A senate committee today killed the bill to repeal the helmet laws in Louisiana. It appears to be dead for the session. However, bills don’t die easily and this one might find a way to resurrect. So, the next post in this blog is only half-correct.
Congratulations to the legislators who realized what hypocrisy it is to require seat belts but not helmets. This still doesn’t salvage the overall session, though. Too many hateful, stupid bills by ill-informed leges seem to be making it to the finish line. As always, lots of good news/bad news when the Legislature is active.
Smoking will take you places you've never been before.
In what is turning out to be one of the ugliest legislative sessions in my adult lifetime, the Louisiana Legislature seems bent on further eroding both our reputation and our wellbeing. After passing a bill requiring rear seat passengers to wear seatbelts, the leges kowtowed to the will of former governor–and mentor/benefactor of current Gov. Jindal– Mike Foster’s wishes and passed a bill that allows motorcyclists to go helmet-less, guaranteeing an increase in death and carnage–and higher medical bills that will cost taxpayers. Additionally, the House soundly defeated an attempt to ban smoking in bars and casinos, ostensibly to ensure freedom of choice. But that freedom only extends to smokers–a minority–and ensures that any nonsmokers–the majority–who wish to work in bars and casinos, or merely hear live music, drink a beer or gamble must breathe the toxic outgassing of smoking addicts.
Thanks, Louisiana Legislature! I’m no longer worried that my “right” to kill or maim myself or to personally pollute the air around me while smoking in confined spaces with nonsmokers will be taken away. Who cares that taxpayers will pay my bills if I smash my head in a minor motorcycle accident? And who cares if I make service workers sick or if nonsmokers don’t want to breathe my smoke? It’s freedom of choice–for me! I don’t want the government telling me what I can’t do to your lungs! That’s an invasion of my pursuit of happiness. So screw all you nonsmokers. How dare you use government to tell me what to do with your health!
Actual skull damage after no-helmet motorcycle accident
Louisiana is truly a leader. We have 2 cities in the Top 10 for murder. We are the Number 1 per capita state for carbon emissions. We incarcerate a larger percentage of our population than any other state. And now we “protect” the “rights” of smokers and soon-to-be-brain-injured motorcyclists. Maybe we’ll become one of the top organ donor states when the helmet law becomes effective.
Just don’t get caught in the back seat without your seatbelt on. We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. Because we care about your wellbeing.
NOTE: As of 3pm June4, all 3 of these bills await final passage if any of you care to get involved and contact your elected officials. See the Comments for this posting for specifics.
This is a rather primitive path in a park out west:
Redwood Path
This is what the N.O. City Park Improvement Association, park directors and contracted designers consider a modern path:
N.O. City Park Path
Don’t you feel better knowing that people on the public payroll showed their wisdom in the management of one of the world’s great municipal parks by designing, reviewing and approving nearly a mile of polluting, impermeable, heat-inducing asphalt eight feet wide? This really brings New Orleans into the 21st Century! Heck, now you can even drive a car in places you couldn’t before. We sure are in good hands.
I want to thank all the wonderful people around the world who continue to contribute to our renewal. I know you will be impressed when you see how we’ve become such good stewards of our landscape in the aftermath of Katrina. Come to think of it, we might even make a few more bucks showing the world how we do this.
I don’t know about you, but I’m so proud right now I could cry.
I’ve decided on a new career that I know will make me rich. I’m going to be a chicken plucking, film making, sports team owning, wood pulping for export, drug testing entrepreneur! Yes, that’s the key.
Since it’s increasingly obvious the state doesn’t care for its arts, music, environment, mental health or safety, I figured I’d put my thinking cap on and ponder: What does the state really support? And, voila, I got the answer!
We’re spending $114 million buying the friendship of the movie industry, we’re putting up $50 million for a chicken plant near the Arkansas border and $20 million for a chicken freezer next to the French Quarter, we’re annually handing professional sports teams dozens of millions, we’re giving tens of millions to speed up the cutting of our mixed hardwood forests for things like wood pellets to be burned for fuel in Europe and landscape mulch, and we might put our money where the piss is by drug testing 20,000 welfare recipients.
Those are the businesses in Louisiana’s future!
On the other hand, we’re doing nothing to support music, cutting the arts, still don’t fully understand how to restore our environment, are closing and cutting mental health facilities and even have a bill ready for the upcoming session that allows guns on campuses… Hey wait, I just thought of something: bulletproof vests for teachers and students!
Hell, I almost missed a big one that could pay for my second Hummer. Yeah, it’s a great time to be in Louisiana, no foolin’…IF you know what you’re doing.
As I write this, N.O. City Park (NOCP) is laying 4800 linear feet of 8 foot wide impermeable asphalt pathways in its Big Lake construction project. Also, construction crews are demolishing old parking and tennis courts between the Peristyle and Botanical Gardens to install yet more, polluting, impermeable, heat-inducing asphalt.
With all that we know about permeable paving and better stormwater management, this old fashioned, 20th century, car-oriented thinking is mind boggling. And to watch all this happen in one of the most precious places in the world, utilizing money donated from people who surely hoped we’d do the best we could to build with a strong sense of ecological awareness, is an abuse which I can find no diplomatic words to describe. I leave it to you to express, exclaim and accuse. As with so many things in the public realm–and NOCP is a public park whose staff is on the state payroll–we all share some of the blame.
I sent the following letter to Sally Perry, VP of the board of the New Orleans City Park Improvement Association (NOCPIA). I encourage readers to contact the NOCPIA and elected officials and demand that NOCP be the most innovative, sustainable park it can be.
Hi Sally:
So glad to reconnect and also happy that you were at the hearing. I’m not a golfer; but I don’t want to turn City Park into a feral landscape, either. There is a balance. A win-win can be achieved. However, I believe the plans as they now stand reflect outmoded thinking; an almost Eisenhower era-style of planning where development is done the way it always has been with cars and “drainage” as primary considerations.
Regarding NOCP drainage, the question starts with “to where?” And the dominoes of watershed realities expand outward for many, many miles. These realities must be understood and built-into all design considerations for our region, not just NOCP. David Waggoner knows so much about this thanks to his personal mission to interact with and learn from the Dutch. Is he part of the design team?
The current attitude seems to be the old “it’s too expensive” brush-off based on little research. We know so much more about ecological management, watersheds, and how to make design regenerative rather than just durable. What the park team needs is a change of thinking. And impervious asphalt and concrete need to be perceived as counterproductive.
We desperately need sustainability/green leadership to help redesign all plans to maximize innovation. City Park would then become a center for excellence in sustainable park design and implementation, something I believe would not only make the park more economically feasible and attractive to the world; but, something I also believe the world expects us to do with their contributions of time and money. And such a turn of thinking would open many more doors of support from myriad foundations and organizations.
The park has no green leader. It apparently has no strong green connections to the rapidly growing body of local professionals available to research, develop and implement best practices for sustainable, low impact design. And with nobody on the staff or board demanding innovation, how can anyone be expected to innovate?
Imagine if NOCP were to become a world leader in sustainable park design and operations, a true community partner in the education, health and well-being of the region. A place where people gathered not only for peaceful beauty but to learn how to live better, how to grow food, how to implement landscaping principles that healthily interact with the surrounding watershed, how to make a park thrive while maintaining its ecological balance and reducing the negative impact of parking, buildings, recreational facilities and golf courses. Now that would be an economic driver that could lead to sustaining the fiscal future of NOCP!
And sustainable is as much about the green of money as it is the green of the landscape. NOCP could be the best municipal park on the planet.
Mistakes we make now will not be ours to live with, they will be faced by our children and theirs. But, when we kill an ancient oak because we added too much impervious asphalt and concrete, or kill a cypress because we failed to maintain fresh water systems by assuming high saline water from the bayou was good, we commit two crimes: we assault our history and we steal from the future. Adding more heat-inducing, polluting, impermeable asphalt and concrete is a crime against the future. The cost must be measured in more than just today’s dollars.
It’s time to stop and look at what we’re doing. It’s time to make sustainable, low impact design the highest priority of planning.
Look at the makeup of the board and staff. Where is the diversity of thought, age and race that reflects New Orleans? Where are the young innovators who will lead us tomorrow? It will be their park, sooner than you or I want to admit.
I would be thrilled to be of assistance in any and every way possible in helping make NOCP the greenest park on earth. However it will take the leadership of the NOCPIA board to make anything happen. Feel free to call upon me at any time, and to share my thoughts with the rest of the board.
OK, so the numbers are in and, as reported today in the Shreveport Times, in 2007 Louisiana invested $100,000,000 in film (after recouping $14m in taxes) on $429,000,000 of film spending. Of course verifying these numbers, particularly the spending by film companies, is a fuzzy math situation in which we remain dependent upon the film companies themselves to report their spending, so I have my doubts as to the accuracy.
Can you imagine that if you were an investor in the film industry, say in a film fund, how much of a long term return your money might be getting? You’d be getting checks for the rest of your life and that of your heirs if you had spent $100 million in a film investment vehicle that spread your investments around the industry. But what does Louisiana get? One time, poorly validated “spending” by these companies that results in short-term jobs averaging $32,000. But we look good on camera!
If this is such a good investment, why don’t we do it for music? In fact, why don’t we do it for every business in Louisiana. If the state can directly spend a dollar and get back four, why not spend on restaurants, grocery stores, construction companies, or any business? Because it defies the laws of physics and economics. You can’t create a perpetual motion machine and you can’t use public money to create perpetual economic engines. For the public to benefit, any expenditure needs to produce more in tax revenues than it spends. Just as too many calories make you fat, too much spending makes you broke. No matter how you extend the numbers to “secondary spending” you cannot ignore the fact that more money is being taken from public coffers than is being replenished.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: where’s Louisiana’s share? If individuals invested this much money in the film business, they’d be getting a a piece of the action, a return on investment. Why is this not possible for public investment?
Music is our true asset. Though we welcome Hollywood and the movie industry, it is not one of Louisiana’s naturally occurring assets. Music is our calling card to the hearts, minds and wallets of the world. Yet we continue to allow it to flounder, leaderless, budget-less and without accountability for what little is being done. The press and public remain silent about the ongoing tragedy that is the Louisiana Music Commission.
Here’s the kind of readily available information that used to be produced by the LMC and which was publicly available on the web until 2006 when the years of undermining by a small, avaricious group empowered by soon-to-be-jailed former Louisiana Economic Development (LED) Entertainment director Mark Smith and other cohorts finally prevailed in destroying the LMC:
In fact, let me state this: former LED secretaries Don Hutchinson and Mike Olivier, along with Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the aforementioned Mark Smith were to music what the US Army Corps of Engineers was to flood protection in New Orleans in 2005–a massive disaster with ongoing consequences that will affect future generations.
Of course, I could be wrong. In fact, I hope I am. Someone, please convince me that I’m wrong about all this and that Louisiana is better off because of these things. I’m a reasonable person.
Artists scheduled to perform include George Porter Jr., Juice with Joe Krown, Billy Iuso, Big Chief Alfred Doucette, Margie Perez, Dr. Bone and many more!
A special thanks to Laura Maggi of the Times-Picayune for her ongoing stories of abuse and death in Orleans Parish Prison. Here’s the latest.
Today’s Times-Picayune reports that the ACLU is looking into deaths at Orleans Parish Prison. Near the end of the article it reads: Gusman emphasized that Miceli, who stopped breathing less than five hours after she was put into the restraints, didn’t die at the jail but at University Hospital. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital after she was resuscitated by jail medical staff.
“She was revived,” Gusman said. “She didn’t die here.”
It’s just as I noted in my original post, hardly anyone “officially” dies in jail. Except this time, the facts are even more horrible. Cayne Miceli, a severe asthmatic for years, was restrained flat on her back with a heavy strap across her torso FOR MORE THAN FOUR HOURS! Sheriff Gusman said it himself.
Orleans Parish Prison is a torture chamber. It violates basic human rights and international laws regarding detainees. It must be held accountable. Nobody is safe. Going to jail for a municipal charge, without arraignment, can result in a death sentence with no judge, no jury, no indictment and no mercy.
The family is holding a Catholic Mass in remembrance of Cayne on Saturday, Jan 24 at 10AM at Our Lady of the Gulf in Gulf Shores, AL where Cayne spent her childhood. Friends are planning other events and memorials as well. Information can be found first at the Yahoo group dedicated to Cayne.
Cayne Miceli @ NO Jazz Fest 2008 photo by Kim Uddo (Links to slideshow)
UPDATED 1/10/09: Note: When I originally wrote this, many facts were unclear. Now that more information is available, I have re-written parts of this piece to reflect more accurately the chain of events and overarching realities that have come to light. This being a blog and not a printed publication, it is a living document and one that can be improved and edited to improve its veracity. I hope that’s what I’m doing. Regardless, I cannot possibly capture all the truths at work here. Suffice to say, Cayne turned to the system for help and it killed her.
Update: Jan 13, 2009-Shoeless Eric was with the family at Cayne’s bedside when the decision was made to remove her from life support. He’s created a moderated group site where you can find more information about what happened and what is going to happen: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/caynemiceli
Update Jan 14, 2009: Karen Dalton-Beninato’s blog on Huffington Post today is about Cayne. It’s a beautiful piece and features a piece Cayne wrote.
The lack of psychiatric beds, health care resources and basic human rights in New Orleans produced yet another tragedy. After being treated at Tulane Medical Center with a powerful steroid, prednisone, for her severe asthma, my friend Cayne Miceli believed she was having an adverse reaction to the drug. She sought to be re-examined and/or admitted and was turned away because the hospital felt it had done its job, and because she had no insurance. Unable to contain her frustration, her emotional state aggravated by the steroids, she flew into a rage and was taken away to jail. She allegedly attempted suicide and was put into 5 point restraints, aggravating both her mental state and her ability to breathe. She reacted badly to the restraints and was further subdued by two jail personnel. Subsequently, she “became unresponsive.”Jail staff intubated and “revived” her so that her “actual” death occurred at University Hospital with the decision of her family to remove her from life support. The facts are still unclear and may not be clarified for a while. But one thing is clear: the system failed her.
Cayne was a vivacious but troubled soul. She had a magical quality that connected her deeply to New Orleans. She was a survivor like the rest of us. She was full of life.
Cayne wasn’t afraid to reach out when she needed support. When she sought medical assistance for her asthma, it wasn’t done lightly. She has lived with asthma for many years. Cayne knew she needed help and did the best she could to get it. In Post-Katrina New Orleans, she found no room for her illnesses.
New Orleans without Charity Hospital is a city without compassion. That we continue to have too few psychiatric beds is unacceptable. That we continue to be haggling over the rebuilding of our health care infrastructure is abominable.
New Orleans is a city filled with Cayne Miceli’s, uncounted troubled and traumatized souls who keep things together most of the time. But when their lungs, hearts and minds can take no more, New Orleans provides no shelter, no bosom into which to retreat because Charity Hospital has not been rebuilt.
I now officially join the voices of those opposed to the tearing down of houses to build a new, fantasy hospital. Charity sits unused and ready to be restored while victims, the detainees–die lonely deaths in jail, our default system for handling the mentally troubled.
The people who seek to extend this process because they refuse to fix Charity Hospital have blood on their hands. I will remind them. Then again, maybe we all have blood on our hands these days.
Note: Jan 10, 2009: It’s clearer to me now that health and justice systems are in a dance of death lottery that can start when you say “I need help!” or merely, “I can’t breathe!”
It’s also clear to me that if someone at Tulane had said, “OK, we’ll examine you again,” instead of “call the police,” Cayne would probably still be with us.
Now that we know more about Cayne’s horrible experiences and death, the lack of beds is only part of this problem.
In Post-Katrina New Orleans, we live with layers and layers and layers of problems, of missed opportunities, of disorganization and incompetence that infect the system from within our “rebuilt” homes to the halls of power in Washington DC. I pray we see that improve in 2009.
I also learned that I have a dear friend whose brother suffered gross mistreatment in a local jail. That this isn’t the first asthmatic to die in a local jail. That the last person to die on that torturous medieval restraint system died a medieval torture death: dehydration.
It’s bad enough my country justified torture. Now I know that my community tortures, too.
5 Point Restraint System
And I’ve learned that best estimates put those shining new hospitals opening in 2016.
At the current rate of death and disablement happening in area jails, I’m probably going to personally know several more victims before the next seven years pass.
Our jails and prisons are maiming and killing too many people who often haven’t even been arraigned. And now our hospitals can’t recognize the symptoms of the drugs they administer and dump their patients on the police? Suffice to say I find this unacceptable/abusive/you fill-in-the-blank.
We’re losing basic human rights. I hope we’re waking up.
As Cayne so often said when she reached a stopping point in the conversation: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peace & Love! Peace & Love!”
<Sigh>.
Magical Cayne Miceli (photo enhanced by Jeremy Machalek of WhyArts.com)
It’s a damn shame how the few writers/publishers making money off Louisiana music have completely ignored the details of this story and its connection to the demise of the state’s main support mechanisms for music. I guess if the occasional ad money from the state keeps flowing, the criticism stays in check.
NOLAmotion Blog 
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