Important thoughts on topics of the day!

Even right wing guys feel and embrace their victimhood.

anthony — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:31:18 GMT

So, my job took me to a meeting where Bob Livingston was on the panel. Bob Livingston, for those who don't remember or never knew, was going to be speaker of the house for about a week in the 90s, following Newt Gingrich, in the midst of the GOP Clinton Impeachment Debacle. His infidelity was outed by Larry Flynt and Hustler and on the eve of the Speaker vote he resigned, (leaving us with David Vitter, whose current infidelity scandal hasn't prompted his resignation, yet.) There must be something about the 2nd Congressional district that leaves its holders sexually unfulfilled with their marriages. He opened talking about Ben Stein's "Expelled". A movie celebrating martyrdom in the creationism camp. At any rate, he went on and on, about the unfairness of scientists being relieved of their posts because they didn't believe in evolution. Now it seems to me that a biologist who can't see that organisms adapt and react through successive generations, and can do this over time, are pretty much in complete denial about underlying principles in biology. Bacteria that become resistant to treatment is a really basic example of evolution. So is selective breeding of animals like horses and cows. It's kind of like a pilot being in denial about gravity. But the topic was ethics, and Livingston was complaining about how new congressional ethics rules made it difficult for him to cozy up to folks in congress. He was whining, actually whining, about how Congress over-reacted to Duke Cunningham setting up defense contracts for bribes. His job is now harder because he can't buy his way in, and he wanted sympathy. The implication was clear, that when he had a clear shot and there were no rules to rein him in, life was easy. Now that there were rules that applied to him he didn't like it one bit. He must have used the term "victim" at least 20 times. And I found a lot of right wing folks have embraced their victimhood. "They won't make everyone pray so I'm a victim", "There are artists doing things that make me uncomfortable and I'm a victim", "The government doesn't want me to dump toxic waste in the river and so I'm a victim of their enforcement... I mean persecution." So, the message is clear. Everyone is a victim. No one is responsible for anything because of their victimhood. It's tedious. People who live in big, big houses and have had all the advantages in wealth and power have no room to talk about how society is unfair. If you are winning the game it is really bad form to complain about how the game is unfair. One more note... A lot of contractors here are using their kids in their TV ads. I guess it proves they are upright family men who won't steal their recovery money. What it has proven to me is that a lot of this kids couldn't act their way out of a paper bag and it is doubly cruel, cruel to the kids and cruel to us in the viewing audience who have to suffer through these performances. If there is an ad guy who is encouraging all this bad kid acting, we need to talk.

Art is Hard

anthony — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:50:58 GMT

Actually making art isn't hard. Finding a place for all the art you make that doesn't sell is hard. Here are the latest pieces I need to find a home for... Wood, Fabric and Electricity.

Quote of the Day

anthony — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:59:36 GMT

So... going into work today from the parking garage. I was struck by a thought. Everyday you walk into a job you don't like you move a little further from yourself. Take it for what it's worth.

So, who do you like for president?

anthony — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:12:30 GMT

The election season is upon us. Who do you like and why?

Season's greetings

anthony — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 01:03:37 GMT

Here on Dec. 25th I wish: To my Christian (and nominally Christian friends) Merry Christmas!!! Hope Santa brought you what you wanted. And you didnt' make Baby Jesus cry. To my Jewish friends: Happy Chinese Food and Movie day!! To my Pagan friends: Sorry I missed you on the solstice, I'll catch you next Equinox.

I am supporting Bill Richardson.

anthony — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:22:03 GMT

With primary season for the presidential election coming up fast there is a lot of talk about the candidates and their "inevitability". I'm not buying it. I'm supporting Bill Richardson for President. Here is a guy who is the Governor of New Mexico (and running from a governorship is good for Democrats), who was the former Ambassador to the UN, former Energy secretary and former Congressman. Given the amount of work the next president will have to do in restoring the US reputation around the world, the challenges energy policy will present and all of the other things that have gotten so spectacularly messed up in the past 7 years, including the deficit, I'm looking for the person with experience. Someone who has worn many hats and has the executive level experience to jump right in with fixing stuff. I trust that he's going to the right thing with all of the issues we are going to face. He'll be tough when he has to. He's not afraid of encouraging new technology. I think he'll be a better president than the rest of the field. He's called for a withdrawal from Iraq and why are we still patrolling there when 1)Saddam's gone 2)they've had their elections 3) we've made sure their aren't any weapons of mass destruction. Seems to me we've won. Let's declare victory already. If the only reason we are is to insure that ExxonMobil can operate then let's get a congressional declaration saying that's why we want troops there. Let's be honest. Hillary will have to work so hard to win election that it's not worth the risk. We need someone who can win. Every time she gets attacked she is going to have to respond and we are going to spend more time talking about Hillary as a lighting rod than her policies (and what are those policies anyway?) And do we want more of the same. We've had a Clinton presidency. If the second Bush presidency was 20 times worse than the first one, who's to say the Second Clinton presidency won't have the same problems. Let's get someone new. Barack is too new. Only 4 years in the Senate. I like the big themes but I haven't seen any command of details. And we have a president now who doesn't have a command of details. If in 8 years he runs from the governors seat of Illinois I'd be all over it. Let him get seasoned. Edwards is certainly telegenic enough and I know all about that "two Americas" but running on poverty is a downer. We keep pretending that we are doing something in America but most all of the real anti-poverty programs like job training and college grants were killed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 to be supplanted by programs designed to keep people in poverty. So.. I'm supporting Bill Richardson. I'll take Biden or Obama for VP.

Send MBAs, send financiers, Send experts in international business.

anthony — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:28:03 GMT

Fighting a cold and not really energized to pick up the big projects that await me, I spent the day trying to figure out something productive that didn't require much in the way of energy. I failed and found myself driving around Gentilly. Gentilly is the basically neighborhood inundated much overlooked London Ave. canal breeches. During the flooding the 17th street canal break got all of the images. After the flooding, the lower 9th ward got all of the celebrity photo ops. The London Ave breech and the Gentilly Neighborhood got very sparse mention even though it provided some of the more dramatic flooded landscapes. And I am looking at all of these houses. All of these buildings. The St. Bernard Project that was a ghetto (in the sense that enforced economic isolation upon its residents) prior to the storm now completely uninhabitable. All of those houses that represented some of the better off folks in New Orleans that have barely been touched since the storm. Maybe gutted, maybe not. All of those buildings. Stores and stripmalls abandoned, some still untouched. And I couldn't help thinking "We are going to need a LOT of money. We are going to need people with money and economic opportunity if we are going to restore these neighborhoods. Not just driving up dump trucks of cash but having a real economy that will sustain the people who live in New Orleans... that will allow them the resources to rebuild their places and maintain them." In short, we need business, we need development. We need to light a fire under people to either shit or get off the pot when it comes to restoring their places. They aren't doing anyone a favor, least of all themselves, by waiting. So, people who want to help New Orleans, I finally have my list. What you can do to help the city. Send Businesses. Send a business that will hire the students from our 6 universities so they can have the resources to stay in the city and the money to restore the houses. Send us businesses that inspire students to get a good education. Send good Teachers. Send us good teachers so that we don't have another generation that grows up with substandard public schools. Send us teachers who can impress upon our students the importance of literacy and standard English. Send Bulldozers. With the number of untouched houses, send a team with a bulldozer and trucks to a neighborhood and ask the neighbors which houses havent' been touched and need to go. If you see no signs of rebuilding take out every structure on the block. Survival of a neighborhood is built on someone caring enough about it to want to rebuild, if no one does, take it out, pay them off for the land and resell it to someone who can build something. Send us trade experts and business. Send us people who want to be in business in New Orleans to bring back the import and export trade to the city. We need folks to speak a lot of languages and can negotiate deals for the goods coming off of the boats at our wharves. Send us people who understand that economic development is the key to the city surviving. We have more than enough people who are willing to say no to economic development. People with jobs for themselves who don't see the value in making sure their neighbors have jobs as well. We'll take the CDBG grants, but we also need some low interest redevelopment bonds that allows for the wholesale redevelopment for profoundly neglected neighborhoods. If the people who own the property currently are unwilling to do the things to make the area viable let someone else do it. Don't send us any more people who are just coming to gut buildings. Send us people who want to live in New Orleans. Don't send us any more activists from out of state who look at the housing projects in New Orleans as a symptom of poverty rather than, as most New Orleanians understand, a cause. You can keep sending us people to build houses in Musician's Village, the showcase, must-do project for any corporate service project during a convention in the city., but more helpful would be sending more corporate offices, so that musicians can make the money from people who have enough money to pay a cover charge so they can be paid so the can afford to keep their house. So... send us MBAs, Send us Financiers, Send us experts in international business. And if you are feeling really generous, I'll take a new international airport in New Orleans East.

How did New Orleans get so many old houses? And what can we do about them now?

anthony — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:35:24 GMT

How did New Orleans get so many old houses? And what can we do about them now? New Orleans is filled with old houses. Some of them are mansions, well maintained by the rich, and some of them are shacks that no one has lived in for 30 years. Most of them, however, are shotgun doubles in various states of repair. The state of these run the gamut from immaculately restored with modern amenities to those in danger of imminent collapse. This was true prior to the storm and Katrina just took many old houses that were marginal in terms of condition and deteriorated them further. Many of the old shotgun houses in New Orleans were not well maintained prior to the storm. Now a debate rages about how to save them. But the question about saving old houses is analogous to getting someone to quit smoking; first they have to want to quit. The same could be said of older housing stock in New Orleans, first it has to want to be saved. There has to be some economic value in restoring and maintaining this deteriorating housing stock or it won’t be saved. Neglect, cheapness and resourcefulness. But how did New Orleans end up with all these old houses when so many cities with developments from the same era seem to have lost theirs. I believe the answer lies with three words; neglect, cheapness, and resourcefulness. Since resourcefulness is the most flattering of the three, I’ll start there. New Orleanians are some of the most resourceful people on the planet. Who else would make a meal out of something they found scurrying around in a ditch? So, when they buy something they tend to hang onto to it and use it until it is beyond use. And they make the best of the resources they have. And if your father or grandfather had a house they didn’t need that you could make money renting out, well that was a use of a resource. So, when maw-maw who lived in the 9th ward or the 7th ward or uptown was finally carted off to the nursing home or the cemetery, maw-maw’s family, looked at the house, which was paid for, and decided to get in the rental business. It was resourcefulness. But they didn’t want to spend any money on the house. New Orleanians love a bargain. The whole “Lagniappe” concept. A little something extra. Getting a deal. And why would you spend money on an old house when you could spend it on a fishing camp or a boat or a ball gown. Sure the house was a resource but not one actually worth spending money on. Some people call it frugal. But that implies that money is being saved. It’s just cheapness, shifting around the priorities to use the money in a way that brought the most happiness with the minimum amount of sacrifice on anyone’s part. Cheapness leads to neglect. If you didn’t want to spend any money on a building then you did just what was necessary to maintain it so it could be rented. And if you didn’t get much return on that investment, well, that was ok because the actual investment had been made decades ago and rental income was the equivalent of free money. And for the most part it worked for poor tenants because they understood that they couldn’t afford a better maintained property. That if the house became something that money was invested in then the owners would want a return on that investment. The pre-Katrina average rent of $430 a month was based on this social contract. The landlord made a little money after taxes and basic maintenance was paid for and the tenant got a place to stay that was, while not palatial or even well maintained sufficed for basic shelter at bargain prices. That is why the $430 a month average rent is gone. Because of storm damage and the rising cost of insurance most every rental property in New Orleans now costs the landlord something to renovate, restore and maintain. Cheap rent in New Orleans is a thing of the past. But we kept all these old buildings because no one was willing to invest in a declining economy in building something new. And most of these old buildings will continue to deteriorate if we don’t turn the economy around. How did we get to this point? Several factors played into the deteriorating housing stock. The usual suspects; white flight, the interstate opening up the suburbs to development, a growing middle class wanting a more affluent lifestyle than shotgun house living. And add to that the New Orleans trio, ending up with formerly owner occupied properties becoming strictly rental units. Add to this a shrinking economy that was transitioning from its natural business of import/export to low wage tourist jobs and it is easy to see that the money wasn’t in the city to maintain all the buildings. And with a shrinking population it is an open question as to whether it is important to continue to try to save marginal deteriorating buildings. Who is this important to? Most natives are deeply ambivalent to the older housing stock. For many people, shotgun houses represent lower class living in marginal neighborhoods. They are considered by many just a step or two above the maligned housing projects, in that they represent not abject poverty to many but definitely not affluence. So many folks that could afford to leave their shotgun house pasts did so gratefully because it represented social advancement. Many of the voices of preservation in New Orleans are coming from people who more recently moved into the city and fell in love with the city because it represented a departure from their modern American city life. It can be argued that they fell in love with decay because it represented in some way a rejection of modern life. Even New Orleanians who love their old houses see little value in retaining houses that have been neglected for decades unless they can be restored and inhabited by someone who will maintain them. Is this even possible? If the area west of the Industrial Canal was originally built out for 650,000 and we added an additional 1/3 more land with the development of housing and businesses in New Orleans East, and given that our population is about 1/3rd the peak population, the question becomes “Even if we save all these houses, who is going to live in them?” You would have to maintain population and radically shift the patterns of development to make all of these old houses viable development again. Even if you took all of New Orleans East out of redevelopment and had all the residents relocate to New Orleans West of the Industrial Canal into old houses, you would still have more houses than you needed based upon current population. Even if you took the land under the large scale housing projects and put it to more productive use and shifted all of the previous tenants out of large scale housing projects and into restored houses you would still have too many houses. For the current population the city is overbuilt. For the pre-Katrina population the city was overbuilt. Which makes the question of whether to invest resources in a marginal building even more troubling. How to solve it or, at least, deal with it? - We have to recognize that not every old house is going to be saved. Or is worth saving. If you really want to increase the value of the older houses in New Orleans you have to reorient the economy away from low paying tourism jobs and towards higher paying finance, high tech and import/export jobs. If you can capture graduating university students in New Orleans by having career track jobs available to them then you can bring enough resources to renovations to make them financially viable. We have to embrace new investment that focuses upon getting people jobs as a way to raise the population. People cannot relocate to an area if no jobs are available for them. And we shouldn’t encourage anyone who can not or will not support themselves to relocate into New Orleans. At this crucial time everyone who is here needs to be working. The City gains nothing by people just hanging around, not being productive. Unless the population of working, productive citizens can be increased there is little hope for New Orleans surviving as anything more than an adult Disneyland surrounded by a couple of wharves. - Quit subsidizing new housing. It seems simple but if you want old houses renovated by investors you have to quit undercutting their investments by subsidizing new housing developments. If you increase the number of housing units to the point that rents decrease to a level that it isn’t economically viable to restore an old house it will be abandoned. - Learn to embrace the side yard. Many New Orleans houses were built with a side yard. Over the decades people have built houses on them. We can go back to being a city of side yards and gardens and orchards if we allow neighbors to buy empty lots next door at bargain prices. This will ensure that the lots are maintained, give people a chance to put on additions and enjoy the outdoors for a greater quality of life. - Some areas are better off being redeveloped wholesale. An area with extensive damage and blight where less than 30%-40% of the houses are re-occupied are better off being redeveloped wholesale, with all owners being bought out, all buildings demolished, the streets re-surveyed, the lots redrawn and sold to someone with the capacity to redevelop it. It is a much more humane option than allowing an area to die a slow painful death. This might play itself out in many communities that have a high degree of participation in the buy-out option of the Road Home Program. The issue is that the buy-out option was not part of the small landlord program, precisely some of the building owners we might want to encourage relinquishing their property to redevelopment. Conclusions We aren’t going to be able to save old housing in New Orleans until we can reverse the negative population and economic trends. We won’t do that until we concentrate on business development and encourage investment. We should save those houses we are able to but encouraging investment in properties that need extensive and expensive remediation might not be a best use of resources. Encouraging renovation of minimally damaged properties first gives investors a chance at a greater return and returns those properties to the pool of available houses. Letting go those that are extensively damaged allows us to concentrate on those that will be easier to handle and speed their reclamation.

Moving the blog post needle

anthony — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 23:05:05 GMT

Ok... here is the idea. A friend of mine is trying to raise money for a Diabetes Bike tour. His blog post is here http://people.tribe.net/blackrockskid/blog/4f5622eb-35ac-477d-8d06-778769f356e4 Where to donate http://main.diabetes.org/site/TR?pg=personal&fr_id=4406&px=3300456 Several family members of mine have diabetes so I'm supporting it and I'm hoping you do too...

The Third Story of New Orleans Recovery

anthony — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:14:33 GMT

I like to tell people that you can tell any story you want to about New Orleans depending upon where you point your camera. Want to tell of a town that's back and open for business and ready to roll? Anyone in town can show you that shot. Take your guest to the French Quarter. Sit them down to eat at a 5 star restaurant. Take them shopping at Saks or Rubenstein Bros. Have them stroll upper Magazine and sit for coffee at one of the many cafes. You would be hard pressed to notice anything of the storm we had here 18 months ago. Perhaps you have a different view and want to punch up the destruction. You drive the devastated streets of the Lower Ninth. Take your guest into oil sodden, flood ravaged St. Bernard parish. Wander endlessly on deserted New Orleans East Boulevards. Take a drive into parts of the 7th Ward that looks untouched since the canal floodwall patch jobs allowed the pumps to do their work. Wax indignant over the government response and try to temper that with the realization that the process of rebuilding in New Orleans, at its heart, is the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of individual decisions and you can't really make people do anything they don't want to do. The third story is more complicated than those two. It is the story of the damaged but recovering neighborhoods. Obviously flooded homes and obvious signs of life. The streets in Mid-City with storm debris on the curbs but a fresh coat of paints on half of the houses. The newly opened or reopened restaurants on Carrolton to feed those hungry for food... and hungry for some contact with their neighbors. People of places like Broadmoor who are working to ensure that their neighborhoods don't become a forgotten history of New Orleans buried under a large tract of "green space". Damaged but recovering, flooded but rebuilding... it's the more common and overlooked story of this city. And it's the hardest story to tell when you are looking for an easy angle. When you have to frame everything in a dichotomy of good and bad, recovered or not recovering, when you don't have much more than 60 seconds to tell a story with every gradation of gray from fog to charcoal its the easy way out to pick an extreme and go with it. But its not right.. and to those of us working so hard to put our lives and our city back together its not fair. Work a little harder. Tell the third story. It's richer and it will give people an understanding of what is actually going on down here.

Civic media -or - rebuilding propaganda

anthony — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:16:28 GMT

Well, maybe not propaganda but I have become interested in Depression/WWII era posters that encouraged the people to become involved in the Recovery and war efforts. But we seemed to have moved into a different era where old ideas of citizenship requiring some actions on the part of the citizenery to an era in which we have all become more or less residents expected to do nothing but pay our taxes and keep our licenses current. And we wonder why people are disconnected from the goverment and all notions of civic pride and patriotism have gone by the wayside. Here in New Orleans, everyone is feeling like they need a little extra encouragement because the pace of the recovery seems glacial. Some of the basics, like stop lights, still aren't attended to. And amoungst the folks who are doing the heavy lifting in this recovery by restoring their houses and contributing to the economy, having others in the community who seemed to have come back to slack is infuriating. Many of the old social ills are creeping back in and the goverment at all levels seems uninterested in helping to foster a better enviroment. So... because someone needs to do something.. and our mayor, invisa-ray has been basically AWOL since re-election only emerging from his PTSD state to say something unfortunate about once a month, .... and the Feds, who have taken the concept "of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing" to a whole new level.... and the state, well, if you live here, you know better than to expect the state of Louisiana to look out for the interests of its citizens in New Orleans (though most time I'm not entirely convinced that anyone else in the state is getting any better service.). Well, as I said, someone needs to do something, and I think the folks of New Orleans need an old fashioned civic media program that encourages its citizens to care about things like education, and fighting crime, and not tolerating political corruption. To encourage people to take personal responsibilty for the conditions of their neighborhood and of the city. I know this might seem basic to a lot of people but New Orleans has neglected the basics. The question, of course, is how does one go about putting something like this together with very limited resources.

"You have 500 new emails"

anthony — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 17:24:24 GMT

Nothing like not having internet for a week and then coming back to download your email. It was good not to be constantly checking stuff. I should go internetless for longer periods of time. What was this? Almost 10 days. And I found very few pressing emails. Of course it didn't hurt that most of the people who would send me emails were without service as well.

The perils of cyberspace.

anthony — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:17:44 GMT

So... I've been posting the blog to keep all the friends up on my whereabouts and stuff. Apparently, I'm being mistaken for some dude on the Soundoff board of Nola.com. The soundoff board is a mess. It's computer forum for people who apparently never leave their computer. And there is some dude named Anty or something who everyone thinks has some magical powers over posts and they are all pissed at him. Well, there are a couple of them who seem to think he is me. So they are writing all sorts of nasty shit about me... er... him... It's annoying. Anyway... for those people who I actually know. It is another series of tedious shows. I'm passing on running for anything in New Orleans politics. No money, no organization. And I wouldn't run for anything if I didn't think I couldn't poll more than the guy in the tinfoil hat who wants the city council to look into alien abductions.