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.

We Could Be Famous' "We Can" Weekend Roundup

There were a lot of stories that piqued my interest over the weekend.
There were some absolute nuggets of wisdom that I just have to briefly lasso together:


The Saturday T-P had a number of interesting articles.

1. The weekly New Orleans politics segment routinely makes my Saturday. I've canceled my TP subscription for a lot of different reasons but I still buy the Saturday paper, mostly just for this article. This weekend's piece elaborated on the Mayor's absolutely hilarious wisecrack about kicking all of the homeless people out of town.

"I'm not suggesting that they were dumped here, but we have a lot of people from a lot of different places around the country, and you may be helping one of your citizens," the mayor said.

"Maybe we can even find some bus tickets. We'll see," Nagin said, drawing uneasy laughter from parts of a crowded ballroom at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. "One way."

Since I've never given my thoughts on those comments, I'll just say that the reason they are offensive is because Mayor Nagin has, at times, been openly hostile to concrete solutions for combating chronic homelessness. They are offensive because Nagin has routinely deflected the homelessness issue by blaming to "outsiders" when he himself continues to support policies that exacerbate rather than alleviate the affordable housing crisis. To contextualize the quote, Mayor Nagin was just kidding, his substantive answer to the question on helping the homeless was to donate to Unity or the Mission. This doesn't help matters much because the Mayor has generally been hostile to Unity's proven approach. As you'll recall, the Mayor's solution earlier this year was to round up the homeless into a giant barracks at the New Orleans Mission. This policy was seen as so reactive that the Bush administration sent an official to try to convince the Mayor to reconsider a more humane approach.

2. There was a second pearl from Nagin in that same TP article:

At other points, Nagin displayed his lighter side, responding to a question about whether local leaders trust the science of polling.

Referring to a recent poll by researcher Verne Kennedy showing that nearly one in four New Orleans voters think the city is "moving in the right direction," Nagin said he has faith in such positive results.

"We like these polls that say 23 percent of people think the city is headed in the right direction," he said. "Y'all keep these coming. We'll pay good money for them."

While I can believe that local poll numbers might be unreliable, I'm afraid that the percentage of people that think the city is headed in the right direction may be lower. If there's one measure of the city's recovery that is more important than any other, it is the one that represents how the residents of New Orleans themselves feel about the direction of their city. If New Orleans residents do not feel as if the city is heading in the right direction than the city is not heading in the right direction - period. This cavalier attitude toward his own unpopularity reminds me of that of another totally unaccountable and unapologetic golden god:




New Orleans residents don't think their needs are being met? So?

It is the job of historians to evaluate what a tragedy your Mayoral administration has been.

3. Also from the TP: Recovery School District behind in its bills

State Superintendent Paul Pastorek estimated that the district is delinquent in paying 10 to 20 vendors. The district did pay out more than $30 million to vendors during the past 60 days, he said, paying off every vendor who was owed $20,000 or less in full.

Yet as the school year draws to a close, officials say finances still remain one of the thorniest problems facing district Superintendent Paul Vallas and his team.

"I don't think anybody, including me, anticipated the difficulties of not having a cash reserve account," Pastorek said.

Well done Paul and Paul. Want to know who anticipated the difficulties?

The Times Picayune did. From the same article:

Recovery District officials have not responded to repeated inquiries over the last month as to which vendors have outstanding, overdue bills.
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The district did not respond to a specific question asking what their 10 largest overdue bills are. It also did not respond to an April open-records request for copies of all invoices marked overdue.

So in other words, it was such a surprise that you spent weeks stalling out public records requests beyond the legally permissible three day wait?

No kidding. Know who else thought the RSD might run into some "surprise" budget issues?

Know who else gets routinely stonewalled by the RSD legal team on public records requests?

He has a blog.


4. Sad.

Over the weekend, our fearless President went to Saudi Arabia to plead with King Abdullah to make more oil. President Bush reads the internets and has heard that gas prices are too high so he went over to ride horses with the King and beg him to help US consumers buy more consumer electronics by reducing oil prices. King Abdullah said no.

Earlier in the week, Saida Mohammed Afrah left her children for two hours to scavenge for food and water. When she returned, her two babies had starved to death. High gas prices contributing to high food prices have exacerbated the effects of a drought in East Africa. Famine is upon Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan. It approaches Kenya.

Our President's crawling on his knees routine with the Saudis is an embarrassment on so many levels. While it was very nice of the man to go to bat to Americans under legitimate pressure from high gas prices, it is so insulting to go begging the Saudis for help as US oil corporations reap windfall profits as a direct result of the high prices that are literally killing people in Africa.

Who is Parsons?

Parsons Corp. is one of two firms hired by the Louisiana Dept. of Education to develop the ten year facilities master plan for the Recovery School District of New Orleans.

This is a big deal master plan because it will essentially determine the capacity of the city's public schools to educate children in the immediate future.

So, who is Parsons?

It has already been pointed out, here and elsewhere on NOLA blogs, that Parsons has been in the news after coming under investigation for jobs not done in Iraq.

A California company, Parsons, had its contract terminated this year after it was found to have finished only six of more than 140 primary healthcare centres it was supposed to build, after two years work and $500m spent. However, the contract was ended "for convenience", meaning Parsons was paid in full.

It wasn't just healthcare 'centres,' but also the police academy:

Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq's security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.

Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.

The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.

"The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.

A spokeswoman for Parsons said the company had not seen the inspector general's report.

Oops. Special Inspector General Bowen ticked off somebody. As news of his investigations undermined the Bush Administration, Bowen soon faced a series of challenges:

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

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Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.

Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.

“It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.”

“The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion,” she said.

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“It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.

“I just can’t see how one can look at this change without believing it’s political,” he said.

Well that strategy, attempted in November of 2006, didn't work. Whichever Bush administration ally in Congress slyly inserted Mr. Bowen's walking papers obviously didn't do so slyly enough. Both Democrats and Republicans were upset and suspicious.

Bowen still represented a problem, however.

He had been a loyal Bushie for so long. He was a special council to Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas. He worked under Alberto Gonzalez during the Florida recount. Was he straying from the flock? Was he more interested in exercising the powers of the office that the President had bestowed upon him than he was in using those powers to prove his loyalty?

Well, problem solved.

Enter the perfectly named integrity committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency.

They opened an investigation in May of 2007 after former employees of Mr. Bowen's office complained of the Inspector's work habits.

Boom, mission accomplished.

Bowen's office was ripped apart from top to bottom. By December of 2007, there were at least three separate investigations into Mr. Bowen's conduct. The Special Inspector General's office was, according to an official there, "gripped by paranoia."

Mr. Bowen clearly felt he was being undermined. One of the more serious allegations was that he and an aide had illegally read employee emails in order "to find out who was loyal and who was not."

It is currently unclear to me whether or not those investigations are ongoing or if they have been shelved. Stewart Bowen still holds his job as Special Inspector General. Nonetheless, the job was done. Mr. Bowen's audits into Iraqi reconstruction contracts were interrupted and the inspector's reputation had been sufficiently sullied as to ensure that future reports by his office were more easily discreditable.
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Back to Parsons.

It's amazing what a little old nobody can find out using the google.

They weren't just in Iraq to build shoddy health clinics and police academies. The breadth of their contracts there also extended to the restoration of...

...wait for it...

...oil fields, pipelines, and refineries - oh my!

The joint venture between Parsons and sister company Parsons E&C was one of two charged with restoring the flow of Iraqi oil. The other was Kellogg, Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Bowen's office has been able to audit some aspects of the oil flow restoration efforts. According to CorpWatch, a main concern is the inability of Halliburton and Parsons to provide simple repairs to the meters that measure the amount of oil flowing. Suspicions related to distribution of Iraqi oil revenues, a crucial political obstacle, hinge on Parsons and Halliburton's failure on this front. According to that site, Mr. Bowen is due to issue a report on this matter sometime this spring.

CorpWatch also reports that Halliburton was actually stripped of its oil work and their former responsibilities in Southern Iraq were given to Parsons.

Now, Parsons Corp. is a huge multinational corporation with lots of different offices and lots of different projects.

What could their stunning failures to complete the objectives laid out in the contracts they received from the Bush administration in Iraq possibly have to do with the new contract they received in New Orleans?