Hunger is slated for a comeback in Louisiana with Governor Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana legislature slashing the food bank budget by 90 percent. The state legislature is in the pocket of the governor, as evidenced by this past session in which he virtually commanded the agenda. New Orleans Adolescent Hospital was closed, severe cuts to Medicaid and higher education, all this in a state that repealed over one year ago, the Stelly tax.
The first of 2009 initiates is the Stelly tax repeal. The Stelly Plan eliminates sales tax on food, drugs and household utilities, and replaces them with income tax. The Stelly Plan was approved by voters in 2002. During the 2008 legislative session the Stelly Plan was repealed, which reduced the two highest income brackets to the level they were prior to the implementation of Stelly...
...Due to the repealing of the Stelly Plan the state is expected to lose $358 million dollars in taxes for the next budget year, with continued losses in following years.
The Stelly tax was a progressive, redistribution of income that benefited most Louisianians. With the devastating drop in tax revenue due to the depression, I mean, recession, Jindal and the state legislature are imposing an ideology on the Louisiana residents: privatize public services to death.
The method: Slash and burn:
Representatives of food banks across Louisiana expected the state to cut their financing this year, but they never dreamed their budgets would be slashed by 90 percent -- especially when the need for provisions is increasing.
The blow has left them scrambling.
No matter how much they try to tighten their belts, food banks will have to turn away many hungry people, said Natalie Jayroe, president and chief executive officer of Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, one of five food banks in the state affiliated with Feeding America.
Mental health care in New Orleans, especially for indigents, has been on life support since Hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans area needs more mental health beds, not fewer. For the administration to suggest that a north shore facility will accommodate the needs of the mentally ill on the south shore is uneducated at best and disingenuous at worse.
The mentally ill individuals who enter the criminal justice system in New Orleans have very limited access to vitally needed health care. Those individuals fortunate enough to have family who can seek help on their behalf have a chance to make it up to the Southeast facility for care. Those who do not have a family to assist are often referred to University Hospital. Typically they are treated under a doctor's care for two days and then released.
This system leads to the revolving door syndrome because these individuals usually return to the criminal justice system.
As a judge who has referred mentally ill defendants to NOAH, I understand the importance of these local beds. The governor's veto will only exacerbate a deteriorating mental health care situation.
The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts -- long celebrated for its role in training high school students in creative writing, dance and theater -- must slash about 20 percent of its operating budget this year as a result of state spending cuts. As a result, NOCCA will probably not be able to offer summer school, Saturday classes or busing to its students in the coming year, said Kyle Wedberg, the school's president and chief executive officer.
Regarding NOCCA, this is the kind of education that should be available to all children in Louisiana. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see "the favored ones" getting their budgets slashed as well. Jindal has spared no one, and the legislature is is in it for the money for their districts. Either that, or they fall in the same ideological camp: no taxes even when the taxes are progressive and reasonable, like the Stelly tax.
Alario, a Westwego Democrat first elected to the House in 1972, said Jindal’s dominance over the state Legislature, particularly when pushing his own legislative package, didn’t differ much from what past governors experienced.
"It’s kind of hard to say ‘no’ to a governor when he’s asking you to help him and you’re looking for stuff in your district too," Alario said. Jindal’s package established policies that "most people back home wouldn’t get angry about."
"A bunch of the new guys came in promising to cut government and downsize it," said state Rep. Bodi White, R-Central, describing the mindset of his colleagues in Jindal’s House majority.
Disaster capitalism can be practiced in many forms and fashions, and disaster capitalism is a best friend of neoliberalism. Slashing public services is a back door method of ultimately privatizing public services. California and many states can look forward to initiatives to take public services out of the hands of the public sector, which usually means a deterioration of services at the expense of profit (remember the Atlanta debacle when they privatized water services).
Naomi Klein has commented in several articles on the response of the government in my home town of New ORleans, to Katrina. Here is an excerpt from an article she wrote shortly after Katrina:
"Reconstruction," whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct "cost plus" government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.
This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation's Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two "Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices," including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and "drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
The Obama administration is choosing to look the other way when it comes to the devastation of public services in many states. How long we can afford this, without a devastating impact on our most vulnerable, is questionable.
The vultures are circling the public sectors reeling under the shock therapy of disaster capitalism. The private sector is consolidating into larger and larger entities, with wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It would be interesting and informative to hear more local reports as to how the recession is affecting home towns and states.
There is this story I heard from a colleague recently. A woman friend happen to cross paths with Jindal one day, and confronted him about his decision to leave Charity Hospital closed, as it has been, since Katrina, in New Orleans. Jindal supposedly put his hand on her arm and rather patronizingly said, "Hon, get used to it. Privatize, privatize, privatize." Mr. slash and burn Jindal has been after the public health care and public services system since serving as the boy wonder in the Foster administration in the 90's. Now the recession threatens to unleash a thousand Jindals into the rest of the country.