People Get Ready

A short explanation for why the recovery is going so poorly half-way through the worst mayor ever’s second term:

1) The transparent mayor and his staff are never around. Another member of Nagin’s administration was curiously out of town and therefore unavailable to answer questions for a Monday WWL TV news story on crime cameras. Given the smokescreen put up by another member of Nagin’s staff the last time WWL News sought an interview, this getting to be a pattern.

2) Despite the fact that Nagin said he needed to be re-elected in 2006 in order to finish his “plan” for recovery, no one in the transparent mayor’s administration is able to articulate what that vision for recovery actually is, and then follow through. Maybe that’s because Nagin himself can’t articulate a vision. That could explain why Nagin couldn’t elaborate upon a single promise made by Barack Obama to the New Orleans recovery. Coastal restoration? Stronger levees? Affordable housing? Hospitals and health care? Education? Crime? Iraq? Energy policy? None of that. No — there’s “just something about” Obama.

Q: “What did Senator Obama say about the recovery that was different than Senator Clinton that won you over about Senator Obama?”

A: His particular talent for supporting candidates for political office who then lose elections. Why he does so might be explained by his faulty gut instincts than intelligent consideration of issues. In announcing his support for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, Nagin said “You know I respect Senator Clinton — ahh — she’s been a good friend — ahh — it was just something about — ahh — how the Senator Obama talked about the recover (sic), and he reminded me of the many trips he had taken to New Orleans, and how New Orleans has some simularities (sic) to Chicago so — ahh — it was — he won me over with that, and just with the general vision of change, and leadership, and taking the country in another direction.”

Given the Nagin curse of choosing losing candidates for political office, Obama might be concerned about what Nagin’s endorsement means in the long run.

Here’s a news flash: Ray Nagin said in that WWL radio interview that he’s never been a registered Republican. He’s been a life-long Democrat. That would be contradicted by numerous stories that Nagin switched parties to run as a Democrat for mayor in 2002, and is contradicted by his many campaign contributions and endorsements to Republican candidates. Given Nagin’s lies about his voting history, maybe someone ought to check Nagin’s voter registration history as well.

Take a ride in the wayback machine via Myanmar to south Louisiana on August 29, 2005 in these Associated Press stories published in the International Herald Tribune.

Cyclone Nargis had all the makings of a perfect storm
The Associated Press
Published: May 8, 2008

“When we saw the (storm) track, I said, ‘Uh oh, this is not going to be good,” said Mark Lander, a meteorology professor at the University of Guam. “It would create a big storm surge. It was like Katrina going into New Orleans.”

Forecasters began tracking the cyclone April 28 as it first headed toward India. As projected, it took a sharp turn eastward, but didn’t follow the typical cyclone track in that area leading to Bangladesh or Myanmar’s mountainous northwest.

Survivors of Myanmar cyclone saw neighbors dead in flood waters of stricken delta
The Associated Press
Published: May 8, 2008

LABUTTA, Myanmar: Some survivors arrived half-naked, others wore clothes they scavenged from the dead. …

The survivors made the journey in rickety wooden boats with makeshift sails fashioned out of blankets, dodging the bloated corpses of … dead neighbors floating in the murky waters.

It was a journey from horror to misery for most, who described desperate hours clinging to trees and debris, followed by days of waiting for aid to arrive, in video shot for The Associated Press by a Myanmar journalist.

Before cyclone hit, Burmese delta was stripped of defenses
By Michael Casey The Associated Press
Published: May 9, 2008

BANGKOK: When Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, it pushed a wall of water through the Irrawaddy Delta, a low-lying, densely populated area that had been stripped of its protective trees.

The delta had lost most of its mangrove forests along the coast to shrimp farms and rice paddies over the past decade. That removed what scientists say is one of nature’s best defenses against violent storms. …

When the storm made landfall early Saturday at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River, its battering winds pushed a wall of water twice as high as a human about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, inland.

Jeff NcNeely, chief scientist for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the cyclone’s devastation was “an expensive lesson, but it has been one taught repeatedly.”

“If you look at the path of the one that hit Myanmar, it hit exactly where it was going to do the most damage, and it’s doing the most damage because much of the protective vegetation was cleared,” he said. “You just wonder why governments don’t get on this.”

Political contributions to Ray Nagin under the name “Cummings” from addresses at 416 Gravier and 441 Gravier Street total $47,500 between January 2001 and May 2006 according to the Louisiana Ethics LEADERS database.

Pay to play:

The Louisiana Board of Ethics said Thursday that Sean Cummings, a private developer who also leads a city agency called the New Orleans Building Corp., can continue to steer two public developments because he does not have a “substantial” financial interest in the projects.

Cummings owns more than a dozen properties in New Orleans, many of them near a 4.5-mile stretch of the Mississippi River he has pushed to redevelop as chief executive of the building corporation.

The Ethics Board voted unanimously Thursday to allow Cummings to continue to lead the development projects. However, the board asked Cummings to return for a review if his agency altered plans for redeveloping the riverfront or if NOBC’s planned conversion of the World Trade Center into a hotel, apartments and cultural museum will affect his properties. Cummings must also return to the board if he amasses other real estate near the riverfront or the downtown high-rise.

Gary Elkins, one of Cummings’ personal real estate attorneys and a contractual attorney for NOBC, defended Cummings’ private development work, saying his client would not receive a “unique benefit” above other landowners near the riverfront.

“There’s nothing about the development of any of my properties that is contingent in my mind on this plan” to redevelop the riverfront, Cummings told the board.

The board’s ruling comes after three years of debate about whether Cummings’ commercial real estate activities conflict with his position on the NOBC, which Mayor Ray Nagin tapped him to lead in 2003. The Ethics Board first took a look at Cummings in 2005, after the City Planning Commission raised a question about properties he owns on Frenchmen Street, in the Warehouse District and in the 2900 and 3000 blocks of Chartres Street.

So $47,500 is the price of doing business with Ray Nagin.

If only we all had that kind of dough to spread around so we too could enjoy the riches of no “unique benefit” from our real estate portfolios. That logic is like saying there are no privileges to royalty above what other kings enjoy.

When you make sour dough bread, you have to use a starter batch of soured dough. Sean Cummings appears to have mastered the recipe. He should be required to decide in which role he would rather serve: commercial developer, or public servant.

Just two of Cummings’ Bywater properties have a combined assessment value of at least $1,965,500, according to the city property database, amounting to an increase in value of $1,394,500 over the purchase price — not inclusive of future increases in value owing to riverfront development.

Owner CUMMINGS SEAN B
Property Description SQ 20 LOTS 14/16 269/289X124 /131 CHARTRES/MONTEGUT C/BLOCK-GULF CYCLE SALES, 2900 CHARTRES ST
Owned Addr. N/A
Mail Addr. ETAL, NEW ORLEANS LA 70130
Administrative Boundary
Municipal District 3
Historic District Bywater
Council District C
Planning District Planning District 7
Police District 5
Flood and Neighborhood Information
Flood Event 100-500 YR FLOOD EVENT
Flood Elevation 0 (AT SEA LEVEL)
Flood Zone B
Neighborhood BYWATER
Ward 9
Assessment Information
Tax Bill 39W100501
Square N/A
Lot 14/16
Land Value 486300
Improvement Value 512170
Sale Information
Sale Date 3/11/1993
Sale Price $150,000.00
Sale History
Sale Date Sale Price
1993-03-11 00:00:00 $150,000.00
1977-06-14 00:00:00 $425,000.00
1991-06-25 00:00:00 $509,243.00
1984-09-28 00:00:00 $745,000.00
1984-09-28 00:00:00 $0.00
1974-04-01 00:00:00 $250,000.00

Owner CUMMINGS SEAN B
Property Description SQ 21 LOT CHARTRES 535 X 165/230 1/STORY FRAME OFFICE GENERAL DRAYAGE SERVICE CO
Owned Addr. N/A
Mail Addr. JOHN J CUMMINGS 3RD, NEW ORLEANS LA 70130
Administrative Boundary
Municipal District 3
Historic District Bywater
Council District C
Planning District Planning District 7
Police District 5
Flood and Neighborhood Information
Flood Event 100-500 YR FLOOD EVENT
Flood Elevation 0 (AT SEA LEVEL)
Flood Zone B
Neighborhood BYWATER
Ward 9
Assessment Information
Tax Bill 39W100601
Square N/A
Lot CHART
Land Value 1479200
Improvement Value 0
Sale Information
Sale Date 7/19/1994
Sale Price $421,000.00
Sale History
Sale Date Sale Price
1994-07-19 00:00:00 $421,000.00

Questions remaining:

1. What personal interest might members of the Louisiana Ethics Board have in NOBC dealings, or in Sean Cummings real estate investments?
2. What interest might Council Member Arnie Fielkow have? The Louisiana ethics web site doesn’t list Fielkow in any of its records. Perhaps he’d like to volunteer that information, since he said, “it would have been a big loss” if the board asked Cummings to step down.
3. What’s that reformer Bobby Jindal doing to update records in the Louisiana campaign contributions database, which appear to be two years old?
4. What does Inspector General Robert Cerasoli have to say about all of this?

Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price

Just kidding. No one holds a candle to the transparent mayor.

$100 for a pair of tickets: completely absurd. So many chairs everywhere that people who were willing to stand (or, God forbid, dance) were being turned away from tents. Wealthy “Big Chief” ticket holders sat comfortably in reserved sections while mothers with babies in arm wandered in circles looking for a place to sit. The concern about not being able to get back to a stage had a stifling effect on the willingness to wander to sample music at other stages, to browse art tents, or buy food. Scorching heat, but patrons forbidden to bring water into the festival grounds were required to buy water for $2 a bottle. Given the price of tickets, I only went to Jazz Fest once this year, which means that I was even more restricted in the ability to wander aimlessly to take advantage of the full experience. That experience was full of more big names in the music business — some of whom are really caricatures of jazz and heritage (if they have anything at all in kind with jazz and heritage music) — with almost no international performers which have always been the source of some of the most interesting experiences. The higher the price of tickets goes, the more that Quint Davis will have to attract big names to attract big crowds to pay performers, and the more that locals will be excluded from the ability to celebrate their own culture — a vicious circle. The demographic mix has become distinctly older and whiter. An unscientific survey generally found that 98 percent of people distributed throughout the festival grounds were white, and more than half of those over 50. The geographic center of Fest-goers this year was probably closer to Kansas than New Orleans. Most of the people of color in the blues tent where I saw Snooks Eaglin and Keb Mo were either displayed in photos, were on stage, were selling peanuts, or were telling geriatric white people that they couldn’t block the aisles between the cramped rows of tiny chairs with their own folding chairs. Later, I discovered that most of them were congregated at Congo Square, but there were few whites there.

Given the segregated, stratified demographic created by Quint Davis & company at the 2008 Jazz & Heritage Festival, is Davis more exploiting the culture which Jazz Fest is all about, than celebrating with those who are the living guardians of that culture?

The We Can ad was posted, ironically or not, in an article last week in which John McCain and Hillary Clinton declared their support for a gas tax holiday.

Leadership is the courage to tell people something they don’t want to hear, and the intelligence to explain to them why it’s good for them.

The We Can campaign is brilliant as an exercise in leadership. In a not-so-funny way, it’s an ad campaign being directed by the guy who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, and by rights, who should have been the president over the last seven wasted years.

Segue way into the Charlie Rose interview with Fareed Zakaria on May 1st.

Here are some choice thoughts by Zakaria on The Post-American World:

The worst president ever’s policy toward elections in the Middle East before creating a culture of tolerance represents “the sacrifice of liberty on the altar of democracy.”

On John Negroponte’s view that the United States is well-respected around the world: “I think part of it is true, and I think part of it is the sad commentary of an American diplomat who has spent too much time inside a kind of imperial bubble, where, of course, people tell him that he’s incredibly important because they want things from him. … There are other things going on, and he needs to get out a little.”

“If you don’t make peace with Hamas, who are you going to make peace with?”

Telling Charlie Rose to shut up until he finishes answering a question by saying, “back to that later.”

“The single-most important thing we should be saying to ourselves is, how do we integrate the newly-rising great powers so that they have a stake in this world order, and don’t want to overturn it. Everything should follow from that. … We haven’t done enough on Russia. We haven’t done enough on China. .. We are approaching this entirely episodically — tactically.”

“We all agree that this is a pivotal election, that the United States is at a pivotal moment. You’re watching the rise of a post-American world, and you ask yourself, what are we discussing? We’ve been discussing Mr. Ayers. We’re discussing whether Hillary fifteen years ago did a corkscrew landing on a Bosnian airfield. We don’t know whether McCain uses his wife’s plane. Who cares? What does this have to do with the challenges facing the United States?”

“What Kissinger and Schultz and Sam Nunn have realized is that you’re not going to get anti-proliferation efforts in the rest of the world legitimized if we continue to have 9000 nuclear weapons.”

On Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that the next president could change the opinion the world has of the United States by declaring in an inaugural speech that the United States would take a leadership role in ending torture, promoting human rights, finding a solution to the problem of global warming, and creating peace between Israel and the Palestinians: “If we’re really going to do this stuff, and really join in the world — really, if you will, ‘adopt the metric system’, as a metaphor. It’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be a lot of sacrifice. There’s going to be a lot of truth-telling to Americans. Look at the game we’re playing with gas taxes right now. Where is that sense of really moving this country beyond this kind of narrow interest. We’re pandering to people’s shortest-term concerns. … Can we understand that in a world in which everyone else is rising, there is enormous economic challenge. There are huge competitive pressures. And it’s a world that is much more unruly and uppity. And if we’re going to try and lead that world, it’s a whole different way of ruling.”

“If we do this right, and if we allow these countries to be integrated, this is a huge win-win for the world, and for us, because, Charlie, it means two-and-a half billion more people in the world will be producing, consuming, thinking, dreaming, inventing, coming up with solutions to all these problems, having the resources to deal with some of these problems. … So, the stabilizing effect of having other people doing well is so obvious. And just imagine it at a human level. The fact that you have two or three billion people who are finally getting out of abject poverty, and being able to contribute in life in every sense possible. I mean, it would be an amazing world. And the United States would have an extraordinary and central role in it, if we can stop stalling, and get to work.”

“We’ve created a country where people from all over the world come and work together and do well. And you ask, why is it that we haven’t had al Qaida attacks? Well, the big reason, I would argue, in this country, is we have a Muslim population in this country that is largely assimilated — that is buying into the American dream. You don’t have those local bases of support that you have in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or even in London or Madrid. But here’s the danger. We’re losing sight of that. So, just as the rest of the world is opening up, we’re closing down. We’re saying trade is bad, immigration is bad, innovation is bad. You know — let’s somehow protect the old industries. We’re not about protecting the old. We’re about inventing the new.”

Steve Sca-sleaze will say anything to do what’s good for Steve Scalise, even if it’s bad for Louisiana.

In the latest instance, Liberty and Justice for All caught Sca-sleaze lying on WWL TV about Bobby Jindal’s role in passage of the Outer Continental Shelf oil royalty revenue-sharing bill which was passed by Congress:

Governor Jindal was able to pass a bill a year and a half ago to finally let us start letting us get OCS revenue.

As a matter of fact, both (then) Congressman Bobby Jindal and Senator David Vitter demonstrated extreme partisanship on behalf of the Republican party rather than doing the right thing, which was to support the more realistic bill Senator Mary Landrieu was trying to get passed. Thank goodness for Mary Landrieu. If we’d have waited for Jindal’s promise that his bill had a 90 percent chance of passage, he’d have gone down in history as another Leander Perez who screwed Louisiana instead of becoming a governor some pundits think might be a presidential candidate’s running mate.

This isn’t about right or left, Republican or Democrat. It’s about good policy. Mary Landrieu worked hard to get a bill which actually passed, no thanks to Bobby Jindal.

For verification of sleaze Scalise’s partisan, bald-faced lie, read a City Business editorial admonishing Jindal and Vitter, which oyster quoted, Ashley’s praise (Sinn Fein) for Mary Landrieu after she got The New York Times to write an editorial in favor of OCS revenue sharing for Louisiana, and an October 2006 PGR post characterizing Jindal’s behavior as typical of the arrogance of power by Republicans who vilify opponents rather than provide Americans with good public policy.

When voting for who to represent Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District, don’t vote for the sleaze Steve Scalise.

We need Reed.

Mercifully, we have an expert family-values senator experienced in such matters to help guide us in such difficult questions.

The Corps of Engineers says that the rising Mississippi River has crested, and it is now beginning the weeks-long process of closing the Bonne Carre Spillway.

The effluent from 41 percent of the contiguous United States land area is being discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, and, since the opening of the Bonne Carre Spillway, into Lake Pontchartrain. Lost sediment which could be used to restore Louisiana’s dying wetlands and disappearing coastline is falling off the continental shelf. The plumes are clearly visible from space in these MODIS satellite images.

Here’s a short video (wmv) I shot at the Bonne Carre Spillway on April 20th.

119,000 cubic feet of water per second.

160 bays stretch across 7000 feet of the river just north of Norco.

A constant flow of tourists parked on the levee to see the Spillway.

The river has inundated trees as it moves up the levee embankments. In the distance (and above), refineries abundant throughout the area continue to provide the basic ingredients essential to the United States economy.

Be sure to see Maitri’s great aerial photo of the Bonne Carre Spillway in her Day 973 post.

In gratitude to the people of Qatar, who generously donated $100 million to help New Orleans rebuild, I’m irresistibly drawn to a particular theme song:

Did anyone else notice the Times-Picayune gaffe in its headline, “N.O. thanks Qatari ruler for support after storm”?