Take it away!
Earlier this week, City Council held a meeting to look into why we're paying two companies double what they used to get to pick up some trash but not all the trash.
And it is super suspicious because the original contracts with the two disposal companies demanded removal of unlimited bulky waste. Months later, after certain political alliances received campaign donations, certain councilpeople hammered through a hidden ordinance that released these two companies from certain provisions of the contract they signed.
I would call that super suspicious. If I were a city council, I might have questions about that.
If I were New Orleans City Council, I might have twice as many questions. When I allude to the fact that "we're paying" these two companies a ridiculous amount for services not rendered, let me explain a little bit more what I mean by "we."
Because I don't mean everybody. I mean only a select, elite few.
I'm talking about pure blood here.
I'm talking about New Orleanians.
All of us. The residents of this city. Every single person that lives or has ever lived here has been victimized again and again and again by the secretive power structures run government away from us. For centuries. I'm talking about the loyal subjects.
Sometimes those powers were uniformly white and prayed on everybody else, though nobody can deny that African Americans received the lion-share of the injustice.
Since the 70s, those powers have been decidedly more racially mixed. But nothing has changed. Everybody else has been prayed upon and African Americans have received the lion-share of the injustice.
In 2005, it rained real hard and it was windy and the pure blood of the residents of this city was befouled in catastrophic fashion by... fill in your own blanks..... and African Americans received a disproportionate share of the injustice.
But everybody got the shaft. All the citizens of this city. And we continue to bend over to the power structures that control how our money is wasted. All of them are impugning our honor.
So I found this very upsetting.
How can anyone claim racial bias because Council is investigating corrupt garbage contracts that are victimizing the citizens of this city? Any type of municipal corruption disproportionally hurts African Americans because they happen to compromise the majority of this city's residents. (That is to say nothing of lower SES that makes AAs more vulnerable to the cuts, deficiencies in gov't services, although I can't stress that enough)
So often, too often, white people deny the existence of racism where it really does exist. So when a group like the SCLC comes to City Hall and makes all sorts of allegations and threats, people listen and people go on the defensive and lose sight of what's going on.
Maybe nobody should be listening to the SCLC anymore. As I learned from their speeches in Jena, LA in September (and it was the same cast of characters in New Orleans on Monday), SCLC is a sham organization. They're concerned chiefly with maintaining their own waning significance as a mobilizer of followers and steward of a movement that died decades ago.
The T-P indicates that they "mobilized" about a hundred people. "Dozens" of them were sanitation workers - employees of the garbage companies that don't pick up garbage. So how many folks did they really "mobilize?"
Spiver Gordon of the SCLC said "We don't need to come back here and dance around your cash registers. We're talking about economic boycott."
How could you not laugh?
Sales of Depends and V8 down 0.01%!
Besides, who would a boycott of New Orleans really hurt? Would it hurt the rich people that benefit from corrupt garbage contracts? Would it hurt the rich people that can afford to make five and six figure campaign donations? Hell no!
It would hurt New Orleanians. It would hurt African Americans disproportionately hard. Both because they comprise the MAJORITY of this city's citizens and because lowersocioeconomicstatusmakesthemmorevulnerabletoaweakenedeconomy.
SCLC was used, manipulated by these garbage people, Richards and Metro. They were brought in to say a bunch of angry serious stuff. They're the usual suspects. It reminds me of when corrupt politicians up north bring in their corrupt union muscle and pretend they're fighting for workers.
Nobody listens to the SCLC anymore. That time was 40 years ago.
Except the Times-Picayune obviously does. How the hell could that be a headline?
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