Ha ha suckers

I guess there is an extent to which holding Brad Pitt personally responsible for all of this is somewhat akin to getting a bad hamburger and demanding to speak with Ronald McDonald about it.  At the same time, though, this is just flat out evil lawyer shit.

Pitt’s lawyers have filed a motion to be removed from the class action suit, arguing that the plaintiffs have not cited a “single factual allegation that Mr. Pitt made any promise” to the residents about their homes

Oh is your house about to explode in a gas fire? Well, so sad for you but you never should have believed that actor we hired, stupid. It's funny the degree to which a "personal brand" matters so much right up to the point where consequences come into play. 

Once upon a time there was a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek effort to draft the spokesmodel into running for mayor.  It seems like a dumb stunt and all but I wonder if what the fine print is going to tell us about the President eventually.

"Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! "

That's one of the better ironic Ray Nagin quotes.  It's from this Details Magazine profile that, thanks to crappy link rot, has been relegated to the Wayback Machine. He was reading The Shock Doctrine at the time. He hadn't read it all the way through just yet.

“I understand exactly the premise that they’re presenting,“ Nagin says, holding the book aloft, “that’s for sure. Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! The shock-and-awe piece of what they’re talking about is absolutely correct.“ I ask if he’s read the chapter in which Klein laments that the public sphere in New Orleans is “being erased, with the storm used as the excuse.“ Nagin replies cheerily, “I haven’t gotten that far! I just picked it up.“

This is maybe only tangentially related but it's what I thought about when I read about the Make It Right lawsuit this week.  Practically everything that happened in New Orleans after Katrina was a grift.  Everybody knows it. Everybody has always known it.  Knowing it didn't change the outcome, though. 

In 2007, actor Brad Pitt launched the Make It Right Foundation with the goal of building 150 single-family homes to help the badly devastated Lower 9th Ward recover.

The next year, to much fanfare, construction began on the iconic, modern homes designed by an all-star group of international architects. Tour operators still run big coach buses past the more than 100 homes clustered around Tennessee, Reyes and Deslonde streets.

But the houses no longer look fresh. Their angles are becoming less defined. Roofs are badly bowed. On some houses, side panels are curving away from vertical beams. On others, cranes are helping crews make massive renovations while families live elsewhere. Some homeowners have gone through more than one interior renovation, neighbors say.

Brad Pitt was a big celebrity.  The non-profit working under his name had some "all-star" architects and some green-branded "solutions" to sell.  For whatever reason, the people and press in this town can't resist a story about how we can entrepreneur our way out of every social or political challenge no matter how many times that ends up being a scam. There's big money after a disaster.  Why are we always so surprised to find so many grifters chasing that big money?  It's why they went into the business.

The day Brad Pitt truly became mayor

The day they sue your questionable non-profit that puts flood victims into shitty housing, that's the day you know you've arrived in local politics.

A lawsuit has been filed in New Orleans, accusing Brad Pitt and his Make It Right Foundation of building "substandard" Lower 9th Ward homes post-Katrina "that are deteriorating at a rapid pace while the homeowners are stuck with mortgages on properties that have diminished values," according to an NBC News report.

The class-action lawsuit, which was filed in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, accuses the foundation of unfair trade practices, breach of contract and fraud, the report said.

A key piece of the complaint is that the foundation allegedly found issues with building materials and the homes’ designs. The problems, the suit says, needed significant repair, but Make It Right didn't tell homeowners.

Pitt doesn't even live here anymore. People were still pushing this as recently as 2009 somehow. Not all of them were joking.


 
Sure a lot of that was just about selling shitty T-shirts. But all in all it's a less harmful scam than Make It Right.