Silver Spring

So instead of returning to a decaying economic structure, New Orleans is talking about revitalization, a buzzword behind the new energy in the city, carried by an intensity and idealism that would have bordered on indecent in the old, charmingly carefree New Orleans.

It is there among the legion of young nonprofit workers crowding the bars of the Bywater at night, drawn to what one described as her generation’s civil rights struggle. They envision the city as a national example for innovative schools, smart urban planning and a housing stock built to the highest environmental standards.

And it is there among the swaggering entrepreneurs, who have set up small branding firms, music licensors and green energy companies in the downtown warehouses. Over drinks at a downtown boutique hotel, they seem largely untroubled by the reluctance of Fortune 500 companies to bring their headquarters here. This is not a town for old-line corporate thinking. This is a town for pioneers, risk-takers, they say.

But this energy is not enough, on its own, for a new, flourishing, functioning New Orleans. A large-scale rejuvenation of the city’s economy needs a large-scale commitment, with the city’s leadership on board. And the tens of billions of government dollars flowing into the city for the next few years give it a rare, but not unlimited, chance to make that kind of commitment.

I have to first confess that I sent the article to my two adult children IMMEDIATELY!   They were born and raised in Bywater, and we all still live there now, so anything that paints New Orleans and Bywater as ground zero for what’s happening in America, I send off immediately with big exclamation points.  I also like the line about rebuilding New Orleans as this “generation’s civil rights struggle.”  Let’s hear and think a lot more about that, and then push to make it real and not just “branding,” which is what it is now in many ways.

Of course the undemocratic, charter-ization of the public schools, the urban planning talk with little action, and the housing stock largely still not built, all make this seem like a charade unless this generation is going to supply the discipline and courage to the rebuilding that would make the civil rights analogy more real and vibrant.  The “swaggering entrepreneurs” are perhaps tipsy as they leave those bars and the watchword for their enterprises may still be “small,” but we wish them well, especially because change is going to require a flat our confrontation and hammer and tong war with the deeply entrenched, CBD and uptown “leadership” of the city.

I like the spin.  We need as many advertisements for the city and it’s rebuilding as possible, even if this one seems to be using the money still coming for revitalization as a magnet to attract schemers and hustlers.  But, we have a huge amount of work in a lot of areas unmentioned here to actually make the city not only different, which it has always been, but better, which the people deserve.

New Orleans Tonight I might have a Fat Tire in memory of four years ago, as I did, when marooned in Denver a mile high while I watched New Orleans flood.  I won’t have a bowl of buffalo chili, as I did then, but hopefully I’ll find a bowl of gumbo.  I’ll be with family, and we’ll mourn the past and still hope and commit to the future.  I will also mourn the fact that four years after the storm in addition to insufficient housing and health facilities, local democracy is also still being withheld from New Orleans citizens because we are not allowed to vote on the issues involving our public schools, their recovery and future, because of literally, as the conservatives say, the “tyranny of the state.”

In our case that still means the fact that the State Superintendent of Education, business lawyer and high paid, Paul Pastorek, continues to refuse to commit to allow the transition of the New Orleans public schools, charter and non-charter, to return to the supervision of an elected school board.  Where else are local citizens not allowed to hold their public schools accountable at the ballot box?  I mean where else in America.

Is this about “No Child Left Behind” and underperforming districts that are allowed to be taken over?  No, the clock has wound down on that excuse, and supposedly (and I say “supposedly” because there is no transparency in this area!) the charters under state-control are doing better.  No this is simply anti-democracy and possibly an anti-New Orleans form of autocracy.

Pastorek partnered with the Times-Picayune the other day to trumpet a poll that locally and statewide about returning our schools to local control.  Out state and in north Louisiana where on any good day, it’s still pretty easy to whip up an anti-big-sin-catholic-black city crowd, pollsters found a wild majority against local control.  Closer to home they claimed 45% were uncommitted to local control.  Poppycock piled on bull corn!  Where do they find these people?!?

Truth is there are so many problems still confronting the citizens that the State and the education czar both know darned well that no one in New Orleans is really paying much attention to this yet, and they are counting on that fog of disaster to obscure this a while longer.  I wish unions and community organizations in the city would ban together again, just as we did to pass a living wage ordinance to put an ordinance on the ballot demanding the return of our ability to elect a school board, binding or not.

I would love to see that the election campaign in New Orleans where we campaigned for the right to vote and hold schools accountable and Pastorek,  Governor Jindal (maybe?), and the rest of the uptown crowed tried to convince the voters that we were Ok as taxpayers to foot the bill, but we alone in the United States were not qualified as citizens to govern our own schools locally.

We need democracy to recover in New Orleans to bring the vestiges of Katrina to an end and accelerate complete recovery.

New Orleans On Sunday and Monday with days to the 4^th anniversary of Katrina, there have been “exclusive” interviews between first Obama and then Biden and the Times-Picayune. Why?  Because here in the crescent city, people feel let down and disappointment finding that the new administration is as slow and unfeeling as the old one was.  These interviews were spin control from the top trying to “explain” why the administration has rejected designating recovery money in the stimulus bill.

I am reminded of the long departed, though visionary leader of Little Rock ACORN in the 1970’s, Bill Whipple (who along with Geraldine Bell from New Orleans was honored by leaders long ago with the creation of the Whipple-Bell Leader Internships in the DC office of  ACORN).  Whipple had a definition for a “rationale,” which I’ve never forgotten.  Hew ould say, “A rationale is just a lie in skin of a reason.”

This shuffling reminds me of Bill’s rationales.

The President had to explain why he had not been to New Orleans yet and promised he would make it before the end of the year.  The Vice tried to make connections with his daughter’s tour at Tulane where she graduated before the storm.

But on the issue of money for the recovery no amount of spinning conceals the fact that for those of us who hoped to see the effort “recharged”  (in the words of recovery czar Ed Blakely), the stimulus has been less than stimulating, I might say.  It is especially painful that the final recommendations of the Bush recovery people to the Obama team had been to designate half-a-billion to jump start the rebuilding of Charity Hospital and other health facilities that are desperately needed here.  The Obama-ites passed.

The message from these exclusive interviews is that there was really, no matter what I might believe, plenty of money for New Orleans recovery in the package, it is just discretionary.

Who are we kidding, Mr. Big Dogs?  Discretionary means Governor Republican-I-Want-To-Dream-of-Being-Preisdent-Too Bobbie Jindal.  Those of us who bother to read the paper have already suffered through countless articles about stimulus money that Jindal has refused to receive to help unemployed workers.  We have read constantly of his efforts to politically “balance” the money around the state.  Only a couple of weeks ago a careful reader will remember that Governor Jindal was doing a road show around the state to act like he should get credit for stimulus funded projects in local areas without saying clearly that that is what they were.  Now, we are supposed to find comfort in knowing that Katrina recovery could be added by discretionary action from the Governor and legislature to help New Orleans.

This is a terrible political game now being played between the White House and the State Capitol, and that means New Orleans will lose again.

Mr. President, you need a better answer by the time you visit New Orleans later this year.  This doesn’t cut it, brother!

Dauphin Island As vacation is slowly going out like the tide on this barrier island, dispatches from home included the mail and the Times-Picayune.  Flipping through them while watching Clive Owen and Naomi Watt in The International with the tribe, I was pleased to recognize two pictures on Friday’s Metro page of the paper with the headline:  “Cao is ‘leaning’ toward Democrats’ health plan.” Heaven help the newly minted Republican congressman from New Orleans if he is not going to stand for health care for our desperate city and its beleaguered cities.

The pictures held the drama of the event and showed good tactics rather than the strong arm stuff that has been grabbing the news.

Sally Stevens (who the newspaper in the picture caption identified “as a woman who identified herself as Sally Stevens” –huh?) is a “Facebook friend” of mine.  She often comments on various postings on my wall and has become a good barometer on a number of issues.  She works for CulturePAC.com in the city and is a campaigner for fair and equitable economic development in New Orleans.  At the town hall she seems to have gone up to Congressman Cao and dropped a load of medical bills addressed to her and demanded that Cao pay them for her, if he wasn’t going to stand for doing what needed to be done.  She then left the hall.  One thing for sure, they will send her bills every month without fail so she didn’t lose anything here.  She may have helped gain a vote for health care reform.

The other picture had our old friend and colleague, Austin King, identified as a resident of the Irish Channel throwing a fastball question to the Congressman.  Austin is a former politician himself as a member of the Madison (WI) city council and more recently director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center  until leaving a month or so ago en route to NYU law school. 

New Orleans folks know how to make a town hall work and flipped a good vote here.  Props all around!

In the bitter court battle and divorce struggle within UNITE HERE as they try to unwind the merger of their organizations several years ago and reassemble various pieces into a new formation or in the former UNITE case to affiliate with SEIU, like the worst of Hollywood divorces both sides seem unrestrained in trying to destroy the other, no matter who and what is hurt at the hindmost.  Most recently when the HERE forces seized the building in New York City where the former UNITE forces had been operating, a flood of documents has been unleashed in internet way past acceptable boundaries.

One details the declining financial fortunes of UNITE laying the cupboard bare for employer inspection at a time when employers are trying to deny recognition – and therefore – dues income to the union claiming (with way too much credibility) that they can’t tell who and what the union really is.  ARAMARK, who I know too well personally from a dozens of organizing campaigns run by my local union or partnerships we managed, seems to have been predictably quick to now refuse to bargain and deny recognition I heard from a colleague in California on the phone yesterday.

Hospitality workers desperately need organization, and here where Local 100 works in the middle South, especially places like New Orleans and San Antonio where such industries dominate, the lack of organization is a tragic factor in impoverishing entire communities.  I would like to pretend all of this mess was in service to a potential organizing program, but there’s no sign of this yet on the horizon.  All sides seem instead to be set on weakening unionization in this critical sector by throwing all of our laundry into the street.  Maybe it was bad judgment to leave these memos lying around, but it was equally wrong to serve them up for public consumption.  We have to be better than our enemies, not the same.

All may be fair in love and war, as the expression goes, but even where there now seems to have been little love, there needs to be an understanding that this is still not really war, so some standards need to be upheld.