I've been around

It was in mid-June that the odds-on candidate for Man of the Year 2023 emerged in New Orleans. 

A popular chef reported missing in New Orleans over the weekend has been found alive after his family told local media he was dead, according to multiple reports.

Family of Demietriek Scott, who goes by "Chef Scott," reported the cook missing on Saturday, New Orleans Police Department confirmed to USA TODAY.

His family later told multiple outlets including WWL his body had been found on the side of a bridge in the city's Ninth Ward on Monday morning.

But on Monday night, New Orleans media reported Scott, 47, had been found alive and well.

“I’ve been around,” Scott told WVUE after he showed up at his family’s home late Monday afternoon. “I essentially just needed some time for myself.”

There's not a man, woman, or non-binary person in the city who couldn't relate to that in some way. We're around. We aren't sure if we want to be around anymore. But what else can we be?  

Despite keeping quiet on this website all summer so far, I am still here, me.  And it's time, once again, for me to try and get some notes in real quick about the things that have been happening before I forget them.  I keep making the joke about wanting to quit tossing everything into the Twitter memory hole. But each time the world's dumbest man gets a step closer to erasing everything I've tossed there forever, it gets less funny. 

It's worrisome to see what's happening to social media. But it's only one manifestation of a larger crisis in media and the internet that has been developing for a very long time. We see aspects of it reflected in the SAG-AFTRA strike over the question of who owns the right to profit from creative labor, in the proliferation of pyramid schemes like cryptocurrency and NFTs, and in the ongoing effort to impose stricter and more invasive censorship and surveillance on the population at large. S uffice to say, it's been a long time coming. We here at the Yellow Blog have been following the "kicking you off the internet" beat for many years. Recently, Cory Doctorow has coined a term that captures well the thing we've all been feeling. 

The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.

To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.

This is the basic template for how everyone in charge of everything behaves now. Enshittification is what happens when everything in life comes down to someone with massively more amounts of power and money than you have actively making choices that put you in danger and/or rip you off.  And it's pretty much how we live now.

 

Anyway, all of this is to say that I need to post more things here in short form so I can look them up when I need them. Because tweeting them into space seems like a really weak bet for that. But I also need to get caught up a little bit. So, what follows is a small selection unrelated items I bookmarked over the past few months. It's not everything I need to save from the void. It's probably not even the most important stuff. It's just what I need to clear out in order to fire this thing up again. So bear with me a bit. 

The Ultimate Move for City Hall: From Duncan Plaza to... Duncan Plaza

I don't know if this is a function of the diminished capacity of local news reporting (support your local indie outlets while you still have them!) But it does seem kind of amazing that the state and city can hold months of negotiations over critical parcels of land downtown and the public doesn't hear about it until the day before the legislature takes up a bill to move it forward.  

Under the mayor’s plan, the state would give the city its share of Duncan Plaza and the Heal parking garage at the back end of the plaza.

In exchange, the state would receive the land under the courthouse at the corner of Poydras Street and Loyola Avenue, as well as two city streets that run alongside the Caesars Superdome and the green space along West Stadium Drive.

There are a ton of tricky points of contention between the city and state that threatened to (and still could) undermine the deal. But they did manage to get by the first legislative hurdle (mostly by just removing the points of disagreement from the law they had to pass.) So there's still a long way to go and we'll see what happens. 

One thing to keep an eye on will be the fate of the public space in the plaza itself. Recall in 2017 the city announced big plans to turn the park over to the DDD for a major renovation. But the goal seemed to lean toward limiting public space in favor of monetization.  Which would be a shame for reasons that then-DDD director Kurt Weigle acknowledged. 

Hundreds of homeless people took up residence in Duncan Plaza for a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, given its proximity to City Hall, it has been a popular site for protests and rallies. That’s been particularly true in recent months, and the park has become a popular starting or end point for marches protesting various policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Weigle said the DDD will not try to curtail that part of the park’s use.

“It’s fair to say that this agreement would not be in place if we had not made a commitment to continue to support that kind of activity in the park,” Weigle said.

“Being someone who loves that part of what it means to be an American, I’d never look to curtail that in any way,” he added. “It’s something we’re looking to celebrate along with all the other uses in the park.”

It's anybody's guess at how sincere Weigle was about any of that. It's a moot question since he's long gone now. Also city officials have been especially hostile toward the homeless as of late which could inform the park design as well.

Gordan Plaza residents suffer one more indignity

It almost seems intentional. 

One of the first buyouts of a home in Gordon Plaza, a largely Black neighborhood built four decades ago atop a toxic dump, netted a $250,000 profit for the owner, who purchased it in late 2021 as a mass buyout and relocation of the subdivision’s residents was being discussed at City Hall.

The Dorsey family had lived at the ranch house on Gordon Plaza Drive since it was built in 1982. They’ve lost multiple family members to cancers they believe can be linked to living on what is now a Superfund site.

But the Dorseys sold the property 18 months ago for $55,000 to Treme daycare operator Lizzell Brooks-Williams, who owns several other New Orleans properties.

It really seems like this is something that could have been avoided in the process of designing the eligibility requirements of the buyout program. Unless, of course, they didn't want to avoid this scenario. Because it just really really seems like they didn't. 

A New Orleans truck driver who wanted to get into the real-estate business by starting with something cheap.

An air conditioning and heating company owner who lives in Atlanta.

A retired police officer who paid fire-sale prices for three deteriorating homes, which remain blighted but are now valued at $475,000.

All are among those now benefiting from the city of New Orleans’ $35 million plan to buy out owners of Gordon Plaza, the largely Black neighborhood built four decades ago atop a toxic dump.

One SWB scandal just flows right into the next

A 2021 WWLTV investigation exposed a wide range of irregularities and self dealing at the Sewerage and Water Board. The facet of that story that drew the most attention from law enforcement turned out to be permits officers with side gigs as contractors. The facet that most interested us was that the records of all of this were kept by, well, not the most modern of systems. 

A lot of this has been kept under wraps by the Sewerage and Water Board’s antiquated plumbing permitting system. The board told WWL-TV that no computerized database of plumbing permits and inspections exists, not even an index. The station has fought for over a year just to be able to see the room where permits are kept and maintained by Arnold and his staff during work hours.

The Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors sent a scathing letter to the Sewerage and Water Board in January, blasting it for being “obstructionist” to the licensing board’s efforts to root out contractor and permitting fraud.

Arnold’s permitting office “operates on what can only be described as index cards, file cabinets and such, (and) it makes it almost impossible to for state investigators, or the public, to find information on projects,” the letter said.

Those filing cabinets and index cards were confiscated by the FBI shortly after the story aired. Jay Arnold, the main target of the investigation, pleaded guilty last month. But the problems were more systemic than just one guy's actions. As of May, McBride was skeptical that any of that had been fixed. 

Other problems going un-fixed this summer: 

New Orleans entered its fourth week of sending untreated sewage into the Mississippi River on Saturday as the Sewerage & Water Board struggles to fix a 60-year-old underground pipe in the St. Roch area.

The agency had expected to complete the job this week but said Friday that workers found an additional leak at the bottom of the force main, at the pumping station at 2800 Florida Ave. They'll keep digging to repair it.

In a tweet last week (that I cannot embed because of stupid Elon) McBride noted that the amount of raw sewage being dumped into the river is "basically all of the sewage from north of I-610," or 97 million gallons per day.

On the other hand, SWB did manage to shut some things down.  For example, it appears that the employee lounge is losing some of its frills.  

Sewerage & Water Board employees have complained to management about a host of other issues in the division in recent years, including allegations of favoritism, retaliation, unsafe working conditions and unchecked harassment. 

In 2022, a filter gallery employee filed a public whistleblower complaint that accused managers of using taxpayer dollars to build a “secret room” inside the Carrollton plant where a select number of employees would bring people to sleep with both on and off their shift.

Verite interviewed two current employees and one former worker from the Carrollton Plant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. In their interviews with Verite, they confirmed the existence of what one employee described as a “secret sex room.” One employee provided a video of it, showing couches, a refrigerator, a microwave, a TV and a shelf full of framed photos of nude women.

Naturally, the "secret sex room" got everyone's imaginations going.  We'll likely see the unfortunate results of that next Carnival season.  It may not be as salacious as what "one employee" implies, though.  I mean it's not too hard to believe that a critical piece of infrastructure requiring a 24 hour labor force and which may also require workers to make themselves available during emergencies, might induce those workers to improvise a makeshift sleeping quarters on site. Now, such a space *might* be used inappropriately. But outside of one person's vague statements, we don't actually know that it was. In any case, it shouldn't surprise anyone that such a room exists.. or did anyway until this story (which is actually about many more credible allegations of payroll fraud) showed up.  Besides, from the looks of the video shared on TwiXter, the now shuttered "sex room" has nothing on the $60,000 office Cedric Grant installed when he was there.

Anyway congratulations to SWB are in order on one point. It's been a mostly street flooding free summer thus far. Who would have guessed that the one trick to getting that to happen would be record drought conditions.

Various other things are broken

In addition to the big leaky sewer pipe this summer, residents should also be wary of malfunctioning air conditioners threatening to shut down various city offices at random times, including NOPD headquarters.  

The city's deputy chief administrative officer for infrastructure, Joe Threat, said Tuesday that the Department of Property Management has struggled to develop new contracts after an Inspector General report in 2021 found that the Department of Property Management had improperly utilized an expedited contractor approval process for non-emergency situations. 

Mohan said that attempts at emergency measures were also hamstrung by city payment issues. He had deployed 45 temporary AC units within the last month, he said.

When he tried to order another 45, he said that the supplier put a credit hold on the city because of outstanding invoices from other city departments.

Councilmembers expressed dismay, but not surprise.

"Dismay, but not surprise," is, by all rights, the city motto at this point. 

Also, watch out for falling trees. 

Cantrell's revelation that a tree inspection was conducted shortly before the accident came a day after attorney Morris Bart, who is representing the injured teen and his family, said the city was "grossly negligent" for not roping off the area after the limb fell in June.

In a text message Wednesday, Bart, who is preparing a lawsuit against the city, said that photos of the tree after the first limb failure showed obvious warning signs.

“The hole left after the limb fell clearly shows rot and damage to the tree,” said Bart, who noted Tuesday that he had hired a forensic arborist for the case.

Who knew you could even hire a "forensic arborist"? I guess that's why Morris Bart gets the big bucks. 

I'm sorry. That's Special Assistant To the District Attorney, Morris Bart now.  Gotta remember that. 

Oh and speaking of District Attorneys.. or DAs that could have been

Keva Landrum, who lost to Jason Williams in 2020, has been in sitting in limbo awaiting an appointment to the post of US Attorney for the Eastern District in Louisiana. But that expected call hadn't yet come as of this July. So she's removed herself from consideration. 

“I just made the decision on my own, based on the length of time it has taken, and no real timeframe,” she said. “I decided that for me it’s best to pursue other opportunities.”

Landrum, 50, declined to say what those opportunities might be. She has been out of public office since 2020, when she left the bench after a dozen years to run for district attorney, a race she lost to then-City Councilman Jason Williams.

She said she was unaware of who might replace her as the nominee in waiting.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, the lone Democrat in Louisiana’s congressional delegation, said Friday that he understood Landrum “has withdrawn from consideration because of the inordinate time that the process has taken.”

It’s unclear what sank her chances, but the sources familiar with the process said that Landrum had drawn fierce opposition from some progressive groups.

Wait a minute. Look "progressive groups" could certainly find numerous reasons to rightfully oppose this nomination. And maybe they did that. But I thought it was pretty clear the matter holding things up was Landrum's ties to a political corruption scandal that would fall under the office's jurisdiction. 

Peterson was an early endorser of Landrum during her 2020 run for Orleans Parish district attorney.

Landrum, in turn, hired Peterson’s husband, Dana, to help run her campaign. She paid the Petersons’ consultancy, College Hill Strategy Group LLC, $130,590 over three months. It is not clear how much of that was profit: Landrum's campaign expense reports say that much of the money went to cover the cost of mailers, postage and other items. Karen Carter Peterson reported income of $513,772 for 2020 on a federal disclosure form when she ran for Congress last year.

Landrum lost the district attorney race to Jason Williams.

See? It was in the paper. Sometimes I wonder if the paper reads the stuff in the paper.  Which, again, is why I need to get back to keeping notes. 

Various other scoundrels on the loose

The freaking "Night Mayor" has been making friends on the streets and online recently. Actually, I'll save this for later but suffice to say the city's selective enforcement regime continues to nickel and dime struggling residents while cutting favors for landlords and bosses.  In the meantime, read this. 

There are other potential ethical concerns behind Kaplan’s appointment as well. In October 2021, Kaplan formed a political action committee (PAC) called the “New Orleans Cultural Economy & Nightlife PAC,” which donated $5,000—the maximum allowable amount under campaign finance laws—to Cantrell’s reelection campaign. After Cantrell won, she created the Office of Nighttime Economy and appointed Kaplan as its director.

Irvin Mayfield was convicted for a fraud in which he diverted non-profit funds intended to support the library toward his own recording studio project. He is making restitution for that now by... overseeing the use of public and non-profit funds intended to support NORD toward his own recording studio project. 

Ron Forman is about to get (maybe? The mayor won't say for sure) $15 million in (additional.. he already has about $11 million) public funds to build yet more limited-access tourist forward privatized public space on the riverfront. The plan also involves a scheme to build a big parking garage that Ron can split the revenue from with the other thieves at the French Market Corp. 

Other stuff upcoming

Like I said, this is all just backlog. I felt like I needed to get all this down somewhere before the interesting part of the year got rolling in earnest.  We're right on the cusp.  Soon we'll know if the mayor can pick a police chief. Soon it will be Prime Hurricane Season. Soon it will be Municipal Budget Season. Soon it will be football season.  

Oh and the statewide elections are about to get rolling. Qualifying is next week! 

And this is why I would like to remind everyone to be on the lookout for suspicious car fires. They tend to happen around this time. I have been trying to keep track over the course of many years. I think this is the most recent post to look back at it. 

And now we have another to throw on the pile.

That's one week ago in our neighborhood.We actually heard it go off at about 3am. I don't know the whole story. As far a I can tell, it never made the news, which is weird because often these things do. But maybe in the context of so many things falling down or breaking apart this summer, it's just not surprising anymore. Dismaying, perhaps. But not surprising.

Who will Cedric choose to be the next US Attorney?

 People said he would lose influence after giving up that congressional seat but I don't know about that. 

Though U.S. senators hold an informal veto power over such choices, Louisiana’s two Republican senators, Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, figure to hold little influence over the choice. Sources say all roads to the post lead through former New Orleans-area Rep. Cedric Richmond, now among President Joe Biden’s closest White House advisors. Richmond did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Who do we think he might choose?  There's a lot of interesting names here. 

Leading names floated to succeed Strasser include former Orleans Parish Criminal District Judge Keva Landrum, who lost a December runoff for district attorney; former state Sen. Walt Leger; St. John the Baptist Parish District Attorney Bridget Dinvaut; Desiree Charbonnet, the former New Orleans Municipal Court judge and mayoral candidate; and Duane Evans, who served as interim U.S. Attorney in New Orleans after Kenneth Polite left in 2017.

New Orleans City Attorney Sunni LeBoeuf also is thought to be in the early mix, sources said. Other names that may be in play include former federal prosecutor Matt Chester, now a local defense lawyer, and Marquest Meeks, a former federal prosecutor in New Orleans who is now senior counsel for Major League Baseball.

Keva Landrum gets special attention in this article in part because she just lost a run for District Attorney despite having garnered an endorsement from Richmond as well as from Mayor Cantrell and the BOLD organization (which has grown more closely affiliated with the mayor over the course of her term.)  It's not unheard of that a candidate would receive support from both sides of that sometime rivalry but it is interesting that such a candidate would have lost their election. 

Anyway it's not out of bounds to think that Landrum would be in for a consolation prize of some sort (although we would have to consider this post more than just that.)  Still, her current gig seems pretty chill. Are we sure she'd want to give that up?

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dall Kammer and his team will have until March 2 to present their own list of potential witnesses to testify at sentencing, at a date that’s not yet been set.

The U.S. Probation Office has already filed a draft sentencing report. Sentencing guidelines depend on several factors, including the amount of money involved. It’s not unusual for people to write letters to judges vouching for defendants’ character before they are sentenced, but hearing testimony from both sides before sentencing is less common.

Mayfield “will probably want to bring forth people to say he was of good character and maybe this was just a simple mistake,” said WWL-TV Legal Analyst Keva Landrum, a former state criminal court judge and district attorney. “And then the prosecution may want to bring people who they thought would have been their witnesses in the trial to say otherwise.”

On the other hand, that story does point out that she already has eyes on a federal case that could be of significance to several of her political patrons. So maybe she is just the person for the job after all.

Reformer's dance

Here is reform candidate for District Atttorney Jason Williams during the city budget hearings this month rejecting calls to defund police. 

City Council members were generally complimentary of the department, and did not signal that there would be any major changes to the proposed budget. 

City Council President Jason Williams — who is also running for Orleans Parish District Attorney, casting himself as a progressive criminal justice reformer —  addressed the calls to defund the police at one point, but he questioned whether or not there were ways to change public perception of police, rather than exploring the idea of cutting the department’s budget further. 

“Given the changing of culture, people crying out for defund the police, people protesting the departments — whether or not there has been a particular egregious situation in their communities or not — across the board there has certainly been a different perception of police officers and law enforcement,” Williams said. “What are we doing now, or what can the council do to start addressing that perceived lack of trust or actual lack of trust, to redefine the NOPD?”

Here is reform candidate Jason Williams suggesting that we put more cops in the schools, while also suggesting that everyone's "older brothers and siblings" are all in jail, maybe?

Williams suggested focusing recruitment efforts toward people who might not normally think to go into law enforcement, and outreach programs in elementary schools to change young people’s perception of the police.

“I would encourage you to figure out a way to get in front of elementary school kids before they have older brothers and siblings helping to frame their narrative about what police mean, and what police do in their community,” Williams said.

Here also is reform candidate Jason Williams helping us get a lid on NOPD's use of intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance technology by.... helping NOPD write a policy that lets them use intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance technology.  

Jones told The Lens that the NOPD only used facial recognition for “violent cases,” but that “documentation of frequency of use of Facial Recognition is not currently available.” Asked whether there was any written policy or procedure regarding the technology, Jones responded by saying that NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson “is currently working with Councilman [Jason] Williams on a policy as to when facial recognition tools should be used.”

Everyone agrees. Of the two candidates remaining for District Attorney, Jason is definitely the more inclined to speak out on behalf of reforming the criminal punishment system. So, you know, as the saying goes, with reformers like these, who needs anti-reformers?  

Well, it turns out, a lot of people think we do. 

Cannizzaro hasn’t endorsed in the race to replace him, but Williams made him a centerpiece of his attacks on Landrum on Thursday, calling her a “surrogate” chosen when the current DA realized he couldn’t win re-election. Cannizzaro did not qualify for the race.

Williams also sought to use against Landrum her stack of endorsements, a list that includes five of Williams’ six colleagues on the council and the BOLD political organization. “You shouldn't have to go through (Councilman) Jay Banks or the BOLD political organization to get to the next DA,” Williams said.

Landrum said Williams had sought the same endorsements she won, and she rejected the idea that Cannizzaro would have any hold over her.

Landrum has wrapped them all up, basically.  It's been something to see.  Not too long ago, Jason Williams, coming off of two overwhelming victories in citywide council races, seemed like he was on a fast track to unseating Cannizzaro, or possibly becoming the next mayor. But now it looks like the whole establishment is lining up against him. The only significant voice we're still waiting to hear from, in fact, is third place primary finisher Arthur Hunter's.  What does Arthur want? Well it sounds like he wants to watch the candidates dance between both sides of the reform question. 

Just out of the money was former Judge Arthur Hunter, with 28%. He has yet to endorse, but in a statement Friday he called on the contenders to prove they would “focus on violent crime while restoring public trust in the DA’s office.”

But dancing is what the so-called "reform" candidate Jason Williams has been doing all year. And look where that has gotten him. I wonder if he will recognize that.

Normalcy in our time, normalcy in our town

Did we talk about the Democratic convention on here yet?  It's been such a weird year in so many ways. Too often I find myself falling behind the noise before I can write enough of it down.  That's not good. Keeping good notes on this website has been such a useful tool for me in just holding it together over the years, I am afraid if I let it go for too long I might dissociate completely from reality.  Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.... 

Oh wait. Here it is. Just a quick summary because I was probably in a hurry. 

But one theme the Democrats pushed relentlessly was Joe Biden's capacity for "empathy."  In Zoom video after dimly lit Zoom video, speakers testified about the times Joe personally had reached out to someone to let them know how well he understood their trauma, how much he cared about and validated their pain.  Almost nothing was said about what he planned to do about any of it.  In fact, one may have come away from the convention with the impression that nothing can be done.  It's a strange thing to offer to voters but it does seem to be in line with the Democratic brand. 

They're basically saying, yeah we know, your life sucks right now. Look at Joe. He's out there feeling your pain. He understands. Meanwhile the policy program is full of little ways to make it easier for you to get used to and cope with the shittiness. We're not out to change the shitty conditions. We're here to valorize your experience of suffering through them.

The hallmarks of this ideology of free market fatalism are visible throughout the mainstream of the Democratic Party.  For example, the same tone was easily detectable in Mayor Cantrell's "State of the City" address delivered just around the time of the convention this year.

“We are all well-versed in the unwavering focus, the hope, and the strength it takes to rebuild from what can seem like disaster,” she said. “I’m here to deliver a message of hope and point the way forward to our future beyond this pandemic.”

The city is now five months past the initial outbreak, which trailed a range of side effects including rampant unemployment and evictions and a city budget now estimated to be more than $100 million in the red. Frequently harkening back to the 1853 yellow fever pandemic, which claimed 8,000 lives, and other, more recent tragedies, Cantrell framed the city and its people as among the most capable of rising to the challenge the current crisis presents.

“We are no strangers to trauma and disruption, you know better than me,” Cantrell said, noting next week will be the 15-year anniversary of the levee failures and flooding set off by Hurricane Katrina.

Again, the message is, our lives are marked by trauma but the mayor knows it and wants us to have "hope."  What, specifically, should we hope for? Well, it's murky.  She says we shouldn't have to worry about making rent.  But her policy response is embedded in trickle-down economics and charitable fundraising projects administered by private non-profits.  And, above all else, great pains are taken to ensure we do not saddle our landlords with worries of their own.

Acknowledging a tripling in the eviction rate, Cantrell touted various rental assistance programs — including a fundraising effort by the nonprofit set up for her transition into office — and said she is fighting for federal assistance.

“The time of a pandemic is not the time for our people to lay awake at night wondering how to make next month’s rent,” Cantrell said. “It is also not the time for landlords to face missing mortgage payments or losing investments they spent a lifetime to build.”

The Dem convention and Cantrell's speech took place a week prior to the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's arrival in New Orleans. That week, a New York Times feature called attention to the long term effects of that disaster and what everyone should know by now are the harmful consequences of the unjust and ineffectual "recovery" policies implemented in its wake.  Sorry to pull such a long quote here.

Pre-Katrina, there was already a considerable shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans. The situation has only become worse, as many of the affordable units the city had were never rebuilt after the storm and the urban core became whiter and wealthier.

New Orleans now has roughly 33,000 fewer affordable housing units than it needs, according to HousingNOLA, a local research and advocacy group. There are opportunities in every corner of the city to fix this, argued Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of HousingNOLA, when we met in her office in Mid-City on South Carrollton Avenue.

Most New Orleanians are renters. Pre-Katrina, the market rate for a one-bedroom apartment was around $578 monthly. It has roughly doubled since then, meaning a full-time worker must now earn about $18 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Real wages, however, have stalled, and many of the places that employ New Orleanians remain closed. Tens of thousands of workers in the city’s beloved music, drinks, food and tourism businesses — who were the most likely to lose their livelihoods both after the storm and now during the pandemic — make a minimum wage of $7.25.

In some other cities, Ms. Morris explained, unaffordable rent “is the result of a housing stock shortage, but in New Orleans we have a vacancy rate of about 20 percent!” In total, there are about 37,700 vacant units. I could feel it biking and driving through the curvilinear streets that weave from the river to the lake, passing by elegant, unfilled properties on otherwise vibrant blocks, then by neatly rebuilt houses sitting lonely in areas frozen in 2007: three empty lots for every six homes you see.

Residents like Terence Blanchard, the Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, who resides in a thriving midcentury neighborhood along Bayou St. John, live this dichotomy. “People talk about the recovery,” he told me as we stood on his dock overlooking the water and City Park. “But if you go to my mom’s house in Pontchartrain Park, there was no real recovery.”

The federal housing vouchers mostly known by the shorthand “Section 8” — which subsidize rent payments above 30 percent of participants’ income — fully cover “fair market rate rent,” which in New Orleans is calculated as $1,034 to $1,496 for a one-bedroom apartment. That means even in increasingly upscale, higher-ground areas of town there is little stopping developers and landlords with vacant properties from lowering rents by a few hundred dollars and still being able to generate revenue.

For Ms. Morris, the continued holdout by many landlords that want “a certain kind of family,” or Airbnb customers, has grown to “psychotic” levels of classism and racism. “At a certain point,” she said, “the math has to let you at least manage your prejudices.”

Whenever the post-2005 destruction and gentrification of New Orleans is discussed, I am obliged to point out again that none of it was an accident.  Since, literally days after Katrina landed, we were already trying to warn that this was going to happen and it would happen as a result of deliberate policy choices made by people who wield political power in New Orleans. Then it happened. It happened every day. Sometimes in very big ways and other times as part of a general creep. But the whole time, we were saying out loud to anyone who would listen, this is happening, the money power, the real estate, tourism and business owners were gutting the city.

And it didn't matter. They did what they wanted. Because that's what always happens. They have the power. We have nothing. You can see it, you can say it, you can object all you want. But they do whatever they want and you don't matter.  Even now, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a depression, there is no such thing as housing justice. Because they can afford to be "psychotic" in their stubbornness and no one with any political power will stop them.

Even at the lowest point of crisis, political leaders emphasize the concerns of landlords holding them equal to or greater than the housing stressed poor. Today, a week after a Category 2 hurricane ripped through and knocked out everyone's power we're still struggling with worries over whether or not the polling locations can operate.  Guess what was back up and running immediately, though.

Public transportation is down, power is out for 90% of the city, but eviction court is open. We have monitors headed in to watch how the judges handle evictions after a category 2 hurricane, during a pandemic.

— Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative (@JanePlaceCLT) October 29, 2020

The thing about New Orleans politics people most misunderstand is how fundamentally conservative it is. The governing ideology in all the major power centers is pro-police, pro-landlord, anti-labor. It's rare to find any observer, let alone someone from out of town, describe it this way, though. Which is why this New Yorker piece by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is refreshing. Taylor is writing primarily about the superficial racial politics of the Biden-Harris campaign but within that argument we find this passage.

There is little consideration of how a municipal administrator’s class standing may complicate solidarities with those it is simply assumed they will represent. This is especially true for Black elected officials, many of whom come from working-class origins but whose class standing shifts when they move into political office. In May, 2018, LaToya Cantrell became the first Black woman to be elected as mayor of New Orleans. Cantrell, who first moved to New Orleans in 1990, in order to attend Xavier, a historically Black university, was deeply involved in community organizing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and served on the city council for six years before ascending to the position of mayor. Despite this background of community engagement, Cantrell has stood on the sidelines during a strike by a small group of Black sanitation workers, over demands for hazard pay and P.P.E. during the pandemic. Sanitation work is outsourced in New Orleans, allowing contracting companies to pay workers less than the city’s living-wage ordinance allows. In this case, when the sanitation workers decided to strike, one of the subcontractors procured a contract for prison laborers, who worked for even less than the striking workers. Even as these “essential workers” have called upon the mayor to help them secure P.P.E. and better pay, Cantrell has refused to intervene directly, saying that these issues are between the contractor and the workers. There is no inherent solidarity along the lines of race, and, when class conflict is introduced into the calculation, it is even more fraught.

This is a city where only a person who promises not to take from the rich and give to the poor and "all that kind of crap" can be mayor.  Policy can only be formulated through a distinctly neoliberal lens. Every problem can only be met with some sort of "business incentive" public-private partnership, or other such trickle down scheme to benefit the ruling classes.

Meanwhile, even within the (very small and insular) world of progressive activism you can't get agreement on basic principles like, for example, housing as a human right or that teachers deserve unions.  And, in any case, the decisions that matter get made at a 10,000 foot remove from any of that through deals between political careerists, tourism bosses, and real estate interests. The public side of the political process, such as it is, is just nonsensical theater.

Which brings us to today's elections.  If you've voted early, or if you've wandered into a polling location this afternoon, you may have noticed that there are a lot of things going on with your ballot besides just that dismal Presidential election.  What even is all that stuff?  Well, if you really want to know the details you should stop here and go read the excellent and extremely thorough Antigravity and DSA voter guides.  But if you want the short version, stay here and I will tell you. 

Basically three things are happening. A slate of reformist candidates mostly associated with the public defender's office is trying to win a bunch of judicial seats.  A few somewhat progressive minded challengers are trying to wrest one or two school board seats away from incumbent charter school privatizers with national corporate backing. And, all of this is happening in the context of various power brokering institutions trying to consolidate their positions as electoral and patronage gatekeepers ahead of next year's municipal elections. 

The linchpin in the insider tug of war is the DA's race where Mayor Cantrell's alliance with BOLD, which did very well in the legislative races last year, is backing Keva Landrum. You can read a little bit about the dynamics of the race in this Advocate story about the fundraising. Landrum has positioned herself as the more conservative "law and order" candidate compared to Jason Williams and Arthur Hunter who she has criticized as "backed by third party special interests." Each of their platforms is invested in reforming the criminal legal system more aggressively than she would like.

As I type this right now, the polls are open for another twenty minutes. But my strong suspicion is the establishment candidates will win most of these judicial and school board races and Landrum will run first in the DA race.  Overall the theme of the night is conservative establishment results at home to match the general "return to normalcy" nationwide as Joe Biden becomes the next President.

Maybe that is disappointing.  But disappointment has pretty much been baked into this since March. Here is what I told the kids yesterday on a parallel internet. We know that the Biden Presidency only represents the replacement of one kind of conservatism with another. We know that, regardless of the election result, we are no nearer to overcoming the massive obstacles to human happiness posed by poverty, racism, disease, empire, and climate catastrophe. And we know these are all deeply embedded consequences of systemic capitalist exploitation and that the work of rooting them out has not even begun. 

But, if only for the sake of your own mental well being and that of your neighbors, please do not deny yourself the chance to revel in the pure and absolute joy of seeing Donald Trump ejected from the White House. Fuck that guy. He's almost gone. It's okay to enjoy that.

Time for healing

I am going to have to go watch this forum now for clarity but it does sound a lot like what Keva is saying here is that the "relationship between the DA's office and the community" needs to be "healed" specifically because Jason has criticized Cannizzaro so much. 

But Landrum said she was the only candidate with experience running an office like the DA’s. She also said that as a judge she was prevented in many cases from speaking her mind, but nonetheless pushed changes like bail reform from the bench.

Without mentioning Cannizzaro by name, she said she would heal the relationship between the DA’s office and the community. She called Williams a grandstander whose “divisive” tactics reminded her of President Donald Trump and took a swipe at him over his St. Charles Avenue house.

“Mr. Williams wants you to believe that he is going to stand for the poor people of our city, when in fact he has made himself a millionaire off the backs of the people of New Orleans,” she said. “I don’t live in a mansion on a hill. He does.”

Which would imply that Leon's contributions to this "relationship," his use of the habitual offender laws to win absurdly harsh sentences, his use of "fake subpoenas" to intimidate witnesses, and his general "tough-on-crime" verbosity which only got worse as his tenure in office progressed... none of that is as detrimental as Jason Williams's public criticism of these practices.  Worse, she seems to say that hearing him make these criticisms reminded her of Trump?  

That can't be right.  I mean, for one thing, Keva has been openly critical of Cannizzaro herself. At least she was when she thought she would be running against him. 

While Landrum and Cannizzaro both worked under longtime DA Harry Connick Sr. at different times, she ventured into public criticism of Cannizzaro’s policies at a forum last year.

Landrum accused Cannizzaro of resisting her court’s efforts to offer pretrial services to defendants and reduce the jail population. She also said Louisiana’s habitual offender law — which Cannizzaro once made more use of than any DA in the state to ratchet up sentences for defendants with prior convictions — does little to reduce crime rates.

Maybe it has something to do with what house you live in when you make these comments?  In any event, the time for all of that is over now.  Have to move on so the healing can begin.

It's Friday, are we tuned?

Are we staying that way?

In his last two campaigns for DA, Cannizzaro filed to run on the first day of qualifying, according to records from the Louisiana Secretary of State. Reached by phone, Billy Schultz, who has worked as a political consultant for Cannizzaro, said he didn’t have any information about the DA’s plans.

“Stay tuned,” he said, “that’s all I can tell ya.”

If Leon really is bowing out, that could open up the dynamics of the DA race quite a bit.  Candidates will now have to build their cases as to what sort of "reform" they might stand for beyond just putting Not-Leon in the office. This article finds each of the announced candidates going out of their way to brag a little bit about their willingness to put people in jail, though. So we're not especially optimistic.  But, hey, stay tuned. 

Update:  Kind of an anti-climax here. 

In a statement posted on his office's website, he said “I have proudly devoted the past 42 years of my life to the cause of making New Orleans a safer place to live, work, raise families and visit. But after long discussions with my wife and family, it became apparent that my interest in serving another term has waned, outweighed by a desire to spend more time with my family, especially my nine grandchildren born since I first took office. This was not an easy decision, but it is the one with which I’m most at peace."

People had all sorts of wild theories going about Leon getting a federal appointment or running for some other office. But no, he's gonna spend more time with the fam.   That's what we had to stay tuned for?

Nobody could have predicted

The job might get a little comfy

Keva Landrum-Johnson, the veteran Orleans Parish prosecutor appointed to step in last fall when embattled DA Eddie Jordan resigned, said Wednesday that she hasn't ruled out seeking the office via election this fall.

"I'm keeping my options open," said Landrum-Johnson, at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court on Wednesday, moments after checking in on a death penalty case set for a hearing. "Being DA has shed some new light on my future aspirations."

Yeah, it'll do that.

Adding: In my honest opinion, there really isn't any reason she should be arbitrarily barred from running just because her appointment was approved by the local political overlords. But when she was granted that appointment, much was made of her agreeing not to run. That seems a bit goofy in hindsight.