Speak no evil

The new thing that happened in the credit card saga is they got the State Supreme Court to appoint an ad-hoc judge who will now decide whether or not the Orleans Parish judges need to recuse themselves. In other words, very little happened.

In any case, let's not hold our breaths for much to come of this. That isn't to say that there's nothing to it. It's just that this "investigation" isn't going to come near anything of any substance. For one thing, the credit card abuse isn't just a LaToya story.  It's more one of those "everybody does it" type of bad practices which should probably be ended. But, in order to do that, you have to turn over everybody's apple cart and our political elites like their apples. Also Jeff Landry really is just out to get LaToya for crass political purposes here so he's not interested in doing any of that the right way.

I've mentioned previously (Linking back to my own blog a lot today. Sorry.) that a potential investigation into Cantrell's finances could be one thread into the wider FNBC scandal which would be a ton of fun to pull on.  But, again, we run into the apple cart problem combined with the Attorney General's lack of sincerity and, well, just don't expect any of this to go anywhere. There are too many people with too much to lose by talking.

Speaking of which..

New Orleans mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell has obtained non-disclosure agreements from members of her transition advisory team and will also collect them from committee members she's appointed to help shape city policy ahead of her inauguration in May, her team announced this week.

The non-disclosure agreements will prohibit transition advisors and the committee members from communicating about what occurs during closed-door meetings during the three-month period before she takes office. The move represents an unusual effort to keep discussions and decisions about Cantrell's leadership plans, which will include personnel hires, shielded from the general public.

Totally normal move toward kicking off an open an honest city administration. Nobody can talk to the public about what's going on. Ever. 

Karen Carvin, a spokeswoman for Cantrell's transition, said that the non-disclosure agreements will be structured differently depending on the position. The members of the transition advisory team, a group of 18 people announced early this month, have signed non-disclosure agreements "in perpetuity," meaning they can never discuss advice or discussions with the mayor-elect.

This was the "grass-roots" mayoral campaign, right?  I swear I read that a bunch of times during the election.  Maybe I'm wrong. But I thought grass-rootsiness was all about keeping the public informed and participating in the process.  You know who we should ask about this? LaToya Cantrell.

“It’s critical to have a transition office, and I’m happy to announce that our team will be housed in my alma mater, Xavier University,” Cantrell said. “I’ve always embraced keeping the public not only informed, but also participating in the process, so the transition will be transparent with a robust website, frequent updates from social media and traditional media, and public meetings. As I often spoke about during my campaign, professional development and partnerships are part of the foundation for effective governing, and this week I am attending a Harvard conference for newly-elected mayors.”

Also, are "robust website" jokes a little too 2012 by now? Ok, nevermind that. It seems like the public face of the transition is in disagreement with its actual policies.  Good luck getting anybody from the team to explain it publicly, though!  I mean other than Karen Carvin. Apparently she's just there to tell jokes. 

Although non-disclosure agreements are typically in place to make a process more opaque to outsiders, Carvin said Cantrell's staff felt they were part of "an effort to have as much transparency within the process."

"It's not to hide anything; it's to give people the opportunity to talk freely and openly," Carvin said. "The whole idea is to allow people the freedom to be brutally honest about their assessment of various departments and each area they're looking at. They are going to be having people interview people who have contracts with the city, and they want them to feel free to be open and transparent about their view of where things stand."

In order to achieve transparency, we must maintain air tight secrecy. Why?

"There is a lot of information that some people may want to share that's of a confidential or a controversial nature," Carvin added, saying, "I think the public will understand and accept that."

Because if there is one thing the public loves, it's elected representatives who make sure to protect them from having to know about things "of a controversial nature" that relate to the public's business. Things are going brilliantly. 

Interestingly, one way around these non-disclosure agreements might be a subpoena from, say, the Attorney General's office.  But, like we said at the beginning here, that isn't likely to happen.  Besides, it's an imperfect remedy for all sorts of reasons. The public would like to be privy to as much of the public business of setting up a mayoral office as possible, not just whatever bits Jeff Landry is interested in.

At the same time, if you were interested in keeping a lazy non-criminal inquiry like Landry's off of your back, one good way to frustrate the flow of information would be to make everybody sign an NDA. In which case it's possible we have Landry's meddling to thank for inspiring this situation too.