Louisiana, Wake Up. They Are Selling What's Left of Us.

The Louisiana you and I grew up in is about to disappear for good if we don’t do something fast. I’m not being dramatic. I read four stories this week that laid it out plain, and if you put them side by side, you can see exactly what’s happening to this state.

The first was the New York Times investigation (free gift link) into Meta’s data center deal in Richland Parish. Go read the whole thing. It shows how the backroom deals actually get made. Governor Landry personally signed a non-disclosure agreement with Meta’s data center subsidiary. He wasn’t the only one. Nola.com built a running database of every NDA Louisiana officials have signed since 2024, and it’s already tracked at least 54 elected officials tied to deals like this one. Your representative may have signed away the right to tell you what’s happening to your own state.

Here’s the part that should make you furious. In April 2024, a state legislative committee was about to take up a routine bill giving a sales tax exemption to fiber optic equipment. The governor called his revenue secretary, Richard Nelson, a self-described “outspoken critic of tax breaks” who was reportedly planning to speak against this very bill, and told him to get it passed for something else. Nelson walked across the Capitol and told the bill’s own author, “Hey, we need to hijack your bill,” admitting he couldn’t even say what it was really for. The author went along with it. No hearing on the merits. No debate. A phone call, a state official abandoning his own stated principles, and the bill became something else entirely, a vehicle for a much bigger deal nobody outside the room knew was coming. That’s how a $50 billion project gets built in this state. Not through your elected officials representing you. Through a phone call and a hijacked bill.

One of the legislators who helped grease that deal did just fine for himself along the way. State Senator Jay Morris co-wrote a bill that helped land the Meta project and voted yes on the tax rebate. Not long after, he sold 300 acres of his own land to the utility company building the site, after nearby land values shot up from around $3,000 to $5,000 an acre to more than $50,000 an acre. He won’t say how much he made. And when reporters later asked Governor Landry why the whole deal was kept secret from the public in the first place, he didn’t apologize for it. He said people have used the word transparency to basically kill deals like this.

And what did that deal actually cost us? The New York Times reports the tax breaks Louisiana handed Meta could be worth as much as $10 billion. That’s built around a 20-year exemption from state and local sales tax on equipment, and GPUs don’t last. Data centers replace their chips every two to three years, and every time they do, that exemption applies again, which means the real cost over the life of this deal could run well past that $10 billion mark. On top of that, there are property tax breaks that could cost us another billion a year, and federal exemptions stacked on top of all of it.

What could Louisiana do with that kind of money? Put insurance costs back where they were a decade ago. Pay our teachers like we actually value them. Fix the roads and bridges we complain about every single day. Instead, it’s going to a company worth over a trillion dollars, because the people we elected to represent us decided a corporation’s chip inventory mattered more than our schools.

The third story is the one that should scare you most. The Louisiana Illuminator reported that our state is now pitching the federal government to store nuclear waste under the Gulf of Mexico, in salt domes off Port Fourchon. We already know how salt domes hold up under pressure. Ask anyone near Bayou Corne, where a salt dome collapsed into a sinkhole that swallowed part of a town. Our governor wants to turn the coast into a nuclear waste dump to win favor with Washington, on top of everything we already absorb from the petrochemical industry. They think rural Louisiana will go along with anything if you wrap it in a flag and call it jobs.

And the fourth story is where all of it lands. U.S. News and World Report ranked Louisiana the worst state in America to live in, for the fourth year running. Dead last in crime and corrections. Near the bottom in education, infrastructure, and economy. This didn’t happen overnight. This is what four decades of trickle-down economics gets you, the same Reagan-era theory that Bobby Jindal supercharged here by gutting the budget and handing out corporate tax breaks like candy. We are watching the final chapter of a story that started in the 1980s, and it is being written by people who call themselves Republicans while working for the same corporations that are dumping their waste, their toxins, and their tax bills on us.

The people doing this to us are not conservatives in any sense that matters to a working family. They are corporate lobbyists who are good at getting elected, who wave the right flags and win rural votes, then go to Baton Rouge and hijack bills for companies worth more than our entire state budget. They are not there to represent you. They are there to keep the money flowing the other way.

This year and next year are what we’ve got. If we don’t organize, vote, and hold every single one of these people accountable, the Louisiana we knew will be gone, sold off in pieces to whoever calls the governor’s office next. Wake up, Louisiana. Nobody is coming to save us but us.

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Who’s running for Congress in 2026? Check out Jamie Davis running for U.S. Senate, Conrad Cable and Matt Gromlich against Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-4), Lauren Jewett against Steve Scalise (LA-1), John Day against Clay Higgins (LA-3), Rubia Garcia in the open seat that the GOP took from Cleo Fields (LA-6), and Dan McKay & Larry Foy against Julia Letlow’s successor (LA-5). Re-elect Democrat Troy Carter in (LA-2).