Everywhere else it's just Tuesday

It had been a while since we had some sort of hunker down order around here so this is kind of nice.

Government buildings, schools and universities in New Orleans are shutting down this afternoon in the face of severe weather threats.

New Orleans City Hall will be closing at 1 p.m. and all public meetings scheduled for the afternoon are cancelled. New Orleans Recreation Development Commission facilities will close at the same time. Louisiana Workforce Commission offices in New Orleans will close at 1 p.m.

City officials are urging residents to stay inside during heavy thunderstorms, which are expected to hit the area about 2 p.m.

Hopefully it ends up being just another thunderstorm. It's only fun to sit around and snark about a free day off as long as nobody gets hurt.

Penny ante

It's go time in the House. Some key revenue generating measures are expected to come up for vote today. 

State lawmakers’ willingness to raise taxes that Gov. John Bel Edwards says are needed to prevent devastating cuts to vital government services will get its first test Tuesday in the special legislative session.

The test will take place in a State Capitol basement room where the 19 members of the House Ways and Means Committee are scheduled to vote on nearly 40 different tax measures beginning Tuesday morning.

“Members are processing whether they can vote for new revenue measures and which ones,” state Rep. Jay Morris, R-Monroe, said in an interview, summing up the view of others.

Edwards is proposing to raise about $350 million by raising taxes on sales, tobacco, alcohol and telephones and by trimming tax breaks for corporations and individuals. He is also seeking to cut at least $160 million in government spending and use $328 million in one-time money — all to close a $900 million shortfall by June 30.

Whether or not they can vote for the taxes depends on what sort of ransom they can demand. The Republicans haven't finished their spreadsheet or manifesto or whatever it was they were working on yet but they have dropped some hints.

House Republicans, under the direction of their caucus leader, state Rep. Lance Harris, were finishing up their list of ideas but did not provide them to Edwards Monday as planned.

Harris declined to provide specifics in advance of a meeting, saying only they would be presenting “things our members want.”

The items are believed to involve pensions for state employees, the tax system, sentencing laws, transparency in government and how the state spends money on roads and bridges. Edwards told The Advocate Friday night that he was open to hearing their ideas.

They want to take people's pensions away.  Because you can't get anything done around here without making some sop to ideologically driven cruelty, I guess. 

Meanwhile, I'm a little upset that this is all happening after Carnival.  "Clean pennies and Dirty pennies" might have made for some fun costume ideas.

The governor’s most controversial tax measure, House Bill 62, by state Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, would raise the state sales tax by a penny to five cents. (Consumers pay more because of sales taxes added by local governments.)

Nearly 200 types of transactions are exempt from sales tax. Jackson’s bill would not allow those exemptions on the additional one-cent, in what tax insiders call “a clean penny.” Her measure would raise an estimated $220 million before June 30 — meaning it would raise more than half of the $350 million that Edwards wants — and $910 million the following year.

House Republicans are insisting that Edwards agree to limit the one-cent sales tax increase to three or five years, which he could accept if the Legislature would raise other taxes to offset the disappearance of the additional penny.

At the same time, Jackson and state Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner, have separate bills that would eliminate the exemptions on the existing four cents of sales taxes, which are known as “dirty pennies” because of the exemptions on them.

Ideally the extra "clean" penny would go away after lawmakers finally agree to a more sane tax structure that  either reinstates something like the Stelly plan or, at the very least, cuts back on the hundreds of millions of dollars in direct annual corporate welfare payouts via our dubious tax credit programs. Those are the dirtiest pennies of all.

Horning in on the racket

The city is getting closer to legalizing the practice of converting housing stock into de-facto hotels and formerly affordable neighborhoods into tourist-saturated sacrifice zones. Rent stressed residents have protested this trend for years now but it's becoming more and more clear that the city is on the side of the landlords.  So long as they get their cut, that is.

The New Orleans City Council has yet to weigh in on proposals to legalize short-term rentals citywide, but Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration already is working on a way to cash in on properties rented through Airbnb and similar sites.

As legislators in Baton Rouge hash out ways to cover a nearly $1 billion shortfall in this fiscal year’s state budget, they’ll also consider a bill that would extend existing taxes on hotel and motel rooms to the growing trend of short-term rentals as well as to small, traditional bed-and-breakfasts that are now exempt from those taxes.

The city-backed bill is among the measures in Gov. John Bel Edwards’ legislative package for the special session that is now underway.

How did we get here?

The fun is only just beginning in Baton Rouge. We're only a week into the legislative special session and already the Republicans are refusing to play nice. 

Time is short for coming up with a budget solution for Louisiana. The Legislature has just two weeks left in its special session to resolve the financial crisis. Both Edwards and Senate President John Alario said the House should have already started voting on tax bills, but there are no revenue bills that have broken loose from committee.

All tax and budget measures have to originate in the House, so the absence of votes by House members has stalled work in the Senate.

The governor said he thought at least the sales tax bill -- the most important tax revenue source needed to resolve the current budget crisis -- should have moved by now. Increasing the sales tax by a penny is seen as the most reliable way to raise money swiftly by the time the fiscal year ends on June 30.

"There really isn't any excuse" for not voting on any tax bills a week into the special session, Edwards said.

Remember back when Rep. Neil Abramson (D-New Orleans) decided to help throw the House speakership over to the GOP partisan cabal obstructing things now? Abramson promised us it would be okay because he was in an awesome position to "work closely with the Speaker to manage some of the important legislation for our region and critical policy-making."

So far, so bad with that. Rather than expediting matters, Republican control of the house has significantly gummed up the works as members stake out reality denying positions on both the causes of and solutions to the current quagmire. At least Cameron Henry took the weekend to think about some stuff.

But they haven't recommended a new or different plan. And a few Republicans are already saying they won't accept the tax increases Edwards proposed that would keep even more dramatic set of reductions from happening.

"I want to go on the record saying I won't vote on all the taxes" Rep. Steve Pylant, R-Winnsboro, said during a House Appropriations hearing earlier this week. He was one of three Republicans on the committee to threaten withholding votes on new taxes.

Yet Pylant and the other Republicans haven't brought forward a plan that's different from Edwards -- yet. Rep. Cameron Henry, the House Appropriations Committee chair, said members are working on an alternative set of cuts over the weekend.

The whole committee is working with staff on a master Excel spreadsheet to see what they can come up with to compete with what Edwards has proposed.

"Hopefully, by Monday or Tuesday, we will have an accurate list of everything members want to cut," Henry said.

So sometime today or tomorrow, we'll get to see whatever it is the Microsoft paperclip told them to do. 

But before we get there, and before we hear anything more about John Kennedy's"400 budget cuts" or Beryl Amedee's GoFundMe page, let's make sure we're all clear on just how it is we got here in the first place.  A good place to start with that is this NOLA.com primer by Julia O'Donoghue published last week. 

The origins of Louisiana's budget crisis are complicated and structural. The state simply isn't set up to collect enough revenue to cover its expenses, even during boom times.

But there are also short-term issues that have cropped up over the past few months, as oil prices have plummeted. One of the state's chief economists, Greg Albrecht, said this week that Louisiana has entered into its own economic downturn, even as the rest of the country's outlook is looking up.

So, you see, we're "bucking the trend" economically. And that's a problem but the larger point is that thing about Louisiana's chronic refusal to take proper advantage of its "boom times."  We've talked about this many times before.

It's no secret that the economic and fiscal fortunes of the state are tied to those of the petrochemical industry. It's also no secret that the fortunes of the petrochemical industry are especially prone to a regular boom and bust cycles.  One would hope that, by now, we would have learned to better manage things in a way that helps us take full advantage of the good times investing windfalls in infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and socking some away for when the inevitable bust comes along.

This is not how we do things. 

Instead, we prefer to shovel revenue out the window as quickly (or more quickly, even) than it comes in.  Most of this happens in the form of special tax exemptions and other "incentive" expenditures written into the tax code. According to the legislative auditor, FY 2015 is likely to end up with almost half a billion dollars more in pay outs than revenues.  Not only do we spend more money than we raise, we don't even spend that money on ourselves. We simply give it away.

In 2014, The Advocate published an excellent series on Louisiana's tax incentive programs finding the annual cost had risen over a billion dollars. Just to focus on one example, here's a separate look from this past December at the amount of money the state gave away to oil and gas firms during the height of the recent fracking boom.

Under the credit’s rules, energy producers are refunded the severance taxes on horizontal oil or gas wells for the first two years of production or until the well has paid for itself, whichever comes first. On average, drilling a horizontal well costs about $9 million.

The legislative audit noted that no other state with significant horizontal-drilling operations offered a full refund of so-called severance taxes — though some offer reduced rates.

As the use of the break exploded, so, too, did the state’s cost — from $3 million in 2005 to a high of $272 million in 2012. It cost $166 million in 2014 as drilling slowed, the report said.

Oil and gas exploration already imposes heavy costs on the state in terms of the environmental and health hazards that come with it. As taxpayers we should demand maximum remuneration for enduring this injury.  Instead, under Bobby Jindal's leadership,  we heavily subsidized it.

Why would we do such a thing? Clancy DuBos thinks he can point to at least one reason.

More likely, in my opinion, the real “paperwork” behind Team Jindal’s corporate handouts is the former governor’s campaign finance reports. If history is any guide, there’s likely to be a high correlation between the former governor’s campaign finance reports and a list of companies that received tax incentives. At a minimum, Jindal committed malfeasance by consistently telling lawmakers and the public that his budgets for the past seven years were “balanced.” They were not.

So how did we get here? In short, we've taken what should have been a fiscal windfall generated by hurricane recovery and a booming oil industry and squandered the whole of it on a political kickback scheme meant to elect Bobby Jindal President.  Look how well that's worked out for everyone.

QOTD

South Carolina:

John and Teresa Wilkinson, however, said they’ve been with Donald Trump from the start.

“Trump may be a fraud — we don’t know yet — but at least he speaks his mind,” said John Wilkinson, a 66-year-old human-resources consultant.

“As far as I’m concerned, they could run a dog and I would have voted for him before any of these other assholes,” he said.

Electionball Day!

In Nevada, the polls are super tight. So the Democratic caucus result there is anybody's guess. And likely it will continue to be for weeks afterward.

In the hours before Saturday’s Democratic caucuses, supporters of US Senator Bernie Sanders circulated messages asking each other to record caucus proceedings whenever possible. The Nevada Democratic Party also sent a letter to the campaigns, urging them not to spread misinformation about how the caucuses and delegate allocation works.

Also on Friday, the Nevada Secretary of State, Barbara Cegavske, expressed “concern” over Republicans who may attempt to participate in the Democratic caucuses by changing party affiliation. In theory, a Republican can register and caucus as a Democrat on Saturday, and the state’s system would not update before the person could participate GOP caucuses on Tuesday.

“It is a concern that a registered voter in Nevada might participate in both caucuses,” she said in a statement, adding dual caucus participants “may be subject” to a ban from participating in the next presidential nominating contest.

Finally, in the rare case of a tied caucus, Nevada Democrats have directed organizers to determine a winner by high-card draw.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, the Christopher Guest movie that is the Republican Primary continues to delight audiences. 

Two grown men running for president met in a storage closet last night.

The meeting, called by Ted Cruz in an attempt to mend fences with Ben Carson ahead of the South Carolina primary, was held on Thursday night before the Conservative Review convention. The two huddled in the unusual venue for nearly 20 to 25 minutes, as Carson’s Secret Service detail stood outside, according to a Republican operative who witnessed the strange scene.

Carson, whose campaign has spent the weeks after Iowa blasting Cruz for lying to voters in the Hawkeye State, agreed to meet him for five minutes, according to a source close to Carson’s campaign, to try to put to bed the issue of his dirty campaign tricks in Iowa, during which Cruz’s campaign told caucus-goers that Carson had dropped out of the race.

Carson’s campaign confirmed the meeting—which was was supposed to be short and off-the-record—and blamed the Cruz campaign for leaking the fact that it occurred in an attempt to rectify his public image.

 Also, this is South Carolina so naturally these this sort of thing is going to happen. 

Just hours before Republican voters were expected to head to the polls in South Carolina, Courageous Conservative Political Action Committee, a pro-Cruz group, was robo-calling voters and warning them that Donald Trump was an advocate for gay rights and would force "people to bake cakes and photograph gay weddings," BuzzFeed reported Friday night.

Not to mention, this sort of thing.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday spread an apparent hoax about Muslims being executed with bullets “dipped in pig’s blood.”

The real estate mogul told supporters at a rally in Charleston, S.C., about US General John Pershing executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines in the early 20th century.

“He took 50 bullets and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.”

The story appears to a false, according to Snopes.com.

And those are the two guys who seem to leading nationally.

Meanwhile, Louisiana is about to join the fun. Both party primaries are scheduled for March 5 which means Early Voting opens today. You can find your Early Voting locations at the Sec. of State's website.

Update: Meant to include Oyster's latest on the Republican primary.  

Donald Trump has dominated the Republican race for the presidency for eight months straight. He's on the brink of winning the South Carolina primary after a debate where he frolicked in the taboo. 9/11 occurred on Dubya's watch. Planned Parenthood provides some 'wonderful' services. The Iraq War was a disaster. However factual, these are verboten topics in GOPworld. To flout the party line on any of them would spell doom for a traditional candidate.

Yet Trump— who enjoyed a big lead in the polls and had every conventional reason to take it easy during the debate— went out of his way to trample on GOP articles of faith.* And he did so looking very orange and angry. Yet it appears his apostasy won't hurt him. Why? How?

Go read the rest.  

This week's fake radio show

State budget, Superdome memories, Beyonce, and more.

Andy Kopplin's vision for UNO

Running it like a business

As state legislators grapple with a $2 billion budget gap for the next fiscal year, Kopplin said the school’s next leader will need to be creative about raising revenue. One possibility, he suggested, is reaching out to large businesses and corporations and developing partnerships that could support research at the lakefront school.

It’s the only tool in the neoliberal box. There's never any social, political, or academic challenge we can't meet with a little determined public-private partnering and commercialization.

Can't wait to see UNO start pumping out the latest research on "super natural cows". 

Crystal Brown, a communications representative from the University of Maryland, explained that the chocolate milk study was funded through the Maryland Industrial Partnerships program, a collaboration between the university and "commercial entities for economic development across the state of Maryland." The idea behind the program is to foster job creation through industry and university collaborations, according to Brown.

As it turns out, the maker of Fifth Quarter Fresh chocolate milk — which comes from a dairy cooperative in Hagerstown, Maryland — funded 10 percent of the study, and the university funded the rest.

So here we have a milk manufacturer working in partnership with the University of Maryland to fund a sloppy study, and the university then blasts the results, persuading schools and the press that this milk works wonders on students' brains.

The last UNO president was tasked with overseeing the dismantling of the public institution.  It only makes sense that the next guy's job will involve selling off the parts.

The Abramson Budget

As the news about the state fiscal crisis becomes more and more awesome each day, let us not lose sight of the fact that one Democratic State Representative promised he would personally take care of everything for us if 1) We let the Republicans control the house and 2) We let him be the one guy they were nice to.

I wonder how that's gonna go?

The age-old warning “be careful what you ask for” rings true today for the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, state Rep. Neil Abramson, a Democratic legislator from New Orleans. Abramson’s attempted run for speaker of the House derailed the governor’s selection for speaker. Abramson was rewarded by new House Speaker Taylor Barras with the chairmanship. Now, Abramson is likely to be considered one of the most powerful men in the Capitol for the next three weeks. Let’s see if he can handle the pressure to work with the governor and the Legislature to minimize the current fiscal crisis.

With Louisiana facing a deficit of nearly $900 million in a state budget that runs until June 30, and a $2 billion deficit for the next fiscal year, Abramson is tasked to provide the leadership and direction to move revenue-raising bills through his committee. After the presentation by the governor clearly identifying the problem, the balls are in Abramson’s court. All legislation that will raise new revenue must pass through the Ways and Means Committee. Given the tight time frame and the high stakes, Abramson has an opportunity to demonstrate his finesse as a legislator by bringing his committee together and balancing special interests to focus on short- and long-term solutions.

It's all on you, Neil. You broke it, you bought it.  

The kids today

They're just, you know, the kids of all the assholes who were here in the first place. So they're gonna argue and disagree about the same things.

The fact remains that progressives in every generation are as embattled by their own internal divides as they are by cross-generational strife. Cornel West and David Duke are both Baby Boomers. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Quentin Tarantino would likely find little common ground in a discussion about racial appropriation, but both are members of Generation X. And if Millennial Twitter activists are emblematic of a specific generational condition, then so are the trolls they battle.

Appraising a generational profile is not as simple as cherry-picking the members with whom one agrees, and writing off the rest as sellouts or traitors. The punkish appeal to generational politics falls far short of substantive rebellion against capitalism. Being a Millennial doesn’t inherently incline one toward revolutionary politics, anymore than being a Boomer or a member of Generation X makes one a reactionary.

The very fact that we think and write about politics within the false construct of generational stereotypes is itself a testament to the triumph of capitalism... as specifically of marketing... over just about everything. 

Is this one of John Kennedy's "400 budget cuts"?

Bobby Jindal's insanely stupid deal with Tom Benson.

Legislators on the House Appropriations Committee lost some of their spirit for their New Orleans Saints this week when they learned the state is paying owner Tom Benson almost $2 million more than the market value of 323,000 square feet of space the state leases in Benson Tower, including an entire floor that’s unoccupied.

The News-Star reports many freshmen lawmakers learned about the cost for the first time this week as they grapple with budget cuts that could cripple higher education and health care.

“It was shocking to me,” said state Rep. Larry Bagley, R-Stonewall, who also owns a home in Shreveport. “To have 24,000 square feet that’s unoccupied? I don’t know of anybody in DeSoto or Caddo or Sabine parishes who has a house that big. It makes no sense.”

But hey like any good solid trickle-down plan, it all comes back in the form of philanthropy money gifted to Ron Forman's con-profit and its continued appropriation of public space for privatized uses. 

The Carrollton Boosters, a nonprofit children’s sports group, intends to build a $4 million sports complex there, thanks to an agreement with the Audubon Commission, the public arm of the Audubon Nature Institute, and to donations from Tom and Gayle Benson, Drew Brees’ family and Louisiana-based companies like Tabasco and Iberia Bank.

The proposed development, which has been referred to in city documents as the Benson & Brees Soccer Complex, would accommodate soccer, football, kickball and lacrosse. It would include new restrooms, a concession stand, a new playground and $250,000 in landscaping, according to Audubon officials.

Audubon board and staff members, as well as supporters of the boosters club, have heralded the project as a way to expand sports opportunities for New Orleans children, providing a much-needed field for a growing organization that has served local children for more than 75 years.

Since the proposed development became public, however, it has ignited protests from residents who denounce the project as turning over public land to a private, though nonprofit, organization, and who say too little of the green space by the river will be left for those who just want to meander by the river or picnic on the grass.

Is anyone going to point out, also, that Forman sits on the LSED board which, technically, oversees Benson's lease?  How is this "donation" in any way appropriate? 

Reality check

There are limits to what the Sanders campaign can actually accomplish at least as far as winning primaries is concerned. And we're going to see those limits on March 5.

New Public Policy Polling surveys of the 12 states that will hold Democratic primaries for President between March 1st and 8th, conducted on behalf of American Family Voices, find Hillary Clinton leading the way in 10 of 12, with double digit leads in 9 of them.

This doesn't mean the Bernie campaign hasn't been a success, however. It has articulated concerns about the fundamental corruption in our politics and the growing inequality in our economic system. This is a rot that can't be ignored by candidates for office anymore if our democracy is going to survive. The Democrats very much wanted to ignore these issues in 2016.  Maybe the brief upheaval Bernie brought to the table will serve as some sort of wake up call for them. I'm rather pessimistic on that point, though.

If anything the condescending and dismissive tone exhibited by mainstream Democrats toward anyone rude enough to advocate for Bernie's agenda demonstrates just how cynical and elitist the core of that party's establishment has become.  The one shining achievement of the Sanders campaign can be seen in the way it has thrown the sick hypocricies of the apparatchicks into sharp relief.
Before any progress can happen, the party will either have to undergo a comprehensive reorientation or die away altogether.  Neither of those things will happen in 2016 but either can and must be made to happen through continued organization. Hopefully the imminent demise of the Bernie campaign will prove to be a beginning of something more impactful.

Monumental task

My favorite building in the entire city has been singled out for special recognition and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

The Superdome, a 40-year-old landmark on the New Orleans skyline, has been named to the National Register of Historic Places despite an objection by the state, which owns the stadium and is concerned the designation might slow down future projects.

The 76,000-seat home of the Saints, known as the Mercedes-Benz Superdome since 2011, was launched in August 1975 with an open house attended by 45,000 people. It has since served as the host site for seven Super Bowls, the Sugar Bowl games, college football championship games, Final Four men's and women's college basketball championship games, and more.

Ok neat. Wait. What does that mean, exactly?

The Superdome's owner, the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, opposed the new designation during the selection process last year. In a letter to the review committee, Ron Forman, the district's chairman, said additional requirements imposed by being a historical place could slow maintenance and capital projects on the building.

"While we are greatly honored for the consideration, we believe that a National Register of Historic Places designation could potentially adversely impact our ongoing obligation to ensure that the Superdome is maintained as a world-class multipurpose venue," Forman wrote.

Well, alright, Ron Forman is against it so that's probably good. But what if, maybe he has a point?  Does this mean we will now have to go through some extra layer of legal mumbo jumbo just to get them to take Bronze Tom down?  Because if so, then I think I'm against it.  The article says the designation is "honorary" but this language still gives me pause.

The Superdome's listing in the National Register doesn't block any future attempt to demolish it. For the publicly owned building, the listing is mostly honorary. The register provides an incentive to preserve buildings by giving private developers access to federal historic tax credits.

The Superdome cost $134 million to build in the 1970s. It is the largest single-span dome in the country. After Hurricane Katrina, the dome underwent $200 million of repairs and upgrades in a project led by New Orleans firm Trahan Architects.

If that means that, in order to take the Benson statue down, we're gonna have to go ahead and demolish the whole building just to get at it then I'm definitely against that. Also note the availability of "federal historic tax credits" which sounds an awful lot like more corporate welfare for a contractor like Centerplate or whoever the Bensons or the NFL choose to gift with some make-work job.

Why is this a good thing, again? 

The Bushes still do not know how "the internets" work

This is over a decade ago now so maybe some people need the reference



Anyway, today on The Internets, this story made the rounds.

Bush's campaign never bothered to register JebBush.com and has been using Jeb2016.com instead. For the first several months of the campaign, that didn't hurt the campaign; as of late September, JebBush.com was benevolently blank, according to the internet archive site the Wayback Machine.

But sometime last fall, someone appears to have noticed an opportunity, and arranged for the Australian company that owns the domain name to redirect visitors to DonaldJTrump.com. (The Trump campaign denies involvement, for what it's worth.)

Which, okay, it's been a while since this prank happened but it's still rather shocking to think the Jeb! campaign would not have made an effort to acquire "JebBush.com" by now.  But then again, here's what the Jeb! campaign was up to today.

Jeb Bush’s caption on a tweeted photo of a handgun inscribed with his name was simple: “America.”


The immediate reaction on Twitter was: Boom! A steady stream of tweets, many mocking Bush’s, followed. Bush’s post also had more than 5,000 retweets less than an hour after he posted it.

If there is a stupider person that Jeb! to have ever run for President (including the rest of this year's GOP field) I don't know who that is.

Unemployment Truthers

Perfect example of how Republicans take a real problem, the official unemployment rate does not give us a true measure of how well most workers are actually doing, and turn it into a stupid conspiracy theory meant to distract from rather than address the problem.

Among Donald Trump’s stump sound bites is that the national unemployment rate is far, far higher than the official rate of 4.9 percent. He is not alone in making such claims. Both former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who dropped out of the presidential race last year, and retired surgeon Ben Carson have repeated this claim during this election cycle. Its origin dates back to the 2012 election when many Republicans believed that Barack Obama had ordered the Bureau of Labor Statistics to report a much lower unemployment rate in October, just before the election, than seemed plausible. It also feeds into a growing distrust for government statistical data that parallels a denial of scientific facts such as climate change.

The reason  the stupid conspiracy theory has power, though,  is because the "official" unemployment rate does not take into account the number of "discouraged" workers currently not actively seeking employment or the number of underemployed workers forced to take jobs below at lower pay rates or for fewer hours than actually meet their needs.

The truth is a lot of people out there don't feel like they are making it.  So when BLS turns out what are supposed to be improving unemployment numbers, we should expect a natural disconnect.  And when supposed liberals like Hillary Clinton trumpet those numbers as evidence of an improving economy they only demonstrate which side of that disconnect they are on.

Which, in turn, opens the door for people like Donald Trump to sell them a stupid conspiracy theory.  A crazy lie that at least speaks to the voters' real pain is going to be more effective than a sophisticated half-truth that dismisses it.

Bundy Ranch Bywater

It's always Portlandia over in the downriver destination neighborhoods.

Squatters espousing allegiance to an esoteric black nationalist movement have staked a claim to a Bywater house up for sale and remain there more than a week after neighbors complained to police about the apparent trespassing.

The newcomers have posted signs claiming the property now belongs to the Washitah Mu'ur Nation. The Washitah, more commonly spelled Washitaw, are an obscure group that claim to be descended from the original inhabitants of the New World, who, according to the the group, were black Africans.

Fredrick Hines, whose name is on the tax rolls for the property and whom neighbors say is the true owner, called police after he found out a group of young people had moved into his investment property and changed the locks. Hines said he showed police the deed, which has his name on it, but they wouldn't remove the people living in the house.

Or maybe it's more like the occupied ranger station. Either way it's somewhere in Oregon,  I think we're all agreed.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has drawn parallels between the Washitaws' strange legal claims and those of the "sovereign citizen" movement, noting a similar anti-government bent. The group probably only has a few hundred hardcore members, according to the center, but many more dabble in its "cocktail of New Age vocabulary" and "pseudo-historical and -archeological gobbledygook."

Hippies or libertarian gun nuts, who the hell even knows the difference anymore. It's all pretty much the same delusion in the hipper realms anyway. Besides, aren't all these people supposed to be into the "sharing economy" anyway?  Or does that only come into play when housing stock is "shared" to the benefit of landlords operating outside of the law rather than tenants who do so?

One last look at Carnival parade season

Usually I write more about what's going on with Carnival season as it happens. This year there didn't seem to be enough time after the first weekend for whatever reason. Fortunately we managed to make up for some of that over the weekend on the fake radio show where we recorded about three hours of Mardi Gras stories and broke it out into three episodes.(Part A Part B Part C) The show notes alone should make up for the lack of Carnival blogging, at least to some degree.  But since we have the space here, I'll go ahead and add a few notes.

Parades: I saw every Uptown parade this year except for Mid-City and Okeanos. I even ranked them on a list.  As we talked about this, it started to feel like more of an exercise in dickishness than it was intended to be. A Mardi Gras parade, like any excuse to go stand around and drink in the street is a fun thing by default.  So the parades at the bottom of the list are still things that a person will enjoy having seen. Let's see if we can say at least one nice thing about each of the bottom five.

Number 22 Oshun: Actually, we covered this already.

2016 Oshun, as it turns out, was a perfectly nice parade. The modest floats looked good. The riders seemed to be having a good time. I don't even remember what the theme of this parade was but it doesn't seem like that should matter very much.  What mattered was that it started to feel and look like Carnival season again.

In fact, when the list made its first appearance, Oshun was pretty high up.  It just happens to be a basic template sort of parade which is fine but it also means the more elaborate groups are going to pass it up by default. For what it was, though, it was perfectly fine.

Number 23 Carrollton:  For the life of me I can't remember why this placed so low. They did everything well. I especially liked that in a parade themed after the seasons of the year, they would have found a way to include Duck and Rabbit.





Number 24 Choctaw: Okay well I think we all know what the problem was here.





But in the interest of having said something nice, Choctaw is a West Bank parade and the people of the West Bank deserve to have their Carnival parades back.  Warts and all.

Number 25 Alla: Well, there was the problem with a day parade having to roll mostly after dark without any lighting on the floats.  And then there was the "American Icons" theme that haphazardly strung together Louis Armstrong, JFK, and The Army.







As Varg said on the show, though, Alla used to be Big Time over in West Bankland. It's probably a great parade in its natural setting.

Number 26 Freret: Again, we covered this already in a previous post. Most of their floats were at least half empty.



On the plus side, Councilman At-Large Jason Williams seemed to be having a good time.



Which brings us back to the point. Even the worst parades are good.

But what about the best parades?  Here's a brief look at each of the top five from the list.

Number 5 Tucks:



Even for a Carnival parade, Tucks is always uniquely loose. From the marching clubs that announce its arrival  to the T-P streamers it sprays all over the avenue, the parade's brand is all irreverence and disorder. This can sometimes work to its detriment but not this year. Tucks's presentation was as tight as I've ever seen it. And its theme of taking pointed jabs at various local neighborhoods was hilarious.

Here, for example, is the CBD, or Bensonville, as we sometimes know it.



Or Magazine Street, where the yuppies run wild



Or the Warehouse District where The Rent Is Too Damn High



Number 4 Orpheus:



Orpheus is gorgeous. It became a major point of contention on our show, though, for reasons we've covered already. So read that and listen to the podcast.

Number 3 Hermes:



Always some of the best float design of the year. Hermes isn't huge but it seemed like, pound for pound, they were throwing more aggressively than the "Superkrewe" Nyx had been.  Hermes usually does some sort of a literary theme. Sometimes they're a bit overly obscure with it.  This year they were "The Tempest" so it was accessible as well as beautiful to watch.







Number 2 Muses: For all the attention it gets and the high expectations that come with it, Muses still manages to live up to all of it.



Their sense of humor was as good as ever.  The floats were themed after different types of candy but with references to current events and pop culture built in.

Donald Trump's Atomic Fired Ball



Irvin Mayfield's Heavenly Cash



Tom Benson's Gummie Heirs



Muses even made some news of their own as celebrity Grand Marshall Solange accidentally threw her wedding ring from the shoe float.



The ring is still missing. If found it must be destroyed in the bridge fires of Bonnet Carre.

Muses also showed us something new this year with this float full of Mardi Gras Indian Queens.



Finally, when it's running well, Muses is one of the most artfully staged parades holding the bulk of its marching clubs, dance teams, art bikes, and other little surprises until the back third of the parade. This makes things start to feel more interactive as the night goes on. Nobody else does it quite this well.

Number 1 Thoth: Thoth is the best parade. It just is.



We'd also like to thank NOPD for keeping everyone safe from our beer cooler by warning us not to step too far away from it.  We'd also like to thank the officer on our block for letting us know that Druids was throwing Jello shots and that we should try and catch some.

Everything else is in the shows or in the notes to the shows all of which can be found here, here, and here. God willing, we'll see it all again next year. 

Back to life

Now that the Bobby Jindal/Grover Norquist eight year quest for national advancement and right wing ideological purity has ended, it's fascinating to watch all these folks in Baton Rouge wake back up to the fact that they might actually be there to do some shit.  Or as Stephanie Grace puts it,

Edwards may be trying to make a point by painting such a bleak worst-case scenario, but it’s a real one. Handy solutions are in short supply.

And that’s not just on the governor but on the Legislature, which did little to fight off years of tax cuts, giveaways and raids of one-time money on Jindal’s watch. Lawmakers, particularly in the House, are now making a big show of claiming their independence and asserting their status as a coequal branch of government. It would have been nice if they’d been acting as a watchdog all along.

Grace is right. The governor's speech yesterday was meant to frighten people. It was meant to spur action. I mean, I'm gonna go out on a limb right now and predict that we aren't canceling football season. But suggesting the idea is a good way to get through to the many people in this state who are fans of the football team but don't necessarily care one way or another about higher education funding on its own.

Edwards made some bold threats last night and it's reasonable to assume they are (mostly but not entirely) bluffs. But somebody has to DO SOMETHING to kick the legislature in the butt. Bobby and Grover's happy playtime is over. They're going to have to come to Baton Rouge expecting to work. Judging by the Republican caucus's highly questionable choice to air a disingenuous  John Kennedy For Senate commercial in "response" to the governor last night, it's not at all clear they are ready to do that.

Just in time for legalized short term rentals

The set of STR regulations recommended by the City Planning Commission included a prohibition against using whole homes for that purpose in residential neighborhoods.  That provision has zero chance of passing City Council approval intact.

Why? Because that's not what the flippers want.

Ragas said the decline in sales of unrenovated homes is a sign that the city’s once-plentiful stock of storm-damaged homes is dwindling, and many of the more easily renovated ones already are off the market, which is a factor in the rising prices.

“Now, we’re looking at houses in many cases that have been empty for 10 years,” he said. “It’s shifting from a market where your buyer is the fixer-upper and they’re going to take this (project) on themselves to a market where it’s more small-contractor-driven, and they’re buying anything they can find and renovate or flipping or renting it.”

37,077 parking tickets

That's a 65 percent increase over 2015!  Business is booming, y'all.

A "political revolution" is not the same as winning an election

One thing that people need to understand about the Sanders campaign is that it isn't actually about electing or nominating Bernie Sanders. It's about building a movement that can expose and challenge the hypocrisies of our oligarchic system. So far that's going pretty well.

For example, Bernie just whipped Hillary in New Hampshire garnering 60 percent of of the popular vote. And yet..

Even measured by committed delegates — the narrowest possible measure of “frontrunner status” — Sanders is at a massive disadvantage. Yes, his campaign has netted a combined total of 36 delegates from Iowa and New Hampshire, narrowly edging out Clinton’s haul of 32 delegates so far. But that’s not counting the superdelegates, a group of 370 Democratic potentates who can flock to their preferred candidates without being constrained by state primary outcomes. Clinton has the pledged support of 362 superdelegates to Sanders’s eight, giving her an overall 394 to 44 delegate lead even before the next 48 states head to the polls.

The nomination is going to go to Hillary.  The entire process is designed to ensure that that happens. But there's still value in winning primaries. It demonstrates just how out of touch the political elites are with the actual challenges people face.   If we're going to build a more responsive politics the first step is demonstrating just how badly unresponsive the politics we now have is. That is what this primary is about.

This primary is about showing the elites as the immoral toadies they are.  One highlight of last night's debate involved the candidates articulating their differing views of Henry Kissenger. The Intercept's Dan Froomkin writes that  it's one of those moments that should tell you everything. 

But Clinton is clearly picking from the usual suspects — the “securocrats in waiting” who make up the Washington D.C. foreign policy establishment.

They work at places like Albright Stoneridge, the powerhouse global consulting firm led by former secretary of state Madeline Albright, a staunch Clinton backer. They work at places like Beacon Global Strategies, which is providing high-profile foreign policy guidance to Clinton — as well as to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And they work at places like Kissinger Associates. In fact, Bob Hormats, who was a Goldman Sachs vice chairman before serving as Clinton’s under secretary of state, is now advising Clinton’s campaign even while serving as the vice chairman of Kissinger Associates.

Despite the wildly bellicose and human-rights-averse rhetoric from the leading Republican presidential candidates, they’re picking from essentially the same pool as well.

A few weeks ago, I talked to Chas Freeman, the former diplomat I once called a “one-man destroyer of groupthink,” whose non-interventionism and even-handed approach to the Middle East was so un-Kissingeresque that his surprising appointment to President Obama’s National Intelligence Council in 2009 lasted all of a few days.

He marveled at the lack of any “honest brokers” in the D.C. foreign policy establishment. “We have a foreign policy elite in this country that’s off its meds, basically,” he said.

“There’s no debate because everybody’s interventionist, everybody’s militaristic.” They all are pretty much in the thrall of neoconservatism, he said. You can see them “speckled all over the Republican side” and “also in the Clinton group.”

Henry Kissinger is thus a litmus test for foreign policy. But don’t count on the mainstream media to help you understand that.

Imagine two types of people: Those who would schmooze with Kissinger at a cocktail party, and those who would spit in his eye. The elite Washington media is almost without exception in that first category. In fact, they’d probably have anyone who spit in Kissinger’s eye arrested.

There are "two kinds of people" involved in this Democratic primary.  Which side are you on?  Think long and hard about whether or not you believe the Clintons are on your side or ever have been.

As far back as 1990, Clinton and the DLC had declared in the “New Orleans Declaration” that they intended to echo the language of conservatism. The Third Way advocates pledged their devotion to the mission of expanding “opportunity, not government.” The war on poverty was replaced by a “politics of inclusion” that would phase out social welfare. The compensatory role of social assistance and affirmative action were denigrated. The lauding of individual initiative and upward mobility refuted a focus on problems of group inequality and the search for social solutions to discrimination.

Economic security would be achieved through free trade, not protectionism. Strong defense had to be maintained on the world stage while the prevention and punishment of crime would define domestic security policy. Concerns of the oppressed were to be sidestepped, as the integration of minorities into the “economic and cultural mainstream” was preferred to “racial, gender, or ethnic separatism.” And finally, citizenship was to be redefined in line with communitarian principles, entailing “responsibility as well as rights.” A strong reliance on “moral and cultural values” would govern public behavior.

I was coming of age during the early 90s. 1992 was the first Presidential election I was old enough to vote in. But even then I was literate enough to understand what garbage humans the Clintons were.  It's disappointing but not surprising to me that the corporate press does its best to ensure younger generations don't instinctively get it without having done some digging. (May not be succeeding anyway because, lo and behold, young people are not, in fact, total idiots.)

What continues to astonish me, though, are the large number among my contemporaries and older who seem perfectly fine with the garbage legacy of these garbage people. All of them should know better. Some of them, no doubt, will come around.  But we're going to have to win a few more primaries first. Even if those primaries don't end up having much to do with how a nominee is chosen.

Fiscal insanity

Bobby Jindal's Louisiana Miracle

Low oil prices are a factor in the budget crisis, but Albrecht and the state's other economist, Manfred Dix, said tax collections across a variety of areas have taken a hit. Sales and income taxes are unusually low.

"This is a very low number for individual income tax collection," Dix said.

Not all of those problems can be attributed to the downturn in the oil market. Louisiana's sluggish sales tax collection predates the low oil prices, Albrecht said.

And perhaps a bigger problem than low prices for Louisiana is the state's lack of corporate tax collections. Albrecht says Louisiana is likely to pay more out to corporations in tax credits and refunds than it collects in taxes this year.

"I've never seen corporate numbers this weak," he told the panel.

Shit Show pre-gaming

The special session begins Sunday. They're coming to Baton Rouge from all over to participate.

Prediction: Pain.

The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance alerted colleges and universities today that they were stopping TOPS payments immediately because of uncertaintly related to the state budget.

“Due to the possibility of state budget cuts, all TOPS payments are being suspended until further notice,” said an email that went out to all TOPS eligible institutions at 3 p.m. “More details will be provided as information becomes available.”

Gus Wales, a spokesman for LOSFA, said the email was sent out as a “precautionary measure, until we learn more about the implications of the potential budget cuts.”

If you're interested in watching the Governor's speech you can stream it live here beginning at 6:30.  If you're interested in John Kennedy's US Senate campaign commercial Republican response, I'm not sure what to tell you yet. But, just taking a few guesses, I'm sure he'll talk about "entitlements" and then say a lot of numbers and percentages.  This will convince at least half of the Louisiana political press that they are dealing with a smart person.  At least, that's what used to work for Bobby Jindal anyway.

I wonder how much money Kennedy could find if he asked his "aggressive stop and frisk" brigade to collect 50 cents from the turned out pockets of every suspicious character they encounter.

Seriously, consider moving Orpheus to Tuesday night

Otherwise, look what we have to do to entertain ourselves

Delicious but deadly

Mardi Gras beads.

Dr. Mielke, along with the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based non-profit group HealthyStuff.org and Dr. Holly Groh, a founder of VerdiGras in New Orleans, studied beads from China. They found lead and an array of toxic and cancer-causing metals and chemicals, including bromine, chlorine, cadmium, arsenic, tin, phthalates and mercury.

At least one of these chemicals was found in 90 percent of the beads at levels higher than allowed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

"Basically, if you have lead exposure early on in childhood, it does change the ability throughout life," Dr. Mielke said.

Lead exposure from leaded gasoline, wheel weight and paint of the past in urban areas has been scientifically linked to learning and behavior problems.

Problem isn't going to go away overnight. Safer, recyclable or degradable alternatives are becoming available but they're relatively expensive compared to the standard plastic stuff and can't be ordered in the same bulk quantities.  And most of these parades and their riders are on pretty tight budgets so.. well, it's a process. 

On the other hand, if we find that the toxicity is a clear enough danger, we should be able to ban the leaden beads straight away. But we all know things don't work like that around here. 

More Carnival wrap-up

I plan on putting out a few more reflections on Mardi Gras 2016 in the coming days; parade reviews, incident reports, photos, that sort of thing. I actually ranked all the uptown parades we saw this year so I'm trying to decide whether I want to write a series of little blurbs or one big listicle.

But nevermind that now. A little over a month ago, we walked over to Magazine Street to see the Krewe of Loup Garou become the first (sort of) parade type thing to happen uptown this year.  Afterward, I wrote a little bit about differences between early and late Mardi Gras.

This week, Bart Everson's Mid-City Messenger column looks at the almost unthinkable prospect of Christian ecclesiastical leaders across the globe determining a fixed date for Easter (and thus for Mardi Gras) in the near future.  Bart, convincingly argues that a freeze in the movement of our feast separates it from one of its core mysteries.

Bring it on, you say. Fix the date and let the good times roll.

I’m sorry, but I can’t get behind that.

You see, in the final analysis, this all comes down to the moon. Easter is currently calculated by finding the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The only way to fix the date for Easter would be to ignore the moon entirely.

That’s just totally uncool. The moon is awesome. Factoring out the moon is the opposite of awesome.

The moon is variable, constantly changing. Some associate the full moon with irrational behavior, from which we derive the word lunacy. All the variability and madness of the Carnival season flows from the silvery light of the moon.

I gotta say I agree with Bart. Not only would fixing the date dampen part of the, well, the lunacy, as Bart says. But it would also greatly diminish the significance of catching and consuming the occasional Moon Pie tossed from a float. And no one is made more well off by that.

Welcome to Shit Show 2016

Your host will deliver a video greeting this evening. He will plead for patience and cooperation during difficult times and all that stuff.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards will give a televised update on the state budget on major television networks across the state Thursday night.

According to the governor’s office, the address will be aired statewide at 6:30 pm on all major network television and radio stations, as well as Louisiana Public Broadcasting. It’s expected to last about 10-12 minutes, according to the governor.

“The challenges facing Louisiana are so severe, and the risk of doing nothing is so big, that it is important for me to outline these problems directly to the people,” Edwards said in a statement. “I promised to be open and transparent with the people of Louisiana and give them the facts, and that’s what I intend to do. There are some real consequences if we do not work together to solve the state’s financial problems and I want to personally communicate them to the citizens of our state.”

Unfortunately the guests have already signaled they are in no mood for any of that.

The Louisiana GOP is demanding equal time to respond to Gov. John Bel Edwards' planned televised address on Thursday (Feb. 11).

Reublicans made the demand in a letter to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and to television stations statewide on Wednesday, saying they deserved time to provide a counterpoint to Edwards plan to raise taxes to close the state's $870 million deficit. In the letter, the party accuses Edwards of proposing "historic" tax increases without doing enough to cut spending.

Just to translate that for a second that's the Republicans saying they don't think the Governor is planning to cut our already badly gutted  higher education and health care systems enough this year. They get to do this because they know that whatever cuts happen under this administration will be owned politicaly by the governor no matter what they say.  Everybody knows it's going to be bad either way. Why not maximize the political damage to Edwards in the meantime?  Sure beats doing anything to help.

Just to give you a sense of how cynical this "response" is, by the way...

Louisiana GOP spokesman Jason Dore said Republicans likely will have state Treasurer John Kennedy give the response. His speech will be provided to any stations that agree to air.

We see your desperate call for responsible governance and raise you one Kennedy For Senate commercial.  Welcome to the shit show that is the 2016 legislature.

When the system is itself a grift, expect grifting

Did you see Landry-Walker's marching band this Mardi Gras season?  One of the best. We noticed them every time they came down the street.  You just can't fake that.

Test scores, on the other hand..

Landry-Walker High School's 2013-14 test results were so amazing that some New Orleans education insiders doubted they were valid. More students at Landry-Walker than at Lusher Charter, a selective-admissions school, aced geometry. In biology, the school was fourth-best in the city.

Skeptical of the numbers, the school's parent organization, the Algiers Charter School Association, launched a 16-month investigation -- without telling Landry-Walker's principal -- into what some feared could be widespread, teacher-enabled cheating. The association undertook a detailed analysis of student performance, hired outside lawyers and, for the spring 2015 round of testing, placed independent monitors in every single examination room at its flagship school, according to internal documents.

When the 2014-15 test results came back, Landry-Walker's scores fell off a cliff. The percentage of students getting top marks in geometry fell by 51 points.

Landry-Walker's principal, Mary Laurie, remains on the job. But the association fired its chief executive, Adrian Morgan, eight months after the plummeting scores came back. And the Louisiana Department of Education has referred Landry-Walker High's 2013-14 test scores to the state inspector general's office to investigate.

The "School Reform" advocates will wring their hands of whatever batch of dishonest individuals are eventually found at fault.  But in the insane context such "reformers" have devised, each individual attempt to game the high stakes testing system is but a symptom of the problem. 

The tests, and why they matter

All Louisiana public school students take six subject-matter tests, called "end-of-course" exams, in algebra, biology, English II, English III, geometry and U.S. history. There are four possible scores: excellent, good, fair and needs improvement. Students take the exams on a computer, through a secure browser that freezes the rest of the machine and doesn't let them access search engines through which they could research the questions and answers.

These tests have high stakes for schools and students. Students must pass at least three of the six end-of-course exams to graduate, including one mathematics and one English exam. Their scores make up one quarter of a high school's annual performance score. They affect teacher performance evaluations. And charter schools are periodically reevaluated and must close if they don't make the grade.

Create a paranoid system built on incentives to "compete" in a race to hit arbitrary numbers and you're going to encourage people to find the most efficient means of hitting those numbers. That's just free enterprise principles at work.  But as long as "reformers" keep telling us that's a great basis for an educational system and not a completely crazy one that's what we're gonna get. 
 

Hangover

Gonna be a fun special session

Louisiana's current budget hole that must be filled by June 30 is $870 million -- even worse than Gov. John Bel Edwards has been saying for the past several weeks.

"For all practical purposes, Louisiana is in its own recession," said Greg Albrecht, the Louisiana Legislature's economist that predicts the state's tax collections.

The even-larger-than-expected problem means the budget cuts and tax increases being considered to solve Louisiana's budget crisis may have to be more aggressive than originally proposed.

In other words, we are "bucking the trend" but in a very bad way.  We've been talking about this for a while but, just for review purposes, here are some links from the past month or so.

December 22 

A year of tumbling oil prices has caused thousands of job losses throughout Louisiana, slowed energy production, delayed new investment, and sent state and local officials scrambling to plug budget holes created by the industry’s latest boom-or-bust cycle.

As prices sank below $35 per barrel last week to hit six-year lows, the latest federal jobs numbers had a grim look: Louisiana’s sector that includes oil and gas jobs lost more than 10,000 workers — nearly 19 percent — in the 12 months ending in November.

That’s the lowest point since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began using its current tracking system in 1990.

“Every day, I hope we hit bottom, until we get up the next day and realize the bottom is (lower) than we thought,” said Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph, whose sales tax revenue fell nearly 14 percent in the first 10 months of the year.

Talk around holiday dinner tables throughout Louisiana is certain to include questions about whether the state is headed toward another devastating recession along the lines of the 1980s oil bust.

January 19

National Oilwell Varco, a manufacturer and parts supplier to the oil and gas industry, is shutting down its Houma facility and laying off the 80 employees that work there.

Layoffs at the facility started Monday, the Louisiana Workforce Commission said, and will continue in phases until NOV shuts down sometime between March 7 and March 21.

Officials with the LWC said they will provide re-employment services to the affected employees, including information on unemployment benefits, résumé help and job-searching tools. Houston-based NOV said it will provide workers with additional pay and benefits because they were unable to provide sufficient notice of the closure “due to economic reasons.”

January 21 

And on Wednesday, oil prices resumed their slide; the price of a barrel of crude oil reached the lowest level since May 2003. Crude oil was down 6.7 percent, to settle at $26.55 a barrel in trading for February futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Royal Dutch Shell warned on Wednesday that it expected its profit for the fourth quarter of 2015 to be about half of what it was in the comparable period a year earlier.

In addition, traders see no signs of the oil glut easing, as Iran has permission to sell into the world markets now that sanctions have been lifted as part of a nuclear deal.

January 28

Nucor Corp. has written off $84.1 million worth of engineering and equipment for a proposed $1 billion blast furnace in St. James Parish, but the company may still build one.

The blast furnace was part of a massive, multiphase $3.4 billion steel complex Nucor hoped to build in St. James. The state had promised the company $160 million in incentives if all the phases were built.

Nucor already has built the first phase of the project: a $750 million, direct reduced iron plant in St. James that employs 170 people.

But the uncertain commodities market hampered those plans, and Nucor missed a year-end deadline to give the state its final investment decision on the complex.

 February 8

Noranda Aluminum Holding Corp., parent company of Noranda Aluminum in Gramercy, filed Monday (Feb. 8) for voluntary bankruptcy protection in federal court. It filed under Chapter 11 rules that would let it restructure its business operations.

The company said it will continue to operate its Gramercy refinery but will would no longer be shipping the Gramercy refinery's product to the company's New Madrid, Mo., aluminum smelter. The change will require the company to find another buyer for its alumina, "along with achieving additional cost reductions and maintaining the company's bauxite business as a secure source of supply."

Get ready for an ugly fight in Baton Rouge this year... and every year for a while, to be honest. 

Purge

It's been both a slow and busy Ash Wednesday if that makes any sense. A lot of stuff to catch up on. Not a lot of physical and mental fortitude with which to do all of the catching up just yet. We'll get there.

In the meantime, here is an Ash Wednesday appropriate article by Andru Okun from this week's Gambit. It's about one of the most unsung but most fascinating Carnival entities sometimes known as the Krewe of Municipal Vehicles.

This year's 10-day Carnival season cleanup force is made up of 600 men and women and 114 pieces of equipment, including seven front-end loaders and 30 garbage and dump trucks. On any given night, these often overlooked and underappreciated laborers can expect to pick up anywhere between 50 to 100 tons of trash, working late into the evening to erase nearly all signs that a parade had ever passed anywhere along the miles-long route.

Trailing behind the last Uptown parade of the evening is a fleet of sanitation vehicles and a large crew of workers. A mighty vehicle called a flusher leads the way, carrying around 3,000 gallons of water and spraying the streets at high pressure from jets attached to the truck's front bumper (the water helps weigh down the garbage). Behind it is a band of rakers, dozens of men and women on foot using plastic rakes to push trash into the center of the street. Then comes a front-end loader, a tractor more commonly seen on large construction sites, that plows down the line of garbage, consolidates it, scoops it up and drops it into a dump truck that drives behind.

  Mechanical street sweepers follow, three-wheeled compact vehicles with powerful brooms on their undersides. Past the sweepers is another set of laborers on foot, a precision crew carrying rakes, shovels and wheeled garbage cans, picking up anything that was missed by the workers in front of them. Penultimate is a line of garbage trucks, edging along the route and absorbing stray bags of trash and the contents of garbage cans. Finally, several flatbed stake trucks fortify the rear, collecting rakes, shovels and garbage cans.

As that description suggests, the experience of watching the KMV come by is almost like seeing another parade. The mechanical plowing and scooping of the trash can even sound like a drum line. We often try to get at least a few pictures of the procession as it rumbles by.  These are from last year.

Here are the lead units approaching in a cloud of dust



Here comes the spray truck



And here are the sweeper trucks



Rake carriers



The dumptrucks



They also do day parades, obviously.





People in New Orleans, particularly those in the upper middle classes, love to complain about how dang inefficient and "Third World" everything is around here. But the Krewe of Municipal Vehicles is one of the most impressive #FixMyStreets operations, you're likely to encounter the whole world over. Just seeing one is enough to disrupt the popular bourgeois narrative about our supposed endemic incompetence. Maybe that's why you hardly ever hear about them.