led to a book contract which pushed DeSantis to dig deeper into the story. With the help of an archivist at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, he was able to locate the names of the eight people who were listed as those killed in the streets of the town on a single day ” November 23, 1887. That led to yet another discovery which enabled him to get to eyewitness accounts of the massacre.DeSantis believes the number of black workers killed that day in Thibodaux by white vigilantes was between 30 and 60. Most were involved with the Knights of Labor strikes that had originated in Terrebonne Parish the year before, but carried over into neighboring LaFourche Parish in 1887.The book is a slim volume that unveils a wealth of detail about labor and raced relations in post-Reconstruction Louisiana and the violent events of that day in Thibodaux that reverberate still today.We talk about the events, the writing of the book, and the key discoveries that unlocked this story that “nobody wanted told.”DeSantis is now engaged in the effort to locate the place where the victims of the massacre were buried.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America was formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012. The group, which now has approximately 5 million members has focused its energies on handgun laws and safety. While it has had success at the state lever (even here in Louisiana), it appeared to be fighting waves of public indifference to the hundreds of mass shootings that have happened since those pre-Christmas days when 20 children and six adults were gunned down at the school in Newton, Connecticut.The murder of 17 people — 14 students, one teacher and two coaches — last week seems to have broken through the numbness brought on by mass shootings between Sandy Hook and the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week. The very public outcry of survivors of the shootings touched off waves of anger among young people which, in turned, appeared to shame adults whose inability to convince their lawmakers to pass laws to prevent further mass shootings allowed the mid-February murders to take place.Rhonda Gleason is a teacher and parent. She’s been active in the Louisiana chapter of Moms Demand Action for more than two years, playing mostly defense in this state where the NRA is actually a designated business partner of the State of Louisiana.As Gleason explains in this interview, Moms Demand Action’s successes in Louisiana have come through putting human faces on gun violence victims. In 2017, the group defeated a bill that would have eliminated the need for a concealed carry permit (and training) for “anyone who could show that they legally possessed a gun.”The Parkland, Florida, shootings have given the movement for common sense gun laws here and in other states new momentum. Perhaps America’s conscience has been re-engaged on the gun violence issue.Propelled by the new energy and outrage of young people who are tired of being targets, those opposing the NRA and their gun manufacturer patrons might now have the chance to pass laws that will break the current cycle of mass shootings that has seemed unending at times.

At the start of 2018, we are nearly three years out from the formal start of the redistricting process that will redraw lines for every legislative body in Louisiana ranging from town councils and school boards, to parish councils, the Louisiana Legislature and our six congressional districts.The process formally kicks off at the end of 2020 when the results of the United States Census conducted that year will be released. In 2021, the redrawing of district lines will fall primarily on the legislative bodies that will then elect members from.But, before we get to that point, Louisiana will elect a new legislature in 2019 and that body will redraw not only its own district lines, but that of our congressional districts and, maybe, our Supreme Court districts.Dr. Brian Marks teaches political geography at LSU in Baton Rouge. He was a panelist at Fair Districts Louisiana’s Redistricting Summit held at the Lod Cook Alumni Center just off the LSU campus on January 19.In this conversation, Dr. Marks (who is programming director at WHYR radio station in Baton Rouge) talks about the various kinds of gerrymandering that has been used over the decades in attempts to lock in or lock out political advantage. We also talk about some earlier redistricting processes in Louisiana and the prospects for the use of an independent commission to carryout redistricting.Representative and House Speaker Pro Tempore Walt Leger III said at the summit that he believes Legislators should not be in the business of choosing their constituents, that it should work the other way around. He didn’t get much support for the idea from fellow Democrats. Removing politics from a political process is easier said than done.Louisiana’s current congressional district map was redrawn with the explicit purpose of carving out a new seat for Congressman Charles Boustany whose 7th District was taken away due to the more rapid population growth in other states. Boustany won the redrawn 3rd District in a 2012 race that pitted him against freshman Congressman Jeff Landry (who is now state Attorney General).Black legislators now believe they painted themselves into a corner with the 2011 redistricting which saw many minority majority districts that had super majorities of Black voters in those districts. The problem was, as Rep. Patricia Haynes Smith said at the summit, “while you’re getting seats that are safe for African Americans with that approach, you’re also creating white seats where people elected don’t have to take into account the interests of Black voters.We cover a good bit of ground here. I think you’ll find it worth your while.

This show materialized when I could not find a guest to interview during the final week of 2017. So, I wrote up some notes and reminders and recorded a monologue about 2017 events that I thought were significant and had the potential to have an impact in the New Year which was just around the corner.Most of this was about public events, but there is a segment that deals with some personal losses I experienced in 2017. Those losses involved my mom and my friend Jim Simmon. Mom’s death was not unexpected, she had been in a slow, steady decline for about 10 months. Still, despite having time to prepare for it, I was taken aback by how hard it hit me.Jim Simmon and I had broken into journalism together at the Opelousas Daily World in about 1978. We did some work together interviewing candidates for governor in 1979. We also lived together in a drafty old farm house outside of Lawtell, LA, during a bitterly cold winter. Thankfully, Jim had a full-size Ford pickup truck and hundreds of trees had been cut along then-US 167 near Opelousas as it was being converted into I-49. We got a lot of free wood as a result and occasionally managed to get the house warm during that winter. We certainly chopped a lot of wood!Anyway, this podcast was the final show of 2017. Sorry for the delay in posting it.

John M. Barry‘s books have informed and moved people, but his greatest accomplishment may well be having singled-handedly (at first) changed Louisiana’s conversation about saving our coast.Barry did this by working diligently and persistently to convince his fellow members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East (SLFPAE) to launch a lawsuit against what were originally 99 oil, gas and pipeline companies for damage their work inflicted on wetlands under its jurisdiction. The lawsuit drew the wrath of Louisiana’s political gods at the time — Governor Bobby Jindal and the oil and gas industry. Killing the levee board lawsuit became Jindal’s obsession.Unlike much of Louisiana’s governing processes, the super levee boards created in the wake of the federal levee failures in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, were designed to move the politics out of what was recognized as an essential work of the state — protecting citizens and their property from flooding.Members of the authorities (east and west) were nominated through a process of committees, who then submitted limited lists of nominees to the governor from which to choose. Terms for the members were fixed — they did not serve at the pleasure of the governor. As a result, Jindal could not replace the board with one more compliant to what had until then be the time-honored Louisiana political position that we knew the oil and gas industry had damaged our coastal wetlands, but our leaders (whose campaigns were financed by that industry) did not want the oil and gas industry to pay for that damage.Barry’s term had expired by the time Jindal launched his war against the levee board. Barry was not renominated. Instead, he formed the non-profit Restore Louisiana Now where he led the public campaign to explain the logic behind the lawsuit and the fight to prevent Jindal and legislators from killing the lawsuit.The official count is that 19 bills were filed in the 2014 session seeking various ways of killing the suit. One managed to pass but it was later declared unconstitutional because the Senate had violated its own rules in the manner it handled the bill.The lawsuit bounced between state and federal jurisdictions before landing in the federal district court in New Orleans where it was struck down. Subsequent appeals upheld the decision.But, while the rush was on to try to kill the levee board lawsuit, parishes operating in the Coastal Zone — where the damage occurred — started filing suits against oil and gas companies for coastal damages using their standing under the Coastal Zone Management Act. A total of six suits have been filed thus far. More are expected in 2018.Governor John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal in office and has been encouraging the other 14 parishes in the Coastal Zone to launch similar suits. Edwards deputized the Department of Natural Resources to be his vehicle to input in the suits after Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who campaigned publicly against the suits in 2015, sought to intervene in the suits to displace the parishes.We’re a ways away from resolving the suits and we’re a long way from saving our coast. But, we will never go back to the days when everybody but the oil and gas industry is asked to do their fair share in what will be an intergenerational, multi-billion dollar effort to stop south Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.We have John Barry to thank for that. And for his great books!

An intra-party squabble involving Louisiana’s then-seven congressmen dominated the 2011 congressional redistricting process. Because other states grew faster than us, Louisiana lost a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2010 Census.The Legislature has the responsibility to redraw the congressional district maps after each Census, but the congressional delegation is actively involved in the process. That was certainly the case during the 2011 special session on redistricting.Congressman Charles Boustany‘s 7th Congressional District was being eliminated as the state went from seven to six districts. Boustany wanted to stay in Congress and was popular with his colleagues. Congressman Jeff Landry‘s 3rd Congressional District was adjacent to Boustany’s 7th and together they covered just about all of coastal south Louisiana.The map that won the backing of the majority of the congressional delegation and the Legislature created the new 3rd District primarily out of Boustany’s old 7th. Landry’s old 3rd District (to which he’d won election in 2010) was carved up between the 1st and 6th Districts and Landry found him self running for re-election in 2012 against Boustany. Boustany won and Landry went off to work for the Koch Brothers for a bit.The problem with the resulting map is that the jockeying for a favorable map between Boustany and Landry obscured what should have been the central consideration in drawing the new six-district map — Louisiana’s 37 percent non-white population warranted the creation of at least two congressional districts where minorities would have a chance to get elected (not to mention Democrats).We are approaching the beginning of a new cycle that will give Louisiana a shot at creating a congressional district map that more accurately reflects the demographic reality of the state than the one we will have been saddled with for a decade by the time 2021 rolls around.The key is citizen involvement. There will be plenty of opportunities to do that. There are tools that can enable you to develop your own maps to submit. Most of all, it’s clear that allowing a single party to dominate redistricting does not produce a map that reflects us as a people. Ultimately, that diminishes the ability of our congressional delegation, legislature and local governing councils to represent the people they are elected to serve.In the podcast, I talk about the 2011 process (in which I was an active participant) and opportunities to learn about the upcoming process that will be upon us sooner than you think. Hint: the 2019 statewide elections will be crucial.

Lily Stagg spent the late spring and most of the summer of 2016 riding with a group of cyclists from South Carolina to Santa Cruz, California, helping to build low-income housing along the way. The ride covered 4,200 miles in 81 days — including 18 days of working on houses.There were 30 other riders in her group, including four team leaders. Most of the riders had never met each other until they gathered in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (across the bay from Charleston) for a couple of days of preparation before they set out.Adjusting to all those personalities during a period of extreme physical and mental exertion proved to be the biggest challenge of the adventure, Lily says in the interview.The experience was intense and transformative. Lily was already a dedicated cyclist before her Bike and Build summer, having ridden as a member of the University of Louisiana Ragin Cajun Cycling team in the spring semester prior to the cross country ride. She had just recovered from a serious cycling accident prior to her collegiate team experience which provided the perfect training regime to at least get her ready to ride across the United States.This interview was recorded in September, 2016, just over a month after Lily returned to Lafayette from California after completing the SC2SC Route and joining her by then best friends in dipping their wheels in the Pacific.Since this interview, Lily has ridden another spring season with the UL team and branched out into cyclo-cross during the fall.In this interview, Lily talks about how cycling evolved from a nice means of transportation into a passion that has her seeking out opportunities to race across the Gulf South.

Michelle Erenberg is co-founder of Lift Louisiana — a non-profit based in New Orleans that advocates for the freedom of women to exercise their reproductive rights. Erenberg is a wife and mother who has been a public policy analyst and advocate for the past 15 years.In our conversation, Erenberg explains that she started Lift Louisiana to help raise women above the barrage of laws that the Louisiana legislature passes on a regular basis that invariably seek to limit the choices available to Louisiana women when it comes to reproductive rights.It is clear from the actions of working majorities in the Louisiana legislature that women are viewed as second-class citizens. Many of those same law makers parroted lies about opposing the Affordable Care Act because (they maintained) they opposed allowing the government to come between patients and their doctors. Yet, the anti-abortion laws and regulations enacted and promulgated have had that exact effect — inserting the State of Louisiana into what should be private discussions between women and their doctors.It’s moved beyond irony into blatant hypocrisy.Earlier this year, Lift Louisiana launched a statewide media campaign calling for Louisiana lawmakers to pass laws based on facts, not laws based on lies. Erenberg says that is precisely what many of the state’s restrictive abortion laws and rules are — based on lies about science and medicine.In addition to public advocacy (Erenberg is not an attorney), Lift Louisiana also helps train lawyers in the process of how to represent minors who seek abortions in the state-mandated judicial bypass hearings. They do that as part of the Louisiana Judicial Bypass Project.While Lift Louisiana has just gotten started, Erenberg says the group will continue to publicly advocate for women’s reproductive freedom as well as full healthcare equality. Judging by their early work, Erenberg and Lift Louisiana are off to a solid start.

Scott Eustis has had a busy mid-2017.As the Gulf Restoration Network‘s wetlands specialist, he’s been part of flyovers finding chemical and petroleum product releases in the flood waters following Hurricane Harvey’s strike and the flooding that inundated southeast Texas in the wake of the storm. He’s been involved in flyovers in the Gulf of Mexico where pipeline ruptures remain part of the regular cost of business there. And, he’s been flying above the Atchafalaya Basin watching pipeline operators wreck “water quality projects” that had repaired Basin water flow that had been disrupted by earlier pipeline work at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers.Like a number of environmental organizations in Louisiana, GRN and Eustis are fighting the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline proposed by Energy Transfer Partners. It’s one leg of the network that begins with the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Bakken fields of North Dakota and zig-zags across and down the country into Nederland, TX. Bayou Bridge aims to connect the Nederland operation and a Phillips 66 refinery in Lake Charles to a storage facility in St. James Parish on the Mississippi River.There are thousands of pipelines in Louisiana. The challenge is making the case that Bayou Bridge is somehow more dangerous than those others.Eustis talks about the need for an environmental impact study of the Bayou Bridge project in the context of the already significant damage inflicted on the Basin by those other pipelines. The cumulative effect of hundreds (if not thousands) of disruptions of water flow in the Basin threatens its viability as a swamp and estuary.Eustis and GRN work in five northern Gulf of Mexico states — Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. It’s a broad, culturally, geologically and environmentally diverse. The indifference of the Trump administration to the environment and threats to it has made the work of GRN all the more important. The broad range of outrages that flow from the Trump White House and threaten things from civil rights to climate protections has sparked resistance but also a raft of new organizations, all of which seem to be competing for a fixed piece of the financial real of progressives.Established organizations have been squeezed as new ones emerge with the resistance strategy of the moment.The climate and environmental challenges confronting the country grow daily and groups like Gulf Restoration Network have been stretching to respond.Scott Eustis is on the frontlines watching the problems unfold, documenting the damage done, and chronicling the reckoning that is coming if we don’t find effective responses quickly.

The United States spends more on military arms, equipment and personnel than any other country. More than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and England combined, according to the National Priorities Project. We sell most of the weapons that countries like Saudi Arabia, England and others buy.In no small measure, the business of the United States is war.Between our foreign policy and our defense spending, we create markets for weaponry and wars and then pivot to respond to the siren cries of those markets.And, while the U.S. Defense Department stands resolute in its commitment to respond to climate change to protect its bases and national security interests, the Department is a major source of greenhouse gases as a profligate burner of fossil fuels.The No War 2017 Conference at American University in Washington in September sought to find paths to link the anti-way and peace movements with the climate and environmental movements. That effort naturally puts the U.S. military at the center of the debate.The conference was a project of World Beyond War, an international peace organization.I was invited to speak about the successful fight to prevent the open burning of 16 million pounds of munitions propellant at Camp Minden following an explosion of a small amount of some of the materials in 2012. After a strong grassroots effort that engaged thousands of northwest Louisiana citizens in the fight, the area’s congressman, one Senator, and a dedicated state representative.While at the conference, I conducted several interviews, three of which are included in this podcast.In order of appearance they are:Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright;Alice Slater;and Nick Mottern.They constitute roughly the second have of the program. I talk about the conference and Camp Minden in the first half.President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Joint Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, left office with a nationally televised Farewell Address. In it, he warned Americans to guard against the influence of the Military Industrial Complex. The video of the full 16-minute speech is below.https://youtu.be/OyBNmecVtdU

Dr. Willie Parker was born into poverty and Christianity in Birmingham, AL. He became a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. He later joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu.During his first 12 years of practice, Parker did not provide abortion services for any of his patience. While some of his Christian friends were opposed to it and believed abortions to be immoral, Parker says he avoided dealing with the moral complexity of the issue by not providing the services himself. He did observe other providers perform the procedures, but he kept his distance from the controversial subject by not directly providing services.Things changed when a change of leadership at the hospital led to the end of providing abortion services there. It sparked a crisis at the hospital and a rebellion among some physicians and nurses who saw the necessity of the legal services.When some of his peers decided to create a clinic separate from the hospital where they would provide the mostly poor women the abortions they wanted, Parker came to a personal reckoning with abortion.In this interview, he talks about how listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech, delivered in Memphis, TN, the night before he was assassinated changed his perspective on abortion and moved him to get trained and certified so that he, too, could provide the services for his patients.The part of Dr. King’s sermon/speech that moved him, Parker says in the interview, was when the Civil Rights leader talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jewish traveler had been beaten and injured while traveling. A priest and a Levite pass him but ignore his needs. A Samaritan (considered enemies of Jews at the time) stopped to help.Parker says that it was the Samaritan’s perspective of asking what the fate of the traveler would be if he did not stop to help is what swayed him to change his position about performing abortions — “What would become of my patients if I wasn’t willing to help them?”Parker talks about his decision to leave his faculty position in Hawaii to go to the University of Michigan’s Medical School to get his training and the needs his patients in this interview. The interview was recorded by phone from an airport while Dr. Parker was en route to a speaking engagement about his book which chronicles his life, his faith and his decision to become an abortion provider.

For six years, there has been an epic David v. Goliath battle being fought in Louisiana over the fate of public education in our state. The Goliaths in this fight are members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) who owe their elections to a group of out-of-state pro-charter school billionaires who have bought that board in each of the two most recent election cycles.The front man for the Goliaths is Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, who has direct personal ties to a number of the billionaires, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.White spent about seven months running the Recovery School District before being named superintendent in January 2012 by the freshly-bought BESE members who won election in 2011. Then-governor Bobby Jindal served as in-state cheerleader for White until the two had a falling-out (real or feigned) over support for Common Core.The Davids in this struggle have been teachers and friends of public education who see the charters as an attack on teaching as a profession and as an attack on the civic role that public schools play, namely creating citizens.Among those opposing the store-bought charter advocates are a handful of activist, bloggers, and authors all of whom happen to be directly connected to public eduction and believers in its central purpose.Mike Deshotels is one of the stalwarts in that group. The retired classroom teacher has been a legal spur under John White’s saddle, having taken the superintendent to court on at least four occasions to force the release of data which Deshotels then used to discredit White’s rose-colored glasses narrative of charters’ alleged success in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans.Deshotels has won each fight and earned the distinction of being sued by White himself — which drew some national attention.In this podcast, Deshotels talks about the way White’s Department of Education has manipulated data to spin narratives of success and what that data (obtained through the courts) ultimately revealed.Mike Deshotels discusses his persistent efforts to de-spin John White’s fairy tales. Check it out.

Jack McGuire met then-Governor Earl K. Long during Long’s 1959 campaign for Lieutenant Governor (in those days, Louisiana governors were barred from seeking re-election to successive terms). McGuire was a senior at Newman High School in New Orleans. He’d been assigned a paper on the state elections that year, and chose to look at Long despite the fact that Jack’s father David McGuire had been kicked out of LSU in the 1930s (along with six other journalism students) for refusing to apologize to Huey Long for calling for him to stop interfering with the coaching of the LSU football team. By 1959, David McGuire was chief administrative officer for New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison — who had run against (and lost) to Earl Long in the 1955-56 governor’s race (primary elections then were late in one year with runoffs early the next. Governor’s were inaugurated in May then). “I didn’t think I had too much to learn from the anti-Longs, so I talked to my father about following Earl,” Jack recalls. They first connected in New Orleans during that campaign. Earl, who’d suffered a breakdown while addressing the Legislature in April of that year, was subsequently committed by his wife Blanche to a mental hospital in Galveston, TX, and then Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville. Jack actually attended the hearing where Earl was released from Southeast Louisiana Hospital after firing the director of the hospital system and then having the new director fire the head of the hospital itself. Earl ran third in the race for Lieutenant Governor. His political career seemed finished. Uncle Earl, as Long was called, decided that he was not done. He chose to challenge incumbent Democratic Congressman Harold McSween for the Eighth District Congressional seat that Earl’s brother George had held for eight years until his death in 1958. Earl was all in. Jack and a couple of high school friends decided to follow Earl on the campaign trail for a couple of weekends during the summer of 1960. What Jack saw in the desperate campaign that Earl Long waged moved him in a fundamental way. He spent a significant amount of his adult life working to claim Earl’s essence from the sensationalistic, often tawdry press coverage and academic writing that portrayed the three-time Governor and brother of Huey Long as a crazy man. Jack gathered an incredible collection of articles, photographs, memorabilia, and interviews with people who knew Long and/or were involved in that 1960 campaign, which ultimately took Uncle Earl’s life. Flooding from Katrina in Mandeville claimed much of Jack’s collection of material on Earl Long. But, because he had shared it with so many people in an effort to get them to write the story of that last campaign, he was able to reassemble his materials and even added to the collection. It became clear that Jack was going to have to write the book on Earl’s last campaign if it was going to be written. University Press of Mississippi sent the original manuscript to readers. One liked it; one hated it. UPM said that if Jack would take into consideration the comments from the readers, they would be willing to take another look at it. Jack and the late Water Cowan had written an earlier book on Louisiana governors that UPM published. Jack turned to me to help him edit the book and get it into shape for reconsideration. We worked together on it for about seven months in 2014 and 2015. We sent off the revised manuscript in April 2015, the weekend before Jack went in for knee replacement surgery. The UPM editors loved the new approach and committed to publish the book. Jack left it to me to deal with the New York copy editor UPM chose to work with us, and to track down many of the photos that ended up in the book. Jack’s son Barrett helped cover the cost involved with printing the additional photographs that contribute to much to the quality of the book. The book, Win The Race Or Die Trying: Uncle Earl’s Last Hurrah, came out in late August, 2016, just ahead of Earl’s birthday. Shortly after that, Jack conducted a series of book signings and radio interviews across the state to publicize it which stretched into 2017. In this interview, Jack talks about Earl’s tumultuous last years and the campaign into which Earl ignored doctor’s warnings and poured every last bit of energy he had into it to defeat McSween. The book has been well received. The interview covers some ground not in the book, particularly dealing with his father David.

Brian Pope was elected Lafayette City Marshal in December 2014, after defeating  Kip Judice in the runoff to succeed longtime incumbent Nickey Picard, whom they'd both defeated in the primary election. The late J.B. Cormier was the fourth candidate in the primary election.Picard's time had passed. Pope's had barely begun when he leapt into the 2015 race for Lafayette Parish Sheriff in support of Scott Chief of Police Chad Leger. It was a fateful decision that might end up ending Pope's political career with the possibility of jail time ahead of him.Pope used the power and authority of his office in an attempt to help Leger's campaign and to hurt Mark Garber's campaign. Garber won the election. Pope has been dealing with the legal repercussions of his acts since 2015.Pope then refused to turn over emails believed to be related to his campaign activities on behalf of Leger which were being sought by The Independent. Emails were erased from the marshal's server but not from Lafayette Consolidated Government's backup servers. The emails were discovered and Pope was found to have violated the state's public records law by refusing to comply with the original request.Later, a Lafayette Parish grand jury indicted Pope on seven felony counts — five counts of malfeasance and two counts of perjury. He's awaiting trial on those charges and has asked that his trial be delayed until next year.The Lafayette City Marshal's office works primarily with Lafayette City Court to enforce bonds, subpoenas and collect fines and fees. Pope, then, is an officer of the court who has found him self being charged (and in some cases convicted) of law violations, has turned his once sedate office into something of a spectacle.When it was revealed in a deposition related to the original email case that Pope has been personally pocketing fees and garnishments in apparent violation of a 2011 opinion from the Louisiana Attorney General, Aimee Boyd Robinson decided she had had enough of the shenanigans. She recruited Steve Wilkerson and together they decided to launch the campaign to recall Brian Pope.On June 12, they filed their petition with the Louisiana Secretary of State's office to formalize the process. They have 180 days from that date (December 12) to reach their goal of  getting 1/3 of the voters in the city-wide district to sign a petition to force a recall election on Pope's tumultuous tenure. That's about 28,00o signatures. They are half-way into the effort.If the recall campaign succeeds (signatures will be counted and verified by the Lafayette Registrar of Voters), a recall election asking voters whether they want Pope recalled or not will appear on the ballot in the spring 0f 2018. If voters oust Pope, there will be a special election in the fall of 2018 when anyone (including Pope) can run for what will by that time be the remaining two-plus years of his term.During that time, Pope's legal battles will continue roll through the courts, ensuring that the Marshal's problems remain high visibility news in Lafayette. And there's still the matter of whether taxpayers can foot the bill for Pope's legal costs.Aimee Boyd Robinson discusses the effort to recall Brian Pope in this podcast.

Dr. Rick Swanson is chair of the UL Lafayette Political Science Department. He was in the audience for the February 2016 LCG Council meeting when an hours-long public comment session regarding the Afred Mouton that sits in the point of a plaza in front of Lafayette’s International Center.Swanson was struck by the inaccurate statements made by some defenders of the statue (Mouton was a West Point trained, slave-holding native of Opelousas whose father founded what became Lafayette) made to the council and the public regarding the origins of the Civil War and the nature of relations between blacks and whites in the area.That launched a still-ongoing research project that sent Swanson scouring the records of the Library of Congress, the Center for Louisiana Studies, and public archives seeking to document the true history of the war and the true nature of the relationship between blacks and whites here.It’s an ugly tale that the Mouton statue, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1922, both symbolizes and distorts. The statue was one of hundreds the UDC erected across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized segregation in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.As anyone who reads history knows, separate was never equal. It took 58 years before the Supreme Court reversed Plesssy with its Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in 1954. The Civil Rights movement was the culmination of a decades long struggle to reverse the practices and local laws that flowed from Plessy.Swanson says the Mouton statues and its cousins across the country were always symbols of white supremacy, erected to celebrate the Lost Cause and to reaffirm what whites then believed to be the natural order of the world with them on top and blacks relegated to second-class citizenship.Recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have driven home for many the connection between these statues and white supremacies and ne0-Nazis, leading some communities to speed the removal of confederate monuments from public spaces.Swanson is continuing to update his work and hopes to muster a book out of it as his schedule permits. We discuss the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana and what all those statues symbolized — then, and now!

"For the second successive August, Louisiana is getting hit hard by rain. Last year, it was three days of heavy rains that dumped 20-inches of rain or more across much of south central and eastern Louisiana. This year, rains associated with Hurricane Harvey have been soaking parts of the state for days, with more rains predicted as the storm prepares to re-enter the Gulf of Mexico. The August 2016 floods and the floods developing now might not be directly attributed to climate change, but they separately show the influence of climate change. Both floods are at least partially the result of the warming of the Gulf of Mexico and of the atmosphere. Higher temperatures allow for higher humidity. Water from the Gulf evaporates more quickly filling the higher capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture. That moisture comes down as rain over land. South Louisiana and south Texas are both flat. We do not drain quickly. Too much rain over too long a time results in flooding. And here we are. This is the new normal. Albert Slap is a former law professor and environmental attorney who recognized that there was no readily available means for individuals to make sense of the implications of climate science and the phenomena happening around us. His Florida-based, Coastal Risk Consulting, set out to solve that riddle by combining publicly available science and data resources with detailed elevation tools to help provide risk assessments for residential and commercial property owners. Florida and much of the east coast of the United States have begun to experience tidal flooding — that is, day-time flooding not associated with storms or even rain. In this interview, Slap says that the late summer and fall are the times when the flooding is most pronounce due to the interplay of prevailing winds and the moon's gravitational effect on tides. Florida shares with Louisiana the problem of sinking land in the midst of rising sea levels. Mortgage bankers and insurance companies are taking note. Slap posts trade publication stories regularly on LinkedIn about how actuaries in each industry are beginning to change the way they view climate change and the risk and costs that will be associated with it. He believes that in the not too-distant future mortgages will be scarce for properties exposed to climate risk. As Hurricane Harvey batters Texas, the National Flood Insurance Program is set to expire on September 30 (the end of the current fiscal year for the federal government). As those who weathered any of the disasters that have struck Louisiana and Texas in this century know, NFIP insurance is just about the only chance homeowners have to approach full recovery from these calamities. But, the program is billions in debt due to payouts made from storms here and elsewhere. What will happen after September 30? Will Congress renew the act, even temporarily? What will happen in the flood next time? Some in Congress want to attract private insurance companies into the NFIP. Insurance companies deal with risk. Climate change and climate change-induced disasters are taking on the look of certainty, not chance. How does the idea of risk figure into that? How much will it cost to get the coverage (if it's available)? What are people living in coastal areas to do if the coverage is not available when they suffer losses? Climate change is happening now and getting real for more people — even those who profess not to believe that it is man-made. Albert Slap has seen it coming. He talks about it in this podcast."

"Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains not only sheds light on the history of the ideas that have come to dominate the best funded wing of U.S. conservatism (more accurately defined as radical libertarianism), it also sheds considerable light on the ideas behind the Jindal era in Louisiana politics. MacLean traces the intellectual and political history of James McGill Buchanan. She stumbled across Buchanan's name in footnotes in separate sources on separate issues and her curiosity was piqued. One of the footnotes referred to Buchanan's role in Virginia's attempted massive resistance against the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Buchanan, it turns out, was the brains behind the idea of proposing the state shut down and then sell all of its white public schools (Brown over turned the separate but equal ruling that came in Plessy v. Ferguson). Buchanan propose the state then issue vouchers to students whose families could then use the money to send their kids to segregation academies which could even buy the schools from the Commonwealth. Like a number of other ideas put forth by Buchanan over the next 50 years, the idea of getting Virginia out of the public education business was not  popular with a lot of people in that state, not the least of which was the business community which had started growing in Northern Virginia. It was a reality that would shape how Buchanan and the people who used his ideas talked about them. They learned that being clear about the intent of their policies would produce public opposition to them. So, a level of language corruption was essential to the promotion and spreading of these ideas. Buchanan was the leading light in what has become the public choice movement, which uses the concept of choice to undermine public belief in a broader common good and public interest. At the core of his beliefs is the idea that majorities are not to be trusted and that liberty is to be defined and measured in terms of wealth, property ownership and the extent to which the state can tax wealth and make claims on property that run counter to those of the owners. In short, when it came to government's ability to tax and its ability to make policy, Buchanan believed that unanimous decisions were the only ones that could be considered legitimate. Buchanan's ideas, then, would award political veto power to the smallest, yet most powerful minorities — the rich and the propertied. Buchanan provided intellectual aid and comfort to the 1%. In return, they funded the ostensibly economic but truly political centers he founded using the largesse of donors such as Charles Koch at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason University. In addition to school vouchers, Buchanan's ideas include cutting taxes, shrinking the size of government, raising the cost of using government services — particularly higher education, removing government from the business of regulating business, and weakening any power that might challenge what businesses or wealthy individuals would do in any sector. If you live in Louisiana, or Wisconsin, or Kansas, these ideas probably sound familiar it's because governors in those three states (Bobby Jindal, Sam Brownback and Scott Walker – all connected to Charles Koch's money and networks) implemented versions of those ideas in their states. In order to understand the basic premise of how Bobby Jindal operated while governor of Louisiana, you need to read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. It provides the framework of Jindal's approach to government, starting with the creation of artificial emergencies which opened the way for him to radically reshape Louisiana government in ways that he could not have done without the existence of those emergencies. Jindal is an intelligent man who was served by smart people. It strains credulity to believe that they never could balance a state budget. The record shows that Jindal used recurring revenue shortfalls as the trigger mechanism to radically change state government in ways that we will be trying to recover from for years to come (think state cuts in higher education funding coupled with rising tuitions and think of the tax exemptions and incentives to companies that his administration threw at companies to get them to locate here). But, Democracy In Chains shows us were many of Jindal's worst ideas came from and they can traced back to Buchanan and places like the Mercatus Center at George Mason which Buchanan helped found and which consulted with Jindal's Commission on Streamlining Government which operated for about seven months in 2009 and early 2010. This commission was where everything from Jindal's so-called education reforms to the great severance tax razoo of 2010-13. Armed with those ideas (what Milton Friedman called a ""tool box"") Jindal entered his second term with his ideological guns blazing in what turned out to have been a bone-crushing failure of a presidential campaign. Jindal came into office with a surplus of $1 billion. By the time the tax exemptions were piled up, the incentives dished out and his administration's general indifference to the fate of state government and its impact on the people of the state, Jindal left office in 2016 as the most unpopular governor in the country (followed closely by Brownback and Walker) leaving his successor John Bel Edwards a $3 billion budget hole to close. Buchanan, MacLean writes, viewed himself as a theorist in the school of political economy. At none of his three academic centers were economists asked to deal with the actual math of economics. It was visionary work unencumbered by pesky numbers or even facts. What the records of Jindal, Brownback and Walker show is that Buchanan's ideas are not the kind that successful governments can be built upon. After reading MacLean's book, it's clear that breaking government was the objective — one which Buchanan, his office-seeking acolytes, and his supporters could not publicly reveal."

"Scientists at 13 federal agencies have released the final draft of their report on the impact of climate change on the United States. The report says that the country is already experiencing the effects of climate change. The release of the report constitutes a form of whistleblowing since it was done without the permission of the Trump administration. There is growing evidence that mortgage and insurance companies take climate change seriously because of the growing book of evidence regarding sea level rise. Tidal flooding on the Eastern Seaboard from Miami to Boston is already occurring. Louisiana's coastal land is sinking even as sea levels rise. Three Louisiana residents share their perspectives on the scientific, engineering and humanitarian challenges facing Louisiana, its people and its leaders as we begin to confront the existential threat posed by climate change and natural forces. Bob Marshall is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter based in New Orleans. Marshall earned those awards (and others) for his insightful work on Louisiana's wetlands both as a natural and economic resource, and as a buffer protecting Louisiana's coastal communities from storms. Marshall continues his work of making sense of climate science for laymen. Bren Haase is chief of research and planning for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the Louisiana entity charged with responding to the disappearance of Louisiana's coast, reversing some of that, and protecting our communities as well as possible from future storms that will assuredly batter our coast in coming decades. Johanna deGraffenried was with the Gulf Restoration Network when her segment of this show was recorded. In it, deGraffenried talks about the unpleasant truth that even if we succeed in saving some of our coast, many residents will no longer be able to live in the communities they now call home. GNR produced abandonment zone maps using data from the CPRA and the Census Bureau. The late Dr. Ezra Boyd produced those maps for CPRA. Three interviews conducted separately that give a compelling view of the challenges we face going forward."

"Americans are accustomed to things just working. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Open a tap and clean water flows from it. But, as investments in essential infrastructure have declined, problems with things like drinking water have begun to crop up more frequently. The problems with lead contamination of the Flint, Michigan, water system persist even as the headlines have faded. Louisiana has not been immune to these issues. The state of Louisiana rescued the St. Joseph water system from problems. Baton Rouge is plagued by salt water intrusion as ExxonMobil and Georgia Pacific continue to suck huge amounts of water from the Southern Hills Aquifer for use in their industrial processes (while other companies use river water). Water systems in several Louisiana parishes have been found to contain brain-eating amoeba (a problem that can usually be cleared up by increasing the amount of chlorine added to the system). Lafayette Utilities Systems' main water well field is located on what was once the north side of the town — just across the railroad tracks around Mudd Avenue and Simcoe Street. That area abuts an abandoned railroad yard that included a roundhouse and train cleaning and repair facility. For seven decades or more, solvents and chemicals of various kinds were used to degrease engines and apparatus, much of it being allowed to spill onto the ground where it was absorbed. Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance says the contamination from that now-abandoned rail yard poses an imminent threat to Lafayette's water system as traces of contaminants from the rail yard have turned up in samples taken from the nearby LUS wells. In any given day, LUS draws about 20 million gallons of water from the wells in that field. Two other factors add urgency to the situation. The first is that recent studies have found that the Chicot Aquifer (the primary groundwater resource in south Louisiana) rises very near the surface of the ground near the rail yard. In some spots, the aquifer is as little as 30 feet below the surface. That would indicate that any chemicals in the abandoned rail yard don't have far to travel before they have reached the aquifer. The second factor is the proposed plan to build the I-49 Connector through downtown Lafayette. An elevated segment of the road would run directly through the rail yard, resulting in hundreds of pilings being driven through the site and possibly into the aquifer, driving contamination toward the aquifer in the process. Beyond the public health threat, the contamination near the water well field could force LUS to relocate its wells and go through the expense of having to reconfigure the structure of the water system. Kim discusses the problems with the rail yard, the lack of any comprehensive study of the extent of the contamination of the site, and the kinds of threats these pose to Lafayette's drinking water."

"Abita Springs is nestled in the piney woods of St. Tammany Parish, just east of Covington and north of Mandeville. The town has a well-earned reputation for clean are and sparkling clean artesian well water. St. Tammany has a reputation for being one of the most conservative parishes in Louisiana, yet in Abita Springs the Republican mayor and town aldermen have committed to move their town to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. The town is one of just over 100 U.S. municipalities who have signed onto the Sierra Club’s “Ready for 100” pledge to pursue full renewable energy for their communities. The group made a splash at the recent U.S. Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Miami, where tidal flooding has become a reality even while some political leaders profess to be climate change skeptics. LeAnn Magee, founder of Abita Committee for Energy Sustainability, attended the Mayors’ Miami meeting with a small delegation of her co-horts. Abita Springs Mayor Greg Lemons is, it turns out, a long-time Sierra Club member and, MaGee says in the interview, enthusiastically embraced the idea of the town making the commitment to sustainable energy. Some of the town aldermen were skeptical but were won over when they learned that one of elements of the program was conducting an audit of public building energy usage. Helping the town reduce its cost of operating by reducing what it spends on energy had great appeal and the town was off and running. Magee comes by her environmentalism honestly (she’s originally from Oregon but has been a St. Tammany resident for all of this century). Others came to the cause as a result of the anti-fracking fight in St. Tammany that flared over a three-year period when Helis Oil sought to frack in the parish. As a result of that long fight (no fracking occurred after a test well was drilled), some in the St. Tammany anti-fracking movement were looking for something positive to get behind. They found it in the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 movement. Abita Springs is the first Louisiana municipality to sign up for the program. For the naysayers out there, it’s worth noting that having a goal does not mean you’ve accomplished it, but having a goal is essential to accomplishing it. Abita has aimed high, setting a standard that other Louisiana municipalities in this climate change threatened state would do well to emulate. We talk about Abita’s commitment and the thrill of environmentalists advocating for positive change."

"Louisiana lost a great friend just before the Fourth of July when Ezra Boyd died. Ezra helped as many people and organizations as he had talents. He was a scientist with a political science degree included in the mix. He brought a heightened social awareness to the issues that he worked ranging from disaster preparation to response to recovery. He worked with public agencies, environmental groups, communities and individual citizens. His DisasterMap.Net provides real-time data that anyone caught in a disaster or who knows people who are caught in disasters can use to provide critical information. In the floods of August 2016, Ezra helped scores of people across south Louisiana find their way to safety or help guide them back home in those tortuous days after the rains stopped but flood waters remained. He brought static information to life combining his grasp of data and his skills as a cartographer and programmer. His passing leaves a void in our community that will be difficult to fill. He had so many skills which he used so well. This interview initially ran in April of this year. Ezra drove to Lafayette to be in the studio to record it. We knew each other for a few years. I had helped him with press releases about some of his projects. We considered each other friends. It was my honor to be considered his."

"Tropical Storm Cindy was a tiny storm that had an outsized impact on south Louisiana. Coastal flooding cut off LA 1 and extended westward to Cameron Parish. Again, this was only a tropical storm. Not a hurricane. Cindy revealed our extreme vulnerability. Flooding in south Iberia Parish has revived calls for a levee to keep some storm surge out of some communities in that parish. A similar proposal was defeated four years ago. There is more of this to come in our future — all across south Louisiana. It's because of climate change. The atmosphere is continuing to warm up, driven primarily by the the burning of fossil fuels which create the greenhouse gases that drive the process. The floods of August 2016 had all the earmarks of being powered by climate change. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) has just implemented its third Coastal Master Plan. Like its 2012 predecessor, the 2017 plan is an amalgam of projects and approaches to restore wetlands, protect people and property. Like the 2012 plan, it carries a $50 Billion price tag. We know that this is a low-ball estimate. And, oh, by the way, we don't have the money to cover even half of the low-ball estimate. One path to getting some of that money leads to the federal government. Good luck with that. The Trump administration (like the Obama administration before it) has proposed cutting off Louisiana's access to GOMESA money which is a new stream of offshore oil and gas royalty money that CPRA leaders include in the $19 Billion in revenue they thought they could count on as part of the minimum $50 Billion needed to implement some significant portion of the Master Plan. That leaves the oil and gas industry. The industry is responsible for some significant portion of the wetlands loss Louisiana has experienced over the past 70 years. Studies in which the industry participated have found that industry activities — particularly the dredging of access canals for drilling locations and trenching through wetlands for pipelines — contributed between 30 and 70 percent of wetlands loss in particular areas, depending on the amount of oil and gas activity and the topography of the area. Six parishes have filed Coastal Zone law suits against oil and gas companies under the powers given them by the Coastal Zone Management Act. There are 20 parishes included in Louisiana's Coastal Zone. Governor John Bel Edwards wants all of them to join the state in suits against the industry as part of a strategy of bringing them to the negotiating table. The industry has a legal, ethical and moral responsibility to help pay for the damage their activities have caused to our wetlands. The profits they have extracted from Louisiana have made them rich but their activities are setting us up for disaster. Climate change — rising seas, sinking land, higher humidity, stronger storms — threatens the future of everyone living in south Louisiana. The core business of the oil and gas industry is fueling climate change. Climate science indicates that relative sea level rise in Louisiana (the combination of rising seas and sinking land) could be as much as six feet within the next half century. Sea level rise of that magnitude will force many of us to abandon our homes, businesses, and communities. For people like us —  people who are deeply attached and connected to place — this will be a traumatic event. We might be able to avoid it, but only if we are willing to confront climate change — the existential threat to south Louisiana."

"Calling Louisiana’s finances over the past decade a train wreck is an insult to trains and the calamities that sometimes engulf them. Bobby Jindal inherited a $1 billion surplus from Kathleen Blanco when he took office, plus a flood of federal and private sector disaster relief and recovery money, and — with the help of a pliant/intimidated/indifferent legislature, burned through all that and an additional $2 billion dollars before he shuffled off the podium at the Capitol in January 2016 to the great relief of just about everyone. John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal and has spent the first two years of his term trying to dig the state out of the hole Jindal left in his wake — despite the best efforts of the House Republican majority to keep us there by refusing to vote for the taxes needed to enable the state to deliver essential services needed by our citizens. Jan Moller has been observing this entire process for the past decade from front row seats. First, he was a Capitol beat reporter for the Times-Picayune back in the days when they were a daily newspaper. For the past five years, he’s been the leader of the Louisiana Budget Project, an organization whose focus is to provide analysis of state budget and spending policies for the good people of our state who would like to be informed. With the state’s long-standing ‘good guv’munt’ organizations reliant on conservative funders for their existence, the Louisiana Budget Project (which is part of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) has brought a unique perspective (as in not dominated by corporate interests) to Louisiana’s budget discussions. In the podcast, Moller and I discuss the budget that just emerged from the regular and special sessions of the Louisiana Legislature, the role of Medicaid expansion in helping economic development in Louisiana, the prospective impact of the first Trump budget on Louisiana as well as what may or may not be the impact of the American Health Care Act which has had more false starts than are allowed in track meets. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that I think you’ll find worth you while. Jan knows his number!"

"Accountants took down the gangster Al Capone. If the corporate education reform movement in this country is brought down it will likely be by a statistician like Mercedes Schneider. The Slidell English teacher got engaged in the public education debate after one of the early leaders of the reform movement Diane Ravitch broke with the reformers. The former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education renounced her earlier support for high-stakes testing. Schneider started blogging her own opinions on public education not much later and has been steadily at it ever since. She also writes at Huffington Post. Schneider's authored three books on aspects of the education reform movement, in addition to the blogging and her teaching, which she has not stopped. As a practitioner and a statistician, Schneider brings unique tools to the table when she's discussing what works or doesn't work in education. And, she's been particularly adept at busting the manipulation of student performance data in Louisiana by Superintendent John White. Schneider pulls no punches. She's plainspoken, authoritative, patient and relentless. In this podcast, Schneider talks about the reformers in Louisiana and across the country, John White's record of data manipulation, and the impact that high stakes testing has in the classroom and how testing came to be a central element in the reform movement."

"Ganey Arsement is a Calcasieu Parish educator who became an education advocate thanks to two men — Bobby Jindal and John White. Jindal began his second term in 2012 with a ferocious attack against public education, public school teachers and local school boards. White arrived in Louisiana from New York in May, 2011 to become head of the Recovery School District. He was immediately touted by Jindal shortly after his arrival as a person the governor would like to see named superintendent of Education for the entire state, not just the RSD. In the 2011 BESE election, millions of dollars in out-of-state money poured in to the coffers of some candidates and White was hired by BESE to be the state's new Superintendent of Education in January 2012. That was the last time BESE voted on a contract for White. Arsement has filed suit to force BESE to vote on whether to renew White's contract or not. White has served as a month-to-month employee since January 2016 when the current BESE members took office following the 2015 state elections. Even though pro-charter, pro-White candidates were elected in seven of the eight seats filled by election. But, each governor gets to appoint three members to the 11-member board and Governor John Bel Edwards appointed three people to the slots who back his position that the state needs a new superintendent. The result is something of a stalemate. State law says that it takes a tw0-third vote of BESE members to hire or fire a superintendent. That's eight votes. White can only muster seven. Or, so it seems since a vote has not been taken since the new board took office. So, White has served as a month-to-month employee of BESE — although there's never been a vote taken on that either. So, Arsement and others have filed suit in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge (the place where all suits against the state and its departments and agencies must be filed). They are seeking to force BESE to vote on White's contract. If a new contract for White cannot muster the required two-thirds vote need, Arsement wants to see the seat declared vacant (as the law provides) and a national search for a new superintendent launched. Arsement discusses the lawsuit and the practices that he and other public education advocates say White has used to spin what they claim is a false narrative about the success of charter schools in Louisiana. The suit has been assigned to Judge William Morvant, but it looks like it will be a while before the wheels of justice start rolling. The initial hearing has been set for August. I met Ganey Arsement in 2015 while working on a min-documentary about the 2011 BESE elections. He's included in the program. Here's the link. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake "

"Paul Douglas is an Evangelical Christian who lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota. He’s also a degreed meteorologist and an entrepreneur. Rounding out the list is the fact that he is a climate change believer. I first heard about Paul Douglas through my friend Kevin Shannon who spent an eventful couple of years in Louisiana before returning to Minnesota. Paul Douglas co-authored this book on Christians’ and climate change. Douglas and Mitch Hescox co-authored a book, Caring For Creation, to urge their fellow Christians to begin taking climate change seriously. The overarching concept is that Christians are called upon to be good stewards of God’s creation, that it appears things have gotten out of hand, and that this creates a call for Christians to drop their skepticism and get engaged in the process of cleaning up the climate on the planet we call home. All great spiritual traditions include among their tenets an intergenerational mandate to care for the planet so that future generations can enjoy it as they have. Somewhere in the industrial age, this concept was lost or shoved down the hierarchy of priorities of those who have led companies, been captains of industry, investors and elected officials. Short-term thinking either obscured the long-term view that we all learned as part of our spiritual formation, or it replaced it all together. One of the most insidious notions to arise in post-World War II America was the concept of maximizing shareholder value. This Milton Friedman concept elevated profits above all other motivations and concerns for business leaders. The concept led to a constricting of the field of corporate vision which drove companies to discount or even ignore concerns of their workers, the well-being of the communities where their plants were located, and, yes, even the impact those company operations had on the air we breath, the water we drink and the soil in which we grow our food. Douglas is also a former cigarette smoker. During the interview he recalls how he came to learn about the disinformation campaigns waged by tobacco companies against the science which showed a connection between cigarette smoking and lung and other cancers. Douglas believes — and a growing body of evidence suggests — that the fossil fuel industry has torn several pages from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt playbook to feed skepticism about climate change. Douglas believes that “things are not hopeless and we are not helpless.” This is the message he takes to his fellow Christians about climate change. And it’s a recurring theme in our interview. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

"Listening to the rhetoric of anti-abortionists in and outside of government, it sometimes takes an effort to remember that abortions have been happening for as long as there have been humans and the right to a safe abortion has been protected by the United States Constitution since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But, this is Louisiana where even lost causes are never actually admitted to be lost. We talk in tongues, never saying in public what we mean in our hearts. Unless, of course, we slip and the bile in the form of hatred comes spewing out. Louisiana's fetus fetish grew out of the same cultural cul-de-sac that venerates confederate leaders but ignores their barbarous acts. Anti-abortionism uses the fetus to bludgeon the rights of women. It was not until the 1970s in Louisiana that women got the right to borrow money on their own. The resentment against that has never died down. Louisiana's restrictions on women's health options have much less to do with the alleged sacredness of life (the canard that is exposed every day in this state by a long litany of statistics ranging from high poverty rates, poor health outcomes, low levels of education, the highest rate of incarceration, etc.) than with the urgent desire of insecure men to maintain control over the lives of women. Thus, you have the anti-regulatory legislature passing an increasingly arcane set of regulations on abortion clinics. You have legislators in a state with high teen pregnancy rates fighting to keep sex education out of schools. And you have legislators gutting funding for the Department of Children and Family Services on one day while trying to tighten abortion regulations the next. We are a backwards state because our elected leaders consistently try to drag us back to a white male supremacy fantasy world of where everyone knew their place and Trey's son could get a job at a bank even it he couldn't count too well. The confederate monuments fight has served two extremely useful purposes. The first is that it has forced us to examine our history. Those monuments had nothing to do with the Civil War but much more to do with trumpeting the rule of white supremacy harkened by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The second thing it has accomplished is peel back the thin veneer of politeness and exposed the ugliness that lurks just below it in the bright light of day. Women seeking abortions have seen this ugliness every time they have approached a clinic to exercise their right to a safe medical procedure. The people who protest and try to block them from exercising their right don't care about the women and they don't care about the fetus that the women want to abort. What they care about is attempting to exercise control over those women in a desperate attempt to cling to the illusion of a past that they can't allow themselves to comprehend. What unites opponents of removing confederate monuments with anti-abortion activists is the fear and hatred that lies at the core of their beliefs, but which erupt from time to time in ways that are so stark and pronounced as to reveal their alleged higher purpose to be a scam. Amy Irvin and I had a great conversation. I'm proud to be included as member of the New Orleans Abortion Fund board of directors."

"Don Clausen and I have been friends for 40 years. We met at what was then USL at, appropriately enough, a protest over tuition hikes. We fluctuated in and out of touch before reconnecting in the early years of this century here in Lafayette. By this time Don was well into his career as a social worker specializing in one form or another of addictive behaviors. Over the years we've had hundreds of conversations that have mixed social, cultural and political analysis with the insights he's gleaned through what are now the three decades of his work in the field. He's been working on his Ph.D. in Social Work at Jackson State University in Mississippi. He's ABD — all but dissertation — at this point and the conversations have gotten richer as he's brought what he's learned from his research of the history of the field of addiction treatment to our ongoing conversations. This is the third time Don's appeared on the podcast. This conversation covers some of the earliest days of the addiction as a disease model and, in it, Clausen discusses some of the moral and class biases that have shaped the field from its early days and which I would say distort it today. Dr. Benjamin Rush shaped the field from its earliest days. He was the first to classify addiction as a disease. Later academicians and practitioners applied a moral judgment to the disease model and treatment programs based on that analysis have flourished for more than 150 years. What is clear is that the moral judgments were applied to the addictions (primarily alcohol) of the lower classes, while addictions of the upper classes (which included drugs) were written off as 'products of success.' We talk about that where the moral judgments were and were not applied. We also delve into the way society conditions us for addiction and abandons us by not providing us the tools to understand and address those itches we try to scratch or numb with substances of choice — some legal, some not. The next time Don is on the show, he'll be a full Ph.D. and I'll have to defer to his knowledge. Until then, we'll rumble!"

"Angelina Iles draws out the best in people. She motivates them to accomplish more than they thought possible. She's been doing this for years in the Rapides Parish city of Pineville. Operating independently as Pineville Concerned Citizens or in concert with other organizations, she's been working to change the political culture in Central Louisiana by focusing on issues that affect the people that too many elected officials ignore — the working poor and lower middle class. The list of projects she's led and/or worked on in the five years I've known her is longer that the life's work of many others. Defending the state workers at Huey P. Long Hospital against Bobby Jindal and from the ineffectiveness of their public employee union. Rallying Central Louisiana around Medicaid expansion even as Jindal vowed to keep hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents uninsured. Working to revitalize the state and local Democratic Party organizations that have conspicuously failed at party building at both levels. She's now working with Indivisible in Central Louisiana on issues ranging from healthcare to pay equity to full citizenship for women. She's working across party lines to improve the plight of the people around her. Angelina was born in Lafayette. She attended Holy Rosary Institute for a time before moving to Rapides Parish. She was a cafeteria worker for years and a member of the Rapides Federation of Teachers. She raised a good family. She cared for her stroke paralyzed brother at the same time she was battling for the rights of others. She brings a pragmatic touch to idealistic battles. She wins even when others say she lost. She is relentless in her efforts on behalf of others. She knows that ""No"" is the bureaucratic response to see if you'll go away. Angelina Iles is a leader in the truest sense of the word. Ask the people who have encountered her. She is fierce but it is not done in pursuit of personal gain or advantage. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake Here's a clip of her in action:"

"Liam Doyle has been had mobility issues since he was born. He used a walker to get around in elementary school, but shifted to a chair in middle school because the campus was larger and he had to get around to classes. He graduated from Lafayette High, one of the largest high schools in the state that operates on a campus built 50 years ago to accommodate a student body about half the size of the one there now. He's 28 now, working on an associate degree in History at South Louisiana Community College and plans to attend UL Lafayette when he finishes up his last class in the next semester. He's just passed the battery of tests needed to show he has the capacity to drive a car. And he's got his hands full working with Lafayette Consolidated Government to improve physical access to public spaces and businesses in the City of Lafayette. He chairs the Mayor-President's Awareness Committee for Citizens with Disabilities, so is pretty officially in the business of removing barriers to access. Even though LCG is the parish government here, because of we have semi-consolidated government here LCG has no authority in the small municipalities that remain in the parish after Lafayette lost its mayor and council to the parish. It's a complicated yet subtle form of discrimination against city residents who provide much of the funding for the parish. In the podcast of our conversation, Doyle says he's found his voice and maybe his calling in the role of advocate for the disabled in Lafayette. It was the role that thrust him into the public spotlight just over two years ago and it's a role he's developed a comfort with in dealing with public and private entities as he has gone about the work of making Lafayette accessible for all of us. He's got a great story! We get to a good bit of it in this interview. The podcast also includes a segment about recent developments in connection with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's Coastal Master Plan. It was recorded before St. John the Baptist Parish became the sixth parish to file suit against oil and gas companies for damage they did to wetlands by way of exploration activities in the Coastal Zone of that parish. If oil and gas won't pay, we can't stay in South Louisiana. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake "

"I interviewed Dawn DeDeaux in 2016. The exhibit at MassMOCA she describes here is about to open. The signs of the climate crisis that propels her art are becoming more apparent. Sea level rise on the east coast is producing sunny day, tidal flooding in cities from Miami to Boston. The great south Louisiana floods of August 2016 were the product of warming water in the Gulf of Mexico and warming air temperatures which fed each other in a vicious cycle for about 72 hours that flooded tens of thousands of homes and businesses, only some of which have recovered from that impact. Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this year are already high. The artist Dawn DeDeaux on the Island Road in Terrebonne Parish, 2016. DeDeaux's art is informed by an observation from Steven Hawking that he believed humans had about 100 years left to figure out how to prevent the climate here from becoming hostile to our survival. DeDeaux's Mothership series is about leaving here, destination unknown. The Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum has a current set of exhibits that loosely and directly provide a perspective of art created in the wake of disasters. A recent panel discussion there in connection with those exhibits focused on how disasters displace people and how the impact of those displacements found expression in the art of the affected people. DeDeaux says her art was changed by the post Katrina flooding of New Orleans. Her art since then could be characterized as art in the face of the disaster that is coming. Climate change is what would drive us out. A recent article published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies captured in a single phrase the nature of climate change and the reason why it is so hard to mobilize communities, states, nations to address it. That term is ""creeping catastrophe."" It is the slow, steady, relentless nature of climate change that makes it so difficult for us to address. It tends to fade into the background of the daily drama of news reports that focus on attacks, wars, shootings, political crisis, etc., that erupt onto our screens in a flash, then fade or are pushed into the background by some newer, more urgent crisis. Meanwhile, in the background, temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Land is sinking. Daily. 24/7/365. While your awake and while you sleep. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority recently approved the 2017 version of its Coastal Master Plan. The purpose of the plan is to serve as a blue print for saving south Louisiana from the impact of the creeping catastrophe of climate change — the very thing inspiring DeDeaux's work. Yet, in public testimony over the past two weeks, CPRA leaders have been very frank about not having the money to pay for even the low-ball estimated cost of the plan which is officially $50 billion over the next 50 years. That is the same price tag attached to the 2012 plan, which Mark Davis of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy says was low by about $40 billion then. Davis says that between the lack of funding and the costs not included in the plan, Louisiana is about $70 billion short to accomplish the task that was at hand then. Things have changed so rapidly since 2012 that the best case scenario in the 2012 Master Plan is considered the worst case scenario in the 2017 version. Johnny Bradberry who runs the CPRA told legislators that the state can only count on about $19 billion to implement the plan. Other sources are not known at this time, although there is some hope that the federal government might help with the effort. The Edwards administration is joining Coastal Zone parishes in law suits to bring the oil and gas industry to the table to pay for their contribution to the destruction of our wetlands — something state political leaders have acknowledged as fact for at least 40 years. The prospects of Louisiana developing the discipline and commitment to meet the threat that most of our business and political class still deny exists are not good. After all, we're still building houses on at-grad slabs in what everyone knows are flood plains here (the August 2016 floods rendered the FEMA flood plain maps irrelevant). Failing that, a lot of people are going to have to move. At some point between now and then, the people who are going to have to move are going to recognize the true cost of climate change denial, of refusing to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for their damage to our wetlands, of basing our economic development strategy over the past eight years on a game of climate change chicken by targeting greenhouse gas spewing industries. But, unless there's a Mothership around, we're likely to be too busy packing and lamenting our fate to think about those issues. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake "

"How much is that Octopus in the parking garage? The more important question is what will persistent exposure to tidal water do to the parking garage and the buildings around it. The octopus can probably fend for itself. Albert Slap is a former law professor who co-founded Coastal Risk Consultants to help people understand the impact that climate change will have on where they live and work and how they live their lives. While it is a business, it is also a compelling way to make the somewhat abstract concept of climate change very real to people who live in those areas that are likely to be affected. Slap's company is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida — just up US 1 from Miami Beach where the octopus tried its tentacles at valet parking. In our discussion, Slap says cities on Florida's Atlantic coast have decided that they must act on their own in response to rising seas and tides where they are. Miami Beach is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise roads. New commercial construction along the shore are essentially waterproofing their bottom floors to enable them to continue operation in times of tidal flooding. Slap's company uses laser measured elevation technology to map parcels down to nine square foot squares that give a level of accuracy and granularity far greater than available through FEMA floodplain maps. As Slap explains, FEMA floodplain maps are inherently backward looking, they cannot project what might happen. Using the laser elevation maps and connecting that data with the latest climate, sea level rise, and geographic data, Coastal Risk Consultants can provide home and business owners much more accurate climate risk assessments than are available through trying to wade through the information being produced primarily for national, state and regional uses. ""We don't have to agree on the sources of what is driving climate change in order to recognize that it is changing and that we must figure out how to respond,"" Slap says. ""We give people actionable information on what climate change will mean for them, their homes and their businesses."" Slap believes that private insurers will look at getting involved in the flood insurance market, even though in some areas it is not a matter of risk so much as a matter of certainty. In the current rollout of the CPRA's 2017 Coastal Master Plan, the most encouraging development has been the recent decision to convene community conversations about climate change impact in those parishes in Louisiana that will be most affected by it. Getting those discussions down from the abstract — ""the coast"" — to the specific — your parish, your town, your street — could be the way to break the paralysis that is a byproduct of the ideological war over whether climate change is, in fact, real. Climate change is real. It's here now. Reality is not particularly interested in whether you believe it or not. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

"Harold Schoeffler is a Louisiana treasure. He has more first-hand knowledge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the river that feeds it and the coast than any other single person around today. He has skillfully used the courts to enforce laws and change Louisiana for the better on issues ranging from shell dredging (as it scraping away protective barrier islands to be used for driveways) to protecting the Black Bear. Schoeffler continues to be a force to be reckoned with on environmental issues in Louisiana based on his instinctual sense of right and wrong which he has used time and again to convince lawyers of the righteousness of his causes who have in turn convinced judges of the righteousness of Harold’s convictions. Schoeffler is old enough to remember the Basin before oil & gas and flood control pushed the natural characteristics of America’s last great swamp into the background to serve what were argued to be higher interests. He remembers catching tarpon in the Basin above Morgan City. He understands that slow moving, meandering bayous are orders of magnitude better for protecting our wetlands than are box-type canals favored by oil and gas interests. All of this has been discounted by ‘experts’ in industry who have come to own our state government. Yet, as we have come to know early in the 21st Century, the Basin is the driver of our ecological wellbeing in south central Louisiana, just as surely as the coast itself is the driver of Louisiana’s wellbeing from Texas to Mississippi. He has heard the fancy language and seen the pretty pictures painted by those who have no interest other than exploiting the Basin and the coast, no matter the cost. He’s gone through his life with his eyes wide open. He’s seen water quality projects used to wreck bayous and streams. He’s seen hazardous waste dumped in ditches by companies who hid behind the law to justify it. He’s watched as state government leaders have pushed restoration plans that will primarily benefit contractors while turning the Basin and the coast into artificial remnants of their greater selves. Harold Schoeffler knows that we have spent more than half a century destroying our wetlands and the Atchafalaya Basin in a quest to save it. He knows that time is running out; that the forces that we have unleashed endanger the Basin now as never before. With three successive governors having the state to spending $50 billion to try to preserve some of our coast, Harold Schoeffler wants those planning the effort to look a little closer at how we got here. Maybe, he figures, if they did that, they wouldn’t make things worse while they try to make things better. Harold Schoeffler on the Atchafalaya Basin and the bogus process that wants to give Lafayette what it does not want – an elevated roadway through the heart of the city. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake "

"Situational awareness is critical in any stressful environment, but particularly so in the midst of disasters. Knowing how events — manmade or natural — are unfolding can be the difference between life and death. Are you fleeing toward flood waters, or away from them? Are you moving toward a plume of toxic gas, or away from it? During the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, communications in New Orleans broke down. The floods that followed the federal levee collapse made things worse. There was a large communications project in post-Katrina New Orleans that sought proposals to unify all public safety and first responder communications in the city going forward. I knew some of the people on one of the teams that worked to win the contract. Their effort ultimately floundered over an intellectual property dispute. Since 2005, Louisiana has been hit by an inordinate number of disasters since 2005's deadly duo of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Gustav and Ike. The BP Gulf Gusher. Isaac. The great floods of 2016 ranging from Shreveport river flooding to Monroe storm flooding, to two severe hits in the Florida Parishes (spring and August) and then the great August floods that ranged from Lake Arthur to Kentwood, and all points in between. Ezra Boyd has a Ph.D. in geography from LSU. He's worked for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation on a number of projects, including one on storm surge that is ongoing. The state is committed to spending $50 Billion trying to save Louisiana's coast and coastal communities from the ravages of rising seas, sinking land and climate change. There will be more natural disasters in our future, not fewer. Rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and in the atmosphere mean more moisture in the air. The floods of last August had all the earmarks of being the product of climate change. Nearly 12 years after Katrina and Rita, disaster responders still work under data handicaps that limit the effectiveness of their work, particularly in the immediate wake of the event. Boyd's DisasterMap.Net is moving towards remedying that situation. In our conversation, he explains how he's pulled data from a variety of sources into his DisasterMap website to enable near real-time data of the situation on the ground before responders can get out onto the ground. He's invested a lot of time and effort doing this. First, identifying the sources, then teaching himself JavaScript so that he could write the code that enables him to add layers of data to his site. Traffic from Google. Weather-related data from the National Weather Service and other sources. Information on shelters from the RedCross and official sources like the Governor's Office of Homeland Security. During the August floods, Boyd identified a potential niche for his firm — helping guide people from harm's way to places of safety. He the experience of helping family, friends and even total strangers last August as waters rose opened his eyes to the need. He's still working on how to get there. In addition to DisasterMap.Net, Boyd puts his geography, cartography and data skills to work on individual projects for NGOs working on things like mapping petrochemical accidents to working on community planning for storm surge events. With disasters appearing to be a growth industry in Louisiana, Boyd sees his work gravitating more toward disaster response, which is what led him to form DisasterMap.net back in 2011. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

A funny thing happened on the new way to repealing the Affordable Care Act. It fractured conservatism. House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the bill rather than face a humiliating defeat. The awful, hastily written American Health Care Act would have eliminated coverage for 24 million Americans and driven up the costs for those still able to buy coverage. Not one of Louisiana’s five Republican members of our congressional delegation came out in opposition to the bill which would have cost more than 300,000 Louisiana residents their health insurance coverage. The bill was killed by the conservative House Republican faction known as the Freedom Caucus. That group based its opposition on the fact that the Trump/Ryan bill was not market based, conveniently forgetting the fact that it has been a series of healthcare market failures that have led the federal government to intervene in healthcare. Prior to the enactment of Medicare in 1965, more than 30% of seniors lived in poverty primarily because of the cost of paying for their healthcare. In 2008, a national consensus had emerged that the health insurance system was broken and that only the federal government would be able to fix it. Republicans agreed. When Barak Obama became president and congressional Republican leaders decided on the night of his inauguration to fight him on every initiative in an attempt to make Obama a one-term president, they focused on thwarting the administration’s push to respond to the national need. That decision marked the end of traditional politics in the United States. This was not about governing and policy. It was strictly about politics and posturing. Some conservatives saw the folly in this. The true cost of it was shown when Ryan pulled the bill from consideration for the second time last Friday. In the wake of the political wreck, uncertainty prevails. President Trump has been all over the map. He’s said he wants Obamacare to implode. Fine talk from the leader of the country when the result would be to put healthcare beyond the reach of people who now have it. Alternately, he’s hinted about talking with Democrats about striking a deal on healthcare, although Democrats are not interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act. Getting bi-partisan agreement on such a major issue would herald a new era of politics here, one that had been written off by the right as dead and buried as they stood in locked-step opposition to all things Obama. The lesson of the failure of House Republicans to rally around Trump/Ryan Care is that opposition alone leaves you wildly unprepared to govern if you have not done the serious work of thinking through and providing workable alternatives. During the Obama years, House Republicans voted 50 or so times on bills or resolutions to repeal the ACA. During the seven years since passage of the bill, Republicans could not write a bill that their caucus could agree on. So, they just kept throwing rocks. My guest on this week’s podcast, Col. Rob Maness, counts himself among the allies of the Freedom Caucus. He opposed the Trump/Ryan Bill because it wasn’t market focused enough, yet he also opposed it because it denied healthcare to so many people. Clearly he’s torn. He also now questions whether President Trump has the skills and patience to execute the kind of delicate diplomacy needed to rein in North Korea using deterrence similar to that used in the Cold War – targeting the opponent and making it clear to them that an attack on the U.S. or its allies would be fatal. Neither Trump nor North Korean leader Kim Jung Un appear to have the ideal temperament to be the players in a game of nuclear chicken. Maness has just begun studying Louisiana’s coastal and climate issues, but says he believes the federal government owes Louisiana help in meeting the challenge of restoring and protecting our coast in exchange for the decades of energy production we have allowed here when other states were not willing to endure the resulting damage. Maness believes part of the challenge of dealing with North Korea now is that we live in a multi-polar world, meaning there are no longer two great powers as there were during the Cold War. With the shattering of the Republican political monolith in Washington, we need to start thinking about what could be an emerging new multi-polar political order in the U.S. But that will be somewhere beyond the chaos that is likely to prevail for a bit. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

We live in a world of constant change. Everything we do changes the world that existed the moment before we did it. That includes flood plains, which people across south Louisiana have learned a good bit about over the past year as a result of flooding that has affected us. The recorded rainfall across south Louisiana and Mississippi on the first day of the Great August Flood of 2016. The big one was the August flood of last year that wreaked havoc from southwest Louisiana into southeast Mississippi. We quickly learned that we were not prepared to deal with the effects of years of rapid growth and decades of thinking about flood control in terms of keeping water in rivers. The hardest hit areas in that flood were the areas that had experienced the most growth. In hindsight, it seems so logical. After all, early settlers and development in regions took place on the high ground, particularly in low-lying southwest Louisiana. Development that followed was toward those low areas where those before them had opted not to settle or build. When the deluge struck in August, we learned hard lessons about hydrology and construction. Water not only finds its level, it finds its way. It is indifferent to what may stand in the way of it getting there. Flood protection strategies that focused on keeping river water out of communities were revealed to be traps that kept rain water in those same communities, particularly in the Baton Rouge region. People whose homes and/or businesses were hit by the floods in Louisiana last year (the Shreveport/Bossier area was hit by Red River flooding in the first part of the year and the Monroe area was hit by flood producing storms in the spring) now have an idea of the ordeal that those driven from their homes by Katrina and Rita went through just over a decade ago. Flooding in northwest Louisiana, spring 2016. This is not the end of it. As the atmosphere continues to warm, the air holds more humidity. The seas are warming, as well, meaning more moisture is evaporating into the atmosphere. It’s a recipe for more severe weather like we experience in 2016. On the other hand, some of the post-flood recovery has involved repeating the very mistakes that made the floods so devastating. Since the floods in the Lafayette area, more ‘slab on grade’ homes have sprung up many in or next to subdivisions that flooded last year. Flooding in south Louisiana, August 2016. Just because an area did not flood last year does not mean that it won’t flood next year. The basic rule of flood plains is that everything built in them — from parking lots to homes to commercial developments — changes them because each structure or project alters the ability of the ground to absorb water. And when wanter can’t get into the ground, it’s going to move to a point where it can. For decades the efforts in south Louisiana has been to quickly move the water out. As we learned last year, sometimes there is too much water to move out. We also learned that there is nothing you can do to speed the removal of the water when the ground is flat and saturated. Water from the Vermilion River in Lafayette stayed in some homes and subdivisions for weeks after the rains stopped. Grasshopper Mendoza Steve Picou Steve Picou and Grasshopper Mendoza have first-hand experience dealing with the impact of water. Their New Orleans home flooded after the federal levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They’ve been part of the great conversations that sprang up in New Orleans about how to rethink the city’s relationship with water. It’s a conversation that should be taking place all across south Louisiana as we confront the elements of climate change — warming temperatures, sea level rise, land subsidence, increased severity of severe storms. In the face of this existential threat to life as we have known it in south Louisiana, as Steve says in the interview, “we must must adapt or move, or both.” The status quo is not an option. It’s already gone. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

The big push is on to finalize (again) a design choice for the proposed I-49 route through downtown Lafayette. DOTD and Lafayette Consolidated Government leaders along with their corporate sponsor/patrons at OneAcadiana say they’ll make a decision in the next few days. The rush to get the project built contrasts dramatically with the same group’s aversion to determining the extent of ground and water pollution in the Union Pacific rail yard that stretches 1.5 miles from Simcoe Street in the north to Taft in the south. The proposed I-49 road way would run right through the Union Pacific rail yard (area in yellow). Base map by DOTD. The rail yard operated about 70 years before all but a few people appreciated the connection between industrial operations and quality of life. The long length of ground and water contamination at the site leads some local environmental activists to believe it is extensively polluted. The road proponents don’t appear at all concerned by that. They should be. The north end of the site is literally across Simcoe from an aggregation point for a water well field belonging to Lafayette Utilities System. The LUS wells already show the presence of trace presence of chemicals linked to the Union Pacific site. These wells serve as the source of drinking water for most of the city of Lafayette. I-49 through downtown poses the very real threat to speed the pollution of the LUS wells because it would run through most of old rail yard, requiring pilings to be driven. In some places in the vicinity of the yard, the Chicot Aquifer — the sole source of drinking water for Lafayette and most of south Louisiana — rises to as little as 40 feet below the surface of the ground. Driving pilings through the pollution would drive it toward the water supply by breaking the barriers that separate the aquifer from the ground above it. The chemicals dumped in the rail yard over those seven decades might well have accomplished some of that already. Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance. Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance is alarmed by the folly of proceeding to disturb the site when no comprehensive assessment of the pollution there has ever been carried out. There has been some spot testing and even some spot cleanups in connection with land transactions. But, Goodell says a thorough assessment is an essential step to an effective cleanup and that has never occurred. The LUS water well field pumps 20 million gallons a day out of the ground just north of the Union Pacific site. That pull has created a current of sorts in the aquifer — a cone of depression which draws water and whatever is in it toward the wells. Goodell is adamant that the problem is real and that the pollution threat exists separate from the I-49 project. Her concern is that the project will make matters worse because state and local officials are refusing to acknowledge the serious nature of the threat posed by the long-term pollution at the site. Goodell is working with community groups across the city through her WaterMark Alliance to call attention to the general need to create more citizen awareness of the pollution issue and the importance of clean drinking water to the ability to sustain life. Think Flint, Michigan. Or, closer to home, St. Joseph, Louisiana. Proponents of I-49 say the train is about to leave the station on that project. If it does before the extent of pollution at the Union Pacific site is discovered, that train just might take our drinking water with it.

RootsCamp LA 7 is coming to Lafayette on March 18-19 and it’s a ‘must make’ event this year because of the surge of new activists that are now engaged in the political and civic process, many for the first time. Dawn Collins, RootsCamp LA founder and chief organizer. RootsCamp started small and has been growing organically since 2010. The first session Dawn Collins organized was in a union hall assembly room near Alexandria. It moves in two-year cycles and has been held in Baton Rouge and New Orleans since the first two events in Central Louisiana. What’s great about RootsCamp is that the agenda is set by the attendees once they arrive. There are some panel discussions that are scheduled, but the vast bulk of the agenda is set on-site by attendees voting their level of interest. What became starkly clear last year during the Democratic primary season – where the first wave of 2016 activists were drawn into the process – is how little understanding there is among people about how government is organized and operates, and how parties work. Progressives seem to need Civics classes. Many people couldn’t distinguish between their congressional representatives and their state legislators. Not a minor issue. We are in a tight spot here. Those who are focused on trying to get members of Congress to respond to voters’ demands are, in many instances, engaged in futile activity. Why? Because the U.S. House of Representatives has been gerrymandered in succeeding Census cycles to lock in congressional Republican majorities in the Congress based on minority vote totals. Oh, by the way. Those House congressional district lines are drawn by state legislatures. Look at Louisiana as an example. Louisiana has had six congressional seats since the 2010 Census. Louisiana happens to have a non-white population of 37% — about 33% African American, with the rest being Hispanic, Asian, Native Americans and others. Under the concept of one-person, one-vote, Louisiana should have two of our six congressional districts that are winnable by non-Republicans. But, we don’t. Why? Because in 2011 the Louisiana Legislature did the work of then-7th District Congressman Charles Boustany (whose district was disappearing) and carved the 3rd District in such a way as to give Boustany the advantage over then-Congressman Jeff Landry who represented the 3rd District at the time. I’m not saying Louisiana is a progressive state. See the 2016 presidential election results to settle that. But, I am saying that congressional redistricting and redistricting of districts in the Louisiana House and Senate have been carried out in a partisan way to lock in Republican advantage and to make our state appear more conservative than it actually is. Coming to Lafayette mid-March 2017. For those of you whose interest is primarily at the federal issue, this is critical information. Why? Because we cannot see better outcomes in Congress unless and until we understand and change the redistricting process in Louisiana (and other states). Control of Congress, then, can be and has been affected by actions at the state level. The next state legislative elections are in 2019. The next Census is 2020. The redistricting of the Congressional seats will take place in 2021 for the 2022 elections. The redistricting of state legislative districts will likely take place around the same time, although that work does not have to be completed until 2023. All of these things require that citizens engage in the process and assert their ownership rights to it. That is the essential requirement of the United States’ experiment with our democratic republic. It’s gotten away from us in recent decades. The corrective is activism and engagement. That’s why RootsCamp LA is essential. See you there! Register here. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

The closed chamber burning of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant is weeks away from being completed at Camp Minden. That work, led by the Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden, prevented a potential public health disaster from unfolding in northwest Louisiana. That threat grew out of the U.S. Army’s plan to burn the explosive materials in the open air — 80,000 pounds per day for 200 days. The burn chamber portion of the closed burn system installed at Camp Minden to dispose of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant. Camp Minden is east of Shreveport in Webster Parish. Wind would have carried the contaminated fallout from the burning in any direction on any given day. Dr. Brian Salvatore recognized the threat and spoke out. He galvanized the community against the open burn. It sparked a grassroots movement that succeeded in getting the Army to change its plans — and to pay for it. The notion that an open burn of those materials could be carried out was not new. It had happened in other communities with Army munitions depots over the years. Some communities fought for safer disposal methods and prevailed. The Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden connected into that network of community activists and experts, engaged local and state governmental leaders. They engaged the EPA as well as members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation which, ironically, was home to some of harsh critics of the agency. The burning method that was selected as the disposal mechanism offered the most reliable, proven method of disposal of the material Dr. Salvatore explains in our conversation. But, it’s not perfect. He points out that the monitoring of the exhaust from the burn process is not highly refined, that there is no analysis of the amount of individual chemicals emitted after the burn. But, he says its a vast improvement over the open burn operation. Dr. Brian Salvatore This being Louisiana, a group in the region now sees a business opportunity with the Camp Minden burn unit and wants to make it permanent. That would make Camp Minden a hazardous waste destination, with toxic materials of all kinds being shipped there through the region to be burned. It is typical for Louisiana which, dating at least as far back as the Mike Foster administration, has had as official state policy to take the wastes that others don’t want for disposal here. The most glaring early example of this was when an Exxon drilling operation at the mouth of Mobile Bay failed in the mid-1990s. The company had a large amount of hazardous waste on its hands that it needed to eliminate. Alabama officials would not allow the company to dispose of the materials in their state. Instead, the materials were hauled by truck to the Lafourche Parish community of Grand Bois in 1998. Dr. Mike Robichaux of Raceland was a member of the Louisiana Senate at that time. Grand Bois was in his district. He sought to have the legislature block the importation of hazardous wastes into Louisiana and was roundly defeated with the help of Governor Foster and the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. He succeeded in bringing national attention to the plight of the citizens there, as well as to the misclassification of “normative oilfield wastes” as non-hazardous. The push to establish Camp Minden as a permanent hazardous waste disposal facility is as short-sighted as burying oilfield wastes in land that is a more membrane than either land or marsh as was the case in Grand Bois. Despite having near state-of-the-art technology in place at Camp Minden, there is little doubt that some toxins (hopefully in safe levels) have been released during the months of burning that will soon end. Prolonged exposure to toxins and carcinogens over time is the course that sometimes leads to cancer and other diseases. We already have numerous examples of this in Louisiana now. Here’s one. Here’s another. This report is about Calcasieu Parish. This is about mercury contamination of water here. Where does your electricity come from? What those examples above have in common is that for much of the time the pollution and contamination was taking place, there was little or no public awareness of the processes at work. Anyone who proposes to put a permanent hazardous waste incineration facility in a community under the guise of jobs and community benefits is engaged in a special kind of cynicism. For too long the problem in Louisiana has been that our elected officials and those who claim to regulate industry have been willing to allow the poisoning of some of us as a means of enriching a few of us. If we are going to leave a state that our children and future generations can inhabit, that must stop. A new fight has erupted over Camp Minden. The good news is that the good people who defeated the Army and the EPA should be able to handle this skirmish. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

The President as a Distraction from his Administration and the Congress Ted Harvey has decided to make it his business defending President Donald Trump. He came to the work in an odd way. He explains in our interview that he was a Rand Paul supporter when the GOP primary season began. He shifted to Ted Cruz after Paul abandoned his campaign. He jumped to Trump after the hotelier and reality show star emerged as the Republican nominee. Former Colorado state Senator Ted Harvey. Harvey’s embrace of Trump came easily as for two years he’d headed the Stop Hillary PAC. His brother serves in the diplomatic corps and Harvey says the infamous Benghazi incident in which four Americans were killed cut close to home for him. Despite the fact that years of House Republican investigations could prove no lawbreaking on the part of Secretary Clinton’s part, the fact that she had ultimate responsibility for the events in Libya (coupled with what he says are “decades of corruption” involving the Clintons) was enough to set him off on his anti-Clinton quest. The first tumultuous month of the Trump presidency has seen the presidents Republican allies in the U.S. Senate approve every person he’s nominated for a cabinet post — at least all of those who have stuck around for a Senate vote. Since the election, a lot of energy and anger have been spent trying to manipulate the Constitutionally established election process to overturn the results. There was a massive march on Washington the day after the inauguration accompanied by many in cities across the country. There have been many new avenues to activism created by veteran activists and those new to it, including the Indivisible movement created by now unemployed congressional staffers. As the results become evident, all of this has been mostly ineffective. Trump is president. His administration is embarking on policy changes that aim to remake the United States into a safety-net free society that has not existed since the Great Depression. This rush to repeal the 20th Century will shift the fights to the courts. The good news is that the systemic inertia that we found so frustrating in the Obama years might well buy us some time to enable us to survive the blitzkrieg of legislative and policy initiatives coming from the administration and the Republican Congress. The Democratic Party bears a large share of the responsibility for this mess. Sure, the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to block Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. But, where have the DNC and the state party organizations been for the past three decades while Republicans and conservatives were gerrymandering the party nearly out of existence in state houses across the country? The party — at the state and federal levels — has been so busy chasing corporate cash that it forgot that its basic work is politics. They have been asleep at the switch, ignoring fundamentals on the ground (like redistricting) while Republicans boxed them in. The opportunity to change the election maps and math won’t really happen until after the 2020 Census. The good news is that there’s time to educate ourselves and organize around that issue. The bad news is that non-corporatists start from a stark disadvantage that extends from state houses to the Capitol. Legislatures redistrict themselves and they redraw congressional district maps. Louisiana will elect a new Legislature in 2019 and there will be significant turnover in the Senate due to term limits. But, there is the problem of the maps of those districts which were designed to lock-in conservative majorities. Don’t expect much change in the 2018 off-year federal elections as the maps of House districts will be the same ones that have locked in Republican majorities in that chamber since 2012. There are few districts that are or can become competitive because of the way in which they were drawn. The current frenzied level of activism does not feel sustainable. What is needed now as the fights shift, is a strategic assessment of where we stand and where we can be effective outside the electoral system. We also need to work with those (not only progressives) who see the need for changes in the electoral system ranging from ending gerrymandering to ending the corruption of the political process through the flow of virtually unlimited amounts of money into elections. All of the major work I see needing to be done is issues-based, not personality driven. In this sense, the President and his chaotic methods are best viewed a distraction from the work of his administration, the long term damage being inflicted on people and institutions by the Congress, — and the work that we must do to save this country. We cannot afford to burnout. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

My first guest from the new home is Dan Collins, the whistleblower who won his lawsuit in 2015 against the Department of Natural Resources and now faces a date for oral arguments on the department’s appeal of his win. The podcast of Dan’s program while we did the show at KPEL was the most-listened to podcast of the year with nearly 1,000 downloads and streams. So, with the appeal looming, I figured let’s get things rolling with an hour of discussing the things that have made our state the fiscal and environmental mess that it is today. Dan and I only met two years ago as we each chased our corruption stories that involved DNR. Dan’s whistleblower law suit involves the hijacking of a water quality project for the Atchafalaya Basin Program into an oil and gas drilling access canal. He identified manipulation of the state mineral leasing process, as well as unusual activity involving rights of way and property agreements connected to the project. State mineral leases are run through DNR’s Office of Mineral Resources. They also collect and audit royalty payments that come to the state through oil and gas leases involving state-owned lands and water bottoms. The corruption story that I was (and still am) chasing led me to OMR, as well. In 2013, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the state of Louisiana had gone three years without auditing oil and gas severance tax payments in the state. The power to perform those audits had been taken away from the state’s chief tax collector (the Department of Revenue) and given to OMR. DoR was supposed to alert OMR about severance tax payers who might be audit candidates, but within three months of the audit authority being taken away from DoR, the Jindal administration also managed to kill the department’s software program that it had used to identify non-payers. For three years, the state flew blind on severance tax payments. Evidence suggests that the industry was tipped off that this change was coming and they made off like bandits accordingly once the two step (authority transfer, then blinding of DoR) was completed. As Dan explains in our conversation, his status as a contract employee of the state gave him standing to blow the whistle on what he believed (and a jury agreed) was illegal activity in connection with the project on which he had once worked. It’s been ten years since he discovered the wrongdoing. Seven years since he filed suit. Just over one year since a jury of his peers in East Baton Rouge Parish unanimously agreed with him. If the state loses its appeal, the case will likely go to the Louisiana Supreme Court. If Dan loses, he says he’ll appeal as well. This case and the severance tax give away should matter to every Louisiana citizen. Severance taxes and royalty payments represent our modest claim on the mineral wealth of this state. Taken together, severance taxes and royalty payments make up about 15% of the state’s general fund revenue. When they don’t collect what is owed us on that revenue, our leaders are giving away our wealth, often times in ways that directly benefit them at our expense. It’s estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars in severance tax revenue was lost between 2010 and 2013 when the audits were not done. One attorney whose looked at the numbers (500,000 severance tax transactions each year when the audits were not done) says the revenue losses could be more than $1 Billion. The industry and the Jindal administration beat back an attempt by the Legislature force an audit of oil and gas production in 2014. They might well have known how much money was lost, but they did not want legislators and the public to know how much had been given away. We still continue to fight revenue shortfalls in this state today. I think those can be traced in some significant measure to the failure to audit severance taxes during those key years. The connecting tissue between Dan’s case and my ongoing work is that in each instance the public’s interest and the well-being of the state was put somewhere down the hierarchy of priorities by our elected leaders. Healthcare could be cut, but oil and gas companies could not be made to pay the taxes they owed. Tuition at colleges and universities could rise at the fastest rate in the country but oil and gas companies could not be inconvenienced by making them give us a true accounting of what they had done with our mineral wealth. Dan Collins stood up for us at considerable sacrifice to himself and his career. Listen to his story in the podcast. We owe him a debt of gratitude. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake