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 New Orleans Today Sandra Bullock, recently an Academy Award winning best actress and since Hurricane Katrina a laser focused supporter and annual homecoming queen of Warren Easton High School on Canal Street, demanded her piece on a promo video done by “Women of the Storm” about Gulf restoration be removed because she refused to front and ‘ho for oil companies. No worry, Senator Mary Landrieu, who wears a permanent tattoo signaling her allegiance to oil companies working in the Gulf, was glad to step right, no research needed, to take one for the storm troopers.
Bullock doesn’t like being played for a fool it seems. She just solved a little problem like that in her personal life from what I’ve read. After doing her part, hoping to help Gulf recovery, she came to understand (thanks to www.deSmogBlog.com which I’m putting on my Google Reader, thank you!) that the storm troopers were joined at the hip with America’s WETLAND Foundation, which has been a “soft core” coastal restoration outfit created (according to Bruce Alpert in the Times-Picayune) with state money and slicked down with oil company contributions (which is a little disingenuous given the huge role they have played in coastal destruction!).
Bullock wants to know the “facts” her release said about the connections. To start with the storm troopers have been a vehicle for Anne Milling since Katrina and based on cozy, old school, uptown relationships with the Times-Picayune, Whitney Bank, oil interests, and others have been a favored darling at the fuzzy point of “elite panic” about the city and its future since the storm. Other than fly an almost entirely lily white delegation of upper crust women to DC in a chartered plane to speak for our 2/3rds African-American and poor city, I’m not sure what they ever did at all, but they were the long toothed, debutante ball in a bad post-K season. America’s WETLAND Foundation’s chair is her husband King Milling, a former bigwig at Whitney Bank, the old school and oil field standard in New Orleans. Milling is Mr. Public Relations, having been quoted by me in the past for his refusal to accept pay limits as a bailed out bank and his opposition to rebuilding the 9th ward and other black majority parts of the city. Of course he’s there as a front for oil and finance interests. No waves will hit them from on his shore watch.
Continue Reading Sandra Bullock for Louisiana Governor
 New Orleans The good news on the judge’s issuance of an injunction is that: boy, this was a close call and could have been soooo much worse! But, let’s be honest, we’re trying to pull “gold out of the garbage” as our ragpickers say. There’s still no reason for great joy and celebration because the opposition will be scheming at how to come closer next time, the appeals will be queued up a mile long, and we lost important issues here even while we are claiming a “win” on what is now routinely being called, the “most controversial” elements.
So local police will be enjoined from asking every conceivable person that they think might be illegal to show papers and stand to be arrested. The judge correctly saw through the governor’s baloney that local law enforcement offers were so well trained that they could avoid discrimination. Can you say the words, Sheriff Arpaio, and still repeat that sentence with a straight face, Governor? They can’t hold people for deportation by the feds based on SB1070, but we still have DHS Napolitano’s 287(g) for that mischief. Various civil penalties cannot be converted into crimes and everyone with a tan will not have to carry their paperwork to prove citizenship, but as today’s rallies in Phoenix “against the hate” make clear, these are symbolic victories when the anger at immigrants is being fanned to a vengeful and violent level of anger and potential attack.
Washed away in the headlines are huge concerns about the future of day laborers, which the National Day Laborers’ Organizing Network has indicated could cripple the ability for day laborers to find work and lead to huge legal oppression everywhere in the country. This was a confusing piece of the injunction story. The judge enjoined the efforts of Arizona to essentially drive day laborers off of the sidewalks and any public areas where they could look for work, but allowed the language that was based on the old ACORN v. Phoenix suit to stand which allows day laborers to be harassed and arrested if they seem to be a traffic nuisance. NDLON has correctly worried that day laborers would now be walking a tightrope thin line in trying to both protect their livelihoods and at the same time avoid arrest and prosecution (and therefore also potential deportation depending on the charge and jurisdiction) because traffic safety would trump everything and everybody.
I’m not whining. We desperately needed to win this injunction, so all good there, but “happy” and “celebrate” are not two words that come easily in this moment when so little is solved, other rights are eroded, and the forces of hate and repression are still gathering mightily in cities and states throughout the country with no real relief in sight.
 New Orleans I admit a hot headline on the front page of the New York Times about paying kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year absolutely caught my eye!
The back story was straightforward. A huge study under Project Star in Tennessee tracked 12,000 children in that state. The study was trying to determine whether or not class size effected a series of educational and life outcomes. A bunch of Harvard economists analyzed the results and came up with some unexpected conclusions. The main determining factor in significantly improving adult prospects for citizen wealth was whether or not the child had a good kindergarten experience. If they did: cha-ching! By 27 years old they would be making another $100 per month, $1200 a year, and so forth.
The “money shot” in the article is below:
“Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.”
Since I’m obsessed (as we all should be!) with what it takes to create citizen wealth for lower income families, my first thought was simple. If we now know what a kindergarten teacher might be worth, then what is a Head Start teacher worth for lower income families?!?
Admittedly, we have lots of horses in this race since Local 100 United Labor Unions represents Head Start teachers with several companies in Houston, Shreveport, and Little Rock, but if kindergarten teachers make that big a difference, logically it seems that early childhood education in programs like Head Start may be more powerful than we had imagined.
Study that, professors, and let’s see if we can’t make a difference for low-and-moderate income families!
And their beleaguered and underpaid teachers!!
 New Orleans Meeting with three visitors and friends from Korea, Yungik Jeong, Young Mi Choi, and Hwang Inhul, who work with PSAU, an organization of the unemployed and irregular workers, as informal and unprotected workers are now known there, the conversation quickly came to plight of home health care workers or domestic workers as they are sometimes called in Korea. Similar to the US, this has become a fast growing occupation which they estimated already involves 400,000 workers, yet these workers are not allowed the usual protections and social security of other Korean workers and from what they indicated are actually banned from membership in labor unions.
It was painful for me to report that in the US after many years of employment increases and rising protections brought by unionization in many states, these same critical, yet low status health care workers, are facing a crisis in state after state. Announcement curtailments of workers has already expanded waiting lists in many states, and California where there may be close to as a many workers as exist in Korea faces drastic budget proposals by the governor. If all the proposals being discussed were realized my guess is that 200,000 home health care workers could see their jobs disappear with cutbacks in state subsidies. The loss of 200,000 union dues payers would also be critical for SEIU, AFSCME, and other unions representing home health workers.
The IMF crisis a little more than a decade ago in Korea finds its lingering wake in the severe cutback of labor protections. The Great Recession in the US may end up leaving a similar tsunami for many public – and private – employees as well.
Bob Hebert in the New York Times woefully reminded today that many are averaging a 25% cutback in income in the recession and that it may take 6 to 10 years to make up the ground to move back from income insecurity to any semblance of citizen wealth.
Discussions with my Korean friends was a painful reminder of the long tail of economic crises with no end in sight.
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