Coast Guard on Southern Scrap: Rest "Assured"

I'm not too familiar with Sheila Grisset of the Times-Picayune, in fact I'm not sure I've ever noticed anything she's written until today. Her article on a meeting between the local Coast Guard commander and the SE Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East was pretty atrocious. While still failing to provide any long view context as to who Southern Scrap is and the political history of it's recent ownership group, the article also fails to provide any real "news" from the Flood Authority's meeting with Coast Guard Captain Lincoln Stroh. Times-Picayune readers were subjected to a rote summary of what Mr. Stroh told "SELFPAE" (I guess?) and just a few choice quotes without any exploration as to whether or not the Coast Guard would be moving to hold Southern Scrap substantively accountable for their failure to secure their property floating in the Industrial Canal during Hurricane Gustav.

Instead we got lovely loose vessels such as these and are left to our own devices to provide the context:

"I am fully committed to you and the people of this area to help save and protect lives," Stroh told members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East.

You know Capt. Lincoln Stroh is on the defensive when he's caught publicly reminding people about his commitment to save lives.

And

"Nothing was going to float if Ike had continued on," he told them. Commissioners appealed to Stroh to take a hard line if any company violates his orders in the future.

Way to go SELFPAE (WCBF pronunciation: 'Self-pay'). Dear Coast Guard, next time Southern Scrap jeopardizes the very existence of the city of New Orleans, yell at them.

Wow. That's bad.

Anyway, the thing that jumped out to me beyond that lack of useful context in the article, because I suppose that there is a possibility that T-P editors gave Ms. Grisset a very restrictive length cap, was her repetitive phrasing.

Children, what did Captain Stroh do to the SELFPAE?

He "assured."

In fact, he, in Ms. Grisset's word, "assured" members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East three times within a very short article.

Eh, maybe I'm being hard on her. (Mirror check: my writing is horrendously wordy all of the time and just plain horrendous some of the time.)

I don't know about everybody else, but I don't want the Coast Guard's "assurance" that 'this won't happen again.' I want Southern Scrap to be punished. I want them out of the Industrial Canal entirely and I want the city and the Coast Guard to recoup monetary damages for actions necessitated by the vessels that Scrap officials failed to properly secure.

I don't think it would have compromised Ms Grisset's objectivity to press Captain Stroh and members of SELFPAE just a little bit about the possibility of actual penalties being levied against Southern Scrap.

But I never went to journalism school so what the hell do I know?

Southern Scrap: More Than Meets The Eye [updated]

According to the Coast Guard, all 70 of the vessels that broke loose in the Industrial Canal during Hurricane Gustav belonged to a company called Southern Scrap.

'Loose Ships Sink Levees'

The loose vessels produced some of Gustav's scariest moments as they careened around the waterway, with some crashing into an interior floodwall, a bridge and industrial warehouses. At least one barge knocked holes in a nonfederal floodwall -- one not responsible for protecting New Orleans residents -- and there were fears that the next big storm could unleash barges in an unprotected industrial area and sweep them across open parking lots toward a federal floodwall that protects the Upper 9th Ward.

The rest of the Times-Picayune article outlines Coast Guard suspicions that Southern Scrap may not have followed it's own mooring plan :

Capt. Lincoln Stroh, the Coast Guard's New Orleans sector commander, wrote in his order to Southern Scrap that the "company has not shown the ability to follow (its) Heavy Weather Protection Plan as hurricanes approach this Port."

But the Times-Picayune avoids providing critical context. People should know about Southern Scrap and it's history.

First, let's remember that Southern Scrap has a history of failure when it comes to securing it's Industrial Canal assets as storms approach. That link leads to a T-P story from just a few weeks that details a court ruling allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with a lawsuit against Southern Scrap dating back to an unsecured drydock that sunk during Hurricane Katrina. Two other companies are moving forward with their own suits against Southern Scrap because their barges were damaged attempting to navigate the drydock wreckage. Additionally, the Port of New Orleans is suing Southern Scrap for the damage done to the Florida Avenue Bridge.

After their failures during Hurricane Katrina, Southern Scrap was somehow given the latitude to implement their own plan to secure vessels on the canal for Gustav without any oversight. The ongoing lawsuits related to Katrina represent critical context that T-P readers were denied.


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But unfortunately that's not the only boat the T-P's been missing in its coverage of Southern Scrap.

As the paper does point out, Southern Scrap is a subsidiary of Southern Recycling which is a subsidiary of Southern Holdings. Or I should say it was a subsidiary of Southern Holdings.

Briefly, Southern Recycling (and largely, Southern Recycling and Southern Scrap can be discussed as one and the same), is one of the largest recyclers of scrap metal in the United States. It is a major force within that industry and gets a lot of fat contracts to help the government dispose of old ships.

Southern Recycling and the above umbrella Southern Holdings were founded by the extremely politically-connected Diefenthal family. Edward L. Diefenthal is one of the most active and loyal Republican donors in the South, having given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates all over the country. The Diefenthals are also amongst the cabal behind David Vitter's Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (see this link also), a PAC that funnels untold amounts of money to Republican campaigns. Edward L. Diefenthal is amongst Governor Bobby Jindal's biggest financial boosters, which may be why we're not hearing much from the Governor's mouth about the barges.

It must be pointed out that Diefenthal and Southern Holdings sold Southern Recycling/Scrap in 2006 to a European company for just over $160 million and in no way am I insinuating that Diefenthal himself should have tied the barges. However, it may be helpful to ask whether or not his political influence had anything to do with the lack of oversight awarded to his companies, particularly since ownership only changed hands very recently and since Diefenthal still lists himself as CEO of Southern Scrap in campaign donations from this year.

It is also helpful to remember that Diefenthal only sold off Southern Scrap/Recycling after it became abundantly clear, especially to the politically connected, that it would be impossible to preserve the 'Hurricane Highway,' the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, on which Southern Scrap relied to move big ships. That was after Diefenthal and other monopoly men dependent on MR-GO like shipping magnate Boysie Bollinger worked desperately to prevent or delay work on this critical security project on which the future of all of SE Louisiana depends. (Boysie Bollinger is another principal behind Vitter's LCRM and served on the BNOB commission, ensuring that MR-GO closure was not made a priority by that body's levees subcommittee)

Though the push to close MR-GO has been ongoing for decades, one wonders why even after the Katrina disaster so sinisterly exposed the risks of continuing to preserve the man made channel, it has still taken over three years to begin work. And at a relatively reasonable $25 million, it certainly wasn't the funding or the price tag that held things up. Of course that $25 million only pays for the plug and does not fill in the channel or restore the wetlands around it, but it's a critical first step that we should have taken years ago but did not because of the inordinate political influence of selfish millionaires like Bollinger and Diefenthal.

Now I think that's pretty critical context.




UPDATE: Loose Links and the Greater New Orleans Republicans

1. Mouthpiece background bio on Boysie Bollinger

2. Article detailing the parties for and against closure of MR-GO

Yet for several maritime companies along the Industrial Canal, including Bollinger Gulf Repairs, New Orleans Coal Storage and Lockheed Martin's Michoud plant, the MR-GO offers the sole outlet for ships too large for an alternative route through locks leading to the Mississippi River. If the MR-GO closes without an alternative route opening first, Bollinger Vice President Robert Socha said the repair dock's 300 jobs could go, too. "If one or the other isn't met, Bollinger Gulf Repair would probably cease to exist," he said.

And here's Congressman Jefferson really fighting for the people:

But St. Bernard Parish Councilman Craig Taffaro said his parish cannot wait that long.

"Congress needs to understand the people of St. Bernard lost everything, including loved ones, due to the negligence and lack of responsiveness by the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the maintenance of that structure," Taffaro said.

But the port has an ally in U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans. In a statement issued last week, Jefferson signaled his support for keeping MR-GO open until the locks are completed.

"I will continue working with the Port of New Orleans and other interested parties so that New Orleans does not lose valuable business at the port," the statement said. "In the interim, I will also seek funding for the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal lock, which will allow us to close MRGO to commercial traffic."

Jefferson spokeswoman Nicole Venable said the congressman also wanted a floodgate system such as Melancon described. But she warned "not to cut off the (Gulf Outlet) altogether in the face of irrational fears."

Nice to see Congressman Jefferson tending to his constituents - the Bolinger and Diefenthal families. Just look at Edward Diefenthal's campaign contributions from 2004 alone! He gave to the horrific Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and rained $15,000 on the Greater New Orleans Republicans Fund. (Anyone remember them?)

3. Here's a strike against Boysie Bollinger from Oyster's archives.

4. Here's a link to some work by Mike Davis. It's a long, well-researched article.

Here's a quick hit:

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardis Gras 'krewes' and social clubs, with the Krewe of Comus and the Boston and Louisiana clubs at the apex. 'Perhaps more than any other city in America,’ historian John Barry has written, 'New Orleans was run by a cabal of insiders...Looking on as if from behind a two-way mirror, these insiders watched and judged and decided.’

Then in the early 1990s, civil-rights activists led by feisty councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor forced the token desegregation of the Mardis Gras and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. Despite a few old-guard holdouts (like Comus, which preferred to stop parading rather than integrate), Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of Black political clout.

But, as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected Black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite with overriding common interests - especially prime real estate and Tulane University - has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, the publisher of the Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the 'New Urbanism'; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real-estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e. he was responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of the largest African-American-owned bank; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally set-up by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and literal kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer with friends in high places. First and most importantly, Canizaro is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to Karl Rove and the White House inner circle. Secondly, he is the power behind the throne of Mayor Ray Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 80 percent of the white vote. And, thirdly, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, he mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master-planners.


5. Notice when the monopoly men were finally forced to cave to reality, they made sure that their puppet David Vitter would take all the credit.

Oh and don't you dare miss this one:

6. The New Yorker describes the "broad-chested and jowly" Boysie Bollinger as also possessing the "carriage of a viceroy." The following passage indicates the repulsive perspective from which this racist dirtbag sees the world:

Bollinger held the view that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was pampering evacuees, by handing families two thousand dollars in emergency help. “I said to the President, ‘You’re empowering people not to come back to work.’ The President said, ‘I don’t think two thousand dollars will do that.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, these people haven’t had two thousand dollars in their lives.’ ” Rather than wait, Bollinger was hiring as many Mexicans as he could find. “I’m hoping the people of New Orleans come back and take a different attitude toward employment,” he said, pulling open the door to a small office building. “But until they do . . .”

Boysie then shot an infant and kicked her screaming sister toddler into the river.

Last one I promise:

7. An Advocate article on Believe in Louisiana, a 527 created to promote Governor Jindal's conservative agenda exposes both Edward Diefenthal and Boysie Bollinger as top contributors, each giving at least $100k.

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What these guys are doing and have done, the inordinate control they have on our political process - it ain't right.

They have a racket and if they don't break the law as it is, we've got to write laws that make it illegal to do what they do. When a social cabal of millionaires can drop $15,000 a pop into a hat that magically produces a mayor and a congressman with original favors to owe, you've got a problem on your hands.

Not too many towns in America that have it quite like New Orleans.