"Qualified"

I wonder what what Pierre Villere is getting at here, specifically.  

A dozen of Moreno’s donors have contributed $12,000, the maximum allowed by state law. They include a mix of local donors and out-of-state donors, among them Zelia LLC, which is affiliated with Saints and Pelicans owner Gayle Benson, and Houston-based FMJR Management LLC. 

Three of Moreno's maximum donations came from financial consultant Pierre Villere, his children or corporate entities affiliated with the family. Villere described Moreno as a longtime friend and said she "is, without a doubt, the most qualified candidate we've had for mayor since Moon Landrieu."

"I moved to Mandeville 32 years ago because I got completely fed up with the crime and the potholes. And 32 years later, nothing has happened," said Villere, who consults for the construction industry. "It's hugely, hugely frustrating to see the lack of progress." 

You know the mayors who came after Moon and didn't happen to be Moon's son all had a particular thing in common. Maybe that's what this guy who has lived on the northshore for three decades is talking about with regard to "qualifications." It's hard to say. 

Ban Mayors 2025: Chapter 1 Midsummer

I thought I had this city figured out.  In New Orleans, or at least in the New Orleans I grew up in, when you tell people an event scheduled in the middle of summer on a weeknight begins at 6:30, surely you don't mean for them to show up before 7.  Maybe that's different now.  I don't know.  Anyway, I certainly wasn't the only person who calculated incorrectly the best time to arrive for VOTE's mayoral forum a couple Thursdays ago. By the time I got there, a sizeable crowd of my fellow stragglers had already been locked out of the over-capacity event. 

It's a shame too. People really seemed to be looking forward to this. I swear I saw couples on dates waiting outside. Or at least a lot of people were overdressed.  Mid-summer isn't exactly high social season around here. School is out. The Saints don't kick off for a few months. The Pelicans have been done for a while. It's too hot to spend much time outside. At the time of the forum, Essence Fest was still a few weeks away (and now that it's here, has turned out to be something of a dud anyway.) Politics is basically the only game in town right now.  And a good number of us couldn't get a ticket. 

That wasn't really anybody's fault. VOTE headquarters isn't a large space. They did the best they could. But maybe the next mayoral forum can book the Smoothie King Center.  One man who didn't make it in was giving the volunteers at the door a hard time about all of this. There was no need, though, as we were assured the event would be live streamed on Instagram and then made available later. "But the video will be biased!" the man shouted. In favor of who or what, he didn't say. Or, at least, I didn't wait around to find out. I hurried off to find somewhere air conditioned where I could watch on a screen.  What follows is a brief summary of the event (accounting, of course, for whatever unseen "bias" the video may be harboring.)  

In the above screen grab from Instagram, we see seated on our left, former criminal court judge Arthur Hunter. Judge Hunter isn't really seen as a major contender in this election. But he is a respected figure in political circles and we can consider him a serious candidate. Or at least, he's not a crackpot. He does have a history of ducking in or out of municipal campaigns serving as either a stalking horse or strategic spoiler, although it's not explicitly clear to what purpose.  On the right, is Once and Current Councilman Oliver Thomas famous for, among other things, his gig as a local talk radio host, some dabbling with acting in community theater, and that one time he pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes in exchange for fixing city parking lot contracts.  In the middle, dressed as an orange traffic cone, perhaps to emphasize her concern with fixing the city streets, is current Councilperson At-Large Helena Moreno.  

Moreno and Thomas were especially energetic in their delivery at this event.  It's opening night of a high stakes campaign and, obviously they wanted to set a dramatic tone. The actual rhetoric could use a little refinement. I'm already tired of hearing Moreno talk about "outside the box solutions." Hunter answered nearly every question by saying he is all about "doing the work and bringing people to the table." So it's a little discouraging to see we haven't updated our go-to cliches since 1996 or so. Also everyone thinks they've hit on a winner with variations on "govern like it's the Superbowl every day."  I understand why they think that. But until I hear any of them actually push back against the way corporate mega-events like this year's Superbowl exploit the city and its people, all of that posturing rings hollow. 

The night's format consisted of questions prepared by VOTE and some submitted ahead of time by audience members and partnering organizations. I'll try to organize candidate responses around general topics covered in the questions.  

Housing: Moreno talked a little bit about city owned properties. For decades, the city has struggled.. or neglected.. to make productive use of the large number of vacant buildings it owns or properties controlled by quasi-governmental agencies. I believe I heard Moreno actually use the term "public housing" while referencing such properties. Normally you hear politicians stop at the more vague phrase "back into commerce."  So that's something to keep an eye on. Thomas said he wants to meet with realtors and owners of home construction firms to see what these "experts" have to say about the problem; a decidedly more conservative, or what the punditry typically terms "business friendly" approach. 

Homelessness:  All three candidates shifted the focus to supportive services for people dealing with mental illness.  That's a laudable point of emphasis in a vacuum, but in this context it is more of a dodge.  It's true that many people suffering from homelessness also need mental health care. But politicians tend to marry the two issues in a way that implies mental illness is the cause of homelessness in general. And that simply is not the case.  Too often, focusing the discussion here is a way to pretend a problem isn't really a problem. 

Short Term Rentals: Here we got a perfect encapsulation of the problem with this issue from the beginning: Strong rhetoric from elected representatives that in no way matches their actions or intentions in reality.  "The real issue is out of town corporations buying up tons of homes and pushing people out," Moreno complained. "STRs are pushing people out of their neighborhoods. It's not morally correct," said Thomas. That's all fine and true.  But those of us who have been watching city councilmembers get performatively mad at while actively enabling this problem for over a decade are going to need to see solid action before getting too excited. Thomas finished his answer by basically passing the buck on up to the state legislature.  Also this week we learned that both councilmembers voted to approve an exception to the temporary commercial STR ban which allowed the owners of a building at 1201 Canal Street to begin evicting tenants in order to convert their homes into new Airbnbs. 

Criminal Justice and policing: All of the candidates spoke favorably of care economy interventions like universal Pre-K although Moreno added that day care facilities funded by a recently dedicated property tax millage "aren't being built fast enough."  Hunter boasted that as a judge he took charge of standing up "re-entry courts" to smooth the transition of incarcerated people back to civilian life. Moreno was quick to claim credit for the legislation creating these courts. Thomas tried to make a point about the economic impact of "lost production" from people excluded by incarceration histories. He has a valid point but there's something dehumanizing about conceiving of people in terms of their potential labor input. 

Oliver Thomas is currently pushing an ordinance that would expand NOPD's use of invasive surveillance technology such as facial recognition cameras and gunshot detection microphones.  The Washington Post recently reported that New Orleans police were already violating local laws banning them from using these tools and are, in fact, creating the most expansive surveillance dragnet in the US right now. This is most acutely concerning as the newly passed Republican budget greatly expands ICE's reach into cities like New Orleans where information gathered by surveillance tech will no doubt lead to more outrageous abductions of local residents like that of this 64 year old Iranian immigrant arrested at her home in Lakeview last month. 

It was in this context that we heard the most shocking comment of the evening from Thomas. When the candidates were asked how they would protect immigrant communities from ICE, Thomas bluntly stated, "illegal aliens who are criminal don't need to be here." Although he did express a desire to find "a humane way" to do deportations. So, good looking out, there.  

Infrastructure: Already mentioned this but I think it was Helena Moreno who first brought up the "Superbowl every day" bit with regard to street repairs. Later there was a question framed around that premise. But there are some problems with this slogan. It references a situation created by the Governor last year when he appointed business lobbyist Michael Hecht to lead a task force focused on making the city look nice for visiting media and corporate guests of the NFL coming into town for the Big Game. Hecht was given charge of some state funds but mostly just money out of the municipal budget to prioritize repairs to roads, lights and other things likely to catch the eyes of visitors in early February. But handing extraordinary power over to an unelected lobbyist to contract out tourist-facing rush jobs such as, in some cases, literally concealing blighted office towers behind wrap-around advertisements is a dubious model for our mayoral candidates to hold up as aspirational.   What Moreno (and Thomas who echoed these sentiments) should say is that they want quality, reliable infrastructure that works for every resident all the time.  It seemed like they wanted to make this point. But I'm not sure they've fully examined the full implication of the Superbowl example. 

Some other infrastructure points:  

Thomas, still on the equity kick, had a line about "fixing the streets in the 9th ward the same way they do in the Garden District."  I wonder if he's actually driven through the Garden District recently. Most of the streets there stay pockmarked. They're so bad, in fact, that I often wonder if the neighborhood wants it that way just to slow the traffic.  

Hunter mentioned "merging" the Sewerage and Water Board with the city Public Works Department. That would entail such a massive political and bureaucratic reorganization, though, that one has to wonder if he knows what he is saying.  On the other hand, I think Jacques Morial is an advisor to Hunter sometimes. So, maybe he does know. 

Moreno complained about the city's chronic problems paying its vendors on time, which, yep, good point. On the other hand, she says the problem here is "leadership," which... eh.. yawn.  

Odds and ends:  

The candidates were also asked about the funding the Public Defender's office, which they all support, about the state of the public schools, about which they all had decent but unremarkable points, and about the UMC nurses' labor dispute. All of the candidates claim to have pro-labor bonafides but didn't break any news with regard to the nurses' situation.  They were also asked to comment on the ongoing genocide in Gaza; a question which they all deflected via one or another version of "There needs to be ceasefire but I'm concerned about ceasefire in the streets of New Orleans..." to paraphrase both Moreno and Thomas's comments. The candidates may not want to grapple with this. But there are ways in which the mayor of a city like New Orleans can and does interface with the war crimes committed by the US military and its allies. So, like it or not, these candidates have a responsibility to think about that. Perhaps someone will ask the question in a way that is less easily brushed off. 

Speaking of brushing things off, the "lightning round" portion of the evening brought us the Yes/No question: "Do you support outright public ownership of public utilities?"  The room went silent for a good thirty seconds while Helena Moreno, gears visibly turning in her head, thought about this one.  Finally, the answer she came up with was, "Yes and no."  

Oof.

Of course, these three aren't the only candidates participating in this year's sweepstakes. The forum was well ahead of the qualifying period which actually begins this coming Wednesday.  According to VOTE, at the time, these were the only three candidates to file campaign finance reports which is why they were invited to appear on stage. 

Lingering around outside I noticed signage on the neutral ground planted by some of the more niche candidates some of whom were giving interviews outside. I thought this bit from James Finn's T-P write up captured the image well. 

Still, a handful of fringe candidates are mounting campaigns, several of whom arrived at Thursday's debate after protesting having been excluded from the event. Counselor Ricky Twiggs, a political independent, and businessperson Renada Collins shook hands with audience members before the forum began. Former 911 call center operator Tyrell Morris tried to enter the event but was turned away after the space reached capacity. He peered in through the space's sliding glass doors as the event got underway.

Finally we should note all of this took place a week before another big name candidate shook up the entire field with this announcement.  

Business owner Frank Scurlock announced his run for New Orleans mayor on Thursday, saying that if elected, he would ensure a safe, business-friendly city. 

Scurlock is running as an independent and his campaign is self-financed, according to a press release issued Thursday and his campaign website. Scurlock, who is known for his family's inflatable party attractions business and his attempt to acquire the former Six Flags site, ran for mayor in 2017 and for governor in 2023. 

Also, Royce Duplessis is running. He says he has to for some reason. 

“Six months ago, I made the very difficult decision not to run for mayor,” Duplessis said in a post on Instagram Sunday evening. “But after continuing to listen to the people of this city, your frustrations, your disappointments, your confusion, and most of all your lack of faith in the future, it became painfully clear that I have to run.”

It's painful for him to have to do this. Sounds like somebody's been twisting some arms. Who, though? and why?  During a sweaty kick-off speech to a packed house at the Ashe center, Royce wasn't long on specifics but he did emphasize three points: 1) Port expansion. This is a major priority for state and local business leaders struggling with neighborhood opposition in St. Bernard Parish, Trump tariff chaos internationally, and competition from modernized facilities in Mobile and in Houston. 2) Support for service industry workers. There was some implication that this would be a priority within the city budget somehow, but nothing specific. 3) "Build 40,000 new housing units." Again, not much information as to who will be building them or for whom or how. Rhetorically, the thrust of his speech was basically, "we wouldn't have so many problems if it weren't for all these dang politics." Which is a weird thing for a politician to say on the day he is getting into a political race. Especially one he says he didn't want to run in. 

Which brings us back to the question of why is Royce running? We'll learn more about that as the campaign goes on and we find out which funders and powerbrokers line up in his corner. But we can see why he might be an appealing option to some still looking in from the outside.  At the outset, I think the rhetoric about "putting politics aside" might be the key to understanding that. Royce could offer a viable third lane in what had been shaping up as a field polarized, not only by race, but by matters of professionalism vs. patronage, transplants vs. locals, etc. Familiar dynamics that map out in a way Royce can kind of float above, or at least appear to. 

Allies of Governor Landry seeking an entry point to "bring the city to heel," might take advantage of that.  Royce is seen as a vocal opponent of the Governor in Baton Rouge. But he's often been receptive to Landry's designs on reforming local governance; putting more decision making power in the hands of state controlled boards rather than locally responsive entities, that sort of thing. Let's watch and see what he has to say about Sewerage and Water Board reform the next time that comes up.  Royce has also been a friend to big business and real estate money in New Orleans. One example we've already mentioned is the port expansion plank he launched his campaign with last week. Another example, he was instrumental in getting tax breaks authorized for the controversial (possibly imperiled?)  "River District" development. 

On the more Democratic side of things, Royce has had alliances with the Ike Spears-Cedric Richmond-Troy Carter... um... what is the term for this? It's not a "machine" really. More of a gravitational center - a blob, maybe(?) of patronage fed by bail bonds and oil and gas money along with some other unsavory interests.  Anyway, it makes up a key part of the Democratic Party establishment (such as it is) in Louisiana.  Likely this support would have ended up with Moreno. Now it may be back up for grabs.  If it shifts to Duplessis, that may also signal to conservative crime panic reactionaries who aren't thrilled that their closest ideological ally in the race, Oliver Thomas, is an admitted felon, that Royce might be someone they can compromise with. 

Anyway, it's subtle but we can see how Duplessis's candidacy might appeal to both liberal and conservative establishment donor bases. It's only been a week but it's tempting to call him the front runner already.  But let's wait and see where the money goes from here.  As of a week ago, Moreno still had a commanding lead there.   We still have a long hot summer ahead of us. 

There's no law anymore

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2025

There are four constitutional amendments that will appear on your March 29 ballot in Louisiana. They're all very bad.  

One of them would allow the legislator to create something called a "business court." In practice, that will likely mean the state can take civil matters out of the hands of locally elected judges and move them into more corporate friendly venues whose scope is defined by the legislature. 

One of them would allow the legislature to greatly broaden the list of crimes for which children under 17 could be sent to adult prison. 

And another one would step up the timeline for special elections to fill judicial vacancies. 

There's no good reason to support any of these. But one, in particular, turns out to be such a mess that a lawsuit has been filed to take it off of the ballot.  Tyler Bridges explains.

During a two-week special session in November, Landry and the Legislature reduced income taxes, abolished the corporate franchise tax, raised the sales tax and kept tax credits used by film productions and developers of historic buildings, albeit at lower spending levels.

The net savings would disproportionately benefit the wealthy and big companies, who, Landry said, would use the money to invest in Louisiana and grow the state’s economy.

At Landry’s behest, the Legislature also passed House Bill 7, which in 115 pages authorized a series of other changes to the constitution if approved by voters on March 29.

The lawsuit says the 91-word question is hopelessly complicated.

“There is no person in the State of Louisiana – including the legislators who passed HB7 – who understands all of the proposed changes to the constitution,” the lawsuit says. “The voters, however, are to be asked to vote on the proposed changes.”

The lawsuit also says the 91 words include only the sweeteners in the proposed amendment – language aimed at drawing favorable votes.

“None of the unappealing changes are included,” it says. “The ballot language is all dessert, no vegetables.”

That article goes on to explain that even the "dessert" part of the menu is misleading.  For example, the ballot language implies that voters would be enacting a teacher pay raise. But what the amendment actually does is pay down a certain amount of debt on the teachers' retirement system to free up enough money to extend a one time stipend for another year. 

The rest of the amendment is incredibly complicated. It lowers income taxes on high earners. It adds a cap to mandatory spending on education and health care. It eliminates the so-called "rainy day fund." It also makes several convoluted changes to multiple taxation rules at once. It really is a lot to put to voters in one ballot item. 

But is it legal? Well that's going to be up to the judges, isn't it. So anyway, about those judges... 

The Louisiana Supreme Court is about to receive a second new member, following a series of moves orchestrated by Gov. Jeff Landry, who has reshaped the court more than any governor in decades.

Cade Cole, an attorney, former prosecutor and tax judge in Lake Charles, will join the court next month after winning election to an open seat because no one opposed him.

The seat for Cole opened up after Landry paved the way for then-Justice Jimmy Genovese to resign from the Supreme Court last year to become president of Northwestern State University.

John Michael Guidry, who had been the chief judge on the Baton Rouge court of appeal, became the other new justice in January after winning his election unopposed.

The seat for Guidry opened up after Landry got the state Legislature to redraw the Supreme Court district boundaries last year in a way that favored a Black Democrat for an open seat that Guidry would ultimately occupy.

Because the map Landry pushed now has two Democrats – Piper Griffin from New Orleans is the other Democrat besides Guidry – the other five districts favor the election of White conservatives in the coming years.

Landry has sought to undermine the influence of Chief Justice John Weimer, a maverick who is a no-party registered voter without a clear ideological line.

Anyway, there's more background on how Landry is working to re-shape the courts in that article.  Suffice to say, though, it's going to become more difficult to appeal his legislative shenanigans there in the future. 

There's always money in the litigation stand (also some notes on the school board race)

They say you can't fight City Hall. In New Orleans, that has been especially true. For a long time, the city was notorious for refusing to pay up on court judgments against it. This year, the city council has begun to rectify that. Though, not all at once. 

Last month, the New Orleans City Council approved legislation requiring the city to almost immediately start paying out the oldest state court judgments on its books, those dating from the late 1990s until 2006. All remaining judgments must be paid off by 2027.

The payments will consist of only the original judgment amounts without interest — a caveat that has frustrated plaintiffs in some of the oldest cases, whose claims have accrued decades’ worth of additional interest fees.

Still, if you are in a hurry, there are some tricks to getting the city to cough up. For example, if you are the Orleans Parish school system, you can... commit an "accounting error" that blows a $36 million hole in your own budget.  Suddenly, the checkbook opens! 

Amid a massive financial crisis spurred by an accounting error, the Orleans Parish School Board has agreed to dismiss a years-old lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for $20 million in cash and $70 million in funding guarantees. 

While school leaders across the city may be reassured by the quick $20 million payment, which will help plug budget holes for the 2024-25 school year, charter officials are still anxiously awaiting final details on the district’s promise to directly support their school budgets and students in the face of the shortfall that remains, which is estimated at $16 million – but may be more, depending on what financial advisors find as they look through district ledgers.

This settlement has both short-term and long-term implications. By the end of this calendar year, the city will pay the school board $10 million, with another $10 million to follow by April 1; the agreement also directs the City Council to pay an additional $70 million through education-program funding over the next 10 years. A promise education advocates are happy to have in place with council and mayoral elections coming up.

The $20 million comes in concert with a series of last minute City Council additions to the municipal budget touching on a number of needs including homeless services, staffing needs in certain departments, and the Algiers Ferry. They also added some questionable items, like $5 million for Troy Henry's Six Flags grift and $12 million for.. whatever is going on at Charity Hospital now. (Or maybe not, actually! More on both of those topics in another post later.)  

There's a bit in the Verite article where members of the council and administration pat each other on the back for cooperating to solve these problems. But the reason they were able to be somewhat generous now is because the austerity cup and ball game the Cantrell administration has played in recent years has left an outsized reserve of unspent revenues. We've written about this quite a few times, actually. Even during the pandemic, the sales tax receipts weren't as bad as Gilbert Montano's budgets projected. But the imaginary projected deficit just around the corner kept us from even spending COVID relief funds in a timely and effective manner. I've argued, and continue to believe, this was an intentional manifestation of the Cantrell administration's conservative ideology. Anyway, the city has these funds available and the council is right to use them. The fact that they weren't included in the mayor's proposal is evidence that the council had to force it to happen.  Just imagine what they could have done if the school system hadn't set itself on fire. 

Speaking of which, did you know, there is one open seat on the Orleans Parish School Board waiting to be filled?  It's on your December 7 ballot. 

The only competitive New Orleans race in the Dec. 7 runoff election will pit a political newcomer against a long-time fixture in the city’s education sector for a seat on the Orleans Parish School Board. 

Gabriela Biro, a Gentilly hairstylist and first-time political candidate, said she decided to run for the 2nd District seat because she didn’t feel comfortable voting for the other candidates running in her district. The 2nd district includes New Orleans East, Gentilly, Pontchartrain Park and the Upper 9th Ward. 

“I had been tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils in many voting instances,” Biro said. “And I was like, I’ll just do this.”

Biro came in second in the Nov. 5 primary election, where none of the three candidates for the seat cleared the 50%-plus one threshold to avoid a runoff.

Biro’s opponent, Eric “Doc” Jones, came in first in November. Jones, who previously ran for a seat on OPSB and the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, has worked in education for decades — first as a teacher and later as a charter school board member and education consultant.

It was a little bit surprising to me that the odd man out of the runoff, Entergy executive Chan Tucker, was the most heavily funded by the national charter school lobbying Death Star that has been placing candidates on school boards with relative ease for years now. Notice also that this article quotes BOTH candidates statements that suggest openness to taking more schools back from the chartering organizations.  Looks like twenty years of New Orleans's "experiment" with an all-charter school system hasn't been a fantastic experience for voters. 

Of course, anti-charter rhetoric in the runoff is a lot more believable coming from the union-endorsed newcomer than it does coming from the former charter school board member and "education consultant" who once worked as a recruiter for Teach for America. Especially now that he's adding equivocations. 

In an interview last week, Jones called the school district’s structure “dysfunctional.” He ran his initial campaign this year as a pro-district school candidate, saying that he would like the district to take over failing charter schools. His stance drew the attention of pro-charter groups, which spent over $200,000 against Jones and another pro-district candidate as they campaigned for the Nov. 5 election. Last week, Jones said the district should avoid taking over failing schools and should instead partner with them to avoid closures. Jones said he would adjust the accountability framework for schools.

Jones said he favors district oversight, but only to a point: “As long as the oversight doesn’t interfere with their day-to-day operations, it doesn’t interfere with hiring practices, it doesn’t interfere with their curriculum selection, it doesn’t interfere with their mutual contracts they have in their building.”

The district should do "oversight" that doesn't actually have anything to say about how a charter school operates.  Okay, got it. 

That article also features an amusing dialog between Jones and the reporter asking about a grade inflation scandal that got him kicked off of the Coghill Charter board as well as a series of ethics violations and resume discrepancies. To me, the funniest one was the part where we learn "pro bono" is the Latin for "give me $5000." 

Verite News confirmed that he has worked at the school, albeit in a pro bono position. In 2015, the Louisiana Board of Ethics filed charges against Jones over his employment at the school. According to the complaint, Jones worked as the school’s chief academic officer, a position for which he received no compensation. 

The ethics charge stemmed from $5,000 he invoiced the school for staff training, even though such training was part of his normal duties in the job for which he agreed to work for free. The ethics board later voted to issue a “letter of caution” to Jones, dismissing the charges.

But there's more in there I wouldn't want to spoil. Just know that Verite's questions to Jones definitely do not make him mad at all. 

Anyway, one of those candidates will be working on solutions to the school system's ongoing fiscal crisis next year.  Which one should that be?

The intolerable acts

The Landry steamroller is just getting warmed up. There's so much coming so fast that it is a struggle to get a bead on what specific historical period of horror our reactionary Governor and Legislature are trying to revive. Is it Jim Crow voting rights and incarceration policy? Or is it Gilded Age spoils politics and industrial scale corruption?   Whatever it is, they do exhibit a special fondness for the post-Reconstruction era. At the moment, they seem particularly focused on union busting. 

Emboldened by Louisiana’s election last fall of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature will try over the next few months to weaken public-sector unions and slash worker benefits.

A cluster of at least 15 proposed laws takes aim at public-sector unions’ ability to bargain with employers, the system for compensating workers sidelined by injury and a requirement that child laborers must receive lunch breaks. Others would cut unemployment benefits and limit how much doctors can make when treating people for workers' compensation claims.

That's a lot at one time. Last year I heard some low key talk among political watchers that maybe Jeff Landry as Governor wouldn't be quite so bad compared to someone like former LABI head, Stephen Waguespack. The thinking there was that, although, Landry is a fire breathing reactionary, he's also kind of stupid compared to a dead-eyed operator like Wags so maybe he wouldn't get quite as much done. Well, it turns out that was all cope. When there are Republican super-majorities in the Legislature, they could put Neuty the Nutria in the Governor's chair to sign off on everything and the agenda would sail on through undisturbed. 

The other thing they've got going for them is their decision to go for a maximalist agenda right off the bat.  The first year of a new Governor and legislature is always the best time to do this. There hasn't been enough time yet for the inevitable power conflicts among lawmakers and between the legislature and the Governor to develop.  That stuff usually starts to set in after the first round of budgetary decisions have to be made. Money has a way of breaking party solidarity even within a large majority. The policy decisions made now are likely to cause a fiscal reckoning down the road. But right now, it all just feels like patronage payola so it glides right through.

Anyway, as we've already said about the crime session, each measure passed this year represents a rollback of decades worth of organizing and agitating undone.  Every single thing they break will be its own eternity of hard work to put back together.  It's exactly the same with these anti-labor bills.  And just like the crime package, they're all coming, as Clancy Dubos says here, through a big "firehose."

Instead, Landry has embarked on a fast-paced, hard-right push that includes more culture wars, less government help for those struggling at the bottom, expanding the state’s already-generous corporate welfare programs, further privatization of public education and removing layers of consumer protection.

He also wants to rewrite Louisiana’s “bloated, outdated, antiquated, and much-abused” constitution. To that end, he’s pushing lawmakers behind the scenes to adjourn their annual session early so that they can convene for a third special session to hurriedly adopt an agenda set by the governor.

The current “regular” session began only last week, and many lawmakers are already tired of having to drink, metaphorically, from Landry’s firehose of proposals — little to none of which he talked about as a candidate last autumn.

Maybe he didn't talk very much about it as a candidate (there was barely a campaign anyway)  but it isn't like nobody could have predicted this was going to be the agenda. Landry's proposals are all drawn from longstanding LABI wishlists as well as model legislation being enacted by GOP controlled governments in many other states right now.

In fact all of this (including the constitutional re-write) was "on the ballot," so to speak in 2019. That year saw what was left of the State Democratic Party by that point band together in an all-hands-on-deck effort to re-elect John Bel Edwards and stave off Eddie Rispone. That campaign made it clear to voters that what we're seeing now as the Landry agenda was on the table then. In 2023, they barely said or did anything at all. 

Which brings us to the question, whose fault is all of this, really? It's one thing to step back and shake our heads at how bad it is when the bad people get to run the government. But if we're going to do anything about it, we have to ask why didn't anyone try to stop the bad people from running the government in the first place? That's what today's party leadership elections are all about. 

Once the results roll in from the Louisiana elections Saturday, March 23, we’ll know who voters have chosen to be on the Democratic State Central Committee, which should vote for party chair and other leadership positions next month.

There’s a total of 210 seats on the committee, two for each state House district. About half of those seats had only one candidate qualify to run, so they’re automatically on the committee. Another 24 had nobody qualify, meaning the next chair will appoint people to these seats after the April leadership election.

In other words, 84 seats are up for grabs on Saturday.

Vying for many of these seats are members of Blue Reboot, a group of both incumbent and new candidates committed to electing a new party chair. More than 40 Blue Reboot candidates also ran unopposed. In some of the New Orleans races, U.S. Congressman Troy Carter, a Democrat, has backed opponents of Blue Reboot candidates.

Some in the party blame current chair Katie Bernhardt for Democrats’ disastrous showing in the fall elections, often citing ads she made early last year in which she appeared to be considering a run for governor. There have also been many cases of infighting.

So far former state representative Randal Gaines, a Democrat from LaPlace, has officially thrown his name in the hat. Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis is considering a run, and some have mentioned two-time statewide candidate Caroline Fayard’s name as well.

After Saturday, we’ll have a better idea of how strong momentum is for the Blue Reboot reform candidates from seeing how well they fare against longtime party players, some of which have more name recognition, and others in the state’s most liberal and conservative districts.

Perhaps you can tease out from those few paragraphs that even if "Blue Reboot" scores a win today, it's highly likely the Democratic "infighting" will continue. Clearly, Louisiana deserves a more forceful and organized opposition to Landryism than what they're getting from the Democrats as currently constituted. Merely firing the Chair is one very small step in what promises to be a long struggle for that.  Some of the Blue Reboot candidates appear committed to the longer project.  I'm not sure all of them are. 

Anyway you can see a list of Blue Rebooters here.  But there's more to the story than just their slate.  Antigravity has undertaken the immense task of telling as much of that story as can be uncovered. Their voter guide features blurbs on every DSCC and DPEC candidate on the ballot. (Insofar as there is enough information available on them.)  Meanwhile, DSA has its own take which includes a more narrowly focused slate of endorsements and recommendations.  These races can feel like bewildering inside baseball to most voters. All of those links should help. 

But electing more and better Democrats to party positions isn't going to stop Landry's anti-labor intolerable acts.  That's going to require more immediate and direct action.  Not sure what form that takes just yet.

What does the "government affairs officer" do, exactly?

Blake Corley is quoted at the top of this article expressing his shock and disappointment at the arrest of the grifters for whom he had been laundering money into political contributions. It's hard to imagine he could be that surprised, though.  I mean if anyone should have known what was going on, it would be the person whose specific job it was to handle the operation.  

The complaint alleges the Patels created a fake lender which they used to “make” a $8,540,000 loan to Precision Powered Products, a Houston-based company, allegedly to expand the company in Puerto Rico. That loan was never made.

However, according to the complaint, the Patels allegedly then had 80% of the fake loan secured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in October 2021 — and then sold the loan to Memphis broker-dealer Hanover Securities the next month for a profit — netting them millions of dollars. The FBI alleges they then transferred that money into accounts controlled by Trisha Patel.

The complaint further alleges that Trisha Patel gave $2.1 million of that money to an unnamed attorney, bought $500,000 into cryptocurrency, gave $200,000 to her four children’s private schools and spent $81,000 on a new BMW. She spent another $91,000 on rent.

According to the complaint, she used another $1.2 million to pay “various attorneys, lobbyists, and consultants on behalf of Nikesh Patel.” The complaint does not name the attorneys, lobbyists and consultants, but Corley, who denied that he is involved, has worked for the Patels and their businesses, including as the chief government affairs officer and in-house counsel for PPP and American Powered Pumps, a new Florida-based company.

“The majority of the remaining funds went to another business entity associated with the Patels,” the complaint reads, though it does not identify the entity. Trisha Patel is listed in a press release as the owner of American Powered Pumps, which formed last year.

One expects the Government Affairs Officer is the person responsible for the interactions highlighted above. Or at least one expects that he is heavily involved in shepherding them. In any case he took about $100,000 of the fraud money and put it into a couple of PACs from where it was spread to a long list of state political figures. The Gambit article gives a pretty thorough accounting of that.

While it's true that candidates don't always have a lot of control over who contributes to their campaigns and not every contribution automatically implies a quid pro quo and so forth, we can focus on a couple of salient matters in this case. For example, there's the curious case of Corley's fiance's recent campaign for the State House. Despite her status as a complete unknown 27 year old challenger to a well-liked Democratic incumbent, Madison O'Malley immediately attracted immense institutional support from Dem Party insiders. 

At the end of October 2022, Corley and his fiancee O’Malley attended a Diwali event at the White House with Trisha Patel. Also present, according to publicly available information, was Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Katie Bernhardt.

Not long after the White House event, O’Malley set up a campaign committee, launching her bid against Rep. Mandie Landry in New Orleans. Within a month, Trisha Patel, her in-laws Rohini and Ajay Patel, Desai, Caimano and the state Build USA PAC had donated a combined $15,000 to O’Malley.

That race between O’Malley and incumbent Landry, both Democrats, garnered significant attention. The Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee endorsed O’Malley, as did several high-profile Democrats, including Congressman Troy Carter, Gov. John Bel Edwards and former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu.

It was a stunning development at the time. And, thanks to Landry's broad grass roots support in the district, it didn't pay off. (Landry won with an overwhelming 66% of the vote.) But it does indicate just how detached Democratic Party leadership have become from their voters. That they'd spend so much time and energy on public endorsements and campaigning for this one fraudulent candidate in a single house district while doing practically nothing to stem the tide of embarrassment in the statewide races that year illustrates how broken and corrupt an operation they're running now. 

These next few years are going to extremely difficult for Louisiana. The worst people in the state have free rein to max out on their worst impulses. And with the "opposition party" content to sit around collecting checks from criminals and do little else in the way of opposition, we can only expect the worst outcomes.

Breaking the city

With the election already upon us, I just wanted to highlight this one aspect of your presumptive next Governor's campaign I don't think has been centered in the press the way it probably should have been. Of course, there's a lot we can say about Jeff Landry's venality or his stupidity, or even his bigotry. But the most alarming matter that confronts us this month is his outright hostility toward the city of New Orleans in particular. 

A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.

“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”

“But we will.”

This is something that has been a long time coming. The political independence of the city and its capacity to protect its residents from the worst abuses of state government has been under constant attack since Katrina. The privatization of the schools, the destruction of public housing, the rampant and unchecked gentrification has chipped away at the city's heart. 

We semi-sarcastically lament from time to time that nobody actually lives here anymore. But the truth is, New Orleans is the state's leading city in name only.  It isn't even the most populous parish anymore. More to the point, the political base it once held has reduced to a shadow.  In recent cycles, local elections have taken on a chaotic nature. The so-called "machines" and patronage networks that once defined city politics don't really exist anymore.  Their surviving remnants, inheritors of diminishing sinecures in the con-profit space, or in neighborhood churches, or in bail bonds, etc. operate in ad-hoc coalitions but none of them command the GOTV apparatus that was once overwhelming and automatic. Intra-city politics in the Cantrell era is the age of incoherence and power vacuums. 

In state politics, that manifests as a lack of clout for the city overall. Once upon a time, a gubernatorial candidate with a strong showing out of New Orleans was at least a third of the way to winning. That's no longer the case. In 2019 it took a massive, unlikely to ever be repeated, effort to shake out every last vote in order to save John Bel Edwards's reelection. Even just four years later, there are fewer votes to shake out now. The COVID and (I know it's a problematic term) post-COVID era has brought an accelerated exodus as housing and insurance costs rise, and as the threat of hurricanes and sea level rise makes life here seem ever more tenuous. The city never fully recovered from Katrina and what remains is fading away.  

And it won't end there. Like I've been saying all these nearly twenty years, now, this is more or less a deliberate project of our city and state's ruling classes who are just as happy as ever to swim in a smaller pond as long as they remain the big fish. Last year's recall petition was a flex by that class in more ways than one. Even though it didn't remove the mayor from office, it did impose a kind of discipline on the mayor by demonstrating a threat.  The fact that a millionaire can always throw the administration into chaos on a moment's notice by funding a recall establishes who is the real boss. The concurrent emergence of the NOLA Coalition and crime panic reaction shows how effective this tactic is at setting the agenda. The other thing the recall did was open up the voter rolls to scrutiny by dishonest and politically driven actors.  Regardless of who becomes the next Secretary of State, there will almost certainly be a full purge of Orleans voters in the coming term.  

The goal in view now is a state whose politics turns less on the concerns of a political base in the city and the people who live there and is more at the whim of the Governor and his much smaller base of a few millionaires and associated kleptocrats with little or no friction from outside. Kind of like some other states we know. 

.@jefflandry says his vision is to make Louisiana more like Mississippi. #lagov

— Jan Moller (@jmollerLBP) April 26, 2023

What are "pro-choice proclivities"?

 The entire premise of this Prospect article is wrong.  

Since Dobbs, voters in Republican Kansas, Ohio, and Montana have rejected far-right overreaching ballot measures and affirmed their support for the right to abortion even with curbs in place. In last year’s midterm elections, voters’ concerns about the loss of that right helped keep the Senate in Democratic hands and blunt the Republican wave in the House that overconfident prognosticators repeatedly claimed was nigh.

This fall, upcoming gubernatorial elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana will test just how deep the revulsion over these far-right Republican excesses runs in the South, and what those races may presage in abortion access politics beyond the region. All three states have Republican supermajorities in their legislatures. The Dobbs decision specifically affirmed a Mississippi statute devised to explicitly challenge Roe v. Wade. But many Republicans have been shaken by the backlash.

No. Louisiana's gubernatorial election will not test voters' aversion to GOP anti-abortion politics in any way.  I understand why national political analysts would like it to. It certainly could do that.  The mid-term results and the single ballot issue results this article cites do, indeed, indicate that abortion rights can be a winning issue for Democrats in supposedly "red" territory.  But that can only happen if the Democratic candidates run on defending those rights. The Democrat in our Governor's race is decidedly not doing that. 

The Prospect article wants to pretend that he is, or could be. But the closest it can come to achieving this pretense is to describe him as having "Pro-choice proclivities." 

Louisiana holds its open primary in mid-October. Gov. John Bel Edwards, an anti-abortion Democrat, is term-limited. Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running to succeed Edwards, sticks to the loud and proud extremes favored by the far-right Republicans on abortion. If he survives attacks from his Republican opponents in the already nasty “jungle” primary, he appears to be poised to romp over Democrat Shawn Wilson, an African American former state transportation secretary and first-time candidate with pro-choice proclivities and little statewide name recognition. Like their Mississippi neighbors, Louisianans mostly vote along racial lines.

To demonstrate those proclivities, the Prospect cites Wilson's extremely milquetoast rhetoric in support of rape and incest exceptions as well as the fact that he affirmatively answered a yes/no debate question about a hypothetical statewide referendum on abortion.  This is hardly anything.  Certainly it is not indicative of the "Post-Dobbs strategy" of full-throated support for abortion rights the article wants these elections to "test." 

In fact, in interviews, Wilson sounds very much like a 90s Third Way Democrat seeking to accommodate anti-abortion sentiment while also not posing a direct threat to an individual's "private decisions." 

In an interview last week, Wilson didn’t describe himself as being “pro-choice” like abortion rights supporters typically do.

The Democrat said he personally opposes abortion except in cases where a pregnant person was a victim of rape or incest – or their health is at risk. But he also believes his personal beliefs shouldn’t be imposed on others, and that individuals need more flexibility to make their own decisions about ending a pregnancy. 

When asked about abortion, Wilson said he is “not interested in preventing folks from making decisions that are private,” and “I dare not question their doctor’s expertise.”

But after Dobbs, those private decisions are already threatened. State laws that are on the books now criminalize them.  Wilson is not promising to do anything about that. He's meekly defending a status quo that doesn't exist anymore.  During the third debate, Wilson was asked why he had begun the campaign with the words "Pro-life" displayed on his website but then taken that down. All he said was, "I am personally a decision maker for me and my family." We can barely even understand what that means for his family members, let alone what it might mean for the people of the state.

What a waste. The thing is, it is probably true that Democrats can make up some ground in GOP dominated states by running campaigns that speak up for abortion rights rather than just hint a candidate's "pro-choice proclivities." The "Dobbs strategy" does, in fact, seem viable.  Shawn Wilson isn't running on that, though. 

Team Jeff and Liz

We're about to install quite a package in two of the highest statewide offices next year.  It didn't come cheap. 

But Landry has made it obvious in several other ways that he is not just quietly backing Murrill but actively pushing for her with his supporters.  The two candidates share political advisers. Landry’s longtime political consultant, Brent Littlefield, is also working for Murrill. Murrill’s campaign manager, Jason Hebert, is running Protect Louisiana’s Children, one of the political action committee’s supporting Landry’s election efforts.

The Republican Attorneys General Association, where Landry is a member of leadership, gave Murrill a very early endorsement in February over her two Republican opponents. Likewise, the Republican Party of Louisiana, where Landry has great influence, backed Murrill early over Stefanski and Maley last month.

On a more personal level, Landry’s wife Sharon donated $5,000 to Murrill, the maximum allowed by an individual in a campaign cycle. Cajun PAC II, a political action committee supporting Landry and run by his brother Benjamin, also gave Murrill $5,000, according to a review of campaign finance reports.

Murrill’s most prolific campaign donors also tend to be longtime, major supporters of Landry.  Her top 15 campaign contributors — those who have given her campaign at least $12,000 combined through personal accounts, family members and businesses — have also given money to Landry, his PACs or the Louisiana Republican Party’s efforts to elect him.

Four of Murrill’s top five campaign donors — people who have given her campaign at least $20,000 — are Landry mega donors. Each gave at least $125,500 to Landry’s gubernatorial election efforts, according to a review of campaign finance records.

That article includes a table listing some of the more prominent high rollers that Liz and Jeff share among their donor rolls. It's a real fun group. 

All the idle little lords

Our post yesterday about who is profiting from the coming carbon capture "bonanza" introduced us to William Gray Stream, heir to the Stream family oil fortune. As a function of his inherited status, Stream has spent time buttering up politicians and sitting on important state boards and stuff. But, like a lot of these guys, he hasn't really made or created anything.  He tried to make somebody else's tech startup work for a while but that didn't seem to pan out. Now he's likely to reel in passive income from federal carbon subsidies. 

There are a ton of guys like this running around now at this stage of empire deterioration. Little lords who didn't build the thing they own now by accident. But their ownership of the thing holds dire consequences for the rest of us. (Yes you are supposed to conjure an image of Elon here.) 

Today, we're reading this story about Jeff Landry's latest ethics charge. Landry has a number of shameful relationships with wealthy benefactors that ought to disqualify him from holding a major public office on sheer principal. But we're way beyond that now. 

At least one flight did violate the law, the state Ethics Board thinks. On Friday, Landry said on Facebook that the Ethics Board charged him over one of the free flights from a top donor. A Republican, he labeled the charge "election interference," and blamed Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who appoints the board members. 

The flights show ties that do not turn up on public records between Landry and some of his top backers. 

Greg Mosing of Broussard, a wealthy businessman who also ran a pro-Landry PAC called Make Louisiana Great Again, said he took Landry on a host of trips on a Bombardier Challenger jet in recent years. The destinations included Hawaii, Dallas, South Dakota and South Carolina, dating from 2020.

Really looking forward to seeing any criticism of the candidate derided as "election interference" for the next month or so. The thin skin on modern Republicans is amazing.  

Anyway, that's not really the point here. What is the point is the link in this story elaborating on Greg Mosing, "wealthy businessman."  Let's take a look at how he comes by that. 

Frank's International's roots date back to 1938, when Frank Mosing founded Frank's Casing Crew & Rental Tools, an oil well casing company that he initially operated out of his garage in Louisiana. Over time the company expanded into oil field services, including manufacturing pipes and connectors for oil and gas wells. Now called Frank's International, it has manufacturing facilities in 60 countries and is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Frank's grandson, Donald Keith Mosing, serves as the company's executive chairman and was previously its CEO and President. The company went public in 2013; the Mosing family still owns more than 75% of the company

Way back in 1938, Frank Mosing tinkered around in his garage at just the right time to end up an oil field services small business tyrant. And the rest is history. And now Greg gets to fly Jeff Landry to CPAC so he can complain about wokeness. 

These are the guys who are turning the wheel now.  And none of them have the faintest idea how it even works. 

Hello, and welcome to a fabulous New Year of blogging yellowly

Unfortunately this new year is still among the 2020s which, as we all know, are categorically bad. Anyway, I know I've been saying it is time to get the Yellow Blog back into running shape for a while and I know that every time Twitter starts to die, it seems like that is the time to crank it back up over here. But I really do mean it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that does it. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the character limit for tweets will increase from 280 to 4,000 characters early next month.

The feature, which was first proposed in December, is one of a number of changes to the social media platform that the tech billionaire plans to roll out over the coming months after purchasing it for $44 billion last October.

The increase in character length will be only the second time in Twitter’s 17-year history that it has changed the limit, having previously boosted the original 140 limit to 280 in 2017.

As the big social media sites have absorbed and siloed off the whole internet over the course of the past decade, so has Twitter eaten up more and more of my blog posts. That's mostly because I am incredibly lazy and it's easy to just tweet a half-baked thought out and let it go. But, when I'm doing it right, a blog post shouldn't be longer than one or two tweets anyway. Ideally, this is where the half-baked thoughts are supposed to go. 

But, also, this is supposed to be where I put stuff that I want to remember later. And a chronological, taggable, searchable web log of annotated bookmarks is far better for that purpose than the increasingly unreliable instant gratification machine currently being dismantled by a chaotic billionaire.  And if the tweet stretches out to blog post length anyway, (I just checked. So far this post isn't even over 2,000 characters.) it might as well be posted over here instead.  So this time, we mean it. We're gonna try and put the stuff that happens this year on the Yellow Blog so that it doesn't all blow by in a confusing haze this time. Besides, 2023 makes 20 years of posting here so we need to have a nice round archival number. 

I think what we'll do for a while is try to get at least one post up every day or so that collects some of those annotated bookmarks I mentioned. There are a couple of drafts of longer form writing that have been lingering for a while which I would like to finish but let's wade back into this a step at a time.

With that in mind, here is today's stuff I wrote down so I might remember it later. 

The Louisiana Democrats will need to find their own loser candidate for governor instead of borrowing a Republican loser

Late last year, there was a parlor game discussion going around trying to parse whether Dem-aligned power brokers and/or centrist establishment media would rally around a Bill Cassidy campaign for Governor in 2023. Cassidy is a "weird dude" and a perpetual darling of the Advocate editorial page. But that's not exactly an unassailable coalition to ride up against the Jeff Landry juggernaut. The last reporting we've seen has Landry wielding a $3 million war chest plus the official endorsement of the state Republican Party and multiple Super PACs all of which multiplies his fundraising capacity many times over. Anyway, Cassidy decided it wasn't worth it. Much better to sit around in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body doing nothing forever than to take on that headache. His fellow Senator John Kennedy (although he theoretically might have posed a stronger challenge to Landry) reached a similar conclusion last week.

When Bill said he wouldn't run, all of that speculation about Democrats and media picking a favorite Republican shifted over to Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser. For a long time it seemed like Billy and Jeff deserved each other.  For example, we know they both have a problem with librarians. Landry is on a typical "anti-woke" crusade to burn them all while Billy is retaliating against them for blowing the whistle on his corruption. Heck, since the day they were elected to their current positions, we've had them neck and neck in a pool to see which of the two would be the first one indicted and whose scandal would be the stupidest.  Maybe this is just a sign of the times, since despite the fact that each has had his share of doozies over this term, neither has yet landed in jail. Guess we should have bet the over.

And like any pair of like alpha dunces vying for the same space, Jeff and Billy clearly do not like each other.  Nungesser hasn't been shy about saying so. In December, Nungesser said that he had to run against Landry if Kennedy didn't because "Jeff is a bad person." That's was after a long summer of scrambling for endorsements and pre-announcing that he was planning to announce a candidacy.  

And yet, today, Billy says, nevermind all that. 

“But the worst pandemic in our lifetime and a series of devastating storms leaves me with unfinished business to bring tourism back to its peak performance, especially for the near 250,000 families who rely on this industry for their livelihoods. For that reason, and after much thought and prayer, I have decided to seek re-election to the Office of Lt. Governor"

Those devastating storms and the pandemic did not happen just this last month, though.  So who knows what really got Billy to back down? The upshot is the Democrats no longer have an easy way to just quietly sit out a Governor's election they had clearly been planning to just quietly sit out.  Can't wait to see what they come up with. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement these days, that's for sure. 

Ad-hoc garbage service

This Sunday morning, we were stunned to see a Richard's Disposal truck picking up on our block. Turns out they're dealing with a "backlog" maybe? What is going on here?

In a statement Monday night, Richard said the company is addressing the backlog with 70 additional personnel, pulling from crews in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss. Richard said he and the company "look forward to working cooperatively with the city council, mayor and all of city government to address the market conditions and other circumstances that affect timely trash collection,” according to the statement.

The statement did not address the administration's decision to turn over some routes to different contractors. 

Those "other contractors on some routes" is confusing. Apparently the city is juggling the routes that contractually belong to Richards among Waste Pro and IV Waste, the companies who recently took over Metro's territory. Now they're encroaching on Richards bit by bit as well. But it all seems to be happening according more to whim than a comprehensible scheme. 

Richard’s contract expires in March, 2024, though the city can terminate it for cause or "convenience," which essentially means it can be ended at the city's discretion. Officials have previously said they want to rebid the contract this year, but they have not laid out a time frame. 

Asked how long he expects his company to supplement Richard’s, Torres said officials had advised him “to be prepared to do it until they put it out to bid.”

Meanwhile, they're just making it up as they go. And paying a premium for it. 

My FNBC jury duty notice was sadly lost in the mail

 I didn't even get invited to the tailgate party.  Anyway, the trial is kicking off. 

A jury was seated Monday in the federal bank fraud trial of First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan, Jr., as lawyers readied for what is expected to be a weekslong trial probing the actions of Ryan, other executives and bank borrowers ahead of the institution's stunning 2017 collapse.

I have said many times there is probably a good book someone could put together centered around this bank collapse that might tell a broad story about the post-Katrina era of New Orleans politics, real estate, education, and non-profit corruption.  I don't really see this trial telling that whole story but... I may have liked to take a look at this list.

Lawyers involved in the case have said the prosecution's witness list initially was between 100 and 200, though it will call far fewer over the next few weeks. Witnesses are likely to include at least some of those who have taken guilty pleas in the case, including Gregory St. Angelo, the bank's former top lawyer.

Speaking of post-Katrina failures and corruption...

This is part of a series the T-P has been running about "changing streets" or some such. I think the idea here is to frame the massive displacement and dispossession New Orleanians have endured as just "inevitable progress" or whatever. But some of this stuff you can't gloss over. 

According to statistics from the New Orleans Data Center, since 2000, the area encompassing the Marigny, Bywater, St. Claude and St. Roch neighborhoods has gone from 61% Black and 32% White to 17% Black and 72% White. The number of households with annual income over $100,000 a year rose from 3% to 19%.

The article trots out familiar apologists CW Cannon and Rich Campanella to sigh and shrug but at least Cashauna Hill is here to point out that these aren't just natural forces at work. They are deliberate policy choices.  

Many of those pushed out crossed St. Claude Avenue, where the process continues today, said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. 

Hill said population changes and demographic shifts are often inevitable, and said opposing gentrification does not mean opposing investment.

The problem, she said, is that the city’s leaders have consistently favored policies that encourage gentrification — pouring millions into Crescent Park and the Rampart-St. Claude streetcar line and failing to rein in short-term rentals — while neglecting policies that would prevent it — primarily funding affordable housing.

No need to catalog all of the atrocities right now. But I will point out that the City Planning Commission is once again this month rolling out yet another round of STR regulation that looks on track to once again favor wealth over residents.  We'll catch up on that later. But seeing this picture of where our neighborhoods are today, reminded me of this remark from Mitch Landrieu when he took office as mayor. 

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

This is the city we chose to become.  

When the "cyberattack" eats your homework

Amazing story from over the weekend. Let's see if we can sum it up in under 4,000 characters. I think we can. 

So, to start with a cop shot a dog. Apparently this was not the first dog this cop shot either. Which is why the owners of the dog that was shot (the second dog) requested the Public Integrity Bureau file on the first shooting as documentation for their lawsuit against the city. The city agreed to hand over the document. Except  WHOOPS it turns out the city cannot actually produce it because it is locked away in the Iron Mountain. 

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

So, according to this report, the city hands over "hundreds of boxes" of public records (which departments and types of records is unknown although clearly NOPD is one) to a private contractor who can, apparently, hold them up for ransom in the (seemingly inevitable) event that the city falls behind on its bill.  That's very interesting! We'd love to know more about that situation. But, WHOOPS guess what. 

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city's BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

Oh man that "cyberattack" sure did a number on public records, huh. Man that is a shame that nobody can get anything from those databases. Unless, somebody... looks it it up and gives it to them... wait.. what? 

What?

Here are Buyspeed purchase orders the city pulled for @misaacstein last year. https://t.co/jffDInLBzN https://t.co/KuGGmE7HWD

— Charles Maldonado (@Maldonado_CB) January 9, 2023

Sometimes the cyber attacks and sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Just a mystery we'll never fully get a grip on. I wonder if it is going to attack those unwritten garbage contracts next.

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Honestly, I have no idea what Saints fans are so upset about this week. They're all ready to fire Dennis Allen after one season as Head Coach even though that one season was the greatest of his entire NFL career to date. In three prior seasons with the Raiders, the dude had never won more than 4 games. This year he won three whole games more than that. That's a 75 percent improvement! 

I'm never clear on what it is Saints fans are really after these days. We already won football in 2009 so there's no need to stress over that anymore. From that point until the time when the brutal criminal enterprise that is the NFL collapses under the weight of its own contradictions,  I just want to see as many interesting things happen as possible. A lot of interesting things happened to the Saints in 2022.  We listed some of them here. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is really a matter of taste. 

All pro football teams are pretty evenly matched talentwise. Most games are decided according to a combination of dumb luck and which team is the least injured that week. Most of the jawing about whose fault that is or is not is just how fans have fun. NFL fans are basically conspiracy theory hobbyists constructing grand bullshit theories to draw certainties out of what is essentially unknowable. You feel a lot better about it all once you understand this.  Not everybody wins the Superbowl every year. Most teams, in fact, do not! Hopefully fans of the teams who do not don't see this as a complete waste of their time. How sad, that would be if they did. 

Anyway, I can't have strong feelings about Dennis Allen one way or the other.  He seems like a pretty boring middle-management guy. That's probably why he's risen to this particular point of mediocrity.  I definitely don't think the Saints got the most out of their offensive players this year. That seemed like a coaching issue to me. But, again, I'm just spinning theories like anybody else there. Whatever they do, I hope they don't bring those awful black helmets back.  I don't think those helped matters one bit.

Election Day

I'm traveling during the worst possible week. There was an LSU-Bama game I would have liked to be closer to home during. There was a Saints game on Monday night I could have had tickets to. Apparently there are also Hubigs pies again? Maybe? I'll find out when I get back, I guess. This is also very likely the last week that the website Twitter Dot Com will exist and, even though that technically follows us everywhere in our phones, it feels weird to be watching from unfamiliar places while that news breaks as well. 

I am going to miss having an easy way to do quick, words based, posts from the phone, though.  Because, even though that's what I'm doing right now, this site really isn't for that. My thumbs are already tired.  

And yet there is plenty to say about today's elections which we'll have to get to later. A tl;dr bit would say that the Democrats are about to reap what they've sewn through their failures to pass a more robust stimulus in general, and their failures to protect voting and labor organizing rights in particular.  Those would have been the best ways to build real power for real people.  But the Democrats, being Democrats, aren't sure that's what they really want to do. They're about to get wiped out because of this. I'm not sure the myopic and careerist party leadership will even see that as a setback, though. 

Locally, it's even worse. The stakes remain limited to the career advancement of minor functionaries in the New Orleans area and the state Dem party's maintenance of inconsequential sinecures within its shrinking sphere of influence. 

Meanwhile the city, the state, and the nation are sinking further into a depressing kind of neo-fascism or neo-feudalist techno dystopia. Whichever term you prefer is fine. Neither really describes it clearly.  But they do sort of evoke the mood of it. In any case, thanks to the complete failure of those who place themselves into positions of political "leadership" no one is able to do anything to stop it. 

When I get back home, (and when Twitter finally dies leaving me nothing but time to write here) I'll try going into more detail.  But while we do still have Twitter, I can link to some threads and put the phone down. 

Here is the DSA guide for this cycle.  And here is the Antigravity guide. 

This is a thread where I read and added some notes on the guides.  And this is a thread where I punched out a couple of predictions even though I should not do those. Nobody actually knows what will happen in the future and it's important to remember that when one wants to recover one's hope.  

We'll work on that when we get home too, I guess.