Dismantling

NOLA.com:

LSU and many other public colleges in Louisiana might be forced to file for financial exigency, essentially academic bankruptcy, if state higher education funding doesn't soon take a turn for the better.

Louisiana's flagship university began putting together the paperwork for declaring financial exigency this week when the Legislature appeared to make little progress on finding a state budget solution, according to F. King Alexander, president and chancellor of LSU.

"We don't say that to scare people," he said. "Basically, it is how we are going to survive."

Moody's Investors Service also announced this month that it was lowering LSU's credit outlook from positive to stable based on concerns about the university's overall financial support. The lowering of LSU's credit rating makes it more likely the university will have to pay more for its building projects in the future.

This kinda crap doesn't happen by accident, kids.  Try to resist thinking Jindal and his Client Cronies aren't doing this on purpose. LSU is a prestigious joint, which makes it a valuable property, which means it should be awarded to a Corporate Friend who'll take it under his benevolent wing and blah blah blah.

And in case anybody needed the reminder, LSU was very much up front about calling out BP for the Deep Water Horizon fuck up - along with any number of other monumentally shitty things that go on in Louisiana in the name of freedom and Unfettered Market Economics.

So let's see if we can identify the basics here - your Environmental Science guys get all uppity about how Big Petro-Chem is making it next to impossible for actual human-type people to live anywhere near The Gulf, so what we'll do is buy lotsa face-time with a yokel governor who wants to run for president, and trade him a pile of campaign cash for looking the other way while we also pour money into the pockets of state legislators (not to mention  US Senators & Representatives) so we can cut the school's budget to the point of no return - and then use that little bit of convenient leverage to get our buddies at Moody's to put the squeeze on their credit - all of which drives the price down to where we can swoop in and "rescue" the failing failure from the failures of the failing eggheads who've failed utterly in their failed efforts to make all of God's America fail.  And before ya know it, our schools will be turning out good wholesome young academics who know the real value of a dollar and who won't be having their minds poisoned with all that boring science-y stuff, which everybody knows is the devil's propaganda anyway.

We are so fucked.