Somebody should really do something

Does Troy Carter know what that is?  Doesn't seem like it. 

Attendees told Carter that they felt helpless, confused and worried about the federal government’s actions. In response, Carter told the concerned residents to take to social media and to call elected officials in Louisiana and other states to express their dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders in Congress.

One attendee, Andrew Cosgrove, asked Carter how to increase political engagement among residents. Carter’s response — encouraging voting and organizing among church groups and on social media — did little to satisfy Cosgrove or other attendees who spoke with Verite News.  

“It seemed like he had no plan and no answers,” Cosgrove told Verite News after the town hall. “He’s saying, ‘Make sure you vote next time,’ but he’s talking to a room of folks who voted and then took time out of their night to go to a town hall meeting, so that didn’t make any sense to me.”

You see, Troy is simply the elected representative to the US Congress.  He's not really there to do anything difficult.  It falls to you, then, to exercise your much greater power to... vote sometimes and also do posts.  Whatever you do, don't yell at him about it.  Remember, he just wants all this stuff off of his desk. 

This might be interesting if it wasn't so predictable. I think I'm just getting old now but I do get tired of watching a cycle stuck on repeat. I used to wonder if the latest turn of the ratchet would be the one the finally breaks it. But I don't know if I still think that can ever really happen. The Democrats, in the main, seem ready to make their same familiar move: not so much opposing the radical right as figuring out how to benefit from its ascendance.

Here is a recent interview with Minnesota Governor (and 2024 VP candidate) Tim Walz where he looks forward to Trump's unilateral and illegal shuttering of federal agencies as a new "opportunity."

How much can Democrats can rebuild, of what Trump is un-building right now? We’ve seen cases where employees are laid off, a court orders them back, but they’re still laid off. Do Democrats run in 2028 on re-establishing it?

I use the analogy of the car running out of gas. Car runs out of gas, you go get a can, you pour some in, you start it up, and it’s all fine. This is the car running out of oil, and it’s broken. And what I’m saying is, he is breaking it. This is a little bit in the Ezra Klein space: Democrats need to acknowledge that not all these agencies work perfectly. All of us who teach would agree to that. You know, we say how important the Department of Education is, how it does incredible work, but we would all argue there’s ways they could be better.

I think we need to start messaging right now. We need to put our experts on this. How will we build back next time? I think it’s an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place, functioning better, without all the barnacles. So, Trump might be doing us a favor. He stripped it down, he blew the motor up. We’re going to put a new motor in it and take off. And I think that’s how we have to start thinking about it.

He's just articulating the thing we've known for a while. Democrats actually agree with Republican austerity policy. They, too, want to dismantle what's left of the welfare state. But they don't want to be the party seen as responsible for that happening. And, of course, they want to make sure they're in position to grab whatever coins they can that spill from the smashed pinata. 

None of this is new. It's just worse now than ever because, well, that's what happens when rot runs unchecked for so long. What is DOGE, after all, besides just the latest and most extreme form of neoliberalism. 

One important reason for the trend toward privatization is the long-standing, bipartisan belief in Washington that private-sector contractors are inherently more efficient than government employees. The Reagan administration embraced contracting with open arms, despite early warning signs, and eventually initiated a formal commission on privatization. This was followed up by the “National Partnership for Reinventing Government,” through which President Bill Clinton promised that he would “make our Government work better” with the help of the business world. This private-sector fetish remains strong within the Trump administration, which has encouraged government workers “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Despite how widespread this perception of contractor efficiency is among policymakers, there has never been much strong evidence for it. In 1994, a Defense Department inspector general report noted that “Federal agencies often contract for services at a cost that is 25 percent to 40 percent greater than if Federal employees had been used to perform the services.” A 2011 report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight found that private contractors are often greatly overpaid in comparison to government workers. And in the situations where waste and abuse is identified in government programs, for-profit contractors are often the culprits.

We've been on this long path to destruction for a generation or so.  Politicians at every level of government and in both parties have specialized in smash and grab for longer than most of us have been eligible to vote for or against any of them.  Why are things so shitty? Because the entire era in which we've been alive has been about making things shittier and shittier for the sake of concentrating wealth in fewer hands. The thing that has been happening is still happening. It's happening in your city on a routine basis. 

Under the auspices of his charitable group, the Wisdom Foundation, and a newly created for-profit company called Civilized.ai, Wisdom and his team had been working for months with the city to integrate “newer technologies” with the city’s infrastructure. To do that, he planned to work with the city’s existing database of 311 requests. 

In late 2023, he rolled out FixNOLA, a website that catalogues and gamifies the city’s 311 data regarding road and drainage issues, creating a leaderboard to keep track of top “fixers,” a mix of contractors and volunteers who provide photographs and updates to existing 311 requests. Then, in February of this year, Wisdom launched ChatNOLA, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that can help log 311 requests as well as provide updates on already submitted requests while communicating in a human-like manner.

Behind the scenes, Wisdom and his nonprofit have rankled some city staffers, who noted that Wisdom is doing this work without a formal agreement with the city government. They are also concerned about whether Wisdom’s team is getting access to the personal information, such as phone numbers and home addresses, that residents enter into the city’s 311 system when they make a complaint. 

Five city employees familiar with 311 systems and protocols told Verite News that they are concerned that Wisdom, who has no background in public service administration, is creating a parallel 311 system when the city is in the process of implementing an already purchased new system for processing 311 data. (The employees declined to be identified publicly for fear of retaliation.)

The city already publishes 311 complaints on a public-facing database. But it scrubs the data of personal information, such as the complainants’ names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

Neither the Wisdom Foundation nor Civilized.ai has any contract or agreement with the city outlining the terms of this work or setting limits on how it can use the personal data it collects.

You can see the continuance of this in evidence as the field of candidates for this year's municipal elections begins to take shape.  A group of donors, politicos, and other local heavy hitters is hoping to influence the campaign by publishing its own Project 2025 document of sorts.

The recommendations from the City Services Coalition, which was formed in 2024 by real estate developer Pres Kabacoff, attorney David Marcello and others, focus on streamlining the structure and management of city government.

They include a proposed overhaul of the Sewerage & Water Board, empowering the mayor’s top deputy to manage day-to-day city operations, reforming the civil service system and clarifying the role of the city attorney.

The effort comes seven months before voters head to the polls to decide who will represent them on the City Council and who will succeed Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who is term-limited and unable to seek re-election. 

The coalition, which released the 216-page policy manual during a news conference Monday afternoon, has already met with announced and prospective mayoral candidates, including Helena Moreno, Arthur Hunter and Oliver Thomas.

Basically what's going on among the local politicians, donors and consulting pros is they're all trying to maximize their potential for getting a piece of whatever new patronage conduits are created after the next round of privatization.  With all the vandalism going on at the national and state levels, locally we have opportunists not pushing back against any of that but rather positioning themselves to catch as much as they can of the money that gets shaken loose. Somebody should really do something about all of this, you say?  Well, that's what your favs are doing. The same thing they always do.