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You’ll find this nowhere else

Sunday, June 30th, 2019

In September 2005, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco selected Dr. Ivor van Heerden to lead the state’s major study of the Army Corps of Engineers’ levee breaches in New Orleans.

That report – called Team Louisiana – was the first report made public that faulted the corps for the catastrophic flooding.

So we were puzzled to learn that the seminal paper was no longer available online. That’s when we took matters into our own hands.

We asked Dr. van Heerden to send us the final version on DVD so we could upload it to Levees.org’s website. But why stop there?

We also uploaded every major study, all six of them.

This is not the first time a group of volunteers with negligible income stream has done what super-funded organizations could have done before.

Feast your eyes: https://levees.org/major-levee-studies/

Lesson from Entergy’s paid actor flap: Honesty is the best policy

Friday, June 21st, 2019

“Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy” (Cambridge University, 2014)

Last Friday, a New Orleans judge ordered the City Council to conduct a new vote on whether to allow Entergy to build a natural gas-fired power plant in eastern New Orleans.

Civil District Court Judge Piper Griffin agreed with opponents who insisted the council’s vote in March 2018 was tainted by dozens of paid actors who filled seats in council chambers.

Eventually it was revealed that Entergy paid two public affairs consultants to artificially create the crowd; and that its CEO was aware of the scheme.

Entergy is one of only two Fortune 500 companies in Louisiana and the only one in New Orleans.

According to Edward Walker in his 2014 book Grassroots for Hire, forty percent of Fortune 500 corporations in the US use public affairs consultants to help locate and target would-be activists and offer them non-monetary incentives for participation.