I know most of you are focused on the stomachache that is the 2016 presidential election, but let’s take a moment to review a statewide race in Louisiana: the U.S. Senate election.
I didn’t see much information on our Senate race this cycle until I actively searched for it, which is problematic because your preferred presidential candidate won’t be able to get anything done without a cooperative Congress. Want to be able to refinance your student loans? Would you like some sort of paid child leave? Good luck doing that without a senator to vote for those policies.
We’re only going to focus on one candidate in this piece: Democrat Caroline Fayard.
If you don’t know about her, she’s one of the two viable Democrats in the race, and while she looks appealing to moderate voters on the surface, Fayard is surrounded by corruption.
For starters, The Advocate reported that she worked for Goldman Sachs for two years in her 20s. For those who don’t know, Goldman Sachs was one of the major players in tanking our economy in 2008.
In a nutshell, this bank approved millions of Americans for home mortgages that it knew they couldn’t repay. Then, it repackaged those subprime mortgages, mislabelled them as safe investments and sold them to investors.
If it’s difficult to understand, just know that Goldman Sachs profited from fraud.
Fayard doesn’t divulge her past with that company other than the fact that she worked there in her 20s, and she’s 38 right now. Since Goldman Sachs started committing the fraud from around 2005-2007, which led to the housing bubble, Fayard would have been in her late 20s at the time. I’m not saying she helped commit fraud, but it does look fishy.
She said she left the bank because she disagreed with “Wall Street values,” though she doesn’t explain whether that was before or after that bank screwed over millions of people.
If you’re concerned about our diminishing coast, you should probably cast your vote elsewhere. She accepts climate change science, but she won’t say whether it’s because of human action. In an interview where a reporter asked whether human activity caused climate change, she gave the following answer.
“I’m not a scientist,” Fayard said, according to The Advocate.
Well, Caroline, neither am I. That’s why, when 97 percent of scientists all say the same thing, I listen to them.
She also doesn’t think oil and gas companies should have to pay to restore Louisiana’s coast, even though we’re literally the most at-risk state for climate change other than Florida.
This year, our global CO2 emissions reached and exceeded 400 ppm. Our CO2 levels haven’t been that high since before humans existed, and scientists all say we won’t go to sustainable levels in our lifetimes. We don’t have time to appeal to the oil and gas companies if we want to have a livable planet. Our politicians certainly shouldn’t be putting their own political ambitions above the welfare of our planet.
In a nutshell, Fayard would be bad for the economy and bad for our planet. We don’t have time for more politicians like her representing our state.
Cody Sibley is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Opelousas, Louisiana.