u/Previous_Basis_84

I switched to city politics. No city elections right now, but New Orleans is living through something strange — a government that acts like it has no money and then spends like it has plenty.

The city is functioning at a low level right now. And we’re going to pay for it.

Morris agreed. She described leaders who were involved in the decisions that created the financial crisis and now refuse to take responsibility. Six of the city council members from the last four years are still in office. New members came in without experience. And the administration is spending money in ways that defy common sense.

The city asked the state for $5 million. Not for housing. Not for transit. Not for human services. To hire consultants to figure out what to do next.

“That’s crazy,” she said. “These are people who have stayed too long in their jobs.”

And then the hotel. The Convention Center is pushing a $600 million Omni headquarters hotel on Convention Center Boulevard — a 27-story, 1,000-room tower to help New Orleans compete for a 2031 Super Bowl bid. The Convention Center is putting up $80 million in direct public investment, plus a package of tax rebates on hotel, sales, and property taxes that the Bureau of Governmental Research estimated at roughly $669 million over the 45-year life of the deal. A hospitality worker told the board: “Our neighborhoods, our communities, and our working people need a break, not Omni.” Morris pointed out that the Superdome hosted Super Bowls for decades without that kind of subsidy.

A city in financial crisis, subsidizing a luxury hotel for half a billion in tax breaks.

Meanwhile, our workers are furloughed, and non-profits got their grants cut.

The state elections coming later this cycle are going to be enormous. Governor. Treasurer. Insurance commissioner. Every one of those seats matters for housing — and Morris and GNOHA will be there with questionnaires and interview slots and community members sitting across the table.

The insurance commissioner race is the one to watch. GNOHA argues the current commissioner spent his tenure making the market comfortable for insurance companies, not for the families being crushed. The last time the seat was contested, weak opposition meant voters never heard real alternatives. GNOHA wants that to change.

Meanwhile, Jeff Landry’s gamesmanship with the congressional primaries — postponing them to redraw maps, leaving candidates on ballots whose votes won’t count — has added another layer of chaos. GNOHA sees it clearly. Elected officials at the state level don’t understand housing. They’re disconnected from the daily reality of the people they represent.

That’s what the scorecard is for.

Andreanecia Morris — the girl from Edgard who wanted to make television — has been building this infrastructure since GNOHA was incorporated in 2012. The alliance now supports a coalition of sister housing alliances across Louisiana. The #PutHousingFirst campaign has registered thousands of voters.

Last November, GNOHA coordinated the campaign to pass a charter amendment creating a permanent Housing Trust Fund for New Orleans — dedicating 2% of the city’s general fund to affordable housing, every year, in perpetuity. No new taxes. Voters had rejected a housing millage in 2021 when the old fund was controlled by the mayor’s office with no transparency. GNOHA went back to the community, held focus groups, made 18,000 phone calls to renters, and built something better. The amendment passed with over 75% of the vote — a 50-point swing. The National Low Income Housing Coalition nominated GNOHA for a 2025 organizing award on the strength of that campaign.

The first allocation hit in January 2026. It was supposed to be $17 million. It came in at $14.6 million — because the city is staring at a $100 million deficit and the mayor proposed an 11% budget cut. The need keeps growing. New Orleans now requires 55,000 new affordable units, up from 47,000 last year. The city created 435 new housing opportunities in the past year.

The trust fund exists because GNOHA organized it. But it’s already being squeezed by the same city government that can’t stop spending money it doesn’t have.

That’s what real organizing looks like. You lose, you listen, you rebuild, you win. And then you fight to protect what you won.

Morris and GNOHA ask the questions nobody else is asking. They sit community members in front of politicians and let them ask the questions. And they publish the grades.

The 2026 scorecard is live at puthousingfirst.org. The May 16 primary is eleven days away.

Most of the candidates aren’t passing.

The ones who didn’t even show up got exactly the grade they earned.

Kevin Roberts earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His dissertation was called "Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831."

He studied enslaved Black families in Louisiana. He published in the Encyclopedia of African American History. He built an academic career on the suffering of people who were treated as property in this state.

Then he became president of the Heritage Foundation. Salary: $953,920 a year. He said his job was "institutionalizing Trumpism." He built Project 2025 — the blueprint to gut the Voting Rights Act, dismantle the DOJ's civil rights division, eliminate the Department of Education, and end DEI nationwide.

Two days ago, the Supreme Court did what Project 2025 asked for. They gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Governor Landry suspended the elections within hours. Over 100,000 absentee ballots won't be counted. Black congressional districts are being erased.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Roberts spoke at a dinner hosted by a magazine with neo-Confederate ties and toasted the editor as "one of the sages of our age."

He studied slavery in Louisiana so he could finish the job.

That's not a failure of education. That's the education working exactly as intended.

🔗 mitchklein.substack.com

Jamie Davis is the people’s candidate. He’s running to represent everyone in Louisiana. He’s not raising big money from polluters who are destroying our state.

He’s a farmer from Tensas Parish who decided to run because it’s time for Louisiana to have a decent Senator who cares about all its people.

His grandfather was a sharecropper.

His farm sits on the same land.

If he wins the primary on May 16 and wins the general in November, he would be Louisiana’s first Black statewide elected official since Reconstruction. The 51st vote to change the Senate. A farmer from Waterproof, Louisiana, will be sitting in the United States Senate if we have anything to do with it.

The people in power are counting on you to be too tired, too discouraged, too overwhelmed by the firehose to show up. That’s the design. The exhaustion is the product.

Don’t give them what they want.

Get mad. Get organized. And get to the polls.

Louisiana Freedom Summer starts tomorrow.

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Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s Attorney General, called the ruling “a seismic decision” that ended Louisiana’s “long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map.”

That’s not legal language in my view. It’s the same segregationist language from decades ago.

In 1960, after federal courts ordered New Orleans schools desegregated, Louisiana Attorney General Jack Gremillion called the court a “den of iniquity.” He was held in contempt for it.

In 1898, Thomas Semmes led Louisiana’s constitutional convention and said its new constitution was designed “to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and Constitutionally done.”

Same office. Same state. Same project. The vocabulary changes slightly. The project doesn’t.

Murrill is invoking the 14th Amendment — passed during Reconstruction to protect freed Black people — as a weapon to eliminate Black representation. She defended Louisiana’s map for two years, then switched sides mid-case and claimed victory for the position she opposed.

Strip the legal language away, and she is saying: Louisiana fought for the right to suppress Black voting power. We finally won.

on the topic of Homelessness to Become Illegal in Louisiana...and New Orleans will be seriously impacted....

Cicero argues the opposite of Housing First. Its homelessness agenda says states should ban unauthorized street camping and direct funds away from what it calls (without evidence) expensive and ineffective Housing First programs. Business Insider reported that Cicero has worked to pass public-camping laws in multiple states, with fines and jail time for people seeking shelter outdoors. Now that logic is in Louisiana.

State Representative Debbie Villio of Kenner authored HB 211. The Louisiana Legislature lists the bill as pending on the Senate floor after it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday with a vote of 4-1. The bill creates a crime called unauthorized camping on public property. The bill text defines public camping broadly: lodging or residing overnight on public property, including with tents, bedding, pillows, belongings, or even without a temporary shelter.

A first offense can bring a fine of up to five hundred dollars or up to six months in jail. A second or subsequent offense can bring up to one thousand dollars and imprisonment, with or without hard labor, for one to two years. That is the machinery of the state aimed at a person sleeping outside.

Villio says this does not criminalize homelessness. But if you have no home, no shelter bed, no registered and insured car, and no legal place to sleep outside, then sleeping becomes a crime. And everyone needs to sleep to live. So I guess living is the crime.

Here is the part that makes it obscene. Jefferson Parish, Villio’s own parish, has no homeless shelter, according to the draft piece and reporting cited there. When Villio was asked where the money would come from for treatment, shelter, and mental health services, she said the bill could help draw down federal money, but did not name the program or the amount.

That is not a plan. That is a hope. Criminalize sleeping outside now. Figure out housing later? Hope Trump sends money, while he is moving in the opposite direction. His FY2027 budget proposal would cut HUD by $10.7 billion, about 13 percent, and restructure homelessness assistance with work requirements and time limits.

A few days ago, two private equity firms announced their offer to buy Cleco Power. Bloomberg reports the deal is worth nearly $6 billion.

That money does not go into the grid. It does not fix a power line in Avoyelles Parish. It does not lower a single bill in Natchitoches, Winn, or Catahoula. It goes to the sellers — Macquarie Asset Management, British Columbia Investment Management, and Manulife — who bought Cleco a decade ago for $4.9 billion, extracted ten years of returns, and just flipped it.

That’s the deal. That’s what they’re calling an investment in Louisiana’s future.

I’ve been in the room when transactions like this get sold to the public. I’ve spent thirty years watching what comes next.

The majority buyer is Stonepeak Partners, headquartered in New York. Founded in 2011 by an Australian named Michael Dorrell. Dorrell spent over a decade at Macquarie Group — the Australian bank whose asset management arm is one of the three sellers in this transaction — before leaving to start his own firm. Per Wikipedia, Stonepeak is “noted for having numerous ex-Macquarie Group employees in its ranks.” Forbes puts Dorrell’s net worth at $8.5 billion.

Macquarie is part of the consortium selling Cleco to him right now.

Same world. Different hat.

The minority partner is Bernhard Capital Partners, based in Baton Rouge. Bernhard already controls Louisiana’s gas — their Delta Utilities bought out Entergy’s and CenterPoint’s gas operations across the state, financed by Blackstone. Stonepeak’s founders came out of Blackstone, too.

Stonepeak. Bernhard. Blackstone. Macquarie. The roads connect.

Governor Jeff Landry praised the deal the same day it was announced. Pay attention to who speaks first when something like this is announced. It tells you everything about who the deal is for.

While all of this was playing out, I was at Jazz Fest.

David Byrne on the Gentilly stage. Byrne is the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads, one of the most important bands in American music. His whole band wore blue. In a red state. No speech about it. No explanation. Just a choice — deliberate, visible, joyful — that told you everything about where they stood without demanding anything from you. The music did the rest. The crowd did the rest.

That’s what love looks like when it’s working. That’s what integrity looks like in practice.

Meanwhile, Trump went to the White House briefing room.

A reporter asked him why he keeps facing assassination attempts. He said, “I’ve studied assassinations. And I must tell you the most impactful people, the people that do the most — you take a look at Abraham Lincoln — the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after.”

Someone just tried to shoot him. His first interpretive frame was: this proves how great I am.

It didn’t stop there. The next morning he posted on Truth Social that the attack “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!” He is demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build himself a personal ballroom. Lawsuits have tried to stop it. His response to an assassination attempt was to use it as a construction argument.

Then the next day on 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell read him a line from the suspect’s manifesto. Trump called her “horrible people.” He told her she “should be ashamed” of herself. “You’re a disgrace,” he said. On camera. On CBS News. The same CBS News that spiked a story to protect him four months ago. The same CBS News whose parent company needs his administration to approve a $110 billion merger.

O’Donnell sat there and took it.

And the press — the people who had been hiding under the tables an hour before — covered it as a unity moment. PBS ran the headline: “Trump calls for unity and bipartisan healing.”

Nobody noted the contradiction. Nobody named what they had just witnessed. A man compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, used an assassination attempt to pitch his ballroom, and called a journalist a disgrace for doing her job. On the network that answers to the man who needs his approval to close the biggest media deal in a decade.

That’s not a free press. That’s a performance of one.

We are fourteen months into a presidency that promised working Americans everything and delivered almost nothing.

He said jobs would come roaring back. Jobs are declining. He said healthcare would be affordable. Healthcare premiums doubled. He said costs would fall. Costs exploded. He said there would be no new wars. He started one.

This is not a failure of policy. This is not a disagreement on approach. This is a failure to deliver on the fundamental promises that got him elected.

And here’s what makes it worse: there are things he’s done that don’t even appear in this report card. The appointments. The cruelty. The erosion of institutions. The lies told daily on Truth Social. The conflicts of interest. The revenge taken on people who challenged him. The pardoning of January 6th insurrectionists. The gutting of the EPA. The attacks on women’s healthcare. The dismantling of protections for disabled children. The budget cuts will hurt millions.

But I wanted to focus on this: What did he promise? And did he deliver?

The answer, when you look at the numbers honestly, is: No. He didn’t deliver on nearly every measure.

This report card is not partisan. It’s not an opinion. It’s numbers. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From the Congressional Budget Office. From Reuters and the Associated Press. From fact-checkers who track every claim. From his own White House press releases.

It’s time for Americans to take an honest stock of what’s actually happening. Not what we hoped would happen. Not what we were told would happen. But what actually is.

Here’s the report card.