Monthly Archives: July 2012

Bobby Jindal and John White: Deceptively Attempting to Manufacture Consent on School Voucher Program 3

by • Education, Local Political News, Media Studies, Music, National News

Update: Superintendent White’s prior communications with BESE Board members may have violated open meetings laws. 

With only a day’s notice and with less than a month before the beginning of the school year, Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White rolled out a set of academic standards for private schools participating in the newly-launched voucher program. Christened as “Louisiana Believes,” it represents the centerpiece of Governor Bobby Jindal’s education reform initiative. And although the initiative was swept through the state legislature through a series of somewhat shady maneuvers, Governor Jindal and Superintendent White were, nonetheless, subsequently required to provide an objective criteria by which they would evaluate the merit of those private schools seeking public subsidization, criteria they provided with only a day’s notice to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for approval.

Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal (R) and President Barack Obama (D)

Instead offering anything meaningful, John White spat out a completely meaningless, totally unenforceable, and intellectually dishonest directive, shielding at least 75% of schools that qualify for public subsidization from any actual accountability whatsoever and reserving his right to accomodate the remaining 25% at his sole discretion.

The students awarded the state’s vouchers, as of now nearly 7,000 students in number, will not be subjected to the standardized testing that the state’s public schools undergo. Instead, they will have to take the Scholarship Cohort Index, a 150-point exam that is similar to the exams the public students take. Unlike in the public schools, however, the tests’ scores will not prevent a student from moving to the next grade.

Still, if the students average lower than a score of 50 in their second year, their new school will not be allowed to take on any more voucher students — though the students will be allowed to remain, and the taxpayer money will still be funneled to the schools.

But these standards, according to White, apply to only 25 percent of the schools receiving voucher students. The remaining 75 percent will still be required to take the tests, but they will only be forced to post the results publicly.

White also inserted a clause that would allow the waiver of any punishments if “the school has improved by more than 15 points on the [SCI] over the last four school years.” That is, if a school has gone from, say, 15 to 30 on the SCI over the first four years — remaining well-beneath the minimum threshold — it would not only retain its current voucher students, it could recruit new ones.

“The whole thing is a sham,” Les Landon, the PR Director with the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, told TPM. “The thing that sticks out is that the superintendent has given himself authority to waive accountability rules that they’ve established, so what does one do?”

Meanwhile, Mr. White, a transplant to Louisiana by way of New York and Illinois, attempts to argue, publicly, that his policy ensures fairness and equitable treatment for all schools, both public and private, despite the obvious truth: He’s a liar. There’s no apples-to-apples comparative analysis involved here. He and Governor Jindal want to divert tens, if not hundreds, of millions in taxpayer dollars away from public schools and into the coffers of privately-held religious institutions, and neither of these men are in any hurry to hold those private schools up to the same scrutiny by which they evaluate our public system.

Make no mistake: Regardless of the spin that Governor Jindal, his administration, and Superintendent White attempt to put on this issue, as I’ve stated before, this has nothing to do with ensuring accountability; it’s about justifying unaccountability. Both of these men, insidiously and under the banner of parental choice, are lying to you, to me, to the people of the Great State of Louisiana, and to the entire nation. It’s a sham, an attempt at a massive redistribution of public wealth into the hands of a select number of politically-acceptable, religiously-right, profiteering con-artists.

Superintendent White’s claims that all private schools will be held to the same standards as public schools are quickly disintegrated by the actual facts and are immediately recognizable by those of us who don’t instinctively believe in this man’s inherent integrity. He, with the support of Governor Jindal, seeks to give tens of millions, every year, to private, religious schools that teach pseudo-science and creationism, schools that rely on textbooks that are filled with anti-intellectual hogwash, schools that teach “scientists” are all sinful people, that the Loch Ness monster is real and therefore disproves evolution, that the KKK really wasn’t all that bad on civil rights issues. And Superintendent John White and Governor Bobby Jindal are completely cool with that, just as long as the voucher students in those schools can pass a standardized test. To them, apparently, that’s the only thing the matters.

And by the way, they’re not asking the other kids in these schools to submit to and pass those tests. Nope, just the poor kids on vouchers. If those kids on vouchers are pulled out of class and prepped for the standardized test, well, it MUST mean that their school is performing quite well, thank you very much. And if you disagree, you’re nothing more than a unionist activist who hates parents.

Less than 24 hours after Superintendent White announced his “academic accountability” plan for voucher schools, it was embraced by a blogger at the Fordham Institute, a fact that Mr. White was happy to report:

Here’s the problem: The blogger at the Fordham Institute, well, it turns out his “blog,” only a year or two ago, was edited and published by Governor Jindal’s Policy Director, Stafford Palmieri, who also served recently as Jindal’s point person on education policy. That’s not a coincidence; it reeks of back-room coordination. Why? Because before Ms. Palmieri was a member of Governor Jindal’s staff, the Fordham Institute criticized Louisiana for its anti-science education policies, most notably the Louisiana Science Education Act, which it called “a devastating flaw.”

I, for one, refuse to have the wool pulled over my head: If the good folks at Fordham, a conservative think-tank, considered the LSEA to be a “devastating flaw,” then, surely, they’d recognize the much more egregious scam of having taxpayer dollars funding New Earth Creationist schools. It is not merely coincidental that Ms. Palmieri once edited this very website or that, on the same day it was announced, it was the first to endorse John White’s plan.

But much more importantly, this is not, exactly, a conspiracy theory. If it were, then it’d be the worst one ever. The other “think tanks” who relied on Fordham’s analysis, like the Heritage Foundation and the Pelican Institute, BREAKING NEWS: You’ve been had.

Ms. Palmieri, the Jindal Administration, Superintendent White: They just hedged their bets that the rest of us wouldn’t be able to so easily connect the dots here. Either way, it’s a blatant attempt at deceptively attempting to manufacture consent for the school voucher program. They want to believe their critics, like them, also live in a windowless echo chamber.

A plug for Superintendent John White: Follow him on Twitter, @LouisianaSupe. He’s nearly as flexible as our Olympic gymnasts.

LA Superintendent John White: Voucher Program Will Fund Failing Private Schools Reply

by • Education, Local Political News, National News

As a part of his ongoing efforts to “muddy up a narrative” about Louisiana’s voucher program, Education Superintendent John White announced new “accountability standards” for schools that qualify for voucher funding. And this time, Mr. White (no relation to me, by the way) seems to have convinced The Times-Picayune to run with his spin. Quoting:

Private schools participating in Louisiana’s new voucher program for low-income students will have to clear roughly the same academic bar that public schools do in order to keep accepting taxpayer dollars, according to a new accountability plan proposed by the state’s top education official.

Except that’s not entirely true or accurate. Remember, Governor Jindal and Mr. White have defended their controversial plan to divert taxpayer money to private schools by suggesting that they were merely giving parents the ability to pull their children out of “failing schools.” Then, once the list of schools Mr. White had “qualified” became public and it became clear that Governor Jindal and Mr. White intended to give tens of millions of taxpayer dollars every year to schools that lacked basic facilities, relied on DVDs instead of teachers, employed administrators convicted of fraud, and taught students that scientists were all “sinful” people, among other things, the Governor and the Superintendent retroactively retired the word “qualified.” They’d meant to say “pre-qualified,” you see. Honest mistake.  John White, we were led to believe, had been working on a strict set of criteria to evaluate the merits of these schools, and if they didn’t pass muster, they’d be removed from the list.

With less than a month to go before the beginning of the school year, Superintendent White finally released the criteria, and despite his spin and despite the somewhat sympathetic reporting of The Times-Picayune, these so-called “standards” will guarantee that taxpayer dollars will be used to fund failing, unaccountable private schools all over the State of Louisiana. His so-called “standards” are actually just empty rhetoric, an attempt to justify and codify a massive redistribution of public wealth to religious institutions.

Beginning this coming school year, if White’s plan is put in place, private schools accepting an average of more than 10 voucher students per grade, or a total of 40 assigned to grades in which students take standardized exams, will have to earn a performance score of at least 50 in order to keep taking additional students in subsequent years. The scores, derived from exam results and other factors, will be based on the new 150-point scale used for grading public schools in Louisiana, which is slated to replace a more complicated 200-point system this year. Public schools that score below a 50 will be labeled “failing” and face being taken over by the state if they can’t improve results.

Last week, Zack Kopplin identified twenty different voucher schools all over the State of Louisiana that teach Young Earth Creationism. Because at least ten of these schools are slated to receive forty or fewer voucher students, they will not even be subjected to any real oversight at all. They can be abysmal; they can teach kids the Lochness Monster disproves evolution or that the KKK wasn’t really all that bad or that Japanese fishermen caught a real dinosaur around thirty years ago (all things they actually teach, by the way).

But even those schools that accept more than forty students (or ten voucher students per grade in which students take standardized tests) will not really be subjected to scrutiny. You see, in order to qualify for a voucher, a student must be zoned for a school that is graded as a C, D, or F, which essentially opens up the program to 56% of all public school children in Louisiana. But now, according to Mr. White’s new “standards” (which conveniently include a new scale), all a school needs to do to qualify for vouchers is to make a D minus. In effect, we will be taking public dollars from “C” public schools and giving those precious dollars to fund “D minus” private schools. And incidentally, one of the main factors in determining the grades of these schools is their pass/fail rates, which creates a huge incentive for voucher schools to simply engage in grade inflation.

Once again, put simply, John White and Bobby Jindal are, by their own definition of the word “failing,” proposing that Louisiana taxpayers fund failing private schools. These standards are just a charade, yet another attempt at muddying up a narrative, a blatantly obvious effort to confuse the public. Make no mistake: This is not about increasing accountability; it’s about justifying a lack of accountability.

One more thing: When the Jindal administration faced an injunction that would have delayed the implementation of the voucher program, they disingenuously told the court that delaying implementation would result in deficit spending, hanging onto a statute that prohibits an injunction if it creates a deficit. But they didn’t merely suggest it would have been a small deficit; they claimed, to the court, that it would result in a loss of $3.4 billion. It was, in my opinion, a particularly specious and dishonest legal argument, bordering on perjury. An injunction against the voucher program would not have resulted in a total loss of $3.4 billion, but because that is what Mr. Jindal’s lawyer had claimed, the judge felt obligated to take him at his word.

However, as Brian Blackwell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “That’s just kind of crazy. … There’s no way that not spending money can cause a deficit. When you don’t fund something, you can’t have a deficit. There’s no deficit if you can’t spend.” Blackwell pointed out that the funds have already been sent to the Department of Education and that an injunction would merely prevent the money from being distributed.

Additionally, because the size of the state’s Minimum Foundation Program has grown since 2011, Blackwell notes — according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune — that using last year’s funding formula, which Louisiana would utilize if the state legislature could not agree upon a new one, would leave tens of millions of dollars as surplus for the DoE.

Governor Jindal and Mr. White are obviously hell-bent on jamming through this voucher program, even if it means potentially lying to the court and even if it requires them to concoct some sort of fake, toothless, half-baked “accountability” standards that merely reinforce the untested, unprecedented “game” they’re now playing with our school system– our actual, historic, whether  inner-city or rural– neighborhood school system, those schools who have for decades been the foundation of a neighborhood and  an incredible part of the neighborhood’s built environment, traditions, and cultural and social identities.

Zack Kopplin: Governor Jindal’s Voucher Program Will Provide Over $11 Million Per Year To Send More Than 1,300 Students To Creationist Schools Reply

by • Education

Reposted with permission

By Zack Kopplin:

Stop Governor Jindal’s Creationist Voucher Program Before Governor Romney Takes it Nationwide

Louisiana is preparing to spend over $11 million to send 1,306 students to 19 private schools that teach creationism instead of science as part of Governor Bobby Jindal’s new voucher program.  It is time to halt the implementation of this creationist voucher program.

It is increasingly clear that one of Governor Jindal’s primary education goals is the teaching of creationism.  He supported, signed , and defended the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), Louisiana’s 2008 stealth creationism law, which allows teachers to sneak creationism into public school science classrooms by using creationist supplemental materials.  Despite hearing from 78 Nobel laureate scientists who urged him to repeal the law because teaching creationism is both bad science and unconstitutional, Jindal instead defended the law.

Now Governor Jindal has passed a voucher plan which provides millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools that teach creationism and whose curriculum doesn’t meet the state’s approved science standards.

My review of the Governor’s voucher program identifies at least 19 schools who use a creationist curriculum or blatantly promote creationism on their websites.  These 19 schools have been awarded 1,306 voucher slots and can receive as much as $11,101,000 in taxpayer money annually.

  • The handbook of the Claiborne Christian School, in West Monroe, LA, says that students are taught to “discern and refute lies commonly found in [secular] textbooks, college classrooms, and in the media.” In the January 2010 school newsletter, the principal promotes young-earth creationist talking points from Answers in Genesis, saying, “Our position at CCS on the age of the Earth and other issues is that any theory that goes against God’s Word is in error.” She also claims that scientists are “sinful men” trying to explain the world “without God” so they don’t have to be “morally accountable to Him.” CCS has 28 voucher slots and can receive up to $238,000 in public money.
  • The student handbook of Faith Academy, in Gonzalez, LA, says that in this Household of Faith school, students must “defend creationism through evidence presented by the Bible verses [sic] traditional scientific theory.” FA has 38 voucher slots and can receive up to $323,000 in public money.
  • Ascension Christian High School, in Gonzales, also a Household of Faith school is Faith Academy’s high school campus. It has 80 voucher slots and can receive up to $680,000 in public money.
  • Northeast Baptist School, in West Monroe, uses ABeka and Bob Jones University science textbooks.  Researcher and writer Rachel Tabachnick, who examined these textbooks, reports that it is “clear that no instruction is included in the text that would conflict with young earth creationism.”  Using such books endangers the educational prospects of students in Christian schools. In 2010, the University of California won a federal lawsuit, ASCI [Association of Christian Schools International] v. Stearns, in which the judge ruled in favor of UC’s right to refuse to recognize high school credits for science classes taken in Christian schools that used such books. UC contended that such instruction is “inconsistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community.” NBS has 40 voucher slots and can receive up to $340,000 in public money.
  • Northlake Christian Elementary School, in Covington, LA, teaches science using both ASCI’s “Purposeful Design Series” and ABeka materials.  One Purposeful Design science notebook requires students to “discuss your thoughts about how the complexity of a cell shows that it must be purposefully designed.” NCES, which specifies that “all curricular content is filtered through and presented within a Christian worldview,” has 20 voucher slots and can receive up to $170,000 in public money.
  • Northlake Christian High School in Covington uses a secular science textbook but also “integrate[s]” material from “biblical-young-earth, Christian/Creationists,” according to Northlake’s high school biology teacher. He uses sources from Creation Ministries International, Answers in Genesis, and the Institute for Creation Research. This teacher also quotes a creationist book that says, “No coherent, cohesive theology has yet been offered that would allow Christians to embrace evolution with integrity.”  Disturbingly, NCHS’s student handbookincludes a discrimination policy against prospective students and staff who do not meet “Biblical standards.” NCHS has 30 voucher slots and can receive up to $255,000 in public money.
  • Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, LA, uses the infamous ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum. Curriculum publisher ACE Ministries is guided by “God’s Mandate for Christian Education,” in which evolutionary theory is described as “extremely damaging to children individually and to society as a whole” because it “denies the principle of the individual’s accountability” to God.  ECA has 135 voucher slots and can receive up to $1,147,500 in public money.
  • New Orleans Adventist Academy teaches a creationist curriculum, according to the New Orleans newspaper, Gambit. A science curriculum guide from the Southwest Region Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, to which NOAA belongs, shows that Adventist schools teach children that “God, in six literal days, made the heavens and the earth.” The guide contains references both to young-earth and intelligent design creationist sources. NOAA has 100 voucher slots and can receive up to $850,000 in public money.
  • Greater Mt. Olive Christian Academy, in Baton Rouge, uses the ABeka curriculum.  GMOCA has 50 voucher slots and can receive up to $425,000 in public money.
  • Faith Christian Academy, in Marrero, LA, uses the ABeka textbooks. FCA has 38 voucher slots and can receive up to $323,000 in public money.
  • Victory Christian Academy, in Metairie, LA, uses ABeka and Bob Jones curricula. Its philosophy of science education is “to develop students in principles of science. . . teaching them to observe relationships and laws as established by God’s creative hand” and that “any teaching of man that is contrary to the clear understanding of scripture is in error.”  VCA has 8 voucher slots and can receive up to $68,000 in public money.
  • Lafayette Christian Academy, in Lafayette, LA, uses Bob Jones and ABeka.  Its “primary objective” is to educate students “without compromising the Word of God.” LCA has 4 voucher slots and can receive up to $34,000 in public money.
  • Cenla Christian Academy, in Pineville, LA, uses the ABeka and Bob Jones curricula. CCA has 72 voucher slots and can receive up to $612,000 in public money.
  • Family Worship Christian Academy, in Opelousas, LA, offers “a stimulating learning environment for our students utilizing A Beka curriculum.” FWCA has 66 voucher slots and can receive up to $561,000 in public money.
  • Trinity Christian Academy, in Zachary, LA, explained via e-mail that it uses ABeka to teach high school science.  TCA has been given 35 voucher slots and can receive up to $297,500 in public money.
The schools listed here may be just the tip of the iceberg.  The true number of creationist voucher schools approved to receive unconstitutionally misappropriated taxpayer dollars under Governor Jindal’s voucher program could be significantly higher.  My analysis above lists only those schools that explicitly acknowledge teaching
creationism or creationist curriculum.  Many more schools listed as approved by Governor’s voucher program are probably also planning to use creationist textbooks, since many of these are self-identified Christian academies that appear very similar in philosophy to the ones I’ve listed above.

The fact that these schools are teaching creationism isn’t the only problem. BeauVer Christian School in DeRidder can’t even meet the fire code and has been accused of financial improprieties, lawsuits have been filed to stop the implementation of the program, and the creators of the state program have already displayed major ethical lapses in trying to cover up their failure to adequately review schools applying for vouchers.

Governor Jindal claims that he created the voucher program because private schools would offer a better education for Louisiana students.  The truth is that schools that teach creationism will give our students a worse education.  Schools that teach creationism and do not meet Louisiana’s state science standards will not give our students a better education and have no business receiving public funds.

Since the justification for this program has fallen flat, Governor Jindal and the Department of Education should not implement it.

Every voucher school that taxpayers support with public dollars should be required to release its teaching materials for inspection by the public, just as all public schools are required to do.

Governor Jindal must do the right thing for Louisiana students and halt his voucher program’s implementation before any funds are allocated to schools that teach creationism instead of evidence based science.

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In Jindal’s Louisiana 15

by • Education, Health Care, Local Political News, Media Studies, National News

On Tuesday, the Louisiana Democratic Party went on a Twitter offensive, sending out hundreds of tweets to local, state, and national media members, bloggers, students, parents, activists, and teachers about the astronomical cuts that Governor Jindal has made to Louisiana higher education since taking office in 2008.

All told, Governor Jindal has slashed $615.3 million, or 41.7%, of funding from Louisiana’s colleges and universities, including 43.1% of state funding to LSU in Baton Rouge, 44.2% of state funding to the Southern System, and notably, for those in Central Louisiana, 47.7% of state funding to LSU in Alexandria and 46.3% of state funding to Northwestern State in Natchitoches.

In order to continue functioning, these schools have had to impose a 52.9% increase in tuition, which, in effect, amounts to the largest tax increase on college students and their families in Louisiana history. Prior to Jindal, tuition accounted for 35% of higher education funding, with the remaining 65% funded through state appropriations. Today, those numbers are reversed.

The Jindal administration, it seems, was caught off-guard by the Louisiana Democratic Party’s #tweetthecuts campaign, with one spokesperson arguing that higher education spending had only decreased by 6% and another suggesting that spending had actually increased by 0.3%. Both numbers, however, rely on offsetting Jindal’s cuts with the simultaneous massive increases in tuition and other fees, increases that, in my opinion, expose the fundamental hypocrisy and flaw of Jindal’s definition and understanding of government.

No one discounts the ways in which the economic recession, spurred and facilitated by unregulated markets and unfunded tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, have affected Louisiana’s bottom line, but instead of seriously tackling the state’s revenue, Governor Jindal, aided and abetted by the Louisiana legislature, has used the budgetary crisis as an opportunity to justify crippling cuts to and the privatization of government programs and services. These are not temporary, stop-gap measures; they’re a reflection of Jindal’s long-term vision and ideology. Indeed, Governor Jindal is not seeking to find ways to restore state revenues to pre-recession levels. Quite the opposite, actually. He’s actively, purposely, and publicly attempting to defund government even more dramatically.

And this may all make for a series of great talking points, red meat, for the national audience that he so desperately seeks to court: “Reducing the size of government” is, after all, a favorite mantra of the Republican Party. But what does it actually mean? To be sure, both political parties campaign on the idea of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and both political parties are guilty of contributing to “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Still, there are obvious differences between the two parties, and the economic recession has underscored those differences starkly.

In Louisiana, under Governor Jindal, there is no desire to ensure the state government also recovers from the recession. When the pension funds for public employees dried up, conservative leaders and right-wing media blamed those employees, without ever acknowledging or even recognizing that those funds became imperiled because they were allowed, even encouraged, to invest in risky private investments, all in the name of deregulation. After the recession hit and state employees suddenly had their pensions drained, the conservative impulse was not to say, “Well, we probably should have ensured that public employees tied their pensions to less volatile investments;” instead, these employees and their pensions somehow became examples of the gluttony of government. And maybe that is true, but it’s the gluttony of a government that sought to direct tens if not hundreds of millions of public dollars into these incredibly risky private markets. These employees who have seen their pensions evaporate are victims of politicians who colluded with banking lobbyists, yet now, they’re being painted as a prime example of a bloated bureaucracy. It’s not only unfair; it’s also not true. Jindal’s plans for pension reform are already being targeted as unconstitutional.

State Republican leaders and their conservative-leaning constituents have become almost Pavlovian in their dismissal of taxes. Recently, Governor Jindal refused to renew a small tax on rental cars, a tax that is paid almost entirely by tourists and out-of-staters, not because it was placing an undue burden on anyone but because he simply couldn’t stomach renewing a tax, any tax, regardless of its merits or who it benefits.

Last Sunday, on Meet the Press, Jindal, in defending his refusal to participate in Obamacare’s insurance exchange program for Medicaid, reminded host David Gregory that “federal dollars” are still our dollars, a self-evident point that Jindal sought to use as principled excuse for his partisan intransigence. But again, it also underscores Jindal’s fundamental hypocrisy: If this money is “our” money, then, by refusing it, Jindal is, by his own definition, giving away our money to other states. He did it with unemployment insurance in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. He did it with broadband money. He did it with $300 million for high-speed rail. And now, he plans to do it again with much-needed money for healthcare. Ironically, a day after his appearance on Meet the Press, during which he bragged about Louisiana Medicaid, it was announced that Jindal would have to cut an additional $859 million from the program, all federal dollars upon which his administration had been counting.

The truth is: Governor Jindal is not rejecting our money because he knows it will lead to disaster. He’s rejecting our money because he, personally, wants to fashion himself as ideologically pure and consistently opposed to the President of the United States. This is not about the future of Louisiana; it’s about the future of Bobby Jindal, which is why, currently, Governor Jindal, acting as a surrogate for vacationing Mitt Romney, is following around President Obama on a bus tour in rural Ohio.

Remember the deep water oil drilling moratorium? After the largest environmental disaster in American history, the Obama administration put a temporary halt on new deep water, off-shore drilling permits, a move that Governor Jindal, his fellow Republicans, and conservative economists said would be catastrophic for the Louisiana economy. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost forever, they warned. Lafayette would be particularly devastated. Notwithstanding the fact that a moratorium was the responsible thing to do (government regulators failed to perform and had an enormous backlog of inspections), Governor Jindal’s dire predictions now seem, even more, like petty politics, the position of a man who cares more about kowtowing to the demands of the oil and gas industry than ensuring that these rigs were properly inspected and regulated. Today, Governor Jindal brags about Louisiana’s relatively “low” unemployment rate. Today, Lafayette is growing jobs faster than almost anywhere else in the nation. If Louisiana’s oil and gas industry lost jobs as a result of the moratorium, those losses were ephemeral, and thankfully, the doomsday scenario presaged by Jindal simply never came about.

And today, for better or worse, President Obama’s administration has increased off-shore oil and gas exploration more than President Bush did during his entire tenure. Domestic oil production is up 12% under President Obama, and for the first time in years, the United States exports more oil than it imports.

Governor Jindal was so willing to overlook the real and obvious need for the federal government to retool its oversight of off-shore drilling, in the immediate aftermath of an epically disastrous oil spill, he parroted the almost absurd talking points of the most profitable industry in the world. If you need a clear cut example of his understanding of government, then look no further than how he handled the BP disaster: Posing for photo opps in “secret” locations in order to disingenuously lambast the President for not taking action in clean-up (even though Jindal’s own response was much more dilatory), and then, siding with industry lobbyists and stoking fears among Louisianans who worried about their jobs.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: While the rest of the world focused on real, effective, proven solutions, Governor Jindal went “all in” on one of the most ridiculous projects in Louisiana history, Jindal’s so-called “Bermdoggle,” forty miles of artificially created sand berms, which proved to be a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, precious time, and energy. This was the “signature” piece of Jindal’s response; he fought with the White House over it; he championed it on national television. And while it may have set him apart and made him appear as if he possessed some unique solution that no one in the federal government had ever seriously considered, Jindal’s sand berms were, again, a bermdoggle. If the stakes hadn’t been so high, it’d seem comical. The berms were a failure from the onset; they stopped very little oil; they were built one day, and then, the next day, they’d evaporate in front of us.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, government does not exist to provide services and protection to its citizens; its sole purpose is to provide services and protection to its corporations.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, government does not ensure for the viability of its skills-based workforce through investing in community colleges; instead, it doubles tuition for community colleges while giving millions and millions away in tax breaks and incentives to wealthy corporations.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, if government collects money from someone who rents a car while visiting New Orleans, it’s a tax and is, therefore, morally wrong. But if it slashes funding to our universities and requires that working class students and families pay twice as much in tuition, well, sorry, revenue is down; what else do you expect Governor Jindal to do?

In Jindal’s Louisiana, tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and state funding for television, movie, and video game production companies is both cultural and economic development, but it’s impossible to find $100,000 to fund French language education, even if the French government is offering an $800,000 match.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, small business development means pulling away funding from dozens of local start-up projects in order to give it all away to one of the richest corporations in the world.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, environmental protections for all take a backseat to the short-term profit motives of the few.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, federal taxpayer dollars are also Louisiana taxpayer dollars, except when they’re supposed to be spent on unemployment insurance, health care reform, education, or new-fangled liberal ideas like rail lines and broadband roll-out.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, there will be no such thing as an unfunded mandate, because nothing will be adequately funded to begin with.

In Jindal’s Louisiana, it’s entirely consistent to take tens and tens of millions of dollars away from our public primary and secondary schools and then give that money to untested, unknown, and unaccountable private and religious schools, all while arguing that this massive injection of our money somehow allows these private schools the opportunity to compete in the “free market.” Redirecting tens of millions of public dollars to help prop up and fund struggling parochial schools does not exemplify free market capitalism; it exemplifies a type of pernicious and corrupt socialism: Depleting our public institutions in order to enrich a small  handful of radically-right preachers, preachers who intend to use our taxpayer dollars in order to finance their own major expansions, all while conveniently harbored under laws that protect religious organizations and 501c3s and all protected by the fact that their schools’s performances will never be subjected to the very same tests that we use to grade our public schools.

This is Jindal’s Louisiana, and if Mitt Romney grants him his wish, it could also become our America.