Cram session

The Orleans Parish School Board is very close to being late with its homework.  Today they're getting together for a cram session to discuss, take public comment on, and approve their budget on the last day before it is due.  

Orleans' budget is -- surprise -- a little more complicated than that of your average school district as a result of the city's bifurcated public education system. All but six of the city's 83 public schools are independently run charters, and the Louisiana Recovery School District oversees about two-thirds.

An additional complication is expected to be settled in court. During the spring, the board approved a new formula that more equitably shares funding between schools that serve special needs students and those that tend to exclude them via selective admissions processes.  

The unanimous vote paves the way for Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. to implement a controversial formula that essentially strips money from gifted and talented students, and pads budgets catering to more pupils with special needs.

More than 90 percent of the city’s public schools view the formula as a victory in the way of fair funding. A select few, however, have adamantly opposed the shift, as schools with high numbers of “gifted and talented” students bear the brunt of the change.

Two of those schools, Lusher Charter School and Lake Forest Charter Elementary School, have filed lawsuits in light of the plan, which would siphon nearly $1,400 per gifted elementary student per year from their budgets.

Before the vote, an attorney for those schools, James Brown, promised “expensive, divisive, federal court litigation” should the board give Lewis authority to disperse dollars as he sees fit. The “essential legal flaw” of the plan, he said, is that it gives the superintendent too much power over funding for a system comprised primarily of independent charters.

The charter operators made good on their threat to sue for their right to operate a discriminatory semi-private school system with public funds.  Essential to their argument was their assertion that the school board's new plan would take money away from their gifted and talented programs. As it turns out, though, that may not be exactly where the money was going.

For months, Lusher Charter School, one of the top-ranked public schools in the state, has been waging a court battle to hold onto the extra funding it gets for pupils designated as gifted and talented, claiming that money is necessary to provide the enriched curriculum required for those students by state law.

But a group of current and former Lusher employees and parents claims the Uptown New Orleans school has been pocketing the money for years without providing the types of services that gifted students are supposed to receive.

The critics also claim Lusher officials have misled middle school parents and state officials about so-called "individualized education plans" for gifted students that schools must submit to the state.

Those plans are not public records. However, two such plans obtained by a reporter were signed by teachers designated by Lusher to teach gifted children despite lacking a gifted certification.

There's some indication that we may finally be coming to grips with the fact that the national education "reform" movement has always been a grift. But that's happening slowly because, well, there's still money to be made and political careers to fund before we finally learn enough to graduate from this level.

How not to maximize recovery funding

Just prior to the Labor Day weekend, Governor Edwards submitted a request to the President and Congress for supplemental flood relief aid.  

Edwards asks that Congress this month approve $2 billion in federal aid for Louisiana for housing, economic development and infrastructure. He says it's a "very reasonable request," adding to other federal programs assisting in Louisiana's flood recovery.

This week the Governor is in Washington pushing his plan in meetings with congressional leaders and Obama Administration officials.  (UPDATE: Already successful in receiving a greater federal cost share of disaster response) I wonder, though, if  he should be aiming a little higher than "very reasonable" in his initial ask.   Much has already been written about the extreme difficulty of Louisiana's shitty congressional delegation getting much sympathy out of the shitty Congress this year.  When you know going in that you're going to see a large chunk of what you're asking for compromised away in the process, it's a good idea to ask for more than you will actually need. Ideally we would start by asking for way too much and then let them whittle it down to "reasonable."

(UPPERDATE: And here we see the President has already whittled out a mysterious $200 million for whatever reason.  So we're going the wrong direction.)

Instead it looks like the Governor may have opened negotiations asking for less than will actually be needed. For one thing, we still don't have a solid estimate of the damage. This article says, "at least $8.7 billion."  But it also says the number of homes documented as damaged "could double" from 55,000 to 110,000.  Does "at least $8.7 billion" then mean AS MUCH as $17 billion?  I have to suppose that can't be what they mean. But it is a logical interpretation of what is written.

Anyway when you've got so many uninsured properties in the mix (80 percent of the documented damaged homes now) you have to expect you'll need extra help.  Last week, again with incomplete and unclear numbers available, we tried to sketch out an estimate of how much a new "Road Home" style program where homeowners are compensated for the difference between the cost of repairs vs the amount paid out by insurance might cost.  Our high end guess at that time was $6.4 billion. That was based on an average grant in the amount of $70,000 going to 63% of 145,000 homeowners.

Let's adjust that math to fit the estimates printed along with the Governor's request.  That's 80% of something between 55,000 and 110,000 damaged homes at an average of $70,000 per grant. That comes out to roughly $3 billion at the low end and as much as $6.2 billion at the high end.   Again, these are very rough guesses but if they're even remotely in the ballpark they suggest that the Governor is asking for maybe a billion dollars or possibly many billions less than what flood victims will actually need.

Governor Edwards is a mild mannered guy. But there are situations where "reasonable" doesn't necessarily cut it.  We've got some experience with disaster recovery in New Orleans. Maybe we can offer some advice.  For starters, has Edwards even read former New Orleans Sanitation Director Veronica White's book?

Does that say, "How to Ask For a Reasonable Amount Of FEMA Funding After a Natural Disaster"? No it does not say that. We're setting our sights on a Maximized recovery here.  And since it doesn't look like Ed Blakely is coming through that door any time soon, I suppose it falls to us to give the John Bel a few pointers.  What follows, then, is a brief sketch of our five point recovery plan for South Louisiana based on our decade's long experience.

One:  Mitch Landrieu told us the key to rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina was that we not just build everything back the way it was, but instead, build "the city we've always wanted to be."   So here is how you do that. First, look around and see if you have any land that might be made for valuable for development if you can move the poor people living there off of it.  Next, move those poor people out of the way.  Like Pres says, they're a "drag on the economy. We've talked many times about how this strategy took off in New Orleans. Make it work for you too.

B: Do you have any public services laying around that might be ripe for a little "public-private partnering" or other such cutting edge innovation? Take a look at your schools. Farming out public education to semi-privatized management has been a pet cause of the best and brightest policy wonks for decades now.  It's made careers for people in politics and people just out of politics.  Most importantly, it has focused attention on communities willing to turn their disasters into "blank slate" opportunities.  This is the kind of thing that gets your mayor invited to Aspen, which, as we know, is at least halfway to getting yourself a bonafide recovery.

III: Say brah, do you like apps? If you're really trying to take your grifting innovation recovery to the next level, you've got to get you some tech savvy entrepreneurs to come in and disrupt your whole situation for you. We can see you've already got a head start on this. Still looking for ways to hack it into high gear, though?  Well what about your....

(4): Culture and "authenticity."  Are you famous for quaint folkways that people with disposable income find entertaining on a self-satisfying pseudo-intellectual level? Yes? Great, you can sell that shit by the truckload! Put it all out there. See if David Simon wants to dramatize the struggles of the unique people St. Amant for premium cable. Do you have music and food festivals that "only the locals" know about? Make sure you rebuild your home in an Airbnb friendly aesthetic because you're gonna have some customers. How about a Disney-friendly gumbo recipe? Yes, definitely do that. 

v: Resilience. What is it? Who knows! You want it, though. Take as much as they offer.

Lagniappe: Do you happen to have a guy who can block punts?  Some people think that helps too.

GNOF Circle

So here's a little scoop via The Lens this afternoon.  An LLC registered to Phyllis Taylor bought the Circle Bar.  Phyllis, as many of you know, is the filthy wealthy widow of oilman Pat Taylor whose name famously accrues to the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students or T.O.P.S. scholarship. Phyllis is also a primary benefactor of the Greater New Orleans Foundation and its nearly completed shimmering new headquarters on the opposite side of Lee Circle from the bar.

Can't say for certain what the plans are, but the smart money is on RIP, Circle Bar at the very least.  As far as the building is concerned, they shouldn't have too much trouble getting a demolition permit since every New Orleans oligarch who is anybody is in the GNOF club. Oh also Andy Kopplin runs it now so, yeah.

Still waiting on somebody to do something about that monument, though...


UPDATE: Gambit has spoken to the Circle Bar ownership. 

The Lee Circle building that houses the long-running dive bar and music venue Circle Bar has been sold. But bar owner Dave Clements says it's not going anywhere just yet.  "We’ll be there for the next five to seven years" remaining on the bar's lease, Clements told Gambit.

Oil and gas executive and philanthropist Phyllis M. Taylor bought the building at 1032 St. Charles Ave. for $1.6 million, according to real estate transfers acquired by The Lens. Taylor's purchasing entity 1032 St. Charles Ave. LLC was registered with the Louisiana Secretary of State in June.

Clements said he had 10 days in which to match the $1.6 million offer. "I was a little panicked ... but she couldn't have been nicer," he said. "So far she’s indicated she’ll honor the remaining years of the lease ... As far as that, no future plans."

 

Fake radio show: Football preview edition

This one is too long. But that's what happens when you try and fuck with the space-time continuum like we did in this episode. Sorry. We did try and mark it out by time signature in the show notes. Hopefully that helps. Anyway if you want to know why I haven't had time to blog much this week despite the fact that a lot has happened and it's almost Saints season. It's because I've been editing this monster.

QOTD

Matt Taibbi on the most recent atrocity committed by Mathew Yglesias.

It's kind of not our job in the media to worry about how officials might conduct politically embarrassing conversations without the press finding out. If that's what Matt stays up at night worrying about, he might need a more news-appropriate hobby, like alcoholism.

This election has been eye opening in many ways. I've lost a tremendous amount of respect for friends and acquaintances this year watching them twist and compromise basic principles falling all over themselves to praise the shitty Democratic nominee. At least Yglesias (who, I never had much respect for in the first place) has the excuse of being a careerist hack.  I'm not sure what explains the behavior of people with nothing to gain. 

Governor Edwards's Blue Lives Matter Law

Remember when the Governor signed this monstrosity everyone praised his political savvy.  Check out our law-and-order son of a Sheriff Democrat.  Certainly no racist gun nuts can vote against him now.  That sort of thing.

Meanwhile, as the sycophants tally up imaginary political points, the terrible law does actual damage in the real world.

The New Orleans Police Department was wrong to book a man who cussed at officers with an anti-police hate crime, the department's communications director Tyler Gamble said in a Thursday afternoon email.  Raul Delatoba, 34, used racist and sexist epithets to address the police he encountered early Monday morning, and initially the police decided that Delatoba's disrespect rose to the level of a felony.

But Gamble wrote in his email, "After reviewing the initial facts of the case, it is clear that the responding officer incorrectly applied the law relative to a hate crime in this incident."  Gamble said the district attorney's office will have to make the final decision regarding what charges Delatoba will face, if any. "In the meantime," he wrote, "we are in the process of training all officers and supervisors on the updated law to ensure it is applied properly moving forward."

It's hard to imagine the "Blue Lives Matter" law being "applied properly" because the "Blue Lives Matter" law was unnecessary legislation that Gov. John Bel Edwards never should have signed.  There were already enhanced penalties for hurting law enforcement officers.  So what does the law do except give police permission to newly interpret obnoxious behavior as felonies?

The law is bad on its face, and no amount of training of officers and supervisors is likely to redeem it.

If the Governor signs a piece of shit law because it's politically expedient, then I'm sure he won't mind us appending his name to the law whenever it's mentioned.  

Vitter's shadow

Some of the more compelling sport to be had during last year's governor's race was watching how many Republicans were willing to be seen at David Vitter campaign events. The supposition at the time was that a Governor Vitter would be in position back one of them as the successor to the Senate seat he would vacate. Turns out Vitter is leaving anyway. But not exactly by the way he had hoped. 

At the time, though, the Senatorial aspirant most conspicuously present at Vitter events was usually Charles Boustany. 

In the book, Murder in the Bayou — which will be released by Simon & Schuster’s Scribner imprint next week — investigative journalist Ethan Brown cites three anonymous sources claiming Republican Rep. Charles Boustany was a “client” of some of the murdered sex workers known as the “Jeff Davis 8.” The book also reveals that the motel where some of the victims did their sex work was run by Martin Guillory, a field representative for Boustany who goes by the nickname “Big G.”

Boustany, who is now running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, denied the allegations to the author through a spokesman. Guillory, who ran the Boudreaux Inn from the late 1990s through the end of 2004, told the author he’d met “one or two” of the sex workers, as well as Frankie Richard, their pimp. But Guillory said he was unaware of any criminal activity taking place at the motel.

Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in the canals and swamps surrounding the small town of Jennings in Louisiana’s Jefferson Davis Parish. The victims, whose murders remain unsolved, became known in the national media as the “Jeff Davis 8.”

The plan is for nobody to actually live here

Well let's all mark our calendars. City Council is taking up the short term rental regulations on October 6.  

The City Council has scheduled a vote on short-term rental zoning changes for Oct. 6, in what's likely to be a marathon debate over the future of properties rented on websites such as Airbnb.

After hearing hours of testimony about proposed zoning changes for short-term rentals, the Planning Commission decided to retain a short-term rental ban for whole-home rentals, but allow people who live in a residence to rent out rooms on a short-term basis. The proposal would also allow whole-home short-term rentals in commercially zoned areas such as downtown.

But the Planning Commission vote was just a recommendation -- the Council has final say on whether it wants to change the zoning code. And if it does, there are questions about whether the city has the resources to enforce violators, or allow illegal short-term rentals to continue operating, as they are now.

The Planning Commission's decision to maintain its original limits on "whole home" rentals was looked on as something of a victory for STR skeptics at the time. But the catch to that is in the zoning. Pat explains this a bit in a recent column.  

Not only will short-term rentals be unlimited in Commercial zones, they will also be unlimited in something called “mixed-use” zoning. That’s a type of zoning that can include both commercial and residential uses. Unless you’re familiar with the CZO and zoning maps, you may not realize that in historic, core neighborhoods of New Orleans – the neighborhoods currently dealing with the highest number of short-term rentals – wide swaths of neighborhoods are considered “mixed-use.” That’s especially true if a property is located near a main street like Canal, Carrollton, Tulane, or Broad.

So yeah, that problem “whole-house” short-term rental you’re thinking might finally be shut down because it is in a remodeled home? Depends on what the property is zoned. If you’re in Mid-City, it is a coin flip whether or not CPC is going to be just fine with making that illegal hotel by your house a permitted use that will never go away. Better check those maps and the fine print in the law. At least you’ll know how much leverage your neighbors will be negotiating with when the short-term rental company offers the city some cash to get their own waiver.

The Advocate was on this in July when they produced this very scary map  of just how widespread the "whole home" problem could potentially be under the proposed regulations.

At a recent even hosted by the Louisiana Landmarks Society, economist Jay Brinkmann talked about inflationary pressure of short term rentals on housing costs. 

Because investors are buying properties knowing they can rent them out for a profitable income — in some cases gleaning a return of up to 10 percent annually — it means prices have been going up faster than the local economy can support, based on local incomes needed to support the prices.

This, in turn, means property taxes are going up, all the while creating a false sense of security about the housing market, Brinkmann said.

In his lecture, he compared the real estate market in New Orleans to that in 2008, when markets were dominated by investors in Florida and other states who fled after the cash flow dried up, thereby causing a sharp decline in property value.

Now, the same thing could happen in the Crescent City, he said, as areas change with the influx of short-term rental clientele, which alters the fabric of the neighborhood. Ultimately, he said, the resale value of homes could eventually be driven down, unless homeowners could find a short-term rental operator to buy it.

“We’ve seen that happen,” he added. “That’s the kind of risk I think we’re needlessly injecting into the neighborhoods here.”

STRs drive up property values by shifting housing stock over to the tourism market.  Housing prices become decoupled from the local wage economy such that nobody can afford to actually live here.  The only way, then, to maintain the inflated property values is to keep selling houses to people who plan to operate them as hotels. Brinkmann suggests that sort of bubble will collapse on its own at some point. I rather doubt it. Not as long as we keep choosing to inflate it.

Will the council and the mayor give a shit? Probably not.  Well, probably they won't give a shit about you, anyway.

In the meantime, Brinkmann said, because rising property taxes is good for the city and the mayor’s office, particularly as the year’s new budget is being formulated, City Council is under “tremendous pressure” to vote in favor of short-term rentals as a whole.

That pressure, Brinkmann said, could explain the “disconnect” he sees between lack of enforcement of short-term rentals seen already, and zealous enforcement of other housing-related laws, including those enacted to protect actual buildings within historic districts.

“Is city enforcement focused more on structures than people?” Brinkmann asked. “The attention paid to structures as opposed to attention paid to integrity of neighborhoods strikes me as a little incongruous.”

Should make for a fun meeting.

What is even happening

Just your typical first week jitters. You know, that thing where the Saints suddenly decide that half the people who made the team didn't actually make the team. 

Courtland Finnegan out. Sterling Moore in.

Kai Forbath out. Some guy named Wil Lutz in.

Zombie Jahri Evans maybe in?

We saw this last year when the team made a sudden burst of moves just prior to the first game.

METAIRIE, La. (AP) — The New Orleans Saints have cut veteran running back Tim Hightower and veteran offensive lineman Mike McGlynn while placing rookie linebacker Davis Tull on injured reserve.

New Orleans also has activated receiver Seantavius Jones, fullback Toben Opurum and defensive back Don Jones from its practice squad.

Not that any of that mattered much. Hightower came back and ended up playing a lot last year. The  Joneses and Opurum contributed nothing.  The Saints also added Obum Gwachum at the last second last year. He has yet to do much of anything although he is still with the team at least. So maybe this is all just routine now and nothing to worry about.  On the other hand, last year we thought it an indication that the team had pretty much decided to phone 2015 in.  And that turned out to be pretty accurate. 

QOTD

Not Quite Undead Billy Cannon would not be amused.

Williams, who's the fifth-leading rusher in LSU history, gaining 2,987 yards from 1986 to 1990, didn't hold back.

"I bleed Purple and Gold, LSU is my life, man," Williams said. "At the end of the day, Les Miles and Cammy-Cam (offensive coordinator Cam Cameron) need to be run out of Baton Rouge, like them ol' Frankenstein movies with torches and all that. Everybody in Baton Rouge ought to light a torch.

"We sat there and watched this last year. After the third play of the (Wisconsin) game, I knew it was the same thing. It's not fair to all those kids out there. If Billy Cannon were dead right now, he'd be rolling in his grave. I feel like I'm watching the '56-'57 football team that was running like a 1920 offense."

Sounds like Harvey Williams has been watching too many horror movies.  But, man, did the knives ever come out for Les Miles quickly this year.

Late Labor Day links

In Jacobin, New Jersey City University professor of education Lois Weiner argues that it's time for the labor movement to move beyond hoping only for "a seat at the table" with an increasingly neoliberal Democratic Party. 

Yes, we must protect what the working class and unions have earned through generations of struggle and sacrifice — gains, it should be noted, that have been seriously compromised by the Democrats’ acquiescence to the corporate “common sense” of a social order that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. But if we want to safeguard remaining protections — to say nothing of winning improvements — we’re undercutting ourselves by backing Clinton, a candidate who has sold out “on welfare, crime, race, labor, trade, drugs, and media.”

At the very least, if labor is going to try to rally votes for Clinton, it needs to do so with a program aimed at creating a progressive movement that will fight Clinton on her agenda. Put the choice as Adolph Reed has: defeating Trump is essential and that means voting for a candidate who is a “lying neoliberal war-monger.” Yet organized labor’s strategy with endorsing Clinton has been the exact opposite.

From Deasdspin, here is  Jack Moore on a recent NLRB ruling against an effort by Northwestern football players to organize. 

Here we are in 2015, and the NLRB has failed to recognize the labor rights of a group of football players, largely black men and men of color, who have dared to suggest the time and effort they put in should be considered work. By suggesting that the stability of college athletic labor relations is more important than the rights of players to organize, the NLRB has implicitly endorsed the current state of affairs, one where players are not only restricted from the billions of profits their work creates, but where some of these players go to bed hungry. All because their work doesn’t count as real labor.

From Slate, this is an investigation by Maria Hengeveld of the contrast between Nike's sweatshop operations in Southeast Asia and its hypocritical PR campaign claiming that the company is really all about "women's empowerment." The Nike ad campaign is called "Girl Effect" and is based on a notion popular among international development charities and related NGOs that investment in developing economies has a greater multiplier effect when directed primarily at women. The theory itself is compelling but, in Nike's hands, it becomes immediately and obviously problematic.

Over four weeks in January, I interviewed 18 women, 23 to 55 years old, who currently or recently produced, labeled, and packaged Nike shoes and apparel at five different factories within 30 miles of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. These plants are listed on Nike’s site as employing more than 61,000 female line workers, and Nike sends inspectors to the sites to monitor working conditions and compliance with the company’s Code of Conduct. Nike wouldn’t put me in touch with employees of its contract factories, so I contacted an underground workers’ rights organization and an independent researcher who specializes in women’s issues. The women they introduced me to live in squalid conditions near the factories, where they mostly share single rooms with two to five family members. Joined by translators, I visited their homes, met some of their daughters and families, listened to their stories, and collected documents including company policies and pay slips.

Although they may be unfamiliar with Nike’s global campaign, the goal of the women I spoke with sounds a lot like the Girl Effect—to raise themselves and their families out of poverty. Each of the 18 women, however, reported pay so low they could not even meet the basic needs of their families, let alone save money or contribute to their communities. (Four had been laid off less than three months before we met, after their factory building burnt down; they spoke only about their wages and child care, cautious of giving critiques that might jeopardize their chances of getting hired back.) They told me that they would need to earn between three to four times their current salaries to offer their families a basic level of economic security. The average monthly wage for manufacturing in Vietnam was $200 in 2015. Their stories highlighted something the Girl Effect campaign is silent about: the importance of a living wage.

I also found evidence that Nike’s contract factories breach basic Girl Effect tenets of freedom from exploitation and harassment, security, safety, and Nike’s own Code of Conduct, put in place to prohibit, among other things, harassment, abuse, and nonconsensual overtime. Women who worked in different factories told remarkably similar stories of being subjected to arbitrary punishments—such as financial penalties and threats of dismissal for making manufacturing mistakes, not working quickly enough, or coming in late, along with intimidation and ongoing humiliation by managers.

Finally, although the Girl Effect champions the importance of women protecting and empowering their own children, the women in Vietnam explained to me why their low wages make it impossible for them to ensure their children’s safety. The 10 mothers with young children whom I spoke with either send their children to unlicensed child care services they consider underqualified or dangerous or they leave them with family in home villages they are able to visit only once or twice a year.

This is no longer an argument for raising women out of poverty but a ready-made "woke" sounding excuse for exploiting their labor.  And Nike isn't alone in deploying the language of gender empowerment for cynical purposes. Consider also the Clinton Global Initiative's promotion of "microfinance" described in this Harper's piece by Thomas Frank.

These ideas made up the core of the Hillary Doctrine. Melanne Verveer, her ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, declared in 2011 that “financial inclusion is a top priority for the U.S. government” and announced her terrible chagrin that “three billion people in the world remain unbanked; the majority of them are women.” Hillary’s under­secretary for democracy and global affairs, Maria Otero, came to State from one of the biggest American micro­lending institutions, ACCION International. Now, in her official government capacity, she expressed her joy at how microfinance had evolved “from subsidized microloans to a focus on self-sufficiency, to an emphasis on savings, to a full suite of financial products delivered by commercial regulated banks”—and how all this had “affirmed the capacity of the poor to become economic actors in their own right.” Hillary herself proudly recalls in her memoirs how the State Department rebuilt Afghanistan by handing out “more than 100,000 small personal loans” to the women of that country.

These are fine, sterling sentiments. They suffer, however, from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. As strategies for ending poverty go, micro­lending appears to be among the worst that has ever been tried, just one step up from doing nothing at all to help the poor. In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesn’t Micro­finance Work? the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microloan gospel. Microlending doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes—instead, it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others. Sometimes micro­borrowers don’t even start businesses at all; they just spend the loan on whatever. Even worse: the expert studies that originally sparked the micro­lending boom turn out, upon reexamination, to have been badly flawed.

Nearly every country where microlending has been an important development strategy for the past few decades, Bateman writes, is now a disaster zone of indebtedness and economic backwardness. When he tells us that “the increasing dominance of the microfinance model in developing countries is causally associated with their progressive deindustrialization and infantilization,” he is being polite. The terrible implication of the facts he has uncovered is that microlending achieves the opposite of development. Even Soviet-style Communism, with its frequently mocked Five Year Plans, worked better than this strategy does, as Bateman shows in a tragic look at microloan-saturated Bosnia.

No matter. The liberal class is unlikely to abandon its romance with micro­finance, for yet another reason: it is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime-mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. Naturally the international goodness community discovered that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates was a fine thing all around.

Last week when Hillary wing Democrats screamed their heads off in indignation that anyone would impugn the Clinton Global Initiative and all the good it does for poor people around the world, this is what they were talking about. 

Finally, I very much enjoyed this article from NOLA.com on the history of people selling and eating sandwiches in New Orleans. But I couldn't help but see it as maybe a bit of an attempt on the part of the T-P editors to diminish the connection between the  "Po-Boy" and the labor movement.  

History has it that the po-boy was invented by the Martin brothers, Benny and Clovis, to feed striking streetcar drivers in New Orleans in 1929.

According to an account on the website of the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival, Benny Martin once said: "We fed those men free of charge until the strike ended. Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming, one of us would say, 'Here comes another poor boy.'"

It is true that the Martin brothers wrote a letter, addressed to the striking drivers and printed in at least one local newspaper, in which they promised to feed the men. "Our meal is free to any members of Division I94," they wrote, omitting any description of what that meal might be.

But history is often not neat. The explanation for how things came to be can change over time. What is accepted as gospel in one generation may bear little resemblance to what was previously believed. Sometimes what sticks is the best story. This is how legends are made.

The article goes on to describe the shocking fact that meats and seafoods were placed between slices of French bread and consumed prior to 1929.  But there's nothing in it that leads us to the definite conclusion that the appellation "poor boy" was a common name for this type of sandwich prior the Martins' famous act of solidarity with the striking transit workers. Nice touch finding the ad for the "Comus Soda Fountain" though. 

"Not necessarily blocked"

Y'all have to know what kind of football season this is going to be.  It's not going to be one of those big beautiful Trumpwalls of catharsis seasons where our heroes accomplish great things and leave us with joyful memories of triumph to talk about for years and years. If that's what you're expecting this year, you're only setting yourself up to be disappointed.

What's worse, if you're too let down you'll be too angry to appreciate what this football season actually is going to be about.  This is going to be a season of rake gags.



We're going to watch our heroes stumble over the same obstacle over and over until the repetition is what actually makes it funny. Here is how the rake gag works.  First, the audience is made to watch Drew Brees sacked violently or Brandon Harris throw a game-sinking pick.  Then, as the shock of of that sets in, they are made to watch it again. And then again and again until it becomes tiresome. After that, the gag continues until it somehow becomes funny again. It's a bit of a comedy cliche but, as those go, it's a pretty good one.

Sometimes it helps if we add an element to keep it fresh, though. So here is little Les Miles, age 5, avatar of human frailty, here to help us add a touch of emo to our gallows humor.

Miles credited Harris with getting out of the way, but the play ended in an interception that killed the last chance at winning the game.

"He dodged extremely well," Miles said. "He was getting sacked, pivoted out of the grasp of the defender and didn't make the throw he wanted to make. There was some difficulty getting plays in that we need some work on. It's more than a quarterback. It's a team issue."

The dodging was pretty good. LSU's team, much like the Saints, have a bit of an offensive line problem.  On Saturday, they used three different tackles to no good effect.  Even when Harris was completing passes, he never looked especially comfortable.  But that's going to be an obvious and recurring theme throughout the season.  Maybe it will get funny on its own. But until it does, at least we have deflated Les here to deadpan the descriptions.

"I really have to see the film," Miles said for the third time in his post-game interview. "It seems to me there were some guys that were not necessarily blocked. I know some guys had a heck of a day, blocked extremely well. We'll have to see how it goes.

"We didn't move the football like we are capable. At times we threw the ball well. At times we turned it over."

Some guys were not necessarily blocked. This is going to be a great season. You just have to understand now the specific way it's going to be great. Some teams will not necessarily win much. But we'll figure out how to make it fun.

But we'd better do that quickly because some especially bitter folks are already looking to make if very not fun if they can.  

"Being an accomplice is a fact of being American"

Spencer Hall on the opening weekend of his and our favorite sports season. 

The violence at the heart of football is the thing that will eventually kill it. It’s in the bones and marrow of the sport, and has been forever, and fatalism in the face of it or mitigating it by degrees of manner or ritual or rule is a dodge. The worst part isn’t even that it’s thrilling, even in measures we consider acceptable like doses of radiation. 

The scariest part of thinking about the inherent violence of football — America’s most popular sport, even now— is that it’s just a sliver of something huge and more monstrous and inescapable. That being an accomplice is a fact of being American. That somewhere in a long history of violence, even the home I buy or the car I drive or the food I eat is a feeble payment against a long debt of crushing injustice, inequality, and ambient malice. 

That every story here— beyond football, even— is one of trying to save or pardon the killing thing you love in spite of itself—even if, or when it turns on you. Even when it is, inescapably a part of you. 

When that thing is you.

It's possible that as some point we'll decide that we can't do the cognitive dissonance necessary to keep this meat grinder business afloat.  But our entire history indicates otherwise. 

So... Donald Trump "without the baggage"?

Bill Cassidy is all hunky dory with Donald Trump's racist, misogynistic, xenophobic message.  It's just that the darn "messenger" is so tacky.

Cassidy said he didn't find fault with Trump's views that a wall should be built on the Mexican border or that Obamacare should be dismantled and replaced. Instead, he found fault with the candidate.

"My point is that it may not be the message, it may turn out to be the messenger," he said.

Also, he's still supporting Trump. 

But has she been vetted by the Gambit readers' poll?

Helena Moreno might run for Council At-Large next year.

State Rep. Helena Moreno, D-New Orleans, is eyeing a run at city Councilwoman Stacy Head's at-large seat, saying that she's "strongly leaning towards" a 2017 campaign when the seat becomes open in early 2018.

Head is term-limited from running again for her seat, which is one of two at-large spots on the council.

State Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, a close ally of Moreno in the Legislature, let news of the two-term state representative's plans slip during a taping of the LaPolitics.com podcast set to air in two weeks. LaPolitics' Jeremy Alford broke the news in this week's issue of his LaPolitics Weekly.

It's still a ways off, but this is the second bit of news we've had in as many weeks about the next municipal elections. Now we just need a thank you note from Moreno and her dog.

Taco trucks on every corner

Not to pile in on the controversy du jour but I find it a little weird that no one mentions the time in 2007 the Jefferson Parish Council decided to make themselves great again.

The Jefferson Parish Council today approved tighter regulations for vendors selling food from temporary stands or vehicles, effectively stopping the taqueria trucks that arrived after Hurricane Katrina from operating in their current form.

The new rules, which go into force in 10 days, bar food trucks from areas along many major streets in Jefferson Parish, limiting them to heavy commercial and industrial zones. And the rules require vendors to provide permanent restrooms, which typically are not available at the trucks that sell Latin American food to workers who came to the New Orleans area for Katrina rebuilding jobs.

Parish Councilman Louis Congemi proposed the crackdown, saying that the vendors clutter parish streets, that they pose safety and health risks and that they are mobile, fleeting operations that don't show any commitment to doing permanent business in Jefferson Parish. He said banning them is in keeping with other parish efforts to clear away signs of Katrina, such as travel trailers, storage units and blighted houses.

This week's fake radio show

Thanks to Val for sitting in this week. There's a little OPSB discussion and a lot about the flood recovery process. Also so sports and other nonsense. Enjoy. Or skip if you prefer.

Whatever you do, don't ever commit to changing anything

This is how elites talk about the rest of us when they coach each other up behind the scenes.

The memo, which describes BLM as a “radical movement” that aims to “end ‘anti-black racism,’” lists several suggestions for how Democratic congressional candidates should handle an encounter with a Black Lives Matter activist.

“If approached by BLM activists, campaign staff should offer to meet with local activists,” the memo reads. “Invited BLM attendees should be limited. Please aim for personal or small group meetings.”

“Listen to their concerns,” it continues. “Don’t offer support for concrete policy positions.”

Remain calm until the rubes go away on their own.  Continue business as usual.  

Big Gubmint

It's what makes this state go. Ours moreso than most.

As Louisiana gears up to petition the federal government for another big disaster aid package, now seems like a good time to remember that the state already relies more on money out from Washington than just about any other.

The reminder comes courtesy of a new national study from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which found that 30.8 percent of state funding across the country in 2014 came from federal grants.

State to state percentages vary widely, though, and Louisiana got 40.1 percent of its state "general revenue" from the feds, which put it second only to neighboring Mississippi at 40.9 percent. Way down at the other end of the spectrum was North Dakota, at 16.8 percent, although that's likely to change in future surveys due to the downturn in the oil business.

It's federal backing that makes almost all of these disaster recovery programs listed here possible.  And we're getting ready to ask congress for billions more in supplemental appropriations.  Better hope our "Small Gubmint" elected representatives are ready to push for that. 

Inventing the Internet

In the beginning, nobody could make any money on the internet. Instead the government spent gobs of money making the internet.

Given the chance to acquire the most sophisticated computer network in the world, AT&T refused. The executives simply couldn’t see the money in it.

Their shortsightedness was fortunate for the rest of us. Under public management, ARPANET flourished. Government control gave the network two major advantages.

The first was money: ARPA could pour cash into the system without having to worry about profitability. The agency commissioned pioneering research from the country’s most talented computer scientists at a scale that would’ve been suicidal for a private corporation.

And, just as crucially, ARPA enforced an open-source ethic that encouraged collaboration and experimentation. The contractors who contributed to ARPANET had to share the source code of their creations, or risk losing their contracts. This catalyzed scientific creativity, as researchers from a range of different institutions could refine and expand on each other’s work without living in fear of intellectual property law.

Since then, we've figured out how to make money. The way that gets written about most is the thing where self-important scam artists make apps that bilk venture capitalists out of their investments but that's not where the real money is. The real money is in being an oligarchic telecom with license to overcharge everyone for an artificially scarce utility.  And that necessarily means squeezing out the open, collaborative spirit that once defined its use. 

QOTD

Newly signed Saints defensive end Paul Kruger being... um.. graceful, I guess... about his release from Cleveland.

"Although completely (mishandled), unfortunate and absolutely the wrong decision to release me, I do wish the Browns and especially my teammate brothers great success."

"Mishandled" is in parentheses there. What word did he actually use?

Business is good

Lots of money being raised this year (ostensibly) to defeat one entirely hopeless Senate candidate. 

The list of avowed enemies of former KKK leader David Duke goes well beyond the other candidates in the 2016 Louisiana Senate race.

That proved true Tuesday (Aug. 30), when the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism PAC was resurrected with the sole mission of eighty-sixing the white nationalist's candidacy.

"The struggle for racial, religious and ethnic goodwill is never really done," said the PAC's chairman, Tulane professor Lawrence Powell, in a statement. "And that's why we've decided to reactivate the Louisiana Coalition: to affirm the values of decency and civility against champions of white nationalism and racial anti-Semitism."

The anti-Duke committee's membership comprises more than a few political heavy-hitters, including former senators Trent Lott, R-Miss., John Breaux, D-La. and Bennett Johnston, D-La., and former governors Edwin Edwards and Buddy Roemer. It also includes Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, Jefferson Parish Clerk of Court Jon Gegenheimer and former Jefferson Assessor Lawrence Chehardy.

And, hey, good for all the illustrious has-beens willing to put their names on this no-brainer of a cause, unnecessary as it may be. A UNO poll at the beginning of August showed Duke with an 80 percent unfavorable rating. There's zero danger of him being elected.

There's a chance, though, that his presence in the race narrows the chances for some of his Republican opponents. It may even set up an all Democrat runoff under the right circumstances although that is a long shot. Still, there are candidates who benefit from Duke being there just like there if only as a handy fundraising foil. Here, for example, is Democratic candidate Caroline Fayard getting a little free national air time from MSNBC as a direct result of Duke's candidacy.

Of course that isn't exactly why Duke is running. He's running because, one way or another, there's money in it for him. Which is why we're always interested in what happens to money raised in the name of either supporting or opposing him.  In every case it's worth asking how or if he's getting a cut of it. 

Who can say what is real anymore?

Congratulations to Sidney Torres on the great honor of being voted "Best Potential Candidate For New Orleans Mayor" by Gambit readers. As a person who also won a Gambit poll one time, I know well the weighty significance of such an honor.  For his part, Sidney certainly seems to know how serious it is.  This week he took out a full page ad to say, Thank You.



So what does Sidney mean to tell us here?  Before answering it's important to note that respondents to the very same poll named Garbage Collector as the "Best next job for Mitch Landrieu."  Clearly folks are having fun with these men. That's just the joy of doing the Best Of poll, I guess.  So is Sidney playing along with the joke? Or is he seriously considering running? Anything is possible in the Trump age so we have to ask.

Actually, Gambit already asked earlier this summer in this cover story.

"I'm serious about keeping the door open," he says. "I'm not going to rule that out right now. My hope is that someone steps up that can do the job, from the approach of hands-on, in the field. This city, currently, right now, has to be run from in the field, not behind the desk. I know [Mitch Landrieu] is out there. I’m not criticizing his efforts. ... I believe a hands-on approach from someone who understands business, someone who balanced a checkbook, someone who knows how to make payroll when you don’t have a lot of money coming in, someone who knows how to manage different departments and understand different departments — you got to have someone who can look at something quickly and diagnose it from experience, not from trying to hire a consultant or an engineer to figure it out.

So he's serious about waiting to see if we can find some good people, the best people, people who "understand business" to come in and do the job. If not he'll consider being himself the one to fix it.  That sounds reassuring. 

Meanwhile, Sidney continues to understand his real estate business.  In the latest development he's roped LaToya Cantrell into supporting a scheme to keep the poors away from his apartments.

In this case, Edwards Communities has agreed to make a donation toward an affordable housing fund instead of building the 14 units required under the zoning code. Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who was behind the push to create the development bonuses, is floating the alternative.

Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, said the deal being considered for Edwards Communities raises the problem of precedent: If the first developer to use the bonuses finds a way around building affordable rental housing, will other developers try the same thing?

"This definitely could feel like a guide point for developers," Morris said. "The way these density bonuses work is that the existing project has the affordable units. So if it's a rental property, then they create rental units. If this was a condo property, then the density bonus would require they do affordable condos on site."

Under Cantrell's proposal, Edwards Communities would provide $644,000 to a fund that would be used to provide up to $46,000 in down payment assistance for low-income families to buy homes in Mid-City if they make at least 80 percent of the area's median income. The problem with that proposal, Morris said, is that most families in that income range often can't afford mortgage payments on a loan of more than $125,000, in addition to paying for utilities. Pricing for houses in Mid-City are usually out of reach for these people, she said.

In recent HousingNOLA surveys of Mid-City, there were few homes listed for less than $250,000. Based on home sales through midyear 2016, the average selling price in Mid-City's major ZIP code was $347,200.

Look, we've talked already about the insufficiency of inclusionary zoning measures like the five percent set-aside Sidney's developer is trying to work-around now.  But this new proposal is actually even worse. It allows developers to buy their way out of the set aside obligation by contributing to a fund that will never be of any actual use to low income renters at all.  It's like trying to solve the climate crisis by selling carbon credits. And then throwing the money raised directly onto a coal fire.

Much like Sidney's campaign for mayor, it's an appalling idea one might be tempted to ask whether or not it is a joke.  But you have to admit it's a great scam if Sidney and LaToya can pull it off. And they seem serious.

Update: GNOHA has issued a statement opposing the Cantrell-Torres scheme. 

The Alliance also questions whether the $644,000 in down payment assistance Edwards Communities would create 14 homebuyers who would ostensibly replace the 14 low-income renters that would lease apartments in the project on Lafitte Greenway. The Alliance argues that a $46,000 subsidy -- the amount a homebuyer would be eligible in receiving from the fund -- isn't enough to offset costs for potential buyers because of the $192,000 average home home price in New Orleans.

"Low-income buyers in New Orleans need at least $150,000 in subsidy to buy existing houses for sale in Mid-City," the Alliance wrote, citing a market study.

SELA forever

Hey we're rich! 

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration and the New Orleans City Council will have a bit more money to play with as they craft the city's 2017 budget, largely due to expected increases in sales and property tax revenue.

The city expects to take in about $594 million in taxes, fees and other revenue next year, or 2.2 percent more than it expects to collect by the end of 2016, Finance Director Norman Foster told the city's Revenue Estimating Conference on Monday.

On the other hand, there's plenty that needs paying for. In most American cities, there is no shortage of infrastructure work to do. New Orleans is certainly no exception to that. 

With potholes, sinkholes, dips, cracks, years of patches on patches and entire blocks that can be navigated only by expertly executed turns, everyone knows New Orleans' streets are in bad shape.

So bad, in fact, that the average condition of all roads in the city rates less than 43 on a scale of 100, and nearly two-thirds of the streets are in "poor" or worse condition, according to a new study.

The good news in New Orleans right now is we've still got a fair amount of federal money to throw into that work. The bad news is, the money we do have isn't going to be enough.

The road survey, conducted by Stantec at a cost of about $555,000, represents the first comprehensive look at exactly how bad New Orleans' streets are. It will play a prominent role in the city's ongoing planning about how to fix the streets, including how to spend about $2 billion in FEMA money for road and drainage work in the coming decades.

Even that money represents only a portion of the $3.6 billion the report estimates would be needed to bring the streets to an average level of "fair" over the next 10 years — and to achieve that the city would need to do nearly all that work immediately.

Even so, $2 billion is not exactly nothing.  It's enough, in fact, to fire off a #FixMyStreets program the city is already describing as bigger than the SELA drainage project. 

"Everyone is impatient (to fix the roads), most particularly the mayor. But this money is going to hit the streets over the next couple of years, and it's going to be on a larger scale and magnitude than even the SELA projects," Berni said, referring to the major, mostly Uptown drainage projects that have been under construction for years.

"But (with SELA) you're only talking about some major arteries that impacted several neighborhoods," he said. "In this instance, you're talking about full reconstruction of major parts of at least a quarter of the east bank neighborhoods, if not half, over a five-year time frame."

So get ready for more road work, basically.  That sounds like a headache. But really we should just be thankful that we can afford to do some of this stuff now.  Because that probably won't be the circumstance much longer. 

Sales tax revenue is projected to increase by about 3 percent next year, Foster said.

"The city's economy has done very well, and we anticipate more tourism growth," he said.

At the same time, the city has not seen as much sales tax growth this year as it had expected. Officials had planned for 3.5 percent growth in sales tax collections this year but so far have only seen about half of that, Foster said.

Combine that with other signs that the regional economy may be slowing and you start to yearn for the days of "bucking the trend." But after this $2 billion in FEMA money is spent, where will the trend-bucking stimulus come from?
 

Lulled back to sleep

We spent so many months remembering Katrina last year that today's subdued remembrances are not only appropriate but, frankly, welcome. The commentary is also subdued. The Advocate and T-P each ran "pay it forward" type editorials about the situation South Louisiana finds itself in in the wake of this year's flood. That seems most appropriate. That sentiment is repeated in a short post by Stephanie Grace here. Clancy Dubos offers advice to flood victims in his Gambit column this week.

Here is a more general Katrina remembrance by Bob Mann.

The papers also are running a low key series of progress reports. Here is one about public transit.
This one is about recovering urban plant life.

This one is a bit different. It's from a brief article by Gary Rivlin, the author and journalist who spoke at the tenth Rising Tide conference last year. 

Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm. A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. That wasn’t due to bad luck; because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home.

Nor has New Orleans experienced an equal opportunity recovery—in no small part because of the white civic leaders who openly advocated for a whiter, wealthier city. While water still covered most of New Orleans, Jimmy Reiss, a prominent local businessman and then-head of the Business Council, told the Wall Street Journal that the city would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. That sentiment was paired with a policy approach then-Congressman Barney Frank described as “ethnic cleansing through inaction.”

Here at the old Yellow Blog, we've been talking about that very story for over a decade now as we, as a local polity, have largely failed to make the inevitable "recovery" of New Orleans an equitable one. Rivilin's post references the Data Center's latest "Who Lives In New Orleans Now" report. There we find the heart of our failure in two graphs.

Here is the change in renters with severe housing cost burdens.



And here is the change in median income.



The median income for renters in Orleans Parish, by the way, is even lower. $24,773 according to this study.

If that's not depressing enough, consider also that now since we've reached the post-post-Katrina era of new New Orleans, the worst of our failures are calcifying into a more permanent new normal.  Last year, during August, I went around town revisiting places I'd taken photos of during the first couple of years before Katrina.  The result was this series of posts.  Looking back through those yesterday, I think it was this part that I most wanted to re-emphasize.

Here is something Troy Gilbert posted earlier this month that got my attention. It's a previously unpublished interview with Chef Greg Picolo about his post-Katrina experiences. There's a paragraph toward the end where Picolo talks about how the flood changed his outlook on civic life to a degree. 

Asked how he was changed by the entire experience, the Chef answers quickly, “That Greg doesn’t live here anymore. Before I led a very monastic lifestyle. I kind of broke out of the tunnel vision I had before. Today, I have more of a need to connect with people. I needed to lose some of my control. I’m easier going. I have zero patience for bullshit, and now I just don’t get bogged down with stuff.”

I'm certain I am not alone in saying this really hits home. It might be the common denominator of everyone's experience rebuilding New Orleans.  When we got back, we were shaken out of our silos. Each of us in some small way at least had to look around to see who our neighbors were. Who else was here? Who could help? How could we help them? Entire new networks were stitched together out of parts that just weren't possible to bring together before.

I wonder, though, if ten years later, we're starting to sink, bit by bit, back into our own tunnel visions of life in a new New Orleans. As we put the recovery "behind us" is receding from the tighter cross sectional communities we built during that process a good idea? Why might this be important?

I worry more now than ever that we're losing that sense of community.  The new normal New Orleans is defined more by "stay-in-your lane" stratification than grass roots organization. Traditional divisions reappear. Press and politics take a dimmer view of reader feedback and public input. Social media has evolved in such a way that it is more likely to fragment communities into walled off cliques than connect them across social and professional boundaries.

We've failed in so many ways to achieve social justice in New Orleans after the flood. Are we destined to lose our post-K social networks as well? Katrina may have ended the lull for a while. But it turns out the lull was resilient.

"The whole ballgame"

Pretty good quote from Mitch Landrieu here.

There’s no guarantee the great flood of 2016 will attract a federal care package. It will be up to Congress to decide that.

But in New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s view, getting Congress on board with a program that bridges the huge gap between the losses suffered by property owners and the amount they’ll receive from their insurance claims is more than crucial. It's the “whole ballgame," the mayor said in a recent interview.

Article is about the need for a "Road Home" type program (yeah.. but one that works faster and better) to bring back South Louisiana after this year's floods. The key to recovery is pulling down federal money.  How much? A lot. 

It’s no stretch to say that the Road Home, warts and all, saved New Orleans after the disaster that struck 11 years ago this week. In the months after the storm, the scale of the damage, the realization that many devastated homeowners lacked flood insurance and the fact that many of the hardest-hit survivors were among the region’s poorest led to a surreal debate about whether New Orleans would ever recover, or whether parts of it should simply be abandoned.

In the end, Congress and the George W. Bush administration doled out $13.4 billion to underwrite the Road Home program. Affected homeowners, about 130,000 of them, got an average of $70,000 apiece.

I wanted to do a little napkintop math in order to figure how much might be needed this time around. But the terminology in this article makes it difficult. 

Some reports — such as one by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber — have estimated there could be as many as 145,000 flooded homes across the region, a number that would put this unnamed rainstorm within an order of magnitude of Katrina. (The federal government’s final estimates for Katrina damage in Louisiana were 515,000 housing units damaged, 204,682 of them severely or totally.)

Road Home money went to 130,000 "affected homeowners" out of "515,000 housing units damaged."  I don't know how to compare that to "145,000 flooded homes" especially when they throw in that "204,682 severely or totally" bit. 

130,000 "affected homeowners" funded by Road Home out of 515,000 "damaged" is about 25%.  But out of 204, 682 it's more like 63%. Are we asking to pay for 25% of "145,000 flooded homes" this year or 63% of them?  Assuming the average grant amount will be the same  $70,000 (it will probably have to be more) that means we're hoping for between $2.5 billion at the low estimate and $6.4 billion at the high end. 

In any case, we need billions of dollars on top of what's already in the pipeline. And we're not going to raise it via thousands of little GoFundMes. It will be up to Congress. That's the whole ballgame. 

There can only be one flag pin

The Louisiana Republican Party today considered and then set aside a scheme to restrict convicted felons (or anyone they don't like) from running in state elections with the little "R" next to their names. Some of them, it turns out, are embarrassed (or at least upset) that David Duke is running for Senate as a Republican this year. 

The proposed regulation would automatically prohibit felons from running for office as Republicans in elections after November, unless an exception was made by the state Republican Party's executive committee.

It also would allow Louisiana's Republican Party to block anyone from getting the "R," for Republican, with a name on the ballot if three-quarters of the State Central Committee voted to bar that person from running as a Republican.

They decided not to do anything, though. The rule under consideration would likely have caused legal headaches in addition to not actually doing anything about Duke anyway.

Even if the changes had been approved Saturday, they wouldn't have been made in time to block Duke, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to bilking his supporters and cheating on his taxes, from running as a Republican in the Louisiana Senate race this fall.

Besides that, the committee members can cry all they like but it doesn't change the fact that David Duke represents a sizeable portion of the Republican Id  and has for decades. We took a little time to explore this last year, in fact.  The nervous denials of the Republican state central committee are no different from the #NeverTrump movement of the national party in this regard.  These are the candidates and ideas they've built a machine pandering to. It's not so easy to just up and ditch them.

Republicans at the state and national level are currently trying to re-brand themselves out of the hole they've dug themselves. Which is why we're suddenly seeing the racist Wallace Dixiecrats, Reagan Democrats, and Limbaugh Dittoheads they've courted for years redefined as an unfamiliar alien force called the "Alt-Right" as opposed to some good and virtuous Republican Party that supposedly exists independently of all that.  It's disappointing that the Hillary wing of the Democratic Party is enthusiastically aiding the GOP in this re-branding effort. But that's a topic for a different post.

Anyway, all of this resulted in some amusing kabuki at the GOP meeting which the T-P covers in the article we began this with.

Duke did not attend the meeting, but his campaign coordinator, Michael Lawrence, did speak out against Republican leaders toward the end of the gathering, well after the rule change had already been deferred.

Lawrence, who was wearing a pin that included both the American and Confederate flags, started shouting that Villere had refused to let Duke speak to the crowd at the meeting. Villere, wearing his own pin with American and GOP flags, told Lawrence over the public address system that the gathering was a "private meeting" and Lawrence would have to leave.

Villere, speaking into a microphone, then called for security to take Lawrence out of the building when Lawrence refused to stop shouting. Five men in suits surrounded Lawrence and escorted him to his car.

Standing in the parking lot after being thrown out of the meeting, Lawrence said Duke planned to sue the Louisiana GOP if they passed any new rule that would block him from running as a Republican in future elections. He said Duke considered it a violation of his constitutional rights.

"Roger Villere has been running this organization like Fidel Castro for 12 years," Lawrence said.  

Just for fun we should see about sending Villere a Cuban flag pin.  

Disruption

Look at these entrepreneurs innovating a recovery out of the goodness of their own hearts.

But Mukul Verma, a BRAF spokesman, said recipients of GoFundMe donations are taxed on the gift, because the company is for-profit. Nonprofit gifts are not taxed.

GoFundMe donations are also not exempt from overhead costs that many critics associate with large nonprofit organizations. GoFundMe automatically deducts a 5 percent fee from each donation. Additionally, WePay, the system that GoFundMe uses to process payments, takes another 2.9 percent plus 30 cents from every contribution made through the site. So nearly 8 percent from every donation made through GoFundMe is skimmed from the top before any money reaches its intended recipient.

Waiting on the money copters

One thing about the flood is it might actually help with the budget a bit.  That will depend on the size and type of discretionary aid that becomes available. (The Governor is expected to make a specific CDBG ask soon.) But, in the meantime, it's probably a good idea to wait on the rest of this planning.

The group tasked with crafting a long-range plan for stabilizing Louisiana's turbulent state finances says it needs a little more time in light of catastrophic flooding that swept across Louisiana earlier this month.

The Task Force on Structural Changes in Budget and Tax Policy was scheduled to have a final recommendation ready for lawmakers by Thursday. But this week its members asked legislative leaders to extend that deadline to the end of September.

It would be a mistake, though, to allow a sudden infusion of one time money to put the committee off its task of fundamental budget reforms.  Next year, the legislature should have to consider a more progressive tax structure with fewer special privileges carved out.  What a shame it would be if they find an excuse to not go as far as they should with that.  

The end of Errol's crusade

In the years following the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a new Carnival tradition has arisen.  Every Fat Tuesday evening, exhausted revelers settling in to watch (and to mock online) the Rex ball and Meeting of the Courts can witness the ceremonial questioning of the mayor about the status of the Municipal Auditorium. The flood forced the Rex ball out of its traditional venue and ball commentator Errol Laborde is determined to lobby annually for its restoration.

But what happens to this now decade's long tradition if Errol's question is finally answered?

Eleven years after the Municipal Auditorium in Louis Armstrong Park was flooded during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans officials say a check from FEMA to pay for repairs could be coming soon.

After years of fighting over the cost of needed repairs, the city and FEMA entered arbitration this month to settle an impasse in the negotiations, said Hayne Rainey, a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

That process is expected to wrap up in the next 90 days and could pave the way for a private developer to take over management of the site.

I guess then we can start asking who they're going to sell it to.

OPSB unification plan

The superintendent presented it last night. There's a description of that meeting and a copy of the plan itself in this story.

The mood was upbeat at McDonogh No. 35 High School Thursday (Aug. 25) as Orleans Parish schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. presented a plan to unify the city's bifurcated education system by 2018.

Comprised almost entirely of independent charter schools, the new-and-improved district "will be the first of its kind in the nation," Lewis told an advisory committee, "dedicated to empowering families, empowering educators, ensuring equity and dramatically improving student outcomes."

But though the committee members lauded the 72-page document, they were anxious about -- what else. Money.

Of course budgets are a problem. But aside from that, we missed a real opportunity to make this process more about the nature of public education itself this year, when we ended up with only three of the seven OPSB seats contested in the fall election. 

That's a problem given the continuing hostility of charter boards toward teachers, and what may be the beginnings of a movement against charters more generally. New Orleans is again missing an opportunity to participate at the leading edge of the discourse.  Instead the plan reflects a will so stay the course. Rather than taking over the school system directly, the new OPSB will mostly just grant and renew charters.  Actually, the superintendent will do that.

Lewis might have an easier time holding schools accountable, because the unification law shifts power from the school board to the superintendent. It will take a two-thirds School Board vote, not a simple majority, to override "all decisions related to school opening, renewal and closure," the plan states.

Seems like a mistake.  

Shelter-at-home

This is the alternative temporary housing plan developed after Sandy.  Basically, they get you set up with necessities if it doesn't cost too much to do that quickly.

If a home can be back in a livable state with up to $15,000 in repairs, then the state will OK the work and a crew will be sent out to do the work.

The program only covers minor repair work: basic electrical and plumbing inspections; carpet and insulation removal; air conditioning and hot water heater repairs; and installing temporary bathroom fixtures, are among the types of tasks they will consider.

The program will also pay for mini-refrigerators or microwaves to be installed to serve as makeshift kitchen appliances.

Riley said that the state will hire a project manager over the weekend. An estimated four-to-seven general contractors will then be hired, and they are expected to then hire sub-contractors to help with the work.

Will be interesting to see which contractors they hire. Just remember they'll get what they pay for. 

But the program didn't come without complaints.

Stories soon popped up in the New York Post, New York Daily News and the Staten Island Advance with reports of "shoddy" repairs through the program.

All of them featured people complaining that government-funded repairs had left their homes with potentially dangerous conditions and in desperate need of additional fixes.

Squabbling Bensons still can't get it together

The judge has had to go and reintroduce the stick.

A federal judge has scheduled a Dec. 8 trial date in Tom Benson's lawsuit seeking to take away ownership in the Saints and Pelicans from his estranged family, after weeks of settlement talks failed to produce a final agreement.

U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo on Thursday (Aug. 25) scheduled the trial and denied a mutual request by Benson and lawyers for his estranged heirs' trust funds to extend a delay in the case.

Milazzo ordered the trial after meeting with the lawyers in her chambers for a status update.

I know it's still a long shot but boy would I love to see this thing actually go to trial.  It won't (probably) because to let it get that far would be the worst nightmare of practically every owner in pro sports.

A trial in the case is expected to make public details of internal NFL and NBA financial information, the financial performance of the Saints and Pelicans, and Benson's personal wealth were expected to be aired.

So they'll have to settle. But it would be fun if they didn't.