| An enterprising reporter writing for Gambit in New Orleans, Jeremy Alford, rips away the curtain and exposes the Jindal ethics "success story" to be the sham that many outside of his reality distortion field have seen it to be.
Alford begins by focusing on an ethics bill that Jindal vetoed during the regular session of his first term. The bill was by freshman New Orleans Representative Neil Abramson.
The Democratic freshman pushed the issue a few months later during the 2008 regular session. Abramson's bill would have forced elected officials to publicly report the names of campaign contributors they subsequently hire or appoint.
During those early days of Jindal's new administration - his political honeymoon - many assumed the governor would support Abramson's bill. Key administration officials kept in contact with him over a five-month period and helped draft the language. Both the House and Senate passed the measure handily.
Jindal vetoed the bill, however, on July 10, 2008, when the regular session ended. Abramson still remembers it as a "dark day for our efforts at true ethics reform."
Jindal, meanwhile, was just beginning to build his own stable of political appointees. As his brand took hold nationally, Jindal made the rounds of TV networks, appearing on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and as a talking head on cable news shows preaching the gospel of a "new day" in Louisiana. During these heady times, he appointed one campaign contributor after another to the state's most influential boards and commissions.
Just like so many of his predecessors.
Today, the Jindal list contains the names of more than 200 campaign donors, based on a review of the 1,738 appointments he has announced since taking office in January 2008. To say he has placed those appointments on a fast track would be an understatement: Jindal appointed more people - 1,478 individuals - to public positions during his first year in office than Blanco did after two legislative sessions in 2004 and 2005.
Alford's search of Jindal's campaign finance database shows that those 200-plus contributors gave a combined $784,000 to Jindal's campaign fund.
He proceeds to focus on some of the more glaring examples of the governor rewarding his contributors with appointments to various boards and commissions. But, Alford and Gambit perform a true public service by publishing a chart showing the contributors, the amount contributed and the positions to which these fine folks were appointed. The PDF of the chart is available for download here.
It's a hell of a story and one that every citizen needs to read.
The Jindal ethics charade has been laid bare. It's been revealed to be a sham designed to conceal a pattern of corruption as deep as anything ever perpetrated by any previous administration.
The story pays particular attention to the contributions and appointment of William Fenstermaker of Lafayette to a highway task force:
Last October, William Fenstermaker of Lafayette donated $5,000 to Jindal's campaign. Roughly one month later, he was appointed by Jindal to the I-49 South Feasibility and Funding Task Force. According to projects detailed on the Web site of C.H. Fenstermaker and Associates, of which William Fenstermaker is chairman, the company has been contracted in the past by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) to do a variety of I-49-related work.
Fenstermaker says he made the $5,000 donation to support good government and doesn't believe there's a conflict of interest with his business and the task force, which he was originally appointed to by former Gov. Mike Foster. "Those are portions of the project we were awarded before I was on the task force, and you couldn't eat based on what we got. I do very little work with DOTD. I'm not what you would call a political insider."
As for his company pursuing I-49 work in the future, Fenstermaker left that open. "I would think that it would be bad for me to tell my engineering group not to put in a proposal for the [requests for proposals] process, but I doubt we have the size to prime a contract like that" he says. "But we could be part of a team, although it would be a slim chance that we would be selected. The task force has nothing to do with selecting the contractor. We didn't even meet under Blanco and haven't met yet under Jindal, either."
While Fenstermaker's appointment to the I-49 task force presents potential conflicts of interest worth asking about, the dates of his donation and subsequent appointment are also remarkably congruent. In fact, several of Jindal's appointments were doled out in close proximity to major donations.
What makes this particular incident even richer is that Fenstermaker was a leader of "Blueprint Louisiana." That supposedly impartial "good government" group backed Jindal's ethics agenda during the campaign and in the special session that followed his inauguration.
Based on Alford's story detailing the money trail connecting Jindal's contributors to his appointments, we're not in Kansas anymore. We are still in Louisiana and pay-to-play is alive and well and being practiced with vigor by the so-called reformers.
This is how government STILL works here and how cynicism is bred. |
