Monday, June 27, 2011

WHAT GOVERNOR JINDAL AND HIS HELPERS DID FOR LOUISIANA

From the Editor's Column in the summer issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas:
Inventing America and Destroying Louisiana

It was Washington's generation that had to invent America and all its institutions and envision what a great nation ought to be. It was Washington and his contemporaries, foremost among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who understood that a national government had to secure revenue for its institutions, and was obligated not only to provide for the national defense and the delivery of mail, but also to found libraries and universities, and to promote exploration, learning, and a civil society.

So how bitter it is for us to descend to the present political movement in Louisiana, of an infantile populism that imagines it can have a democracy and not and not have taxes adequate to provide for the commonwealth, that would savage by a loss of $300 million a year to a higher education system that had just barely gained the ranks of respectability, that incarcerates its own citizens at the highest rate in the free world, that has a high school graduation rate of of 59 percent, that slashes its arts programs 60 percent in a single year and completely eliminates funding for humanities? It is a barbarism we are imposing on ourselves, a dark that descends from the head of the stairs.

To put it in more colloquial terms, imagine that Louisiana was a football team in a 50-team league and finished perennially, year after year, in 49th or 50th place. Would we not be firing its coaches and running them out of town rather than even contemplating re-appointing them? Would the citizens really care that the tickets cost only a nickel and clamor to see such a team play? And yet politically, that is the low bar we have set for ourselves: in education, in health care, in literacy, in the humanities and culture. And it is not being imposed by Washington or people from New Jersey; we have done it to ourselves.

The complete loss of the state appropriation for the humanities, just recently at $2 million annually, will cost the state $14 million annually in economic impact, increase our illiteracy...and diminish the quality of life incalculably. I could delineate this in detail but I will suffice to illustrate the result as Laurence Sterne might have in his prescient post-modern novel "Tristram Shandy":

as a black hole.

Martin Sartisky, Ph. D.
Editor-in-Chief
There you have it. We have done it to ourselves. And Bobby Jindal is very likely to be reelected on his platform of no new taxes and ridding ourselves of the old taxes. Governance by slash and burn. Unfortunately, if I said, "Only in Louisiana!" I would not speak truth. We are surely at the extreme of the spectrum, but the same sort of madness is spread throughout the land.

7 comments:

  1. {{{Mimi, and other SANE Louisianians}}}

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  2. What does Sartisky have against people from New Jersey?

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  3. I sometimes think people would rather sink their own ships together with the lifeboats rather than see anyone but them share benefits and rights. Self-destruction rather than see "those people" (whoever they might be at the moment) get anything.

    Texas is racing Louisiana for the bottom, and is not far behind.

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  4. This virus seems to be going around all over, not in just once section of the country. Slash and burn is not even the worst of it. I fear that our government has be sold to the highest bidders. All of our politicians are obviously bought and paid for. Some days I just want to scream, "WAKE UP!" to our fellow citizens.

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  5. Paul (A.), I knew you'd say that. I confess I wondered myself why Sartisky singled out New Jersey. I'm guessing NJ symbolizes the elitist Northeast.

    Countrlight, I know. Texas is trying its best to play catch-up.

    BooCat, when all the functions of government have been privatized and handed over to the corporations, the citizens may wake up.

    Come the revolution.

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  6. Jindal is an amateur. We had a DEMOCRAT! Richie Daley sell of parking enforcement for the next 50 years (not a typo!) and the spend the money in one year. So we have predatory ticket writers, no business as people are afraid to park on the streets, and no money.

    Do not even get me started on Wisconsin!

    FWIW
    jimB

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  7. Jindal wanted to sell our prisons for a one-time payoff to balance the budget, and then we would have to pay the company forever to manage the prisons. The legislature balked at that one.

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