#latoya cantrell
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okay I can understand cheating but with a member of your security team while you are on duty mayor?
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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell faces a possible recall election as violent crime spikes, uncollected trash overflows into the streets and she contends with allegations she had an affair with a member of her security detail.
The first Black woman to be elected mayor in 2018, Cantrell easily won re-election in 2021. But her popularity has waned as the number of murders has climbed, allowing New Orleans to capture a title last year that no municipality wants — the murder capital of the nation.
Her second term has also been plagued by questions about her personal use of a city-owned apartment in the French Quarter and her relationship with a member of her security detail.
Organizers of an effort to recall Cantrell delivered nearly a dozen boxes of signed petitions to the registrar of voters’ office last week, just ahead of a deadline to seek a recall election. Organizers said they gathered enough signatures to force a recall vote.
“We’re talking about our lights, our trash, our streets, our crime, our children,” said Eileen Carter, one of the organizers spearheading the effort.
With a population of 377,000 that is 58% Black, New Orleans had the highest number of murders per capita in the country in the first half of last year, after falling off dramatically in 2019, according to NBC affiliate WDSU of New Orleans.
Homicides in New Orleans had increased about 144% through mid-September in 2022, compared with the first nine months of 2019, according to data from the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a public safety nonprofit. By the end of the year, a total of 265 homicides had been committed in the city, according to official numbers.
“In 2022, we were the nation’s murder capital, how does that happen?” Carter asked.
Cantrell’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Her communications director recently sent a statement to USA Today that said, “The mayor continues to work on behalf of the people of New Orleans. The city just came off a successful and safe Mardi Gras, and crime is down in numerous major areas. Today and every day, the mayor remains focused on delivering real results for the people of New Orleans.”
In January, Cantrell announced the formation of a violent crime reduction task force, saying New Orleans was part of a trend occurring in major cities across the country, where violent crime is rising and the number of officers on the streets is falling because of staffing shortages.
“So far, 2023 has already been met with a significant increase in violent crime, and now with the proper resources at our disposal, I cannot think of a better moment to establish this task force," Cantrell said in a statement announcing the unit.
She said the group of police officers and other public safety officialswould be "laser-focused on preventing violent crime in our city" and removing "the most violent offenders from our streets.”
City officials said Cantrell's office has also taken steps to improve garbage collection with two new contracts and other improvements. Service was disrupted for weeks after Hurricane Ida struck in August 2021, and it had already fallen behind because of staffing shortages during the pandemic.
Cantrell, who is married, is also contending with allegations that she had a relationship with a subordinate. The accusation was contained in a divorce filing made by the wife of New Orleans police officer Jeffrey Vappie, who is a member of Cantrell’s security detail. In the petition, Vappie's wife claimed her husband was having an affair with Cantrell, according to the news outlet nola.com.
Vappie said through his attorneys last month that he never admitted to his wife that he and the mayor were in a relationship, according to nola.com. An attorney for Vappie did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
Cantrell has also faced calls for an investigation over her use of a city-owned apartment, with detractors saying she's using it for her personal benefit while it's meant for city business only. Cantrell’s office said her use of the apartment is consistent with that of previous mayors.
Recall organizers have not said how many signatures they have collected, but they claim to have reached the threshold to force an election. Nearly 50,000 signatures, or 20% of registered voters in Orleans Parish, are needed to hold a recall election, but that number could change: Recall supporters filed a lawsuit this week claiming the number of active voters in Orleans Parish is actually much lower than officials suggest and could be off by potentially tens of thousands of voters.
The registrar of voters has 20 days to certify the recall petition and send it to Gov. John Bel Edwards. If enough signatures have been collected, Edwards would issue an election proclamation within 15 days.
New Orleans resident W.C. Johnson, 75, said he initially supported Cantrell when she was a member of the New Orleans City Council, but he has changed his mind.
“Cantrell is not a manager, she is not good for the city," he said. "She has mismanaged the Office of the Mayor of New Orleans so badly, we need to get somebody in there that’s going to be able to put the house back in order.”
In a 2022 quality of life survey for Orleans and Jefferson parishes conducted by the University of New Orleans, 31% of city residents said they approved of the job Cantrell was doing, while 62% said they were unhappy with her performance.
The survey found that crime had “a profound effect on the overall quality of life in Orleans” and that residents were “very dissatisfied with the quality of life in the city and say the city has become a worse place to live in the past five years.”
Resident Annette Cranford-Hamilton, 60, who supports the recall effort, said she was the victim of a crime last yearwhen a stray bullet entered her home, “leaving plaster all over my husband” after it struck a wall in the master bedroom.
“I don’t feel safe at all," she said. "I’m afraid to leave my house. I am afraid to drive my car.
“We need someone that’s going to care about our city and fix our city. It’s broken," she continued. "It needs some nurturing, and I don’t feel that Latoya is doing that. I feel LaToya Cantrell is out for LaToya Cantrell and not the people of the city of New Orleans.”
#Amid a crime spike and complaints of uncollected trash#New Orleans mayor faces a possible recall election#new orleans#LaToya Cantrell#Black Mayors
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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell calls Eviction 'Unreasonable
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Hey Los Angeles! What are your plans for the weekend?
On Saturday, June 17th at 11:00 AM, Los Angeles City Councilmember Heather Hutt, and the Los Angeles Jazz Festival Foundation will host the dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly named, “New Orleans Corridor”; (Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church, 1977 W Jefferson Blvd, LA, CA 90018) to Harold & Belles Creole Restaurant (2920 W Jefferson Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90018). The New Orleans…
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#african american families#Black Music Month#creole#event#events#free event#Juneteenth#lost angeles#louisiana#mayor latoya cantrell#weekend#weekend plans
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SHE THINKS SHE IS SPECIAL
SHE THINKS SHE IS SPECIAL
Dem mayor refuses to pay back taxpayer money she used on upgraded travel, says critics do not ‘understand the world black women walk in’
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) has found herself at the center of controversy after she repeatedly used taxpayer money to finance expensive upgraded air travel.
Now, she is refusing to reimburse taxpayers.
What are the details?
Despite apparently…
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It's getting hard 2 keep up w/ all the shenanigans going on:
1st Claudine Gay is forced to resign from Harvard, for blatant Plagiarism.
Then Fani Willis is caught up in Adultery w/ her subordinate.
Now Tasha K is caught Red Handed perjuring herself in her lawsuit against Cardi B.
All of these Women had the Wind @ their backs, but chose to Push the Envelope, for whatever reason. Claudine Gay forgot WHO finances Harvard Univ. A little finesse could've gone a long way to keeping her position. Fani Willis has denied allegations of Adultery w/ one of her 'Rock Star' Special Prosecutors, Nathan Wade; despite Court Papers showing that she was subpoenaed in his Divorce Trial, as a witness for his estranged Wife, Jocelyn. It is insinuated that Nathan Wade used a portion of his paychecks to take DA Willis on lavish vacations... DA Willis then attended a local Black Church, where she tried to Sistah Gurl & Obama Speak her way out of Adultery, while simultaneously making a plea(?) to her Superiors.
Tasha K tried to emulate Wendy Williams, & got the same result. She obviously underestimated Cardi B. Rather than negotiate Settlement Terms w/ Cardi B's Legal Team, Tasha K tried to hide her funds & got caught! I followed 'Sharell's World' down the rabbit hole, as She & Perry went through the Court Transcripts showing that Tasha K had 5 Trust Funds set up to hide her Cash... Maybe Tasha should've used something other than her Middle Name & her Children to name those Trusts? Again, She underestimated Cardi B's Legal Team. According to the Court Transcripts, Tasha has also dragged her husband & her accountant into this mess... Maybe she should Cease & Desist w/ antagonizing Kevin Hart & R. Kelly?... Maybe?
These 3 events got Me asking: Is there an Attack on Black Girl Magic, or is this yet another case of White Supremacists playing w/ their food? All three Women suffer from self inflicted wounds, so they can't point to a Patriarchy. That said, All three Women were given platforms over other able bodied Women, so were they hand picked? Jason Black (aka The Black Authority) pointed out a previous 'Adulterous Affair' in New Orleans, between Mayor LaToya Cantrell & her Executive Protection Officer, Jeffrey Vappie. TBA detailed how these Women seem to be mimicking their White Peers, but I don't think they understand how White Supremacy works. 'Go For Self-erism' really only works for Whitefolk & their 'Model Minorities'. Blackfolk R like those things in 'Wack A Mole' holes; at ANY GIVEN MOMENT, They can be knocked into oblivion... Dolton Mayor, Tiffany Henyard should B paying attention.
-Just My 2 Cents
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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The New Orleans City Council voted Thursday to change the locks on a coveted city-owned apartment in its latest dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell, whose use of the French Quarter property drew scrutiny and figured in a failed recall effort.
The newly flaring dispute centers on one of 50 units in the 19th-century building known as the Upper Pontalba. It's steps away from the Mississippi River and, along with St. Louis Cathedral, is among five historic structures bordering the green space known as Jackson Square.
Previous mayors have said they had used the apartment for meetings, special events or to house visiting dignitaries. Cantrell came under criticism for her personal use of the unit after a series of reports by WVUE-TV that used public surveillance video to document her long hours there, including time with her police bodyguard and an overnight stay with guests during the summer Essence Festival.
Her use of the apartment and her billing the city for first-class airfare on official trips abroad — both defended as proper by Cantrell — were among complaints by backers of an unsuccessful 2022 recall effort against the mayor, who was reelected in November 2021 and cannot seek a third consecutive term.
Last August, the council overrode Cantrell's veto of a measure putting the apartment back into commerce with other Pontalba units that are available for rent. That followed a March 2023 finding from the city’s inspector general, who said in a letter to the mayor that her use of the apartment may violate the state constitution’s restrictions on the donation of public property and city code language governing her salary.
Council President J.P. Morrell said in a Feb. 28 letter to the mayor that “furniture and other personal effects” remained in the unit. “It is also my understanding that you and members of your executive protection detail possess the only keys to the unit,” Morrell wrote.
In a statement issued early Wednesday, Cantrell's office said the French Market Corporation, the nonprofit in charge of the building, had keys to enter the unit. It didn't say whether the mayor had given up her keys. The statement said Cantrell is not using the unit and that there have been no impediments to the corporation's access to the unit since last year's ordinance was passed.
“We hope that any reasonable person would recognize that initiating an eviction process is unreasonable when there is no tenant to evict,” the statement said.
The mayor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment following Thursday's 5-2 council vote. In addition to calling for the French Market Corporation to change the locks, the measure calls for any personal items to be removed by March 21.
“To date,” Morrell told the council Thursday, “whether by inactivity or willfulness, the mayor has refused to comply with the law.”
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I'm going to use my favorite word concerning democraps.
Shocked.🥱
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I'll Have a Sazerac with That, Acrylic on Panel, 24" x 36", 2023
This piece was inspired by my experience in New Orleans in the spring of 2022. I had the most incredible opportunity to design a mural for a levee in the French Quarter, which was then executed by Louisiana artist JoLean Barkley. The mural project was put together by the Consulate General of Canada, the Office of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, and the Arts Council of New Orleans. I was flown out to the Big Easy last year by Canadian Consulate for the unveiling of the mural. I saw gators in the swamp! In fact, it was the same bayou that inspired the artwork for Princess and the Frog which is one of my favourite Disney films. The alligator’s reflection is of Indigenous design, a call to the mural itself, all surrounded in the flora of a Louisiana swamp and framed in an oyster shell. I will never forget my first experience eating oysters (I haven't had a good once since) with my mother, Noella De Maina – Consul, Foreign Policy and Public Affairs and Consul General of Canada, Dr. Rachel McCormick who also was the one who suggested I paint something inspired by my experience and told me to try a Sazerac with that.
* Please ignore Instagrams compression issues - for a better view check it out on my website!
#indigenous#chantelle trainor-matties#art#artist#frettchanstudios#indigenous artist#native art#painting#indigenous art#new orleans#louisiana#swamp#aligator
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In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.
First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.
The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.
The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7
After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.
A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.
By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.
Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.
Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.
But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.
A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.
It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.
That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.
That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.
An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.
Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.
The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19
It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20
What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.
Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.
But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.
Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.
The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.
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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell: “Today marks the series wrap of the longest-running Black family drama series created by a Black woman, acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay.
📷: @SkipBolen #QueenSugarDay #RoadToTheFinalSeason #QueenSugar
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New Orleans mayor Latoya Cantrell is being investigated by the Feds for ...
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Another Sex Scandal: New Orleans Democrat Mayor LaToya Cantrell Faces FBI Investigation Over Alleged Relationship with Her Married Bodyguard and Misuse of Taxpayer-funded Dubai Trip | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hᴏft
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/another-sex-scandal-new-orleans-democrat-mayor-latoya/
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A campaign to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is in its early stages, but appears to be gaining momentum as residents are feeling increasingly fed up with rising crime and the mayor's jet-setting lifestyle.
At petition signings city-wide, referred to as "parties" across social media and on nolatoya.org, citizens are pushing back after feeling forced into supporting Mayor Cantrell’s expensive international travel on taxpayer dollars and enduring her alleged gross negligence in managing violent crime.
The New Orleans Police Department lost over 150 officers in 2021 under Cantrell's watch, despite a surge in murders and carjackings. According to the Metropolitan Crime Commission weekly bulletin, as of Sept. 11 carjackings in the Crescent City this year stood at 217, an increase of over 200% since 2019.
NOPD Chief Shaun Ferguson gave Fox News Digital a terse "no comment" when pressed for his opinion on recall efforts against Mayor Cantrell Thursday.
The two New Orleanians who filed the recall petition united through social media. They refer to themselves as an "odd couple:" Eileen Carter is Cantrell’s former social media manager, and Belden "Noonie Man" Batiste ran for New Orleans mayor in 2021, garnering just over 5% of the vote. Both are registered Democrats. They cite "failure to put New Orleans first and execute the responsibilities of the position" as reason for recall on their August 26 request.
DEMOCRAT MAYOR UNDER FIRE FOR RACKING UP $30K IN FIRST CLASS TRAVEL FOR 'SAFETY' PURPOSES
A current Edgewater poll puts support for Cantrell's recall over 55%. 53,700 signatures are required citywide by February 22, 2023 to initiate a recall election.
If the petition does not meet requirements, residents must wait 18 months in order to file another recall under Louisiana election law.
Once the petition is submitted and certified, Governor Jon Bel Edwards must proclaim a recall election. In this election, voters can ultimately decide if Mayor Cantrell vacates office.
"If we keep up this pace, we will meet the goal in five months instead of the six months allotted," said Vice Chair Eileen Carter. "The sooner residents sign, the sooner we [can] petition the governor."
Carter and Batiste did not want to reveal the latest number of signatures received on the recall petition because of fear of sabotage by Cantrell supporters. Since the recall petition was officially filed, many fake petitions and one impostor website set up to confuse citizens have made the rounds. The last published number listed on the website was at over 3,100 signatures.
After the recall effort began, Cantrell’s team dismissed the petition as a Republican-backed attempt to "undermine and discredit the first Black woman Mayor of New Orleans" and lashed out at Fox News. Maggie Carroll, the director of Cantrell's PAC "Action New Orleans" and former campaign manager, has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
However, for many residents, Cantrell's appearance in court August 18 in support of teenage carjacker at his sentencing hearing as his two female victims looked on was the impetus for a recall.
The 14-year-old teen had been found guilty of five counts of carjacking in the span of two days. He was a graduate of Cantrell's Pathways youth internship program for teenagers arrested, detained, or charged at least twice in the previous 18 months. According to a June statement from the mayor's office on the program, "mindful meditation, life skills and how to make better choices" are part of the curriculum. More than 80 juveniles who have passed through the criminal justice system have graduated from the program; Cantrell's office claims 90 percent of these graduates "have stayed out of trouble!"
Juvenile Judge Ranord Darensburg handed down sentencing of three years’ probation and no jail time to the carjacker after Mayor LaToya Cantrell's courtroom visit. Fox News Digital found this same judge was endorsed by Cantrell, according to his campaign's Instagram account in November 2020.
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" shed light on Cantrell's controversial courtroom appearance and New Orleans' problems with carjacking, including the brutal death of grandmother Linda Frickey, 73. She was killed at the hands of four teenage carjackers who were accused of dragging her four blocks until her arm was severed, and she bled to death.
"New Orleans is now the most violent city in the world, only behind other countries that are in war," Laura Cannizzaro Rodrigue of the Bayou Mama Bears said in an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital. "The recall petition was filed just days after New Orleans Mayor Cantrell sat beside a serial carjacker… The multiple victims of the carjacker sat on the opposite side of the courtroom in disbelief. America looked on in shock at New Orleans, yet again."
Mayor Cantrell’s politically costly sister city trips to the European cities of Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this past summer have also pushed some New Orleanians to support a recall. Her travels have cost the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.
City of New Orleans official travel policy requires all employees to personally pay any difference in cost for work-related airfare upgrades, stating "employees are required to purchase the lowest airfare available… employees who choose an upgrade from coach, economy, or business class flights are solely responsible for the difference in cost."
Despite this, Cantrell has not paid the near $30,000 bill from her first-class international flight upgrades over the summer.
In a press conference last week, Mayor Cantrell stated that "my travel accommodations are a matter of safety, not of luxury…. I need to be safe as I do business on behalf of the city of New Orleans." Her security detail traveled in coach class on flights to both Milan Malpensa and Charles de Gaulle airports this summer.
Cantrell has defended her sister city trips, arguing that they yield a positive return of investment. "When I go, I'm reinvesting in the people who get marketed, and no apologies surrounding that at all," she said at a town hall.
Fox News Digital contacted the Tourism Board of New Orleans regarding the mayor’s summer travels yielding more tourism revenue for the city in 2022. The board did not have much insight.
Senior Vice President of Communications Kelly Schulz said, "We are not yet back at pre-pandemic levels" of tourism, but could not give any concrete revenue numbers or tourism numbers for summer 2022.
NEW ORLEANS COULD BECOME MURDER CAPITAL OF US UNDER MAYOR LATOYA CANTRELL
Per public record requests with the Department of International Affairs for the City of New Orleans, correspondence for both the trips to Switzerland and the French Riviera date back as early as 2020, but Cantrell's flights were not booked until three days before her tours with the agency Going Places.
Cantrell spent $11,027.08 on her sister city trip to Ascona, Switzerland to coincide with the city's annual jazz festival in June.
Her Swiss itinerary included a tentative one o'clock in the morning "jam session" and suggested the mayor is "free to return at any time" to the Hotel Eden Roc, with room rates ranging from $304 to $1,351 in mid-June. For her diplomatic work on behalf of New Orleans, three hours of afternoon rest appear to be required ahead of a photo call and "short brassband parade" of just 10 minutes' duration.
Mayor Cantrell returned to New Orleans with enough time to host a lavish welcome "pink party" at Essence Fest in a custom handmade beaded jumpsuit. Essence Fest hosted many celebrities and elected officials from the Biden administration, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Kamala Harris, with the latter interviewed by actress Keke Palmer in front of a banner which misspelled Louisiana. Cantrell's official Instagram page shows a video of the mayor dancing the night away while ensuring to credit her fashion designer, hair stylist and makeup artist for their work.
Belden Batiste, chairman of NoLaToya, ripped Mayor Cantrell's track record of attending and hosting parties amid escalating crime in New Orleans in an interview with Fox News Digital.
"When you see crime on the rise, when you see people getting carjacked, guns being put to the head, and you see a mayor going all around the country partying and twerking and not working, there's something wrong with that," he said.
NEW ORLEANS HOMICIDE RATE REACHES 14-YEAR HIGH FOLLOWING FATAL SHOOTING NEAR HOTEL
She then jetted back to Europe once more. Mayor Cantrell’s following trip to France after Essence Fest was even more expensive than Switzerland: $19,654.37 were spent in only five days’ time in the French Riviera for Cantrell’s sister city trip to Juan Antibes-les-Pins in July. No official business was scheduled on-the-record before 10 am.
Cocktails were scheduled with lunch shortly after arriving, and before meeting any local officials or Cantrell making statements on behalf of New Orleans. In original correspondence, purported diplomatic visits with the royal family of Monaco and the mayor of Paris were proposed but ultimately did not come to fruition.
The mayor and her team completed their French tour in Paris at the Pullman Hotel which overlooks the Eiffel Tower. She defended this booking, stating in a press conference, "The hotel rooms are booked by travel agents, and I can’t tell you why, I would say because that, that’s what was available." Cantrell paid $776.78 for one night at the Pullman Hotel.
Mayor Cantrell's communications director Gregory Joseph has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
#nunyas news#wonder if she's considered heading up a blm chapter#after she's done with politics#she'll fit right in with several others
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