Cleo Fields, Jeff Landry, and your tax dollars.
Cleo has a 30 year pattern you need to know about.
1997: FBI video catches Fields accepting $25,000 cash from Edwin Edwards, the governor later convicted of federal racketeering, who tells Fields to make sure “everyone is careful how that’s handed out.” Fields is never charged but quietly does not seek reelection.
He spends the next 28 years bouncing between the state Senate and private practice, amassing an estimated $38 million net worth on a government salary that never exceeded $20K as a state senator.
January 2024: Landry takes office as governor. Cameron Henry becomes Senate President. Fields is immediately handed the chairmanship of Senate and Governmental Affairs, one of the most powerful committee seats in the legislature because the chair controls which bills get scheduled. Fields had quietly supported Landry over Shawn Wilson in the gubernatorial race, helping Landry win the primary. That chairmanship put Fields in direct control of the redistricting process, where he helped draw his own congressional district.
November 2024: Fields wins that congressional seat.
2025: His first year in Congress, Louisiana’s Republican legislature appropriates $500,000 to the Louisiana Leadership Institute, Fields’ personal nonprofit. Then Fields is caught buying up to $300,000 in Oracle stock days before Trump’s TikTok executive order made Oracle’s role public. Fields sits on the House Financial Services Committee overseeing capital markets. No charges filed.
2026: Landry signs SB 121 eliminating Fields’ district entirely. Same session, the legislature passes two enrolled bills sending an additional $1.1 million to Fields’ nonprofit. Rep. Jack McFarland chaired the Appropriations Committee that produced HB 1 and authored HB 312. The HB 312 line item contains zero purpose language. Just the name and the number.
While this money was moving, the Louisiana Leadership Institute broke ground on a $3 million amphitheater.
Total state funding across two sessions: $1.6 million to a sitting congressman’s personal nonprofit.
This is the uniparty taking care of itself, protecting itself, and operating like a business, and we are the ones funding it.
#lalege #lagov
The Federal Reserve creates $4 trillion in new money, yet your grocery bill barely budges while Nvidia stock doubles in six months. Welcome to the most insidious form of inflation: when newly printed dollars bypass consumer prices and flow directly into financial assets.
You won't see this wealth transfer reflected in the Consumer Price Index. The CPI measures bread and gasoline, not Bitcoin and Berkshire Hathaway. Meanwhile, the Fed's money printing operation sends fresh liquidity straight to primary dealers, who park those dollars in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Asset owners get richer. Wage earners watch their purchasing power erode in real terms, even as official inflation statistics claim everything is fine.
This creates a vicious feedback loop that sound money advocates have warned about for decades. Cheap credit inflates asset bubbles, which the Fed then feels compelled to support with even more money printing. Each cycle makes the wealth gap wider. The Tesla shareholder benefits from artificially suppressed interest rates. The school teacher saving in a checking account gets destroyed by financial repression.
The establishment calls this "quantitative easing" and pretends it's different from old-fashioned money printing. Expanding the money supply faster than real economic growth means that new money has to go somewhere. Since 2008, it has systematically flowed into assets that wealthy people own rather than goods that working people buy.
Your 401(k) might look healthy, but you're watching monetary debasement in real time. The stock market is booming because dollars are dramatically less scarce, not because companies are dramatically more productive.
If you can, buy stocks, bitcoin, property, or gold. This makes you a beneficiary of this phenominon, not a victim.
@BrianFeroldi Doesn’t that depend on your age and timeline. Capital preservation becomes a larger consideration as you age because there’s less time to recover.
@chamath No way. Cholesterol plays many roles that we don’t fully understand. Work on your overall health, not an oversimplified indicator. Put the big rocks in first!
@itsolelehmann One big problem now is getting to Truth. We still have lots of bias in the information that AI searches through. Take Covid as an example. There are still some obvious scientific errors that were told as truths & AI right now isn’t capable of using logic to deduce false reports.
@elonmusk AI is also going to create a lot of problems. Getting to an answer quickly is not always the most correct answer. Some things have to be thought through and we are likely to turn more thinking over to AI. We are going to make a lot of mistakes.
There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones.
And honestly, it explains a lot.
We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.
We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.
That is not a small thing.
People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.
Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.
We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.
We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.
We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.
We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.
And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.
That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.
A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.
We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.
That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us.
But we exist.
We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.
And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.
College sports is an arms race that features the Big & Sec, in alliance with TV networks, competing for as much cash as most professional leagues. It will bankrupt the other schools trying to compete. Greed will take it all down.
Big Ten distributes record $1.37 billion in revenue, or $72 million per school (though its newest members - Washington and Oregon - receive a reduced share)
https://t.co/zYN3XeWk0v
@appsteve@BrettFavre Not wanting media exposure is one thing. He had nothing to do with signing the contract. The whole thing was a political stunt to use his name for more media exposure for the state auditor. The folks who worked on the contract are the only ones who could explain their actions.
@appsteve@BrettFavre Stop lying. That contract was for an on campus multi-use & community facility & was executed by public & school officials. Brett Favre was paid for a series of ongoing speaking engagements and while he had already done some of them, he gave all of the money back.