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Louisiana voters were casting ballots in the governor's race, with Trump urging people to choose one of two Republicans in the race to force a run-off election against incumbent John Bel Edwards, a conservative Democrat. What is your opinion on it?Since there will be a runoff for Governor I did a lot of digging. All I can say is the Republican did a poor job of encouraging a decent candidate for Governor.If you get Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone, a 70-year old mega-millionaire construction magnate from Baton Rouge, talking about why he is such a passionate believer in the state’s school voucher program, don’t be surprised if he gets emotional. It’s already happened a few times during his quixotic and nearly entirely self-financed campaign. And if you didn’t know any better, that’d seem endearing- a powerful, wealthy man who just can’t help but get teary-eyed whenever he’s talking about education.“(Rispone) chokes back tears when describing a drive to try to help thousands of children who attend public schools deemed failing by the state, saying ‘God has asked me to do something about his kids’,” Melinda Deslatte of the Associated Press reported.But if you are familiar at all with the program, then you may wonder if Rispone, a Republican, is simply channeling his best impression of the state’s most lachrymose stage actor, Jimmy Swaggart. Because if you’re going to express any emotion over school vouchers in Louisiana, the only appropriate response would be anger.Even Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the nation’s biggest cheerleader of so-called “school choice” initiatives, acknowledges Louisiana’s voucher program is a failure. “I would just say that the Louisiana program was not very well conceived. It has encouraged some schools that probably would not have been parents’ first choices if they’d been given a full range of choices,” she said last month.There are compelling reasons to believe that Rispone’s emotional investment in the school choice program is more about a rich man being publicly emotional about his private investments than about an earnest belief in a voucher program so bad that even Betsy DeVos has distanced herself from it.“This has nothing to do with education,” Dr. Andre Perry, a Brookings Institute fellow who has spent his entire career studying race, structural and institutional inequality, and education policy, tells me, after I describe to him the details of Rispone’s central role in developing the state’s little-known and rarely-used Tuition Donation Credit Program.In simple terms, the program potentially allows Rispone to not only zero out his state income tax liability but also to reduce his federal tax exposure by hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.I imagine things may have become a little awkward between the embattled Education Secretary and the wealthy businessman with a direct line to God when DeVos, uncharacteristically, criticized Louisiana’s program.Because with the exception of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, Eddie Rispone is more responsible than anyone else in championing the state’s voucher program. He’s dumped an enormous fortune underwriting pop-up advocacy groups promoting school choice.In 2011, a year before Jindal signed the school voucher program into law, Rispone and his wife spent $750,000 producing a school choice documentary titled “The Experiment.” The film’s trailer begins in New Orleans with the image of a dead body of a black man being covered with a tarp, immediately exploiting a family’s tragedy as a way of introducing a movie that is, ostensibly, about school choice. The filmmakers also manage to sneak in interviews with two of Louisiana’s most prominent Democrats, former Gov. Kathleen Blanco and James Carville, leaving viewers with the mistaken impression they both were supportive of privatizing public education when, in reality, they were simply commenting on the ways in which Hurricane Katrina forced leaders to consider different ways of investing in public education after the city had to confront what had been, at the time, how to best recover.Recently, a collaborative investigative series on Louisiana’s school voucher program by Fox 8, the Times-Picayune, WWNO, and the Center for Investigative Journalism- “The Cost of Choice”- emphasized Sec. DeVos’ comments, which were, without question, newsworthy. The problem is that we knew it “was not very well conceived” from the very beginning, when Bobby Jindal declared it to be the largest and most ambitious school voucher program in the nation and the Wall Street Journal gushed that it was Gov. Jindal’s “Education Moon Shot.”The whole experiment was and still is a complete farce, a cynical effort by an embattled and deeply unpopular governor to stage a theatrical performance billed as the kind of red meat he had hoped would persuade Iowans to support him in the Republican presidential caucus. As I once wrote in the online publication Salon, Jindal had hoped to recruit a network of homeschooled teenagers and their parents to operate his ground game in Iowa. Obviously, that didn’t work out as planned.Recently, during a campaign event at T.J. Ribs in Baton Rouge, Rispone admitted to the audience that he had, in fact, been the benefactor of the television commercials that aired during the very beginning of John Bel Edwards’ first term featuring an African American woman who stared directly into the camera and called the governor a liar for daring to propose a cut in funding to the voucher program.At the time, the state was confronting a $1.6 billion shortfall, and due to the intransigence and the gamesmanship of a small contingency of far-right partisan Republicans in the state House, nearly all of whom were taking their cues from U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and former U.S. Sen. David Vitter, the state had been left with no alternative but to propose across-the-board cuts, including significant reductions for programs vastly more important and consequential than ensuring we paid for a child to attend a private school with the name Saint or Academy in it than a public school that didn’t sound as prestigious, even if it offered a better education.With the state on the brink of falling over the fiscal cliff due to the negligence and wanton mismanagement of the Jindal administration, this is how Eddie Rispone decided to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars:The commercial features a 55-year-old woman from Kenner named Coretta Pittman who stares directly into the camera and complains about the possibility of losing school vouchers for her young children. Unwittingly, Ms. Pittman reveals herself to be either a paid actor or an completely ignorant about the school her children actually attend.It earned a D grade from the state.So, the questions remain: Why does Eddie get so unsteady and emotional about this particular program? How is it that a wealthy white conservative who spends a fortune promoting candidates who oppose healthcare expansion and are supportive of initiatives like the Industrial Tax Exemption Program are hyperbolically supportive of a failed voucher program that takes resources away from struggling public schools in order to prop up even worse private schools?There is, in fact, a simple answer, and unless Eddie Rispone’s wealth manager is nicknamed God, it has nothing to do with any message he’s received from the Almighty.You see, Eddie Rispone, when he served as Chairman of the Louisiana Federation for Children, was directly responsible for promoting and helping to pass an amended tax scheme that allowed him to avoid paying 95% of his state income taxes, ensuring that nearly every dime he donates to a parochial voucher school is eventually given to the school instead of to the state. Initially, the law treated such donations as a deduction (though they called it a rebate); today, it’s a tax credit.But regardless, the programs both also allow him to write off the remaining 5% as a tax-deductible charitable donation and therefore, due to a rule change under the Trump Tax Plan, avail himself of an enormous discount on his federal taxes.I have written about the (scam) scheme before, in a report published in April of 2018 titled “In Louisiana, there’s a way for the wealthy to avoid paying state income taxes.”In Rispone’s particular case, here’s an example of how it works:In December of 2014, he donated $1 million to ACE Scholarships Louisiana, a Student Tuition Organization, and according to an audit of ACE, 100% of his donation was rebate eligible.While we do not know Rispone’s income or how much of his donation was used toward scholarships, it’s possible to estimate how much Rispone could have profited off his $1 million donation. If Rispone’s entire donation was used for scholarships in 2015, assuming Rispone did not donate more than 50% of his annual gross income and that he was in the highest income bracket (36.9% marginal tax rate), Rispone’s donation qualified him for up to a $950,000 rebate from the State of Louisiana and a federal tax savings of $369,000.Therefore, his $1 million donation had a potential return of $1,319,000 ($950,000 + $369,000) for a profit of $319,000. (Incidentally, Rispone’s company earns approximately $350 million a year, and personally earns just 5% of that revenue, his state income tax liability would be around $1 million).No wonder the subject makes him weepy.According to the American Association of Superintendents, Louisiana’s program may be terrible for the state and may not have anything substantive to do with education, and it ranks dead last.“People like Rispone seem more interested in self-hoarding their wealth than improving education,” Andre Perry tells me. “Any state (as poor as Louisiana) needs revenue and should not have laws like these on their books.”There’s a Reason Eddie Rispone Supports Louisiana’s Corrupt and Failing School Voucher Program - Bayou BriefIn 201Eddie Rispone Relies on Controversial Program That Outsources Jobs to Foreign Workers6, Eddie Rispone’s company applied for three H1-B visas to hire cheaper workers for management jobs. At the time it made the applications, ISC had been in the middle of settlement negotiations with nearly 100 former employees, the majority of whom were Hispanic, who alleged they were not properly compensated for their work hours.In February and March of 2016, ISC Constructors, LLC, the mega-million dollar electrical installation contractor founded and led by Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone and his brother Jerry, asked the U.S. Department of Labor for permission to hire three foreign citizens, each at a base salary of $56,000 a year, through the controversial H1-B visa system, according to public records uncovered by the Bayou Brief. At the time it made the applications, ISC had been in the middle of settlement negotiations with nearly 100 former employees, the majority of whom were Hispanic, who alleged they were not properly compensated for their work hours.Ultimately, while all three applications were “certified,” Rispone’s company only obtained approval for one of the positions, which was titled Estimation and Projects Coordinator. Every year, the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducts a lottery to dole out a maximum of 85,000 visas to businesses, ostensibly to ensure they can fill jobs requiring a specialized skill.While companies must assert it will not pay visa holders less than it would otherwise pay an American citizen, critics of the H1-B system assert that it is routinely abused by employers as a way to essentially outsource otherwise high-paying jobs, particularly in STEM-related fields, and that, in some cases, it is a form of modern-day “indentured servitude.” If an employer fires someone with an H1-B visa, that person must immediately return to their home country.Although the system had been conceived as a way of recruiting “the best and brightest” to America, it became the focus of national criticism in 2016 after it had been revealed Disney had been granted nearly 200 visas for IT employees at DisneyWorld. A growing body of academic scholarship on the system suggests it undermines the U.S. job market and drives down wages.As he ramps up his campaign for governor and prepares to spend at least $5 million of his personal fortune on advertising, Rispone has placed federal immigration policy, over which governors have very little control, at the center of his message. He has parroted the incoherent promise of Donald Trump’s fantasy border wall that voters had been told Mexico would pay for; he has advanced the patently false claim that Gov. John Bel Edwards turned New Orleans into a “sanctuary city” (the city’s police department is under a consent decree with the federal Department of Justice, signed during the Jindal administration), and he has bemoaned the outsourcing of high-paying jobs.Two years prior to applying for the three H1-B visas, Rispone predicted to an industry trade publication that he would soon be forced to recruit skilled labor from “other states” due to a construction boom.All three cases were settled in mediation, with ISC agreeing to settle for an undisclosed sum.According to the terms of the H1-B certification Rispone’s company received, the three-year visa expires in only two weeks, on August 15, 2019. The available record does not provide any personally-identifying information about the employee, though as a prerequisite for qualification, the visa holder must have at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent and possess a specialized skill (usually in technology).Rispone has never publicly explained why ISC could not hire a citizen of Louisiana for the $56,000 a year Estimation and Construction Project Coordinator job or revealed how much his company paid to settle allegations it underpaid employees in Texas.Eddie Rispone Relies on Controversial Program That Outsources Jobs to Foreign Workers - Bayou BriefJohn Bel EdwardsJohn Bel Edwards’ rise from a small-town Democratic lawmaker to the most powerful figure in Louisiana represented a stunning political feat, but as governor he received no honeymoon.He was immediately faced with a state budget crisis and a majority of Republicans in the Louisiana House who rejected his pick for speaker then installed one of their own, breaking with decades of tradition. In the years since, Edwards has navigated an at times toxic political environment in the state House as well as more than his fair share of natural disasters. The Legislature has held 11 sessions, including seven Edwards called specifically to deal with budget issues.He is occupying a tenuous political space: Edwards is now the only Democratic statewide elected official in Louisiana, and the only Democratic governor in the Deep South. He is running for reelection in a state that President Donald Trump carried by 20 points. And he accuses a group of conservative Republicans in the Louisiana House of having worked to thwart compromises throughout his first term.But as he runs for reelection, Edwards is making the case that despite the political turbulence, he has actually accomplished notable victories, like Medicaid expansion and solving the budget crisis. (The budget which had a 1.6 million deficit now has a surplus of 300 million plus surplus) In doing so, he is making the case for centrism in a deeply Republican state. While he said “more and more of the oxygen” is being consumed by the “very far right and the very far left,” the governor is trying to position himself in the middle, where he insists most voters also reside.He is pro-gun, anti-abortion graduate of West Point who comes from a family of sheriffs. Now 53, Edwards’ life story played a prominent role in his 2015 run.This time, his ads feature sheriffs and DAs defending him against attacks from Republicans, and those same West Point cadets lauding his first term.Still, Edwards said he “never intended to do anything beyond Louisiana.”State Rep. Bernard LeBas sipped a Miller Lite as he mulled over Edwards’ first term before concluding his fellow Democrat has done a good job, “especially considering what we were left with.”Edwards has developed a reputation among lawmakers who are close to him as a workhorse with a seemingly endless motor.Alario, who is term-limited this cycle, said each of the seven governors under which he has worked has done what they thought was best for the state, and noted it’s a difficult job. But he added, “this guy works harder than anybody I’ve seen.” Alario said he often received telephone calls in the early hours of the morning from Edwards, who said he rises before dawn and is frequently on the phone by 7 a.m.“He is in a unique position,” Alario said. “There’s almost a (Republican) supermajority in both houses of the Legislature … Things have gotten much more partisan. But he’s willing to roll up his sleeves and work on both sides to reach an agreement.”The long hours are due in part to necessity. Edwards repeatedly assumed his role as commander in chief of Louisiana, gaining plaudits for his handling of hurricanes, floods and other disasters. In 2016 alone, Edwards dealt with crippling flooding across the state, as well as police shooting of Alton Sterling that thrust Louisiana in the middle of a national debate over police use of force, and the shooting of six police officers that followed. Dealing with the state’s budget shortfalls also required seemingly endless long nights negotiating with the Legislature.Rep. Barry Ivey, a Republican, criticized Edwards on taxes and other issues. But he said the governor and Legislature both faced an “extremely challenging” time over the last three-plus years. While he would have liked Edwards to be more hands-on dealing with rank-and-file lawmakers like him, he said the governor has always been approachable.“For a long time our state has been driven by the governor only,” Jones said. “By having a divided House like we did, I think it made us all better. I think it made him better.”A rare Democrat, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards sells centrism in run for reelectionTruthfully, the Republicans have controlled the states government for years and have done nothing to improve the lives of the population unless they pandered to the rich and influential leaving the rest of the population behind. They have driven the state budget into a high debt due to their own selfish interests. The people spoke when they elected a Democrat as governor telling the Republicans it was time for a change and hopefully that message will still resonate come November 2020. John Bel Edwards has done much for Louisiana even in the face of the Republican opposition at each turn.It seems that the Republican party doesn't believe in compromise in any political arena be it local, state or federal government.A2A