We went through a mayoral election. No one wanted to handle the tough
issue, what's going to happen to the neighborhoods, because
everybody wants to get elected. No one wants to be realistic and hard
decisions have to be made. The problem right now is you have a very
scary situation. You have a lot of potential to really correct a lot of
things. New Orleans was a great place. It had a lot of problems that
were basically not exactly being addressed. Number one, it had a big
city and it had a lot of crime; it had a lot of crack-fueled crime and
violence. This is not isolated to New Orleans, but the problem is people
don't want to realize that big cities have these problems.
Secondly, education, the school system was horrible, publicly, and
anybody that has any sort of money seems to drag their children out and
try to put them in a different school; it doesn't matter. It
was basically more of a thing of like, "Okay, if I can afford
it, I want to put my son or daughter to get an education." The
school system, I don't know how you fix the school system.
Maybe hopefully, by putting it under the charter system, it would
improve, but it's obviously in shambles. You have a violent
system. You have the health care issues, which
Page 26we
talked about, where you have a large population and you have a very
large poor population in the city probably basically living under the
poverty line, which didn't help things.
On top of that, you have the whole economy based on tourism, which
basically there's nothing—we do have a port, but
tourists drive us. If you take the workers out, so you lose the engine
that runs it, which is the people that worked in the tourist industry
that basically filled a lot of the lower-paying jobs, but on account of
the thing, you can't have a tourism industry. So
it's kind of like a catch-22. You need to have people come
back here to fuel this industry. You really needed the first industry to
try to do it. Now they're talking about bioengineering
complexes and all this other stuff. That's going to take
years to develop. It's not going to happen
"boom," so it's a very scary proposition.
You need to have tourism. Unfortunately, it's the only thing
that's going to drive the city, so you need to get people to
come back here.
The problem is it's a shell game. Do you say, "Okay,
how much is the city really together?" Well, you could show
this part, but look at all of this destruction. Those people need to
come here to see the destruction and say, "Wow, how could this
have happened in an American city? Let's rebuild
it." But you can't show them too much or they
don't want to come back and say it's a depressing
thing. So it's just a complete kind of weird situation. For
instance, I took a bus to Jazz Fest, a shuttle bus out to the
fairgrounds. We have all these people that, "I want to come to
New Orleans to spend money." How many of these people were
looking out the window and checking out what was going on?
They're oblivious. They were more concerned about who was
playing at Jazz Fest and where they were going to go party to really pay
attention to what really happened here. While I'm
sympathetic, well, look at what's going on because you should
be outraged that this happened in an American city, that this occurs.
The US government, what happens when we have a hurricane? Do you go and
you guarantee that city's bond so that they can keep jobs
open and keep—? No, they declared it worthless.
We have these people that are screwed, they can't do anything.
Banks are going to foreclose on houses. We need to do something. The
banker bill comes, a golden opportunity for them to help people, nothing
done. We have opportunities to send the SPA into people that really need
it, gone, they don't do anything. I get the SPA calling me
offering me loans every day. I don't want an SPA loan. They
need to give it to people that really need it. I had a FEMA
Page 27guy call me in Memphis ten months after the Stomp asking me
if I wanted him to come here, do whatever for something. It's
like, I never got any money from the government, that two thousand
dollars or whatever, which was the FEMA thing, which supposedly every
household got. No one can ever explain how that really worked because it
was arbitrary. I've had friends that were living on poverty
level to people that do extremely well. There's no rhyme or
reason, who got that money. By refusing to ensure the bond rate goes up,
you've killed all the public sector jobs. Then you kill the
small businesses because they can't get SPA loans and
businesses interruption loans. So basically, you nail the whole middle
class of New Orleans, especially the African-American middle class, and
destroy a city, economically bring it to its knees.
Then on another level, this whole race issue, it's much more
complex than black and white in New Orleans. There's a lot of
Creoles and this. It's very complicated on that level and
yes, there is probably some other thing, but I think it's
more economic than anything drives it. Because anybody with money wants
to leave and they want to either go live in, it used to Meteriere, now
they want to live across the lake to St. Tamanee, or African-Americans
want to go live, were living in New Orleans East. So there's
been a lot of economic flight from the city. If you really want to look
at the city, it's not just New Orleans. The whole
metropolitan area, you have five parishes. You still have large chunks
of, while the city itself may have been white, the majority—I
mean was African-American, black, the overriding outside probably was
white in suburbia. It's not an entirely clear picture here.
There is probably some shifts in dynamics of what's going on
and the whole thing, the mayoral election, and the mayor won basically
the first election on Lakeview and eighty percent of his base was white.
Then all of a sudden, he turned around and he won basically the black
vote and maybe a little bit of the Republican vote, business. To me,
Landrieu, Nagin,
Page 28neither of them would have been
the solution. Nagin was a middle-level management person who basically
would have been fine had not a major disaster struck. He
wasn't going to do anything earth-shattering. He's
surrounded himself with people that are not that talented and they
don't handle things well. He's not a politician.
He doesn't know how to close a deal. Landrieu, on the other
hand, was a career politician who maybe didn't know how to
close a deal, but how much do you want to put faith in that? Which evil
do you take? The problem is that because Nagin's so off the
cuff, unpredictable, and shoots himself in the foot too much with his
comments, I don't think he would have stolen anything. I
think he was a man of integrity. I think he just burned out.
Well, what happened? I'm surprised he wanted to run again.
It's almost like he was trying not to win because he would
make these crazy comments and pander to whichever audience, but somehow
he won the election. The question is the business community, what does
this signal to the rest of the country and the world? Are we going to
invest in a city that seems to flout, just not really care, and do what
it wants? The bottom line is New Orleans is completely dependent on the
outside world right now. There's no money here.
It's going to need to rely on private capital because the
government's not gonna come up with the money.