Canyon

Like how important pickups and suburbans are to working stiffs.  Pulling into the lot outside of Shreveport in a motel filled with Anglo and Latino oil field hands, a car was a surprise among that long beds and tall racks of the trucks.  Equally common in these motels is the small smoker or grill perched on the motel railing or the pickup flap next to a couple of six packs.  These have now become the standard carry-on’s for fence minding just as wireless, cable-TV, and coffee and juice has become the fare even at $50 buck motels.  Filled parking lots at midnight are empty before 8AM.  One of our caravan commented after a mandatory stop at Southern Maid Hot Donuts, which Orell and I will argue is simply the best donut spot in all of north Louisiana, that she had never had a hot donut, and thanks.   I’m 100% for healthy, but can you  believe that that is possible without a benchmark for comparison?

North of Dallas and Fort Worth once past the sprawling D/FW airport, I was still surprised in the depths of the recession to uncover the planted ½ acre mini-mansion suburbs that had been planted in the plains and rolling scrub oak literally in the middle of nowhere, and were still standing somehow.  The Texas Speedway incidentally is so big that as we approached from a distance one passenger thought that might be the new Cowboys’ billion dollar stadium on the horizon.

The small towns along the trail continue their slow deaths.  The Wal-Mart had actually closed in Bunkie, Louisiana, which shocked me since I could remember when it opened 25 years ago as I would drive by on the way to Shreveport to negotiate nursing home contracts, sometimes 3 in one day.  In many there are more antique stores than most anything else.  Fast food outlets are more of the same and equal in number to boarded up restaurants with nothing but signs on the windows.  Just the way of these things, I guess.

On the other hand there are three Thai restaurants in small Canyon alone and twice as many or more locally owned and run Mexican places giving a run to the last couple of steakhouses that are still mandatory in this town.  Fence riders still need a chicken fried steak sooner or later, but I would probably have to draw a picture of that for you to get the full sense of it.  For the record, I always hold the gravy.  Just never have been a gravy man or liked sugar in my coffee.  Just keeping it real on the road.

New Orleans

Bullock doesn’t like being played for a fool it seems.  She just solved a little problem like that in her personal life from what I’ve read.  After doing her part, hoping to help Gulf recovery, she came to understand (thanks to www.deSmogBlog.com which I’m putting on my Google Reader, thank you!) that the storm troopers were joined at the hip with America’s WETLAND Foundation, which has been a “soft core” coastal restoration outfit created (according to Bruce Alpert in the Times-Picayune) with state money and slicked down with oil company contributions (which is a little disingenuous given the huge role they have played in coastal destruction!).

Bullock wants to know the “facts” her release said about the connections.  To start with the storm troopers have been a vehicle for Anne Milling since Katrina and based on cozy, old school, uptown relationships with the Times-Picayune, Whitney Bank, oil interests, and others have been a favored darling at the fuzzy point of “elite panic” about the city and its future since the storm.  Other than fly an almost entirely lily white delegation of upper crust women to DC in a chartered plane to speak for our 2/3rds African-American and poor city, I’m not sure what they ever did at all, but they were the long toothed, debutante ball in a bad post-K season.  America’s WETLAND Foundation’s chair is her husband King Milling, a former bigwig at Whitney Bank, the old school and oil field standard in New Orleans.  Milling is Mr. Public Relations, having been quoted by me in the past for his refusal to accept pay limits as a bailed out bank and his opposition to rebuilding the 9^th ward and other black majority parts of the city.  Of course he’s there as a front for oil and finance interests.  No waves will hit them from on his shore watch.

Alpert quotes:  “A written statement Thursday from Women of the Storm said America’s WETLAND is listed as a sponsor of the Restore the Gulf effort because it agreed to help with logistics, such as presenting the signed petitions to Congress and the administration.”  Huh?  What are the storm troopers going to do then?  Or the US Mail if planes are not landing at National or Dulles airports?  DeSmogBlog says both groups are fronts for a taxpayer bailout for British Petroleum’s cleanup and a full tilt, no change charge to return to business as usual by the oil companies in the Gulf.  Neither group has gotten the memo that those days are now gone in the wake of the oil spill.

So, I’m for running Bullock for Governor.  She makes stuff happen.  She seems like she doesn’t want to shill for either the elites or the special interests.  She doesn’t hesitate to walk her own talk.  Rather than just politic about education, she rolls up her sleeves and makes change happen.  She actually seems to care about both Louisiana and New Orleans and given her deep Austin, Texas roots that must represent a life changing experience, which is also a good thing.   Given our constant war with crime as well, her experience with the FBI from “Miss Congeniality” won’t hurt.  She’s a huge football fan from what I gather from “Blind Side” and that puts her in good stead with the vast majority of Louisianans smitten with the LSU Tigers and the New Orleans Saints.  Given the amount of tax money that the State of Louisiana hands over to the film industry in tax breaks, she would at least make sure we got something on the backside because he has experience watching the books of these film folks.

I’d switch from a clown now to a star tomorrow in a flash:  Sandra Bullock for Governor of Louisiana!

New Orleans

Good question!  They have a lot to say about, some of which is probably on point (general recession) and some of which is not (too far…huh…Louisiana is way closer than Alaska!).  I worry that there is more to this though.

Woefully part of the problem has been the total inability of the environmental organizations and the movement as a whole to speak with anything resembling one voice.  Many times there seems to be more jockeying for position and resources among the groups that real mobilization of support for change.  But, clearly there is a real lack of consensus on what the changes should be.

Perhaps the largest divide is over calls for a ban on oil drilling.  The ban is opposed by 77% of the American people who have been sold for decades that there oil is important and it is better for it to come from “home” than the Middle East and elsewhere.  The divide is also stark in the Gulf where the support for oil workers and the oil service industry is significant because of the jobs and impact on the economy.  The oil companies have also just been better by miles for decades in keeping any of the environmental problems of drilling off of their shoes.  The best example is the well documented problem of canal dredging by the companies along the bayous which has led to tremendous coastal erosion with no real consequences to the companies.

The “face” of the workers more often has been the fisherman and the nostalgia for a “way of life” on the coast, but this has been a deep seated problem for years, exacerbated by Katrina and the loss of thousands of boats and jobs over the last 5 years as well.  The long term impact on these workers could stretch for decades.

The inability of many environmental groups to find common cause with blue collar workers on the water and on the rigs is not new, but it also means that winning real protections for the environment, the coast, and the future might be part of the price being paid for the inability to forge the real blue-green coalition needed here.

Environmentalists are the only ones unable to pull the switch.  Unions have been embarrassingly silent in this crisis.  The initial loss of life and the obvious worker safety issues have not given unions and other worker advocates traction in calling for more health and safety measures or even clearing up the OSHA jurisdiction on a rig outside of our territorial waters.  The oil patch has resisted unionization for 50 years, but here was an opportunity met in silence once again both on the water and on the rigs.

It almost appears that movements have lost ties to their base so completely and are now so caught on agendas that are based in the beltway, no matter how important or valid, that they are just stuck and scratching when opportunity knows somewhere that is not at their front door in Georgetown or somewhere on a street with an NW fixed firmly.  This has to change!

New Orleans

All of these memories came back to me reading a piece a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal called, “Besieged in the Bayou:  Shrimpers Fight Back,” by Jeff Opdyke that focused on the problems in the industry because of imported shrimp from Indonesia, Thailand, Ecuador, and elsewhere, as well as potentially price fixing and bad handling procedures by processors that have spoiled the market.  Sadly a lot of the same problems existed for shrimpers back then.  A lot of the shrimpers then thought that they couldn’t do well because of overfishing and the fact that there were too many boats on the water and too many captains willing – or forced – to settle for prices that sucked any margin out of the shrimp.

Opdyke notes that since 1989 the number of shrimpers has plummeted to a quarter of what it was (16500 to 4700), which is a huge difference.  Unfortunately, the shrimp are only getting about $1.00 a pound at the dock, which is shockingly low.  The level of imports is now dwarfing what comes of the boats.  Opdyke reports in 2008 Louisiana moved 90 million pounds of shrimp worth only $135 million, while imports in 2007 were at 1.6 million pounds and that was double the imports of 10 years ago.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) is writing letters to beg for help from the federal government, but in the meantime the state doesn’t seem to be inspecting the processors and others whose practices are taking beautiful shrimp off the docks and running the downstream market with chemicals and fast dealing.  I read today Jindal is off fundraising again in other states.  This would seem worth a minute if he can spare it.

The other problem not mentioned is Katrina.  A lot of shrimpers and fishers lost their boats in the storm.  In fact some of the early crews working on houses with our rebuilding program in New Orleans were Vietnamese fishing families who had lost boats worth more than $100,000 but were having problems with FEMA, insurance, and everything else and being pushed off the water by the storm and government inaction.  Now more than 4 years since Katrina it was only recently that FEMA made an announcement on a partial program to begin clearing some of the waterways of the boats sunk by the storm.  That’s no way to support working boatmen whose living is on the water.

Even in New Orleans hardly 75 minutes from the water, the price at the store for a pound of Louisiana shrimp (and that’s all my partner buys!) is $3.57.  The shrimper is getting a buck and god knows where the $2.57 is leaking out along the way.

And, even in New Orleans we can look at the packaging of shrimp in our local store (a Louisiana grocery chain) and see the imported shrimp from China with a picture of the state of Louisiana on the outside and the claim that it’s Louisiana Gulf shrimp.

If they are doing the hard job on water, why can’t people do the right thing the rest of the way, once we’re walking on land?