I'm still waiting for that Epstein crossover moment

I'm still very behind on a lot of things I wanted to put on the blog this week. Probably won't get caught up for a while. But this is one for that if-I-don't-write-it-down-I'm-gonna-forget-about-it category. So here it goes.

Among the latest characters to pop up in the FNBC saga is real estate shark Gary Gibbs. (No, he is not the ex Saints defensive coordinator by that same name. Yes, I checked.) His case is one of several instances revealed so far where the bank appears to have been shoveling out new bad loans in order to cover old bad loans in the expectation that some external event might come about to turn everything around.

Regulators from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a notice filed last week that Robert Brad Calloway, a former loan officer and chief credit officer at First NBC Bank, submitted false or misleading documentation in order to make a series of loans to Diamondhead, Mississippi-based businessman Gary R. Gibbs that totaled $123 million at the time of the New Orleans bank's collapse.

The filing says that Calloway, along with First NBC'S former CEO, Ashton Ryan, got the loans to Gibbs approved when they knew he didn't have the necessary collateral, and that they also knew the money was being used by Gibbs to cover payments on existing loans instead of for Gibbs' business expenses, as was represented to the bank's loan committee.

In Gibbs's case one such external event may have been his successful conning of a former business associate's widow out of her inheritance. She has filed a civil suit seeking to recover those assets which, thanks to FNBC's collapse, now may technically belong to a vulture capital firm. 

In her civil case, Heisler is trying to keep assets that include a $2 million brokerage account, a shopping center in Metairie and a building at 844 Baronne St. from being seized by Girod LoanCo, the debt investor that bought a large portion of the First NBC loans sold by regulators last year, including the notes Heisler signed.

Girod LoanCo is a specially created company that is ultimately owned by TPG Capital, a $100 billion private investment firm co-founded by billionaire James Coulter.

Coulter, by the way, has been turning New Orleans's disasters into "opportunities" for some time now.  Here he is in 2010 dishing out advice to the 'treps at Idea Village.

Coulter told the crowd Friday  morning that there are three types of entrepreneurs: the natural, the coin flipper, and the rest of us.

The natural entrepreneur has the natural gift of gab and persuasion, which helps him find success in business. The coin-flipper is successful purely out of luck, while the rest-of-us are hard-workers.

It's not clear which entrepreneur type Coulter is supposed to be here.  If we're going by the way he describes himself to Forbes, we'd have to say he's the right-place-at-the-right-time-with-the-right-barrel-of-cash type.

I married a woman from New Orleans, so I had family here. Post-Katrina I had a number of friends call me up and say they wanted to do something to help the community – not just Habitat for Humanity or Red Cross, we’ve done that, but what can we do for the community. So we raised some money from one email and said to some friends: find some good places to put it.

One of the questions was how do you create something sustainable? And if you look at jobs here it’s likely that one of the real job creation engines will be entrepreneurship because it’s a place where people want to live.

Not so sure about that "job creation engine" of entrepreneurship in retrospect.  Unless the job we're talking about is grifter.  Post-Katrina New Orleans has been a ripe environment for those. They do like to call themselves "entrepreneurs," though. I think we've covered that a fair amount.   Maybe that's the type Coulter is.  That's more or less how this reads, anyway.

I think it takes an entire ecosystem, and to that end it has to attract entrepreneurs, and that’s about a lot of people under 30. I think the renaissance going on in education with TFA people coming into town provides a natural fuel for the city.

So the first thing you have to do is have the entrepreneurs, and the second thing is you have to have a funding system to help them. Now you see investors coming into town and investors that you didn’t know were in town showing up. The third is you have to create an infrastructure of support – the chamber of commerce and government really make it easy for entrepreneurship here. And lastly there needs to be a confidence that it can get done here. That’s part of what we’re seeing in that community that’s important – it’s exhibiting that confidence.

Coulter is the type of entrepreneur who was able to"create an infrastructure of support" within business and government circles by exhibiting a lot of confidence in order to turn the "fuel" provided by things like school charterization into a "renaissance."  Got it.  Anyway, now he owns a bunch of assets that got sucked up in the collapse of the bank that financed many of the post-K con jobs you read about.  Good for him.

I wonder how many more of these stories and characters we will read about before the FNBC case is over. I do hope someone is researching the book. If done well something like that has the potential to connect a lot of interesting threads in this city. I promise I really was just joking the other day when I suggested that maybe somewhere in the pile of politically connected non-profits, start-ups, and university projects that exert so much influence on what happens in New Orleans, somebody might have some Epstein money laying around.  But, you know, maybe that's not all that far fetched....

Anyone surprised Walter Isaacson called Joi Ito's book "brilliant and provocative"?

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) September 7, 2019

"Bond angels"

Okay let's first make some statements for the record. Posting bail bonds on behalf of people who can't afford it is a terrific harm reduction model. And since this organization is also working to end the cash bail system itself, they deserve support. Let's be clear about that at least. 

A 31-year-old man sat in the New Orleans jail for 15 days this June until he got surprising news from his attorney: Someone was posting his $2,500 bail for a heroin possession arrest. It wasn’t his fiancée, who had been trying to scrounge up the cash. “Bonded out by who?” he recalled asking. “I couldn’t believe it. They just picked me.”

The answer was an organization called the New Orleans Safety and Freedom Fund. Until this month, it has flown under the radar — except for the lucky defendants awaiting trial who have been released thanks to its money. The group's founders include Joshua Cox, a senior adviser to Mayor LaToya Cantrell who has continued posting bails since Cantrell took office, including that of the man who was arrested for heroin possession.

To the man released from jail, who asked to remain anonymous, they are the “bond angels.” His charge was refused by prosecutors the day after his release.

I'm a little curious about the Advocate's position here. This article mentions Cox's relationship with Cantrell several times.  The impression one gets is they intend it to be a hit piece on her somehow.  But tying her to a cause like this hardly seems like it should reflect poorly on her.

In any case, it is much to the Freedom Fund's credit that it has pissed off Leon Cannizzaro.  For this they probably deserve some sort of medal.

Cannizzaro declined an interview request, but he made his feelings clear in a statement.
“This is a very disturbing set of circumstances,” he said.

Family members or friends who post a cash bail with their own money will encourage a defendant to show up in court when ordered, he said. Otherwise, they stand to lose their money. “But when there is some outside group, some agency we don’t know anything about, simply posting the bond for the individual and walking away, then it gives the defendant no reason, no incentive to show up. And so he doesn’t have to be accountable,” he continued.

Still, having said all of that, it's hard to ignore the elephant in the room here. As much as we support the Freedom Fund's work, in this case it must be said that they are, in fact, terrible people. 

In an interview on Tuesday, Medbery and another group member, software developer Chris Laibe, said the Freedom Fund sprang out of the same concerns the federal judge had about the New Orleans bail system.

Medbery and Laibe said a group of entrepreneurs like them, under the name of the Krewe de Nieux, had been looking for a way to change the city’s criminal justice system.

That may seem like a small thing for now. But just make a note of it. It's likely to become relevant sooner or later.  

The money pit

Hammer's report on the still shuttered and bankrupt African American Museum in Treme has all sorts of fun stuff going on including Irvin Mayfield, First NBC, and Wisner Trust funds which I think may be some sort of super trifecta. 

Some of this is just the comedy of organizational chaos. But it's also a window into the way the local non-profit sector spreads public subsidies around among the same familiar circles of professional fund-raisers, bankers, and lawyers operating in New Orleans.  Some of them, like the unfortunate Mayfield, tend to get themselves into sticky situations and become scapegoats.  But, really, it's a whole system of backslapping corruption that brings together neighborhood associations, historic preservation purists, and start-up entrepreneurs along with the aforementioned money people to direct public and private money toward feel good projects that don't really help anyone not invested in tourism or real estate. 

This sector has done well for itself under the Landrieu administration. As the post-Katrina money begins to dry up, the party may be ending for the con-profiteers. It's never a bad time to have a friendly mayor in the pocket, though. LaToya Cantrell, you may notice, delivered her platform vision thing speech last week at Irvin's Jazz Market.  There's probably more to that than just symbolism.

Stupid mayor is stupid

In this cautionary tale, Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto slowly realizes he's made a huge mistake by giving Uber everything it wants from in return for nothing besides a momentary claim to being an "Innovation!" guy.  Here's a timeline with emails and stuff, My favorite part is probably where Peduto goes on the radio and lectures his critics as though they are children.

The emails I obtained showed that Peduto was both eager to impress the Silicon Valley hotshot and was happy to carry the company's water in public. In May 2015, Peduto and his staff fought hard both in public and behind the scenes to get the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to reduce a fine levied against the company for operating in the state without permission. After we published our story, Peduto railed against us on local radio.

"I have an opportunity to talk to the CEO of Uber on a semi-regular basis. And they're committed to creating over a thousand jobs in this city that are well-paying jobs," Peduto told Pittsburgh radio station WDVE after our story ran. "To say 'Oh my god, he's trying to help this horrible company, he's defending this horrible company. When we are creating an entire industry that brought the White House here to talk about autonomous vehicles, robotics, and everything else and will bring other companies and spinoffs for decades to come … it's unbelievably ridiculous."

Uber goes on to deliver none of the jobs, data sharing or any of the obligations of the "partnership" Peduto imagined they had agreed to because, of course. He seems frustrated about this now but then maybe next time he'll remember that when you're getting to be text buds with a billionaire venture capital creep, you're probably doing the opposite of serving your constituents well.

The takeaway here for politicians is that Uber—nor any other major corporation—is not your friend. The company has shown time and time again that it will ignore regulations, lobby ferociously, promise the moon and stars, and then act as it always has: in whatever manner is best for Uber. Uber has always done this; it's long past time for local politicians to stop handing the keys to their cities to the company.

Or any company, really.  Will your local politicians to learn this lesson, though. Not unless there's a slideshow about it at the next Entrepreneur Week.

Work is just work

This article does a pretty good job of talking about the problem of life in the 'trep age.  The root of it is the ego-driven bullshit that bubbles up from people when they are expected to "compete" to demonstrate their own virtue or worth.  But it's precisely this scam that allows employers to take advantage of people. It's also a ready excuse for individuals to be dismissive or cruel to one another.. even in the name of "doing good." The way to combat this, I think, is to stop running around expecting to derive self-worth from your job.


This doesn't mean you should fester forever in a job that makes you hate yourself.  If you find you are working in a kitten abattoir, for example, or worse, a French Quarter hotel, do what you can to get out of that as soon as you can.  But generally speaking, if you allow your job to bleed into the package of things that define you as a human being, you're setting yourself up to be manipulated. Like this:

One of the central problems with THINX is its low pay and substandard benefits. Former workers recount Agrawal calling them “ungrateful” and “selfish” when they asked for pay raises commensurate with additional responsibilities. Agrawal’s language may seem extreme, but it isn’t surprising given “do-good” capitalism’s obsession with “purpose” and “doing what you love.”

In the universe of benevolent capitalism, workers are assumed to be motivated more by mission and purpose than by their paycheck. But under capitalism, ethical or otherwise, work is what you have to do to survive. Even in the most inspiring workplace, work is still just that: work.

When capitalists like Agrawal ignore this reality and insist on reframing “work” as “purpose,” they are using their mission as a tool to extract labor-on-the-cheap. Workers may even feel guilty about asking for more money, because doing so makes it seem like they are showing up for the paycheck, rather than the cause.

But inspiration doesn’t pay the bills.

In New Orleans, home of "Entrepreneur Week," we like to celebrate this kind of exploitative nonsense basically every day. Our entire non-profit sector is dedicated to shit like this.   But, in practice, all that serves to do is glorify an enrich a narrow circle of grifters and oligarchs. For the great majority of us it's malevolent gibberish.

Jobs suck. They aren't supposed to define you or make you happy. By that same token, you aren't there to serve the greater glory of your employer. Fuckabuncha work. You don't owe your job any piece of yourself or your soul. You only owe the work and time you've agreed to be compensated for. Do that and then get the hell out of there and go live your life.

Did you have a happy 'trep week?

The "recovery" period is over.

For the first time since Hurricane Katrina, more people moved from New Orleans to other areas of the United States last year than came to the city from other communities, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.

While New Orleans continues to grow slowly thanks to births and international migration, the reversal of in-country migration is a milestone for a city that has added thousands of new residents from areas across the country during its long recovery from the 2005 flood.

If the estimates are correct, and 2016 does not prove to be an aberration, the new figures may also be a turning point in the continued growth of the city.

It's fine, though.  No need to add any more residents at all, really.  As long as we can "fight blight" by rehabbing empty houses into STRs where nobody actually lives, it makes for smoother governance, anyway.  That Census estimate has New Orleans at roughly 390,000 or so residents. By comparison, there were 10.5 million tourists here last year.  They so greatly outnumber us that we might as well not even be here at all.  A predominantly tourist population is easier to deal with. It isn't going to bother you about better services, schools, transit, etc. Crime might still be a problem. But if you keep a close eye on the places where visitors are likely to hang out you're probably OK there too.

In general terms the "New" New Orleans is smaller, whiter, more expensive, more dominated by tourism than ever. It's what the city's elites always wanted before the flood. The "recovery" has been an exercise in wish fulfillment for them. And now the mission is accomplished.  All that's left to do are the congratulations.

The mayor had plenty of those to hand out during this most recent "Entrepreneur Week." This is an annual event created by Idea Village which is now an interlocking directorate with NOLA.com consisting of the same crowd of boosters and tech bros who once upon a time foisted Ray Nagin upon us.  They're just as happy now with Mitch, though, who is himself always too happy to promote the con that all our city's social inequities can be solved, not with politics, but with apps.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Twitter account provided snippets of his address to open the Civic Innovation Summit Tuesday. "#NOLA is the definition of a resilient city. Catastrophic events provide an opportunity -- out of necessity -- to transform a community," he said. "All of the progress we've made continues to be threatened until we all move forward together."

The Landrieu administration last week launched the Digital Equity Challenge to come up with ways to connect New Orleanians who are underserved -- including low-income, minority, elderly and disabled residents -- to technology. The city is seeking proposals for the best ideas for solving the technology gap. "Connecting New Orleans' low-income residents to technology is an important step to connecting all our residents to new opportunities," Mayor Landrieu said in announcing the effort.

It's this sort of nonsense that delivers the Potemkin village we've built here. All the houses are actually hotel rooms. All the streets are movie sets. The oligarchic landowners are the wealthiest in the state. Meanwhile, the standard of living for most of its residents is poor and steadily declining. The tourism industry that feeds the fortunes of the ruling class runs on the desperation and cutthroat competition among those who create its "cultural" product and those who provide the support services that help deliver it.

Here's a look at what "entrepreneurship" means for  musicians scraping by from gig-to-gig on Frenchmen Street, for example.

Musicians are responsible for the crowds and the drink sales on Frenchmen Street. In an environment where each club has live music from 4 PM until closing time (which may be 4 AM), bands encourage the traffic. The musicians who keep the city’s culture and tourism operating year-round deserve to be paid fairly. Yet the standard pay for bands at Frenchmen Street venues with no cover is 20% of the bar plus tips during a three- to four-hour time slot. This amounts to a starvation wage, as bars pay out as little as $200 total for four- to eight-piece bands. It is common for musicians to walk away from a three-hour, no-cover gig with less than $50, including tips. Musicians must be compensated not only for the time they are performing but also for the countless hours of training and preparation that are required to play well. Music is skilled labor, and demands a high wage. With rising housing and living costs, musicians are left struggling to make a living while spending has rapidly increased at Frenchmen Street venues over the last decade.

Here also is a quick commentary on the "gig economy" writ large. Despite the speeches and presentations and editorials coming out of Entrepreneur Week, the more salient point about the app and 'trep craze is the work environment it fosters for most people just trying to make it.

Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges “doers” to “always be available,” to think about beating “the trust-fund kids,” and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about “In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I’d guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some “whiteboarding” in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.

As always, the fundamental problem is the imbalance of political power between capital and labor. Or between the owners and the chronically underemployed now euphemistically encouraged to think of themselves as "entrepreneurs." NOLA.com and Mitch Landrieu and his app aren't going to do anything to correct that.  But they are quite good at dazzling and distracting audiences from it.  And that's what this week has been all about.

'Treppin' tripe

CNBC asks us to swallow quite a load of pig guts in this story about how hot dogs saved Freret St.

While paying a little extra for a storefront in an established neighborhood can be justified, other times an ambitious business owner might gamble on a neighborhood's potential.

For New Orleans native Constantine Georges, a former federal prosecutor who served for 22 years, the idea to open a hot dog stand was already a gamble, but perhaps even more so considering the location he settled on in 2011: a 475-square-foot shack in a traditionally economically depressed New Orleans neighborhood on Freret Street.

Oookayy.. sure. And it helps also when the city is investing federal community development block grant money in upgrading the streets, sidewalks and landscaping. It also helps when the area is the focus of a Commercial Corridor Revitalization Program designed to combine grant money, tax credits, and special planning consideration in order to help promote new businesses just like your stupid hot dog stand.  And, hey, that's pretty nice.  There's a lot of good stuff on Freret Street now.  But it didn't happen because Constantine Georges took a courageous gamble. He just happened to be in position to reap the benefits of it.

How not to maximize recovery funding

Just prior to the Labor Day weekend, Governor Edwards submitted a request to the President and Congress for supplemental flood relief aid.  

Edwards asks that Congress this month approve $2 billion in federal aid for Louisiana for housing, economic development and infrastructure. He says it's a "very reasonable request," adding to other federal programs assisting in Louisiana's flood recovery.

This week the Governor is in Washington pushing his plan in meetings with congressional leaders and Obama Administration officials.  (UPDATE: Already successful in receiving a greater federal cost share of disaster response) I wonder, though, if  he should be aiming a little higher than "very reasonable" in his initial ask.   Much has already been written about the extreme difficulty of Louisiana's shitty congressional delegation getting much sympathy out of the shitty Congress this year.  When you know going in that you're going to see a large chunk of what you're asking for compromised away in the process, it's a good idea to ask for more than you will actually need. Ideally we would start by asking for way too much and then let them whittle it down to "reasonable."

(UPPERDATE: And here we see the President has already whittled out a mysterious $200 million for whatever reason.  So we're going the wrong direction.)

Instead it looks like the Governor may have opened negotiations asking for less than will actually be needed. For one thing, we still don't have a solid estimate of the damage. This article says, "at least $8.7 billion."  But it also says the number of homes documented as damaged "could double" from 55,000 to 110,000.  Does "at least $8.7 billion" then mean AS MUCH as $17 billion?  I have to suppose that can't be what they mean. But it is a logical interpretation of what is written.

Anyway when you've got so many uninsured properties in the mix (80 percent of the documented damaged homes now) you have to expect you'll need extra help.  Last week, again with incomplete and unclear numbers available, we tried to sketch out an estimate of how much a new "Road Home" style program where homeowners are compensated for the difference between the cost of repairs vs the amount paid out by insurance might cost.  Our high end guess at that time was $6.4 billion. That was based on an average grant in the amount of $70,000 going to 63% of 145,000 homeowners.

Let's adjust that math to fit the estimates printed along with the Governor's request.  That's 80% of something between 55,000 and 110,000 damaged homes at an average of $70,000 per grant. That comes out to roughly $3 billion at the low end and as much as $6.2 billion at the high end.   Again, these are very rough guesses but if they're even remotely in the ballpark they suggest that the Governor is asking for maybe a billion dollars or possibly many billions less than what flood victims will actually need.

Governor Edwards is a mild mannered guy. But there are situations where "reasonable" doesn't necessarily cut it.  We've got some experience with disaster recovery in New Orleans. Maybe we can offer some advice.  For starters, has Edwards even read former New Orleans Sanitation Director Veronica White's book?

Does that say, "How to Ask For a Reasonable Amount Of FEMA Funding After a Natural Disaster"? No it does not say that. We're setting our sights on a Maximized recovery here.  And since it doesn't look like Ed Blakely is coming through that door any time soon, I suppose it falls to us to give the John Bel a few pointers.  What follows, then, is a brief sketch of our five point recovery plan for South Louisiana based on our decade's long experience.

One:  Mitch Landrieu told us the key to rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina was that we not just build everything back the way it was, but instead, build "the city we've always wanted to be."   So here is how you do that. First, look around and see if you have any land that might be made for valuable for development if you can move the poor people living there off of it.  Next, move those poor people out of the way.  Like Pres says, they're a "drag on the economy. We've talked many times about how this strategy took off in New Orleans. Make it work for you too.

B: Do you have any public services laying around that might be ripe for a little "public-private partnering" or other such cutting edge innovation? Take a look at your schools. Farming out public education to semi-privatized management has been a pet cause of the best and brightest policy wonks for decades now.  It's made careers for people in politics and people just out of politics.  Most importantly, it has focused attention on communities willing to turn their disasters into "blank slate" opportunities.  This is the kind of thing that gets your mayor invited to Aspen, which, as we know, is at least halfway to getting yourself a bonafide recovery.

III: Say brah, do you like apps? If you're really trying to take your grifting innovation recovery to the next level, you've got to get you some tech savvy entrepreneurs to come in and disrupt your whole situation for you. We can see you've already got a head start on this. Still looking for ways to hack it into high gear, though?  Well what about your....

(4): Culture and "authenticity."  Are you famous for quaint folkways that people with disposable income find entertaining on a self-satisfying pseudo-intellectual level? Yes? Great, you can sell that shit by the truckload! Put it all out there. See if David Simon wants to dramatize the struggles of the unique people St. Amant for premium cable. Do you have music and food festivals that "only the locals" know about? Make sure you rebuild your home in an Airbnb friendly aesthetic because you're gonna have some customers. How about a Disney-friendly gumbo recipe? Yes, definitely do that. 

v: Resilience. What is it? Who knows! You want it, though. Take as much as they offer.

Lagniappe: Do you happen to have a guy who can block punts?  Some people think that helps too.

Disruption

Look at these entrepreneurs innovating a recovery out of the goodness of their own hearts.

But Mukul Verma, a BRAF spokesman, said recipients of GoFundMe donations are taxed on the gift, because the company is for-profit. Nonprofit gifts are not taxed.

GoFundMe donations are also not exempt from overhead costs that many critics associate with large nonprofit organizations. GoFundMe automatically deducts a 5 percent fee from each donation. Additionally, WePay, the system that GoFundMe uses to process payments, takes another 2.9 percent plus 30 cents from every contribution made through the site. So nearly 8 percent from every donation made through GoFundMe is skimmed from the top before any money reaches its intended recipient.

The dawn of the Treppin' age

TPM is doing a feature series on the "privatization" movement. If you're like me, you might be so old you actually remember some of this stuff.  If not, well, see here. 

Writing in 1997, the Heritage Foundation’s Ron Utt (who had been Reagan’s “privatization czar”) praised Clinton for pursuing “the boldest privatization agenda put forth by any American president to date,” and noted that his proposals were “virtually all drawn from recommendations made in 1988 by President Reagan’s Commission on Privatization.” In 2006 Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole declared that “the Clinton administration’s privatization successes exceeded those of Reagan.”

In the first year of his administration Clinton assigned Vice President Gore to oversee a major initiative to “reinvent” government under the auspices of an intergovernmental task force, the National Performance Review (NPR). Clinton embraced the ideas popularized by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, in their 1992 bestseller Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector, and later on by a follow-up book by Osborne and Peter Plastrik, Banishing Bureaucracy.

The Gore initiative was about making the federal government more effective, but the idea of privatization was also baked in from the start, as it was in Osborne and Gaebler’s work.

The Clinton years were dark times. (All the times are pretty dark.) The next Clinton age is going to be a real doozy.