Arnsparger nostalgia

Sort of fitting that Bill Arnsparger's passing should come so soon after Ken Stabler's.  Each of them is more well known abroad for accomplishments outside of Louisiana. But each is also remembered locally for having enjoyed a brief last hurrah of sorts here.

Arnsparger's was slightly more glorious than Stabler's.

He arrived at LSU with a coaching mantra: “We’re shooting for the moon. If we miss, we’ll still be among the stars.”

It took just one season under Arnsparger for the Tigers to get there. They had been an up-and-down group under Stovall, who was National Coach of the Year in 1982 but slipped to 4-7 the following year.

The no-nonsense Arnsparger opened his LSU career with an impressive showing, a 21-21 tie against SEC favorite Florida. Had the 8-3-1 Tigers won that game, they would have switched places at season’s end with the champion Gators in the conference standings.

One of the reasons for the transformation was physical condition. Stovall’s last team was nicknamed the “Lunch Bunch” for its bulk.

“The first time we got together, I just thought many of (the players) looked too fat, and that was before the tests we did,” Arnsparger said.

So he set demanding body-fat ratios — 15 percent for lineman, 10 percent for backs and tight ends, 6 percent to 8 percent for skill positions — and almost every player met the requirements by the start of preseason camp.

“I cut out late-night snacks, rice and white bread,’’ said offensive tackle Lance Smith, who dropped 40 pounds to end up at 265.

A year later, the 1985 Tigers, who went 9-2-1, picked up the nickname “The Lean Machine.’’

LSU went 9-3 in 1986 and won the SEC for the first time since 1970.

Arnsparger’s record then was 26-8-3 — at the time the best of any third-year coach in Tigers history. He had coached the Tigers to victories over the best of the best in college football: Southern California, Alabama, Notre Dame and Florida.

You can relive some of those moments via YouTube.  Here's a link to the upset win over Alabama in 1986.  But if you don't feel like watching a whole game, try this reel of highlights from the Notre Dame game from that year, including a dramatic fourth quarter goal line stand. So many years later, I still think of this as THE goal line stand.


 

Your pragmatic establisment Democrats

Hillary in New Hamshire tells climate protesters to STFU because she is a grown-up and they are not.

Mitch in Algiers tells residents worried about public green space becoming high rise condos to STFU because he is a grown-up and they are not.

Someday maybe we'll be grown-ups too. Probably not, though.

The rent and the too damn high being of the rent

We're number two.

In New Orleans, for instance, 35 percent of renters dedicate more than half of their pay to housing, the second highest share for the cities studied. Many people working in tourism and hospitality, a major industry for the area, might have low-paying jobs that make it harder for them to afford the median rent bill of $900, Boyd says.

Last week we talked a little bit about the fallacious attempt by high-end developers to blame this on "NIMBYism."   As in, the rent is too high because you won't let us build more high rent housing.  This is a preposterous lie for numerous reasons. At its heart, though, is an implication that once a piece of land becomes profitable for an investor, then the poor people living on it are obligated to move out of the way. You could call it a sort of eminent domain of capitalism.

But it's also an eminent domain of government working hand in hand with developers. This is where Dambala picks up with the first in what he's calling a "Neighborhood Journey" exploration of New Orleans neighborhoods threatened by gentrification. In this case he's talking about the Algiers waterfront where Mitch Landrieu and Nadine Ramsey seem to believe a "hot real estate market" absolutely dictates the conversion of common green space into high rise condos.

What was really fascinating, in respect to  the city budget meeting, was the Mayor's response to the batture zoning issue.

Landrieu informed the Algiers residents that New Orleans is the hottest real estate market in the country and that waterfront property in every city is considered prime real estate.  As for height restrictions he says you can either have long, skinny buildings along the river where "no one can see anything" or you can have tall buildings (I suppose suggesting that these tall, skinny building are somehow less of a hindrance to viewing the river).

He then went on to break the bad news to the Pointers (Algiers) about "what's not going to happen".  The residents of the Point were not going to be able to say "I gots mine and nobody else can have theirs"...essentially confirming their worst fears about what probably "is going to happen" regarding development plans for the batture.

Interesting he would frame it that way.  Right now the batture is green space that everyone can share. The Mayor's logic seems to be that the residents of Algiers Point are being selfish for wanting to keep sharing it that way.

Public park = "I gots mine nobody else can have theirs." So make way for tall buildings full of nice things for rich people.  They gots to have theirs and there's nothing you can do about it.

Turns out dumping oil all over the coastline wasn't the best way to save it

Go figure.

Hopes that the Deepwater Horizon would be a larger economic boon to the Master Plan always rested on BP being held to maximum penalties for fines under the Clean Water Act and restitution required under the Natural Resources Damage Assessment. Some of those estimates ranged as high as $22 billion for Louisiana alone.

For example, BP faced a maximum fine of $13.4 billion for Clean Water Act violations based on the judge’s rulings on the amount of oil spilled and that “gross negligence” on the part of the company led to the accident.

However, the settlement allows BP to pay only $5.5 billion for the Clean Water Act fines.

The RESTORE Act, championed by Louisiana’s congressional delegation, will split 80 percent of that, or $4.4 billion, between the five Gulf states. Louisiana’s share comes to about $800 million.

The state always figured to do better under for the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, and it does.

That process measures how much damage the oil did to fish, wildlife and wetlands, and presents the bill to the polluter.  Some estimates put Louisiana’s possible take from a complete damage assessment — which was underway when the settlement was reached — as high as $12 billion. But the oil giant stopped that process by agreeing to pay $7.3 billion to all five states and the federal government.

Since most of the oil landed on Louisiana’s coast, it will receive 76.8 percent of that total, $5 billion.

Now the reality of the situation is, had BP been pressed for the maximum penalties, it's unlikely they would have ever paid anything close to what they'd been assessed.  The precedent there is Exxon; fined $5 billion for the Valdez spill, they were able to fight that back down to $500 million over a 20 year appeals war of attrition.  

So while the BP settlement is far less than the law technically entitles us to, it's also far more than we could have reasonably expected and far sooner. Still, in all, it's far far less than Louisiana will need to get going with coastal restoration efforts. So the idea that despoiling the wetlands with petroleum represented any "last best hope" to save them is every bit as absurd a proposition as it sounds.


Hey, also, the Rising Tide X schedule is starting to roll out this week.  The future of the Louisiana coast.. and by implication the city of New Orleans.. will again be a heavy topic there. Take a look at the program here.  

The Shrinking Metairie Carnival

The new Jefferson Parish parade permitting rules do seem kind of ridiculous.

In a statement issued Wednesday (July 15), the deadline to apply for a permit, Zeus' captain apologized to Jefferson residents for not submitting the paperwork and not delivering a parade next year. "The Krewe of Zeus regrets to inform the citizens of Jefferson Parish that a tradition in Metairie which has lasted longer than most of its current citizens' lifetimes will not continue in 2016," the statement says.

"We all have faith that time, as it is inclined to do, will heal all wounds, even those besetting Jefferson Parish Carnival," the statement says, "To that end, the Men of Zeus remain hopeful that one day — or more accurately, night — they will once again parade in Metairie under the Zeus banner."

The clash between Carnival regulators and the krewe's leadership erupted in 2014 when parish officials found too few members in one of Zeus' marching bands -- 30 musicians are required -- and too few floats. Zeus leaders appealed the citations and gained some relief, as a judge agreed the krewe had a sufficient number of floats under what was a described as a vaguely written rule. However, the krewe was still found to have violated the band rule, and as a result it was suspended it from parading in Jefferson in 2015.

And yet every year we hear about how the Uptown route in Orleans Parish is overcrowded.  One strategy for keeping it from getting that way would be to encourage more events of varying sizes spread out over different neighborhoods throughout the city and region. Recent successful models might include non-standard parades like tit-Rex and Chewbacchus which have thrived in New Orleans.  Next year, the Krewe of Loup Garou is planning a small-scale parade through the Irish Channel. 

Granted those events happen in the more heavily touristed parts of Orleans Parish but there are a million ways to celebrate Carnival season. Not everything needs to be Endymion. Maybe Jefferson could do with a little more flexibility.  

Go with the flow

Make way for nice things for rich people. It's just the natural order of things.

The initial investment in Freret Street — the first new restaurants, the first abandoned homes restored for new families — was praised. But that success, forged largely by business owners with roots in the neighborhood, attracted increasing attention from others and now has a different feel.

"It's not just Freret Street that's changed a lot — it's five or six blocks on either side," Marvin said. "All that's changed. A lot of older black people who owned houses, they didn't come back. People just kept going in there and flipping [those houses]. It's not a bad thing, but older people just can't afford the property taxes anymore."

Campanella said he has observed that some housing prices appear to be reaching a plateau and increasing at a more natural, gradual rate. The pattern observed in areas like Freret, the Carrollton riverbend, Marigny and Bywater and Mid-City now is spreading to nearby neighborhoods, suggesting a future city that is wealthier at its core and poorer at its edges.

"I expect this to continue, although not necessarily at a constant rate," Campanella said. "Spatially, I predict it will spread into neighborhoods that are perceived to be historic, interesting, walkable, or otherwise culturally and structurally desireable, and adjacent to areas already seeing reinvestment, or that had never suffered divestment in the first place.

"On the urban and suburban periphery — that is, in New Orleans East, St. Bernard Parish, nearly all of the West Bank and most of East [Jefferson Parish] — housing remains relatively affordable if not flat-out cheap, compared to nationwide standards. This being the case, we should expect to see more of the trend that has been going on for a number of years: working-class and lower- to middle-class families shifting outwardly in a centrifugal pattern, while wealthier households, particularly young professionals and empty-nesters, moving inwardly in a centripedal shift."

You have to love these anesthetized, hands to the air explanations. Welp, nothing to be done. Better to go with the flow. Because everyone knows that people and their lives are just grains of alluvium dispersed by the water.  It's just inertia or gravity or whatever. No one ever thinks about guiding these events in any way.

Giving out rent vouchers as an alternative to building public housing projects has made a modest dent in the problem of densely concentrated poverty in the New Orleans metropolitan area, according to a new Data Center report.

But the report’s authors, Stacy Seicshnaydre, of Tulane University Law School, and Ryan Albright, a doctoral fellow in urban studies at Tulane, point out that voucher recipients here are still far less likely to live in low-poverty neighborhoods than their peers elsewhere in the country.

They also found that black voucher recipients are less likely to live in low-poverty areas in New Orleans than their white counterparts.

The group recommends various steps to help low-income renters escape high-poverty neighborhoods, such as counseling, initiatives to combat racial discrimination by landlords and tax credits to expand the supply of affordable housing.

“The stakes are high for the low-income children in our region,” the report concludes. “The housing voucher program must be used to its fullest potential — assisting the next generation of New Orleans children to overcome the life-altering effects of poverty.”

Okay well, sure, we did put some effort into escaping people from high-poverty neighborhoods.  That the very buildings we helped them "escape" from are now being advertised as "Historic Buildings with Front Porches" is just a coincidence.



Funny thing about "escaping high-poverty neighborhoods," though.  It's different from actually escaping poverty.  

For all the destruction and lives lost or permanently altered, there's a broad consensus that the city works better and offers greater opportunity than it did before the storm. Local governance is more responsive and seems to be less corrupt.

Yet many opportunities have been squandered. “We're proclaimed a 'new' New Orleans,” says Karen Gadbois, of the investigative-reporting website The Lens. Yet, she adds, “40 percent of children here live in poverty,” and high crime rates persist.

That tends to follow people around... even as they "shift outwardly in a centrifugal pattern" as Camapnella puts it. What do we do when it re-concentrates?

Today, federally issued housing vouchers are the primary tool that low-wage residents use to pay for homes. In theory, vouchers can be used to move into any unit on the private market. However, Seicshnaydre’s and Albright’s analysis of voucher use shows that they have not afforded poor New Orleanians better housing choices. A key section of their report reads:

An examination of voucher households reported by HUD in 2010 reveals that 25 percent of the vouchers were used in 5 percent of the census tracts (4,279 total vouchers used in nine tracts). In each of these nine tracts, more than 300 vouchers were used, which is triple the amount that would be present if vouchers were evenly distributed across all tracts. The number of vouchers appearing in these tracts ranged from 318 to 843. Seven of the nine census tracts are located in New Orleans East; six of the nine tracts in this group are in high-poverty areas

The map below shows that the nine high-poverty/high-voucher household census tracts are in just two areas of the city.

Here's the map produced by that Atlantic article.  You can see a larger version in the original report at the Data Center site.

Guess it's pretty much okay for high-poverty neighborhoods to sit out there in the East and in Algiers. Nobody needs to "escape" from there. Not until someone decides that's where we should put more nice things for rich people, anyway. Don't expect that to happen any time soon.

All of Uptown is closed for summer

The SELA-RTA-ENTERGY-S&WB Demilitarized Zone is restricted access only.  Also, it is expanding.

Navigating Uptown traffic has become somewhat of a sport in recent months. Drivers can expect more detours starting Monday (July 13) as Entergy New Orleans moves forward with a $30 million construction project in the area.

Entergy crews will be upgrading transmission lines in the Audubon Park, upper Magazine Street and upper Annunciation Street areas over the next three months. The utility says the upgrades are necessary to deliver more electricity to the city and improve reliability.

Do not attempt to enter or traverse the area unless absolutely necessary. In fact, you should probably just stay inside where it's air-conditioned anyway. Really, it's okay to do that. 

QOTD

This is actually from yesterday but I'm a little behind. Anyway, enjoy:

July 13, 2015 

 

Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s upcoming announcement to run for President of the United States:

Scott Walker is a national disgrace.

Does Ron Forman still make six figures?

Can't imagine he's come back down off of that $700,000 in the past year. 

Are Audubon's attractions and service free and open to the taxpayers who provide Ron Forman's six figure salary?  No?

Well guess what. 

Sophisticating up the corruption

About eight years ago, the city of New Orleans hired Robert Cerasoli as its first Inspector General.  It was one of the many highlights of the heady post-Katrina Era of Ethics.  Reform-minded crusaders had "corruption" on the run.  People were still reading the headlines about Jim Letten rather than the comments. Ed Blakely was the butt-kicking savior we'd all been waiting for. Other folks were gonna clean up the city by consolidating the assessor's office and privatizing the school board. Bobby Jindal was a Dragonslaying Knight in Shining Armor.  It was pretty funny... or maybe you had to be there.

One punch line that really grabbed me from that time was Cerasoli's observation that corruption in New Orleans was different from other cities in that it was not as "sophisticated."

Cerasoli said he is shocked the city has nothing in place to prevent corruption in awarding city contracts. The inspector general’s role is to prevent and detect corrupt and unethical practices in city government, Cerasoli said.

“It’s real simple. There should never be one person who decides who should get a contract,” Cerasoli said. “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.”

I made a lot of fun out of that. In retrospect it probably wasn't fair to Cerasoli to lump him in with the phony reformers who defined his moment.  He wasn't anywhere as bad as the rest of the class.  Even so, he'd be happy to know we did manage to sophisticate up the corruption in New Orleans.

D’Juan Hernandez, a New Orleans attorney and businessman, spent less than a year as head of a struggling local charter school called Milestone Academy.

But he managed at least one significant accomplishment before resigning last month: racking up $13,000 worth of expenses on a school credit card, including $4,000 in payments to Tulane University, which his daughter attends, and $500 for plane tickets to Florida, where his family vacationed.

On the night of the Zulu Ball — his daughter was a maid in Zulu’s court — he racked up a $687 bill at Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club on St. Claude Avenue. Other big-ticket items included a $224 bill at the Smith & Wollensky restaurant in Miami Beach, Florida, and hundreds of dollars on upgrades to first-class flights.

Tessa Jackson, president of the nonprofit board that governs Milestone, says Hernandez obtained an American Express card in the school’s name without getting approval from the board.

Well, ok, so just charging a bunch of personal stuff on the school credit card is probably still the stupid kind of corruption. But it's a charter school so that at least makes it reformed stupid corruption which is sort of in the ballpark.  

But we really have figured out how to do the fancy kind too.  What do you think all these entrepreneurs are here for in the first place?

Griftopia

Seems legit

Either St. Roch Market is a farmers market with an illegal liquor license, or St. Roch Market is a restaurant paid for with federal recovery dollars illicitly allocated by the City of New Orleans. Bayou Secret collects from eleven businesses comes to a total of $49,500. The monthly collective rent of eleven vendors, paying for individual stalls and the use of a collective kitchen, is at least 14 times greater than the rent Bayou Secret pays to the City of New Orleans  each month for the entire building.

Regardless of sales, $4,500 is the minimum monthly rent for vendors. This figure can be even higher for vendors doing well, with some rents exceeding $10,000. A centralized point  of sale system, powered through the software system Square, allows Bayou Secret to closely monitor all individual  vendor sales and garner varying percentages of gross sales. Bayou Secret places higher percentages on lower earning vendors. Higher earning  vendors pay smaller percentages, although they still pay more in rent than  vendors earning less. The more a vendor  makes, the more Bayou Secret collects. No ceiling is placed on this collection.

A single vendor, paying the minimum rent and a single full-time employee at the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour), would need to spend $5,600 each month to cover these basic operating expenses. This figure doesn’t factor in the staffing issues related to the market being open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday with an additional hour on Thursday through Saturday, totalling 96 hours per week. The above figure of basic expenses also doesn’t include the cost of product or any other costs associated with the running of individual businesses. Considering the exorbitant overhead,  along with the lengthy business hours, it is uncertain how this could be a tenable arrangement for vendors. Nonetheless, Bayou Secret’s uncapped earnings facilitated through all sales occurring via a centralized system  ensure income for St. Roch Market’s management. 

The St. Roch Market was renovated and "put back into commerce" using federal community block grants. The building is owned by the city of New Orleans.  The management team has figured out an efficient way to squeeze the juice out of that melon, though. How entrepreneurial.

In the tweeter tube

If you use Twitter, there's a robot in there you can follow who just tweets when this blog updates. You don't have to. But if it seems like something that fits your lifestyle, just know that it's an option.

The year of the shitty governor

You may be aware Governor Bobby Jindal is running for President.  This is a matter of some ridicule for most people. And that's only appropriate, of course. Bobby's made a wreck of the state budget, made creationism part of the school curriculum, privatized and/or shut down state hospitals, permitted cronies to loot the state's Medicaid allocation,  done political favors for oil companies, shat all over the notion of equality under the law, other things.

A major knock on Bobby has to do with the inconvenient fact that he is governor of a state where everybody hates him. This is considered a weakness in the Republican Presidential primary. But is it? Just because a product may have grown stale in one market doesn't mean it isn't ripe for a re-launch elsewhere.  We are, after all, living in an age of branding genius.

Besides everybody hating on Bobby is a very novel fad, even among the hippest of local "creatives." Witness the tens of people who showed up in Kenner to "protest" Jindal's kickoff speech last month. 

Meanwhile, on the Lake Pontchartrain levee, several dozen protesters gathered with their own message — "Neaux Bobby." They lampooned Jindal as MAD magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman and wore stickers that urged people to "Pray the BJ Away." Members of the Krewe du Vieux's Krewe of SPANK had other amusing "BJ" stickers. Others carried signs critical of his rejection of federal funds under the Affordable Care Act, and chastised him for his positions on solar energy and the film industry. A Facebook group set up to protest the announcement had nearly 3,700 respondents, but there were fewer than 100 protesters on the levee. They chanted "You are the one percent!" and "Jindal gives Christianity a bad name!" 

What a hoot!  Hey, how many of those folks do you reckon voted for Bobby in one or more of his runs for governor.  If they're a good sample of the local electorate, odds are a lot of them did... if they bothered to vote at all that is.

Turnout from Orleans Parish was 27% in 2007 when Bobby won with 54% of the statewid vote in the primary. In New Orleans, he finished a very narrow second to another Louisiana paragon of virtue.

In 2011, it was even harder to plead ignorance about the type of governor Bobby Jindal might turn out to be. Still, I have a hard time remembering any fun Facebook memes or interesting costumes mobilized in protest.  Also nobody voted that year either.  Jindal rolled to reelection with 66% of the statewide vote (again in the primary where there were multiple contestants).  That's a remarkable result even for a guy everybody doesn't hate.  That year, a whopping  24% of our creative and engaged fellow New Orleanians bothered to show up at the polls; most of them to vote for Bobby.

We don't have solid data on the number of "protesters" at the Jindal event who couldn't be bothered to vote against him when they had the chance. We do have indication that at least one voted for him.

(Photo via Gambit)
Ironically, people who voted for Bobby are unable to spell douchebag. The point of this digression, though, is that there's another gullible douchebag born every minute.  And if you can keep enough of them fooled (or at least apathetically disposed toward you) while driving their state into the ground, surely you can fool more of them in places where nobody gives a shit what happens in Louisiana.

As if to demonstrate this point, Stephanie Grace reports from the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

Jindal’s national aspirations may make his own constituents roll their eyes, but at a Monday night town hall meeting at the aptly named Governor’s Inn near the Maine border, he was greeted with open minds — nearly 100 of them.

That so many people would come out to meet him may seem unlikely back home, but here, where early primary politics are something like a state sport, the crowd’s curiosity appeared genuine. So, too, did Jindal, at least according to the reviews from an admittedly self-selected audience.

Unlike Iowa, where Jindal’s overt religiosity is a better fit, New Hampshire is dominated by moderates and independents who are expected to gravitate to candidates like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. Still, plenty of voters here are looking for a break from the establishment. Voters I spoke to put Jindal on their short lists alongside candidates like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker. They like that he’s a “fresh face” and a governor with executive experience and specific policy proposals, several told me.

If those sound like Jindal campaign talking points, well, they are. So consider the event a reminder that impressions matter, particularly when voters aren’t so familiar with the details of a politician’s record — and haven’t been living with frustration over Jindal’s steep spending cuts, flip-flop on Common Core, embrace of divisive “religious freedom” measures and use of budget gimmicks to create a false impression that taxes are not going up.

And consider it a reminder that, as unpopular as he is at home, as poorly as he can perform on television, as amateurish and nakedly ambitious as his efforts can seem, Jindal’s got a real talent for campaigning.

That last line is great. For a shitty governor whom everybody hates, that Bobby Jindal is a pretty good politician.  Besides, in the GOP primary, 2016 is actually The Year Of The Shitty Governor.

Previously in American history, eight sitting governors have been elected president—compared to just three sitting senators—so there’s a clear historical reason to look to such candidates as credible top contenders.

But when one looks at the GOP governors this cycle, it’s starting to look more and more like a “most hated governors” club, with men like Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal all polling as losers in their home states—the exact opposite of what governors are supposed to bring to the table as White House candidates.

Not only are they viewed negatively by home-state voters, all would lose their home states to Hillary Clinton in the general. Christie trailed her by 23 percent in New Jersey back in May. Walker trailed her by 12 percent in Wisconsin in April. Even in deep red Louisiana, Clinton lead Jindal 44.5 to 42 percent in a recent poll, just as she had throughout most polls in the 2014 election cycle.

The Walker campaign's coming out party is today.  Here's a TPM article about how and why Everybody Hates Scott in Wisconsin.  It may look familiar to you.

Walker plans to announce his presidential candidacy Monday. He had hoped Republican majorities in the Assembly and Senate would enable his party to finish the budget early and allow him to coast into his announcement. But the budget ended up on his desk a week into the new fiscal year marked by the most "no" votes from GOP lawmakers of any of his three state budgets. One Republican, state Rep. Rob Brooks, described the budget as "crap."

The Legislature's Republican-controlled budget committee handed the governor a string of defeats as it spent months revising the two-year budget.

The committee scrapped his plans to grant the University of Wisconsin System autonomy from state oversight and scaled back a $300 million cut the governor wanted to impose on the system by $50 million. The panel also rejected deep funding cuts for K-12 public schools and the popular SeniorCare prescription drug program as well as a proposal to borrow $220 million for a new Milwaukee Bucks arena.

The committee slipped a provision into the budget that Walker's office helped draft that would have dismantled Wisconsin's open records law. Walker and Republican leaders did a quick about-face, stripping the provision in the face of a wave of bipartisan outrage.

Even though we're sitting uncomfortably through the Summer of Trumpmania right now, most oddsmaker pundits place Scott Walker alongside Jeb! and Marco Rubio in their big three GOP favorites. There's plenty of time for lots of things to change, of course. But it's worth noting that a candidate with a similar profile to Bobby Jindal's isn't necessarily disqualified just because everybody in his home state happens to hate him right now.

Is Tom Benson even necessary?

Not a new idea on this blog, but given the massive public investment the state and city make in facilities and subsidies for the Saints and Pelicans, and given that both teams' trademarks are based on the names and symbols.. the public intellectual property.. of the city and region, isn't it a valid argument that the teams really belong more to us than they do to the billionaire who leeches off of the profits for.. some reason?

Just have the state claim the teams. We've already paid for them. Then nobody has to worry about Gayle v Rita anymore.

Here's John Oliver.

Nobody is coming to take your fleur-de-lis

The movement to take down Confederate flags and monuments has nothing to do with "PC culture run amok." It is not an effort to censor or erase history.  Rather, it is an effort to (finally) end a specific 150 year anti-historical propaganda campaign. 

The most successful defenders of the Lost Cause are currently getting everyone caught up talking about statues and place names for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. We've even gone off the rails so far in New Orleans that there's a "serious" discussion over the meaning of the fleur de lis and whether the city should abandon the symbol.

How does it help the so-called Confederacy to talk about bad parts of slave-owners? Well, despite their complex and often troubling places in American history, Washington, Jefferson, & Jackson were all Presidents of the UNITED States of America. There is definitely a need to further scrutinize their mythological histories with their historical realities, but not when the topic of conversation is focused on the so-called CONFEDERATE States of America and the cultural legacy of the Lost Cause in the South. Suddenly, you're rhetorically defending men who tried to destroy the United States through rebellion by referencing men who all used their office to put down rebellions or respond to threats against the United States.

Furthermore, consensus history already includes a lot about George, Tom, & Andy's slave owning, Native American fighting, and general hypocrisies. New Orleans already took names of theirs off local public schools. Most of us learn that the story of George Washington & the Cherry Tree is apocryphal - it is one of our first lessons in the difference between what we tell children at bedtime and what is the real story.

The Lost Cause mythology is a bedtime story treated as real public history. It's time for the sons and daughters of the Confederacy to grow up.  There is no slippery slope here. Anyone making that argument is intentionally trying to muddle the issue.

None of this is to say the mayor is doing some great thing simply by allowing himself to be dragged along by the activists who have seized a moment to make these corrections.  In fact, he's doing exactly what we worried he might do when this process began. He's taking the opportunity to pass out favors to political allies who are themselves questionably deserving figures.

And, of course, the mayor and council are fresh off turning two city streets into monuments for bigots just this year.

What I can't stomach about this current campaign by Landrieu is his blatant hypocrisy.

Just last month Mayor Mitch Landrieu championed the effort to rename two sections of our city's streets after the late Rev. John Raphael Jr. and Pastor Robert C. Blakes.  The effort passed through City Council in a 4 to 3 vote.

I went to City Council chambers and spoke against the move on behalf of NOSHA - New Orleans Secular Human Association.  I cited two main points on why my fellow humanists and I felt the tribute was inappropriate.  The first reason is that in the case of Raphael the street is now using a religious moniker in its official name, "Rev. John Raphael Jr. Way".  This is a clear violation of church and state as taxpayers' dollars have now gone to enshrine a particular religion in our city, in perpetuity.

But the most important issue I raised is that both of these men were hostile towards the LGBT community having made numerous bigoted remarks against gay people.  Raphael went so far as to rant at his own brother's funeral and suggest that his death (he contracted the AIDS virus) was a punishment by God for his evil, gay lifestyle.

How is it that, in June, Landrieu can support renaming city streets after two notorious bigots while lobbying to remove monuments that have been in the city over a century, citing bigotry, one month later?

If there really is any sort of  "slippery slope" it appears to be angled uphill. 

They aren't in Iowa

Does that answer this question?

During his successful 2007 campaign for governor, Jindal spent many Sunday mornings at Protestant churches in north Louisiana, a region where he got fewer votes than expected when he lost the 2003 race for governor.

“He enjoyed it so much, he kept doing it during his first term,” said state Sen. Mike Walsworth, R-West Monroe, a close ally. “We went to so many different churches. Some were traditional, some were charismatic, some were Southern Gospel. It was never political. He talked about his faith.”

Walsworth said he wasn’t sure why Jindal mostly abandoned the church visits during his second term. “I guess you can only go to so many churches in so many towns,” he said.

Sold for 8.4 freezers

Bill Jefferson's house: $758,000.

Nine years and 11 months ago, five FBI agents armed with a search warrant rapped on the door of an Uptown home in the 1900 block of Marengo Street.

So began the downfall of U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, long one of New Orleans’ most towering political figures. Since convicted of corruption charges, he is now a federal inmate in Oakdale, La., about a third of the way through a 13-year prison term.

The six-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot house where Jefferson’s world began to crumble was quietly sold last month for $758,000, a tad more than Jefferson and his wife, Andrea, sought when they first put it on the market in 2011, and a bit less than they asked for when they relisted it early this year.

Granted, it's a really nice house in decent area. In 1978 the Jeffersons paid $106,280 for it according to the assessor's records.  That's $387, 636 and change in today money... which is a lot. But you can see how much the real estate market has heated up.  Adjusting everything for inflation, the Jeffersons have profited over their original investment by about 4 $90,000 freezers.

Moral Hazard

Somebody got "bailed out" via Greece. It wasn't the Greeks, though.

In other words, the Greek deficit was a rounding error, not a reason to panic. Unless, of course, the folks holding Greek debts, those big banks in the eurozone core, had, over the prior decade, grown to twice the size (in terms of assets) of—and with operational leverage ratios (assets divided by liabilities) twice as high as—their “too big to fail” American counterparts, which they had done. In such an over-levered world, if Greece defaulted, those banks would need to sell other similar sovereign assets to cover the losses. But all those sell contracts hitting the market at once would trigger a bank run throughout the bond markets of the eurozone that could wipe out core European banks.

Clearly something had to be done to stop the rot, and that something was the troika program for Greece, which succeeded in stopping the bond market bank run—keeping the Greeks in and the yields down—at the cost of making a quarter of Greeks unemployed and destroying nearly a third of the country’s GDP. Consequently, Greece is now just 1.7 percent of the eurozone, and the standoff of the past few months has been over tax and spending mixes of a few billion euros. Why, then, was there no deal for Greece, especially when the IMF’s own research has said that these policies are at best counterproductive, and how has such a small economy managed to generate such a mortal threat to the euro?

Part of the story, as we wrote in January, was the political risk that Syriza presented, which threatened to embolden other anti-creditor coalitions across Europe, such as Podemos in Spain. But another part lay in what the European elites buried deep within their supposed bailouts for Greece. Namely, the bailouts weren’t for Greece at all. They were bailouts-on-the-quiet for Europe’s big banks, and taxpayers in core countries are now being stuck with the bill since the Greeks have refused to pay. It is this hidden game that lies at the heart of Greece’s decision to say “no” and Europe’s inability to solve the problem.

Euro speculation led banks in France and Germany to become "too big to fail."   They were over-leveraged in Greece. So that's where the money went. It didn't stay there.

The EFSF was a company the EU set up in Luxemburg “to preserve financial stability in Europe’s economic and monetary union” by issuing bonds to the tune of 440 billion euro that would generate loans to countries in trouble.

So what did they do with that funding? They raised bonds to bail Greece’s creditors—the banks of France and Germany mainly—via loans to Greece. Greece was thus a mere conduit for a bailout. It was not a recipient in any significant way, despite what is constantly repeated in the media. Of the roughly 230 billion euro disbursed to Greece, it is estimated that only 27 billion went toward keeping the Greek state running. Indeed, by 2013 Greece was running a surplus and did not need such financing. Accordingly, 65 percent of the loans to Greece went straight through Greece to core banks for interest payments, maturing debt, and for domestic bank recapitalization demanded by the lenders. By another accounting, 90 percent of the “loans to Greece” bypassed Greece entirely.

Banksters take enormous risks. Banksters make enormous profits. Until the risks start to fall through and the banksters demand to be paid out of people's retirement funds. In the end there's really no such thing as a risk as far the banksters are concerned.  So this is a story of moral hazard. It's just not the moral hazard story our political scolds would like us to believe it is. 

A race, perhaps?

This poll has John Bel Edwards practically tied with Vitter and that's even when Russel Honore was included as an option.

The poll, conducted by Jackson, Miss.-based Triumph Campaigns, had Edwards capturing 30 percent of the vote and Vitter taking 31 percent of the vote; the poll had a 2.4 percent margin of error.

Republican Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle polled at 14 percent and Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne polled at 11 percent.

Fourteen percent of voters identified themselves as undecided. The poll of 1,653 likely voters was conducted on June 30. The poll was automated, meaning it did not involve callers conducting live interviews, and it did not reach cell phone users.

The poll did not ask voters to pick between Edwards and Vitter if they were to face each other in a runoff. In Louisiana's unique primary system, this question is key later in the race because according to Triumph's numbers, neither candidate is polling high enough to avoid a runoff election.

Also note the Angellementum.. such as it is.  Not much news else here, though.  In a runoff, it's hard to imagine JBE pulling in enough of the leftover voter from the Republican also-rans for any of this to matter.  30 percent seems more like a ceiling for him statewide.

Kind of a quiet Governor's race at the moment. Can't stay that way forever.

Nobody actually lives here

I'm kind of running out of ways to say it by this point. But neighborhoods where nobody actually lives are not actually.. you know.. neighborhoods.

The Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates Executive Director Meg Lousteau goes so far as to say residential life here is under siege.

"The thing that gives it that intangible feeling of authenticity and realness is the fact that people live here, and if we lose that, we're going to lose the thing that everyone does realize they love," Lousteau said.

Census data shows the full-time residential population in the French Quarter has dropped since Hurricane Katrina to around 4,000 people.

Lousteau cites quality of life issues, including crime and parking problems. But she said illegal short term rentals, like Airbnb, are making housing less available and more expensive.

"If you are looking to buy a property that you are going to live in, and you're competing against somebody who's buying to rent it out every weekend, who's making a profit on it, that person's numbers and math are very different from yours," she said.

This WWL report concluded by noting that Stacy Head is working on a way to "fix" this problem.   I've already noted but it bears repeating I have zero confidence that's what she's actually up to. 

Revenge of the nerd

The awkward stage. We all go through it.  Bobby Jindal did once too. His was probably a lot like yours... although maybe not exactly.

Jindal captained the Equations team, which required quick thinking.

And he dressed like Alex P. Keaton, the conservative high schooler played by Michael J. Fox in the ’80s sitcom “Family Ties.”

“He had a bow tie with dollar bills on it,” said Elaine Parsons, who is now a history professor at Duquesne University. “When the movie ‘Wall Street’ came out, he’d go around saying, ‘Greed is good!’ People would roll their eyes at him.”

For years, Jindal bought bags of candy that he would keep in his backpack and sell individual pieces to sugar-craving students.

Some classmates view it now as a sign of a would-be political operator.

“But I always thought of it as more entrepreneurial,” said Johnson, who is now a professor of political communication at LSU.

Selling Jolly Ranchers on the sly seems like it's really more of a Skippy thing but OK.  Anyway, there's nothing wrong with being a smart kid, or a geeky kid. But it kind of looks like Bobby was a bit of a weird kid among weird kids.

Maybe that doesn't matter. Usually it wouldn't. But still there's this nagging notion that maybe Jindal's awkward phase grew with him into a kind of sociopathy. Consider this story today where we learned of a fresh examination of College Bobby's old exorcism essay.

Most Louisianians have probably heard the story about Gov. Bobby Jindal witnessing an exorcism in college a bunch of times.

The story made the rounds when Jindal first ran for governor; it was trotted out again when Jindal's widely mocked 2009 State of the Union response was delivered; and now that he's running for president it's creeping its way back into the national consciousness.

But now a pair of producers want to give the curious account of casting demons out of Jindal's college friend Susan new life: They want to turn it into a rock opera. Apparently the story -- written by Jindal himself and published in a Catholic magazine more than 20 years ago -- is so dramatic, and told so evocatively by Jindal, a couple of guys just couldn't resist setting it to song.

Cute. Really, it's funny. They're not actually going to put this into production, though. At least I hope they don't. Some jokes work better as conceptual art than in practice and this is undoubtedly one such joke. Interesting that they've got a Kickstarter going.. ostensibly to fund this project.. but who knows where that money goes.  Still, the would be producers have some insights to share about the exorcism that many of us probably haven't pondered over in a while.  Such as this. 

"It's a love story more than anything. It's more about a story about a young man's inability to love," Chiari said. "An ability to love or inability to love another person can play a role in how we look at the world."

The exorcism itself, with vivid descriptions by Jindal that included the "guttural sounds" coming from his friend Susan and "taunting the evil spirit" within her, has always been more of the focus for political writers. But the essay also contains accounts of a lovestruck Susan and her frustration with the emotionless Jindal, as well as Jindal's own admission that "I was beginning to doubt that I had the capacity for feeling."

We've all had opportunities to parse the story of Bobby and Susan over the years. There have been theories about repressed sexuality, failure of empathy, and so on.  But mostly this is a story about confused young people told to us through the point of view of a person who either didn't fully understand the social interaction he was participating in or, more likely, someone who purposefully misinterpreted that episode in the retelling.

Over our years with him we've come to understand that there's very little Bobby Jindal tells us that isn't politically calculated and/or probably false.  He actually has a preternatural talent for this when spouting abstract political absurdities about "no-go zones" or the metric system or whether or not it's a good idea to fire the Supreme Court. Not many people can tell such utterly stupid lies with as straight a face. At the same time, and probably not coincidentally, few people come off as obviously phony when trying to project or talk about anything involving personal emotion. Worse than that, sometimes he comes off as just plain weird.

In the exorcism story Bobby was writing about what he says is a critical moment in his religious development. For some reason, those moments tend to come to him through awkward failures with women. on Thursday Bobby was in New Orleans (no, for real this time) to speak to the National Right to Life Convention. During his remarks there Bobby told us about how his beginnings in anti-abortion movement Catholicism were inspired at an early age.

Jindal opened his remarks with an anecdote about his gradual conversion to Catholicism and how, at 15 years old, he began to think about anti-abortion advocacy. "I was a teenage high school boy, and [God] used a teenage high school girl to get my attention," he said. He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said she wanted to be a United States Supreme Court Justice because she wanted to "save innocent human lives right here in America."

"I just wanted to talk to a pretty girl — where did this come from?" he said. "God used that experience to plant a seed. We could've used her on the court just a couple weeks ago."

Let's assume this is a true story and not just some thing Bobby made up in order to sound like a hu-man on stage. It's probably not rock opera or anything but here's a short one-act play about this episode in Young Bobby's life.

SETTING: A classroom at BATON ROUGE MAGNET HIGH.  It is the first week of school and BOBBY JINDAL is finding his desk.  He is wearing bright green pants and a pink shirt. He doesn't have his bow tie on but his Trapper Keeper has a picture of Tina Yothers on it. At the desk next to him is a TEENAGE GIRL just settling in.

BOBBY: Hi I'm Bobby. I like to be called Bobby. Greed is good.. heh heh.

GIRL: Um hello.

BOBBY: Hey do you like Jolly Ranchers? I usually sell them for fifty cents each but I can get you one for a quarter because you seem really special.

GIRL: No thanks. I'm not....

BOBBY: So are you going to be in the Latin Club this year? I'm pretty much the king over there. They say it's really good to have impressive activities on your college application. I'm shooting for the Ivies. How about you?

GIRL: (nervously) Well I...

BOBBY:  Hey how about math club? I'm up for captain of the Equations team. That's going to be huge on my application to Brown. I could be a doctor, you know. Or better. Heck I could be President. It's really just a matter of what I settle for. What do you want to be when you grow up?

GIRL: I'm gonna..

BOBBY: You really should have one of these Jolly Ranchers.  You sure you don't want..

GIRL: I'm going to be a Supreme Court Justice! Excuse me I have to um... (gets up and heads to the restroom)

BOBBY unwraps a small grape candy and pops it into his mouth. Thinks about his future. 

And this is the story of how Bobby Jindal, the awkward kid, grows up to be an empathy-poor, megalomaniac who interprets his rejected advances as a message from God to him that someday he would lead governments and use his position to make sure women's health choices were appropriately difficult or at least shameful for them.  Some kids' awkward phases are more consequential than others, I guess.

Movie time

Here's the 1983 Saints featuring Ken Stabler.  Bum was fantastic.

Nuisance statues

Mitch is doing a talk about statues for the city council today.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has formally asked the city council to begin the legal process required to have four public monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle, declared public "nuisances" and taken down.

In a letter addressed to City Council President Jason Williams, Landrieu asks the council to hold a hearing to determine whether the following monuments should be removed: Lee's statue, the statue of Jefferson Davis on Jefferson Davis Parkway, the PGT Beauregard equestrian statue at the entrance to City Park and the Battle of Liberty Place monument on Iberville Street near the riverfront.

Landrieu is scheduled to address the council on the subject at noon Thursday (July 9) during its business meeting.

I was all set to head out to Lee Circle with my decibel meter but I stopped and read the rest of this article where it actually defines what makes something a "nuisance statue."

The law sets up a three-point test to determine if a statue may be removed. Briefly stated, the council must find that the monument:

* Praises a subject at odds with the message of equal rights under the law.
* Has been or may become the site of violent demonstrations.
* Constitutes an expense to maintain that outweighs its historic importance and/or the reason for its display on public property.

The language of the first provision in particular seems tailored to the removal of Confederate statuary, as it makes a clear reference to the 14th Amendment, which was added to the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War and made black Americans full citizens with equal protection under the law.

According to that provision, any monument that, in the council's view, "honors praises or fosters ideologies ... in conflict with the requirements of equal protection," would be subject to removal. Also eligible: anything that honors those who "participated in the killing of public employees of the city or the state" or anything that lauds any "violent actions" to promote "ethnic, religious or racial supremacy."

This is obviously an ordinance written in response to a controversy over the Liberty Place Monument brought on by David Duke.

The monument left public view in 1989, reportedly for safe keeping, amidst construction on Canal Street. Mayor Sidney Barthelemy pledged to return the marker, though his administration missed the originally stated date for its replacement. The structure stayed in storage until February 1993, when a movement led by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sued for its return. To the chagrin of many residents, the city obliged but moved the obelisk off of Canal Street to its present site in the curve of Iberville Street, between railroad tracks and the entrance to a parking garage.

Mitch is finally asking for the new ordinance to be applied to the cases it was intended to address. But why stop there? There are plenty of statues around town we might consider nuisances. Mr. Peanut is pretty annoying, for instance.  Also those Evac-U-Spot giant metal stick men. Nobody likes those.

But neither of those cases seem like they fit the criteria set forth by the ordinance. Mr. Peanut is an advertisement. Maybe we can dig around and find some way Planter's is "at odds with equal rights under the law" but let's not get too deep into the problematics today.  (A Twitterer tells me he's already gone anyway) The Evacu-Spots aren't likely to draw demonstrations.  Hell, they aren't even likely to draw crowds of evacuees even though that is their ostensible purpose.  Some nuisances you have to live with, I guess.

This, on the other hand...



Everybody hates Bronze Tom.  Tom Benson's personal fortune is derived from public subsidies and the use of public facilities. This constitutes a considerable expense to maintain. A lot of people might not agree the expense outweighs its historic importance.. at least in terms of the football team which we seem to enjoy.  But if we're just talking about the statue.. well.. everybody hates Bronze Tom.  This has already caused it to become the site of demonstrations which, on occasion, have bordered on violence.



No reason to stop at just the Confederate monuments. Mr. Landrieu, tear down this paw paw.

You mad?

Louisiana State Supreme Court justices rage impotently over matters.

Justice Jeanette Theriot Knoll — in an almost two-page criticism of the five U.S. Supreme Court justices forming the majority in Obergefell — stated she concurred with the opinion only because she is “constrained to follow the rule of law.”

She continued, “I write separately to express my views concerning the horrific impact these five lawyers have made on the democratic rights of the American people to define marriage and the rights stemming by operation of law therefrom. It is a complete and unnecessary insult to the people of Louisiana who voted on this very issue.”

Knoll, who in 2005 wrote the court’s unanimous ruling in Forum for Equality PAC v. McKeithen validating the state’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, further called the federal ruling an “imposition” on the Louisiana public’s wishes.

“I wholeheartedly disagree and find that, rather than a triumph of constitutionalism, the opinion of these five lawyers is an utter travesty as is my constrained adherence to their ‘law of the land’ enacted not by the will of the American people but by five judicial activists,” she wrote in Tuesday’s written comments on the Lafayette case seeking marriage and adoption rights.

"The opinion of five lawyers" is supposed to be some sort of belittlement, I guess. But since this is a State Supreme Court justice who is herself a lawyer picking on US Supreme Court justices who are also lawyers for being lawyers I think, maybe, it loses its punch.  Maybe if she threw in a few "jiggery pokerys" she would have had something.

Anyway, that is one mad lawyer. The Louisiana State Supreme Court does not suffer well the equal protection of the law in the interest of granting everyone some basic dignity. 

Meanwhile, back in federal court, the lawyers on the 5th Circuit are totally fine with torturing convicts.

Louisiana does not have to air-condition the entire death row facility at the State Penitentiary at Angola but does need to provide some relief to three condemned killers with medical conditions who complained that extremely hot conditions on death row subject them to heat-related injury, a federal appellate court ruled Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans agreed with Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson, of Baton Rouge, that Louisiana is in violation of the three prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The 5th Circuit panel, however, said Jackson went too far in ordering that heat indexes on death row be maintained at or below 88 degrees, which the panel said effectively requires the state to install air conditioning throughout the death row housing.

 It's partly cloudy and 93 degrees in Angola today. About 10 degrees hotter if Justice-Lawyer Knoll walks in the room, though. Better keep her away from the prison for a while. 

Eric Holder's new (old) gig

You can't even really say it's despicable anymore. It's just normal.

Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.

The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.

Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.

Banksters run the world. Even when their computers are broken, they run it all. 

Created jobs Boustanying out all over

If when David Vitter becomes Governor next year, we're gonna have to go and make ourselves a new US Senator.  The speculative field in that inevitable election has not yet emerged, but Charles Boustany bravely volunteers for consideration.  

Rep. Charles Boustany told supporters at a June fundraiser that he plans to run for the Senate in 2016 if Sen. David Vitter's 2015 gubernatorial run is successful, a donor told National Journal, and Boustany has hired an experienced Senate campaign manager to helm his political operation.

Boustany showed up in your Times-Picayune/NOLA.com/Freak Lobster Feed last weekend with an op-ed about how he was authoring a piece of legislation to help Louisiana "job creators."  It is called the "Seasonal Labor for Job Creators Act."

Today, there is a statutory cap on the number of visas issued per fiscal year – 33,000 from October to March, and 33,000 from April to September. As the economy slowly improves, the need for these visas is increasing and surpassing the number available. Unfortunately, between onerous new rules promulgated jointly by Homeland Security and the Department of Labor and what appears to be manipulation of the process employers must complete to attract these workers, the program is in chaos. This year, the cap was opened for applications on April 1, and all 33,000 visas were spoken for within a few days.  Amazingly, my friend Frank told me that he's resorted to bailing prisoners out of jail to do the backbreaking work of processing Louisiana seafood.

Boustany says there aren't enough temporary work visas available for his friend Frank to exploit in supplying the slave labor he needs to keep his seafood processing plant running.

For most people in Louisiana, cracking the shell off a crawfish, sucking the head, and swallowing the tail meat is a joyous part of what it means to call this place home. But peeling crawfish is not so fun for guestworkers from Mexico, who allege that they are facing slave-like conditions in a Louisiana plant. Eight striking guestworkers, who say they are sometimes forced to peel and boil crawfish for up to 24 hours straight without overtime pay, outlined the alleged abuses in a rally outside of a Sam’s Club in Metairie on Wednesday, June 6th. That same day, they filed complaints with the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their employer, C.J.’s Seafood of Breaux Bridge, La., on behalf of the forty guest workers employed there. C.J.’s Seafood sells an estimated 85% of its crawfish to Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, and owner of Sam's Club.

Why won't those "bureaucrats in Washington" let Boustany's friend Frank create more of these kinds of jobs? One just can't imagine.  Frank even had to go down to the pound and pick up some prisoners to get the work done once or twice. Lucky for Frank, there's plenty of those to go around in Louisiana.

Goes to show if we don't let our job creators have their "Slavery By Another Name" one way they'll go out and get it somewhere else.  The free market really is terrific like that.  In any case, Boustany is hoping Frank will help create a job for him in the Senate next year. He probably will. Maybe Governor Vitter can drop him a reference. This stuff seems pretty important to him too.

Buy some dirt

The dirt ain't cheap, though.

A statistical analysis of the 79 properties sold in the auction shows many were significantly undervalued by the Orleans Assessor's Office. About 28 percent went for more than twice their value as estimated by the assessor.

Investors bought two properties, a 7th Ward double and vacant lot in English Turn, for more than 10 times their assessed value.

People keep saying the real estate market in New Orleans is a "bubble." I don't think that's true.  At least, it isn't true in the sense that one day it will "crash" and suddenly there will be affordable housing everywhere. We're a resort city now. And our most "desirable" neighborhoods are being sacrificed to prop up the luxury market.

In theory, this is the sort of thing that exposes a city to the structural adjustment happening in cities all over the world where formerly modest assets are concentrated in the hands of the international investor class.

A handful of elite cities around the world have increasingly become magnets for residential investments from super-rich foreigners looking for safe places to park their fortunes.

They invested approximately $25 billion in cross-border residential real estate in 2014, according to Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle, an investment management company that specializes in property.

Living in the world's most desirable cities has long been associated with exorbitant housing prices for a multitude of reasons, ranging from high infrastructure costs to demand that far outstrips the supply. Yet this vast injection of wealth is increasingly contributing to soaring home prices in places as far flung as London, Vancouver, Miami, New York, Panama City, Istanbul and Sydney.

It has also distorted home prices in some city centers beyond the reach of all but the world's wealthiest individuals at a time when 330 million urban households worldwide live in substandard housing, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates. For millions of middle-class — and even upper-middle-class families — urban life in these cities is out of the question.

New Orleans isn't listed among the cities treated in that study. But it's worth noting the trend as our real estate market becomes shaped more and more by luxury and tourism. It also suggests that.. no.. "NIMBYism" is not the real problem. 

Cities need to relax density and height restrictions so developers are encouraged to build more housing, Estes writes.

"Cities must adopt inclusive zoning policies that incentivize or require affordable housing to be built in opportunity-rich neighborhoods, particularly when they are rezoned for greater housing or commercial development, and dedicate significant funding for the development of housing affordable to low-income residents who are entirely unserved by the market."

Mayor Mitch Landrieu inserted such rules into New Orleans' recently adopted Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance over the vocal complaints of residents who said he was ruining the unique character of historic neighborhoods.

The newly created Riverfront Overlay District, which runs across the waterfront downriver from the French Quarter, included such "inclusive zoning" provisions. They allow developers to build larger, denser buildings in exchange for the inclusion of low-income and middle-income housing units.

If 10 percent of the units go to low or middle income tenants, developers who invest in the overlay district can build up to 80 feet high and 75 percent more densely than they otherwise would be able to, according to the new zoning rules.

But reserving just 10 percent of new construction for "low and middle income tenants" is nowhere near sufficient and everyone involved in this scam knows it.  If the new theoretical "denser" developments were not sufficiently nice things for rich people, they wouldn't be financed in the first place.

More importantly, as we've already pointed out above, local supply and demand isn't even the primary problem. 

A problem defined locally ("zoning rules") is applied generically ("big cities"). The same pattern of gentrification in London and Berlin (as well as Raleigh-Durham) does not suggest a local real estate market distortion that can be addressed locally. It's like blaming unions for the economic convergence of manufacturing. Upzoning will be about as useful policy tool as right-to-work legislation. Manufacturing jobs as a share of regional employment will continue to shrink. It's a global trend. The same thing is happening in regions with low (or no) union participation.

I have sympathy with the argument that neighborhood associations and historic preservation do, in fact, contribute to the gentrification problem in their own right. But this is different. Scolding locals as NIMBYs, really only leaves them a choice between gentrifying neighborhoods where the rent is too damn high or luxury towers where nobody actually lives.  Either way it's a hell of a way to run a city.

Time does fly

Everybody get in line to yell at the Mayor season is back!

Have you ever had something you wanted to say to the city government? Now is your chance. Mayor Mitch Landrieu will host a series of community meetings beginning on Monday (7.13). The meetings, held in conjunction with the New Orleans City Council, aim to discuss budget priorities in preparation for the city’s 2016 budgeting for outcomes process.  

And with so much irrelevant-to-the-city-budget stuff to talk about.  Better pack a lunch.  Times, dates and locations behind that link. 

Populism theater

Bobby Jindal is standing up for the little guy against the Kochs.  Primarily he is doing this because they won't give him money.

CNN's John King, on Sunday, reported on "Inside Politics" that meetings and conferences being held by groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Partners aren't inviting Jindal to speak but are inviting other presidential candidates. Both groups receive support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who are executives at Koch Industries and well known for wielding influence in the Republican party through their considerable finances.

"The Kochs haven't settled on one GOP prospect -- at least not yet," King reported. "But it is clear they view some candidates more favorably than others. Top aides for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are now complaining to friends their candidate is being excluded from these Koch-sponsored gatherings."

King goes on to comment that GOP candidates have taken to calling the competition for the Koch Brothers' attention as "the Koch primary." And, King reported Jindal's aides as complaining that the rules for that shadow primary "just aren't fair."

Conveniently enough, though, this is probably just what Bobby wants. In 2016, many GOP candidates are going to try and sell themselves as populist advocates for free enterprise which, in the conservative narrative, has been corrupted and suppressed by a Wall Street many voters (quite rightly) associate with President Obama and Hillary Clinton as much as they do with.. say.. Jeb Bush.

Here is Jindal trying out this pitch on the Sean Hannity show last week.

JINDAL: A couple of things. We're the only ones offering a detailed plan.  Every Republican has a one-liner on ObamaCare. We've got detailed plans on energy independence, on school choice, on health care, on foreign policy.  They all hire somebody to write their plans. They can borrow mine. We've actually got ideas. Plus, we've got a proven track record. Again, enough with the slick talkers. Let's elect somebody that's done something.

And, finally, we're willing to stand up to leaders in both parties. The Republican Party is not supposed to be the party of big government. Sean, we're not supposed to be the party of big business, either. On Common Core, on amnesty, on religious liberty, we've seen too many Republicans fold the tent, not fight for conservatives.

HANNITY: Facebook post from a viewer, Gus Peterson. "Are you a conservative? And will you look us in the eye and promise to remain a conservative?" I guess he wants you to look into that camera.

JINDAL: I'm a constitutional conservative. Sean, I've heard you describe yourself as a Reagan constitutional conservative. I can think of no three better words to describe my political philosophy. I'm a Reagan constitutional conservative. I will remain a Reagan constitutional conservative. It doesn't matter to what the elites D.C. think in the Republican or the Democratic Party.

Among those Jindal has seen "fold the tent and not fight for conservatives" as Jindal defines them.. David Koch. 

David Koch, the big money political donor and liberal boogeyman, has agreed to sign onto to an amicus brief supporting same-sex marriage at the Supreme Court, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The brief he will reportedly sign in DeBoer v. Snyder, a case that could afford same-sex couples a constitutional right to marry, will host a number of other prominent conservative signatories, including retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein and former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman. News of the brief was first reported Tuesday by The Washington Post.

Earlier in the year, Bobby's New York Times manifesto against gay marriage relied on this specter of big corporate bullying as a foil against which to demonstrate Bobby's moral constancy.

Some corporations have already contacted me and asked me to oppose this law. I am certain that other companies, under pressure from radical liberals, will do the same. They are free to voice their opinions, but they will not deter me. As a nation we would not compel a priest, minister or rabbi to violate his conscience and perform a same-sex wedding ceremony. But a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses. That’s why we should ensure that musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion on deeply held religious convictions.

Jindal also added the term "corporate welfare" to his repertoire this spring while rationalizing the contortions he put the state budgetary process through in order to maintain  Norquist-approved ideological purity. Jindal is positioning himself as the real conservative which he defines as something opposed to what "big business" and their (possibly) radical liberal allies are selling and probably corrupting you with.

We can pick apart the hypocrisies of all of this later. But that would be beside the point. Presidential campaigns are mostly theater, anyway.  The 2016 campaign is going to be a populist kind of theater, though. The candidates may be insincere but voters, on the right and on the left, are angry.

To move those votes, candidates will be looking for ways to tap into that impulse; to identify with the large number of Americans who feel left behind or ostracized in some way by the system.   If you're looking for a way to maximize your populist appeal in the GOP primary, you could do a lot worse than a "team of experts who specialize in leveraging Christian outrage" and a candidate who is publicly on the outs with the Kochs.

Bobby Jindal is not doing so bad for himself right now.