Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gets a hug from Sally Campbell, Chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition of Mississippi, before speaking at Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority event in Washington, Saturday, June 21, 2014. (AP/Molly Riley)
When it comes to suffering, there are few better places than the American South to set stories of oppression and malfeasance. Amidst magnolia trees, lazy rivers, backwoods bayous and the twists and tangles of religion and race, American conservatives rule their states with an iron fist.
Of course, the party labels and faces may change over time, but here in this most gothic of American settings, the South seems to always epitomize the home of the dark, beating heart of political evil that pumps corruption throughout the rest of our body politic.
The best example of this latent tendency in our most peculiar of regions can be found in Louisiana, where an Indian-American wunderkind huckster who plays to crowds by appearing on “Duck Dynasty” is so totally in the pocket of “Big Oil” that one wonders where the man ends and the petroleum begins. The oily man in question, of course, is Bobby Jindal — since 2008, the 55th governor of the Pelican State and a politician who honestly believes he may have a shot at the White House in 2016.
For those who remember such things, Jindal easily ousted the incomprehensibly inept Kathleen Blanco in the 2008 gubernatorial elections, bucking the year’s nationwide Democratic sweep of political offices by riding to power largely on the Louisiana public’s disgust with then-Governor Blanco’s handling of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Perceived at the time by a thoroughly upset public as a reformer and a technocrat, Jindal subsequently went on to become something of a media darling for the chastised post-Bush Republican Party as it searched for a way to show that it, too, was friendly to both minorities and basic competence. Indeed, such was his popularity that he gave the GOP’s rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in 2010.
That point in the spotlight, however, seemed to be the moment of peak Jindal, as his national political star has dimmed ever since. Almost immediately after his televised rejoinder to the president, Jindal was compared to and mocked as a dead ringer for — though with a slightly darker complexion — “30 Rock”’s Kenneth Parcel, a backwoods simpleton so astoundingly naïve that he makes Mayberry look like Harvard Yard.
Then, if that weren’t bad enough, Jindal was faced with another crisis — the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill. He responded to the situation as one might expect a young technocrat to — even one resembling “30 Rock”’s Kenneth.
But as more questions began to be asked about how the industry was regulated in the aftermath of the spill, information also began to trickle out about Jindal’s cozy relationship with “Big Oil.” It turns out, for instance, that Jindal was loved by the industry, and in his sure-win run against Blanco in 2008 he received $100,000 in donations from oil, gas and energy interests. Then it came to light that even as the oil spill was continuing to pour billions of gallons of gas and oil into the Gulf, he was lobbying President Obama to lift the temporary drilling moratorium slapped on the industry — including at least four offshore projects run by the spill’s primary culprit, BP.
Since then, Jindal has received over $1 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, which sees the deep-water Gulf of Mexico as one of the few remaining exploration frontiers left in the United States. None of this came free, of course, and earlier this month the governor made a significant down payment on repaying these donations by pushing through and then signing into law a sweeping bill that would effectively eliminate the ability of Louisiana’s coastal communities to sue oil companies for destroying the state’s vulnerable coastal wetlands via their everyday activities of drilling, laying pipe, and bringing oil to market.
With a sweep of the governor’s pen, Jindal waved aside what is perhaps the most pressing long-term issue facing Louisiana today — the inundation of huge swathes of southern Louisiana and the rapid advance of the ocean onto the very doorsteps of the New Orleans metropolitan area, home to 1.4 million people — largely to appease and protect his well-heeled friends in the state’s powerful oil and gas industry.
The fact of the matter is that by the end of the century, much of what is seen on the map today as coastal Louisiana will be under water, with the new coast running across the state along what is now the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. This is not speculation, but science, and by signing the bill into law, Jindal — as pointed out by nearly everyone not profiting from the oil industry — will permanently take away the rights of these local communities and local governing authorities to fight to protect their land from being cast into the sea by an oil industry too concerned with profits to care much about coastal protection.
Indeed, so sweeping and poorly worded is the bill that it could also impact ongoing litigation and various other claims being made against BP and other defendants in the Deepwater Horizon case by negating the claimants’ ability to seek redress under state law.
Even more disturbing, Jindal and his cronies in the state Legislature have been waging non-stop war against the county and local officials and governments who had the temerity to sue the oil companies for the loss of their coastal regions. They’ve done this by removing and blocking opposition board members, stacking local bodies with pro-industry apparatchiks, and pushing legislation aimed at making the relatively independent coastal protection districts and boards charged with serving as the public stewards of Louisiana’s threatened coasts playthings of the governor’s office.
It’s funny, though, just how closely Jindal is hewing to standard Republican operating procedure in all of this. With one fell swoop a powerful industry is being protected and privileged over the rights and well-being of average Louisiana citizens — but one wouldn’t know that from talking to Jindal. Indeed, he’s busy casting his role as a neo-Cajun-by-way-of-Calcutta culture warrior in order to distract attention from the way he is gutting environmental protection. In addition to appearing alongside the fundamentalist Duck Commander, he’s spoken out against threats to religious liberty that only elderly, far-right conservatives believe exist and he’s signed into law a draconian anti-abortion law that would keep terminally-ill pregnant women alive against their will or that of their family.
What’s more, after offering a preview of his new culture-warrior shtick at the Republican Leadership Conference he hosted in the Crescent City in May, Jindal has taken his act on the road. He’s appeared at such august right-wing venues and saints’ shrines as the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Reagan Library — the holiest of conservative holy places. He is also making appearances in Iowa, meeting party hacks in Indiana and Minnesota, and has even been spotted hobnobbing with GOP money types in Las Vegas and New York. These are all obvious signs of an incipient presidential campaign, one would think, despite the fact that he is one of the most unpopular governors in the country.
So, get ready America — Bobby Jindal is coming to preach the gospel of family values and government so small it can be drowned in floods caused by hurricane damage his oil industry buddies paid him off to insulate them from.
His is the usual bait-and-switch story that has fooled the conservative faithful for so long that it has become a cliché — turn hard right on values to give oneself cover while protecting wealthy vested interests at the expense of average people, all while citing Jesus as inspiration and motivation. But this time around, the package has got a neat new face — and an immigrant background — to help sell it.
The post The Jindal Jinx: How Big Oil And The GOP Rule Louisiana appeared first on MintPress News.