All dead

Not mostly dead. All dead.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - Oyster fishermen are saying 100 percent of what they dredge up is coming up dead, which is not only a serious hit to their livelihoods but could have lasting impacts for years to come.

Fishermen will tell you part of the draw of the job is just being out on the water, but the waters near the Biloxi marsh are a little too quiet.

“North, east, west, there’s usually someone harvesting someone trawling you don’t see nothing, there’s not one person out here,” said oyster fisherman, Gregory Perez.

Gregory Perez says he's worked for years building and tending to these acres of water, or his private oyster leases. This year was supposed to be the most lucrative for him until the oysters started dying.

Perez blames this swirling blue-green algae blooms he’s seen intensify in the area. He says it’s killed off all the oysters he was planning to harvest, including the young oysters that would be ready years from now.

“Twenty-five square miles of blue-green algae in this area, and everybody's oyster farm in this area they’re 100 percent completely dead,” said Perez.

I noticed this week Rouses was running a sale on shucked gulf oysters.  The price was still high because Rouses but it does make me wonder where they were getting them from. Might have to be wondering that for a while, it turns out. 

A spokesperson with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries says as the oysters die, and the flood continues, the crisis is just beginning for those in the oyster industry.

“We’re also going to see the aftermath of the flood in terms of additional algal blooms… they’re not going to be able to recover quickly,” said Fisheries Administrator, Harry Blanchet.

“We have more damage now. This is worse than B.P. this is worse because we don’t have any reproduction,” said Perez.

Cops give the worst advice

This is one hundred percent wrong. Please do not do this. You will definitely regret it.

Over the past few months, Eyewitness News has told you about a series of car break-ins in both Orleans and Jefferson Parish. In the last four weeks along, crimemapping.com shows over 500 reports of vehicle break-ins and theft in New Orleans.

It’s the reason why District D Councilmember Jared Brossett has a stack of “Lock it or Lose  It” signs in city hall.  “My office has received a lot of complaints from concerned citizens regarding break-ins throughout the city and throughout my district,” Councilmember Brossett said.  Brossett said he’s partnering with Crimestopper GNO for their “Lock it or Lose it” campaign.

"Most of the car break-ins we've got statistics from Crimestoppers say that 70 percent of them have been from unlocked vehicles," he said.

Locking your car at night is a great idea if your objective is to wake up to a smashed window the next day. I learned that the hard way a couple of times. I don't think I've locked a car door in at least ten years now.  I'd leave the windows rolled down too if a person could ever trust the weather around here.

Sure some mornings I walk out to discover evidence of an overnight visit.  But as long as I remember not to leave anything valuable in there, it's no harm to anyone. It's a strategy these people may like to consider.

Darlene Cusanza with Crimestoppers GNO said the suspects are not just stealing cash. Last year, Cusanza said more than 700 guns were stolen from unlocked vehicles throughout the Greater New Orleans area.

What is even going on out there? I thought gun owners were all about defending their "castle" from invasion.  How does leaving the gun in the car help with that? 

What if, for example, you are lying in bed at a reasonable hour (say 11:30 pm on a Friday night) just reading your book peacefully, and someone just walks into your apartment thinking it is his Airbnb?  Wouldn't you feel silly then?  I certainly did last night when this exact thing happened to me. I don't mean I felt silly not to have a gun. I don't own one. I mean it was awkward for all of us, the guy, his wife, my cat and their chihuahua to stand around with me in my boxers trying to figure out what was going on.  

It turns out what was going on is one of the neighbors is running Airbnb out of her apartment. She gets pretty good reviews. The consensus among her customers is the place is a little bit noisy and "dingy" but the location is super convenient to all of your favorite "NOLA" sights.  I can't argue with any of that.  And I should know I've lived in the building for almost 20 years now.  But I guess actually living in your home isn't what people do here anymore unless you are "fair sharing" your personal space with tourists. 

In this case, though, it was my space that almost got shared. Still not exactly sure how that happened but from what we were able to gather last night the guests just tried the wrong door. And that wouldn't have been too bad except for the fact that the key she had left for them happened to be a master somehow. So this means, not only has the neighbor had a key to my apartment since the day she moved in, she has also been lending it out to random strangers on the internet for the better part of two years now.  Anyway, the "sharing economy" is very good. 

I guess if I had heard about something like this happening to somebody else I'd be upset. But since it's me, it's just another awkward and funny thing to put on the pile.  Or at least it would be that if not for the fact that Menckles lives in my home too. I'm very glad she was sitting out on the back porch at the time so it could be me instead of her who got walked in on. This is the only reason something unfortunate did not happen to the poor confused visitor regardless of whether there was a gun in the house or not. 

It's also the only reason somebody got up extra early this morning to run out and buy a new lock for the front door. In fact she had already installed it by the time I left for work.  If I lived alone I can easily imagine myself letting the situation go on as is for months just to see how many more times something like this might happen. Because she is there, it feels like a violation. If it's just me, it's just a funny bit. 

Either way, at least nobody has to bother the police over something as trivial as whether or not a door is locked.  Sounds like they've got their hands full enough as it is trying to track down all those guns.

Why is John Bel soft on vouchers?

Good news! John Bel says he's finally ready to do something about Bobby Jindal's disastrous school voucher scheme.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said he will call for an overhaul of the state’s scholarship voucher program, saying the structure that uses public money to pay for private school tuition for nearly 6,900 underprivileged students was poorly conceived.

In an interview just weeks after an in-depth examination by a consortium of local and national news organizations highlighted flaws, Edwards said he will call on state leaders to reform the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program. The governor did not specify what changes he will seek, but said the goal should be for schools in the program to perform better.

He doesn't say what he's going to do.  But he definitely is not interested in abolishing the voucher program.  Which raises the question from us, why on Earth not?

Last month, WVUE, WWNO, Reveal, and what's left of NOLAdotcom collaborated on a damning series of reports confirming what most of us already knew about the voucher scheme. The plan was always more about siphoning money away from public education regardless of whether Louisiana students realized any benefit, which, of course, they did not.

Seven years later, however, the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a months-long examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found.

And this was always at least part of the intent. We've known pretty much since the beginning that the voucher scheme was a direct attack on the concept of public education, an avenue for Bobby Jindal's cheap pandering to science denying evolutionists, and an obvious opportunity for the sort of corruption described in these reports.

 It's even worse than you might think, though. As the Bayou Brief points out, the vouchers aren't merely a means of diverting public money into unaccountable private hands. They're also a vehicle for ultra-wealthy individuals like Eddie Rispone, for example, to set up very large tax loopholes for themselves.

In December of 2014, he donated $1 million to ACE Scholarships Louisiana, a Student Tuition Organization, and according to an audit of ACE, 100% of his donation was rebate eligible.

While we do not know Rispone’s income or how much of his donation was used toward scholarships, it’s possible to estimate how much Rispone could have profited off his $1 million donation.

If Rispone’s entire donation was used for scholarships in 2015, assuming Rispone did not donate more than 50% of his annual gross income and that he was in the highest income bracket (36.9% marginal tax rate), Rispone’s donation qualified him for up to a $950,000 rebate from the State of Louisiana and a federal tax savings of $369,000.

Therefore, his $1 million donation had a potential return of $1,319,000 ($950,000 + $369,000) for a profit of $319,000.

So, given all of this, since we know the voucher program is a disaster for Louisiana education,  and since we know criminally wealthy oligarchs like Rispone are benefiting from it. Why does John Bel say we should merely "reform" (he doesn't specify how) rather than abolish it?  Rispone is even applying a significant portion of his ill-gotten and protected wealth to challenge John Bel in this year's election.  Why would he let him get away with that?

Literal election rigging

Elena Kagan is obviously correct. 

She went into the details of the two cases in front of the court — challenges to a Democratic-drawn map in Maryland and GOP-drawn map in North Carolina — and how the legislatures were able to draw districts that ensure that their respective received a number seats disproportionate to the state wide vote.

“Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” Kagan said. “I have yet to meet the person who thinks so.”

“Free and fair and periodic elections are the key” to the framers’ vision of democracy, Kagan said.
“And partisan gerrymandering can make [elections] meaningless,” Kagan said. “At its most extreme — as in North Carolina and Maryland — the practice amounts to ‘rigging elections.'”

Not sure it's any kind of earth shattering observation or anything but it is the correct one.  Also not sure what to do about it.  Anyway, so what now?  If we operate from the premise that elections are rigged and pointless, then the way to proceed must involve pursuing power by means other than the pointless and rigged elections, right?  So then where are we?

Ah the NIMBYs look like they've won one

Kinda thought they might be able to stop this. The further uptown you get, the better the neighborhood association people are at shutting down affordable housing projects. 

Update: That article was just at stem when I posted this but now that it's been fleshed out it's... yeah well it is what I thought.

Still, Wheeler said a lawsuit by the Touro Bouligny Neighborhood Association and a recent swell of opposition to the swap gave her pause.

In its May suit, the neighborhood group argued that the land ought to remain a school and criticized the OPSB for not giving other charter school operators more time to decide if they want McDonogh No. 7 before offering it to HANO.

Wheeler also highlighted a swell of neighborhood opposition to HANO’s separate plan to redevelop vacant land as affordable housing in Bywater, another neighborhood with high property values.

“The people in Bywater and in Uptown... are not going to sit idly by, when they say they don’t want to (see something turned into affordable) housing,” Wheeler said. “I would rather see us have housing that’s not necessarily Uptown, but still have housing.”

Oh no these rich people might get mad at us if we don't respect their redlined and segregated neighborhoods.  Probably should just give them whatever they want, I guess. 

QOTD

Jason Williams:

Councilman Jason Williams, who chairs the Criminal Justice Committee, said in a statement announcing Wednesday’s meeting that there has been “an increasing amount of reactionary comments and decisions based upon a belief that juvenile crime is on the rise.” Police data doesn’t back the perceived trend, he said, and more information and discussion is needed ahead of “crafting new policies or clinging to old ones.”

“The premise of juvenile intervention must not be based on a single bad news cycle,” Williams said.

He's talking here a little bit about LaToya Cantrell's "reactionary" curfew enforcement policy. He could just as well extend that to her administration's embrace of invasive surveillance and predictive policing.  Or he could talk about her punitive.. almost vengeful.. approach to traffic enforcement. And for that matter he could comment on his colleagues' imposition of absurd fines for parking violations and minor breaches of bicycle etiquette.  Generally speaking, this supposedly "progressive" mayor and council have been remarkable in their enthusiasm for aggressive "reactionary" police practices.

None of them have been quite as boorish as Leon Cannizzaro, of course.

Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who declared juvenile crime “out of control” in April, has participated in recent summits with city leaders to arrive at solutions. In a statement Tuesday, he commended Cantrell, the council and court officials for their efforts yet called for holistic efforts as well as “meaningful consequences” for violent youth criminals and parents who don’t supervise them.

“While some continue to advocate for coddling juvenile offenders at all costs, others are recognizing the very real trauma their violent acts are inflicting upon our community and are realistic about the need to restore accountability into our juvenile justice system,” Cannizzaro said in a statement.

The children will not be "coddled."

Anyway, Leon is up for reelection next year. Williams is one expected challenger but, as we've seen this week, there are better models out there to emulate. City Council is holding a hearing this afternoon about juvenile criminal justice policy.  Maybe they'll have something new to say there. 

Fiscal administrators

I wonder how many people know this is even a practice in Louisiana.

This year the state took the first step towards taking over the administration of more financially troubled towns than ever before.

But Louisiana’s own money troubles kept state government from taking the second step – asking the courts to appoint a fiscal administrator – leaving those towns in financial crisis for months without a fixer.

This is happening at time when Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera doesn’t know many more towns – his office recently counted 15 – are also on the brink of needing to replace elected local officials with a single administrator who has the power to unilaterally raise fees, fire workers and otherwise make the tough decisions that stave off financial ruin.

Small town life in Louisiana is getting tougher. Back in March we read that 25 local governments derive over half their revenue from fines and fees.. in other words, they send cops out to collect bounties from people. 

And 194 of the state’s 304 incorporated cities, towns and villages raise more in fines and forfeitures than they do in property taxes, according to latest financial audits.

The reason is less Barney Fife passionately holding scofflaws to account for minor infractions and more small-town officers strictly enforcing traffic laws — issuing tickets costing $80 to $200 or more — that has the added benefit of bringing more money to municipalities with few other revenue-raising options.

“That’s the symbol of a broken system when you have to depend on preying on people to pay your bills,” said Robert Scott, head of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. PAR is a nonprofit Baton Rouge-based government policy analyst. “If you’re protecting people, that’s OK, but if you’re protecting services, you need to re-examine.”

In New Orleans we already have a version of this problem as city leaders have spent much of the past year playing gotcha with residents over traffic tickets and water bills and the like.  At least they're still accountable to voters, though, which means we can go yell at them and they might even listen.  A Fiscal Administrator doesn't have to put up with any of your crap. 

"Caretaker of incredible assets"

That's really great. Good one, Gayle.

For now, Benson said she will stick with the status quo, though as someone who sees herself less an “owner” and more “a caretaker of incredible assets”, she plans to address the issue at the league’s upcoming summer meetings in order to be as inclusive as possible.

“As with any word, phrase or expression, interpretations can be perceived differently,” she said in a statement. “That is in many ways why diversity, inclusion and openness is so important to companies and society. As with any expression, my intention and the intentions of the organization I am responsible for is never to be insensitive or insulting.

The "insulting" thing is that we are asked to maintain billionaires through massive public investments in subsidies and infrastructure creating profits that accrue to them. Brand them however you like.

Do do do do do do

And the latest bit in the Metal Shark saga is......

No, the boats aren't ready yet.

Two new ferries built for the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority have again failed inspections, yet another setback for a project that has been delayed for over a year.

The inspections, outlined in a June 3 report by an RTA consultant, have kept the boats out of service well after one RTA official's prediction a few months ago that the boats would be in operation by the time of the 2019 Jazz Fest at the end of April.

Oh well. Maybe they'll be ready in time for Gretna Fest instead.  Better make sure the gator-proofing is up to standard, though.

GRETNA, La. — The City of Gretna has a warning about large gators. The warning comes after several gators were spotted along the riverfront.

Mayor Belinda Constant ordered the posting of signs that say "Caution! Alligators have been sighted in the river in this area."

Constant is nervous that a child or pet could be snatched up.

"We received another picture of the alligator actually sunning himself on the concrete part of the levee," Constant said. "The most important thing for us is just having people aware that there is an alligator close by."

 Anyway it's good to see there's another looking at the boats now.  That should.. help?

Shipbuilder Metal Shark did fix some issues with the boats within 45 days of receiving roughly $959,000 from the RTA, as was agreed to in a March deal between the two parties, RTA attorney Sundiata Haley said.

But Greenwood Marine Management of Morgan City found the company still had not addressed other problems, including issues with the boats’ rescue equipment and fuel tanks.

I don't know who Greenwood Marine Management is. But it looks like they are different from The Shearer Group who RTA had hired to review the Metal Shark work just back in December.  No idea if this is getting the boats on the water any faster but, hey, it's a living.

Maybe someone can explain all of this better at one of these public input meetings.

Public meetings to redesign the public transportation network across Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes kick off Monday evening in New Orleans. Where people live and work in the New Orleans area changes over time, so the public transit authorities need to periodically update their transit systems in order to efficiently move people around the region.

Under a yearlong program called New Links, transportation planners are studying existing transit lines and holding public meetings to get input from riders. Information gleaned from that process will be used to propose an entirely redesigned transportation network for Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Bernard Parishes, according to information on the New Links website.

Or maybe they can't. Either way, it means more consultants get paid which I am beginning to think might be the actual point. Still, if you think it's worth your time, most of these meetings are in July. Here is the schedule.

Time to start finding candidates for DA

I think we have our first contender.

District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro said Crawford has "falsely" portrayed herself as a licensed lawyer, and Chief District Defender Derwyn Bunton said he has sidelined her while his office looks into whether she should have been handling cases.

“We're gathering information and working to resolve it. Until we get more information, she is not authorized to appear on our behalf or on any client's behalf in court,” Bunton said.

Attempts to contact Crawford were not immediately successful.

I'm not even really joking.  I mean, since when has Cannizzaro cared about what's real and what's fake, anyway? Besides, look, a bunch of people might get their convictions overturned now.

Defendants who entered guilty pleas with Crawford at their side could challenge their conviction. Loyola University law professor Dane Ciolino said those cases would have to be considered on an individual basis, if it's confirmed that Crawford was ineligible.

"Each case is still going to be looked at on a case-by-case basis to see whether she provided substandard legal advice and whether that advice caused prejudice to a client," Ciolino said. "It doesn’t turn into an automatic get out of jail free card."

An excellent start, as the saying goes. 

What is the reason a person might run for President?

1) The person might genuinely be interested in pushing the boundaries of the discussion about what is possible so as to bring that more closely in line with what is moral.

Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced his most sweeping plan yet to tackle the increasing cost of a higher education, introducing a bill Monday that would make public colleges and trade schools tuition free and cancel outstanding student loan debt for everyone, a proposal that goes beyond one introduced earlier this year by one of his chief presidential campaign rivals, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

2) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(CNN)In an already-crowded primary field, former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak became the latest Democratic candidate to wade into the race for the presidency, announcing his candidacy in a video posted to his website Sunday morning.

Sestak, who mounted unsuccessful bids for US Senate in 2010 and 2016 touted his "commitment to service," citing his career in the US Navy, where he rose to the rank of 3-star Admiral.  

Is Mitch Landrieu still thinking about it?  I know he said he would defer to Biden but we all expect Biden is going to cancel himself any day now. 

Year of enforcement

The pleasure seekers are out there tonight...

NEW ORLEANS – The NOPD’s Traffic Division will conduct an upcoming sobriety checkpoint at a location within Orleans Parish.

The checkpoint will be in effect beginning at 9:00 p.m. on Friday, June 21, 2019 and concluding at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, June 22, 2019.

Stay safe

Impersonating an... officer?

Is that what you'd call this?  What is going on here?

The officers noticed two surveillance cameras mounted to a public light pole on the block. They looked very much like hundreds of crime cameras that have been installed across New Orleans since 2017. Those are owned and controlled by the city, all transmitting video to the Real-Time Crime Monitoring Center on North Rampart Street.

In addition to being attached to city-controlled property, the cameras on the Lakeview light pole bore the New Orleans Police Department’s logo.

The problem: They weren’t city-owned cameras. The officers didn’t know who owned them.

“The camera mounted at 6119 Vicksburg is not a City-owned camera, is not integrated to the Real-Time Crime Center, and is unauthorized to be on the light pole,” said Laura Mellem, the public engagement manager at the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, which oversees the city’s surveillance system.

Nor was it owned by the Lakeview Crime Prevention District, a security district that maintains cameras in the neighborhood, LCPD President Brian Anderson told The Lens in an interview.

“That is without a doubt not one of ours,” Anderson said.

The victim of the alleged car burglary told the police that the cameras belonged to Jeff Burkhardt, according to the police report.

Burkhardt, whose wife owns a house on the block, is the vice president and chief operations officer for Active Solutions, LLC, a crime camera supplier and installation contractor for the city. The camera on the block bears a resemblance to Active Solutions’ Neighborhood WatchCam model. The Neighborhood WatchCam draws its power from streetlights, according to the company’s website.

Burkhardt tells The Lens he doesn't know nothing about no cameras. Also he tells them they are "fake news."  But, see, the thing is he's got it pointed at his ex-wife's house. And he has NOPD logos on it. And he is the contractor who makes and installs these things.  And this is all very normal.

Return of the varmits

The infamous Uptown Coyote(s) is(are) back in action.

"It has to be millions"

Looks like we're trying something novel in this capital projects bond issue that will appear on your November ballot. The city hasn't done one of these in a while. The Mitch people were more about planning this stuff year over year out of the regular operating budget. Nagin got a $260 million package passed back in 2004 which, because the next year was 2005 when certain things happened, kind of got subsumed into disaster recovery efforts.... haphazardly... and not entirely.  But, at the time, it was one of Ray Nagin's genuine achievements as mayor.

This new one says $500 million.  It doesn't yet say specifically how that money will be divided up just yet.  The CAO Gilbert Montaño says that's for "maximum flexibility," which we know is a thing voters always find reassuring. The really intriguing element, though, is part of it is designated for "affordable housing." I don't think I remember the city doing that before.  It sounds good but there are questions.

Most immediately, we'd like to know more about the scope of such an endeavor. But that would mean knowing more about how the money is going to be allocated and, well, it's "flexible."

The use of city bonds to build affordable housing that would be owned by the city is a new approach for New Orleans. The city’s bond attorneys have said that it would be the only municipality in Louisiana to fund such projects that way, Montaño said.

Asked how much could potentially be put into that effort, he said, “Millions. It has to be millions.”

"It has to be millions," says the guy who will decide how much it will actually be.  That's.. positive? He could have said tens.

Update: Anyway, we hope it's a lot. It won't be enough. But I hope it's a lot.

Despite efforts by housing advocates, New Orleans’ housing affordability remains virtually unchanged from last year, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2019 “Out of Reach” report.

The report found that in order to afford a “modest” two-bedroom rental in the New Orleans-Metairie area without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs, a person would have to make $19.38 an hour, up slightly from a housing wage of $19.15 in 2018.

By these estimates, minimum wage workers in the city would currently have to work 108 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom rental in the city.

What could possibly go wrong?

The John Bel administration is about to enter into a big contract for privatizing energy systems servicing state buildings. The deal is with a company called LA Energy Partners.  Who are they?

The agreement would see LA Energy Partners take over the chiller systems at the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge, as well as make a host of energy upgrades at 31 state buildings.

If approved, the deal would set the state for any state entity to “opt in” to a similar agreement with the company, which is a joint venture between Bernhard Energy Solutions and Johnson Controls Inc.

Bernhard sounds familiar to you probably.  Here is why.

Bernhard Energy is controlled by Bernhard Capital Partners, a private equity firm founded by Jim Bernhard, who co-founded and ran the energy services giant Shaw Group before its $3 billion sale to CB&I in 2013. Bernhard, a former Democratic party official, was floated as a possible candidate for governor this year before he ruled it out.

Oh boy oh boy. Sure, Bernhard has been a big wheel in the State Democratic Party but his Shaw group was always happy to contribute to whichever Democrat or Republican was in a position to help it make money.  It was at least in part through Republican channels that Shaw made a ton of money "dewatering" New Orleans after Katrina.

Last week FEMA gave out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts to engineering and construction firms to build an estimated 300,000 temporary housing units. Those contracts were awarded without competition under rules that allow agencies to bypass normal procedures during an emergency. Several went to companies that have been major financial supporters of the Bush administration. One firm, Shaw Group Inc., of Baton Rouge, is on the client list of lobbyist and former FEMA director Joe M. Allbaugh, though he has said he does not get involved with contracts.

Shaw also was picked last week by the corps for a $100 million contract, with one of its first tasks to pump floodwater out of New Orleans. The agency contacted two other companies to generate competition for the work, a corps contracting official said yesterday, but only Shaw responded.

Later, Shaw greatly benefited from Bobby Jindal's Hazard Mitigation grant program which came under scrutiny in 2011 from the Legislative Auditor.

The findings seem to fit in with years of complaints from applicants and HMGP staffers alike, who said the program is plagued by miscommunication, convoluted verification procedures and ever-changing policies. The policy changes were mostly intended to speed up a program that took almost three years to pay significant dividends for homeowners but was "front-loaded" to pay program management fees to a prominent state contractor, the Shaw Group.

At one point late last year, one of every four dollars paid out by the program had gone to Shaw for administrative fees.

Despite these criticisms, Shaw's role in the program was continued and expanded. This was in addition to the scratch they picked up building Jindal's sand berms to nowhere following the 2010 BP oil spill. They must have just happened to be in the right place at the right time again.

The berm project has been a boon to Louisiana industry: although many of the dredging companies working on the project have out-of-state headquarters, all have a major presence in Louisiana. The Shaw Group, the lead contractor on the project, is based in Baton Rouge and has been one of Mr. Jindal’s leading campaign contributors over the years.

Anyway, so, according to the Advocate today, Jim Bernhard was thinking about running for Governor this year. This will be the second time he's almost gotten in John Bel's way but was convinced to step aside somehow.  Surely this new LA Energy Partners contract coming when it does is just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, back to today's story, look who else is here.

Bernhard Energy Solutions partnered with the HVAC firm Johnson Controls at the behest of the Edwards administration after both companies submitted proposals to land the state energy deal.

Ooohkaayy. So what we have here is a big expansive contract to do energy efficiency in government buildings involving one high profile political operator AND Johnson Controls.  Never seen anything like that before. What could possibly go wrong?

Why are they making them work with no a/c?

S&WB loves to take out their mismanagement problems on ratepayers and line employees. What else is new?

Is Joe Biden cancelled yet?

It's only a matter of time.

Former Vice President Joe Biden assured rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected.

Biden told donors at an event at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday evening that he would not “demonize” the rich and promised that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” Bloomberg News reported.

Biden’s assurance to donors in New York came shortly after his appearance at the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum in Washington on Monday.

Well, okay, maybe that's not going to be enough to get it done.  Usually, cozying up to wealthy donors is good for a candidate's staying power.  We could pick at this as an example of the "saying the quiet part loud" faux-pas but that's not typically a campaign killer either.



 Maybe this will be, though.

Speaking at a New York fundraiser Tuesday evening (June 18), he pointed to long-dead segregationist senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia to argue that Washington functioned more smoothly a generation ago than under today’s “broken” hyperpartisanship.

"We didn't agree on much of anything," Biden said of the two men, who were prominent senators when Biden was elected in 1972. Biden described Talmadge as "one of the meanest guys I ever knew" and said Eastland called him "son," though not "boy," a reference to the racist way many whites addressed black men at the time.

Yet even in that Senate, Biden said, "At least there was some civility. We got things done."

That's no guarantee either, of course.  Certainly nothing is more impressive to the political press than a politician who is willing to put aside "principles" like say a commitment to racial justice in order to
"get things done" like say cutting Social Security. And it has long been understood that the party leaders themselves are willing  to "get more racist" or, at least, adjust their branding in order to appeal more to racist voters.

But it looks like at least some of the other Democratic candidates this year are willing to hang on tot their principles for once see if they can score some quick points lighting up Joe. 

Sen. Cory Booker, one of two major black candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, said Biden's "relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people and for everyone," and he called for the Biden to apologize.

"I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together," the New Jersey Democrat said in a statement that was especially notable coming from a candidate who entered the 2020 primary with a sunny message, vowing to highlight "the best of who we are and not the worst."

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democratic presidential candidate and a white man who is married to a black woman, also offered a sharp retort. "It's 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of 'civility' typified by James Eastland," de Blasio tweeted Wednesday, along with a picture of his family. "Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal."

The mayor added that "it's past time for apologies or evolution" from Biden, whom de Blasio cast as "out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party."

Not Cedric Richmond, though.  He's already on board as a Biden campaign spokesperson and isn't ready to jump ship just yet. 

Cedric Richmond, Biden's campaign co-chairman and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, pushed back, saying Biden's opponents are deliberately ignoring the full context of his argument for a more functional government.

"Maybe there's a better way to say it, but we have to work with people, and that's a fact," Richmond said, noting he recently dealt with President Donald Trump to pass a long-sought criminal justice overhaul. "I question his racial sensitivity, a whole bunch of things about his character ... but we worked together."

But give it time.  Biden sounds almost like he's trying to fail early. He's not. This is just who he is. Which is why it is extremely difficult to imagine he's going to make it all the way to the nomination this year. At some point he's going to cancel himself... if he hasn't already.

Don't worry about Cedric, though.  He's got plenty of options available for later.

Ralph is doing the hot take wrong

I'm fine with the "Pelicans become more popular than Saints" article in theory.  I don't buy it. But I get why you might build an argument for it at this point in time.  The Pelicans are about to draft Michael Hecht and "validate the business community" or something. And, as we all know, 2019 will probably be the Final Football Season In History.  But the thing that really moves the argument that basketball could overtake football in popularity from TAEK to plausible would be the phrase "traumatic brain injury."

When was the last time LaToya Cantrell actually commented on the short term rental issue?

It's not easy to pin her down on the question. We've all been trying to for years. And since she's become mayor, Cantrell has become even more quiet on the subject. Which is weird given her penchant for rambling on extemporaneously in just about any circumstance. Here she is last month delivering a commencement address at Bard College that relays insights into the utility of organic deodorant.  But in New Orleans, even as the process of revising the city's approach to regulating short term rentals has steadily made headlines, we've barely gotten a whiff as to what the mayor's inclination might be.

Historically, she's pretty slippery. I believe the first time I heard her say anything about it one way or the other was in 2015 at this Tulane Hillel forum on gentrification.  There was an audience question from someone who had been personally displaced to make room for an Airbnb. Cantrell appeared to empathize but would only say she was interested in a "balanced" approach. She also spoke about that balance in terms of the potential to increase revenue in light of the fact that  New Orleans is, in her words, a "destination city."

In December of 2016 City Council passed Mitch Landrieu's disastrous legalization scheme which we are now trying to undo. Cantrell voted with the 5-2 majority that day.  This was shortly after it had come to light that her father-in-law, Judge Harry Cantrell, was found to have been operating an STR out of his law office in violation of the zoning rules at the time.

Judge Cantrell has also been a focus of local efforts at bail reform. It was only this week  and under a federal consent order that he finally agreed to curtail his routine habit of setting unreasonably high bail for defendants least able to pay. Cantrell's bail practices have been described as enabling a de-facto "debtor's prison" in New Orleans.

But this isn't a post about Mayor Cantrell's affinity for and connection to oppressive over-policing policies that hurt poor people. It's about her apparent sympathy for housing policies that do the same. At least, she has been sympathetic to specific individuals who profit from it.  As a council person she was often amenable to spot zone requests from landlords.

This one in particular caught our eye because it, at least, gave the appearance that LaToya was taking a more conservative position than Stacy Head on a housing question.

Head said she supported the legalization of short-term rentals in commercial areas, but did not intend to convert residential neighborhoods to commercial zoning to allow them to proliferate.

“This seems to be in conflict with your cry for more affordable housing,” Head said to Cantrell. She explained later, “I do not believe we should allow the creeping into neighborhoods that are otherwise residential by changing the zoning to commercial.”

The short-term rental issue should not be blamed for the city’s lack of affordable housing, Cantrell shot back. That, she said, was the result of intentional efforts by city leaders after Hurricane Katrina.

“Affordability and the crisis that we’re in in the city of New Orleans is not because of short-term rentals,” Cantrell replied. “It’s because the issue of housing was not a priority in the post-Katrina environment. Resources allocated for the city of New Orleans, millions in fact, were reallocated because there was sentiment coming from policymakers in this city that New Orleans was on the path of having too many affordable units.”

It's a little bit tricky because, yes, of course short term rentals aren't the sole or even the main driver of the housing crisis. And it's also germane for Cantrell to point that out to Head who, many will remember, actually blew kisses at public housing residents from the council dais when she voted to demolish the Big Four projects. But this line from Cantrell is also a misleading talking point frequently deployed by the pro-STR lobby.  The proliferation of short term rentals might not be the thing that got us here, but 1) it greatly exacerbates the problem and 2) we don't have to allow it if we don't want to.

For some reason, LaToya Cantrell often wants to. Last February we counted at least four spot zoning requests approved by Councilmember Cantrell that would have allowed for short term rental usage under the (hopefully) outgoing rules. Since she became mayor, she hasn't had to make any decisions like these.  But she also hasn't had much to say about the debate over where all this is headed.  A mayor's thumb on the scale can make a big difference in a matter like this.  Even at the end of what has been a very long process.

Today The Lens published an infuriating story about one New Orleans resident's attempts to get the #CityOfYes to enforce the rules against an STR operator running multiple whole home rentals with expired or inappropriate permits.

The Massachusetts-based company that operates the four short-term rentals on Phleger’s block is called Heirloom, also known as Stayloom. It manages more than 100 homes in New Orleans, Boston, New York, and “other destinations,” according to its website, and caters to large groups looking for luxury accommodations.

“They’re all kind of branded almost as Instagram Airbnbs, for lack of a better word,” Phleger said.

The company manages houses owned by other people. But The Lens also identified several Heirloom-managed properties owned by the company’s co-founders, Frank Glaser and Dan Glaser.

As of last week, the company had 67 listings in New Orleans on its website, including a “Cosmopolitan Designer Home with Pool” for $2,250 on average per night, the “Trendy Creole Luxury Home” for $1,710 on average per night and the “Opulent Esplanade Estate near the French Quarter” for $3,140 on average per night.

The Lens was able to confirm the addresses of 34 of those listings. Nineteen of those had expired short-term rental permits. Of the 15 with valid permits, several have records of alleged violations from the Department of Safety and Permits.

Even if City Council were to pass the strictest regulations we could write up for them, it will still fall to the mayor to see that they are enforced. Sooner or later we're going to have to hear something from her about how she plans to do that. Apparently that isn't happening today, though. 

Officials with the Department of Safety and Permits said they needed permission from Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s communication team before they could speak to The Lens. Cantrell’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

NBA cap and trade

I have never understood anything about how the NBA financial infrastructure is supposed to work.  Protected picks, super-max contracts, non-qualifying veteran free agents, bi-annual cap exceptions, etc. etc. You need some kind of advanced degree.  (Yes, I hear you saying "NBA MBA" and you can shut up now.) 

Also it is possible to make trades that aren't really trades yet which leads teams to make draft picks that aren't really their draft picks.They belong to other teams, who may or may not have also already traded them.

Technically speaking, the Lakers will still be making that draft pick. Whomever is selected will still put on a Lakers hat when they go shake the commissioner’s hand on stage, and then they’ll meet with a slew of reporters and be asked multiple times in different ways about their thoughts on being drafted by a team they aren’t going to be playing for.

Even though everyone will be talking like that No. 4 pick is owned by New Orleans, or whichever team they may trade it to before Thursday, it still belongs to Los Angeles for now. Should New Orleans elect to keep the pick, rather than trading it, they will no doubt instruct the Lakers who to pick for them from any observations the front office is able to make from any last-minute pre-draft workouts they manage to organize.

Very important to put the correct hat on no matter what happens. 

They might have to do the Entergy plant vote all over again

As of right now the ruling itself isn't in the story but the lawyers seem to think this invalidates the approval vote.

Orleans Parish Civil District Court Judge Piper D. Griffin on Friday ruled that the City Council violated the state’s Open Meeting Law when dozens of residents were barred from entering two public hearings on Entergy’s proposed $210 million power plant in eastern New Orleans. Griffin ruled for the city in a second lawsuit that argued that the council’s utility consultants played conflicting roles as both advocates for the plant and fact-finders for the City Council, violating plaintiffs’ due-process rights.

It's not clear to me from reading this what specifically prompted the open meetings violation in the judge's opinion.  The Lens and the plaintiffs strongly suggest it was the "paid actors."  The Lens writes, "The suit said that the tactic exacerbated the Open Meetings violations," but that doesn't mean 1) that this was the really the heart of the matter or 2) that the judge said anything about that one way or the other.  It could be that there just weren't enough seats available.  Maybe they should hold the do-over vote in the Superdome.

If there even is a do-over vote. We'll have to wait and see if that's what the ruling actually demands. 

And now we do the real politics

This is the part of the short term rental regulation saga where the rubber really meets the road. All the landlords who have been profiting from the practice the new regs are intended to put a stop to are going to ask if they can all keep doing it anyway. 

New Orleans city planners are warning against proposals to allow all residential short-term rentals that have previously had licenses to operate to remain open even if new, more restrictive regulations are adopted this summer.

In a study released this week, the planners also poured cold water on suggestions to create areas of the city with laxer regulations so as to spur economic development there — at least until there’s a chance to see the impact of the new rules.

The Planning Commission says it's a bad idea. But they aren't the decision makers. The City Councilmembers are. And several councilmembers have stated at several points during this process that they are interested in either grandfathering in some existing uses or making use of special overlay districts and "opportunity zones" to do precisely what CPC is saying they shouldn't.

So far this year the council has been pretty good about following CPC recommendations but this question of grandfathering in or creating special exceptions is the tricky part. This is when the wealthy people who actually fund the elected people start to call in the favors they are owed. And in doing so they could undermine the entire effort.

Update:  This is being passed around town and it seems like an appropriate thing to include in an STR post.

Information on how to report, and hopefully destroy, an illegal Airbnb. Included in our most recent issue. Have fun 🏴🏴 pic.twitter.com/BKgciQUNA9

— The Shotgun (@shotgunpaper) June 14, 2019

 

Free milk and a Brown's cow

A full two years after the announcement of its closure, the Brown's Dairy complex is going up for sale.  Does there go the neighborhood?

For decades Central City has been an affordable neighborhood for African-American residents. The NAACP has historic roots there. Dryades Street (now Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard) was a major shopping thoroughfare with dozens of bustling stores and an open-air market. The Brown’s Dairy redevelopment will create further gentrification and change the traditional residential mix. It could also drive out some long-time renters. The Muses, a mixed-income apartment complex, currently provides the highest concentration of affordable living units in the area.

Listing agents formulated two prospectuses for the site – one that highlights mixed-use redevelopment and a second prepared for hotel investors. Without a zoning waiver, the site could accommodate a 550-room hotel. There is already a successful Quality Inn less than one block from the site. Hospitality industry real estate broker Lenny Wormser believes the site is not appropriate for a major hotel chain such as the Marriott, whose development costs are in the range of $450 per square foot including land. More affordable hotel chains such as the Comfort Inn could build out the site for $150 per square foot or even less, Wormser said. Even at $150 per square foot, development costs could reach $30 million, a previously unheard of budget for any Central City construction project. The city could approve a height variance perhaps in exchange for new affordable housing offsite.

Why go "offsite"?  Is that even a thing being talked about or is Columbus just helpfully suggesting it?  These kinds of set aside deals are insufficient tokenism in the first place even when they're applied directly to the development in question.  Moving them "offsite" just cedes the question of protecting the neighborhood altogether.

And Central City is in need of protection.  According the most recent Data Center neighborhood profile, 67.6% of renters there are "cost burdened" (defined as households that spend over 30 percent of their income on rent.) The Brown's lots are also important in that they are on relatively high ground. Every land use decision that deliberately excludes poor and working class New Orleanians from the limited range of sustainable real estate is yet another missed opportunity to create an equitable housing policy.  When Brown's closed two years ago, it meant a loss of 185 working class jobs. It looks like the plan is to replace those with more nice things for rich people and more upward pressure on rents.

On the other hand, you could probably put like five Top Golfs on that property so, you know, best highest use, right?

Speaking of Top Golf, it looks like Joe Jaeger and Melvin Rodrigue have completely broken up now. Jaeger had been on board to develop the now green-lighted Convention Center hotel. But that changed after Rodrigue appeared to cut a separate deal to build a Top Golf on vacant riverfront land controlled by the Convention Center. Jaeger was already involved in a venture to open a competing golf arcade franchise on the old Times-Picayune property. The Top Golf plot prompted him to leave the hotel deal in a huff.

Jaeger told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune he has no intention of returning to hotel project. He said he has deep concerns about Convention Center leadership. He declined to mention any leaders by name.

Jaeger said those concerns remain after seeing the lease terms revealed in the now-quashed Topgolf deal. The situation is baffling given the millions the authority spent on consultants to develop a master plan for the acreage it owns, he added.

The Convention Center leadership includes Michael Sawaya president and general manager of Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and Melvin Rodrigue, president of the New Orleans Exhibition Authority. The 12-member authority board has a mix of business and civic leaders.

If the leadership remains the same, “I don’t want anything to do with anything on that property,” Jaeger said. “It just doesn’t work for me.”

Now, even though the hotel has been authorized and the Top Golf deal mothballed, neither side is interested in making up. Instead they are moving ahead to develop their adjacent properties independently of one another.  Thanks to LaToya Cantrell's embarrassing "grand bargain" with the tourism oligarchs, Rodrigue now has legal authority to treat the Convention Center pretty much like his own private development company. 

House Bill 617, passed by the Senate on a 33-0 vote on Sunday, authorizes the Convention Center to build and own the $550 million, 1,200-room hotel proposed for the upriver end of the giant exhibition hall. The bill also clears the way for the Convention Center to develop other vacant land it owns next to the site

He hasn't decided what to do with it yet. But whatever it ends up being, the hard part was making sure the taxpayers would back it. That's all done now, thank you very much, Mayor Cantrell.

In his email, Rodrigue admitted the vision is still being formed, though he expects convention center leadership to turn more of its attention to the future of those lands now that plans for a headquarters hotel are progressing.

“We know the type of programming elements needed to make it a successful mixed use development and have lots of ideas of what those look like,” he said.

"Mixed use," meaning some riverfront condos and retail, maybe.  There might have to be a little "affordable" set aside somewhere in there. Or maybe that can go "offsite" too. 

Jaeger is making plans for the Market Street power plant.  Or at least he would like to.  This makes it look like there aren't many solid ideas at the moment. But there are plenty of public subsidies available should any ideas emerge.

Jaeger intends to push Market Street forward starting this summer. His team attended the International Council of Shopping Centers conference in Las Vegas in mid-May. Market Street was among the projects they looked to chat up among investors. Jaeger said he and his team plan to revisit previous redevelopment ideas, including the possibility of an entertainment use for the space.

Redeveloping the century-old property will be costly. The work will likely involve environmental remediation. But developers would be able to leverage historic tax credits, Jaeger noted. The plant also sits in an Opportunity Zone, a federal tax break program that is spurring frenzied investment in real estate. That could attract investors, he said.

“It’s difficult, but it’s got some reasons why it could happen,” Jaeger said.

So here we are again with all this public money available to throw at all this vacant land on high ground.  Nobody really cares what gets built there, specifically.  Meanwhile, this city has a serious housing crisis.  Somehow, despite all the recent rhetoric about what constitutes a "fair share," nobody can figure out how to connect these two facts.  Maybe nobody wants to.

The bail industry

Doing pretty good business in this city according to a new report released this week by the Vera Insitute.

The report argues that money bail and conviction fees are unjust, disproportionately harm black people, do not increase public safety and end up unnecessarily costing taxpayers.

“The extraction of wealth is a terrible suppression of economic and racial equity in this city,” Jon Wool, the Director of Justice Policy at Vera’s New Orleans office and one of the co-authors of the report, told The Lens.

According to the report, in 2017 New Orleans residents paid $6.8 million dollars for bail fees and premiums and $1.9 million in conviction fees. The majority of those costs — 88 percent of bail premiums and 69 percent of conviction fees — were paid by black families.

The current system of money bail also fails to keep the city safe, the report argues.

“In New Orleans, 65 percent of people arrested for the most serious crimes or who are flagged as high risk for other reasons avoid jail by paying bail,” the report says. Meanwhile, it claims, many are incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to bond out.

“We are using government’s most oppressive  tool — incarceration — in circumstances where it’s wholly unwarranted,” Wool said. “And it singles out poor people and black people, all in the name of raising revenues for government agencies and politically powerful for-profit industry.”

“That’s morally wrong. Bad policy, and morally wrong.”

Vera's report further proposes that by ending the cash bail system, the city can actually save as much as $8 million a year which it should spend on the courts, the DA, and the public defender and eliminate the "user pay" system that currently prevails. 

But, of course, it won't be that simple. People have vested interests in maintaining the $8.7 million industry as it is. DA Cannizzaro sounds like he's making his pushback against reforms a central theme of his reelection campaign. During the recent legislative session, lawmakers voted to bail out the bail bondsmen, so to speak, by retroactively approving $6 million worth of new fees they had been sticking their customers with. And, of course, the Mayor recently endorsed a plan that allows judges to lock up more juvenile defendants by ignoring a standard risk assessment tool.

So there's a lot of heavy lifting to come still if we want to get out from under this oppressive system.  Here's the link to Vera's report. 

Heating up

It was surprising to learn from real estate professional Stacy Head that the Dew Drop Inn is "hot" now.

Through strategic, persistent and well-organized advocacy, long-standing neighborhood issues like blighted housing can be resolved. Just as Freret Street blossomed after Hurricane Katrina, Head considers LaSalle Street around the Dew Drop Inn as the next “hot” area for redevelopment.

It was just last month, however, that we learned that the latest attempt to develop the venue has failed.  Maybe Stacy means that makes it "hot" now for an opportunistic and well capitalized investor to swoop in now.  I don't actually think it would be Sidney in this case. But I did mention in that post that there is a "cultural overlay" district on LaSalle Street there. This is probably what Stacy is thinking about.  More importantly, though, the "opportunity zone" rules look like a tax shelter scam for parked money. 

So it's possible that we could see "investment" in the area that drives up land values without actually creating anything.  That's "hot" as hell.

The growing menace of barge rage

Jackie's navy is still in dry dock, unfortunately.  Meanwhile the chaos is growing.

A barge on the Mississippi River hit “something” early Wednesday morning (June 12), knocking out power for thousands in Algiers, according to a report from WDSU. 

More than 5,000 Entergy customers along the river lost power for about two hours, according to the utility company’s outage map. Power had been restored to all but 50 customers as of 6:30 a.m.

Entergy told WDSU a barge hit “something” that knocked over a utility pole on River Road at Patterson Road. The crash happened around 4:20 a.m., the report said.

Do do do do do do

Hey what do you know, the Metal Shark boats still aren't ready.

NEW ORLEANS — Two brand new ferry boats arrived in New Orleans about a year ago to replace the 60-year-old, oft-broken down ferry boats that traverse the waters between Algiers and New Orleans CBD.

 They have yet to transport ferry patrons and no one seems to know when that will change.

 “RTA and Metal Shark owe an explanation and a clear timeline of when we can expect the vessels, which have been delayed for more than a year, to go into service,” said Council member Kristin Gisleson Palmer.

This is a bit of an oddball TV story in that it treats the matter as though it were a sudden discovery.  There's actually been a lot of local reporting on the ferry saga. I compiled much of it here a few weeks ago.

Anyway it's been pointed out to me that the problem could be as much RTA's lack of experience determining and enforcing the terms of its contract as it is the shipbuilder's ability to fill it. Which is to say it could be a Transdev issue. Is Transdev going to be in charge of that part of the business under the restructuring?

Summer reading

The beginning of June is probably a good time to roll out a few book recommendations. I'm getting the brain worms in my early old age now and I find I need to do a better job of keeping a record of what I've been reading. I used to have a Library Thing account for that. And there's still a Goodreads linked here on this very blog but I haven't used that in ages. Recently I've reverted to just keeping a boring old spreadsheet. But I'm going to try posting books here more often.  Otherwise, like everything else in life, if I don't take a second to write it down, I'll never remember any of  it happened.  So here are some titles I've finished over the past few months.  If I remember to do this more frequently, these posts won't be quite so long.  

• Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age Of Revolutions by Rashauna Johnson (2016)
  
  There is a long overdue movement in the treatment of slavery in popular history writing to place it in its proper context as a (if not the) founding institution of modern global capitalism.  Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire are a couple of relatively recent popular books I can recommend here. Also here is a two part episode of The Dig podcast recorded during this "Slavery's Hinterlands" symposium at Brown University.
  
  Johnson's book contributes something to this as it traces the movement of enslaved people to, through, and from New Orleans during a pivotal period centered around the Haitian revolution. The context of this book is global but most of the focus is local. Slavery marked every aspect of life in the city. Johnson describes its effect on domestic living patterns in the city's neighborhoods. She discusses its influence on popular culture and entertainment. One example of ths is an explicit characterization of the sometimes romanticized raquette matches played near Hunter's Field during this period as a brutal and exploitative use of black bodies.  She also writes about the local jail's role as an aggregator and lessor of slave labor (some things never change.)
  
  Here also is a brief WWNO interview with Johnson from last May.



• The Parade by Dave Eggers (2019)
  
  This is a short novel you can read in a day or two if you want to. I'm not sure you actually have to, though. The style is a faux parable where two main characters (their names are not given) go to work for a contractor building a new road across a recently war-torn country (also unnamed) supposedly located somewhere in the global south. Things happen along the way but it ends pretty much the way you expect.  Imagine if Dave Eggers had tried to write The Road by Cormac McCarthy and this is what you would get.



• The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson (2018)
  
  This is a juvenile/YA novel that will probably show up on a lot of middle school summer reading lists this year. A young girl and her mother spend the summer away from their home in Atlanta at her grandmother's house in a small town in South Carolina. She discovers a letter in the attic that leads her and a neighbor boy to investigate a mystery from the town's past. That premise frames a story built around fictionalized historical episodes from the segregationist South combined with a sort of Count Of Monte Cristo story.  Explores themes of racial justice and LGBTQ acceptance.



• Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
  
  Data driven systems for intake and management of social services make poor people easier targets for police. Eubanks describes experiments with screening systems for welfare benefits in Indiana and homeless services in Los Angeles as well as a "predictive" tool for assessing the risk of child abuse in Allegheny County, PA. She argues that these and systems like them constitute a "digital poorhouse" and an insidious expansion of the 21st Century police state.
  
  This is all very much worth paying attention to for New Orleanians as the City Council and Mayor implement so-called "tough love" homeless management and juvenile justice policies that can end up doing a lot of harm to vulnerable people under the very likely bad faith offer of aid.



• She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore (2018)
  
  This week, protesters took to the streets in Monrovia to express frustrations with the Liberian government headed by former soccer star George Weah.
  

  Among protesters’ main gripes: a stagnant economy in which most still live in deep poverty and a scandal in which the country last year lost $100 million in newly printed bank notes destined for the central bank.
  
  “Weah is not governing our state the right way,” said Ishmael Hassan, who voted for Weah in 2017 but has since become disillusioned. “The economic situation in our country is going down the drain.”

  Weah's election had been seen as a relief from the stagnation and corruption of the EJ Sirleaf government. Sirleaf came into power with high hopes after years of civil war under the dominant influence of Charles Taylor. Taylor came into power having led a revolt against the corrupt Samuel Doe. Doe came in... look this goes back a ways. Maybe we should start from the beginning.
  
  Okay so the nation we know as Liberia finds its origin in the efforts of the, ostensibly abolitionist, but primarily white supremacist American Colonization Society.  The idea behind ACS was to remove as many Americans of African descent as possible from the US by sending freed slaves to a newly founded colony on the West African coast. The Americo-Liberian colonists clashed with and quickly came to dominate the indigenous tribes living there. This continued on into the Twentieth Century as the elite colonizing classes collaborated with international corporations (most notably Firestone) to exploit Liberia's natural resources.  Basically, it was run as a big rubber plantation. Later, like pretty much every Third World nation, Liberia became a pawn in the US/Soviet Cold War rivalry until that played itself out at which point matters really began to deteriorate.
  
  You won't learn any of this by reading She Would Be King. But Moore's magical realist novel does attempt to relay some of the essence of Liberia's founding elements. Her three main characters are basically avatars of the country's ethnic mix embodied as folk heroes. They begin their stories living separate and oppressed lives in Virginia, Jamaica and the African back country.  Each discovers a unique magical gift as they move along on their journeys before coming together at the moment of the nation's independence.  The novel is successful in creating a mock folk legend about the people of Liberia. It's less compelling as a beginning-to-end narrative but that's not really the primary aim.



• Cities: The First 6000 Years by Monica Smith (2019)
  
  This is a quick and engaging survey of the archaeology of urban places that isn't anywhere near as ambitious as the title might sound. It's really more a personal summary of the author's observations and general theories based on her own work in the field. Most of which is quite fascinating although here and there the reader gets a sense of a creeping Pinkerist message. Trash is good, actually. Capitalism and class hierarchy are good and permanent fixtures of human society, actually. Things that seem bad now are actually not that bad because they are not new.  Probably the author doesn't mean for this to come through quite so explicitly. But if you are a reader who is sensitive to that sort of thing you might grow a little suspicious. Don't let that detract too much from what is really a delightful book, though. You're probably overthinking it. 

The whole point of the internet

Once upon a time there was this quaint notion that academic research, specifically, but general human knowledge by extension, would be greatly accelerated if the individual costs of sharing information were reduced almost to zero. Inevitably this ran up against the equally quaint notion that you can make billions of dollars creating artificial and unnecessary bottlenecks in the process.

The University of California decided it doesn’t want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world’s research output. “They’re a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher. Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals, earning its parent company RELX billions of dollars a year. 

This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

Which one of these notions defines the actual point of the internet for you depends on how favorable you are to the advancement and liberation of humanity vs.. you know.. capitalism.

Now we'll never know whose share was fair

So much lost revenue. What a shame.

For nearly two months after the city quietly reduced the threshold for speeding tickets, New Orleans raked in millions of dollars from tens of thousands of drivers who were unaware there was less margin for error as they drove through school zones.

The extra cash more than made up for the money the city was expected to lose after Cantrell decided to take down 20 traffic cameras in other parts of the city, in line with a campaign pledge when she ran for mayor.

The Advocate's analysis, which looked at publicly available data on the nearly 875,000 camera tickets issued in the last two years, shows that after media reports exposed the new rules and warned people about the policy in April, the number of speeders in school zones dropped by 28% on average.

That raises new questions about Cantrell’s claim that she lowered the thresholds to improve the safety of schoolchildren.

"It's so confusing to look at things these days"

RIP Dr. John 

His 2008 album, “City That Care Forgot,” offered his gritty meditations on Hurricane Katrina and the official response to the disaster that wreaked havoc on his hometown.

“None of my work has been as aggravated or disgusted as this record. I had never felt the way I do now, seeing New Orleans and the state of Louisiana disappearing,” he told Smithsonian magazine in the 2009 interview. “We've given the world jazz, our kind of blues, a lot of great food, a lot of great things. It's so confusing to look at things these days.”

This plus, of course, the passing of Leah Chase this week had some of us thinking in kind of a fin-de-siecle mode.

Ella Brennan, Fats Domino, Paul Prudhomme, Leah Chase, Dr. John—a generation that presented New Orleans to the world, and invented it in the process—all gone in the space of a few years.

— Brett Martin (@brettmartin) June 6, 2019

 

Chase's obits alone practically tell you the whole story of 20th Century New Orleans. For the better and for the worse, the elements of that century are rapidly receding now along with its icons. I know that sounds stupid.  But this is the mood this week. Probably we can throw into that reckoning the ominous situation on the river and beginning of Hurricane Season as well. For Mr. Clio here it called to mind the loss of Buddy D in January of 2005.  I thought also of Tootie Montana who passed in June of that year. Pivotal year, that one. But, again, maybe this is stupid. Not every passing is a portent.  Or maybe, actually, that's exactly what they all are. 

Anyway this week has been one hell of a year. Maybe let's take a day or two off.