Letters

The Louisiana ACLU has some things to say about Mitch Landrieu's plan to install surveillance cameras in every bar, restaurant, and corner store in the city.

The New Orleans City Council recently proposed an ordinance, No. 32-107, that would put the city's already-intrusive surveillance apparatus on steroids, subjecting New Orleanians to near-constant monitoring of their daily lives.

While presented as an innocuous measure to reduce crime, this heavy-handed government surveillance mandate would impose exorbitant costs, violate the constitutional right to privacy, undermine trust with the community and have a chilling effect on our public spaces - without reducing crime or making the city safer.

 See also, this

The Trump administration is spying on us. It’s wrong, un-American, and unconstitutional.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the National Security Agency operates at least two spying programs, PRISM and Upstream, which threaten our privacy and violate our Fourth Amendment rights.

Section 702 will expire in 2017, so Congress has to decide soon whether to reauthorize or replace it. We have a real chance at winning important reform to put constitutional limits back on government surveillance.

But how can we effectively push back against the fascistic Trump Administration's surveillance operations if our mayor and mayor elect endorse the same sort of policy?  I am of the belief that, all politics being local, we ought to start with the fascists on our own block and then go from there. We failed so badly at this this year in New Orleans... but that's another post.

The New Orleans DSA chapter has some things to say about Trump's tax plan.

This is the many-times-debunked "trickle-down economics" at its absolute worst. Kennedy professes to care about fiscal responsibility on the part of the individual citizen. What part of increasing the deficit by a trillion dollars is fiscally responsible? U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy claims to care about providing health care to the working poor. But the repeal of the individual mandate will raise premiums and increase uninsured rates drastically. This tax scam cuts almost $400 million in Medicare in Louisiana next year alone.

This will cost lives. Any appeal they invoke to ideology is a sham: this is a giveaway to the rich and corporations. Our senators are appeasing their donors off the backs of the poor. Not only that, but the bill was passed in the middle of night with illegible handwritten notes scribbled in the margins. Those are not the signs of a healthy democracy. That is a sign of extreme disregard for the voices of the people. Stand up for your constituents, senators, and use your seats in the Senate to stop the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

So now Bill Cassidy is all freaked out about the commies under his bed or something.  Meanwhile, the bill itself looks like it's on its way out of conference. So if anybody has any more ideas on how to scare Cassidy, now would be the time.