Warren Riley! Stacy Head! In 3-D! On Ice!

Update: WDSU just caught up with Superindendent Riley and he appears to be meekly backing off. It makes his comments on the radio last week all the more slanderous.

Off-camera, Riley told WDSU that he doesn't believe the e-mail is a big deal, that he's never seen the message and he doesn't have proof that Head actually sent it.

Update II: Seriously, I cannot believe how pathetic this walk back is by Riley. Unbelievable. He should apologize to WBOK's listeners and to Councilwoman Head.

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Warren Riley leveled some pretty serious and racially charged allegations in an interview with WBOK last week. I really wish WBOK archived its broadcasts. Thankfully, the T-P's Brendan McCarthy was tuned in.

The allegations about Head's e-mail came up when a radio station caller, who went by the name Malcolm, mentioned the alleged message.

The caller said: "I hear some of our council members are sending e-mails out -- one in particular, Ms. Head, sent an e-mail saying she hopes you fail and let's not approve your budget. But anyway, she's the failure in all of this anyway.

Riley responded: "You forgot the N-word that was in that e-mail, from what I understand."

"Well, yeah, you heard about it," the caller responded. "She said 'Let's make this Negro, not Negro, but she used that other one."

The caller then lambasted the media for ignoring the message. "The news (media) did not, nobody else put that out, nobody else interviewed, nobody made a big story about that. And if it was somebody of color that sat on the City Council who had that kind of behavior, would have been asked to step down."

Those who know Stacy Head personally have been quick to insist that this allegation is baseless and that such behavior would be unimaginable. But considering Stacy Head's history of off-color and, in a general sense, prejudiced language, Riley's allegation must at least be considered plausible.

Saying something that reflects ignorance, prejudice, or bias is different from saying something indisputably racist with malicious intent. Riley's accusations, if true, would be far more condemning of Head's character than her casually offensive observations in the Walmart checkout aisle.

If Head indeed used that epithet toward anyone, she would have to resign. She should not and cannot represent a population for which she has such an expressed, visceral hatred. The public pressure would be intense and well-deserved.

Luckily, we don't have to live in a world of 'what ifs.' Warren Riley claims Councilwoman Head used that particular slur in an e-mail. He should immediately produce the email. Regardless, news organizations should submit a public-records request to Head to obtain it.

Head's colleagues should hold immediate hearings to demand Riley produce the email, to censure Head if he can come through, or to call for Riley's ouster if he cannot.

If this email does not exist, Riley would be guilty of an extraordinarily insidious, divisive and manipulative slander. He knew that the forum he chose to air this allegation, WBOK, would not challenge him. He knew he was speaking to an audience predisposed - because of Head's past intransigence and WBOK's listener base - to believe a plausible, even if baseless, allegation of racism about the councilwoman.

And maybe he thought Head would prefer to ignore the story and minimize its media echo amid a tough reelection fight instead of throwing down the gauntlet to make him prove his charge.

Stacy Head should not and cannot simply ignore this story. Merely asserting that the allegations are totally baseless and false, as she did to the Times-Picayune, is not enough. Because of her salty language in the past, there is a special burden on her to substantively prove her innocence to the extent that she is able. When the e-mail controversy first began, Head took it upon herself to release a large set of emails to the public by publishing them for download on her website. Those emails have since been taken down. She owes it to herself and her supporters to more substantively address her views on race, language, and the allegations being leveled by Warren Riley, perhaps first by reopening her email outbox to additional public scrutiny.

As someone who has interacted with Stacy Head and parsed all of her emails released to date, I personally, have an extraordinarily hard time believing Riley's accusations.

This is different than a blind caller on talk radio throwing out an accusation. This is the Police Superintendent, one of the most important and powerful people in the city.

For someone of that stature to level this kind of accusation without prepared evidence is irresponsible, dangerous, and wrong.

It's not just manipulative.

Mr. Riley seems... a bit... delusional, and here's what I mean:

Riley said the recent release of a poll - showing that only 33 percent of citizens are satisfied with the NOPD - was timed to dissuade him from entering politics. The poll was unveiled by business leaders shortly before the political qualifying period. Riley also alleged The Times-Picayune chose that week to release several negative stories about him.

"There's a revolution going on, and we are missing it," he said.

Riley also criticized the slate of mayoral candidates and promoted his tenure as police chief.

"You know, I listen to the mayoral candidates," he said. "I run a bigger organization, and have had bigger budgets than any of these individuals. And I'm not knocking any of them. I'm just saying, I have had the ultimate challenge. The only person ... there are two people who have bigger challenges than I. And that's Mayor Nagin and President Obama."

Riley appears to be saying that he was all set to enter the mayor's race until that poll, which showed faith in the police force at an all-time low, was released.

Riley apparently put out feelers for a mayor's race over the summer before explicitly announcing in August that he would not seek that office, saying that he had "absolutely no interest."

So Riley is essentially saying that just weeks before the qualifying deadline, with no money raised, and with no campaign team assembled, he was considering swooping into the mayor's race. That is, until, a poll was strategically released to demonstrate his department's almost cartoonishly low approval ratings. Riley is intoning that he had a really great shot at raising money and gaining popular traction had it not been for that poll.

Think about how crazy that is.

Objectively speaking, Riley has presided over one of the most dysfunctional police forces in the country, to say nothing of his own conduct during his career on the force. The feds are looming over the NOPD for its unjustifiable pattern of police brutality, missing evidence, and who knows what else. Hasn't Riley been one of the most unpopular figures in local politics for over two years? Would people argue that the poll released in early December said something they didn't already really know?

If Riley had assembled his record of sloppy, ineffective catch-and-release, fire-when-ready police work during a Presidential administration that put any effort into exercising the powers of the Clinton administration's COPS bill, the NOPD might currently be in the control of a federal receiver right now because systemically discriminatory pattern and practice.

He's not just delusional and silly. He's not just calculating and manipulative.

He's desperate.

Riley's plans, given that this conspiracy of unpopularity dissuaded him from seeking the Mayor's office?

"I'm looking at a public venture ... with a couple people here in the city that I think would be profound and lucrative," he said. "I also am looking at another position that I will absolutely not talk about. Regardless, I am going to do well no matter what. As I stated, my future is bright. If I don't work another day in my life I'll be OK. I'm not just a police chief."

Punchline: Omg omg, a press meme

First, let's talk briefly about how and why Ed Murray left the race and what it means electorally and symbolically.

Clancy D's narrative of events is similar to what I have heard. Apparently, Murray disappeared for a few days after seeing some pretty dismal poll numbers and returned with the decision not to continue his run for office. He then announced the decision to the press without consulting his political bffs or his campaign staff.

The rest of Clancy's story - that advisers told him he'd have to find a half million bucks, make the election about race, and that Murray refused to go there after some soul-searching - leaves some stones unturned.

Chris Tidmore then went live with a story about a possible buyout from the Georges campaign.

Oyster gives us a cathartic profile of the reactions of some lovely conservative blogs who, of course, immediately reached the conclusion that everything is the White House's fault.

Clancy also accidentally (in the comments of this post) sort of confirmed that Georges' people have been pushing photographs and/or video that might be embarrassing to Mr. Murray. Since nobody else will, I will add a little bit of detail. There may be some embarrassing material circulating about Mr. Murray's fondness for wine. But considering that we generally accept politicians who drink, and even make drinking a standard benchmark of the campaign trail - see Batt, Jay or Clinton, Hillary - nothing that has been described to me would end Senator Murray's career. Even the worst rumor I've heard would just be really embarrassing and politically harmful if it were released at the right time, but not something that would make me think Senator Murray is a dishonorable human being.

So my sense of Murray's decision was that, despite the general sense from a couple of leaked internal poll numbers that he was running in second place, he didn't think he could win the election.

Let me say that again: HE didn't think he could win the election.

Clancy DuBos insists that Murray came to some sort of moral realization.

Murray’s top supporters and close friends are hurt, and most don’t understand his logic. But anyone who looks at Murray’s decision as a moral choice — particularly anyone who knows Murray — should have no difficulty understanding his decision. I spoke with Murray on Sunday afternoon and, while the conversation was “off the record,” I got the clear impression that he wanted to follow his inner moral compass, not his steering committee’s political advice, on this one.

For whatever reason, the explanation that it would take some nasty racial divisiveness on Murray's part for him to win is assumed to be reasonable. Yet, the fact that his advisers were telling him he was going to have to raise another $500,000 - $700,000 is just passed over as though it is easy or even possible to raise and spend a half million dollars over the next thirty days. Nor does anyone seem to point out that Murray was the most recognizable African American candidate going into campaign season, had already spent more money on advertisements than any African American candidate, and yet apparently still couldn't crack 20% in the internal polls that have been reported.

Here's the real dirty little secret about Ed Murray - he's a horrible candidate.

State Senator Ed Murray is a horrendous public speaker. HORRENDOUS. He's quiet, he mumbles. He trails off at the end of sentenc...

Again, he was the highest profile black candidate in the race BEFORE he unloaded his campaign war chest on an expensive two minute television commercial. I didn't see every single debate, but in the ones that I did, Murray was getting destroyed. He wasn't being attacked, he was being ignored - he was barely part of the conversation. John Georges, for all the sleaze, is out there talking about getting Charity and Methodist hospitals open. What the hell was Ed Murray's rallying cry?

And even in the internal polls that showed Murray to be the front-runner among African American candidates, his lead over Henry for that distinction wasn't even outside the margin of error.

So when you consider that Murray was going nowhere fast in his own polls even though he'd spent the most and had the best name recognition, it doesn't seem like his decision to drop out of the election was against the grain.

Mitch Landrieu is certainly the front-runner in this election and could indeed obtain the votes needed to avoid a runoff but I have a hard time believing that Mitch Landrieu is substantially better off today than he was before Ed Murray made his announcement.

One could argue that Landrieu is going to earn a lot of Murray's voters but one could just as easily argue that Murray's departure heals a fracture in the African American electorate and will lead to a more unified effort to mobilize voters on behalf of Mr. Henry, Judge Ramsey, or Mr. Perry.

The reason that I think the media and others have fixated on Murray's departure is that Murray was the only African American candidate from the African American political lineage that fought so hard for a fair share of municipal power over the last five decades. That is a major development within the African American political community, which is, to throw out a major generalization, the place where white people go to try to figure out what all African American people must be thinking. When, for instance, the Louisiana Weekly the New Orleans Tribune writes that Ed Murray's exit represents a "betrayal of the African American community..."

...what the Tribune is saying is that Murray is betraying the particular political lineage that helped him get to the State Senate in the first place, a political lineage that since Katrina, has lost a lot of real political power.

But after reading that, one might come to the conclusion that Senator Murray must have been the consensus black candidate to hold the Mayor's office.

That view isn't supported by evidence.

Murray was going no where fast.

With the election a month away, the best known black political candidate, the candidate who spent the most money on signs and advertising, was only polling in the teens in a city that is two-thirds African American.

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Yesterday, Troy Henry pulled a classic stunt to ensure attendance at yesterday's press conference so he could then lambaste local media. He is upset because he believes the media is pushing a meme that the mayoral election is over and that Mitch Landrieu is going to be the next Mayor of New Orleans.

He doesn't think that meme is fair. He thinks that if the media spreads the idea that Mitch Landrieu is probably going to win, voters will be unduly influenced to tune out the campaign.

"What we don't want to do is begin to put in the minds of all voters that this is a fait accompli, that this is not a real race, that this is an anointment. That's not fair to any of the candidates. And the fact that some of the reports have categorized this in terms of race, it's disingenuous to all of the African-American candidates. It's not fair."

Read the whole article or watch the press conference to get a sense of what he said overall.

There are a couple of points I think he was trying to make.

1. The press is spending too much time analyzing electoral prospects and not enough time reporting the positions of the candidates, and that's not fair to African American candidates or to the African American community.

2. The analysis of the press - that it is going to be nearly impossible for anyone to beat Mitch Landrieu - is wrong.

I agree that the media tends to fixate on the theatrics of the election - the horse race itself - and not on positions and values of candidates relative to the problems the city faces. I agree that this hurts African American candidates and the African American population, but it also hurts everyone in this city. The public should know who their choices are and what differentiates them from one another. Mitch Landrieu should be forced to really prove he knows "what to do and how to do it" by being asked to provide some basic detail about what it is he's going to do and how it is he plans to do it.

But in the end, it's kind of hard not to say 'tough sh-t.' That is how the media works.

And on point two, I think it's going to be extraordinarily difficult for anybody to defeat Mitch Landrieu on Election Day. That was true before Ed Murray dropped out of the race and it is true now. It would take a sizable financial investment and an lightening fast organizing effort to mobilize enough voters - white and/or black - to overcome Landrieu. You need more than a month to build a political machine from scratch. Troy Henry maybe has the money to get his name out there but probably can't scramble the necessary field outreach. James Perry has performed very well at the debates and maybe can get some television more television exposure but the guy doesn't even have a sign on the front door of his campaign headquarters, let alone in the lawns of supporters. I'm not sure most voters have even heard of Nadine Ramsey.

We are not at the beginning of the campaign anymore, we're already approaching the end. There is one month to go. They say that's an eternity in politics but it really isn't. A month is a month. With Landrieu reportedly 20 points or more ahead of everyone else and earning significant shares of the African American vote himself, we might soon approach official dead girl or live boy territory...

With regard to Henry's assertion that writers wrongly "categorized" the electoral dynamics in terms of race, it is kind of hard to ignore the entire last half century of elections in this city.

Since the VRA, municipal elections in New Orleans have been about the realization African American political power and the mobilization of African American voters to win basic political representation for the first time. In this election, African American community leaders are struggling to unite behind a consensus candidate, to mobilize demonstrable support for any African American Mayoral candidate - but that was true before Ed Murray got out of the race.

If Henry is upset with this analysis insofar as it has resulted only since Mr. Murray ended his candidacy, well then he has a real point.

The press could have written an article about the African American leadership crisis well before Ed Murray ended his campaign.

It's a sad thing.

Mitch Landrieu is a polished, recognizable politician but it ain't like he's the second coming.

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The Line

6. Rob Couhig

5. Nadine Ramsey

4. James Perry

3b. John Georges

3a. Troy Henry

1. Mitch Landrieu

Not a pretty picture

When the NYTimes holds up a mirror.

Great article but not fun to read.

Everybody likes comfortable furniture at rock bottom prices

Kudos to Cliff for bringing us this breakthrough in race relations:

DeBerry hits it on the head

This column by Jarvis DeBerry is required reading.

The issues of the poor often intersect with those who are racially oppressed, but not always. We see the conflicts between the two groups when black people with money wage campaigns against those who are without.

Eastern New Orleans has often been a battleground for this kind of intra-racial class warfare because that part of the city has included beautiful mansions and huge unsightly apartment complexes -- one of which I used to call home. Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis gave the impression soon after Hurricane Katrina that she spoke for the entire area when she trumpeted the phrase "right to return."

She's fought mightily for homeowners -- that is, those who have already acquired some semblance of wealth. However, she has shown herself to be indifferent -- if not outright opposed -- to the interests of low-wage residents who require affordable-housing options to return to the city.

In leading the opposition against a developer looking to build 36 affordable single-family houses near Lake Carmel at an average cost of $200,000, Willard-Lewis said the interests of current residents are her chief concern. So much for everybody else returning.

The City Planning Commission voted 6-2 to approve the legal subdivision developer Harold Foley needs to start his project. The New Orleans City Council, however, voted 5-2 against the project. The only two members to show Foley support were James Carter and Shelley Midura.

In voting against the project, the City Council isn't showing itself to be any different than the St. Bernard Parish Council, which has twice been scolded by a federal court judge for violating the Fair Housing Act.

The judge found that St. Bernard officials have withheld a routine re-subdivision request for a developer planning to build apartments because parish officials are trying to keep out black people.

See Judge Ginger Berrigan's order.

The City Council is employing the same strategy St. Bernard officials have used. It's difficult to imagine a judge looking any more kindly on the city's blockade of this project. The federal court would be unfairly punishing St. Bernard if it allowed New Orleans to do the same thing.

This is pretty much what I was trying to express

A thoughtful and articulate comment to this post:

me said...

I question the argument that Katrina was "color" blind in the sense that it affected blacks and whites the same. First, as a previous blogger points out, blacks were disprortionatley living in low areas because elevation costs more. When blacks first had an opportunity to buy where they pleased (1968 Fair housing Act) virtually all the above-sea level land was taken (the sliver along the river). They migrated first to the 9th ward and then their children to the East. All the studies showed that if you were black you were much more likely to have suffered severe flooding. So Katrina potentiated pre-existing racism--and the data indicate that color made a difference in who was most likely to be impacted by Katrina.

Second, whites had distinct advantages because of family networks and previous discrimination in housing and employment. The average extended black family found itself dispersed around the country: grandma had lived in the ninth ward; their middle class chilren in the East. In contrast, whites in flooded areas had relatives on how ground where they had purchased homes when blacks could not. Within a week after the flood, my block uptown had at least three families who had been flooded and were loaned homes or sharing homes. Because they did not have to leave, they held onto their jobs and began rebuilding their homes immediately. In contrast, blacks returning to New Orleans had no relatives to stay with as they attmepted to put their lives together; indeed, they were not allowed to stay overnight in the East even in gutted homes (the Vietnamese community for some reason had a special dispensation). In addition, resources and wealth affected how the storm impacted people. One poll showed that the majority of blacks who were in the shelters had no savings, though 2/3 were employed.

Bottom line is that because of racism past and present, any natural disaster will have a differential impact on African Americans in general and the poor specifically. This is important to acknowledge because it is not just a question of who suffered more (and some suffered tremedously) but that the recovery policies that were based on "common suffering" or "we were all in the same boat" failed to recognize that some groups had special needs if they were to return. One example is that renters suffered much more than home owners: they were not ensured a place to return; they were not compensated for contents of their homes, and most important, neither the BNOBC or the LRA allocated a penny in their initial plans to rebuild rental housing--while 70% of blacks rented. The rental policy was either just plain old racism to make sure the city was majority white and more affluent, or it was a byproduct of the notion of "common suffering"--that we all experienced Katrina the same way.

Of course Katrina was color blind--but the implication that its effects were race and class neutral is mistaken. Disasters potentiate old inequalities. We were not "all in the same boat" as Clancy Dubos once wrote: some of us were in the boat, some were clinging to the side, and some were adrift in the sea. By not addressing the inequalities during the recovery, we created racial distrust and anger. The first step to reconciliation of blacks and whites is acknowledging how Katrina affected us in different ways--and second that no one tried to prevent whites from returning, but there was a broad movement to prevent blacks from returning. One glance at the BNOBC map will tell you that virtually all black neighborhoods--rich and poor, were slated for demolition. While all the plan's targets were not black, all blacks were targets. That's an important difference

Broken Record?

On Friday, I posted what I thought to be a pretty innocuous link to really interesting looking online magazine that did a fairly expansive profile on Mayoral candidate James Perry. I posted it mostly because I thought the presentation was really interesting, the platform itself.

But a couple of people took a look at the content, which I thought to be mostly harmless and mostly accurate, and wrote some comments that really depressed me.

First and foremost, was an objection to a couple of sentences that a commenter flagged and discussed:

"They saw white ... leaders oppose the rebuilding of the most damaged parts of the city, which had been predominantly poor and African American."

Not true; monetary losses among the races were approximately equal, as has been established for some time. The poor were less able to return (because they were poor; it's a truism), not disproportionately damaged. What we have here is a repetition of the discredited TV Guide version of the history of Katrina: un-nuanced, misleading, and factually wrong.

This really ticked me off. It actually is true that African Americans perceived the BNOB green dot plan as an attempt to codify the closure of many predominantly poor and African American parts of the city. If you take a look at a map of the green dot plan, it's pretty hard not to deny that the plan was in fact attempting to shutter African American communities. In fact, the whole notion that neighborhoods would have to "prove" their "viability" before being granted the supposed privilege to rebuild is pretty indicative of the general attitude of the folks empowered to make decisions on everybody else's behalf.

That monetary losses amongst the races were equal may or may not be true, I don't know where that number comes from. But it's irrelevant either way because African Americans, as a result of decades and decades of personal and institutionalized racism, were systematically barred from accumulating the same kind of wealth as their white neighbors.

What percentage of those that died during the storm were African American? Was it 50/50?

No. Storm casualties were overwhelmingly African American.

Of the 150,000 residents that remain displaced from New Orleans, what percentage are African American? Is it 50/50?

No. Displaced New Orleanians are overwhelmingly African American.

The two sections of the city that sustained the most devastation, the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East, are those generally 50/50 communities?

No. They are overwhelmingly African American communities.

Were these communities also poor? Well they certainly weren't rich but I think a good argument could be made that they're mostly middle class communities. When you think of the types of jobs that middle class African Americans had access to over the last couple of decades, you think about nursing, education, and civil service bureaucracy. Well, after the storm, the major hospitals were kept closed, the entire public school teaching core was fired, and the civil service was cut in half.

Which community bore the brunt of those moves? Was it 50/50?

No. It was overwhelmingly the African American community of New Orleans that had to eat these damages.

And when you look at where the city is today, which neighborhoods are struggling the most and why?

Now that same commenter made a few more additional points that were more salient but I couldn't really read them to be honest. When someone denies the racial injustice of the storm and of rebuilding policy, listening further becomes difficult and meaningful conversation becomes almost impossible.

White New Orleanians simply cannot remain in denial about the racism in their midst if they hope to form positive coalitions for change with their African American neighbors.

That said, the same commenter went on to add significant nuance to his personal views after a regular anonymous commenter flagged them.

That same anonymous commenter chimes in often here at WCBF and I think generally makes too many flippant toxic points that conflate all white criticism of municipal corruption with every single racist policy ever created in the city of New Orleans.

This is also a totally counterproductive stance to take, one that erodes efforts to create coalitions around the plentiful common ground that exists between black and white in New Orleans.

I talk a lot about this coalition and this common ground. I don't think these are things that I'm just daydreaming about or romanticizing. Rather, it's real.

When white people recognize, amplify, and work to reverse the racism that exists in our midst, their critiques of certain corrupt African American municipal politicians become more credible and less susceptible to insidious arguments that the accusers are just being racist.

But on the flip side, when others say that all white people are racist, that all white people are responsible for the green dot plan, and that white people shouldn't call out the Mayor and others for corrupt practices, well that's also a non-starter when it comes to meaningful discussion of what we need to do to move forward.

Certainly this city's dynamics are much too complicated for any general discussion of race to be 100% accurate but I was quite shocked by the negative reaction to that article. I don't think it's wrong or inaccurate at all when writing an overview piece about the dynamics of recovery to generally couch the dynamics in terms a concerted effort to re-engineer the racial dynamics of the city through rebuilding policy or lack thereof. The problem comes when every white New Orleanian is put on that bus when in reality certain aspects of the African American power structure were way more complicit in this indecent recovery policy than some powerless white waitress or bartender.

Meanwhile, you have an article... and I know it was quite fluffy... but you have an article about a guy, James Perry, who has fought real institutionalized racism in recovery policy across the entire region, AND who has called out African American politicians for insidious defensive use of the race card to deflect from serious allegations of corruption, and all people did was complain.

That's flippin' pathetic. It ruined my weekend.

So I hope I was able to synthesize these thoughts in a manner that was reasonably civil. I really didn't feel like being polite.

Ugh, Stacy, Stop it.

Stop doing things like this.

Following the lead of some nearby parishes, the New Orleans City Council voted Thursday to continue using 2006 advisory base flood elevation maps to determine minimum construction elevations in Orleans Parish until at least 2011.

The vote was 5-0, but Councilwoman Stacy Head used the occasion to denounce eastern New Orleans and Lower 9th Ward "activists" who refuse to look at the good of the city as a whole and insist on special treatment for their heavily storm-damaged neighborhoods, she said.

--

She then compared her willingness to "do the right thing" with what she depicted as the selfishness of "activists" in eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward. She said they demand preferential treatment for their parts of the city as "a perceived right" because those areas suffered heavily after Hurricane Katrina, even though many other parts of the city also were flooded and badly damaged.

Head did not include any council members in her criticism, but Councilwomen Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represent the areas to which Head referred, have in the past complained that their districts have been treated unfairly in the distribution of post-Katrina aid.

Totally inflammatory and 100% unnecessary.

Guess what? Eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward DO deserve preferential treatment. They do! They do! They totally do!

I don't want to have to go into a long rant about privilege and victimization before, during, and after Katrina right now. I really don't. I hope that my position has been consistently clear.

But even if you've never understood it or still don't buy it, you have to recognize how out-of-touch or intentionally mean-spirited this kind of language is.

The words and tone are explicitly evocative of Reagan-era Republican arguments against helping inner cities and emblematic of why Stacy Head has become such a magnet for criticism from the African American community. "Activist" and "perceived right" are especially insulting code words when used in this context.

I would have thought someone as sharp as Stacy Head would have picked up on this by now.

It's infuriating.

And of all the times for Cynthia Willard-Lewis to hold her tongue...

James Perry, Leader?

I wanted to say something last week about Council's failure to override Mayor Nagin's veto last week but got caught up in Mardi Gras.

First off, there's been a lot of unfair criticism of Cynthia Hedge-Morrell's decision to abstain from voting. I think she made the right decision. She angered a lot of people by articulating people's mistrust for the good government crowd but I thought it would have been extremely useful as a starting point for negotiating a consensus response from Council to Nagin's executive order.

Part of the reaction derives from people's misunderstanding of what that vote meant. Hedge-Morrell did not kill a transparency law. The proposed ordinance, passed unanimously by Council and vetoed by Nagin would have brought professional services contract advisory committees under the purview of public meetings laws. Nagin circumvented the ordinance entirely by simply abolishing the advisory committees. So when the vetoed ordinance came back to Council for a potential override vote, it was totally worthless.

In my opinion, there was no reason to hold the vote. Hedge-Morrell suggested at City Hall that Council instead focus on discussing the language of a potential charter change - the only means Council has at its disposal to substantively alter the impact of Nagin's executive order. But instead, Fielkow and Clarkson pressed ahead with the vote, posing an unfair political challenge to Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell, who was the only African American willing to sit in on the meeting.

While I don't understand why Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis had to be in Washington D.C. with the US Conference of Mayors instead of at Council for this debate, at least she has an excused absence.

The person to be disillusioned and angry with is Councilman James Carter. He was at Council chambers when the contentious debate began, only to slink out when things got too hot. It was unforgivable gutlessness. He could have provided a level-head and helped foster a respectful conversation. Instead, Councilman Carter headed for the hills. I believe the best excuse his office mustered to the media was a "previously scheduled appointment" or some nonsense like that.

The disdain he seems to have for his own responsibility is increasingly noticeable and unfortunate. He's a coward.

As soon as Carter abandoned ship, the vote should have been postponed.

-

Meanwhile, in a stunning juxtaposition....

What is all this?

Am I really seeing a New Orleans political figure synthesizing viewpoints to take a stand in the midst of a fiery controversy? Huh?

Go read what James Perry says in Race and Trust in NOLA:

To build trust we need to have information from disinterested sources. We need information that provides clear unbiased data that we can rely on.

In New Orleans there is strong racial mistrust and general mistrust of our elected officials. We can use honesty and transparency to overcome that distrust and create a new basis for working together. Information and data, are key components in building this new trust. When objective data is unavailable, regardless of what the truth is, people revert to historic racial dividing lines. In today’s information age, there is a new opportunity. We can share all data and information and build relationships in much the way that friends do.

In working towards a post-racial New Orleans, sharing data is key. If we all have the common goal of a better City then there is no harm in making information available to everyone. Decisions about contracts should be open, inclusive, and transparent. Transparency and openness provide a base allowing trust to endure even through disagreement and bad reasoning. We need transparency in New Orleans government now. The progress of New Orleans’ racial dialogue depends on it.

This is an interesting way to construct the argument in favor of transparency since a lot of folks have been saying that the whole reason we can't have common sense public meetings and records laws is because of racial mistrust.

-

Certainly the issues last week were extremely frustrating but I'm at least glad that when things finally broke down last Thursday, there was some frank talk (in Council and online) about the racial tension that too often manifests in blood pressure doubling passive aggressiveness.

James Carter's cowardly display was not what we needed. Arnie Fielkow's poorly contrived attempt to symbolically rebuke Mayor Ray Nagin was not what needed.

What we need is leadership that isn't afraid to substantively and publicly tackle the political and racial controversies that hamstring our recovery.

Nossiter!

The Gamblog has just pointed out that the New York Times has been especially attentive to New Orleans over the past few days. Kevin Allman links this article by Adam Nossiter about day laborers as victims of crime.

I'm glad he did because the article sucks. I see it as an example of Mr. Nossiter's often incendiary and anecdotal perspective on race in New Orleans.

But on the street, these laborers are known as “walking A.T.M.’s.”

Their pockets stuffed with bills, the laborers are vulnerable because of language problems and their status as illegal immigrants. And as Hispanics have become the prey of choice in crumbling neighborhoods here in one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, racial friction between the newcomers and longtime black residents has moved close to the surface.

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Many bluntly assigned a racial component, saying that it was “los morenos” — their colloquial term for blacks — who were after them. “When we are leaving here after work, we have to go on foot,” Mr. Billado said, speaking through an interpreter. “The blacks are waiting for us. They’ll beat you up. They’ll take your money.”

I don't want to dismiss the tragedy that is the victimization of hardworking New Orleans residents and the plight of undocumented workers in general. Nor do I want to dismiss the notion that there is tension between Latino and African American communities.

But Nossiter seems to cherry-pick quotes and structures his narrative to suit the needs of a predetermined meme - that racial tension has resulted in African Americans preying upon Hispanics.

The anecdotal quotes from victims of crime are given the lede but the causal factors - the high rate of crime generally, African American joblessness and underemployment, the overall vulnerability of undocumented workers, and the fact that African Americans are so often victims of crime themselves - are buried on page 2 or left out entirely.

Furthermore, this article could have been written at any point over the last three years and the issue of the vulnerability of immigrant laborers to robbery in New Orleans has been covered by local and national media.

Nossiter does not break a new item anywhere in the article so I question the choice of subject.

If he wanted to take the pulse of the city, he might want to examine the backlash bubbling up against the NOPD that has been separately emanating from black, white, and brown quarters.

He includes a line about this:

The police, the men said, either ignore their calls, admonish them for being in the country illegally or arrive too late at a crime scene to do any good.

But what could have been useful in another context becomes a throwaway within this article in particular.

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Did anybody else get a little queasy reading this Nossiter piece? Or am I being a cherry-picker too?

Politics, Race, Class, and Building Permits Collide in New Orleans East

Yesterday, State Rep. and current Mayoral candidate Austin Badon, State Senator Ann Duplessis, and State Rep. and erstwhile candidate for Congress Cedric Richmond held a press conference to blast Mayor Nagin's decision to halt the issuance of all building permits in New Orleans East for 30 days or more.

Within hours, the City of New Orleans reversed its policy and agreed to once again issue permits.

Very interesting stuff, since the City of New Orleans had originally adopted the policy to halt building permits in the East as a result of a law put in place by those very same group of legislators, with support from Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis.

It all stems from the controversial Levy Gardens project under construction directly adjacent to the wealthy enclave of Eastover. Levy Gardens is controversial because it is a multifamily, mixed-income development, which means that there will be low income residents directly right next to an exclusive golf course community.

It lead to the establishment of the Eastern New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission and the passage of a state law last year by Duplessis, Richmond, and Badon that gave that commission the power of review for before the city can building permits in the area.

It's a fascinating controversy on many levels. For one, there is the city's acute affordable housing crisis and its impact on poor and minority communities:

James Perry, head of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, said Duplessis is missing the point. The Fair Housing Act covers a policy's impact, not its intent, and blocking multifamily housing disproportionately hurts minorities, he said.

Perry also doesn't buy the argument that multifamily housing causes concentrations of poverty. He said apartment complexes thrived in the east until the local economy, once humming on NASA and oil industry jobs, tanked.

"The role of community leaders has to be to show we're open for business and say, 'If you come here with your business, we have enough rental housing for your employees, ' " he said. "But for now, it's been that New Orleans East is open if you bring homeownership, and that says, 'Don't come here, don't come here, don't come here.' "

But the intersection of race and class doesn't break down into the too-typical poor blacks v. rich whites paradigm. Residents of Eastover, the aforementioned cooperative between Richmond, Badon, Willard-Lewis, and Duplessis, and the Eastern New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Committee are primarily black but also primarily wealthy. The developers of the Levy Gardens are white and wealthy but the future residents would likely be poor and black.

The other element is planning policy. Aren't residents supposed to have some say over the types of developments built under the zoning master plan being put together by Goody Clancy? Does the fact that building permits for Levy Gardens had already been issued prior to the zoning master plan ordinance make moot the right to review being asserted by Eastover residents?

The whole thing seems wrought with double standards on all sides. How do we solve the city's affordable housing crisis without building affordable housing units? What what are the different development restrictions on multifamily construction in places like Uptown and the French Quarter? With so much hurricane damage in the East, shouldn't all residential construction be welcome? Hasn't New Orleans East been the slowest neighborhood to recover population? Plus how do you handicap the politics of the situation? Badon, Richmond, Willard-Lewis, and James Perry are running for higher office or were running for higher office as this controversy has unfolded.

A lot to consider, no?

Bad Politics By French Quarter Chotchky Elite

Unless you've been living under a soundproof rock, you know that this city's been gripped by a particularly nasty wave of violent crime since the New Year and citizens across New Orleans are fed up.

Of course people are fed up with the actions of violent criminals but what makes the reaction to this crime wave different is the overwhelming frustration with the NOPD itself.

This frustration is felt in black neighborhoods, white neighborhoods, uptown neighborhoods, and downtown neighborhoods. People do not trust the police. People do not respect the police. Too many officers have been arrested for crimes themselves. There are too many documented and anecdotal stories of indifference and laziness, brutality and violence on the part of the NOPD. Too many caught criminals have been released because NOPD officers don't file police reports properly or on time. Statistically speaking, if you murder somebody tomorrow in Orleans Parish, there's only a 20-30% chance you'll ever fact legitimate punitive jail time. And so on and so forth...

Again:

[E]xperts have already identified many of the major issues facing the NOPD. The NOPD itself ordered an audit by BGI in 2007. But after BGI identified several systemic failures and prescribed a blueprint toward the superior community policing model, the NOPD suppressed the report for months. To this day, Warren Riley has failed to substantively institute the suggested reforms.

Wendy Byrne's murder in the French Quarter was certainly a flash point. But so were the murders of little Ja'Shawn Powell and Adolph Grimes. It's the compounded frustration of so many instances of violence touching so many of our lives that I think compelled so many people to participate in some of the organic anti-crime activities of the last week.

But piggybacking on some of those efforts was today's so-called "Meeting of the Minds." They called a big press conference in the Royal Omni Hotel to call attention to a petition they circulated that calls for a number of both totally reasonable and extraordinary measures to address crime in the French Quarter and Marigny Triangle. Here is the list of signatories:

• Chuck Ransdell, chair, Meeting of the Minds
• Eric Reitman, president, French Quarter Business Association
• CoCo Paddison, president, French Quarter Citizens
• Jude Marullo, president, Bourbon Street Merchants Association
• Chris Costello, president, Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association
• Lori Herbert, vice-chair, North Rampart Main Street
• Samara Poché, president, Lower Quarter Crime Watch
• Ken Ferdinand, executive director, French Market Corporation
• Darryl Berger, senior chair, French Quarter-Marigny Historic Area Management District
• Mike Moffit, president, Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates
• Christine Sory, president, French Quarter Business Women’s Network
• Beth Lovett, representative, Upper Quarter Neighborhood Watch
• Stephen Swain, president, Patio Planters
• Jason Patterson, chair, Frenchmen Street Coalition

Anybody missing from that petition?

Yes. The entire rest of the city.

By discussing the crime problem as something specific to the French Quarter and the Marigny, these organizations are demonstrating a callousness to the much more frequent violence occurring in every other neighborhood.

It allowed Superintendent Riley to couch his response in these terms (video available):

"We understand the value of the Quarter to the city, but we also understand the value of every community."
--
"This is one New Orleans,” he said. “We are not gonna pull other resources from other parts of the city, to put into the Quarter, when we feel we have a sufficient force there at this point."

That argument is going to win every time.

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In a similar vein, the Mayor has challenged the same business community by backing off a prior compromise agreement with City Council to fund full sanitation services. Council is livid because the Mayor seemingly sprung this upon them without any kind of warning. They're threatening legal action to compel the Mayor to continue FQ sanitation services. After it seemed like a compromise was already in place, why would the Mayor all of sudden threaten to pull the rug out from under the French Quarter by cutting sanitation right before the busiest season of the year?

It's a proxy war, I tells ya.

It's another opportunity to force French Quarter business owners to demand extra services, money, and attention denied to the rest of the city's residents.

It forces the FQ business community to engage in two geographically-specific battles against the administration at once.

Good divide-and-conquer strategy by the Nagin administration.

Predictably bad strategy of exclusion by various French Quarter business associations.

RNC: Rock Bottom Coming Any Day Now

For whatever reason, I've been following the race for the new Chairman of the RNC especially closely. Many bloggers have found that little campaign to be an exercise in unintentional comedy - and I'd have to agree - but I think it also happens to be fascinatingly microcosmic of the GOP's larger need to reorient given the new political environment.

I was almost certain after the election that Michael Steele, the African American former Lt. Governor of Maryland, was a sure thing. I felt this way because the Republican brand had become such poison to the minds of... well pretty much everyone outside of Southern White Men.

I figured, because it was statistically evident, that Republicans would realize that they couldn't continue to hemorrhage Latinos, white Catholics, and suburbanites from their caucus. I imagined that, if only out of the need for self-preservation, that RNC voters would elect someone that could help reinvent the GOP as a legitimate national party.

Steele, in addition to being a token minority in the GOP, also happens to be pretty smart and charismatic. He's also from a 'northern' state, one with a huge suburban population that has become non competitive for the GOP.

Given the leadership vacuum in today's GOP, Steele seemed like a sensible choice, one that would have mirrored (image-wise, to become a national party) what the DNC did (substance-wise, to become a national party) under Howard Dean after Kerry's loss in 2004.

After Gingrich opted out of the RNC race to sort of? back Steele, I figured Steele's chances had only improved. Gingrich is a huge mark for Bobby Jindal and it seemed intuitive that RNCers would start orienting themselves to take advantage of some of their younger rising stars.

But that's not what has happened at all...

Nobody's getting whipped into line for this. In fact, the race has seemed to grow more fractious over time.

On one end you have nonmember candidates like Steele and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. On the other you have several current or former heads of state party organizations including Saul Anuzis (Michigan), Katon Dawson (South Carolina), Mike Duncan (Bush's appointment, formerly head of the Kentucky GOP), and Chip Saltsman (Tennessee).

This Perry Bacon Jr. article in the Washington Post indicates that RNC voters are reluctant to vote in a nonmember. It also says that Chip Saltsman's 'Barack the Magic Negro' giftbag has effectively killed his chances, contrary to reports of a reactionary boomlet in favor of his candidacy after news of the giftbag leaked. That leaves Azunis, Duncan, and Dawson. (Never mind that Dawson has struggled to explain his long-standing membership in an all-white country club. Guess it hasn't been as big a media-issue as the Saltsman CD)

How interesting it is that so many RNC voters have decided to disqualify the two African American candidates. The rationale for Steele I stated above. Blackwell, for his part, recently racked up the endorsements of many of the major influentials of the conservative movement including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Toomey, Phyllis Schlafly, etc.

But none of that seems to matter since RNC voters have decided to discriminate against nonmember candidates, regardless of qualifications, conservative credentials, potential effectiveness...

Why do you think that is?

Giggle away.

Sad Story, Subtle Headlines, Misunderstandings

Mychal Bell is a troubled soul, I wish him a speedy recovery from his wounds and whatever peace he needs to grow as a man.

The nola.com headlines the AP article as such:

Convicted 'Jena 6' defendant Mychal Bell shoots himself

CNN went with something slightly different:

'Jena 6' figure shoots himself

I think it's fair to say from my quick googling of the event that the only new outlet to insert the word "convicted" into the title of that story was the Times-Picayune. I think it's important to notice these kinds of things.

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Last night I was watching the Utah Jazz demolish my poor Philadelphia 76ers. Toward the end of the 4th quarter, with the outcome of the game already decided, Reggie Evans of the Sixers was called for a technical foul, the NBA equivalent of a yellow card in Soccer.

Reggie Evans is a big, bald, bearded, black guy that has developed a reputation for hard play, earning his paychecks by fighting on the offensive and defensive glass. Evans is gregarious on the court but also something of an enforcer for his team when necessary. He's kind of a goon, but a fairly well-respected goon.

Anyway, as the game slipped away from the Sixers, Evans was given some minutes off the bench. I forget exactly what transpired, but a Sixers offensive possession was cut short when Evans fouled Kyle Korver of the Jazz during a scuffle for a loose ball. Korver is an Ashton Kutcher look alike - a white boy next door - and a former 76er. Korver and Evans were teammates last season for a two month stretch before Korver was traded.

Evans, laughing at himself a little bit for losing a loose ball to the smaller Korver, said something crude to his former teammate and slapped him on the butt as they were both running back down court.

The white referee saw that and immediately called a technical foul against Evans.

Look, I found video:



Not included in that video is another interaction between Korver and Evans that occurred shortly thereafter in which Evans went over and shook Korver's hand just to make sure that he hadn't also misinterpreted the friendly gesture.

The local Sixers TV analysts, with very little to talk about in the blowout, later highlighted the penalty against Evans as the "call of the game." Again, the event was of little consequence. I'm sure the referee would admit that there had just been a misunderstanding and he had missed the call.

But I tend to notice this kind of thing.

Harry Shearer Gets It Wrong

I generally like Harry Shearer but his response to A. C. Thompson's article in the Nation profiling the racist killings on Algiers Point during Katrina is way off track.

It is not how I want to face the nation.

I actually had a number of concerns about A.C. Thompson's writing style and the lack of context too. I also lamented the lack of national progressive attention to issues like the closure of Charity Hospital.

But the facts were there for all to see. Maybe you've seen this despicable video by now:





Harry Shearer read that article and watched that video and started his response acknowledging that the actual crux of Thompson's article - the part about the supremacist white mobs hunting down unarmed black men during Katrina, bragging about it on tape, and the NOPD letting it slide - is solid journalism.

Then he proceeds to rip Thompson apart for "lies" related to basically off-topic factual infractions. For instance, Shearer complains that Thompson said Katrina "crashed" into New Orleans when it is technically true that it was the undermining of the poorly constructed Federal levee system that truly precipitated our tragedy. He implies that the article was written as part of some mainstream media refusal to investigate the levee failures.

Maybe so, but way way off-topic.

In downplaying the racial tensions that exist here, he suggests that Thompson's article - about the city ceding authority to a modern day lynch mob, their failing to investigate the murders they committed, and the free murderers basically confessing on tape that they went out and shot black people for sport, all chased down over 18 months - was published by the Nation because the publication had "contented itself with a crime story."

Certainly, Thompson's article included some unhelpful and inflammatory rhetorical embellishments. It also boasts some pretty gaping context gaps. But let's be real.

This disgusting event happened in our city. The tragedy of Katrina touched people of all backgrounds. But let's not pretend for one second that African Americans weren't treated "special." I'm not just talking about the indifference of Bush and Brownie because state and city officials also played their respective parts. So did some of our police and so did some of our citizens.

Shearer's pride in anecdotal "casual, easy, frequent interactions" with black neighbors just isn't evidence that this city doesn't have gravely serious racial tensions to work through. I'd point to statistics that discuss which community is disproportionately victimized by things like, I dunno, the criminal justice system, the public education system, neighborhood recovery policy, public health policy, post Katrina economic development policy, and affordable housing policy.

Progressive New Orleanians are working to form diverse coalitions around those actual policy matters. When African American victims of supremacist crimes cannot get the NOPD to investigate, there is a huge problem, one very indicative of the many forms of institutionalized racism that progressive New Orleanians must work to eradicate.

Shearer has worked hard as an advocate for New Orleans and for the need for a massive federal infrastructure intervention. His point has always been that America needs to step up and take responsibility for the 2005 flood.

And he's right.

But New Orleanians need to step up themselves and take responsibility for local institutionalized racism. Mr. Shearer could have made all the points that he did without totally brushing aside the matter at hand. Our African American neighbors are hurt by this. We shouldn't ignore that just because Thompson said 'race war' without offering a nuanced differentiation of liberal whites and the supremacist vigilante terrorists that appear in the video.

We can draw that contrast pretty sharply ourselves by condemning these acts and demanding a full criminal investigation.

Shearer should have used his national forum to do that first and foremost. His larger mission to hold the Federal government accountable would not be undermined, it would be that much more credible.

Katrina, the Left, and New Orleans Today

This article from the Nation is a painful read for a variety of reasons.

The investigation by A.C. Thompson details white vigilantism at Algiers Point during the immediate aftermath of Katrina. A group of white neighbors formed a militia to keep Algiers safe, which for them meant terrorizing African Americans, murdering them, shooting them in the back without any justification beyond what might be charitably described as a sick cowardly prejudice.

Thompson was able to interview some of the racist citizens who took up arms against victims of the floods. They express no remorse, instead glorifying themselves as protectors.

It makes your skin crawl.

Color of Change is pushing this petition, which calls on Governor Jindal, State Attorney General Caldwell, and the Justice Department to investigate racist vigilante shootings.

I have signed it and I recommend that you do too.

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Yet on another level, I hate how the piece was written and am disheartened by Color of Change's call.

A little weird, I know, but let me try to explain.

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One of the things I thought the article lacked was a complete context. Dambala gets at some of this in his reaction to Mr. Thompson's work. There's something gratuitous about the use of the phrase 'race war' in reference to what happened on Algiers point. Maybe I'm the one overgeneralizing a little bit here but my sense is that only a certain "type" of white guy chooses not to evacuate during a huge hurricane threat but instead to stick around with a gun collection. "Choose" being an extremely operative word that provides a not so insignificant contrast to the majority of people with basic means that chose to evacuate and to the masses of poor black people without those basic means that had no choice but to stay.

But maybe it's parsing to get all bent out of shape over the use of that phrase. We're a little bit sensitive to it I think because 'war' implies a certain ubiquity, implies that everyone was involved and that everyone chose a side. It totally oversimplifies the issue of race, but particularly so for the city of New Orleans, which has a complex history of racial tribalism that is not as simple as black vs. white. I think that I would have gone with "Katrina's unrepentant supremacist terrorists" instead of "Katrina's hidden race war," but that's just me.

The much more consequential whiff, on Thompson's part, was the failure to contextualize these vigilante killings as a part of a chaotic whole. He pays only lip service to the reality that there were scores upon scores of murders and rumored murders on the East Bank during Katrina. He couches the NOPD's failure to keep records during the storm or to disclose public records to him as specific to his investigation of the shootings on Algiers Point.

We know that there were grizzly acts of violence committed throughout the city during that time, by citizens, by the NOPD, by black people, by white people, by Ray Nagin, by Kathleen Blanco, by Michael Brown, by the Army Corps of Engineers, and by President Bush. Thompson cherry-picks a specific incident and doesn't do nearly enough to place it into the context of what was a much larger event. He boils down the entire injustice that was Katrina and the Federal Flood AND decades of systematizing racism via the criminal justice system into a digestible 'nobody is investigating these rednecks!'

But I don't want to just blame A.C. Thompson.

Color of Change should consider its reaction to this story.

They call on us to get to force "Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the racist shootings, and to demand accountability from Louisiana's dysfunctional criminal justice system."

Certainly, it's a noble thing to ask for, but at the same time, it's also short-sighted and maybe even a little bit selfish.

Even if Bobby Jindal were to call on an investigation and supposing that NOPD was able to piece together charges based on records they never kept and evidence they don't have, would it really be credible enough in a court of law to yield a conviction? What kind of healing would that bring for the victims? What about all the other horror stories from those days? Are we investigating all of them? Are criminal convictions possible for any of them?

What we need is an independent federal investigation into all of it: All of the vigilante killings, all of NOPD's desertions, all of Nagin's mistakes, all of Brownie's incompetence, all of Bush's neglect, and the Army Corps of Engineers for the failure of the federal levee systems. We need the truth and we need accountability, but what we really need is healing. Color of Change's call, even if it succeeds in precipitating an investigation into what happened in Algiers, is just as likely to salt our civic wounds as it is to sanitize them.

We needed it starting in late 2005 and we still need it today. Color of Change isn't going nearly far enough. They're flailing in Bobby Jindal's direction in reaction to the Thompson piece instead of actually putting forth a proposal that might help usher New Orleanians toward some sort of closure.

But again, I don't just want to call out Thompson and Color of Change. This instance is emblematic of the larger role that Katrina and New Orleans play in national political discourse.

For the nation, the federal response Katrina signalled a final deathblow to President Bush and conservative governing philosophy. Polls demonstrate that the public pretty much turned on the GOP for good as a result of the Katrina saga. The PR battle that took place between the parties was one in which the Right blamed Nagin and the natives for their lack of "personal responsibility," while the Left (and the vast vast majority of the country) blamed Bush and his henchmen for their inexplicable and inexcusable inability to respond to an entirely predictable catastrophe in a major American city.

Since then, national analysis of New Orleans is through these lenses, not just the lens of 'Katrina' but the lenses of were was the immediate partisan reactions to Katrina.

The Left, during Katrina, was justifiably incensed over the way that African Americans were labeled "looters" while whites just looking for food. That's why it is unsurprising to see the lions of the liberal netroots (HuffPo, Think Progress, Color of Change) seize upon this story - it scores points in that old front against racist right wing media portrayal.

Katrina is an eternally smoldering political fire, that actual people live here New Orleans is an abstraction that most don't, can't, and won't think about in the midst of the constant drone of the 24 hour news cycle. That the story of New Orleans continues, that it takes on new twists and turns, that its existence continues to be tenuously propped up on a three-legged stool of racism, corruption, and incompetence seems lost on much of the progressive netroots, on thinkers who I respect greatly and read every day.

The most frustrating thing to me is that the progressive netroots really can be of great assistance in this city, without really sacrificing the opportunity to score those political points.

It's great that Color of Change is pushing Bobby Jindal to investigate these vigilante shootings and I'm sure they'd also support a real truth commission for Katrina, but neither option is particularly viable in the short, medium, or long terms unless we start changing course at the municipal level.

What we really could use at this moment is help forcing the reopening of Charity Hospital and help preventing the needless demolition the historic black neighborhood of Lower Mid City. That fight is right now. It has real tangible consequences for the African American community, it speaks to national progressive issues, and Bobby Jindal is an obstacle.

For Color of Change and other progressive/netroots orgs, it's a battle they ought to be itching to join.

Save Lower Mid City, Reopen Charity

It's real in our lives right now.

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*One of the biggest reasons national progressive advocacy organizations seem to be so ignorant as to the situation here is that local bloggers, myself very very much included, do a horrendous job of communicating to an audience that isn't totally ensconsed in the daily municipal minutia. We can definitely do a better job summarizing things more regularly for a national audience in a way that imparts the critical concepts without oversaturating names and locations. To that end, I'm crossposting this at Kos.

This Day In City Politics

Today I put on my Wednesday best and went to City Hall for the budget vote and then to check out the Committee to Reopen Charity's protest of LSU.

And I took notes.

City Hall buzzed more than usual. Somehow this was the first time I'd ever made in time to see the official opening credits. Here's what I wrote down shortly after it was appropriate to sit:

Did you know that every city council meeting begins the same way?
First is an exceedingly long prayer. This made me uncomfortable.
Then is the pledge of allegiance.
Then is an extremely poorly produced video of the star spangled banner with all sorts of images of New Orleans – Pre Katrina. It’s weird and it’s a waste of time.

Normally I'm okay with Christian prayer, even when the venue is somewhat inappropriate in a secular society. (I'm an agnostic Jew) I think that a lot of times, those that care about the separation of church and state pick poor battles by going after things like the ten commandments on courthouse walls, etc. This prayer before the start of this Council meeting felt pretty wrong. Generally, it's not a matter that I get worked up about, especially considering the other types of things that get decided sometimes at Council. Today however, it certainly foreshadowed my discomfort with the entirety of the proceedings.

The stupid New Orleans chamber of commerce Star-Spangled Banner public access video is unintentional comedy and is especially redundant after the pledge. I'll stand by that.

Okay so taking stock of the attendees...

Lots of employees wearing SDT Disposal apparel. Trashanova himself wore a suit and sat front and center, right in the middle of all his guys. Smart.

We also have a whole mess of protesters. They’re not here to push for the reopening of Charity, they’re here to rabble rouse against Councilwoman Stacy Head.

They have lots of signs.

“Recall Stacy Head”

A lot of these protesters are here representing the local chapter of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

More on them later.

Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, as chair of the budget committee, is in charge of the talkings once Jackie Clarkson finishes testing the vote buttons. I don’t know what it is, but I really like the way Cynthia Hedge-Morrell conducts herself from her budget seat, on a personal level. She carries herself with a certain sarcastic dignity, like she hates her job but doesn't want anyone to know. She somehow always emerges from these food fights with less mashed potatoes on her clothes than everyone else.

They will be voting to override the Mayor’s veto, with some changes. Twenty-Five percent of the sanitation budget will be placed in reserve, pending the “audit.” Also, Council recommends that the Mayor make no service cuts once that money is released from reserve. As the Mayor, Ray Nagin has the power still choose not to execute parts of the sanitation contracts. So the lemon chemical spray will continue to be part of our lives.

Before we get to the vote, Cynthia Willard-Lewis is given the opportunity to grandstand for awhile because she has decided to buck her colleagues and vote to sustain the Mayor's veto. I've said it recently in this space but I'll say it again right now, Cynthia Willard-Lewis is Mayor Nagin's staunchest ally and most reliable vote on City Council.

It is important not to gloss over Councilwoman Willard-Lewis' speech because I thought it was quite revealing. The entire thing was a lie. I wish I had a transcript for you but allow me to relay a few of the key points she was making.

- There are a lot of people out there that question why resources are going into the city's most devastated neighborhoods, like the ones in her district. These discussions are "fallacious" because these areas are returning and she'd like to symbolically put an end to those "fallacious" discussions today.

- She is voting against Council because she wants to vote for a budget that has "humanity" in it as well.

- Throws in the prerequisite dig at Stacy Head with a comment about the sanitation contracts: "Some people say we paid for a Cadillac. Well we asked for a Cadillac."

Then the rest of City Council voted to override the Mayor's veto, cancelling the spending cuts Mr. Nagin had proposed across the board.

Each was allowed to say a few words. A lot of high fives over funding for the DA and for the office of the public defender. James Carter says this is the first time that Orleans Parish has ever funded the public defender. Is that true? That's sad if it's true. It's about time.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis then got another chance to grandstand, touching on many of the same themes. This may have been when she used the "humanity" term but the speeches were more or else the same.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis

I want to go into some detail here because I found her statements to be some of the most hypocritical I've ever heard delivered by an elected official in a public setting.

It's one thing if she's going to talk about the nefarious intentions of those still trying to backdoor a shrink the footprint campaign to raze her district, but she really just used the idea of that threat to create an unidentifiable other. She voted to sustain the Mayor's veto, so she was quite literally voting for the Mayor's budget that would have made major service cuts to her district. The other sad irony is that if Cynthia Willard-Lewis really cared about injecting "humanity" into the budget process, then she would have made an issue out of the proposed $79 million to be spent buying houses to raze in Lower Mid City instead of going toward the rebuilding and reopening of Charity Hospital. She has the power to question expenditures like $30 million for the Reinventing the Crescent project in the Marigny. She could have come out and opposed the school facilities master plan, which I argued shortchanged damaged neighborhoods. Instead, she voted for the Mayor's budget and his plans to strip the public defenders office and to strip after-school programs. She could have offered Councilwoman Midura some help in restoring the money needed to pay to fix bad street lights. She did not. She instead voted for the Mayor's service-cutting budget and gave a speech about how she was this great champion for social justice. It was an insult to anyone that pays attention to anything in this city. Cynthia Willard-Lewis is a toady for the Nagin administration and it is Nagin administration policy to shrink the footprint by contracting out master planning services to firms that work to implement artificial measures of neighborhood "viability" as the primary means of determining who gets rebuild money and who gets nothing. Cynthia Willard-Lewis is no champion of social justice and her speech of lies today made her look more like a scam artist than a public official.

Sorry for the rant but that speech made me so angry.

Anyway, then Cynthia Hedge-Morrell explained how awful this whole budget process is, how rushed and inefficient it is. Word. It's totally disorganized.

She promises to get with Mr. Cerasoli to work on ways to improve the process.

Then it was time for public comment and Spiver Gordon of the SCLC was permitted to speak first.

The SCLC was once a great organization at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the South. Dr. Martin Luther King founded it.

Some things have changed but SCLC's membership has not. The organization has not been dynamic, has not recruited a new leadership class, and has not been fully engaged on the issues where other AA political insurgent organizations are leading.

This can happen with movement organizations sometimes. After a series of initial successes, some organizations lose focus or are unable to shift to respond to changes in political opportunity structures. As organizations earn victories, they are unable to reframe their purpose in a way that effectively maintains rank and file mobilization. Or, they are co-opted into establishment structures.

I'd argue that this occurred to the labor movement as unions appeared to become more concerned with the maintaining bureaucratic norms they were able to win during years of boom (perhaps because they got to close to the leaders of the Democratic party) than with actually fighting for higher wages and better workplace protections. It is happening in the LGBT movement right now as grassroots activists are rebelling against the Human Rights Campaign for their narrow focus on organization building and 'acceptable' campaigns for reforms to hate crime laws.

The SCLC also succumbed to the bureaucratic temptation of many movement organizations before it and after it, they became establishment.

Spiver Gordon

I wrote about this extensively well over a year ago when I went to the Jena 6 protest and watched Spiver Gordon hog the microphone while the much younger crowd rolled their eyes. I wrote about them again last year when Spiver Gordon threatened to boycott the city of New Orleans for investigating the sanitation contracts. Oyster wrote about SCLC then too, noting that the organization that once mobilized 42,000 people to march in Selma now only has 3,000 dues paying members worldwide. He highlighted a sad quote from former SCLC President Fred Shuttlesworth as he lamented a disastrous meeting in 2004 shortly before his resignation:

For years, deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten away at the core of this once-hallowed organization.

And here was Spiver Gordon once again in front of City Council railing against Stacy Head because Councilwoman Head has this history of rudeness when it comes to interacting with some African American preachers.

Reverand Dr. Marshall Truehill, who is someone I respect a great deal, explained Stacy Head's conduct in the context of her policies, by highlighting the kissing incident that occurred at that unfortunate Council vote that sealed the fate of the city's public housing developments.

Reverend Truehill has the credibility to speak out against Stacy Head because he was there outside of City Council last year and fought for the rights of the city's poor public housing residents every step of the way.

But Spiver Gordon and SCLC were not there last year. They mobilized to protect Jimmie Woods and Alvin Richard but they are too often MIA when it comes to issues that really matter to young black people in the city of New Orleans.

--

So I got up and walked over to the protest being conducted by the Committee to Save Charity Hospital. These guys are doing something that's really important. The failure to reopen Charity remains a scourge on this city's reputation. It's absence has contributed to the public health nightmare that is Southern Louisiana. Poor black people have relied on Charity for decades but our state and municipal leadership would rather raze a residential neighborhood to build two private hospitals than to even entertain the idea of rehabilitating Charity.

There were about thirty people there to picket an LSU administrative building. They had signs and slogans but the thing they had more than anything else was an issue of critical importance. I don't know if I can say I was empowered by the turnout, I thought the protest should have been at City Hall, but it's easy to second-guess. Certainly, there is a core there but it will be important for mobilizations to get bigger and louder if mobilization is indeed critical to blocking the plans.

Renew - Restore - Reopen Charity Hospital

Spiver Gordon and the SCLC didn't turn up here, I'm sorry to say. Could've used 'em.

--

There were several ironic juxtapositions to think about as I walked back to my car. They were all disheartening to a certain degree.

More on Jefferson-Cao

From Dr. Lance Hill, before the results came in:

So will race continue to play a role in elections? New Orleans remains one of the most racially polarized cities in the United States. At the heart of the distrust is the fear that many blacks have that whites have not relented in their plans to demolish black neighborhoods under the banner of protecting residents or reducing government costs. Indeed, while the debate on reducing the “footprint” of the city at the expense of black neighborhoods has largely been put to rest, some white leaders continue to float proposals to selectively “greenspace” poor neighborhoods into parks or retention ponds but this time through zoning laws or withholding public services and utilities.

This kind of talk does little to inspire trust and promote voting across racial lines; history tells us that when people feel threatened, they tend to coalesce along racial lines and block-vote to enhance their power and defend their group interests. In a political climate of fear and mistrust, every election can potentially be transformed into a symbolic contest of power in which voters end up supporting candidates as a show of racial solidarity, despite the candidate’s flaws.

The long-term solution to New Orleans’ racial polarization is to put an end to the divisive proposals that pit one neighborhood against another and that make income the measure of who has a right to return. If we want to be free of the politics of fear, we need to eliminate the threats that breed fear.

It is a testament to Bill Jefferson's diminished pulpit, and perhaps also to Cao's origins in New Orleans East, that 'greenspacegate' wasn't a central issue in this election.