Depressing

A really disturbing question popped into my head recently and I've really been struggling to find a satisfactory answer.

Given the sober outlook for many of the poorer, lower lying areas of the city over the medium term (10-15 years) in regard to societal basics (economic opportunity, education, housing, health, safety) and fundamental life sustainability (flood protection, subsidence, rising seas), at what point to rational organizations working in the public interest determine that it is more in the interest of disadvantaged New Orleanians to work on subsidizing rescue relocation instead of rebuilding?

Everything I've tried to do in New Orleans from a political standpoint has been predicated on my unwavering belief that it was humanity's moral imperative to rebuild this city while wholly recreating the conservative state institutions and instruments that systemically perpetuate for generational poverty, structural racism, and their associated societal ills.

It was also predicated on my belief that this region is uniquely positioned to capitalize on macro trends that will undoubtedly create economic opportunity around different aspects of the sustainability movement.

But so much and so little has changed.

On the national level, the economic crisis has pushed the obligation to New Orleans further and further away from priority status. Additional infusions of federal capital to the Gulf seem increasingly unlikely given the ideological opposition to federal spending by 90% of our Congressional delegations. The realization of the right of return seems like a pipe dream given the confluence of these and other national and international factors.

On the local level, political discourse in general terms remains largely monopolized by supremacist robber barons and short-sighted machine widgets. The public has little faith in municipal institutions nor is there enough working trust between citizens of different backgrounds to appreciably alter those institutions in the short term. On this front, I have sensed some hard-fought incremental progress.

In other cities, or if this city hadn't experienced such devastating trauma, the incremental change that has occurred over the last 2-3 years would seem monumental.

But the time window New Orleans has in which to make fundamental, perhaps radical change is much much smaller than anywhere else's. We live in a state of political emergency. It may not be right that we should have to prove our right to exist given absolute federal culpability in the disaster that has brought us to this point but unfortunately that's the situation we find ourselves in, isn't it? Especially now after recovery resources have been squandered, stalled, or have otherwise failed to substantially put this city on the road toward short, medium, or long term recovery. Especially now after the national economy has created emergency situations throughout the sunbelt. Especially now as the region's political clout has waned.

I'm sorry that this post is so depressing, especially on such a beautiful sunny day just hours before the Krewe of Muses rolls down St. Charles Avenue. And certainly the morose outlook here is somewhat colored by my personal frustration as a young man searching for stable, fulfilling employment in this time of economic contraction. But I don't think I'm exactly going overboard here.

The fact is that the preconditions for a robust and equitable recovery still remain. But time is running short. Really, really short. Joseph Cao short.

There will be a new Mayor elected one year from now. It's the last best chance to save this city. We have until then to reach out, educate, and organize. The events of this week - the Mayor's politicking and Council's pandering - demonstrate very clearly the uphill climb that remains before honest conversation and evaluation of the city's health can occur in the public domain.

It's too early to pick a Mayoral candidate, but I'm looking for someone that can articulate an optimistic vision for how to maximize the region's advantages without sugarcoating the extremely dire forecast that New Orleans faces if we make no change or only small change.

There's something romantic and courageous about the sinking ship imagery and the unwavering commitment that people have to go down with it, so to speak. But I worry about the people that don't really get a choice in the matter. And I worry about my own transformation from energetic wide-eyed young man to perpetually exhausted and disillusioned curmudgeon.

Transparency and efficiency are not mutually exclusive

Today may have been the first time I ever left City Council chambers with a smile on my face. Sure, the Mayor had just announced a vicious power grab to give himself sole control over the award of professional services contracts. But at least he was there in the flesh to hear public comment.

In spite of all the predetermined pageantry that sought to shield the Mayor from direct criticism, he still got dressed down pretty good.

It's weird because in an objective sense, this has been a horrible week for New Orleans. Mayor Nagin has erected the barricades. If it wasn't clear before, it's perfectly clear now that he has no intention of working with anybody on anything remotely productive for the rest of his term.

The meeting today merely fulfilled a legal requirement associated with the Mayor's new executive order and will take effect in seven days. There was no mystery to that.

Today was just for show in that regard, so it was nice to see the choreography come undone to a certain degree.

Arriving at noon, I was surprised to see that between a third and a half of council chambers was filled with NOPD officers dressed in recently reinstated powder blue. I wasn't entirely sure what the NOPD had to do with open meetings laws and executive orders but I was soon enlightened.

Much of the opening statements from city attorney Penya Moses-Fields and Mayor Nagin focused on their concerns with the recent City Council ordinance requiring the administration to comply with preexisting rules for take-home vehicles.

Of course their rhetoric was the typical "we are focused on recovery and these things get in the way" stuff with which we've become so familiar. But the substantive point was that the ordinance failed to exempt first responders from having to sacrifice their take home cars.

I'm pretty sure the original ordinance from the 80s limited that first attempted to restrict the take-home car fleet already exempted first responders. The IG audit of take home car policy purposely didn't touch the NOPD. Last week's ordinance requiring compliance with the law, therefore, implicitly exempts NOPD and EMT because there is a different law governing take vehicle fleets for first responders. And still, it is likely that the ordinance will be modified to make this explicit since clearly nobody wants to restrict the ability of first responders to get to work, given that NOPD and EMT are always on call.

So this non-issue was puffed up as the main event even though the real reason the meeting was called was to present the executive order banning advisory committees for professional services contracts.

As luck would have it, when the time came for comment, there was a steady stream of city officials and people associated with first responder organizations ready to speak out against the take-home car ordinance, eating up time that would have otherwise been used to discuss the executive order.

You had speakers from Police Association of New Orleans, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Black Association of Police, etc.

Police Chief Riley spoke. So too did CAO Brenda Hatfield and Director of Public Works Robert Mendoza - all about some made up or easily resolvable qualm with the take home car ordinance. This is why the whole place was stocked with uniformed NOPD officers.

Citizen comments (nearly unanimous in opposition) related to the power grab executive order, at the beginning, were interspersed with additional trumped-up outrage related to the peripheral car issue. But toward the end of the meeting, it was one frustrated speaker after another. Brave citizens looked Mayor Nagin in the eye and told him exactly what they saw.

That's why he was so irritated during his closing remarks, when he said how much he was looking forward to leaving office in order to watch candidates struggle to clean up after his own mess.

The Times-Picayune

WWL article, WWL TV report

WWL video of Nagin's closing remarks.

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Clancy DuBos' separate analysis for WWL was not good. He describes the controversy as representing a clash between the democratic values of 'transparency' and 'efficiency.' He sets up a dialectic between the efficiency of closed-door authority and the inefficiency of transparency. He says that in a Democracy, you have to balance these "competing interests."

However, he fails to understand or articulate the underlying reason why people are fighting so hard for open government at this moment in New Orleans. Folks are not interested in transparency because of the thrill of the democratic process or intellectual curiosity. Certainly an efficient and effective recovery for New Orleans is way more important to me right now than the philosophical purity of a completely open direct democracy.

Rather, the reason the fight for transparency and open government has become consumed this city is because people are trying to figure out why the recovery has been such an inefficient failure to this point. The most poignant moments of citizen indignation came when people wondered why it was nothing was getting fixed, why there are no cranes on the skyline, and why we see so little evidence of the flowing recovery dollars Mayor Nagin continues to promise.

I care about transparency precisely because I care about efficiency and recovery. Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind if Nagin used city money to install a gilded toilet in Greg Meffert's stretch Escalade so long as he'd also crafted a long term vision for regional sustainability, brought home displaced residents, advanced the causes of economic and racial justice, improved city services, and raised our collective quality of life.

Bring me a government that works efficiently to advance the public interest and I'll never say transparency again. Until then, I'll work to find out why the Nagin administration seems to be doing just the opposite.

Trash Talk

This is just embarrassing. Raw video available at WWLTV.

There was surprisingly some intelligent, cool-hearded, rational discussion about the personal tensions underlying the gridlock. But none of that gets to the substance of the sanitation contracts and the selective enforcement of the rule of law.

We simply do not have civilized debate on policy in the public realm in New Orleans.

Comforting

I've been a little nervous lately about how things are going with the infrastructure stimulus.

But this is great to hear. It's a change.

Priorities!!!

Via email:

Unfortunately, there is no more money in the 2008 budget to make streetlight repairs for the rest of this year, and the 2009 budget that was passed includes only the smallest amount for repairs in 2009, despite Council Member Midura’s efforts to get this infrastructure fund properly funded at the budget meeting.

It is possible your lights are likely to remain out for a while. We will continue our best efforts to provide a remedy to this situation.

Thank you.

Where is our money going instead?

Just a peek, from City Business:

The budget includes $75 million to acquire 34 acres of property for the new VA hospital and remove infrastructure, although the city is still evaluating “that which we can keep and that which we can get rid of,” Blakely said.

Also in the spending plan is $30 million for the first phase of the Reinventing the Crescent project, a plan to redevelop nearly 7 miles of the Mississippi Riverfront. It will pay for “the design and development of 1.5 miles of new riverfront, roughly tripling the length of what folks can access now (at) Woldenberg Park,” said Sean Cummings, executive director of the New Orleans Building Corp. and the project’s conceptual architect.

Sounds like we've got our priorities straight. Zero money for average residential neighborhoods. Tens of millions of dollars to demolish one such neighborhood or for 'economic development' in an elite neighborhood.

Such progress we're making giving all this money to a neighborhood that didn't flood and is doing just fine without the extra assistance.

I live in a neighborhood expected to benefit greatly from the RTC project. I'd love to have pedestrian access to the river, I really would.

But I'd gladly put the whole thing off for a decade in the blink of an eye to help out the neighborhoods that truly need it.

Did you know that for the 2.1 billion some odd dollars we're collectively sinking into the destruction of Lower Mid City, we could build a brand new comprehensive mass transit system? Probably we could build two of them for that kind of money.

If we had a plan to that ready to go, we might even get it funded by the Feds. After all, Obama is proposing to spend a trillion bucks on local infrastructure projects within the next several months.

Update:

Jan Moller tells us that the state is ready to demolish a neighborhood without the hospital construction money in hand. It's apparently illegal for the state to put itself in that much debt. Perhaps they'll scale back plans by NOT demolishing a neighborhood and instead rebuilding Charity Hospital.

With the economy slumping and energy prices falling, state revenue is expected to plunge well below current projections, giving the state even less room to issue construction debt. Moreover, hundreds of projects across the state are competing for money under the cap, making it unlikely that the state would commit $400 million to a single project.

Update II

I was going to let it slide but I can't. For some reason, in an article that profiles the various ways we might reduce the state's financial obligation, in an article that floats a "scaled-back alternative," Moller doesn't even mention the proposal to rehabilitate and reopen Charity.

In Defense of Mayor Nagin (Part II)

I wrote part I over the summer.

Today I wrote another.

Let me preface it with a call for the immediate resignation or dismissal of Sanitation Director Veronica White.


Mayor C. Ray Nagin sure was dealt a tough hand when Katrina came. At the point the storm came 2005, he was well into the third year of his first term. His administration had earned a reputation for adequacy. Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin had not pressed for updated hurricane evacuation plans as aggressively as he should have. A strong municipal game plan became that much more necessary when President Bush left FEMA in the stead of political hacks. We were on our own without viable hurricane preparations and were finally facing the worst-case scenario storm that we’d always been told would come. As the federal rescue failed to materialize, while Michael Brown was eating steak dinners in Baton Rouge, Mayor Nagin was left on his own. Our government failed us and our Mayor was put in an impossible situation. Certainly, he had not done enough to revamp our evacuation procedures but the newly minted Department of Homeland Security was created to help coordinate that very effort, especially at the nation’s most vulnerable locales. The DHS failed New Orleans and it failed the nation. Instead of revamping our country’s disaster response mechanisms, President Bush had merely assembled a leach-like bureaucracy from which to reward political patrons with jobs and contracts. Our country was no more prepared for a catastrophic hurricane than it was for a terrorist attack, disease outbreak or earthquake. And Ray Nagin was left holding the bag.

It wasn’t fair. It was too much for one man. For New Orleans, Mayor Nagin was the town crier, the constable, and the bucket brigade. For the President, his henchman Karl Rove, and the rest of the right-wing machine, he was the fall guy.

I will never ever forgive those people for what they did to this city. I will never forgive George Bush or Karl Rove or the conservative court jesters that left this city to drown or advocated we abandon it forever when it didn’t.

But I forgave Ray Nagin.

I forgave him because even though he didn’t do enough, he was asked to do it all. I forgave him because he yelled and cursed and cried while Bush, Brown, and Chertoff patted each other on the back. I forgave him because I thought he would never forgive them. I forgave Ray Nagin because I thought he’d never forget what they did to our city and I thought he’d keep yelling and cursing and crying until they made it up to us. I respected C. Ray Nagin enough as a man to believe that if he didn’t have the decency to do right by us as a matter of service, we’d at least benefit from the revenge campaign.

But since then…

Since then, Mayor C. Ray Nagin has worked to earn my utmost contempt. His second term in office has been a disaster of epic proportions, a criminal enterprise, a human rights violation for which Ray Nagin can never earn forgiveness. Ever. Let alone respect.

And he has crafted a city in his own image:

A city incapable of delivering basic public services to its citizens, a city unwilling to expand economic opportunity for those most routinely left behind. Mayor Nagin squandered every last ounce of international goodwill and sympathy with a recovery agenda that favors every whim of big business and every impulse of his well-heeled friends.

Instead of working toward a compromise plan to rehabilitate our public housing stock, Ray Nagin laughed his way to the wrecking ball as his city burst at the seems with the same racist rhetoric of so many public service debates of years past. Instead of embracing the permanent supportive housing initiatives that prove to be the best means of reducing homelessness in cities all across the nation, Mayor Nagin and his police chief Warren Riley used entrapment tactics and insidious loitering laws to arrest them or herd them into camp-like barracks. That episode got so bad that the Bush administration had to send down representatives to talk Ray Nagin into a more humanitarian approach.

Instead of using this cities recovery funds, Katrina reparations belonging to victims of the Federal Flood, Mayor Nagin and his incompetent planning stooge Ed Blakely hatched ridiculous development schemes that don’t come close to addressing our emergency recovery priorities. Take our community block grant development funds: What could have gone toward needed infrastructure improvements at target zone sites around O.C. Haley Boulevard or St. Claude Avenue were instead allocated in huge sums toward a river redevelopment scheme being planned for the distant future. What could have been used to reopen Charity Hospital was instead allocated in vast amounts to demolishing a recovering Mid-City neighborhood for a new LSU/VA hospital that won’t materialize for years to come. When basic municipal functions like the police, the fire department, EMS, and the DA office are struggling to find enough support to staff their temporary offices, the Mayor heralds plans for golf courses, tennis courts, and condominiums. He touts the return of the tourists as the benchmark for which we are too judge our own quality of life.

His actions as Mayor, his policies, have squandered our national goodwill. New Orleans is seen as a money pit and Mayor Nagin is viewed as a laughingstock. While the media’s treatment of certain ill-conceived remarks has not helped, those do not constitute the substance of the Nagin administration’s well-deserved reputation. Rather, it is his reactionary ideas, his lack of vision, and above all, the lack of results.

Though African Americans no longer constitute the overwhelming majority of the city’s population, it can be safely said that the African American community has been most victimized by Mayor Nagin’s wrongheaded recovery policy. This is what is so disconcerting about his most recent invocation of race in defense of his administrations incompetence, and really his repeated use of this defense mechanism throughout his term. What happened this week at City Council is clear. Our city’s sanitation department is dysfunctional on a number of counts. Sanitation Director Veronica White has locked us into some exploitative trash service contracts with the Mayor’s closest political friends and donors at a time where every saved penny is needed for other public service emergencies. Her stewardship over demolition contracts have made her an integral cog in the broken machine that is this city’s blight removal program. Instead of leaning on delinquent slumlords, the city has improperly subjected scores of salvageable homes to the wrecking ball. The city now stands to lose millions more in lawsuits from wronged property owners. But when Stacy Head has the audacity to question Veronica White about her job, all of a sudden she’s being inappropriately racial and profane.

It is like the time last year that Council called hearings into the ‘unlimited bulky waste’ provision that was retroactively stripped from the sanitation contracts. Instead of correcting the mistake and saving the city millions of dollars, Mayor Nagin encouraged his administration to defend the contractors on racial grounds. When it was discovered that the quasi-governmental nonprofit had essentially embezzled millions of dollars in CDBG money, Mayor Nagin maliciously attacked the citizens that had brought the issue to light as enemies of the recovery. He purposely lumps liberal bloggers with the unfiltered anonymous conservative and racist talk radio leftovers on Nola.com as the new Ku Klux Klan. Now he accuses Stacy Head of race-baiting because she dared to suggest that Veronica White was wasting millions more of the citizens’ dollars.

It is patterned behavior. The Mayor categorizes all of his critics, be they from the right or the left, as racially motivated. It is a mechanism he has employed time and again to avoid providing justification for his administration’s policies or avoids holding his underlings accountable for their failings. Critics are not looking for criminal activity to throw people in jail and claim victory. We just need our government to do better for us. When watchdogs discover waste, when they call attention to instances of incompetence, it is because they want you to correct them and move on. Instead, the Mayor refuses to acknowledge that problems exist, erects a smoke and mirrors campaign to obscure the information available, or accuses detractors of racism. Instead of embracing efforts to improve the function of government, the Mayor’s defensive posturing only magnifies the appearance of criminal impropriety.

In a sense, I understand where it comes from. African Americans fought too long and hard to earn their fair share of power in this historically racist city. That African Americans sometimes feel defensive about criticisms lobbed at high profile black officials is understandable given historical context and more recent efforts to use planning to eradicate communities deemed inviable and invaluable. When African American leaders use race as a political bludgeon, it effectively evokes not just the dark chapters of the past but also the sinister efforts of parts of the white establishment in the present-day.

The ‘chocolate city’ speech resounded in this city because African American communities were truly fighting to stay on the map. Now, C. Ray Nagin can no longer credibly sound that alarm because he has switched teams. Instead of fighting for the greater African American community he promised to represent, he has embraced the plan B agenda of the very same interests that originally sought to avoid rebuilding poor neighborhoods all together. We’ve become all too familiar with what that Plan B looks like. In it, Mayor Nagin clings desperately to the loyalty of political patronage while the people of this city, and African Americans disproportionately, are deprived of basic public services, intermediate opportunity, and advanced vision for this city's ultimate revenge: A full, just, and equitable recovery.

A Bad Day Gets Worse For Ray Nagin

Nagin proclaims in Details

“To me, some of those blogs have become the new sheets for racist people,” Nagin explains when asked why he worked an anti-blog rant into a Katrina memorial. “They’re not marching around with white sheets. They’re on the blogs and in the comments sections.”

It's interesting. He could make the claim that he's not talking about progressive and liberal bloggers critical of his administration but of the racist and incendiary anonymous comments routinely left at nola.com, but consider the context. He made these remarks during his speech on the third anniversary of Katrina:

"The most important work we need to do this third anniversary, in spite of the challenges we face this hurricane season, is to learn, ladies and gentlemen, to respect and honor each other -- our diverse culture that is unique to New Orleans. I don't know exactly who is in those coffins, you don't know who is in those coffins, but I will bet you they represent every aspect of this great city. . . .

"So when people talk about their love for this great city, and then you go to a blog, or you read something and it is divisive, it is hateful, it is mean-spirited, my question to you is: How you can you love New Orleans if you don't love all of us?"

Recall that he made these remarks in the same week his administration came under FBI investigation for their degree of culpability in the NOAH scandal. This was also the same week bloggers protested his "Excellence in Recovery Award."

So it is likely that at this point, Mayor Nagin is capable of distinguishing between the bloggers investigating fraud within his administration and the bubbas and bubbettes spewing anonymous hate at the embarrassing nola.com website. He just chooses not to make that distinction because it serves him well to lump all of his critics into one metaphoric white-hooded rider.

It's sort of like accusing Councilwoman Stacy Head of "race-baiting" after she dared to question the Sanitation Director about the city's bloated trash pickup contracts.

But the most devastating indictment of this man, our Mayor is at the end of the Details article.

The writer Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, describes actions like those as “disaster capitalism”: profiteering and privatization in the wake of shocks such as 9/11 or Katrina. So when I spot Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence, on Nagin’s desk and ask him about it, I’m surprised to learn that he’s not reading it but The Shock Doctrine, which he pulls from his briefcase.

"I understand exactly the premise that they're presenting," Nagin says, holding the book aloft, "that's for sure. Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! The shock-and-awe piece of what they're talking about is absolutely correct." I ask if he's read the chapter in which Klein laments that the public sphere in New Orleans is "being erased, with the storm used as the excuse." Nagin replies cheerily, "I haven't gotten that far! I just picked it up."

Shock Doctrine has a whole chapter about Ray Nagin's post-Katrina New Orleans. You can find some excerpts of that section at one of Ms. Klein's Huffington Post pieces. Essentially, Klein argues that business forces use the shock of disaster to ram through all kinds of goodies for themselves while the actual victims of the disaster are left waiting on their rooftops. It is a scathing denunciation of neoliberalism. It is one of the most strident criticisms of Ray Nagin's recovery philosophy that exists today.

And Ray Nagin is in the middle of reading it, just not the part about him. He's interested in the part where she explains how business forces exploit people, the part he can interpret as a manual that can instruct the rest of his disastrous reign of terror on this great American city.

"Look, man, after this disaster there is big money!"

But he doesn't and didn't need Naomi Klein to tell him how to do it.

He was a natural:

"It is a smorgasbord in New Orleans! It is a buffet, an economic buffet! All you can eat!" he told the crowd. "If you have a lawnmower and an edger, you can make money in New Orleans."

You must be lonely. And that crown must be heavy.

Be well.

Council Meeting Devolves Into ANOTHER Circular Firing Squad

How shameful that it went down the way it did. Council fought against itself and ultimately delayed approval of the 20 economic development projects for another two months and directed Blakely to do a cost benefit analysis.

During the debate, council members tossed around terms such as "irresponsible, " "shameful, " "blackmail, " "double talk" and "an embarrassment" to describe colleagues' attitudes and actions.

--

Shortly after 7 p.m., the meeting was halted for about 20 minutes after Councilwomen Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, soon followed by Midura, left the room without explanation, leaving the seven-member council without a quorum.

The three eventually returned, with Midura accompanied by one of her young children, after their colleagues condemned their sudden exits. Calling their absence "an embarrassment, " Councilman Arnie Fielkow said, "This is why people have no confidence in government."

Now this devolution of discourse on Council seemed absolutely unnecessary. There was an awful lot of consensus there that got warped and abused by Council's lack of imagination.

There was not one member on City Council that thought this process was conducted properly. In fact, there was universal agreement on where the blame belongs:

Much of the anger on display was directed at the Nagin administration, and especially recovery chief Ed Blakely, who was given oversight of economic development matters more than a year ago.

Some of the strongest words came from two council members who generally refrain from harsh criticism of the mayor. President Jackie Clarkson and James Carter both said they felt the administration had dumped a mess into their laps.

"I'm just fed up, " Clarkson said. "I'm resentful and very offended that we have not been held in higher regard."

"I'm really, really, really saddened and disturbed that the City Council is in this position, " Carter said. "This is absolutely ridiculous."

Now, of course Council was in that nasty position because Mayor Nagin abused his power by circumventing the advisory committee charged with selecting projects for economic development with an unchecked executive order issued during the middle of a natural disaster. One could also point to Dr. Blakely's refusal to provide a basic cost-benefit analysis or otherwise preventing the paid consultants from doing so. It is clear to everyone on Council and to the media covering this story that Blakely and Nagin gummed up this whole process for over a year and then gave it to Council and demanded they rubber stamp the thing.

The disagreement was whether or not it was worthwhile to reject or further delay the allocation of these grants to the applicants given that at least some are not blatant pet projects of the Mayor and that the applicants have been waiting for over a year.

To me, that disagreement seems relatively minor given the critical importance of addressing the first problem, on which there is absolute consensus. Why couldn't have Council reached a compromise?

I pitched one yesterday:

1. Approve all grants minus the $2.7 million giveaway to the LSU VA interest group.
Most of the grants are going to small businesses. Let's not wait any longer, they've been patient since 2007 and are counting on this money to come through. It is unlikely that Nagin and Blakely will negotiate with Council on this, so pass the grants and force them to accept the rest of the terms of the compromise. The proposed award for the hospital group seems shady since that project has faced stiff community opposition and may not get built on the current proposed site. Besides, I'm not sure it deserves our scarce economic development dollars when all the other recipient projects are small businesses.

2. Blakely's resignation effective immediately.
This would probably be in the form of some sort of resolution. That's fine. I know that Council doesn't have the authority to fire a Mayoral staffer. But it would be a powerful statement. It would threaten the Dr.'s somehow still sterling international reputation. It would be worth it. He would notice.

3. The suspension of the economic development fund for the rest of Ray Nagin's term in office.
It should be reconstituted as a program to help New Orleans entrepreneurs launch their first business - only with a transparent vetting process based on concrete and unbreakable guidelines.


My friends on City Council, listen up:

The Mayor has put you in these situations time and again. He fails to follow the law or purposely gums up procedures and time lines so that City Council is basically forced spend money on flawed plans. City Council stands in a circle with guns cocked only the real target is already back inside the saloon. Shots ring out and Council shoots itself while Mayor Nagin throws 'em back in laughter.

Stop the cycle. You are in positions of power. Start making demands of the Mayor and start punishing him if and when he fails to meet those demands. Council controls the purse. Council controls the budget.

Go on another stupid team-building retreat and when you come back y'all have better figured out who the real enemy is. Stop fighting each other and start fighting for us.

Backed Into A Corner

Following up on yesterday's on-going conversation about the economic development fund money that Mayor Nagin is trying to hammer through City Council without cost-benefit analysis and after circumventing his own advisory committee via an executive order in the middle of a Hurricane, the City Council's Economic Development Committee voted in favor of a full vote on the projects.

However, Council remains split.

The Cynthias have indicated they will vote for approving Mayor Nagin's list of grants on the rationale that small business need immediate investments given the economic crisis and the overall delays in economic development fund distribution timeline.

It also appears that Fielkow and Midura are prepared to vote against for two general reasons. First, because the administration has failed to provide a basic cost-benefit analysis of the projects as demanded by the law. The second reason involves suspicions arising from discrepancies between projects highlighted by the consultant hired to vet the applications and what Mayor Nagin has decided to submit to Council. The firm, GCR, says that some of the groups Nagin would like to give money to did not even submit completed applications.

In trying to wrap my mind around what's going on here, I will say that I relate very sincerely to exasperation of Councilwomen Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis. This money is from way back in 2007. The 2008 grants have already been approved. It does us no good to continue to sit on this money when the controls that would ensure a clean and transparent process simply do not exist or are too easily ignored by the Mayor. Certainly there are a number* of worthy grant applicants that should get paid already.

(*** THOUGH SOMEHOW, OVER HALF OF THE DEVELOPMENT DOLLARS ($2.7 million) GO TO THE DISPUTED LSU/VA PROJECT ***)

But when oh when do we get to examine the broken process that lead us to this point? Why is it that time and again we're just supposed to blindly approve spending the Mayor asks for when time and again the administration has proven incapable of avoiding waste or worse?

It's a pattern, ya dig?

The administration refuses to follow the law, withholds information, or otherwise fails to provide reasonable rationales behind whatever it is they press upon Council. Then, because this city is so desperate for infusions of cash, so desperate for construction, for ANYTHING, Council is under the most immense pressure to rubber stamp whatever it is just so that the cash gets spent. Any 'no' vote is seen as obstructionist or worse, even if 'no' means 'well at least provide us with the basics we'd need to make an informed decision.'

Take this quote from Cynthia Willard-Lewis from today's hearing:

"The process was flawed, we all admit that," Willard-Lewis added. "But today we talk about the people, who are not flawed."

On which day then, Councilwoman Willard-Lewis, do we talk about the process?

When will that day come?

Let's talk right now about why we're in such a big hurry to get these dollars out today.

After a few hundred thousand dollars of 2006 grant money disappeared literally into toilet seats, City Council required the Mayor's office to submit a complete cost-benefit analysis for each of the projects submitted to the advisory committee charged with selecting projects to send to City Council. Seems pretty reasonable, right?

Well, not only did the Mayor not provide a cost-benefit analysis, but he penned an executive order during a Hurricane to circumvent the advisory committee.

Why did he do that?

According to the Times-Pic, it was because resignations on advisory committee made it difficult to get the quorum necessary for the committee to take any definitive action. Apparently, the reason was that the Mayor had trouble finding people to appoint as replacements and this is why the projects haven't been submitted almost a year past deadline.

Well I asked around and do you know how many people the committee needed for a quorum?

Just five.

So the Nagin administration intentionally gums up the processes or is so disengaged and negligent that it fails to get things done in a viable time frame. But then when Council wants to ask for the basic documentation that might help avoid blatant waste and corruption, it is they who are delaying the process.

The other thing I'm wondering, and this may be why the LSU/VA Hospital is getting so much, is if the specific projects were invited by Blakely or his office to apply. If he did not publicize the availability of municipal development dollars, the general business population would have had no way of knowing that there were grants for which to apply.

Here's the compromise I'm proposing:

Council will approve all projects minus the LSU/VA grant. The $2.7 million saved from the exclusion of that award can go back into the general fund or directly into an account that would help impoverished families pay for winter heating costs . In exchange, Ed Blakely will tender his resignation and the economic development fund will be suspended through 2010 until it can be reconstituted by the next administration as a program to help seed the dreams of first-time entrepreneurs.

What do you think? Who will sponsor this on Council?

Tipping Point

In advance of the ball dropping to 2008, Mayor Nagin announced that this would be "the tipping point" for our city's recovery.

He was right.

And things are not going very well.

And everybody knows it.

The City is demolishing houses wholesale with no review and no appeal. A demolition permit has been issued for a home belonging to a regular critic of the Mayor's regressive recovery policy. This woman barely staved off the wrecking ball after crews could not get to her house due to the dumpster she is renting while she renovates.

The School Board is prepared to blindly rubber stamp a facilities master plan that will reduce the capacity of the public school infrastructure for decades, squandering over a billion dollars on a few suburban style campuses.

Entergy is moving forward with a plan to eliminate a system agreement that will have the effect of sending our utility costs even further through the roof.

The Mayor's home remediation program, from NOAH, to help senior citizens was nothing more than a criminal racket that is now under federal investigation.

The Mayor's crime camera initiative was also nothing more than a racket used to funnel undisclosed sums of cash to a friend.

The entire recovery seems to have been narrowly staked on the health of the condo market and its ability to attract wealthy tax payers. The condo market is crashing, merely catching up to well foreseen national real estate trends.

Everyone I know is or has been sick in the three or four weeks since Gustav.

There are no tourists in town and with the national economy free falling, the service industry has had a difficult few weeks. At least those of us that don't make $70k per year.

One coworker is packing up his stuff and will be out of here by the end of the week.

My landlord just told me a few hours ago that he too will be jumping ship; he's put the house up for sale and hopes to move away. (Not that anybody's looking to buy home to move to New Orleans, he joked. Sadly.)

The most energetic advocates for a progressive recovery are growing weary and depressed.

I wish that were all. I wish that were all for the last 7 days.

The tipping point. It's funny because I'm reaching mine too.

McCain in High Def

Even since it became appropriate sometime last spring to anticipate a general election campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain, I've made one point more than any other during many private conversations.

My belief was, and I often emphasized this especially to those most skeptical of Obama's general election chances, was that even if Senator Obama could inly keep it a toss-up until the debates, he'd be fine. Now of course he's performed waaaaay better than that as a candidate and in the polls, already assuaging many of the fears of those feeling anxious after a contentious Democratic primary process but the point remains relevant as we try to understand how the media and voters might differently digest this debate.

My point then, and throughout the summer, was that once you got the two of these candidates side-by-side on television, there would be no mistaking the stronger candidate. Once you put the stoic, tall, young Obama next to the old, short, weathered-not-grizzled McCain, the substance of the debate would be of little consequence. This isn't something that pleases me, because I'd prefer Obama to win purely on the superiority of his policies but it is the reality of the television age of politics.

While most pundits, even Obama supporters like Josh Marshall, have scored the debate as a draw because neither candidate "scored points" or something, early polling data and focus groups indicate a fairly convincing victory for the Senator from Illinois. At this stage of the election, there are few true undecided voters remaining and I could be wrong about this but it is likely that many of these undecideds are not the types that tend evaluate the candidates on their policies. Those that still show no preference between the political agendas of either John McCain or Barack Obama, are either cartoonishly centrist or simply not paying that much attention to policy. Rather, a sizable chunk of undecided voters tend to 'feel' their way to a decision based on an image-based perception of strength, readiness, steadiness, charisma, and consistency.

When you examine CBS's poll of purely "uncommitted voters" Obama is considered the victor by a slightly larger margin.

Getting back to my point about the electoral effect of seeing the two candidates side-by-side, the line I always shot at people skeptical of Obama's chances against the GOP election machine was: Have you seen John McCain in high definition? That line always elicited laughs, and it was meant to be funny, but the larger point was serious. John McCain's age, the wear and tear on his body from several bouts with skin cancer, would speak louder than words. He would 'look' unfit. He would 'look' like the lesser candidate.

And that's precisely how it played out, even if we totally ignore the eye contact/body language miscues that are being emphasized in the media. McCain looked like the weaker man.

How many elections in your lifetime seem to have been decided based on that? Pretty much all of them, right?

Though Jeffrey is dead-on in lamenting the anti-substance fixation on McCain's body language, the reality is that the appearance of the candidates is EXACTLY what people focus on. Save for a major gaffe or transformative moment or line that sticks out, Obama wins all three debates by default.

SIGN THE PETITION: EXTEND THE FACILITIES MASTER PLAN PUBLIC COMMENT DEADLINE

A petition is now online to extend the public comments period on the school facilities master plan to January. I can't tell you how critical this is.

Go here to sign it.

The school facilities master plan will guide the capacity of this city's public education institutions for decades to come. It was poorly conceived to begin with and is structurally flawed now that it has been 'completed.'

Go here to sign it.

As of this moment, the Orleans Parish School Board and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education are scheduled to vote on the master plan within days though the plan was released in the midst of Gustav panic and is close to 2000 pages. The case for extension of the public comment deadline based on the insufficient amount of time the public has had to review and provide comment would be plenty compelling by itself. Yet, disturbingly, we've learned that some members of the Orleans Parish School Board, who are, and I can't stress this enough, directly responsible for the approval or rejection of an absolutely critical guiding master plan, HAVE NOT READ IT THEMSELVES.

Go here to sign it.

Over half of the members of the current school board are lame ducks, some of whom may have already checked out: they are disengaged from what is going on but are still prepared to vote on a 1.8 billion dollar blueprint that they may not even have read.

Go here to sign it.

Orleans Parish voters will elect a new school board on October 4th and it is they who should be making any decisions on the master plan.

Go here to sign it.

Thus, it is of urgent importance for anyone and everyone that cares about either education, democratic processes, or both go HERE to sign the petition to extend the public comments deadline. Currently there is a target of 1000 signatures. I know that we can meet the target and I think we can do it quickly.

Go here to sign it.

McCain Campaign Strategy Is Crystal Clear

For Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, and John McCain, it's only tangentially about swinging different demographic groups with divisive smears and distortions that feed divisions related to identity.

What we're seeing intensified this week, this typical GOP lie and deny, is a tactic that enhances the McCain camp's larger road map to victory.

"This election is not about issues."

That's what McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told the WaPo's Chris Cillizza last week. (emphasis his)

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.

"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

Davis added that issues will no doubt play a major role in the decisions undecided voters will make but that they won't ultimately be conclusive. He added that the campaign has "ultimate faith" in the idea that the more voters get to know McCain and Barack Obama, the better the Republican nominee will do.

And yesterday, in the thick of all that pigstick, Cillizza pointed to some data from the most recent WaPo-ABC polls that truly illustrates where the McCain camp thinks it wins this election.

Which is more important to you in choosing a candidate for president: their personal qualities such as experience and leadership ability, or their positions on specific issues?

Presidential Preference Among "Issue" Voters

Presidential Preference Among "Personal Qualities" Voters

NOTE: Results among registered voters.
SOURCE: This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone September 5-7, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,133 adults and 961 registered voters.

The graphic on the side should help drive this home. Essentially, the Republicans believe that they can change the numbers on the first pie chart there. The McCain campaign thinks they can whip the media into a personality-based narrative in the final weeks of the campaign and that coverage of personality scandals, regardless of the tone of the reporting, will ultimately influence people to vote based on personal qualities.

Of course, by extension, the McCain camp believes that the more people do that, the more likely they will be to choose "maverick" McCain and "hockey mom" Palin over "arrogant" Obama.

This is partially why I believe that the continued focus on Palin, even when progressives point out that she's been lying about her record, is ultimately detrimental and feeds into the McCain camps overall strategy. Because the lies are relatively banal, the media will not use that term and will not really press the McCain camp to stop repeating them. GOP surrogates are very deft at pivoting away from questions related to Governor Palin's record toward a discussion of her background as a small town mom or traits like her feistiness, etc.

This is also why the McCain camp has decided to keep Palin by McCain's side for pretty much the rest of the campaign. They welcome the Left's objection that she's hiding from the media and will only agree to puff interviews because it allows for them to continue to distract voters and the media with charges of sexism or the imagery of ruthless packs of wolves. Never mind that one could allege that the McCain camp is being sexist for claiming that Palin cannot handle herself in the media because I'm sure the McCain camp would love to talk about that. Anything to avoid substantive debate based on policies and issues - because they understand that they lose overwhelmingly if voters are focused.

The media is content to go along with this game, even though responsible journalists are beginning to call out the McCain camp for deceptions and even though many deemed pigstick to be irrelevant at best and fabricated at worst. The fact is that the media still covered it ad nauseum because it generated ratings. Palin was able to get her way in terms of "deference," able to force the media (Charlie Gibson has no integrity) to accept her fluff-only interview preconditions because she draws high ratings.

But Obama can cut the bull here. He draws high ratings too and he can leverage some of his influence over the media when really bs stories like this one are being force-fed on the country by the McCain camp. He should have issued a statement calling out pigstick for being what it was but also simply stated that the matter was closed and that his campaign staff and supporters had been encouraged to move on to contrasting the two campaign's education agendas. And I think the media would generally have accepted this from the Obama campaign as reasonable, at least to the point where we might have had a more balanced news day yesterday.

-

Stop spotlighting Palin. The McCain campaign is juiced to use her as a ratings draw and as a distraction from the repulsive agenda of the GOP and of the McCain-Palin ticket. The left should be working to make her a boring non-factor instead of a polarizing focal point.

When Americans are thinking about issues, we win. We lose when we play on GOP turf like this. We actually have moral high ground in this election because what's gone on the last eight years and because of the lies being put forth by the McCain campaign. We can leverage it to get back to discussing issues and back to dominating news cycles.

--

On Monday morning, Obama and Biden should talk about the housing crisis and the free falling economy from near one of McCain's several properties in Arizona, kicking off a tour of Western swing states. Especially since McCain's lead in Arizona is much smaller than one might imagine.

All Pigstick All Day

I worked my service industry job during the day today and it was slow so I got to watch a whole lot of MSNBC. I was treated to an entire day of this stupid back and forth over the lipstick pig comment. It's a funny thing, this controversy, because the media actually seems to be accurately portraying the fracas as an intentional misinterpretation of the remarks on the part of the McCain campaign to avoid discussing policy. But the media kept on leading every hour with 'lipstick politics.' Chris Mathews, who absolutely demolished the McCain camp on this and expressed utter frustration that it's even being covered nonetheless still devoted two whole segments to it. Even NPR talked about it.

So even though the media fairly vetted both sides in the controversy, they were still doing the bidding of the McCain campaign by making this thing the top story all day long. The McCain camp didn't much care that the media was largely debunking their claims because the focus stayed on the Palin personality and off of the repulsive policies of the GOP.

And unfortunately, the Obama campaign chose to play defense on this controversy all day. Barack Obama even responded personally. He did so effectively, tying this distraction to all the failed discourses of past election years, but he was still in response-mode.



Playing armchair campaign consultant, I would have recommended, once it became clear during the mid-morning that the McCain camp was effectively making this pigstick comment an all-day affair, that the Obama campaign craft a simple press release. In it, I would have spelled out all the criticisms that Senator Obama outlined in the video above but also that the campaign considered the matter closed and would not be issuing any more statements on the matter. Campaign representatives and talking heads would then have grounds to completely pivot away from responding to this bullsh*t to remind viewers about the detailed policy proposals that Senator Obama outlined in Denver.

Let's Stop Talking About Palin

I've been mulling over lots of different thoughts since John McCain's announced his VP choice.

I thought at the time that it reflected a desperate lack of judgment on the part of Senator McCain and exposed some real control issues within his campaign. How, I asked myself, could they not even vet her? Why would they undercut the 'experience' theme they've been building for months? How could McCain choose someone he'd only spoken to once or twice?

And then when the details began to emerge, from her daughter's pregnancy to the state trooper firing scandal to the bridge to nowhere lies, I thought to myself that McCain's gambit had totally backfired. Here he's elevated this total political novice without fully vetting and it's backfiring right in his face.

And maybe it did sort of happen like that. McCain's advisers and GOP stakeholders knew he needed to shore up the evangelical base not just if he was going to have a chance at bridging the so-called 'enthusiasm gap' but also because there would be no grassroots basis for 2010 or 2012 if McCain had had his way and picked Joe Lieberman. They convinced John McCain to go with Palin, assuring him that the positive aspects of a ratings draw for the ticket would far outweigh whatever gaffes she may commit or bad positions she'd previously taken.

Democrats and especially a lot of online progressive news sites walked into the unintentional trap. Immediately there were many questions about Sarah Palin's ultraconservative ideology, her poor performance as Mayor of Wasilla, and the trooper scandal. There were even more questions about what the selection said about McCain's judgment, whether or not he himself had a basic familiarity with Governor Palin, whether or not he'd known about the family preganancy. I'm not sure that I 100% buy the argument that the 'unintentional trap' was the typical GOP wagon-circling and push back against the elite media though certainly this was the party response. I don't think that the left is entirely caught off guard by that tactic anymore, as it had certainly been employed at various junctures by the McCain camp already.

Rather, the 'unintetional trap' that Democrats stepped into was Palin's personality.

The GOP push back against the 'liberal media' was in full swing in the days before Palin's acceptance speech but it did not necessarily yield any kind of response from the public. I anecdotally remember seeing many numbers indicating fairly disparate national favorability numbers for Palin, shockingly low considering that VP picks are supposed to poll positively right after their selection. As I recall, roughly 38% of respondents indicated that Palin had made them more likely to vote for McCain and pretty much the same number indicated that Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain.

Once Palin flashed that smile on stage in St. Paul and told her story, her place on the ticket was solidified beyond a doubt. The two most often quoted lines from that speech illustrate what her selection was really all about. Can you remember anything she said she'd do politically? No. You remember the line about hockey moms and lipstick, you remember the brilliantly delivered cutesy line about putting the state jet on EBay, you remember all the small town America nonsense. The whole speech was about imagery, identity, personality, and relate-ability.

Then, when it was kicked back to the Left's pool of tv pundit talent or to the progressive blogosphere, the pointed questions kept being asked - and it looked like this 'everywoman' was being bullied around on her first day at school - never mind that she's been lying about her record.

And since the convention wrapped, criticism of Palin continues dominate the headlines, even on progressive blogs. I know she's being isolated from the press and being briefed over and over again because she has little command of the issues Americans face in this election. I know she's lying about the bridge to nowhere.

But who cares?

Is it really more important to highlight Palin's lies than it is to contrast McCain's blank speech to Obama's extremely detailed agenda? Shouldn't we be highlighting the ridiculousness of McCain's calls for change?

Palin brings ratings. And she brings them to a Republican ticket that was really struggling to generate any kind of interest or excitement.

This Dick Polman piece, which is excellent, examines this theme by critiquing the poor political sense of those clamoring for the use of Hillary Clinton as a foil to Palin:

The Clintons may be exasperating figures to roughly half the Democratic electorate, but they do know a few things about politics and how to play the game. The McCain people have made a politically smart move by picking Palin - her lack of preparedness is another matter entirely - because they have created buzz for the Republican ticket, allowing the GOP to focus on personality and thus distract voters from the Republican policy record of the past eight years. If Hillary was to take on Palin directly, in a battle for the sisterhood, she would be fighting dumb, on the new Republican turf - personality versus personality - while failing to focus voters on the Republican policy record of the past eight years.

And consider this: If Hillary went mano a mano with Palin, how long would it take for this kind of imagery - courtesy of James Bond cinema - to be the talk of the nation?

Wolfson, wise to the imperatives of popular culture, and the allure of so-called "cat fights," put it this way: "For whatever reasons, editors and news executives are convinced that two women fighting sells magazines and attracts eyeballs. You can imagine the thinking. If Angelina Jolie vs Jennifer Aniston, and Britney Spears vs Christina Aguilera sell copies, what could be better than Hillary Clinton vs Sarak Palin...(That) might drive ratings and sell magazines, but it wouldn't be good for the Democratic party or the cause of women's rights."

You see, the McCain camp became wise to the fact that Americans are really bored by John McCain. They realized that McCain's understated public persona, awkward mannerisms, inability to fluidly read a teleprompter, and increasingly common 'senior moments' really exacerbated the age issue and turned off voters on the right and in the middle. The McCain camp is happy to have Palin bump McCain's TV time. Her appearance alone makes her inherently better able to connect with average Americans than John McCain. Notice that Palin and McCain continue to stump in tandem. It may be, as many on the Left snicker, because Palin needs more prepping before she's allowed to do her own photo ops recite her own talking points. However, it is much more probable that the McCain campaign strategists are purposefully working to obscure Americans' views of the ticket by putting Palin out front. It ensures that media coverage of any McCain campaign speech is as much coverage of Palin's barbs as it is anything the actual nominee says. It ensures that Biden and Obama will continue to be pressed to respond to this Palin quote or that Palin quote. It ensures that the progressive blogosphere continues to rip apart all of her misstatements and distortions.

She sells ad shares, she drives web traffic. Palin is getting pretty good mileage out of the same one-liners written for her convention speech whereas Barack Obama's extremely detailed, persuasive, and historic argument for progressive change has generally failed to generate residual coverage.

It's what the McCain camp is banking on.

I actually think the Obama campaign has really played this pretty good. Neither Biden nor Obama have really mentioned Palin by name and continue to hammer away at McCain's proposals that expand upon the Bush administration's disastrous policies.

Unfortunately, however, the progressive netroots is being called to action to clamor on and on about the media's refusal to report accurately on Palin. That's a mistake, it's not something worth leveraging progressive muscle for.

Call out her lies, highlight her distortions, and continue to uncover her insufficient qualifications but stop making her the focal point of the response to the McCain campaign. She should be treated as though she is completely irrelevant because she's essentially being put forth to distract Americans from the actual proposals of the GOP platform and of the McCain campaign.

It's also extremely frustrating as a resident of New Orleans. So much energy went into going after Sarah Palin, who is still essentially a NOBODY, that few bothered to question the 'gee Louisiana really dodged a bullet with Gustav' narrative that allowed the GOP to go back to partying in Minnesota while a huge swath of America barely hangs on.

Nagin Walks Out Of Trouble the Water Screening

H/T: People Get Ready

Go read the whole account from Democracy Now!

For those of you that don't remember, Trouble the Water is an incredible documentary profiling the resilience and heroism of ordinary New Orleanians when all levels of government failed during Hurricane Katrina.

TIA LESSIN: So the mayor stayed for about five minutes, and his handlers said that, you know, if they had seen the whole movie, that they wouldn’t have ended up coming.

CARL DEAL: I’m so disappointed that the mayor and his people didn’t—weren’t able to stay for the whole film and disappointed that they said that it was a negative portrayal of the people of New Orleans. Poverty is a very negative thing. Poor education is negative. I mean, it’s not a pretty picture for a lot of people who live in New Orleans. And yet, this is a story that takes you through one family’s entire journey, and it tells the truth. Kimberly and Scott open themselves up and expose themselves through this camera, because they felt so strongly that people know what it was like living in New Orleans before, during and after Katrina.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: The camera don’t lie. So we shot the truth. And it’s like no one wants to be held responsible for this. So that’s why I think he kind of ran away from it.

Before Nagin walked out of what he considered to be a "negative" portrayal of citizen heroism, Kimberly Rivers Roberts confronted him about chronic underemployment and the lack of a living wage. Mayor Nagin explained that po-boy shop guys make $70k per year.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: I want to know what is—you know, what are the people, the leaders of New Orleans, are going to do about the neglect that’s going on in the city?

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: Unfortunately, we can’t change 200-300 years worth of habits overnight. The good thing about Katrina, if there is a good thing, is that we’ve got our economy going in a much better direction. There’s lots of jobs, opportunities, and business.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: I’m talking about real jobs with living wages. We’re still—

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: Let me just tell you a couple of examples. And I know this is something that is—we need to have a deeper discussion about.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: Right, right, right.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: Just things like, you know, working at Gene’s po’ boy shop.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: Yeah, yeah.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: They’re paying, you know, $1,500, $1,800 a week to their cooks.

KIMBERLY RIVERS ROBERTS: No, they’re not, man. I’m putting [inaudible] Gene’s, man.

You know, the Mayor must know something we don't. From his perch atop his mansion he can really see the big picture. What we have in New Orleans is a bunch of whiners that are suffering from a mental flood and mental poverty.

Mayor Nagin is an embarrassment, a joke, a traitor, and a liar.
He is willfully ignorant, inexplicably incompetent, and ideologically immoral.

One of my first acts as Mayor will be to permanently 'displace' C. Ray Nagin from the city of New Orleans.

Inexcusable Callousness from a Hometown Favorite (updated)

Will Bunch, a Daily News writer and blogger at Attytood is a favorite of mine from Philadelphia. I have always held Mr. Bunch at high regard because when I was younger, he was way ahead of the curve on new media and the use of the internet for national and local progressive reform and he is a big influence on what I'm doing here at WCBF.

But I'm about to rip him.

Because this post is absolutely disgraceful.

I hope for the sake of the beleaguered Gulf Coast that this doesn't come to pass -- but from a realpolitik point of view, there is a potential nightmare for the Republican Party swirling around the warm Caribbean waters right now.

His name is Gustav.

That's real cold.

I agree that Republicans should be forced to defend themselves on the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, their refusal to properly investigate levee failures, and their reluctance to facilitate a faster and more equitable recovery - but in Bunch's mind, New Orleans needs to be on the brink of extinction for that to happen.

You know, the Republican convention will be right around the Katrina anniversary too. Isn't that enough pretext for bringing up GOP policies that exacerbate poverty and GOP ideology that inherently leads to ineffective governance?

As a matter of fact, why do we even need to have the anniversary of the greatest natural disaster in American history as a pretext to discuss the domestic implications of another neoconservative administration?

Mr. Bunch, do you think the Dems need the threat of Hurricane Gustav to be able to hit the GOP on the Katrina response right at the three-year anniversary mark, or is it merely 'fortuitous' timing?

Yo Will!

What the hell dude?

---

This is something I wrote at First Draft after encountering this Daily Kos thread.

The callousness is incredible. These bloggers want to talk about the FABULOUS political implications of Gustav's landing in the Gulf South but largely have nothing to say about the disgustingly reactionary recovery policies being imposed by the Bush administration and our own horrid Mayor. Where is their support for local progressive reform efforts? Where is the advocacy for an 8/29 investigation? It's sickening.

If these fools were really being wise to the political implications - instead of their reason d'etre being sickeningly beholden to posting SOMETHING relevant to a name in the news, they'd realize that if they wanted the GOP to have to answer for poverty, reactionary recovery policies in New Orleans, and the inherently ineffective neoconservative government in general - they would have been elevating progressive voices from New Orleans all along.

Now they find themselves epitomizing the most sickening comparison: they're no different from conservatives that wish for another terrorist attack in order to play on the Dems-can't-protect-America meme.

I meant it.

Especially because people really are worried about this storm. It's a constant topic of conversation. Already, everyone is asking everyone whether or not they have evac plans.

First thing tomorrow morning, I gas up the car and buy drinking water.

A Great Way To Sandbag Jindal's Political Ambition

Okay so check this guys!

Jindal cancels his convention speech to deal with Hurricane Gustav.

The levees fail and the whole city goes to shit again and Jindal is pathetic in his response!

See how that works?

All we need is the hurricane to come kill us and Jindal will be cooked as a presidential possibility in 2012!

(see post below)

In Defense of Mayor Nagin

The American Zombie on Monday:

I just got an angry email in my AZ account from someone claiming that Nagin is being attacked because he's black and that I and "all the other bloggers" in the New Orleans blogosphere are racist....I guess the person wasn't including the African-American bloggers in this city who have been critical of Nagin as well.

By the way...is there a pro-Nagin blog out there?

Anywhere.....where.....where.....where....

Gambit contributor Kevin Allman in the comments section of that AZ post:

Just a note: I've got keys to the Gambit blog and I will GLADLY run a pro-Nagin essay by a New Orleans blogger as long as it's original and not a press release.

I've looked for pro-Nagin blogs so I can invite the authors to contribute. I can't find any.

Anyone: get in touch with me.

Yes, this will be a "pro" Nagin blog post.

--

There is an appropriate time to 'defend' Ray Nagin. It occurs just about once a year, around the anniversary time when conservative pundits can't avoid discussing Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf's recovery process.

Conservatives hate Hurricane Katrina because, perhaps more than any other singular Bush Administration failure, as the federal response to the disaster most irreparably battered the President's highly cultivated image.

Look at what happened to his approval ratings in late 2005 and early 2006.

Bush fluffers would prefer to ignore that painful episode as much as possible. It provides evidence of the fallacy of the neoconservative model of governance blatant enough that it doesn't take an effete Wall Street Journal liberal to point it out. (Cons: "Gov't=Bad" :: Cons manage Gov't badly :: Cons: "See how bad Gov't is?") The Katrina tragedy also brought the issue of poverty back into the national discourse. Conservatives don't like talking about poverty because the policies they advocate so often exacerbate it - and pretty much everyone knows that.

Thus, when discussion of Hurricane Katrina is unavoidable, like it will be next week, drowning conservatives have little flotsam to which they can cling.

There are only a few things they can try.

One is to blame the citizens of New Orleans for their 'refusal' to evacuate. This one is usually only parroted by uber-insulated conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that are not accountable to the mainstream public and never have to justify their statements with demonstrable fact. There are a few reasons why this argument isn't really attempted outside of ignorant talk radio. First, the rebuttal to this fabricated refusal myth is a discussion of poverty that conservatives don't want to have. Second, the language associated with the refusal myth, which touches on some expectation of government handouts, laziness, and stupidly is so racially loaded that any media personality that faces a mainstream audience knows better than to indulge.

What mainstream conservative pundits can do to is deflect criticism of the Bush administration and avoid substantive conversations about America's responsibility to the Gulf, the human rights of displaced New Orleanians, and poverty is to drop the hammer on C. Ray Nagin.

Last week, I did my first ever radio interview for an extremely obscure talk show based out of New York. Though the program was billed for political independents, I was greeted with the following question, which I will paraphrase:

The Hurricane was awful, we all remember the tragedy as it came into our living rooms, yada, yada, yada... In the days after Katrina, there was a fleet of school buses ready to go and Ray Nagin told them they weren't needed. Wasn't Ray Nagin terrible? Isn't it all Ray Nagin's fault? Isn't he an idiot and the worst guy ever?

Now certainly Ray Nagin deserves a great deal of blame for our failed hurricane preparation but to get a question like that three years after the fact demonstrates the lengths the conservative message machine has gone to put forth a revisionist history of the storm. This effort has been buttressed by more competent federal responses to the wildfires in California and the flooding in Iowa. It has given conservative voices an opening with which to carry out the Rove disaster response plan: blame the Democrats. (Never mind the fact that Mr. Nagin was instrumental in originally implementing the very Rove-hatched media response plan which Nagin himself is now the most direct target - I'm trying my best to make this 'pro' Nagin.)

It's funny because conservatives don't want to talk about Nagin's failures as a mayor post-Katrina because Nagin's most glaring failure has been his implementation of a generally conservative recovery ideology: outsourcing to private developers, dismantling public assets, stalling investment in the most devastated neighborhoods, and refusing to address low wages, high rents, and nonexistent health care. Instead, the focus is on Nagin's failures as an agent of FEMA during a 3 week period 3 years ago.

Beyond that, conservatives bring on local guests willing to talk about how far our tourism industry has come since Katrina and how you could walk the French Quarter and not even know a Hurricane had ever hit.

Ray Nagin is an unfair victim of conservative racism and attempts to paint the mayor of New Orleans as indicative lazy do-nothingness on the part of New Orleanians during the storm. Neoconservatives don't want to place the blame for the Katrina response where it really belongs, at the feet of their own ideology that implements broken government on purpose.

So:

Sometimes I feel like defending Nagin when he is used as a punching bag or used as a symbol for black people in general by neoconservative Bush administration brown-noses.

That's the best I can do for him.
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There is a great irony here and it's not 'e doesn't actually like Nagin.'

All of the apologists out there that rail against Nagin critics by levying charges of racism are themselves ignoring what Nagin's policies are actually doing to the African American community of New Orleans.

The reality is that the biggest Nagin apologists out there aren't those that think attacks on Mr. Nagin are racist, they're the racist Republicans that themselves profit from Mr. Nagin's implementation of a bastardized free market disaster "recovery" policy slate that disproportionately hurts poor African Americans.

Recall that Ray Nagin himself contributed to George Bush's campaign in 2000 and nearly maxed out to the evil Billy Tauzin.

Also recall that campaign donations of members of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, hand picked by Mayor Nagin, went to GOP candidates a whopping 94% of the time.

It is Nagin and the policies of his administration that are propping up and perpetuating the economic and racial injustice.

Those that call critics of Mayor Nagin's recovery policy racist should look in the mirror. They should think about who's really holding up Ray Nagin. They should look at who's really behind the Mayor's Excellence in Recovery Award (i.e. excluding those that were tricked into membership). They ain't exactly the victims of Katrina - they're the profiteers of false recovery.

So to Kevin and the American Zombie, if we're looking for a real pro-Nagin blog, maybe we should be contacting the exclusive class of boosters profiting from our city's unrecovery. They'll be above the Ritz on Friday.