That thing where all the investigations cancel each other out

Oh boy, we've reached the going around and confiscating everyone's computer phase of the game. 

New Orleans Inspector General Ed Michel’s office has seized the computer of a city IT worker involved in the “smart city” contracting process, an indication that the canceled project has spawned an investigation from the city’s top watchdog.

The IG seizure of a city computer assigned to Christopher Wolff occurred on Wednesday, according to Wolff's attorney and City Council President Helena Moreno.

Wolff’s lawyer, Michael Kennedy, told Moreno’s office that the seizure would complicate his ability to comply with an subpoena request from the City Council for reams of documents related to the smart city project.

Thinking back to the Hard Rock aftermath, recall that there were at least three or four independent investigations into the Safety and Permits department operated by the feds, by the City Council, by the Inspector General, and I don't remember who Ken Polite was working for at the time but he was there too.  Anyway it seemed at times that the various probes hired by various entities with different interests may have worked at cross purposes a little bit.  

That might be what's about to happen with the "Smart Cities" mess. We can't give you any evidence because somebody else already came and took it, etc. 

Also it's worth remembering what happened the last time city officials had to turn over digital evidence during an investigation of a tech corruption scandal. 

After a public solicitation, Nagin hired the Louisiana Technology Council to conduct a forensic search. He fired the group in July after its president, Mark Lewis, and a colleague held a news conference to say they failed to find any of the information. They also said they suspected a tech-savvy person had intentionally removed the mayor's e-mail inbox from the server months earlier.

Nagin then hired SunBlock to resume searching for the missing data. He also asked the new firm to review and report on LTC's efforts.

In its report, SunBlock dismisses LTC's claim that Nagin's files were deliberately erased, saying LTC misinterpreted a technical analysis used to detect whether data were deleted.

I guess we're about to find out how far the science of email deletion/undeletion has advanced over the course of the last decade. 

Entergy's Company Town

We're finally doing something about the terrorists.  On Wednesday, March 23rd, your New Orleans City Council will begin an inquiry into an ongoing insurrection that threatens the security of our civic life.

NEW ORLEANS - The City Council's Utility, Cable, Telecommunications, and Technology Committee will be meeting next week with Entergy New Orleans to discuss animal-related outages at Entergy substations. The meeting comes after several reported outages caused by animals last week, including one which resulted in outages for over 10,000 customers in the downtown, CBD, and Mid-City areas.

Councilmember Morrell released the following statement in regards to the meeting: “Last week, over 10,000 New Orleans ratepayers lost power for hours because of a single bird, resulting in business closures. In light of the downtown outage and subsequent Lakeview power outages caused by a squirrel, I have requested for members of Entergy New Orleans to come before the Utility Committee to address the issue of animal-related system failures.

Incidents of power outages are unfortunately all too familiar to the residents of this city. These animal-related outages are not just mere inconveniences. They are hardships that grind our city to a halt.

When a bird topples key power sources for three years in a row, it’s time to take a deep dive into what is currently being done to prevent incidents like this, and which areas need improvement. If Entergy is going to request a rate increase, they should be able to explain how small animals repeatedly put thousands of customers in the dark.”

Reading that, one wonders if JP is really digging deep enough.  It's true the creatures have waged a campaign of sabotage against our infrastructure. But their terror activities extend beyond the scope of just three annual bird attacks. Channel 6 put together a cheeky little graphic on the fly last week to try and get the point across. 

Based off WDSU's records, there have been 5 incidents of animal-related power outages since 2013. There was also one non-animal related incident involving a balloon. Weather related outages are not included in this graphic. https://t.co/h2OObo3sJm pic.twitter.com/nizrMrFkRM

— wdsu (@wdsu) March 9, 2022

But that doesn't really capture the whole picture. We won't presume to provide a full catalog either. But just to give you an idea of what a few moments of casual googling and hazy memories will turn up, here are two outages allegedly caused by raccoons in 2008 and 2012.  Here is the squirrel JP's memo refers to. Here is another squirrel in 2016.  Here is one in Baton Rouge last year.  The WDSU graphic references the famous cat and the mylar balloons (2017, 2018, and 2021.) 

Technically a balloon is not an animal but we cannot rule out the possibility of them having been deployed through one or another creature's deliberate intervention. One hangs around here long enough and one begins to get the impression that the animals might be up to something.  The peacocks might vandalize your car. Feral hogs are undermining your levees. Alligators are up to all sorts of mischief in your streets, under your streets, in your dumpsters.  This weekend, our most prominent animal insurrectionist celebrated his seventh birthday to considerable internet fanfare. Clearly his growing cult of personality is emboldening others in his movement. 

With so much evidence of an organized animal uprising underway, you might think stewards of critical infrastructure like Entergy would invest more in countermeasures. But, as we've learned time and again, improved service is not the focus of Entergy's investment strategy. Profit hoarding is.  And, as we've also learned time and again, that isn't a model conducive to producing reliable public service.  

Entergy has aggressively resisted efforts by regulators, residents and advocates to improve its infrastructure. The company’s restoration of its equipment after major storms didn’t prioritize the grid modernization that industry experts say could limit the scope and duration of power outages. Instead of shifting toward renewable energy, Entergy doubled down on building plants that emit greenhouse gases — the same pollution that has made hurricanes more intense. 

ENO is uniquely positioned among American utilities to protect its interests because of how it’s regulated. The subsidiary is one of only two investor-owned utilities overseen by a city council; utilities typically are regulated by a state-level commission. That setup has often left the New Orleans City Council without sufficient resources and expertise to effectively regulate the monopoly electric utility, according to interviews with some residents, council members and former city officials.

How frustrating is it for City Council to regulate this monopoly? Earlier this month, we learned that they can't even hire a consulting firm to help with their analysis.  What's the matter? Don't these accountants want to work?  There's real beans to be counted here!

The New Orleans City Council is planning to rebid a contract to conduct a management audit of Entergy New Orleans, after its first attempt received zero responses from interested firms. The management audit was announced in September, in the wake of Hurricane Ida and the weeks-long power outages it caused in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana. 

“To be candid we’re nowhere,” said Councilman and utility committee chair JP Morrel in an interview. “We got zero responses.”

The lack of responsive companies is not isolated to this one contract. In recent months, the council has faced roadblocks finding companies to fill several contracts vital to its role as regulator of Entergy New Orleans.

Morrell called it “frustrating” and “jarring.”

These consulting contracts are typically the most lucrative the council can offer to anyone for anything. All last summer we kept hearing complaints from political and business elites that "free money from the government" was keeping too many people from going to work. But here we have the government with all this free money to give away to an auditing firm for, let's face it, not very much actual work, and there are no takers to be found.

The Lens asked JP Morrell why he thinks that is.  He can't say what is keeping national firms out of the running but he does have an interesting theory about what crowds out local bidders.

He said Entergy’s outsized influence in the region’s economy may have also played a role. He was clear that he had no evidence of actual active “economic intimidation” from Entergy, but said that companies that stand to work with Entergy may see the council contracts as a liability. 

“Someday you might want to do work with Entergy,” Morrell said. “There’s always going to be the idea both from law firms and accounting firms locally, that if you do work for the council on one of these pieces, you might conflict yourself out of any future work with Entergy.”

Someday you might want to do work with Entergy.  It's true, the revolving door between local government and the utility giant has been in operation for as long as we can remember. Just a few examples would include the following:

Former Entergy CEO Charles Rice who resigned in 2018 following a series of scandalous events including the "paid actors" incident, a contentious rate case negotiation, and at least the appearance of insider trading activity. Rice has been in and out of local government, most notably as City Attorney and Chief Administrative Officer under Ray Nagin.  Probably Rice's most famous exploit from that time was his purchase of the supposedly "bomb-proof" trash cans. In this story, we see Nagin trying to distance himself from the controversy. 

In a recent interview, Nagin said he was never a fan of the squatty cans, bought with a no-bid contract at the direction of former Chief Administrative Officer Charles Rice. Rice left city government in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina.

"Those little munchkin trash cans? We got rid of those," Nagin said, referring to the trash can deal as "a Charles Rice special."

The mayor's chief beef, apparently, was that the receptacles, known as "Jazzy Cans," were too small.

"I said to Charles, 'Where'd you find these trash cans?'¤" Nagin recounted. "They're about this tall," he added, holding his hand at the level of a table top. "I had to bend over to put stuff in ¤'em."

Told of the mayor's comments, Rice fired back.

"This was discussed with Ray Nagin one-on-one and in a staff meeting in his office," said Rice, who is practicing law. "Ultimately, any decision involving the city of New Orleans rests with the mayor. He approved the purchase of the trash cans, and at the end of the day, Ray Nagin makes the decision and bears the ultimate responsibility."

The trash cans were controversial when they were installed, though the controversy had nothing to do with their size. The problem was that the company that supplied them, Niche Marketing USA, acknowledged a business relationship with Terrence Rice, Charles Rice's brother -- though the Rices have denied the link.

While Charles Rice is no longer the CEO at Entergy, he is still there in the legal department. His wife also works for Entergy as a systems analyst while maintaining a quasi public service role as chair of the public library board. 

When Ken Polite left the US Attorney's office for Louisiana's Eastern District, he was briefly rumored to become a mayoral candidate. Instead he landed at Entergy. Here was his job description. 

Entergy, based in New Orleans, confirmed the hire in a statement Tuesday (April 18), adding Polite will serve as the company's chief compliance officer overseeing legal and regulatory matters, including its compliance with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules. Polite, 41, joined the company Tuesday and will assume full leadership of the department over the summer.

In the statement, Marcus Brown, executive vice president and general counsel at Entergy Corp., praised Polite's "superior legal acumen, experience leading people and his personal commitment to local communities."

"He is well suited to upholding and enhancing Entergy's high standards for ethical behavior and our serious commitment to complying with laws and regulations -- and doing what's right even when there's no rule to follow," Brown said.

Having received ethical instruction from Polite, Entergy would go on to unnecessarily shut down power during a severe freeze in New Orleans, struggle with restoring power and being transparent with the public after Hurricane Ida, back out of its commitment to funding a new substation for Sewerage and Water Board, and, of course, continue inventing new ways to nickel and dime its ratepayers.  

Of course, Polite would also remain closely involved in government.  In 2020 his firm was hired (secretly and outside of regular procurement procedures) by the city to perform one of the several simultaneous and conflicting investigations into causes of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse. Last year, President Biden appointed Polite to head the US Justice Department's Criminal Division where he will be in charge of investigating, among many other things, public corruption.

And then there are the firms the city council is (supposedly) attempting to replace through this bidding process. Here is a Lens feature from a couple years ago on the Dentons lawfirm and Legend Consulting Group. The story provides one of the best looks at the interlocking relationships between the City Council, the consulting firms, and Entergy itself.  There's so much going on there, it wouldn't do the article justice to just quote a few paragraphs.  But here are a few paragraphs. 

It’s neither illegal nor uncommon in Louisiana for government contractors to make campaign contributions to the politicians that hire them. And prior to the April 2007 resolution, members of the utility committee received a steady stream of campaign contributions from utility advisors, adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. Even after 2007, several council members received campaign contributions from utility consultants.

Thomas’ campaign finance records from his time on the council show thousands of dollars in contributions from several utility advisers, dating from at least 2002 to early 2007. The Lens identified one small contribution of $250 to Head from Bruno and Tervalon — the utility committee’s accounting contractor — in 2015. We could not identify any such contributions to Midura, who said in 2007 that she did not accept campaign money from contractors involved in regulating Entergy, according to an article in The Times-Picayune.

Clint Vince’s law firm, Dentons, also gave $25,000 to the Louisiana Democratic Party’s political action committee between 2013 and 2018, according to state campaign finance records. State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party since 2012, was hired by Dentons in 2014.

“Dentons does not have a relationship with the Louisiana Democratic Party,” Peterson said in an email to The Lens. “Separate and apart from my role with Dentons, I serve as chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party.”

There also appears to be a longtime relationship between the utility consultants and the Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD), a local political organization based in Central City. That relationship can be traced back at least to 1987, when the council hired a firm run by Sidney Cates IV and then-Tax Assessor Kenneth Carter. Carter, a co-founder of BOLD and the father of Karen Carter Peterson, was a close friend of then-Councilman Jim Singleton, another BOLD co-founder.

Long story short, the very small circle of people in the New Orleans political elite class (and we are talking multiple generations of the same families) tend to ping pong in and out of government  as they take lucrative jobs with the contractors those offices hire and the utilities and businesses they regulate. One more classic example of this occurred in January when we learned that Judge Regina Bartholomew-Woods, who is married to Jimmie Woods, the owner of one of the city's two major trash hauling contractors, was resigning her judgeship so she could take a position with, yep, Entergy.

All of which is to say, it's little wonder an unusually combative City Council can find any takers for these consulting contracts that may already be tacitly spoken for.  And that's a shame because JP makes it sound like they are so very close to getting to the bottom of this animal conspiracy. But it's tough when you can't get anyone to take the case. Nobody wants to work in this town anymore, it seems. That is unless they're working for Entergy.

Happy Anniversary!

Hey look, Waste Management's civil RICO suit against Fred Heebe and Jim Ward is turning 10 years old.

Both sides have lined up high-powered attorneys – Waste Management is represented by a group of lawyers from Phelps Dunbar, a white-shoe New Orleans law firm, as well as the Washington firm Baker Botts, while Heebe and Ward’s legal team includes, among others, Kyle Schonekas and Billy Gibbens, the lawyers that blew up the federal investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2013.

Given that legal horsepower, it’s perhaps not surprising that the litigation is about to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. There are more than 600 items in the online court docket, including dozens of complex motions, and the plaintiffs want to introduce more than 400 exhibits, a move Heebe and Ward are opposing.

Do you think all those big money lawyers are "celebrating" this cash cow? I think they are celebrating.  Ray Nagin, whose bribery conviction, obviously, figures into this case, once said he decided to go into politics because it was, "the dominant industry." And now everyone involved in this case has a decade's worth of stimulus checks to prove it. 

But that isn't the only interesting principle of politics this group of "high-powered attorneys" has proven in the course of their work.  They've also demonstrated that amassing great fortune and influence through corrupt political dealings and environmental endangerment, is nowhere near as serious a crime as commenting on websites. 

Heebe, meanwhile, was represented by some of the city’s most aggressive defense lawyers, who pushed back as federal investigators dug into how he secured a near-monopoly on the local landfill business. They didn’t wait for the feds to strike. Instead, they went on offense, revealing that two top prosecutors had routinely posted comments — using aliases — on news stories about cases the U.S. Attorney’s Office was handling.

The scandal turned the office upside down, ending the long reign of popular U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. More remarkably, it won Heebe and his stepfather, Jim Ward, his partner in the River Birch landfill in Waggaman, the equivalent of a pre-emptive pardon. The Department of Justice, which rarely even confirms the existence of investigations, announced that its probe of Heebe and Ward was over, and that neither would be charged.

This astonishing precedent was further cemented when we learned that commenting on websites is, in fact, so egregious an offense as to outweigh actual murders committed by police.  

“Legacyusa” turned out to be one of the top federal prosecutors in New Orleans. His post was just one of many anonymous barbs that led a federal judge Tuesday to throw out the convictions of those ex-cops in the Danziger Bridge shootings, which left two people dead and four seriously wounded.

In a 129-page ruling, District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt cited long list of “egregious and inflammatory” comments by at least three Justice Department officials using a variety of online identities. Those comments fueled a “21st century carnival atmosphere” that tainted the 2011 trial and will require a new one, Engelhardt wrote.

Engelhardt actually threw out the River Birch case at one point too, even though that ruling didn't stick.  Wonder how that happened. 

Engelhardt had connections to other players in the case. When Heebe and Ward pushed to unmask the pseudonymous commenters in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Engelhardt joined the crusade, eventually directing the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to probe the commenting scandal.

Engelhardt owed his appointment to the federal bench to then-U.S. Sen. David Vitter; he had served as Vitter’s campaign treasurer. Vitter was also an ally of Heebe and Ward. He was among the politicians who questioned decisions by the state DEQ to hastily open landfills around the region, moves that also drew scorn from environmentalists.

The "dominant industry" works in fascinating ways, doesn't it.  I mean.. look what happened even during the time it took me to type this up. 

This time, there was no 11th-hour surprise. But once again, Fred Heebe and Jim Ward, owners of the River Birch landfill in Waggaman, found a way to dodge a public accounting of what their detractors have long portrayed as an improper influence campaign meant to keep potential rivals at bay -- and as much local garbage going into their dump as possible.

On the eve of trial of a civil racketeering lawsuit that was filed a decade ago, the two men settled with their accuser, Waste Management, one of the largest garbage companies in North America. Terms of the settlement, noted in the case's lengthy docket on Friday by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, were not disclosed. The case was set for trial Monday.

Well, happy anniversary, in any case. To quote Nagin once more, thanks for "keeping the brand out there."

Sculpture garden

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more lame.

President Donald Trump announced during a speech in front of Mount Rushmore on Friday an executive order to establish a "National Garden of American Heroes" featuring statues of "historically significant Americans." 

The executive order includes a list of former American presidents and historical figures to feature – with Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, and Billy Graham among them. 

Trump's effort to build more statues comes as protesters across the U.S. have torn down statues in protest of police violence against Black people in the wake of George Floyd's death in May.

Oh great another big dumb wasteful project that doesn't do anything but score political points though empty symbolic trolling and leave a massive wave of graft in its wake. After you do a border wall for that very same purpose, this just looks kind pathetic by comparison.

Besides, it's been done already. 

For most of the day before Nagin's scheduled dedication ceremony, the statue of Louis Armstrong, first dedicated in 1972 and recently moved to make way for a rendition of the old French Opera House, lay swathed in bubble wrap under a makeshift wooden shelter in the bed of a truck.

Mayoral spokesman James Ross said Tuesday five of the new statues will be displayed at tonight's event. Crews from A.M.E. Disaster Recovery Services were working furiously Tuesday under the supervision of city Parks and Parkways employees. A.M.E. has a $2.6 million contract for the so-called Phase 3 of Armstrong Park restoration. It got the deal in December 2009, a year after Burnell Moliere, the founder of similarly named companies housed at the same address, pleaded guilty to helping the former head of the Orleans Parish School Board collect a bribe.

Free Ray

It's time to let Ray Nagin out of jail.

A federal judge on Monday denied former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s appeal of his conviction and 10-year sentence for corruption charges.

U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo said that none of a litany of complaints Nagin raised about prosecutors and his own defense attorney, in a brief he wrote from a federal prison camp in Texas, justified overturning the first conviction of a New Orleans mayor for public corruption.

The 63-year-old Nagin is due to stay behind bars until May 25, 2023, according to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate database.

Not saying he never should have been prosecuted.  Ray definitely did the petty crimes he's in jail for. But he was always more of patsy than anything else.  I'm sure from his point of view, he did everything right.  Pleased all the important people. Said all the right "let's run government like a business" things. Nagin just wanted to be another successful guy in the politics herd. 

That's why after Katrina, when it mattered the most, Ray did the "safe" thing and let the pro-gentrification crowd have whatever they wanted from him. That's his real crime but it's not the one he's in prison for.  And there are plenty of his erstwhile friends running free now who have done worse and fared better by it than he has.  Either way, the dude has suffered enough.

"You are hurting this recovery and you need to stop it"

First, a correction.  Yesterday when we linked to this Advocate story about the dubious claim that Sewerage and Water Board has  $134 million in uncollected bills sitting out there, we mistakenly believed that issue had been raised by S&WB itself.  It turns out the point actually came from Councilman Giarrusso's staff.  We'll get to why that matters in a minute.  But first, there is this other thing that happened.  In an amusing follow-up to yesterday's story, the Advocate has cleverly decided to publish the mayor's feedback. 

Remember, LaToya has been working behind the scenes with the governor and the city's legislative delegation to land a sensitive deal with the city's tourism magnates over tax revenues.  The mayor has, correctly, asserted the money in question could be better applied to shoring up city infrastructure than its current purpose which is, basically, making the tourism magnates richer.

Unfortunately,  the deal currently reported to be in the works only takes the slightest, insufficient step toward that goal while largely preserving the untenable status quo.  It's not a long term solution. But brokering it does present the mayor an opportunity to make a superficial claim on a political "win" which, of course, is all she really cares about.

So she called in to say some things.

Those fragile negotiations could be imperiled if state officials do not believe the S&WB is doing all that it can to properly manage its own finances. That concern was explicitly voiced by an angry Cantrell, who called The Advocate late Tuesday afternoon to complain that reporting on the figures “could kill the deal.” 

 “What do you want to do, screw the city?” Cantrell asked in a phone call hours after the newspaper posted an online story about the questions over unpaid bills. “Is that what you want?”

“Who’s doing the work trying to get the money we need? Me,” she said. “It’s for the city. And it’s just that serious. You can play games if you want, but this is not the one. It’s not it.”

Now it doesn't look like Cantrell threatened to "cold cock" anybody, but plenty people heard some distinct Nagin echoes nonetheless.

Others of us heard some Trump too. But, as we've pointed out previously, Trump and Nagin exist in very much the same genre.  Harboring no true ideology beyond self-aggrandizement, this particular type of pol is always willing to tolerate any injustice and appease any wealthy toad so long as it suits the ego. And, of course, there is the hallmark reflexive lashing out at any and all criticism.  All of which is very much on brand for LaToya as well so it's hardly surprising to see it here. But, as amusing (or disconcerting.. I often confuse the two) as the spectacle is, there are still some questions that haven't been answered.

First, the $134 million clearly is not real. We already know S&WB can't send anyone an accurate bill.  Why assume that they can compile an accurate record of outstanding accounts?  McBride says here that they can't.  (Update:  NOLAdotcom also reports on the" murkiness" of the numbers here) Anyway, given all of this, why would Cantrell not dispute these numbers in her call to the Advocate?

Cantrell did not dispute the numbers — in fact, she credited her administration with already being aware of them — but said reporting on the figures promoted a “false narrative” that the S&WB could do without money she says it needs for the city's very survival.

"Credited her administration with already being aware of.." the numbers but not questioning them?  If the bogus number tells a "false narrative," maybe someone should get on that.  Cantrell sounds like she would prefer to sweep it all under the rug until it's too late for anyone to ask.  It makes sense when you remember this was the mayor who made everyone on her transition team sign non-disclosure agreements. Paranoid behavior just breeds more suspicion, though.  Why not just conduct the public business in public?

Which brings us to the next question.  It's not even the Advocate's reporters who brought this up in the first place. It was Councilman Giarrusso. Give him credit, at least, for asking the question in a public forum.  But, as you can see here, if anyone is promoting the "narrative" Cantrell is concerned about, it is him. 

Under questioning by Giarrusso at a Public Works Committee hearing Tuesday morning, S&WB Executive Director Ghassan Korban said he could not dispute the figures. But Korban added that it would take months to figure out how much was actually owed by customers and how much was the result of billing problems or other errors.

It was unclear how much of that money would turn out to be entirely uncollectable for those and other reasons, he said.

“The numbers that we learned today of $134 million possibly being owed to Sewerage &Water Board are eye-popping,” Giarrusso said after the meeting. “We want them to have the money they need to operate. But they’ve got to collect the money that’s owed to them.”

Did LaToya call up Giarrusso to yell at him too?  Maybe she did. We kind of hope so, anyway, since he does need a talking to. Not so much about the billing stuff but about this. 

Giarrusso said Thursday that rather than shutting off water to those who owe money, the S&WB should consider using devices that would limit the amount of water that could go to a customer. That would limit the water they get to what is needed for essential needs — such as drinking and cooking — while not providing enough for bathing or more extravagant uses like watering lawns.

What is he trying to screw the city? 

Swapping spit with turbines

You know New Orleans tap water has won state and national "taste tests" on several occasions. (This really is a thing.)  I always wondered what the secret was.   Turns out it's very possibly the turbine backwash.

Under the current set-up, which Korban said has been in place for more than 100 years, the turbines that power the S&WB's systems are cooled by drawing water that has already been treated by the utility. That water moves through copper pipes in the turbines before being poured back into a pool of water that is then sent out to taps across the city.

While that system is designed to keep the cooling water from coming in contact with the mechanical equipment, it raises the risk that contaminated water could be introduced into the drinking supply.

During the pitch for an aborted early 2000s privatization scheme, Ray Nagin wanted to bottle and sell the city water. He suggested we brand it as "Crescent City Clear."  I wonder if he would have followed through on the whole thing if he had the tagline, "It's like kissing 25 cycles of power" available.

Business partners

So long, Lil' Entergy. 

Charles Rice, the embattled president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, will step down Monday and take a lesser role, part of a broader damage-control effort by a company that's been mired in controversy for months.

Entergy Corp., the local utility's parent company, said Friday that it will launch a national search to replace Rice, who will join the company’s legal department.

In the meantime, Rod West, who serves as Entergy Corp.'s group president for utility operations, will take on Rice’s duties on an interim basis. He was president of Entergy New Orleans before Rice took the job.

I'm thinking about applying for this job.  All they can say is no. That's the worst that can happen, right?  Actually they could hire me, promise me a raise, and then immediately fire me. That might be worse. But that's a story for later. For the time being, it is a job for Big Entergy.

West attended a City Council committee meeting Thursday and pledged to improve relations with the council, acknowledging that the company had not moved quickly enough to acquire renewable energy sources or to address frequent power outages. He also said the company had done a poor job communicating with the public about the proposed rate increase, and acknowledged its power grid reliability is substandard.

"Entergy New Orleans wants to be a good and constructive business partner in this city," West said. "And we intend to win your trust back."

City Councilman Jay Banks said he saw West's appearance on Thursday as a harbinger of things to come, comparing his council visit to a father having to go to his son's school to deal with an issue.

"If 'big Entergy' had to step in, that did not look good for Charles," Banks said.

City Councilwoman Helena Moreno also found West's appearance curious, asking him why he had asked to appear before the council instead of Rice. West told her he represented the entire corporation, saying, "I felt that given the seriousness of our relationship, our presence here as a corporate partner, you need to hear from the corporation today."

Big Entergy Rod wants to be a "constructive business partner." That seems nice.  But really we'd just like him to keep the power on.  Imagine a world where the governmental function of providing people with basic necessities like power and water didn't have anything to do with "business partnerships."  Sounds impossible, right?  It's not a world that would have a lot of use for Charles Rice, anyway.

There are a lot of interesting Charles Rice stories but I think my favorite one comes from the time he served as Nagin's CAO.  Remember Ray Nagin? That was the guy we elected specifically because it was fashionable for the mayor to be a really good business guy. Anyway, the Nagin Administration bought these fancy "bombproof" garbage cans. Nobody knows if they ever prevented a terrorist attack or anything. But they did make for a productive business partnership.. with Charles Rice's brother.

The trash cans were controversial when they were installed, though the controversy had nothing to do with their size. The problem was that the company that supplied them, Niche Marketing USA, acknowledged a business relationship with Terrence Rice, Charles Rice's brother -- though the Rices have denied the link.

The deal was also a demonstrably bad one.

Typically, companies that deal in trash can advertising supply the cans for free to cities -- and give cities as much as 25 percent of the ad revenue as well.

Niche Marketing not only charged New Orleans full price for the cans, it promised the city only 15 percent of the ad revenue. Because of poor ad sales and the cans' short life span on New Orleans' streets, the city's return worked out to only about $6,000.

Anyway, Rice isn't actually leaving Entergy. He's just being reshuffled back to the legal department so the new CEO can continue to benefit from his experience.  

The resilience economy

Not sure what the big deal is here.

Coastal towns would enjoy an economic boon from a massive oil spill in the Great Australian Bight, BP claimed in newly revealed documents from a 2016 drilling bid.

The oil giant said any cleanup operation following a huge spill would bring a “welcome boost to local economies.” The claim was uncovered via a freedom of information request by the U.K.-based Climate Home News website.

It's true, though, right? At least that's what New Orleans's political and business leaders have been telling us for years. As Ray Nagin once famously said, "There's big money in disasters."  Ray was always an idea man, though.  It wasn't until the following administration that we really professionalized the notion of resilience as an economic development opportunity. 

BP, Ray, Mitch, et al are really the optimists here. Sure, climate change is going to destroy cities, threaten food supplies, and endanger millions. But we chose to allow that to happen a long time ago. The challenge now is for global corporations,  political elites,  and well placed entrepreneurs to go to work figuring out how to profit by it.  That's just what leaders do.

Forget about it, it's Trash Town

Very good to see the trash men who rule us are finally able to put aside their differences and allow their system of rote bribery to continue apace.

Nearly five years after federal authorities abruptly abandoned a massive corruption investigation targeting local landfill owner Fred Heebe, a civil case with similar contours — this one brought by a competitor in the sometimes bare-knuckles trash-disposal business — was settled on the eve of what was expected to be a two-week trial starting Monday in federal court.

Given that the feds never brought charges, the trial over Waste Management’s civil racketeering claim against Heebe and his stepfather, Jim Ward, looked likely to be the closest thing to a public airing of the allegations that investigators were exploring before they gave up the chase.

Now those issues may never be aired. The terms of the 11th-hour settlement, reached Thursday, are confidential, according to court records.

I don't keep up with such things the way some people do but I do still wonder if Heebe and Ward have ever thanked Sal Perricone for his service. These days we're never quite sure whether or not the President is going to start a war by posting a fart noise on Twitter. But if one guy saying racist things in NOLA.com comments could derail a whole federal racketeering investigation, then we may only be beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.

This article laments the things we may now never learn about River Birch. But another benefit of living in the Age of Trump is that it probably doesn't matter what comes to light or doesn't now. Nobody is ever going to be held accountable.  Besides, what more brazen admission than this are we hoping for?

The now-aborted trial appeared likely to provide a window into the broader allegation that River Birch built a web of influence by illegally subverting Louisiana campaign laws.

A summary of the two sides’ cases drawn up by Engelhardt noted that Ward, in his deposition, “incredibly admitted that River Birch made campaign contributions to Broussard through various shell companies in order to give more than the legal maximum of $5,000 to Broussard and ‘to make it not as obvious to anybody that’s looking into the records as to what is going on.’ ”

Most of the shell companies were in the name of Dominick Fazzio, River Birch’s chief financial officer, who had a low public profile until he was indicted amid the federal probe. The feds later dropped their case against Fazzio, who had been expected to testify at the trial.

And remember this is what Engelhardt will write even as he's the person responsible for keeping most of this bottled up through his rulings in this civil case and through his role in reacting to Perricone's impact on the Danziger trial. As we sink further and further in to the kleptocratic hellworld, Engelhardt is nothing if not an appropriate judge for such times. Looks like he's also being recognized for his service.

Engelhardt, who was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, may be in his final weeks in his current post. President Donald Trump has nominated him for a spot on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located next door to the federal district courthouse.

Running it like a bidness

It turns out privatizing the Sewerage and Water Board operation is not too hard to do so long as you keep saying over and over that you aren't privatizing the Sewerage and Water Board. 

WWL-TV asked the mayor about these privatization concerns in August, back when he first hired the current Emergency Management Team.

“We are not privatizing the Sewerage and Water Board,” Landrieu said on Aug. 16. “Now, people have a lot of ideas about what that is. Public-private partnerships equal that for some. I'll let them argue about that.”

Landrieu also was very clear that any contracts for outside management would be temporary, nothing beyond his term that ends in May 2018.

“What I need to do is bring in some really strong people to stabilize it and then work through what's going to happen next with the other folks. But I'm not going to bind the next mayor and next administration,” Landrieu said.

Malek-Wiley said Landrieu is going back on that promise with this request for proposals from contractors.

“You're talking about six months to three years,” he said. That sounds like tying the hands of anybody and the council into the future.”

Did the neoliberal ideology ever really go out of style in New Orleans?  One would be hard pressed to prove the case.  The branding is a bit different now which seems to satisfy some credulous observers. For example, it was six years ago, during the nadir of Naginism, that Clancy DuBos declared the Era Of Running Government Like A Business officially over.

Don't try to run government like a business. This is a lesson for us all. Businesses are dictatorships; our government is a democracy. The two are not designed to work the same way. The next time you hear some puffed-up businessman saying we should run government like a business, remind him that Greg Meffert and Mark St. Pierre were successful businessmen — and ask him if he likes how they ran things. If nothing else, we now know the danger — and the folly — of running government like a business.

Despite the danger and the folly and such, we forged right on ahead anyway. It turns out you can continue right along subverting the deliberate and transparent democratic process with only the slightest bit of re-branding.  Enter the era of the "public-private partnership."

August 13, 2010

New Orleans, LA - Mayor Mitch Landrieu today announced appointments to the NOLA Business Alliance board and launched the city’s first-ever public-private partnership for economic development, a structure that will deliver unprecedented coordination for economic development across the city.

“This is a landmark step for our city,” said Mayor Landrieu.  “For the first time, both the public and private sector will partner in a single coordinated effort to deliver new jobs and economic opportunities for this city.  And we will facilitate economic growth by linking government, the private sector and the nonprofit sector while leveraging our resources.   It’s another step in our goal to restructure and transform city government by implementing best practices that improve our quality of life.”

Studies by both the RAND Corporation and the International Economic Development Council demonstrated that a transformational structural change was needed in the City to improve the effectiveness of our economic development efforts. 
 
To that end, a new corporation named the NOLA Business Alliance was formed to serve as the official public-private partnership entity.  NOLA Business Alliance is governed by a 17-member board of directors of which seven (7) seats originate from the public sector, seven (7) seats from the private sector, and three (3) seats from non-governmental organizations.

That press release puts Mitch's name on The Business Alliance, but it's important to note the process that birthed it really started back with Nagin. The change from Nagin to Mitch is falsely described in media as a turning point of the post-Katrina period.  In fact there is a traceable continuity of governing philosophy that runs straight through the entire period with many of the same players calling the shots along the way. Under the Nagin and Landrieu administrations, the public-private model was applied to practically any governmental function we can name.  A few examples:

Mitch's NOLA For Life initiative

Aside from vague explanations, it’s difficult to determine precisely how and why 23 recipients of the money were selected out of 64 applications. Applicants with experience were rejected while new groups were awarded grants. And one politically influential recipient of the highest-level grant of $40,000 hasn’t followed through on other city and state grants it was awarded several years ago — nor did it provide required financial information in its grant application.

The public could be forgiven for thinking this is a public grant process.

Landrieu and other city officials initially took credit for securing a $1 million donation from Chevron to finance the grants, and they promised to contribute another $250,000 at the city’s disposal. But the administration and Chevron say the company’s donation was a private transaction with the foundation — the company said Landrieu’s acceptance of the donation on stage was “ceremonial” — and there’s no official pledge to donate city money to the effort. Therefore, the city said, how a private foundation chooses to make grants from a private donation is not subject to state sunshine laws or Landrieu’s own reform procedures, put in place his first days in office.

Mitch's Office of Technology

Still, the foundation’s work goes on largely outside the usual scope of accountability, even though documents abundantly demonstrate a working relationship between the foundation and city officials in the Office of Information Technology and Innovation.

The official line from City Hall is that the foundation isn’t working for the city.

“The New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation is not signing a contract or doing business on behalf of the city,” said Landrieu spokesman Berni, speaking on the proposed Sierra contract before it was scuttled.

Sidney Torres in a number of capacities, but most notably with regard to policing.

A $75,000 donation from developer and hotelier Joseph Jaeger will help keep the off-duty New Orleans police officers of the French Quarter Task Force on patrol through the month June.

"What Mr. Jaeger has done is not just an act of generosity, but also leadership," task force founder Sidney Torres IV said in a release announcing the donation. "This is exactly the kind of support this program and our city need in order to tackle the crime problem."

Housing in all sorts of ways.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans's first experience with the public-private partnership model came when HRI converted the St. Thomas housing development into the River Garden neighborhood in 2004, anchored by the city’s first Wal-Mart.

HANO then began regularly leasing its complexes to private developers under a plan that was speeded up following Katrina, when many hundreds of units were flooded and otherwise damaged.

After Katrina, HANO demolished its Big Four projects — C.J. Peete, St. Bernard, Lafitte and B.W. Cooper, which accounted for about 60 percent of public housing in the city — in order to make way for new housing models. In some cases, by 2015, fewer than half the new units had rents comparable to those in public housing. Some were market-rate, and others were in-between.

As subsidized units declined, the number of housing vouchers for privately owned apartments rose — as did the waiting list for people waiting to get them.

Replacing the "Big Four" incorporated a trick from even further back that became a staple of post-K housing policy.  

Several other builders had tried to develop the American Can project but failed to come up with the necessary financing. Mr. Kabakoff used public-private partnerships to finance the deal. His first mortgage consists of $29 million in tax-exempt bonds from the State of Louisiana's private activity bond cap program. The program mandates that 20 percent of the housing units be set aside for low-income renters.

How did that one turn out?

Look, there are a lot of these. They touch on practically every aspect of government; transit, drainage, pretty much anything where there's been a surplus of public money available to be vacuumed up by a contractor, a startup, or a non-profit  with minimal transparency or oversight.  Basically no service is worth providing for people if it doesn't help some third party get rich in the process. Here is a fun one where Paul Rainwater helped Bobby Jindal kill rural broadband access.

But, while noting that it was the Board of Regents that applied for the grant, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater said that, "from the start, we've always said there were implementation and sustainability problems in the grant that had to do with a top-down, government-heavy approach that would compete with and undermine, rather than partner with, the private sector and locals."

And now Rainwater is playing a prominent role in the privatization plans at Sewerage and Water Board. Brand it whatever you like. After all this time, we're still stuck on the notion of running government "like a business" for the benefit of businesses and the political people connected to those businesses.

The latest version of that brand depends heavily on the coolness cache of the tech industry. For today's futurist-utopian progressives, selling out the fundamentals of democracy to corporate "partners" has never been more cutting edge.  Evgeny Morozov has written extensively about the interplay between the tech industry and modern neoliberal politics.  This recent column comments on Alphabet (Google) and its dabblings in urban design and management. 

Alphabet’s long-term goal is to remove barriers to the accumulation and circulation of capital in urban settings – mostly by replacing formal rules and restrictions with softer, feedback-based floating targets. It claims that in the past “prescriptive measures were necessary to protect human health, ensure safe buildings, and manage negative externalities”. Today, however, everything has changed and “cities can achieve those same goals without the inefficiency that comes with inflexible zoning and static building codes”.

This is a remarkable statement. Even neoliberal luminaries such as Friedrich Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke allowed for some non-market forms of social organisation in the urban domain. They saw planning – as opposed to market signals – as a practical necessity imposed by the physical limitations of urban spaces: there was no other cheap way of operating infrastructure, building streets, avoiding congestion.

For Alphabet, these constraints are no more: ubiquitous and continuous data flows can finally replace government rules with market signals. Now, everything is permitted – unless somebody complains. The original spirit behind Uber was quite similar: away with the rules, tests and standards, let the sovereign consumer rank the drivers and low-scoring ones will soon disappear on their own. Why not do this to landlords? After all, if you are lucky to survive a house fire, you can always exercise your consumer sovereignty and rank them down. Here the operating logic is that of Blackstone Urbanism, even if the techniques themselves are part of Google Urbanism.

Google Urbanism means the end of politics, as it assumes the impossibility of wider systemic transformations, such as limits on capital mobility and foreign ownership of land and housing. Instead it wants to mobilise the power of technology to help residents “adjust” to seemingly immutable global trends such as rising inequality and constantly rising housing costs (Alphabet wants us to believe that they are driven by costs of production, not by the seemingly endless supply of cheap credit).

During the debate Wednesday, LaToya and Desiree were asked a question about the ability of politics to respond to change on people's behalf.  I've transcribed the candidates' very different answers.

Q: "Proposed changes such as those in the Urban Water Plan may make dramatic changes to the physical face of the city. How will you address environmental justice concerns?"

CHARBONNET:  "Well you have got to make sure these changes don't just affect poor neighborhoods and those with the lesser voices in town. It's hugely important. We do have to accept change. That is just part of growth. However, I hearken back to the days of my parents' time when they had to put that Interstate over Claiborne Avenue. And how that was such a thriving neighborhood and how it changed that neighborhood forever. And there has always been the feeling that it was done in that neighborhood because it was a primarily African American neighborhood. We cannot make those mistakes again. We've got to change. But we also have to consider the lives of the people in these neighborhoods who are going to be affected."

CANTRELL: "Ensuring environmental justice has to be a priority in the city. And even as we talk about advancing the building on high dry ground. That is something that has not been well received. Even in this post-Katrina environment. Often times I get complaints about.. oh.. blocking my view to the point where, uh, me and my staff, we say it's a 'I have a view' speech. So we really have to encourage people to adapt to change. But it's all about protecting the environment. Protecting the lives of all of our people. Through the history of our city, we know that there has been definitely a disservice to predominantly minority communities. We know that. But in terms of mitigating those environmental hazards, it needs to be a priority. And it will be one under my administration. But putting in also incentives uh so that future development can occur... again with not damaging the environment." 

The question doesn't state this explicitly but Charbonnet interprets it to address the social and economic impacts of urban environmental policy.  Her concern here is making sure those with "lesser voices" don't bear the highest costs associated with implementing the Urban Water Plan.  Another way to put that is politics has a role to play in ensuring the poor and voiceless aren't bulldozed in the name of progress.

Cantrell, on the other hand, seems to discount even the idea of dissent. She tells us about a joke she and her staff have about constituent complaints about land use issues. To her the problem is more about convincing the disaffected to "adapt to change" than it is about taking seriously the harsher effect of change on those with lesser means to adapt.  Although she does express some concern for how it might affect developers.  They still need "incentives" for some reason.

It's a remarkable answer coming from a person who got her start in politics complaining to the city about the "green dot" a water management plan once placed over her neighborhood. But it does fit in well with the prevailing "Google Urbanism" Morozov is describing. No doubt the next mayor will have no trouble running her administration "like a business" too. It looks like the current mayor has already given her a head start with Sewerage and Water Board, anyway.

Free Ray

I'm sure there are many people who are worried about the implications of the McDonnell case for the future. And I'm sure those people have some good points to make about that. But all things being equal, Nagin has probably suffered enough already. There are plenty of public officials who have done worse and been punished less severely for it.

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has asked a federal judge to throw out his corruption conviction, citing a recent Supreme Court decision making it more difficult to convict public officials of bribery.

Acting as his own attorney, Nagin filed a motion Wednesday "to vacate, set aside or correct" his 10-year sentence for bribery, "honest-services" wire fraud, conspiracy to commit bribery and money laundering and filing false tax returns.

Nagin argues that his case is identical to corruption cases recently overturned by U.S. Supreme Court concerning former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and by a federal appeals court concerning former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Nagin's case was reassigned Thursday to U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo. The judge who presided over Nagin's trial retired last year.

One thing we could stress about Nagin's case, though, is it's important to remember how he came into office in the first place. Once upon a time, Ray Nagin was sold to voters as an innovative entrepreneur who was going to run city government like a business.  A vote for Ray was a vote against the "corrupt machine."

Of course, in New Orleans politics, "corrupt machine" is a term applied to traditionally black political organizations. There are plenty of powerful and corrupt white operators in town but they're usually described as "business leaders." It's a convenient shorthand for signaling to racially motivated voters even when there is no actual white person among the major candidates. This terminology persists in campaign 2017 coverage.

The lesson of Ray Nagin should have been that one need not be part of the "corrupt machine," to engage in corrupt practices. But the "business leaders" have since revised the story to the point where nobody is able to agree as to which side owned Nagin in the first place. And, of course, since nobody remembers anything that happens, we'll have to go around like this again and again.

On the other hand this year's business leader reform candidate may have an easier time of things.  If the McDonnell decision can vacate Nagin's conviction, it may prevent the next Nagin from even being prosecuted. Given the arbitrary nature of the justice system as it is, that may not be a bad thing altogether. Although, one can imagine that current and future public officials might feel emboldened by this and, well, all sorts of things.

The Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans has declared an "extreme emergency" to hasten the repairs of an unusual electricity-generating turbine that's been in disrepair for more than a decade.

Without so-called Turbine 4, the agency can't produce enough electricity to power the city's aging drainage system during heavy thunderstorms, S&WB deputy superintendent Bruce Adams wrote Sunday (Oct. 8) in a letter calling for the emergency.

The declaration gives the agency's executive staff free rein to buy any parts and equipment and hire any outside specialists to finish a repair job that ballooned to $24 million and has stretched on for more than five years. 

Beat the clock doctrine

The first two decades of the 21st Century may be the golden age of Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein's coinage "Shock Doctrine" has become popular almost to the point of cliche as a means of describing the political opportunism that follows and feeds off of crisis events. Wars, terror attacks, natural or man-made disasters furnish the means of subverting laws and systems that would ordinarily slow or prevent ethical abuses ranging from petty graft on up to civil and human rights violations. As Ray Nagin once said, "There is big money in disasters. Huge money."

This is nothing new, of course. Emergencies have always presented these kinds of opportunities. But the reason Klein's description is particularly relevant now is it suggests a stage of capitalism where the "big money" seems to be made during the course of destructive rather than creative events.  We aren't bending the rules and passing out money under the table to build bridges and roads or put a man on the moon. Instead we are spending it on "recovery" from the disasters we have brought on ourselves or "resilience" against the disasters we will bring on ourselves in the future.  The very term "resilience" implies fatalalism.  These are pessimistic, cynical times. We expect bad things to happen. Our leaders aren't planning to overcome or prevent the bad things. They are scheming to help themselves and their peers profit from the bad things as they happen.

Mitch Landrieu talks about resilience all the time.  So much so, in fact, that he stretches the term beyond meaning altogether. Now we can have a resilient affordable housing plan, a resilient COSTCO, a resilient bike share gimmick, a resilient Four Seasons Hotel, and so on.

Naturally, we also have a resilient French Quarter "security" plan.  For some reason, this involves street and sewer line repairs.  Probably we shouldn't complain too loudly about that.  Essentially what's happened is the mayor has talked the convention center into paying for millions of dollars worth of necessary infrastructure work. He shouldn't have to jam that into a wholly unnecessary surveillance and policing project in order to get access to this money. But it's one way to take advantage of the "shock" of a perceived crime wave in order to get around structural budgetary obstacles.

Of course, it also helps get around a few other inconveniences like the public bidding process, for example.

Rather than put the centerpiece of Landrieu’s $40 million citywide public safety plan out to bid as a capital project -- as is typically done for work of this size -- the city used an existing pavement maintenance contract to get the project started more quickly.

The three-year specialty pavement maintenance contract was put out to bid in December and the city selected Hard Rock Construction’s low bid of $3.9 million on Feb. 2. That was a little more than a week after Landrieu unveiled a public safety plan that included sprucing up Bourbon Street, fixing its long-standing drainage issues and converting it to a pedestrian mall.

But Hard Rock’s vice president, Jan Langford, said her company had no idea when it was selected that its pavement maintenance deal would be used to perform the far more involved Bourbon Street work.

It's pretty nice when you can just rush through all these details. That way nobody has time to worry about little stuff like  which Landrieu cousin might be coming out ahead.

Adding to the political intrigue with this project, Landrieu’s critics took to Facebook in recent days to complain that his cousin Renee Landrieu’s company, Landrieu Concrete and Cement Industries, had trucks on the job.

Maybe that's unfair. There are so many Landrieus running around out there that odds are anybody you encounter in the course of your daily business has about a 1 in 4 chance of being one.  So let's not judge. Instead, like David Hammer does in this story, we'll be sure to mention the fact but distance ourselves by sourcing it to "Facebook critics."  We also enjoyed the way Hammer explains that Hard Rock contributed $2,000 to Mitch AND $2,000 to Nagin during the 2006 mayoral election suggesting to us that as long as you bribe both sides there's probably nothing unethical going on.

But let's not get too bogged down in all that. Instead, the key bit from that story comes where Hammer asks Public Works Director Mark Jernigan what explains the irregular process.  The answer is, we're in a hurry.

Asked why such a complex and critical project would not be bid out separately as a capital project, Jernigan said there wasn’t enough time to go through such a long contract-procurement process.

He said the project needs to be finished by the end of the year. Asked what the rush was, he said it was important “to minimize the construction impacts and also to make sure it's integrated with the citywide public safety program.”

Asked if it had to be done by the end of the year to avoid construction during the city’s 300th anniversary celebrations in 2018, he repeated that it was important to finish the work as soon as possible.

And there we see the standard Landrieu move come back into play.  You don't need an actual disaster in order to play disaster capitalism. It turns out you can create an emergency situation simply by imposing a deadline.  Not every ticking clock needs to be attached to a bomb.  All that's necessary is to get people to buy into the premise.

Call it Beat The Clock Doctrine. It's been the primary motivator of Mitch's agenda throughout his term in office.  It was absolutely imperative that we finish the Loyola streetcar in time for the Superbowl.  It was crtical that we open the St. Roch Market in time for the tenth Katrinaversary. It's important that we finish Bourbon Street before the Tricentennial. No time to consider the long term consequences, of course. Does that streetcar to nowhere improve public transit or just move tourists around slowly?  Will the festival marketplace  be an affordable food source or a luxury entertainment? Will Bourbon Street be a public place or Disneyfied pedestrian mall? Que sera with all that. The important thing is that we get it all done right now.

Normalizing the expectations

One thing we can say for Trump is that he's doing a fantastic job of pulling the band aid off of Idiot America's understanding of the way its ruling institutions actually work.

Senior White House and Justice Department officials had been working on building a case against Mr. Comey since at least last week, according to administration officials. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been charged with coming up with reasons to fire him, the officials said.

All the decent folk are shocked shocked. But this is how things always work.  For whatever reason, most people are a-ok with day to day corruption and abuse of power so long as the practitioners are subtle in their manners. 

Ten years ago, New Orleans' first Inspector General introduced himself with the curious remark that the corruption here just wasn't "sophisticated" enough.

“Corruption in other cities is so sophisticated (because of their rules) you wouldn’t find briberies. It’s very unusual you’d find someone passing money in an office somewhere.”

The New New Orleans does much better corruption now. But don't think for a minute that that means less corruption. It's just that as long the graft isn't so stupidly blatant that it embarrasses the comfortable classes, then nobody has to worry their pretty little head about it.

Well the country went and elected Ray Nagin President last year. And now we're having a daily panic over the very basic fact that America has not actually, "Always Been Great."  The danger here isn't so much that we "normalize" the uncouth behavior of the Ogre President. It's more that our capacity for collective self-delusion once again outstrips the opportunity he presents for honest discussion of how fucked up things really are and have been.

It's Chinatown

Fred Heebe runs and owns all of it. Ray Nagin gets a day out of jail to go testify and all but, you can kind of see where things are headed.

In a sense, the bare-knuckled lawsuit brought by trash conglomerate Waste Management represents the closest thing to a public airing of the corruption claims against Heebe and Jim Ward, his father-in-law, that New Orleanians are ever likely to see.

That’s because the criminal case the federal government was building against the two men cratered amid evidence, unearthed by Heebe’s legal team, of major misconduct by top officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And the case is resurfacing at precisely the same moment that the leader of Heebe’s legal team, defense lawyer Kyle Schonekas, is expected to be nominated by President Donald Trump to run the office whose leadership he toppled five years ago.

In another odd convergence, the jurist presiding over Waste Management’s civil racketeering case, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt, is the same judge that eagerly embraced the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct that Heebe brought forth in 2012, and embarked on his own crusade to measure its extent.

By the time the case gets to the courtroom, in late August, it's possible that Engelhardt, the chief judge in the district court, will have moved on as well: He is said to be a leading contender for an open seat on the New Orleans-based U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal. Such a nomination would also come from Trump, with input from Louisiana's senators.

Yeah so congrats to everybody on their promotions.

Everybody's feelings got hurt

This monuments controversy sure has been divisive. It's good to see that the powerful wealthy men on both sides of the argument can maintain their friendship.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu apologized Wednesday to one of his longtime supporters, businessman Frank Stewart, seeking to de-escalate a spat between the two over Stewart’s opposition to the mayor’s plan to take down four Confederate-era monuments.

Stewart purchased a two-page advertisement Wednesday in The New Orleans Advocate titled “Dear Mitch — Shame on You.”

In a rambling, incoherent tl;dr post yesterday, I threw in a bit about this. 

Mitch can't say this explicitly but there's probably a lot more pro-Confederate sentiment out in the business community than anyone wants to admit. Because he often counts a lot of these people among his own donors and allies, it's no wonder this has been so exasperating for him.

There's a faint echo here of Ray Nagin's post-Katrina political crisis. Not to get too far into it but here's a quick summary. Nagin was elected in 2002 with the backing of the city's upper and business class whites. I don't know if Stewart was among the Nagin coalition but people like him were. There was a mayoral election during the immediate aftermath of the flood. At this time, restless plutocrats abandoned Nagin and sought to install one of their own in an effort to rebuild the city, "demographically, geographically and politically.”

They couldn't settle on a single favorite candidate, though. Twenty something people ran in the primary. Rob Couhig, Peggy Wilson, Ron Forman and a few others all competed for the white money vote but couldn't quite corner it. So the 2006 runoff came down to the centrist neoliberal Mitch and the ideologically similar Nagin who had cynically shifted to a superficial sort of racial politics.  The big public break for Nagin was the famous "Chocolate City" speech. Even though his former backers were already intent on leaving him, the effect, Nagin publicly declaring his independence, granted him a perceived initiative that carried him to reelection.

Mitch made a similar break when he threw his weight behind the monuments movement although he probably didn't do it on purpose.   Most likely, Landrieu seized an opportunity bolster his already rising national profile without fully considering, or perhaps while simply dismissing, the local political consequences.  It's still probably a good decision for Mitch politically. It's definitely the right decision for the city. But it also seems like Landrieu was genuinely surprised at his friends' hurt feelings.  Landrieu says he has a "a strong and principled disagreement” with his friend. But he's probably  just miffed that the guy has an opinion at all.  This is what happens when cynical politicians fail to fully appreciate that other people actually care about the effect of their policy choices.

It also points out something to watch for in the coming municipal elections.  The neoliberal model tells us it's possible to win and hold office in this city branding oneself as a "strong and principled" progressive and still maintain alliances and friendships among the old white money crowd.  But as a more authentic, confrontational politics emerges that engages more people on issues they actually care about, the neoliberal model becomes less and less coherent.  If New Orleans is going to build a new politics in 2017, we might be able to gauge its progress through the continued hurt feelings of elites.

Will the pie explode again?

President Obama is slated to arrive in Baton Rouge this afternoon to survey flood damage and talk about recovery efforts.  We're still in the process of gathering data right now, but certainly there's going to be plenty of work to do.

While the final numbers won't be known for some time, Gov. John Bel Edwards' office has estimated 60,646 houses were damaged and 30,000 people rescued; other people escaped on their own. FEMA says 109,398 people or households have applied for housing help, and 25,000 National Flood Insurance Program claims have been filed. The American Red Cross called it the worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey in 2012.

Now a new analysis offers another set of numbers. Ezra Boyd of Mandeville, who holds a Ph.D. in geography from LSU and runs the website DisasterMap.net, said Monday (Aug. 22) that as many as 188,729 occupied houses and 507,495 people -- 11 percent of the state's population -- were "affected" by the flood.

Last week, the Advocate reported the estimated cost of the damage at $20 billion. The same analysis suggests that "far fewer" than 50 percent of the homes affected by the flood were insured. Here's why that's a problem.

The federal disaster declaration triggers assistance for those whose homes and businesses have been damaged or displaced. Those who don't have flood insurance can still qualify for grants up to $33,000 for repairs. Temporary housing assistance will also become available

That's not going to cover rebuilding (and mandatory elevation) expenses in, dare we say, most cases. Unless more money is found (and we mean a lot more money) a regional economic recovery isn't likely to happen at all.. much less take only one year as this LSU economist seems to say. 

It could take a full year for southeast Louisiana to recover from horrific flood damage sustained during last week's historic rain event, according to one of the state's most trusted economists.

“You can count certain things (right now), such as the number of homes that were flooded, business that were flooded, public facilities such as schools that may have been flooded … then you start asking, ‘what are the real issues that are going to be coming over the next year?’” said economist and professor Jim Richardson to LSU University Relations.

Richardson, also a member of the state's Revenue Estimating Conference, said recovery expenses could generate a boost to local economies in the first year.

He predicted businesses would bounce back the quickest.

“Businesses, for the most part, will get back up and running quickly," he said. "Perhaps not some small businesses in areas badly hit like Denham Springs … but national chains will have resources and additional dollar amounts to get (going again).”

That seems pretty optimistic considering everything we've learned over the past decade in New Orleans. (Are we really even "recovered" now?  That's a different post.)  Furthermore, Richardson appears to be describing a consumer driven "recovery" where flood victims have access to the funds and credit necessary to do the consuming. Will they, though? There are problems. First among these problems is, Louisiana's congressional delegation sucks.

Louisiana's delegation could find itself seeking hundreds of millions of dollars for unmet needs just a few years after several of its members spurned such requests in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. And the delegation, which has few senior members, will be calling for cash from a tight-fisted Republican Congress during an exceptionally heated election season that will end with at least two and possibly three of its members leaving Capitol Hill.

The second thing is, Congress itself also sucks.

In major disasters, the assistance offered under the Stafford Act, which provides funds to both individuals and local government agencies to cover some of their costs, is often only one part of the equation. As of Friday afternoon, FEMA had already approved more than $7 million in individual assistance, which includes money for housing and other needs.

The rest is provided through supplemental funding from Congress, which dedicates money through programs like Community Development Block Grants to meet additional needs.

That extra money is going to be needed to cover costs that aren't met by insurance and to provide for other needs, such as providing vouchers to contractors who can gut houses.

But its availability is dependent on the willingness of lawmakers to go along with the plan, something that's hardly a sure thing.

For just one example of the gridlock in Congress, take the ongoing fight over funding to combat the spread of the Zika virus. In February, the White House requested $1.9 billion to battle the mosquito-born virus, which is present in Florida and could threaten other states, but fights over provisions tacked onto the bill have left it in limbo.

Thirdly... did we mention that our delegation sucks? Because they suck in specific ways that might cause others to have no sympathy with their appeals for help given their own behavior. 

Call it logrolling or one hand washing the other, a generally recognized fact in Washington is that if you want something for your district, it pays to agree to the same thing for another guy’s district.

That point may have been lost on three Louisiana congressmen when they voted against a $50.5-billion relief package for the victims of Superstorm Sandy. The 2012 storm ravaged coastal communities in New Jersey and New York. Now they’re in the position of needing the same sort of aid for their own state. How will that play out?

The three lawmakers, all Republicans, are Rep. Steve Scalise (currently the House majority whip); Bill Cassidy, who moved up to the Senate last year; and John Fleming. They’re all likely exemplars of another Washington truism: fiscal responsibility is great, until it’s your own district that’s getting fiscally hammered.

Despite so much cheery crap you may have read over the years about how the New Orleans economy "bucked the trend" during the recession because it had "resilience" and because hipster entrepreneurs showed up to make apps and open juice bars, the actual recovery.. such as it was.. depended on billions of dollars worth of federal spending. This meant FEMA reimbursement, new flood control projects, and hundreds of millions of dollars in community block grants.   

In the aftermath of Katrina, the federal government gave New Orleans a $411 million pot of CDBG disaster money. Designed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as “flexible grants to help cities, counties, and states recover from Presidentially declared disasters, especially in low-income areas,” such money comes with relatively few restrictions beyond guidelines that projects must “principally” benefit areas or groups wherein a majority of people live in households with low-to-moderate incomes. In New Orleans, with a median income of $37,079, that means funded projects must principally benefit households with an annual income between $18,500 and $42,000.

When Ray Nagin told us about "this economic pie that's getting ready to explode" in New Orleans, he knew the federal stimulus was coming.  We can have a separate discussion about whether the CDBG money really did "principally benefit" people with low-to-moderate incomes. (It didn't. But, again, that's another post.)  But we can say that it did stimulate the economic activity we typically associate with Post-K "recovery."  If the political will isn't there to, pardon the image, make it rain again, none of that other stuff is going to happen this time.

Here is a letter Governor Edwards submitted to the President today. In it he asks for, among other things, these items:

A reduction in the state's cost share for damages from 25% to 10%

$125 million for the Army Corps of Engineers in order to complete the Comite River diversion

Expedited emergency relief highway funding

A waiver of the state's $100 million annual obligation to pay for federal hurricane protection systems. (A big deal of granted)

And, finally, an as-yet unspecified amount in CDBG-DR funds.  This one is the real key and the one that will have the hardest time fighting its way through Congress. But if we want to make the pie explode again, that's how it will happen.