New Orleans     Consider these facts if you will:

From Wikipedia:   As the country’s major coffee-handling port, the Port of New Orleans has 14 warehouses covering over 51 hectares of storage space and six roasting facilities.

Coffee Handled Here. New Orleans is the nation’s premier coffee-handling port, with 14 [...]]]>

The Port of New Orleans in the 19th Century

New Orleans     Consider these facts if you will:

From Wikipedia:   As the country’s major coffee-handling port, the Port of New Orleans has 14 warehouses covering over 51 hectares of storage space and six roasting facilities.

Coffee Handled Here. New Orleans is the nation’s premier coffee-handling port, with 14 warehouses, more than 5.5 million feet of storage space and six roasting facilities in a 20 mile radius. Two of the most modern bulk processing operations are located in New Orleans: Dupuy Storage and Forwarding Corp. (first in U.S.) and Silocaf of New Orleans, Inc. (world’s largest).   [Source:  Port of New Orleans]

Let’s discount the fact that the Port of New Orleans is probably involved in some boosterism, but there can be little doubt that New Orleans is one of the major, if not THE, major entry points for coffee coming from Latin America.  Ironically, whether in trying to buy fairtrade green coffee beans in New Orleans or trying to ship them directly from Honduras for example, we keep hearing these days of shipping routes to Newark and the Port of NY/NJ rather than on the shortest route to New Orleans from the eastern, Atlantic or Gulf Coasts of Latin America.  Talking to our roasters and sources for fairtrade green beans for Fair Grinds Coffeehouse as a 100% fairtrade shop in the city, we are constantly struggling to get our beans directly through the Port of New Orleans, rather than trucked in and warehoused in the city.  What’s up?!?

I heard a rumor that New York /New Jersey had offered tax incentives to divert coffee traffic after Katrina to move coffee out of New Orleans, but after spending hours on the Internet, I cannot yet confirm the truth of that information.  The facts though are that Katrina did ruin a lot of coffee and tea in area warehouses, and some have not returned more than seven (7) years later.

Sadly, and perhaps ironically as well, the leading fairtrade buyers have perhaps been the slowest to return, rather than the fastest.   The coffee buying cooperative composed of 22 of the biggest, leading fairtrade roasters all used to bring all of their coffee through the Port of New Orleans, but are only now debating a return.  These roasters include many of the best including Just Coffee in Madison, Café Campesino in Georgia, Bongo Java in Nashville, Third Coast in Austin, and Amavida in Florida, as well as a bunch of great roasters in all across Canada.

Seems like fairtrade social justice would include making sure that there is support for the City of New Orleans and its great, deepwater river port, as it recovers from Katrina, especially among the progressive forces in the rebuilding effort that continues unabated but with grave challenges even to this day.  Add to that the union jobs and living wages on the Port and in the warehouses and the arguments made by many, including COWS director, Professor Joel Rogers from the University of Wisconsin, that the Port should be the “economic driver for high road development” after the storm, and I would think this would be an easy decision rather than a lengthy debate.

We should be up to our elbows in fairtrade coffee beans in New Orleans, not on our knees begging for a bag here and a bag there.  What’s missing in this story?

Maybe it’s time for us to put our coffee cups down for a minute and start an organizing campaign, which is something we do understand!

New Orleans    Ok, yes, I live in New Orleans, and by law, I’m a Saints fan, so it will be hard for some readers not to think I might be biased, but the Saints players who have been suspended for different periods from captain and linebacker Jonathan Vilma for the whole [...]]]>

Saints Player Jonathan Vilma

New Orleans    Ok, yes, I live in New Orleans, and by law, I’m a Saints fan, so it will be hard for some readers not to think I might be biased, but the Saints players who have been suspended for different periods from captain and linebacker Jonathan Vilma for the whole season to lesser penalties for others, are right to join with their union and challenge the NFL and these penalties.  Simply put, the heart of any collective bargaining agreement such as the one between the owners and the players and their union, the NFL Players Association when it comes to discipline has to be “just cause.”

Just cause means that no worker covered by the agreement can be disciplined for any reason other than just cause.  Furthermore, the final burden of proof in determining just cause always rests with the employer, not the union.  Published reports indicate that the NLF bosses investigated the “bounty” program where allegedly players and coaches put money in a pool to encourage opposing players to be hurt and taken out of the game.  When the NFLPA filed grievances on behalf of the players, the NLR refused to share the facts of the investigation or the so-called evidence justifying these suspensions with the players or their union.  In labor law that’s not only a contract violation worthy of arbitration, but also an unfair labor practice before the National Labor Relations Board.  The union always has the right to receive all available information and the files involving any disciplinary action which would take away a worker’s livelihood.  Any union steward at any organized workplace would immediately tell you that when the boss refuses to share any information that justifies a decision, they are going to be wrong on those grounds alone.

Why are the sports pages missing the boat on these grievances?

Simple answer:  sports writers are no longer cigar chewing, beer swilling working guys themselves represented by the Newspaper Guild, but folks who buy the management and owners’ story, hook, line, and sinker, so they don’t know the simplest truths about labor relations in sports.

Coach Sean Peyton and the other management types didn’t have a real choice.  When the head of the NFL said they were dirty, that was the end of the discussion.  They were management and agents of the owners, so end of story.  They could hire lawyers, but it was easier to buckle down and bear up.

With union workers it’s a different story.  Scott Fujita, now with another team, was categorical in his denial that he every participated in any action designed to hurt another player.  Others have also been clear.

The head of the NFL only cares about the how the whole mess looks, not whether or not he made the right call on the participation of individual workers and their involvement.  That’s why these running, tackling, football players have a union so they can fight for and force fairness, and make the employer, no matter how rich and powerful, prove their case based on “just cause,” not advertising dollars.

In fact it’s why all workers need a union, so people shouldn’t begrudge NFL players for having one and demanding a fair shake.

New Orleans    For decades Robert Caro’s Power Broker, a biography of New York City’s parks, ports, bridges, and roads czar Robert Moses, has been required reading for community organizers interested in understanding how power works in cities.  Jane Jacobs of course was the author and planning [...]]]>

Protest where people dressed in their Jane Jacobs eyeglasses

New Orleans    For decades Robert Caro’s Power Broker, a biography of New York City’s parks, ports, bridges, and roads czar Robert Moses, has been required reading for community organizers interested in understanding how power works in cities.  Jane Jacobs of course was the author and planning aficionado best known for her advocacy of human scale community development.  Roberta Gratz, our neighbor, wrote a book (The Battle for Gotham:  New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs) about their conflict some years ago and was going to give a lecture on how their shadows could still be seen on the New Orleans landscape, so it was bound to be an interesting hour at the Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street to hear her remarks.

I had been attracted to the lecture because I had thought she was speaking about shrinking city footprints, which is a critical organizing issue these days.  That turned out not to be the real drift of Roberta’s remarks though it was fascinating to hear her point about a Brooklyn land survey finding more than 500 acres of undeveloped property in the city, making that amount larger than Prospect Park!  The real sharpness of her critique was on the Moses-like attempts to create state authorities over local land use and development without any accountability.

She correctly drew direct comparisons in New Orleans to some of the controversial Moses strategies of public control that authorizes the Bio-District developing a so-called medical corridor for the new Veterans’ Hospital and replacement for Charity Hospital.  The outsized footprint of the hospitals she argued would create a suburban-like city center competitor driving businesses and services out of the core central business district to the magnetized health facilities.  She predicted that they would end up requiring subsidizes and would not deliver new jobs or enterprises as promised. The virtually all-white French Quarter and uptown crowd wildly applauded these remarks.  They were equally enthusiastic about her critique of a newly state proposed Tourism District that would not involve the immediate planned destruction as the Mid-City hospital district had, but amassed $11 million for marketing that was seen as unnecessary and she warned that an unaccountable authority in the Moses-model could keep annexing more area and power having already claimed even the Treme neighborhood as part of its footprint.  She argued that this district was little more than a hotel development stalking horse.

One of the key components of the Moses-model was the ability to control public revenue streams which Gratz did not mention.  The authority may have been the Moses hammer, but the money from his ability to control bridge tolls and other streams provided the muscle that moved the tools.  In a city where one of the proposals for renaming the local basketball team is to call us the New Orleans Poor Boys and in a state which is not hesitating in its guerrilla war against the city to transfer power and control, revenue is still the delimiting factor in plans no matter how grand.

Gratz had the dignified crowd whooping when she raised the Jacobs arguments against one current streetcar plan that would extend the line for tourists near the behemoth Morial Convention Center and not farther downtown along St. Claude in our Bywater neighborhood.  She related an Jacobs-like development axiom:  “…do it for locals, visitors will come…do it for tourists and the locals will leave eventually.”  That’s worth thinking about some more.  Another line about “authentic regeneration” is also intriguing along with a Jacobs term she cited about something called, “cataclysmic money,” all of which I need to consider longer and weigh harder.

The contradictions and ironies in the crowd were hard to avoid.

Gratz took incoming hits during the question period for her criticism of the cloistering of Armstrong Park and her comparisons to the earlier planning disaster of Grant Park in New York City.  She made an interesting point about letting people decide by waiting to build sidewalks until it was possible to recognize the “desire paths” that people chose to walk.

She let the crowd off easily by not defining the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act as having been specifically passed in 1978 by ACORN and others to end racial discrimination in lending, but soft pedaling it more as something that moved the banks to lend more to neighborhoods.  Also unspoken was the obvious points that might have lost her the support of many in this particular room had she pointed out the fact that nowhere is an unaccountable and undemocratic state control in the city in more dramatic evidence than the usurpation of the local school system which still goes largely unchallenged and in power almost eight years after Katrina.

Nonetheless, anyone listening carefully would be hard pressed to escape the conclusions and the dire warnings that hung from Roberta’s words at almost every turn.

Jane Jacobs

New Orleans    The HBO show, Treme, another auteur urban tour from David Simon following the wildly acclaimed Wire, may not have found mass appeal out there in viewerlandia, but in New Orleans literally everyone has an opinion, all of which made for a fascinating evening with Tulane media and communications [...]]]>

Professor Vicki Mayer on Treme

New Orleans    The HBO show, Treme, another auteur urban tour from David Simon following the wildly acclaimed Wire, may not have found mass appeal out there in viewerlandia, but in New Orleans literally everyone has an opinion, all of which made for a fascinating evening with Tulane media and communications professor Vicki Mayer as part of the Fair Grinds Dialogue series.  It was fascinating to listen to the Mayer’s presentation but also to hear the discussion.  People in New Orleans watch Treme for so many different and highly personal reasons that if this were an Occupy general assembly, the dialogue would never end, because quite simply “the personal is the perspective” for many here.

Mayer was able to color in parts of the picture that locals couldn’t imagine especially the enthusiasm and interest by scholars around the world.  After an astute opening comment on the way the film industry in New Orleans is “colonizing” the city and contributing to the “privatization of public space” (amen!), Mayer said there were three main points to the scholarly interest in Treme:

• As multiply layered art with various tropes and themes of such significant interest to film auteurs that HBO could afford to run the show to advance its partnership with Simon as a “loss leader” despite slimmer ratings because the later box sets and long term sales would be good.
• Scholars see the show as one of a smaller group of television offerings that tries to “speak about social ills in society, especially the post-Katrina, post-crisis society.”  My own view is that the show does this very poorly, but that doesn’t take away from Professor Mayer’s point that there are damn few that even bother, so it’s worth a good look.  The concept of “private mobilization” that emerged as part of this story was interesting.  There is agreement between those at the dialogue and scholars that the occasional intersections with New Orleans culture are important and interesting, regardless of whether or not the show makes this a tourist film and musical minstrel show of “Disneyland on the Mississippi.”
• Perhaps most interestingly, Professor Mayer shared that many looked at the show as an allegory for the “prototypical neoliberal city” where “citizens take care of the city” develop as local entrepreneurs who are in “training for how to be a good citizen.”  The subliminal message of the show in some ways, Mayer said, is that citizens “can’t count on the city to do anything.”  Wow – right on! I knew I resented this part of the show, but was grateful to Mayer for putting a name to it!

This being New Orleans, there was a lot of discussion about how poorly the show dealt with women, power, and race and how they worked in reality as opposed to in Simon’s Treme.  One dialogue participant told a story of being an extra in a Treme neighborhood joint she frequented and being asked along with others to leave during the filming, because the club scene wasn’t “black enough.”  At the same time person after person at Fair Grinds told how the show “spoke” to them because of a street here or a restaurant there or something that was still a “marker” of home, particularly for many now recently returning from the New Orleans diaspora after Katrina.

There was also a hearty discussion not often heard in New Orleans about whether the burgeoning film industry is “paying back” to the city.  The huge tax credits that are writing off 1/3 or more of film costs are the most lucrative for the industry in the US now, but here there was criticism and mourning about how little was being done to train and develop long term jobs in the industry and deepen the skills and connections for a film industry in the Crescent City for the future.

Perhaps that point deepens the theme of the neo-liberal, global city.  Industry comes here in a race to the bottom for wages and work, and never sets root so they can easily flee to the next place in the future without leaving any skills or infrastructure.  Best that Treme not talk about power, because there should be popular and political accountability at the city and state level in Louisiana about who could have allowed the city and its citizens to be exploited once again as if we are little more than a third world Jamaica without a beach and a China of little labor standards and migrant, transient workers.

I thought of this recently while hanging around [...]]]> New Orleans    As we fight to regain population in the wake of Katrina and so many other demographic struggles over the last half-century, New Orleans in the NBA/NFL world is a “small market city,” which means we often find that we are living in a very small world.

I thought of this recently while hanging around some Regional Transit Authority employees that our union represents and over hearing folks talking in the hallway about how the 1% and old money and prerogatives really work in the Crescent City still.  The RTA has been installing automatic ticket machines in several high bus traffic locations in the city, which is a good idea.  One location right downtown is at the corner of Canal Street and Carondelet.  2000 people a day catch buses or streetcars at that location, so it was an ideal location for the City to locate a standup shelter with a ticket machine and route maps obviously.  RTA went through all of the formalities and won approvals from the Vieux Carre Commission, Downtown Development, Historic Landmarks, etc.  They dug the hole, spent the money (about $40,000), and were ready to put up the shelter, but…

This location was in front of Adler’s Jewelers, the long time, iconic location for uptowners, the Carnival Club crowd, members of the Pickwick Club nearby, and others to buy their jewelry and get their watches fixed.  Late in the construction process, the senior member of the Adler family started coming out from time to time to observe the work.  He didn’t say much, just looked from time to time.   Suddenly, a call came to RTA from the Mayor’s office cancelling the entire project!  Adler claimed they hadn’t realized what was happening in front of their store, despite all of the hearings and notices.  Turns out, if you serve the 1% in New Orleans, it’s not what you know, but still “who you know.”  RTA covered the hole and pulled away the trucks leaving working people stuck like chuck.

Quelle shock!  That’s how “we roll,” I guess?

Ps.  One person who heard the story said, “at least they haven’t moved all of their stores to the suburbs.”  We’re even abused as consumers, much less citizens, it seems.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of [...]]]> New Orleans  The Times ran a story that tried to put a face on the 1% and encourage us to embrace our inner percentage.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of understanding of why such whacky percentages of Americans sometimes respond that they are richer than anyone factually might believe them to be or in other words why so many modest income American families still identify with the rich.  There are some people who might look at the household income figures in their communities where $200000 or $300000 or even $400000 might indicate the upper elite of the 1%, and say to themselves and to others like pollsters and Republican politicians, “hey, I can get there too with some luck or a break or two.”

On the other hand people like me are amazed that that the real meaning of such numbers proves how widespread relative poverty is in these same communities.  If you can be a one-percenter in Laredo at hardly $200,000, since it is a percentage that means people on the whole are desperately poor in Laredo and something should be done about it!  In my New Orleans $362,000 puts you there, and that’s a lot of money, and I’m not sure how folks would be making that here.  Little Rock is only a bit over $300,000, similar to Billings, Montana or Albuquerque or Boise or Panama City, all of which speaks a bit to the slightly more populist nature of some (much?) of the South and West.

The real story is not in the shading of the percentages but in the gap as the Times story indicates, as well as advantages that come from both chance (birth) and structural rigidity (access to job networks):

The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago. They pay just over a fourth of all federal taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2007, they accounted for about 30 percent of philanthropic giving, according to Federal Reserve data. They received 22 percent of their income from capital gains, compared with 2 percent for everybody else.   Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1 percent is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75 percent of the money, compared with 64 percent of the income in other households.

As interesting to me was playing with the formula that allowed a family to find their “place in the percentage.”   For example $100,000 family income puts a family in the top 21%, and if that family were fortunate enough to be living in New Mexico, where I have long thought about living such a family could be in the top 12% or in Montana, where we like to camp and wet a line, you would be in the top 14%.  Of course you still have to figure out how to bring $100,000 into your family, but I’m just saying…

When I left ACORN in 2008, starting wages were about $26,500 for a field organizer, which even today in 2012 would put an organizer ahead of the bottom 25%.  If they were living with another organizer or bunking in and sharing household costs, boom, they would have been in the top 50%!  We always would hear about how low our wages were, but mostly we were hearing from funders who lived in places like New York, where more than a half-million puts you in the 1%, or San Francisco where that starting wage would have put you in the bottom 17%, or Boston in the bottom 20%.

I can remember starting ACORN in Arkansas and finding that 70% of the people made less than $7500 in 1970.   Now to get to that 70% for household income, you would be knocking on the doors of families making about $100,000 around the USA.  A lot has changed in 40 years, and it’s not just inflation.

As I say, embracing your “percentage,” really depends on where you stand and how far up or down you gap is huge and growing, and the distribution is way out of plumb.

Ps.  Want to figure your place in the percentage?  Here’s the link to the calculator.