Disenfranchised Citizen

photo by Eliot Kamenitz - Times Picayune

From the Times Picayune…

In this impromptu gang of friends, “Band Camp” was the oldest, at 26. He was taking his turn with a cardboard sign, appealing to the charitable instincts of drivers on Elysian Fields Avenue as they slowed for the red light at North Claiborne. A month from now, he would likely be doing the same thing in a different city with different people, bound together by their preference for hitching rides on freight trains and living on the margins of society.

It was an unusually warm morning in late December. The drinking had taken its toll, and a shirtless Band Camp staggered through traffic. Still, one driver tossed a $5 bill. Another unloaded a couple small bags of Sun Chips, to the delight of the others hanging out on the neutral ground.

They happily discussed the lunch they would buy once they collected enough cash. But they were also in mourning. Later Thursday afternoon, they would attend a memorial for the eight young people who perished in a fire in an abandoned 9th Ward warehouse two mornings earlier.

Continue reading:

‘Traveling kids’ linked by tight networks in many cities – Times-Picayune

And on a more personal note:

One night a few years back, I was hanging out at Checkpoint Charlies in the Marigny, having a smoke and a drink and on stage was a guy doing his best with an acoustic guitar, but I think I was one of maybe five people in the place when in walked two kids. They slid up to the bartender and asked if they could play. Obviously, they were a couple of the “gutter punks” one sees on the streets, hanging out in the Quarter at night in Jackson Square, the Haight in San Francisco, the U-District in Seattle, Burnside in Portland, Peace Park in Madison or in so many other places across the country. The bartender shrugged and pointed at the guy on stage and the two kids waited for him to finish his song before asking if they could play a couple. He looked out at the empty bar and with a bemused expression said, “Sure, why not.”

One of the two kids, grinning now, ran to the door, signaled his friends outside and in walked six more kids carrying instruments. They quickly set up and began to play a raggedy song that was raw, and it was brilliant. By the time they had finished their third song the bar had almost filled with curious people, dancing, drinking and having a great time. The kids had a few CD’s for sale and I bought one.

I’m listening to it right now as I type this, and when I read about the fire…I wondered if any of those kids I saw that night were inside the squat.

Having been a social worker for the past many years, I’ve become somewhat familiar with the kids in the above mentioned towns. Many are troubled, many are not. Many are brilliant writers, musicians, activists and many are not. Many are living that life by choice and some don’t feel they have one. Some struggle with addictions and many don’t. Doing what I do, I’ve heard all the disparaging comments thrown their way over the years and then some, by a lot of people out there who want to dismiss them as a nuisance rather than accept their choice in lifestyle or offer help if they are looking for it, and that’s too bad. Some of those kids have the courage to reach for a life more free than most anyone else who typically reads the morning paper, and sometimes they suffer the hard nights of their choices, just like we all do.

And sometimes, those nights are harder than anyone could have imagined.

For those that have passed…RIP.

For those that knew them…I’m sorry for your loss and I wish you the best – with tolerance, equality and mutual aid…

- Drake

And now, a word from our sponsors…

Rancid – New Orleans

“I never slept that night, until my arrival.

I romanticized a long embrace.

You see I lost my tongue and I burned my bible

But I made it back home to New Orleans.”

The hidden subtext?

Obviously…              Happy New Year everybody, best wishes and be safe.

- Drake

Neutral, cause the letter says so.

Oh man, sometimes this story just writes itself…from the - ”are you serious?” file comes this article in the Times Picayune:

A spokeswoman for the Gulf Coast Claims Facility told The Associated Press on Thursday that fund czar Ken Feinberg has agreed to pay New York University professor Stephen Gillers for a letter he produced stating that Feinberg is neutral and not subject to BP’s direction or control. Spokeswoman Debra DeShong Reed wouldn’t say how much Gillers is being paid.

Okay, so like the lawyers he hired to help claimants understand the claims process and their rights, Ken Feinberg, your “neutral” arbitrator of the GCCF is also using British Petroleum money to pay an NYU professor to say he is ethical and neutral.

Nahh, no conflict of interest there, none at all.

Just one question, if Feinberg is so ethical and neutral, why couldn’t he find someone who might be willing to write a letter saying so for free?

Have a nice day.

"See Tony? Told ya I'd make things right."

The Associated Press reports British Petroleum will survive the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Cleanup, government fines, lawsuits, legal fees and damage claims will likely exceed the $40 billion that BP has publicly estimated, according to an Associated Press analysis. But they’ll be far below the highest estimates made over the summer by legal experts and prominent Wall Street banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which said costs could near $200 billion.

Among the reasons given why British Petroleum will be able to survive is the company has little debt, its global business operations are forecast to earn $26 billion next year, the environmental impact isn’t as bad as once thought and the government would appear unlikely to ban BP from future offshore drilling in the Gulf. And whereas that is certainly good news for the company and its investors, the news for residents of the Gulf Coast isn’t so good…since the oil spill, residents have much more debt with homes sliding into foreclosure. Businesses in the region aren’t generating income with many going bankrupt. Whereas the Associated Press can claim the environmental impact isn’t as severe as it could have been, to all the dead wildlife, the fisherman nervous about eating their own catch, the continued effects of the oil in the water and health effects from dispersant and crude exposure its plenty bad enough, and while the fishing waters have reopened, many are skeptical about Gulf Coast seafood and government and independent scientists continue to battle it out over whether the seafood is safe.

In an interview on Gosztola Blog with Elizabeth Cook, a Gulf Coast resident and lead organizer of a group called Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster, she states that the long-term implications of the emotional, cultural and financial devastation wrought upon the region are that many Gulf Coast residents are considering whether they should leave the region. She cites the many conspiracy theories that abound, from continued spraying of Corexit to government downplaying the amount of oil still washing up on the beaches.

And in a recent article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, stories abound to display the hardship in the Gulf:

- Daniel Lee, a representative of Boat People SOS states, “I have seen people picking up aluminum cans to supplement their incomes…people have sold their furniture, their TVs, so they can buy food and pay their bills and feed their children. People came out in hundreds waiting in line for the food drive which we organized with the Bay Area Food Bank.”

 - Maryal Mewherter, a spokeswoman for Bayou Interfaith Community Organizing, said indigenous people like the Houma Nation members “were left with an uncertainty about being able to return to work, sell their catch or being able to eat any of the seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.”

- In regards to tourism, Keith Overton, chairmen of the board of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, speaks of the uncertainty overwhelming his industry, “We don’t know how long it’s going to take to restore confidence in people that the Gulf of Mexico is safe.”

 - From Louis Skrmetta, owner of a ferry business in Mississippi: “They continue to find oil every day on the barrier islands,” Skrmetta said, and he said that does not bode well for the future of tourism.

But relax everyone because British Petroleum is going to be okay.

Their stock price has risen 63 percent from its post disaster low in June and the investors are returning, confident in its continued climb. Blackrock Investment Management, Managed Account Advisors and Rydex Security Global Investors have more than doubled their holdings in BP stock since this past July and with BP’s assets sales and a predicted return from Feinberg’s managed $20 billion dollar escrow fund…things are looking good and they plan to begin issuing stock dividends again next year.

So again, British Petroleum is going to be just swell…

Tony Hayward got his life back and Bob Dudley is the toast of BP. Wall Street investors have again become comfortable and the national press has gone away so what America don’t know, can’t hurt them and the importance of that cannot be stressed enough.

After all, ecosystems and people come and go, but big business is forever.

Have a nice day.

5800 beds?

Worth a look…$250,000,000 on a new prison, yet Charity Hospital remains closed…what’s the intended message?

From Critical Resistance in New Orleans:

New Orleans Sheriff Marlon Gusman and other city officials are trying to push forward the expansion of the notorious Orleans Parish Prison(OPP) which would add 5,800 new beds, extend the prison 9-10 city blocks, and cost $250 million. Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) is already the largest per capita county jail of any major US city, while resources for housing, education, job training, and healthcare continue to be cut or remain deeply underfunded.

In an effort to stop construction and shrink the prison system in the city, CR-NOLA has been working nonstop with allies and community member, trying to build people power in order to shift vital resources away from the PIC and toward building thriving, sustainable, self-determined communities.

Click here to watch the video and get contact information for Critical Resistance – New Orleans…

Have a nice day.

BP trusts me, what more do you need?

Who do you trust?

Who do you believe?

Who’s looking out for you and who is not?

Such are the questions in the Gulf Coast, about the claims process and the safety of Gulf seafood. In the federal version, the seafood is fine, the FDA is doing their testing and everything is coming up aces while Feinberg is doing his best as a neutral arbitrator and quickly trying to get as much money as he possibly can into the hands of a beleaguered public. Justice is running its course, and all of the companies involved in the BP oil catastrophe will be legally obligated to make amends and pay their fair share towards restoring the pristine waters of the Gulf back to their only kind-of polluted state. British Petroleum is cleaning up the oil, using all the manpower it deems necessary to do so. In a show of confidence, the federal government has urged the armed forces to start using Gulf Seafood to feed the troops.

Obama is silent on most of these issues and on vacation in Hawaii, so no worries…the Secret Service won’t allow for anymore shirtless president photos to grace the AP wire.

Sounds pretty good.

Sounds.

Course then there’s this:

An environmental law firm in New Orleans said it was preparing to challenge the government’s public declaration that following the nation’s worst-ever oil disaster, seafood from the Gulf of Mexico remained safe to eat. Stuart H. Smith, Esq., of the law firm Smith Stag, LLC., was leading the charge, rallying additional litigants to his side through a website called Oil Spill Action.

One of the toxicologists on Smith’s litigation team pursuing BP was Dr. William Sawyer…he’s calling the Food and Drug Administration’s safety test “little more than a farce…they did not test the [total petroleum hydrocarbons] (TPH) in their samples,” he said, calling his testing methodologies a much more comprehensive way of examining compounds present in seafood when compared to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests.

Dr. Sawyer added that some of his test samples came from seafood on its way to market, pulled from waters that had only recently been classified as safe for commercial fishing activities. “The sensory test employed by the FDA detects compounds that are volatile that have an odor; we’re detecting compounds that are low volatility and are very low odor,” he added. “We found not only petroleum in the digestive tracts [of shrimp], but also in the edible portions of fish. We’ve collected shrimp, oysters and finned fish on their way to marketplace — we tested a good number of seafood samples and in 100 percent we found petroleum.”

Among the people represented in his suit are everyone from seafood retailers to crabbers to real estate developers, and they continue to add plaintiffs, all targeting BP, Transocean, Anadarko, MOEX Offshore and Halliburton.

Said Dr. Shaw, a marine toxicologist at the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Maine about exposure to the crude oil in the Gulf, “There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems…many people in the Gulf have been exposed for months — not just workers but residents. There are hundreds of health complaints from local people with symptoms that resemble symptoms of oil exposure. It will be years, possibly decades, before we understand the extent and nature of the health effects caused by this spill.”

Meanwhile, Feinberg and the GCCF’s claim process continues to get its fair share of criticism.

In an Op-Ed written by the Alabama attorney General, Troy King and published in the USA today, King writes “Gulf Coast Claims Facility Administrator Kenneth Feinberg cannot be trusted. While Feinberg has tried to persuade residents of the Gulf Coast that he works for them — referring to himself as their advocate and friend — he was hired by BP, his law firm is being paid $850,000 a month by BP, and every action he has taken has benefited BP….regrettably, throughout this process Feinberg has dragged his feet, admittedly applying uneven criteria to many well-documented claims from businesses on the verge of bankruptcy and closure, thus pressuring business owners to take whatever small compensation he offered.”

And from an editorial in Sunday’s Times-Picayune:

Nevertheless, Mr. Feinberg promised that legitimate applicants could expect to receive money within a day or two. Yet, many applicants have languished for months without receiving anything, and Mr. Feinberg appears loath to blame his organization for that. If a person’s been waiting for money since August, he told The Times-Picayune, there must be something wrong with the application. “All I can say is there’s a very, very good reason for it.” Apparently not so good a reason that he can share it with frustrated applicants. Mr. Rogers (a claimant) says he doesn’t know why he hasn’t gotten a payment.

Mr. Feinberg’s presence here along the Gulf Coast is supposed to guarantee that people with legitimate claims can get damages they’re owed by BP without having to give a portion of it to a hired lawyer. Yet, hundreds of people were so frustrated with Mr. Feinberg’s slow pace that they lined up in the cold this month to sign over a third of any money they get to attorney Tim Porter if Mr. Porter can help them secure the money. That should be a sign to Mr. Feinberg how frustrated people are with him and his organization.

In response, Feinberg has hired several law firms and a claims administration company to help people in applying for final claims. The law firms will be set up in offices across the Gulf Coast and though Feinberg has now promised to release the methodology the GCCF is using to approve or deny claims and determine how much each claimant is given, as of yet these guidelines have not been posted to the GCCF website.

So again, who do you trust? Who are the people in the Gulf Coast supposed to trust?

Its a hard question with no easy answer.

The government has never appeared to play it straight with the Gulf since this thing started. Be it flow rates, the waffling of Thad Allen, the exceptions granted every time to BP to continue spraying dispersants while maintaining their categorical use had ended. It’s also the ridiculous oil spill numbers they released, the NOAA’s opening of water for fishing only to find newly discovered oil and then the immediate closing of the same waters. There appears to be an overall refusal from the beginning to acknowledge adverse health effects of the crude or the chemicals. They appeared complicit in BP’s refusal to allow the press in to cover the story. The NOAA seems virtually incapable of finding oil on the seafloor while for the University of South Florida, this appears to be no problem. The government withholds information from the public at every turn and Barack Obama? Besides a brief swim and a couple of speeches has been absent from the Gulf of Mexico.

These things are glossed over in the official version of events, but we are told to trust the FDA that the seafood is safe despite the increasing clamor from independent scientists like Dr. Sawyer who believe this isn’t the case.

Meanwhile, Feinberg has been a colossal disappointment at best and his solution to his own failure is to hire more attorneys to advise plaintiffs on what to do. If British Petroleum pays Feinberg, then British Petroleum is paying these new legal advisers as well. And if it is in both BP and Feinberg’s interests to settle claims without suing BP, why would a plaintiff be anymore inclined to trust the new legal help?

Personally, I worry about a bunch of attorneys running down to the Gulf to sign up plaintiffs for lawsuits and take a healthy chunk of any compensation that should all be going to the plaintiffs, but at this point what other option exists? Trusting Feinberg?

So who do you trust?

In my estimation, you trust your own instincts and the people who want the truth, and not just best case scenarios. If the seafood is safe, even though not legally necessary, why doesn’t the FDA do the more thorough testing to prove their point? If anything, just to reassure the public because isn’t that the whole point of the FDA saying the seafood is safe? To reassure the public? And Feinberg…Good lord, where to begin…if he had been more up front, more realistic, more consistent and most importantly, transparent…Gulf Coast residents would not have felt it necessary to hire their own attorney, but Feinberg has been none of these things and if it were me, much as I don’t want to say it, I’d be making some phone calls. At least then I would know for sure the attorney is on my side.

It didn’t have to be this way, but through the unfortunate actions/inactions of Feinberg, the government and their collective agencies, now it is.

Have a nice day.

Dumb and Dumber

So, when you saw footage of the Deepwater Horizon explosion or the oil blasting out of the Macondo Well, what did you think about it?

The New York Times described it this way:

“Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck. . . . Crew members, certain they were about to be cooked alive, scrambled into enclosed lifeboats for shelter, only to find them like smoke-filled ovens.”

Well, that would be one perspective (from those alarmists on the liberal left), however Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Tx) saw things differently. He described it kinda like…no, he described it exactly like this:

As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out – all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week – that was tremendous to me. That we could deliver that kind of energy out there – even on an explosion.

Yeah, I’m too cynical in my beliefs and opinions…how about if I mentioned that Mr. Hall is about to become the chair of the House Science and Technology committee.

Brilliant.

Have a nice day.

I didn't shoot him, but I know who did...and I like it.

Ed. Note…17-14…New Orleans over Atlanta…Who Dat!!!! And to Mr. Hartley…a 51 yarder…it almost, almost makes up for what you did in week three…like I’ve said before – though I do forgive you…the forgetting part is really, really hard…but, great kick tonight…

Go Saints!

Hey everybody.

So todays’ the day and yes, certainly the Green Bay win over the Giants helped and the Saints are practically in the playoffs by now and that’s all well and good, but more importantly…

Atlanta.

And yeah, I’m looking at you Hartley.

I hate Atlanta. I hate the city, its people and its team. Perhaps a bit irrational, sure…I’ll give you that but its my hatred and I won’t apologize for it. I hate Atlanta like they are the Detroit Red Wings, the New York Yankees and the Miami Heat all wrapped up in one giant ball of raccoon fecal matter. I hate Atlanta like I’m considering a chalk “X” on the third pew from the back on the farthest left of St. Louis Cathedral. I hate Atlanta because I hate the movie “Top Gun” and every time I hear Ryan referred to as “Matty Ice,” it makes me think of this piece of shit frat boy rah-rah false patriot war death bravado film, and then I hate Atlanta even more.

I hate Atlanta because I hate their airport, except for the Popeye’s chicken stand, it’s terminals are long and fucking evil.

Now, I love me some New Orleans Saints and that love is an unconditional thing so I will support them no matter what happens (Hartley?), but I just got buried in a foot of snow and I don’t get to go back to New Orleans for another 18 days so you win, I win…win-win…Atlanta loses, Happy New Year…

Go Saints!

Go to hell, Atlanta…

This has been a public service announcement…

Have a nice day.

And now, a word from our sponsors…

Soilent Green – Antioxidant

The hidden subtext?

Obviously…

The money BP pays for their violation of the clean water act should be used specifically for the region whose water is now unclean…sign the petition.

Have a nice day.

Read my lips...no new taxes, for the Shaw Group or LHC Group or Entergy or CenturyTel or...

So, Bobby Jindal maintains that in the next legislative session, he will not permit taxes to be raised to close the monstrous Louisiana budget gap, but like all things having to do with terminology, language and narrative, this is untrue.

Sure, he won’t force everyone to pay a higher state income tax, but what about…

 Are bus fares going up around the state?

Are school tuition costs going up?

Social programs, are they being cut?

Once one blasts away all pretense at framing arguments, these three things and many, many others amount to taxes and more importantly to Jindal and his ilk, they amount primarily to taxes on the poor and middle class.

Sure, they aren’t called taxes per se, but when bus fares and tuition go up, it is routinely because the money they are getting from the government (funding, subsidies) is being cut to save the governor from having to cut the subsidies given elsewhere, often to larger business. And when social services are being cut, again to maintain the subsidies given to larger business, it is again the poor who are being affected.

These are government decisions that take money away from a family’s wallet or purse. If it happens on April 15th, it’s called a tax but if it happens on the other 364 days of the year we are supposed to call it fiscal responsibility and hard choices. No new taxes is never true, no matter how it looks in the campaign literature. Just ask those at the poverty line trying to buy groceries or a pair of middle class parents looking at a tuition bill from LSU…

Just a thought.

Have a nice day.