This is one of those stories that makes me upset I haven't been keeping the blog up as well as I used to. There are a ton of notes I've got about this very long running story that I just haven't had time to post about. I do think I'll eventually get to some of it. Anyway here's the thing that's in the news at the moment.
Forward Together New Orleans, the nonprofit formed by Mayor LaToya Cantrell to pay for some of her signature social welfare programs, has returned more than $1 million in public money as it faces an Inspector General investigation and winds down its operations.
The nonprofit was subpoenaed by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General last year, after the City Council questioned two contracts Cantrell signed with FTNO that sent almost $1.1 million in city money to the charity she founded in 2019.
It looks like a little self-contained matter having only to do with the conduct of this mayor in particular. But really it's more about the permanent bad state of things. The bad state of things is we live under a regime of neoliberalism,where the dominant philosophy of government is to not have any government and instead farm all of its functions out to "private partners" on an ad-hoc basis. Much easier to spread money around to friends that way. Much harder to know if it's doing anyone any good.
What's happened most recently is, when the current mayor came in, she represented a slightly different formation of private partnering friends than what had existed. There was still a pile of money meant to be distributed to semi-privatized social services designed to be stolen from. So the people around her wanted to build a new network through which they could better steal it. In this case, instead of folding the members of the Cantrell "transition team" into official city government positions, they just decided make their own non-profit and administer things from there. Back in the day they used to call this "running government like a business." Except in this case they were running a business instead of a government.
The thing about that, though, is that sometimes with too much reinvention of perfectly fine graft wheels, the inexperienced grifters don't really know what they're doing and make a big mess of things. This story is contains examples of some of those messes.
In April 2022, Cantrell and FTNO’s executive director at the time, Shaun Randolph, signed a formal agreement granting FTNO $568,000 in city money to run a gun-violence intervention program and $505,310 for the city’s Job 1 Earn and Learn program.
Earn and Learn provided stipends and job training to at-risk youth. The gun-violence program was run on the city’s behalf for years by the Urban League. FTNO was supposed to take over that role in 2023 by paying a crisis-response team to meet with shooting victims at crime scenes and at the hospital in an effort to prevent retaliation. But in October, the city’s finance director, Norman White, asked FTNO to return the money for both programs.
All $1,063,410 was returned to the city on Jan. 30, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño said. The city signed a new agreement with Total Community Action to serve as fiscal agent for the Earn and Learn program last week, allowing that program to resume, according to Montaño.
So now they have to close up the new patronage entity they created for stealing the money and the old patronage entities will go back to stealing it like before.
The story says FTNO "paid back" the money which sounds like a no harm/ no foul situation. But is that really true? It's difficult to know... and that's kind of the point.
Although the fireworks were earlier in the @NOLACityCouncil meeting yesterday. @JPMorrell hits the nail on the head as to why we can't seem to make any progress with youth programs in the city. pic.twitter.com/hJsMMcX876
— Down For Whatever (@dadioonthepatio) January 19, 2023
If they would stop making everything a "signature" program tied to the specific patronage networks of each new mayor and instead just built a city government that did this work through professionalized civil service staff, this stuff wouldn't keep happening. But then how would anybody get paid?
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