Dirty South Bureau

A lot has gone down since the server that housed my blog went out. The big news:

The lawsuit to re-open Charity Hospital went to its first hearing in Civil District Court. Judge Ethel Simms Julien rejected LSU HSC-New Orleans claims that would have forced the case to go to court in Baton Rouge.

This is a big win. Baton Rouge may only be eighty-five miles away, but it’s another world in many respects. Baton Rouge judges have not been as sympathetic to these issues as our own have.

More by Justice Roars

Last week I also had the pleasure of meeting Eli Ackerman of the blog We Could Be Famous. I am impressed by his work, notably his filing of FOIA requests for the contracting process that landed Concordia and Parsons Engineering with the school facilities master plan contracts, requests that so far have resulted in his being stonewalled.

We Could Be Famous on Paul Vallas, Parsons and Concordia

Apparently Eli has a lot more time for research than I do, and thank God someone is doing it.

And lastly, there has been a leadership change at United Teachers of New Orleans (for the record: my day job) resulting in Larry Carter and Jim Randels being elected to President and Executive VP of UTNO.

UTNO website

My readers will pardon the delay with which I am passing on information about a fairly urgent situation. However, the sheer volume of work that the union has sent my way, plus the psychological exhaustion that comes from prolonged outrage have conspired to keep me from relaying this information clearly until now.

Ah, where to start?

Decision makers at the state level are planning on closing Frederick Douglass High School on St. Claude in the Upper 9th Ward. We know this for two reasons; one that no new freshmen were admitted last year, and that several weeks ago teachers at Douglass were pulled into a meeting and told that the school is being phased out.

The very way this is being done is sneaky and vague; likely because if these plans were publicly announced they could result in a huge PR problem for the RSD and State Superintendent Paul Pastorek.

But first, a bit about Douglass for those of you not familiar with the school.

Douglass High School

Frederick Douglass High School is in the 9th ward, on St. Claude between Pauline and Alvar. It’s in an old, poorly maintained but still beautiful pink art-deco building that straddles the block, across the street from Charles Drew Elementary. The names, Douglass and Drew, are more recent; those who grew up in the neighborhood in the 50’s and 60’s still remember them as Nicholls and Washington, respectively. Times change, demographics change, and with massive white flight, black power and a movement towards a recognition of black history, names change. I have only heard the process of renaming the school from that of a Confederate General to a radical trade unionist, former slave and abolitionist alluded to, and unfortunately have no concrete details for my readers.

The Ninth Ward (upper ninth, that is), with the exception of parts of the newly gentrified Bywater (between St. Claude and the river), is a low-income African American neighborhood with serious problems. The student body that goes to Douglass is almost exclusively black and almost exclusively free and reduced lunch. LEAP test scores are low, graduation rates are some of the lowest in the city.

It also has a lot of community support. Before the storm the Frederick Douglass Community Coalition was very active in school and the neighborhood surrounding it. The school is also one that participates in Kalamu Ya Salaam and Jim Randels’ nationally acclaimed writing program, Students at the Center (SAC). At Douglass, along with other public schools, Kalamu and Jim have been turning inner-city youth into writers and intellectuals for years now. It’s an incredibly hopeful and inspiring project.

Given the socio-economic status of the neighborhood, it would be extremely unlikely for Douglass not to have problems. But many people in the community support the school and see it as a place where there is a struggle to improve things for the children of the 9th.

The Plan to close Douglass

We are not sure who is behind this plan, but Pastorek would have to be massively out of touch to not know about it. As for RSD Superintendent Paul Vallas, he is likely not the originator of this plan but he is at least an accomplice, and has been making statements about the state’s designs for the school which range from dire to vague to downright contradictory.

Vallas claims that the decision not to bring in new freshmen in the ’07-’08 year was made before his tenure, which is probably true. However, I was at a BESE (state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education) meeting a few months ago where he and his financial team brought forth the RSD capital improvements budgets, and there was a very clear distinction between the schools that were to receive large amounts of funding for building renovations and those that weren’t. Douglass was among the schools that had very few funds allotted to them. Maybe Vallas was counting on the assumption that no-one concerned about Douglass would be at that meeting, as it is held during the work day in Baton Rouge. However there is a plan in the RSD that specifically does not allocate funds for the repair of Douglass and a number of other schools, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest.

This all came to a head at a very disappointing meeting with Paul Vallas last Tuesday, a meeting that was shocking for the sheer level of disregard Vallas displayed towards a group of concerned community members and stakeholders. Now, given that I am used to official disregard for community concerns, but the powers that be usually do a better job of hiding this than Vallas did. And it was not just anyone that met at Douglass- this was a group that included Jim Randels and Kalamu Ya Salaam of SAC, Gwen Adams of ACORN, musician Charmaine Neville, Reggie Lawson of Crescent City Peace Alliance, teachers and students at Douglass, and neighbors who live within blocks of the school.

The meeting

First, Vallas showed up half an hour late. Now, here in New Orleans meetings rarely start on time. But thirty minutes was excessive by anyone’s standards. This was followed by a presentation by Vincent Nzinga of the RSD, who gave one of the more absurd speeches I’ve heard yet, where he tried to associate the spirit of Frederick Douglass with a criminal justice academy in the Lower 9th, planned to replace the art-deco building on St. Claude, because Frederick Douglass was a lawyer.

I feel the need to point out to Mr. Nzinga some facts that he is likely aware of: that the 13th amendment does not apply to those duly convicted of a crime, and that the incarcerated population in America, particularly in the south, is disproportionately black. Many of us have realized that in the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, prison is the new slavery. And I feel the need to remind Mr. Nzinga that Frederick Douglass is primarily remembered not because he won a few court cases, but because he was an outspoken abolitionist.

I digress. This was followed by Mr. Vallas taking questions. Now, before we get too far into this, let me explain what a public meeting with Paul Vallas is like.

All of us got lungs at birth. Paul, he got lungs for, say, two or three people. The man can talk. Lord, he can talk. I’ve been at more public meetings with Paul Vallas than I can count. He talks, and talks, and talks. When people talk this much, you may think they have something important and/or profound to impart. However at the end of a meeting with Paul Vallas, one is often left with the realization that he has not committed to anything substantial except what he had already planned.

He also talks over people. Which he did quite a lot of at this meeting. To my knowledge no one has ever accused Paul Vallas of being a particularly good active listener. But this meeting was truly rare form.

Because this group wanted answers. Answers Mr. Vallas did not want to give.

He started off by dodging a question from a woman who had been teaching at Douglass for eight years and is temporarily in Illinois with her sick mother, questioning whether or not she was coming back. Vallas’ questioning the woman’s status was not received well by the crowd. Then Charmaine Neville got up and said that she knew a large number of tradesman and contractors who would be interested in working on the building for free. Vallas interrupted her to suggest that she bring them tomorrow to the school. Whether or not it was intended as so by Mr. Vallas, this was widely seen as a disrespectful brush-off and elicited hisses and angry remarks. But it was easy to see how. The entire meeting Vallas was defensive, awkward, angry.

At some point in the meeting (you will forgive my lack of chronology) Vallas passed out a brief report from Parsons Engineering which suggested that repairs to the school would be in the 30 million dollar range. Vallas repeatedly stated that he had no say in what would happen to the school building, saying that he only dealt with academics. For all of these questions, he referred us to the Master Plan.

Which brings me back to the rally to re-open Morris X. Jeff that I attended on Sunday April 6, 2008, where Torin Sanders of the OPSB (Orleans Parish School Board) stated that as much as he believes we should rebuild schools with that level of community support, that he’d have to refer to the Master Plan.

Master Plan? Many people in the meeting at Douglass were asking questions as they had never heard of a Master Plan.

Master Plan

At this point in the meeting I was able to clarify that the Master Plan that he refers to is the one being managed by Concordia Architects and Steven Bingler.

This is problematic for several reasons. One, Steven Bingler was sued by DeSoto Parish Schools in a situation that does not make Bingler and Concordia sound like very competent managers of school facilities.

Two, Steven Bingler is the brother-in-law of Sarah Usdin of New Schools For New Orleans (NSNO). It concerns me when you have those managing facilities with strong family ties to the heads of ideologically driven organizations like NSNO.

And you’ll have to pardon me, but I just don’t feel that NSNO has children’s best interests at heart, and I fear that ideology is clouding their vision. This is the group that, on their website, describes Katrina as an opportunity, and is spearheading bringing in large numbers of poorly-equipped recent Ivy League graduates to replace the veteran teachers in New Orleans. Multiple studies have shown that particularly in inner-city school districts, veteran teachers make a huge positive difference in test scores. But those like NSNO who are trying to replace a population because their analysis is that veteran teachers were the problem have ignored this data.

However, Bingler and his family connections are not the only problem here. Parsons Engineering has done quite a bit of work in Iraq, and the track record isn’t positive. A Washington Post reporter has described their Baghdad Police Academy, which literally rained feces from the ceiling, but this apparently is only one in a string of bad projects for Parsons.

To quote from the article:

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

Bowen’s office plans to release a 21-page report Thursday detailing the most alarming problems with the facility.

Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq’s security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.

Federal investigators said the inspector general’s findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.

The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.

“The truth needs to be told about what we didn’t get for our dollar from Parsons,” Bowen said.

There are already too many parallels in disaster profiteering between Baghdad and the Gulf Coast.

I left the meeting early, but from what I hear Althea Strong of American Friends Service Committee tried to pin Vallas down to a promise to stand behind the community, a promise he wouldn’t make.

The long and the short is this: Don’t count on Vallas or anyone at the state level for help, and frankly you should not be lulled into waiting for this dubious Master Plan. For the Douglass community, you are going to have to fight to keep your school.

To quote Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

Blog entry by Jim Randels on this meeting

Save Frederick Douglass

It’s sad to think that while I was busy working and sleeping during the vast majority of films at the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, I easily could have missed Saturday night’s premier of Ya Heard Me?, a groundbreaking documentary on Bounce.

This movie blew my mind. It starts pretty much as one would expect— gratuitous booty dancing shots, interviews with various artists and producers. But during the course of the film, it slowly peels away the layers not only to reveal Bounce as a highly original and powerful artistic expression of a people, but also to delve into the sexual politics of Bounce— from artist Mia X’s straight-up feminist lyrics to the entire “Sissy” scene, with artists like Katey Red making Bounce that is an expression of homosexual, trans culture.

The exploration of dance in the movie also moves beyond simple booty shaking to show a highly sophisticated form of dance that looks remarkably similar to traditional African dances, expressed in a contemporary, urban context. One has to wonder if the filmmakers intentionally led the viewers from stereotyped scenes deeper in slowly, to emphasize the contradictions between mainstream (often white) perceptions of Bounce and the real thing.

But perhaps the most powerful thread to run through the movie is Bounce as music that came out of New Orleans’ public housing developments. Many of the scenes are shot in and around projects such the Magnolia (CJ Peete), Calliope (BW Cooper) and Melpomene developments (large sections of Calliope and all of Magnolia are now piles of rubble). The term “project music” is repeatedly used by musicians and producers to describe Bounce, and it is a powerful irony to see the celebration of this culture at the moment it is most threatened, which the film also explores, tracking the displacement of artists such as Cheeky Blakk.

Big shout out to Jordan Flaherty, an organizer of the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, for making this possible. Jordan struck a powerful chord in his introduction to the film, hinting at the importance of recognizing the range of cultural achievements of this city, particularly when they are left out by the self-appointed arbiters of New Orleans music culture such as (he did not mention them by name) WWOZ.

Incidentally, I’ve heard rumors that OZ has finally grudgingly acknowledged the cultural importance of New Orleans Hip-Hop and begun letting certain DJ’s play Hip-Hop and Bounce. I have yet to hear any of that on the station. Last thing I knew OZ had a strict no Hip-Hop policy. To quote DJ Davis “When they said community music, I didn’t realize they meant the community of white Yankees who listen to black music from forty years ago instead of the community of thirty-year old black people who actually live here and make music.”

So for the time being, Bounce, instead of having non-profit and foundation backing like Jazz and other “acceptable” forms of music, is sold out of trunks at gas stations.

Little changes. It’s important to remember that Jazz was originally as unacceptable to mainstream white culture as Hip-hop is, that white musicians were drawn to it (like Hip-hop), that in many ways it was co-opted, and that now that it is no longer considered a threat to mainstream white culture it is acceptable. I have to wonder if Hip-hop (and Bounce) will follow a similar trajectory.

Yaheardmefilm.com

Nolahumanrights.org

Looking back recently, I’ve realized that in all the rush to fight the impending demolition of public housing as we know it in New Orleans, that I and others have never really taken the time to explain the specifics of why we oppose the demolitions. Maybe it just seemed to obvious that the demolition of hundreds of units of livable housing was simply too absurd and too wrong to even bother to explain given the institutionalized displacement of over one hundred thousand residents of New Orleans and the severity of the housing crisis that we are experiencing.

But it is worth explaining, and the details are important.

First, let me be clear that I speak only on behalf of myself and that others in the movement to stop the demolitions may disagree with me on some or all of these points.

Some may be surprised to hear that both I and some other allies of public housing residents agree that mixed income developments are a better strategy for public housing than the old, Fordist warehousing of poor people. Yes, you heard me right— concentrating large numbers of poor people in massive developments may have seemed OK in the 1930’s- 1950’s, but I don’t believe it is a good idea today.

As a caveat, I don’t think concentration of poverty is at the root of the social ills that policymakers describe in their rush to destroy public housing. Policymakers are frequently confusing the problems of concentration of poverty with the problems of poverty itself. For instance, there is violence around the drug trade in low-income communities in many American cities. This is true if the poor are concentrated or spread out; in fact since the mixing up of returning New Orleanians post-storm there is generally more violence, reflected in our higher per-capita murder rate. No amount of moving people around in the shell game that we call our housing policy has changed that.

Why then, are we opposed to the demolition of public housing if it results in mixed-income redevelopments? First, because it doesn’t.

There is simply no reason to believe that any of the entities involved in the redevelopment of public housing— developers, the assorted opportunistic non-profits or HANO/HUD— have any intention of allowing the vast majority of the poor who lived in these developments pre-storm to return to the new developments. Developers like Columbia Residential, who has the contract for the St. Bernard Redevelopment, are corporations like any other and exist to turn a profit. It is simply more profitable to skew the numbers to create more “market-rate” units, and it is easier to sell, lease and rent these units for larger profits if there are fewer poor people living near by.

These sort of mixed-income developments could potentially work if there was stringent government oversight of the process to assure compliance with an income mix that allowed the majority of low-income residents to return. This approach appears to have worked in such cities as San Francisco, where the Valencia Gardens Development appears to be a successful HOPE VI redevelopment.

However, can anyone argue that known crooks like Alphonso Jackson- who resigned amid an FBI investigation, or the HANO bureaucrats— who had their office taken over in 2002 for massive mismanagement— are effective stewards of the public good?

More importantly, we watched this process go down in River Gardens, the St. Thomas Redevelopment. An excellent master’s thesis by Brod Bagert Jr., now an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, lays out much of what happened when the foxes guarded the hen house. In a nutshell, Pres Kabacoff of HRI, the developer, fudged the numbers and the New Orleans City Council, as now, looked the other way.

There is no reason to believe that homes in these mixed-income redevelopments will ever materialize for the vast majority of public housing residents.

(Side note- Kabacoff is now trying to redevelop his own image with the assistance of a white voodoo-priestess girlfriend and a new development on St. Claude in the 8th ward that includes a police substation and a food co-op housed in a “healing center”. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.)

Second, even given the laughable contention that any significant numbers of public housing residents might be allowed to return to the new developments, there is still the issue of time. It will be years before any of these redevelopments are rebuilt; some units may be opened as soon as 2009. So for every public housing resident who returns to a “mixed-income” redevelopment, there is first 4-6 years of unnecessary displacement.

Scott Keller, assistant to Alphonso Jackson, called the post-Katrina situation an “opportunity” in 2006. I again feel the need to tactfully explain to all the big wigs and suits out there that this was not an “opportunity” for the tens of thousands of men, women and children evacuated from public housing, this was a disaster. Losing your home and having to find a new one for 4-6 years in a city where rent has more than doubled is not an “opportunity”.

If there was even a shred of consideration for the residents of public housing, redevelopment would have occurred in stages, with residents moved back in to a majority of easily cleaned-out units while the redevelopment occurred one development at a time. But there wasn’t.

The situation of Charity Hospital is very similar. If LSU Health Sciences Center had any concern for the low-income residents of the city who depended on Charity, they would have allowed the crew of military and hospital personnel to re-open Charity while they work on their “dream” hospital. But they don’t. In the case of both Charity and public housing, the people of New Orleans are pawns to be swept aside in the grandiose dreams of the powerful.

Lord knows pubic housing in New Orleans needed an overhaul; most significantly some maintenance of otherwise excellent buildings. How about keeping the developments but reintroducing the street grid, as was recommended in District 4 of the Unified New Orleans Plan?. Frankly, I would support an overhaul of public housing if it was done with real involvement of the residents and a plan to bring back those who wanted to return while redevelopment occurred in stages.

What is happening right now is not an overhaul, it is wanton destruction of not only buildings but lives. It is a totally unnecessary human rights catastrophe, and makes a mockery of the concept of mixed income.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson stepped down yesterday. If I am saddened by this news, it is only because he resigned after doing so much damage to the lives of so many men, women and children in the city of New Orleans, and that he was not stopped earlier.

It is ironic that Jackson’s resignation comes less than a week after the final accomplishment of his wantonly destructive tenure at HUD- the granting by the city of New Orleans of a demolition permit for the Lafitte Housing Development.

But not to fear; Jackson losing his job will likely not be a time of instability, like it would be if you or I lost our employment. I am sure Jackson’s friends at Columbia Residential, Jackson’s former employer and the company he awarded with a contract to oversee the redevelopment (read: destruction) of the St. Bernard Development, will not allow Jackson to see tough times. Like most former cabinet-level officials, Jackson will be free to return to the world of private industry which did him so well on his way to the top.

There are more than a few similarities between Jackson and another prominent Bush appointee who resigned amid scandal, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Both have lives that read like sinister versions of the Horatio Alger myth. Both are men of color who were born into poverty in large families, to fathers who labored in humble jobs. They are amazing examples of the kind of class mobility that America has prided itself on, often exaggerated in our national mythology of who were are. But Jackson and Gonzales were the real deal; hard-working, ambitious men whose rise would be unthinkable in the pre-civil rights era.

What happened to make these men forget where they came from, and to turn them into the monsters they became? They represent a curious trend in American society. Unlike the blue-bloods who run, say, the Times-Picayune, these men knew poverty and want, rose above it, and then proceeded to mercilessly sacrifice those still trapped below them to their own massive ambitions.

The administration of Bush Jr., himself a patrician and a faux-Texan, will be remembered for promoting a large number of minorities to cabinet-level positions. They appear to have made a study of finding the most ruthless, unscrupulous and spineless African-Americans and Latinos to fill these positions. It is truly a PR feat. Rove, or whoever else has been running the Bush machine, is very clever to have used these individuals to do their dirty work while still paying homage to equal opportunity employment. In this case, it reads more like equal opportunity oppression.

Ultimately, Jackson’s resignation is too late for the homeless under the interstate, and for those in semi-permanent exile in Houston. The Magnolia (C J Peete) Development has already been flattened, and demolition is underway on both parts of B W Cooper and St. Bernard. New Orleans now has a 4% homeless rate, four times that of most major US cities. Most of them, like the overwhelming majority of the poor in New Orleans, are of course black.

Maybe Horatio Alger wouldn’t be the best person to write Jackson’s story. It’s a pity Theodore Dreiser isn’t still around.

Driving by work today I drove past the ruins of what was formerly the St. Bernard Housing Development. Block after block is now rubble; cranes smash what was formerly livable, if not particularly well maintained, housing. Rumor has it that the development will be replaced with a private golf course.

This is what “free-market” restructuring looks like on the ground: the wanton destruction of sound homes in the interests of lining the pockets of developers and politicians. Today, housing, tomorrow, golf courses.

Meanwhile, go under the I-10 on Claiborne, or go to the streets of any major city, and you will see what happens when we as a society don’t ensure the human right to housing.

Alphonso Jackson, George Bush, Mayor Ray Nagin, and every member of the New Orleans City Council will be remembered by future generations as criminals and the restructuring of Katrina which they oversaw as a human rights catastrophe. Already the UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has condemned these actions.

Full report

But all of this is too late for the people living under the overpass. As for me, I’m just sick.

The most glorious image I have seen in years came across my computer screen the other day… the image of families and streams of people crossing the collapsed remains of the wall between Gaza and Egypt. Can there be any sight more affirming to the human spirit than human beings crossing the barriers that keep them from other people… and in our contemporary era, from the things that they need- such as, in this case, food, medicine and fuel?

We cheered when the Berlin Wall fell, and people all over the world should cheer now. And yet this morning, I found myself looking at another curious sight… Counterpunch publisher and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn endorsing Ron Paul for president in the January 21 edition of The Nation (I know, I’m a week late reading this one). In Coburn’s deeply creepy column, he speaks about seeing the faces of the people with Ron Paul bumper stickers pass him on the highways of his northern California retreat and liking what he sees. I don’t know, Alex… is that because they look like you? White country folk?

I dislike even writing about Ron Paul, who to me is just another small time right-wing nut, like the pathetic two dozen white supremacists who marched in Jena on Monday (surrounded by, according to the AP, ten times their number of counter-protesters), or former presidential spoiler Ross Perot. But lately folks like Cockburn and Stan Goff have been supporting him, and so I feel like I need to come out and say it.

Now I know that the Iraq war is the most important issue in this election, and that Ron Paul has voted consistently against the war- unlike Hillary Clinton or John Edwards (Obama wasn’t in a position to, but has scary enough foreign policy statements). But there are plenty of people who oppose the war these days, and frankly that isn’t enough for me. And here’s why.

Ron Paul wants a more “secure” militarized border. Read— big wall between us and Mexico. In the twenty-first century, this is not only sick and wrong, but it is deeply backwards. Coburn mentioned that he liked Paul’s commitment to “Jeffersonian democracy”, which should tell you something- that Ron Paul is stuck in the early 19th century. Of course he opposed the Iraq war- he’s a nativist isolationist, and his ideas are worthy of the Know-Nothing Party.

True, Paul would avoid certain foreign policy decisions that increase the stimulus for immigration. But it’s too late for that. We have populations in much of Latin America who have been pushed to desperation through lopsided trade policies and other means of economic warfare, and now they are coming here.

You may be asking yourself- what does this have to do with New Orleans?

New Orleans, as a city, is proof of the power of diversity. The greatness of this city cannot even be taken away in our recent ruin, because the gifts New Orleans gave the rest of the world shaped and at times defined world culture in the twentieth century. With our Spanish and Caribbean architecture, our African-American rhythms set to European-American instruments, our African parades, Catholic-French/Latin carnivals, our African and Italian food, we remain the most culturally rich city in the nation. And we owe all of this to our mixed heritage. This was, according to geographer Richard Campanella, the most diverse city in America one hundred years ago, because of large numbers of descendants of slaves and immigrants.

Who are we to say that our ancestors, who created all of this, were the ‘worthy’ immigrants, and the new immigrants are unworthy? It is not only hypocrisy. It is self-defeating. Today Hondurenos, Mexicans and other Latino immigrants are rebuilding this city faster than it ever would be rebuilt otherwise.

To Ron Paul and all of his supporters: this is the twenty-first century, folks- not the nineteenth. Get on board. Walls didn’t work then and won’t work now. And when they fall, get ready to meet your neighbors- “over the obscene boundaries.”

So the DSB is back after a lengthy hiatus… actually in the interests of full disclosure I got a new job working for the teachers union. And let me also say that anything that I say here on this blog is my own personal opinion and should in no way be connected to the union.

And what’s new on the horizon (drumroll please…) Alphonso Jackson send us bulldozers for Christmas! And the City Council lacks the guts to do anything about it! Maybe this is because in our electoral apathy we allowed a devout gentrificationist and a woman who epitomizes hatred of poor people to be elected?

Where to start? Alphonso Jackson’s compromising relationship with Columbia Residential?

12,000 homeless people on the streets of New Orleans?

Blatantly biased reporting from that paragon of journalism that we know as our daily paper? (Love those 64-word lead sentences with no clear connection between clauses, guys.)

All I know is that I have sent my letters to Midura and Fielkow, and I am going to be at the City Council Meeting tomorrow morning, Thursday, December 20.

My letter to Shelly Midura:

Dear Councilwoman Midura,

I live in your district in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and I am asking you to vote not to allow HUD to demolish the CJ Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard Developments.

Though I lived in District C at the time, I was glad when you defeated Jay Batt. You seemed like a person of compassion and integrity. This vote will be a test of those qualities.

We all agree that public housing in this city needs to be improved. But HUD’s plan is privatization, not improvement. It will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in senseless destruction and will not provide enough low-income housing for New Orleanians who want to come home.

There are other plans that have been approved by the city government, including your office, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, which provide for some demolition but also renovating and improving much of the city’s public housing instead of wantonly destroying it. This plan was arrived at in a democratic and inclusive manner and is supposed to be the official plan for rebuilding the city. I implore you to follow our city’s plan instead of arbitrary and destructive measures put forth by a federal government which has repeatedly shown a lack of care for this city and our people.

There is an article in the art and design section of the New York Times which describes better than I can what a waste destroying these buildings is. Before you vote you should read it— the historical and architectural value of these projects, especially Lafitte, is immense.

But it is the people, not the buildings, who are the real issue. There is a housing crisis in this city of epic proportions, and tearing down thousands of units will make it worse. It will take at least three years to rebuild any of these developments, which will only contain a fraction of the affordable housing. Many poor people simply cannot afford to move back to this city. The failure of the federal and state government to provide for a way for these internally displaced citizens to come home is a violation of international human rights law. If you vote for demolition, you will be a party to that crime.

Please make the right choice, the humane choice, the compassionate choice. Do not allow these demolitions.

Christian Roselund

Nia Robertson was killed on Wednesday night, August 15th at a neighborhood bar in Mid-City. I had met her there maybe a week ago. She was warm, intelligent and attractive. I recall asking where she was from, and she explained that her New Orleans accent had been eroded somewhat by a few years away at college. She was 25.

People are killed every day in New Orleans. And the murders often appear senseless to many of us. But the incredible recklessness of this one stands out. A young woman in the prime of her life, her throat cut by someone she apparently didn’t know.

A number of things stand out about this murder. In the discussions of crime on the internet, in bars - anywhere where either anonymity or privacy is available, my fellow white people frequently talk about “the thugs”. It is no secret that many of those who do the killing, as well as those killed, are young black men. And whites in this city fear “the thugs” in a way that is racialized.

The Times-Picayune doesn’t print the races of those who are charged with murder - a good practice in a city where racial mob violence is a not-so-distant historical reality. However, the killer here has a Slavic last name (probably Polish or Serbian- note the cz). There are only a few Pal’s regulars who are black men, and none I’ve met are anywhere near 35.

So it appears that a white man killed a young, college-educated black woman.

Helen Hill’s death galvanized white communities in the downtown neighborhoods- the death of a promising young white woman and a mother of a young child. In a city where people die every day, the death of Helen Hill sparked outrage.

Will there be similar outrage now?

I for one want to know what could have been done to prevent this killing. There are a number of details that stand out to me. First, the killing was done quickly without any warning. This is not a murder that any number of police could have prevented unless we have police officers on every other barstool at Pal’s and every other bar. Incidentally, that would make me stop drinking. So those who suggest that an improved criminal justice system could have prevented this are either being delusional or they are thinking of a sci-fi psychic-prevention crime techniques like one in the movie Minority Report.

Second, the man claimed to be ex-military. Was this another murderer created by the US government who finally snapped? According to the Times-Picayune article the co-owner of Pal’s says that the whole process happened very rapidly. Was this a trained killer who used his abilities on an American instead of a foreigner, say an Iraqi, like he was trained to do?

This is also a man who had been fighting at work and had threatened to kill co-workers. I will note the absence of a mental health infrastructure, exacerbated by the loss of Charity Hospital, to deal with all the certifiable mentally unsound people in this city. Could this murder have been prevented by adequate mental health services in the city of New Orleans?

Finally, Nia was rushed to the hospital and died during surgery. The hospital is not mentioned in the article. Was it University? I will note the loss of the excellent level one trauma center at Charity Hospital. Incidentally, a good friend of mine who was an Emergency Room doctor at Charity just moved to Newfoundland, largely as a result of the disappearance of the hospital. Could the highly experienced ER doctors who worked at Charity have saved her life if it was open?

We will likely never know the answers to whether or not improved mental health services or an open Charity Hospital could have prevented Nia’s death. With time we may find out if this was a murderer who was created by the US Government, or if the man was idly boasting of a background that he did not possess.

Either way, a beautiful young woman is dead for no good reason.

I went out to Lafayette on Saturday for the Festival International. I got a little carried away, stayed too long, skipped out on my ride back, drank too much, spent too much money, said the wrong things and spent the next morning hung over wandering the streets of Lafayette, feeling like Johnny Cash’s Sunday Morning Coming Down. Lafayette is a pretty town, and feels affluent; everywhere I saw happy, well-fed Cajuns. Of course, every American city I’ve gone to looks affluent after New Orleans.

Made my way down to the Greyhound station and borrowing a cell phone I met two other New Orleanians, a girl going to school at Loyola and Eddie the Cake Man.

Eddie lived in the seventh ward before the storm, in an apartment building on Claiborne next to the freeway painted purple and yellow. When I met him he had a small bag at his feet with his rolling skates; he was headed fifty miles away to Baton Rouge to go skating and would come back tonight on the Grey Dog. Ed is fifty-seven and a veteran. He is soft-spoken, and gentle, and looks you straight in the eye when he talks.

Eddie’s story came spilling out of him like an open bag of rice falling over.

Ed’s mother died during evacuation in Michigan. He showed us pictures of his mother on his camera phone; kind of like a digital version of the photos of my ex-girlfriend and little sister that I have in my wallet. He had several pictures of her in there, and scrolled through them for us. Another Katrina casualty; an eighty-year old woman in poor health who had to take a road trip that lasted more than twelve hours. He says her house was almost fixed up when she passed in Michigan.

Ed’s father died a year before, and his sister a year before that. A friend of Eddie’s and his whole family died in their house in the rapid flooding in the lower 9th. Eddie tried to move back to New Orleans and live in a FEMA trailer, but the formaldehyde off-gassing made him sick (like most people he didn’t know that you are supposed to run the air conditioning all the time to help deal with the toxic gas chamber that FEMA trailers are). He says the city was just too much of a mess, so he came out to Lafayette to live with his daughter.

Eddie got a job with a baker here, he says he just called him up and he hired him. His specialty is cake decorating, he says he can do everything including comic book figures for kid’s cakes. Never went to school just taught himself. He says his website is on the way.

Eddie says that the Prozac helps, that before he started taking it he would just ball of on the sofa. He can’t afford individual therapy but is going to group therapy. He speaks slowly and with no shame. The thing that really helps him, though, is skating; before the storm he would go to the lanes on Terry Parkway in the West Bank. And now he waits for the Greyhound to go to Baton Rouge.

Someday he says he wants to move back to New Orleans but he doesn’t know when.

I wonder how many people there waiting at Greyhound stations like Ed. And it matters, because it’s more significant when two people suffer than one. On the other hand the mathematics of suffering can be misleading; the other people aren’t Ed and they aren’t standing in front of me with their soft voices, steady brown eyes and roller skate bags. There is aggregate of human misery, the numbers and statistics, and then there is Ed the Cake Man.

Ed tells us that a doctor he saw in Lafayette told him that the Hurricane was two years ago and that he should get over it.

“What a bunch of bullshit”, I respond.

“Thank you”, he says quietly. And he goes on to explain the thing that everyone down here knows and that for some reason people in the rest of the country seem to have a hard time grasping. The hurricane is not over for Ed the Cake Man. And it won’t be any time soon.

So I moved six months ago to a new apartment, which is in Mid-City/Bayou St. John. I always have to explain to folks who are visiting that there are actually neighborhoods and meta-neighborhoods in New Orleans, and that they sometimes have the same name, for example Uptown can mean anything on that side of the interstate or it can mean Uptown proper, which is a much smaller area. So Mid-City is my meta-neighborhood, and Bayou St. John is the neighborhood, though my block feels more like the back of the Treme (which is right across Broad). I guess I am also living in the 5th ward, but I am neither black nor did I grow up here.

Today is a beautiful day, first day of Jazz Fest, and the streets (which often have no sidewalks) are filled with parked cars. A high school kid is playing the trumpet outside.

Bayou St. John is a funny neighborhood. It’s mildly affluent in parts, Ursulines which is one block away has noticeably wealthy sections. But the part I live in is mostly low-income and mostly black, but with enough other white folks that I don’t feel like an intruder. This part of Mid-City feels sweet and lazy and even more laid back than other neighborhoods here. More private too, quieter than the neighborhoods nearer the river.

Of course on New Years my immediate intersection was a war zone of fireworks from five in the afternoon to four in the morning. People get down here, but mostly you see them on stoops and porches, or coming home from work. A man named Blue with gold teeth talked to me last time I was working on my truck about carpentry work. I have discovered no way as good to meet my neighbors as regular automotive repair.

Pal’s is my new neighborhood bar, a bar that I had been flirting with for years. It used to feel cool and quiet and like a getaway- six months after moving down the street I don’t go there as often. Reminds me of some relationships. I, like most other people, must be a sucker for the allure of the inaccessible. Or maybe it’s the new bartenders, some of whom fail to live up to the legendary charm of the old ones.

Soprano’s, the local grocery, has not lost its charm. The place is your typical ghetto grocery story, canned food, toilet paper and beer, except that it has a kitchen and serves hot food. The walls are decorated with autographed photos from the Soprano’s TV show, which the proprietor, a man from the Middle East, is apparently obsessed with. I don’t know how long he has been here, he halfway talks like a Yat and has decided that I am German, so he greets me with a “boomstig shaiza! (or something like that in German) every time I show up. He has a mischievous gleam in his eyes and is constantly in motion. I wonder about the source of his constant energy, stuck there behind the counter with toothpaste, chewing gum and cheap cigars.

Whenever he grabs my hand to shake it vigorously I notice again that he is missing the last digit of his index finger. There’s a small sticker of a flag on the back of his car, I think it is Palestine. I can’t seem to bring myself to ask him about either one of these things.

And he’s hard to keep up with sometimes. At times like this I will smile and slip out to the street, to the cool under the oaks, to the stars which are more visible with the lack of streetlights, to the night air which is filled with distant sounds- cars and children, couples arguing, and the sounds harder to hear, and indistinct, somewhere out there people are making love, fighting, eating, living. And the clean smell of the banana trees, of food cooking, all the growing things, and the earth.

I found myself in the Dragon’s Den the other night to catch some hip-hop. For those of you who don’t know, the Dragon’s Den is a little club in the Marigny that used to sit on top of a Thai food place (which has been replaced by Z’otz 3, which is a far cry from the elegant weirdness of the original Z’otz; duplicates and sequels are almost always inferior, but I digress). Regardless, Dragon’s Den is a strange dark space reminiscent of a broke downtown take on an opium den that has a wide assortment of music ranging from hip hop to gutter punk orchestral pieces.

I digress again… this night the music was something between hip hop and soul. Being a consummate honky, I find myself at a loss to describe it further. Music, most things in New Orleans, is subtly but definitively segregated, and I was glad to have yet another opportunity to view this other world without feeling like I was intruding. Besides, the music was good, even if I didn’t get all the musical and cultural references. I had come with my friend Miss Maybe, and we made our way back to sit on the wrought iron porch which is among Dragon’s Den’s best features. Before long we were beset by a number of lost individuals including a self-important Common Grounder. We sat and smoked an enjoyed the light rain despite these distractions.

Before long a couple sat down across from us; a black man and a pretty woman with blond curly hair. As we sat there, the delicate quiet was broken by a question:

“Are you mixed?”

The question was directed at Miss Maybe. She is someone who is fairly obviously of both African and European descent, pale coffee colored skin and facial features that suggest both. I winced- Miss Maybe is quite capable of laying down the law when confronted with someone saying something inappropriate, and questioning ethnicity is a hell of a way of saying Hi.

Miss Maybe took a moment to respond. “Yes, I am.”

The woman did not miss a beat. “Was your mother white?” she asked.

“No”, replied MM, her voice betraying a hairline crack of annoyance. “My father is white.”

“Oh.” Said the girl. There was something doe-like and innocent about her large eyes, which were focused on Miss M. “Do you identify as mixed?” asked the girl, blithely.

This was really too much. Who was this white girl to be asking M. Maybe about the details of her ethnicity? What fucking business was it of hers? Yet she approached with a naiveté that was curious and somewhat unnerving.

“I identify as black”, Miss Maybe stated. “Mixed has no political power.”

In addition to “What the Fuck?” another question was standing outside ringing the doorbell. Who isn’t mixed? I mean, I look damned “white” and despite nearly all my known ancestry arriving from Northern Europe fairly recently, I’ve got Paiute Indian blood five generations back (or so my family thinks). How many Black Americans don’t have some European ancestry after centuries of slavery and rape? How many white people whose families have lived in New Orleans for a few generations don’t have any African blood somewhere in there? How many people successfully “passe blanc”, to create this utterly false and hegemonic idea of “White”.

And if you want to go back further, how many Europeans don’t have an influx of East Asian genetics via the Mongols and the Magyar (Hungarians), or the Finno-Ugric peoples (Finns, Estonians)? Or Turkish blood from the centuries the Turks were in the Balkans? Or African blood in Italians, Spaniards and French via the Moors? Or Semitic blood? What the fuck is “White”, anyway?

My annoyance finally broke through, and I asked the girl- “Are _you_ mixed?”

“Yes”, she replied, and immediately I saw the African features in her face, and the green eyes under the blond hair. And I realized that she was asking these questions as much of herself as of Miss Maybe.

And I shut up.

By Sean Benjamin

In addition to flooding 80% of the city, Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 50,000 rental apartment units. A small portion of these have since been refurbished, but the vast majority are still unlivable and the city still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing 19 months after the storm. Rents have skyrocketed since the storm; landlords have taken the opportunity to jack up the rents on the apartments that are still livable. Apartments that used to rent for as little as $400-500 before the storm now regularly rent for between $800 and $1200. In many cases, rents have more than doubled as the pressures of a drastically-reduced housing stock and the lack of price regulation allow landlords to gouge their tenants. The folks who still haven’t returned home since the storm regularly cite a lack of affordable rental housing as one of the main reasons they are unable to come home to New Orleans.

For the first six months after the storm, I was working with a group called NOHEAT (New Orleans Emergency Housing Action Team) to fight rent increases and evictions. NOHEAT doesn’t exist any more, but high rents are still a huge problem. Since NOHEAT disbanded last year, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) Tenants Rights Working Group has been doing the bulk of the organizing around issues of fighting high rents. This week they managed to get a hearing before the City Council to demand rent control and the creation of a board of New Orleans renters mandated to defend the rights of tenants and to have a voice for tenants in the rebuilding process. I haven’t been very involved in the housing struggle lately, but when the PHRF called for a large turnout of renters to this City Council meeting, I figured I’d better attend.

Malcolm Suber from the PHRF led a team of presenters to outline the urgency of the housing crisis in front of City Council. He didn’t rant about ‘ethnic cleansing’ or chew the scenery the way that some of the city’s self-proclaimed housing advocates are in the habit of doing; his approach was calm, considered, and was amply backed up with statistics and with testimony from renters and displaced New Orleans residents. He explained that affordable rents were necessary so that the low-wage workers central to the city’s economy could return, and that the lack of affordable housing was a major obstacle to the return of displaced residents and to the city’s reconstruction efforts. The PHRF proposal called for the creation of a city-wide tenants’ council to represent the interests of tenants in all decisions made regarding the reconstruction of the city. He also pointed out that it’s the City Council’s responsibility to protect its citizens by regulating exorbitant rents and demanded the enactment of an anti-price-gouging and rent control ordinance using August 2005 rents as a retroactive benchmark and allowing for modest annual increases to account for increased costs of property insurance after the storm. The PHRF delegation also submitted a 10,000-signature petition in support of these demands.

I doubt Malcolm Suber or the PHRF is under the illusion that the City Council has any real interest in counter-acting the landlords’ price gouging. He’s a solid socialist with decades of community organizing experience, and he’s well aware of the class interests of the Council and the purpose it serves within the city’s economic power structure. But publicly coming before the Council and demanding that it take a strong stand for the citizens it ostensibly serves was the right approach to take. The councillors, for their part, knew they had to appear sympathetic so that when the meeting was covered on the evening news they’d look like they have the interests of tenants at heart. The Council referred the proposal to the housing sub-committee, and most of them made appropriate noises about the urgency of the problem and the need to find ways for displaced New Orleans residents to return. Most of them, that is, except for Stacy Head.

Stacy Head made no attempt to hide her disrespect for the presentation and her disagreement with the need for protection of tenants’ rights. She spent the entire length of the PHRF presentation sighing, scowling, rolling her eyes, and whispering indignantly to James Carter and Shelly Midura, the two councillors sitting beside her. She interrupted Malcolm Suber a number of times to angrily insist that landlords faced insurmountable hardships in insurance costs and that they were the real victims needing protection. (Never mind that the PHRF proposal took into account the fact that small landlords needed to deal with increased insurance and repair costs; they recommended a combination of amortization and pressure on the state legislature to enact controls on insurance companies.)

Later, a former resident of the Lower Ninth Ward got up to testify that he’d been the owner of a small local hip-hop record label before the storm, but he couldn’t come home to contribute to the economy because of high rents and he was still stuck in Baton Rouge while commuting to the city every day. Stacy Head showed him even more contempt. She refused to believe he couldn’t find affordable housing in the city. “You’re a young man,” (I’d guess he was in his 30s) she said with that mixture of disdain and patronizing sweetness that only a yuppie can muster. “You’re probably looking for - what – a one-bedroom?” No, he said, he was actually a family man with two kids to support. “Well, there’s a website you might try looking at; it’s called Craigslist, and it’s got all sorts of listings for apartments available. I’m sure you can find something there.” This in the same cloying, falsely-helpful tones as before, as if it had never occurred to a man trying for months to get his family home and re-start his business that there might actually be apartments listed on *gasp!* the Internet! The audience murmured angrily at her patronizing suggestions, but she kept going with her lecture on Apartment-Hunting 101, completely unaware of how offensive her assumptions were.

So apparently to the Stacy Heads of the city, the housing problem is not due to high rents, lack of livable apartment units, or shuttered public housing; it’s just that these complainers just aren’t resourceful enough to find apartments for themselves. They just need to look harder. The same goes for jobs, I presume. It’s not that unemployment is a built-in side-effect of contemporary capitalism, or that New Orleans’s economy is dominated by low-wage tourism and service-industry jobs through any consequence of the way the city has been run for the last fifty years. No, it’s that people just don’t have the dedication or stick-to-it-iveness to create opportunities for themselves. It’s their own fault, really…….

Stacy Head isn’t the only opponent of affordable housing on New Orleans City Council by any means. The two Cynthias (Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis) are also allied with developers’ interests and just as opposed to affordable housing. But they manage to talk a good talk, making populist appeals to bringing New Orleanians home while at the same time opposing the construction of affordable housing complexes in their districts. In the time-honored tradition of two-faced New Orleans politicians, they manage to fool a lot of people into thinking they represent the interests of regular folks. But Stacy Head doesn’t even try to seem sympathetic to the needs of tenants. She’s an open unabashed representative of real-estate developers, yuppie gentrifiers, and landlords. During her election campaign last year, one of her most-trumpeted qualifications for elected office was that she had bought a number of run-down rental properties, renovated them, and resold them for a tidy profit. She’s a landlord and gentrifier, plain and simple.

Stacy Head is the Jackie Clarkson for a new generation. Jackie Clarkson was also unabashedly in bed with big money real estate and developer interests, but she was also a caricature of herself: showy, flamboyant, New Orleans old money. Even if you knew she was on the opposing side in most issues, she was just too silly to take seriously. Stacy Head’s got an updated image: young, educated, professional, eloquent, with just enough of a veneer of good-government reform credentials to make her look progressive in some circles. It’s been less than a year since she was elected, and a lot of people were happy to see her defeat Renee Gill Pratt in last year’s election. Pratt was an old-style New Orleans politician of the worst kind: incompetent, openly corrupt, and solidly connected to one of the city’s most powerful political machines. She needed to go. But her replacement is one of the most dangerous politicians operating in New Orleans today.

A couple of the characters responsible for the dissolution of NOHEAT are still around, attaching themselves to the campaign to re-open New Orleans’s shuttered public housing developments. They’ve already singled out Stacy Head as an opponent of affordable housing and as a representative of landlords’ and real estate developers’ interests, and they’ve been picketing her Uptown house for the past couple of weekends. These folks are very problematic. They’re textbook examples of how not to do community organizing; they’ve got a strident, pompous, abrasive vanguardist approach which turns most people off. In any genuinely revolutionary situation, they’d probably be more likely to be strung up as ‘enemies of the people’ than be accepted in the kind of leadership role they aspire to. In fact, their outsized presence in New Orleans housing campaigns is a big reason why I’m not very involved anymore. But once in a while these guys just might have the right idea, and I’m starting to think that their targeting of Stacy Head as a major enemy in the housing struggle is a good choice.

I’ve always liked the idea of using home demos as a way to personalize a struggle and give faces and names to our opponents. Anarchists in Montreal used to organize “proletarian field trips” to the wealthy suburb of Westmount, and one of the best New Orleans demos I’ve been to took place outside a George W. Bush fundraiser at a country club amid the mansions of Old Metairie. The ruling class doesn’t like it when we come into their neighborhoods to raise a ruckus, and it’s also a good way to promote class warfare. In any case, a stepped-up campaign against Stacy Head at her home (and her law firm, for that matter) is a step forward in the fight for affordable housing.

Photos from the Council meeting: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=895693&galleryId=52565

Link to the text of the PHRF council presentation: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/storage/documents/council_presentation.doc

Stacy Head’s website: http://www.stacyhead.com/

I ran into my old friend and client Matt Ryan today and found out that Pete Smith has passed.

Pete Smith was someone most folks outside of the Irish channel and the 9th ward won’t know. Pete was a carpenter, a musician, and a vagabond- he had built houses and played music all over the country. He was a kind and gentle soul who never had a bad word to say about anyone.

I learned a lot from Pete. He was a master of the sort of reconstructive carpentry that is needed these days in New Orleans. He had large, heavy hands and worked very carefully. Probably the only reason that the building between First and Phillip on Magazine that we spent nine months fixing up didn’t collapse on our heads was because of Pete’s skill with hydraulic jacks and braces.

Pete was a fine musician as well, played the mandolin beautifully. He made a mean Spanakopita, too. You wouldn’t think that the skinny old man who looked like Willy Nelson could do things like that with those big hands. I had the feeling he could cook other things, but I never knew. He was always glad to see you, and he had a personal warmth and charm that affected everyone around him. I met only one person who didn’t get along with Pete, and the individual in question didn’t get along with anyone else, including himself.

We called him Old Pete, and he was beloved in the neighborhood. I am not exaggerating when I say that he was like a holy man, a holy man who was also an alcoholic. Pete drank too much and all the time. Not only did it keep him poor for the years that I knew him but it probably contributed to his untimely death.

I can still hear his rich voice in my skull, and see him shaking his big hands in that peculiar physical expression of his.

There are a half dozen houses around this city, maybe more, that are fine homes for people because of Pete Smith. I know of three myself, one of which is four two-bedroom apartments. There are businesses that operate in spaces that he constructed out of the shells of falling apart buildings. And the people who live there will never dream of the man who put them together, will enjoy the use of these spaces but never will know the old half-Irish half-Greek hippie carpenter from was born in Massachusetts, who could never afford to live in any of these places.

And never cared, either.

I remember one day when we were working on the big house on Magazine in 2002. It was a quiet day like most days we spent there, and hot. There was nothing but a hot, white silence as we put up stud after stud of Canadian spruce. And then, seeming from far away, someone started playing boogie-woogie piano across the street, and it got loud. Pete and I heard it, and he put down his tools, and walked over to the wall and beat out a rhythm with his big hands, and began to holler.

Pete Smith died but he never got old. He was alive.

Peter Smith, God rest your soul, we miss you.

On February 28th the US House of Representatives Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on the insurance crisis in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

My mother once pointed out to me that insurance companies make their money on collecting premiums, not on paying claims. That, and investing the money that they get from us. Upon this logic they seem to be cutting their losses in the Gulf Coast quite effectively.

The Hearing was presided over by rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC). It featured testimony by reps Bobby Jindal (R-La), Gene Taylor (D-Miss) and William Jefferson (D-La), David Maurstad, Federal Insurance Administrator for FEMA, Jim Hood, Attorney General for the State of Mississippi and Dr. Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, who was revealed at the end of the hearing to be representing Allstate Insurance as well, which was hardly shocking given his defense of the insurance industry.

Selected audio from the hearing follows, starting with the testimony by rep. Jindal. audio

Testimony by William Jefferson. audio

Testimony by Rep. Gene Taylor. audio

The hearing got good when Maxine Waters came on board to blast insurance company shill Hartwig. audio

But perhaps the best was rep. Taylor of Mississippi tearing into Marstaud for the incompetence of FEMA. audio

My apologies to my readers about the lateness of this audio, and thanks to FSRN reporter Mayaba Liebenthal for her willingness to share this.

Following is audio from the January 29th hearing in New Orleans called by United States Senators Mary Landrieu, Barack Obama and Joseph Lieberman. Please note that due to a technical failure at the site (go feds!) the audio is not of as high of quality as we might have hoped.

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The audio begins with presentations by Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama and Donald Powell, Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

audio

Presentation by Donald Powell audio

Senator Mary Landrieu confronting Donald Powell on the disparities in CBDG funding audio

Senator Lieberman confronting Powell on the CBDG disparities audio

I personally think the best piece of audio is the last one, which is Lieberman asking Walter Leger of the LRA what the hell is going on with the delivery of federal monies. Walter Leger squirms a bit, blaming things first on Katrina and then on federal red tape.

Is this a partial explanation or merely the latest in disingenuous excuses from Baton Rouge? I’m guessing both.

audio