Science | openDemocracy

Ruling Louisiana

Jim Gabour

Important issues, matters which will define who we are as a people, took centre-stage at the just-ended legislative session in the state of Louisiana. The universal and the trivial roared through political processes and merged into a swirling storm of self-indulgence that eventually, through an extended sequence of events, had a very real impact on the upcoming American presidential race.

Jim Gabour's articles for openDemocracy are collected in the latest edition of the openDemocracy Quarterly For details of Undercurrent: Life after Katrina, click hereLawmaking is a varied and occasionally otherworldly business.

Just ask Mom for a note.

In a New Orleans grammar school, if you suspect there may be a shoot-out at "Bring Your Dad to School Day" and your own parents want to insure your survival, you must first get them to sign a permission slip a day in advance.

Bill 1153 proposed by representative Chris Hazel makes it a crime to wear body-armour or bullet-proof vests on school campuses or at school-sponsored functions. But as amended the bill will allow the wearing of body-armour on school grounds if the principal or chancellor is simply told in writing twenty-four hours prior to the child wearing a bullet-resistant vest.

Child molesters at carnival beware.

Molesters can only play dress-up on regular weekdays, but can on no occasion whatsoever carry Hershey bars, at least for distribution.

The house voted 89-3 to approve senate bill 143 by senator Nick Gautreaux that would prohibit sex offenders from wearing masks or costumes on Mardi Gras and other holidays. It also prohibits them from giving candy or other gifts to people younger than 18, at any time.

If you wish to murder your political-science professor, you should wait until next year to do so.

Representative Ernest Wooton withdrew house bill 199 and admitted he did not have the votes to pass the bill, which he designed to allow concealed weapons to be carried on the campuses of universities. Wooton claimed it lacked support because it was targeted by editorial writers and opposition from university officials. Onto whose campuses he would bring guns.

But he warned that he will bring the bill back "at every session I can", including next year's.

Dad, I didn't know I was an illegal alien.

House bill 738 by representative Damon Baldone was passed allowing children who are at least 12 years old to work in their parents' businesses, rather than waiting for the current legal age of 14. The bill requires parents to get employment certificates for their children if they ask them to help out at the family business.

The bill is headed to Governor Bobby Jindal's desk for signature into law.

Bobby Jindal. Remember that name. He is the new man in office, a prodigy -- the youngest-ever United States governor and the first person of Indian origin elected to the highest state office.

Jim Gabour is an award-winning film producer, writer and director, whose work focuses primarily on music and the diversity of cultures. He lives in New Orleans, where he is artist-in-residence and professor of video technology at Loyola University. His website is here A selection of Jim Gabour's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"This is personal" (23 April 2007)

"Cutting loose" (4 May 2007)

"Mahatma 189" (11 May 2007)

"Undercurrent" (22 June 2007)

"Cry Oncle!"(12 July 2007)

"Lessons in the classics" (6 August 2007)

"The recurring anniversary of wilderness" (28 August 2007)

"Native to America" (26 September 2007)

"Number One with a bullet" (22 October 2007)

"The upper crust" (8 November 2007)

"Windfall" (17 December 2007)

"Jesus pulls a right cross" (25 February 2008)

"Show me some ID, so I can kill you" (30 April 2008)

While Jindal spent time these last weeks honing the over-compromised and ornate ethics reform bills he had promised in his campaign, the legislature tackled the tougher issues. Desperate health and education needs lay dormant awaiting action, as politicians struggled with deeper personal crises.

State representative Nickie Monica, reaffirmed in multiple meetings that house bill 455 was important, despite a tide of criticism affirming otherwise. Monica wants to allow the fleur-de-lis symbol's use on official documents, and was incensed by charges that he was authoring insignificant and time-consuming legislation.

"What I wanted to do is to make people proud of the fleur-de-lis", he said to the press. After multiple meetings Monica agreed to make it "a" symbol rather than "the" state symbol. This he proclaimed a worthy compromise. "I didn't want to knock the pelican off the state flag", he said.

The flag of the city of New Orleans holds multiple fleur-de-lis, a variation on the flag of the Bourbons.

Coincidentally, bourbon is important in New Orleans.

Are we whirling yet?

And along those lines, the house and senate faced off in separate committee sessions on how to handle the Sazerac, one of the nation's oldest cocktails, since it first splashed into a glass in the 1830s. And even though it is made with rye whiskey rather than bourbon, some legislators felt it necessary to make a statement about the drink's importance.

But the full senate rejected senate bill 6 by senator Edwin Murray to make the drink the official state cocktail, saying it should be limited to being recognised as the official cocktail of New Orleans.

More conservative senators also protested, proclaiming that glorifying any alcoholic beverage would send the wrong signal to the rest of America, and even the world, who might now suspect imbibing in our midst.

In spite of that, the house favoured Murray's bill to make the drink the state's official cocktail, forcing the measure into a joint house-senate conference committee to resolve differences. The dual group dropped much of its other legislative agenda and considered the subtle implications of ennobling liquor over three more days of intense work.

The governor, too, was working or actually not working, at important governmental affairs, declining to confirm the English professor nominated by the prior governor to be poet laureate of the state. Jindal refused to send the scholar's name to the senate for confirmation, refusing him a poetic license.

Swirling.

As the session drew to a close, the legislature, exhausted by dealing with intellectual crises like those above, suddenly voted itself a 300% pay raise, over the vehement objections of both the public and media. Unlike the Sazerac affair, there was little debate and almost no committee meetings.

The all-too-arrogant politicians had not bargained for the uproar that ensued, but faced with the denunciations, and operating solely in the spirit of true democracy, diminished their raises to 200%. Public forums were if anything even more incensed by this second move. The voting public wondered aloud if their representatives were this far out of touch with the populace of the state, most of whom subsist on far smaller incomes than those who govern them.

Voters demanded the new governor veto the raise, which he had explicitly said he would do before his election, both in printed campaign material and in speeches. But it seems that when faced with trying to get his reform bills passed, he had subsequently assured the legislature that he would not get involved in their business, no matter his earlier commitments.

Jindal decried the bill as totally out-of-line with the interests of the state and encouraged the lawmakers to kill it before it became law, but over and over repeated adamantly that he would not use his veto power to stop the raise. It was their business, not his.

Then he left town.

Pathos swirling.

He had gatherings of more import than a mere state legislature to attend.

As one of the up-and-coming stars of the Republican Party, Jindal was invited, with two other prospective vice-presidential candidates, to an informal barbecue at presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's ranch in Arizona.

"The senator is just having a few folks over for dinner", was how press aides tried to characterise the get-together.

Jindal went for the barbecue, posed with McCain in staged media events. He went to Washington and New York to be interviewed as a serious prospect for the second-in-command job. He is affable, good-looking, young (especially as opposed to McCain), of admirable ethnic origin, had been brilliant at bureaucratic problem-solving as a Louisiana secretary of health, was elected handily over Democrats, and now heads a southern state. All things the Republicans badly need.

National magazines lionised him, his wife, his family, his origins, and heralded his arrival on the national stage.

Then he came home.

To a raging firestorm.

The pay-raise controversy had spun out of control. Recall petitions for Jindal and five other legislators were receiving enormous attention. The front and editorial pages of every newspaper in the state were pointing out the discrepancy between his campaign promises and the current situation. The talk shows were seething with public discontent. At the same time, the legislators were literally screaming over the hubbub that he must keep his promise to them first, the public be damned.

Jindal caved, to the voters.

"I thank the people for their voice and their attention", he said in a news conference right before the raise was to become final. "The voters have demanded change. . . I made a mistake by staying out if it."

"The bottom line is that allowing this excessive legislative pay raise to become law would so significantly undercut our reform agenda and so significantly diminish the people's confidence in their own government that I cannot let it become law, so I have vetoed the bill."

He had also waffled. Even though he admitted he was wrong, he had waffled. In full view of his constituents. His once-overwhelming popularity numbers in the polls dropped out of sight.

And just like that, the brief McCain love affair was over.

Once courted, now spurned, there will be no more invitations to the larger forums.

Have a Sazerac, Bobby.

The global politics of climate-change: after the G8

Andrew Pendleton

The stock response of many campaigners and activists to the sorts of headline announcements that emerge from G8 summits is that the devil is in the detail. Whether the topic is development aid or climate change, their consistently wary advice is: "Read the small print". In the aftermath of the 2008 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, the reverse is true: for although the Japanese government hosts had sought to make climate change a central theme of the gathering, it is the lack of detail in the final summit statement on this issue that bedevils the G8 leaders' approach.

The world’s water future

Mike Muller

The global food crisis of 2007-08 has propelled governments and international agencies into a series of emergency responses, designed both to meet the needs of desperate citizens in many of the world's poorest countries and to maintain their own authority in face of a surge of popular protest. The flurry of activity and discussion around the issue has tended to deflect attention from the global problems associated with the source of food: water. If the questions of agriculture, land use, supply, distribution and price that lie at the heart of the food crisis are to be addressed, the clouds over the world's water future must also be taken far more seriously (see Paul Rogers, "The world's food insecurity", 24 April 2008).

Mike Muller is professor in South Africa's Witwatersrand University graduate school of public and development management. He is a former director-general of South Africa's department of water affairs and forestry

Mike Muller was invited to CSD16 to address delegates on the issue of improving water management in the face of climate change and other challenges

Also by Mike Muller in openDemocracy:

"A global thirst: water, power and the poor" (10 November 2006)There is a slow evolution of understanding among governments that tackling global development requires an integrated focus in which climate change, poverty and food security are among the constituent parts of a whole rather than separable concerns. It remains to be seen whether the G8 summit in Hokkaido on 7-9 July 2008 will advance policy or mere rhetoric in this respect - and whether the leaders and their advisers will recognise how vital water is in relation to these other topics. If they do, they may find that their capacity to make water part of a global-development strategy has been seriously weakened over the past decades by the way that the resources for its management have been allowed to dwindle.

The problem

United Nations member-states are usually too careful to set targets for themselves that may later going to embarrass them. One such target did slip through, however, during late-night negotiations at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002: that all countries should produce integrated water-resource management and water-efficiency plans by 2005.

Three years after the requisite date, the sixteenth annual review of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) found in its May 2008 report that more than half of eighty countries surveyed still had no plan in place. Moreover, many of those that had a plan were not implementing it. Just one more failure of an well-intentioned but impossibly impracticable system of global governance? Yes, but something more.

The problem is that water is a complex subject and its challenges differ widely from one place to another. So there is no generic "roadmap" setting out how water should be managed to contribute to national well-being. This is the precise reason for the initial agreement by countries to design approaches suitable to their particular circumstances.

Something that needs to work is not working. The enormity of the challenge of (for example) sustaining the population of burgeoning cities while producing more food and more energy crops without destroying the natural environment is recognised. It does not take a great deal of technical knowledge to understand that climate change will make this challenge even more acute. The climatic impacts of the increasing use of carbon-emitting energy use include the drying up of rivers and the desiccation of land. This suggests that if energy is the focus for mitigating climate change, water will need to be the focus of adaptation efforts.

The countries who made the WSSD commitment may not have produced the documents promised, but all at least agreed that it was critical to have an integrated approach to the management of the water that underpins so many development projects. A huge amount of work is needed to ensure that competing demands on this limited resource can be balanced.
Also on water, conflict and climate change in openDemocracy:

Stephan Harrison, "Kazakhstan: glaciers and geopolitics" (27 May 2005)

Ian Christie, "When the levee breaks" (2 September 2005)

Ken Worpole, "Living on water: welcome to a shedboatshed world" (14 December 2005)

Simon Roughneen, "Hard to believe your eyes: drought in Kenya and Ethiopia" (15 May 2006)

Ehsan Masood, "The world's thirst" (26 January 2007)

Anna Husarska, "Water problems in Somalia: a photo-essay" (9 October 2007)

Valuing a single small life in the face of global disaster

Jim Gabour

_____________________________________________________________________________

He was deserted by his mother at birth and survived by his wits as a literal infant. He begged for food from seedier neighbourhood hangers-on, those scarcely better off than he. He scavenged for meals through rotting garbage in restaurant dumpsters, running between shadows on the precarious New Orleans lakefront. He occasionally trapped a fish which had strayed into the shallows or found a recently dead crab washed up on the shore.

A tale of two futures

Paul Rogers

Never make predictions, especially about the future, is a wise piece of advice. But prophecy can also be understood as "suggesting the possible". The possible large-scale consequences of current global trends have been explored in an earlier column in this series (see "A century on the edge, 1945-2045", 29 December 2007). The future imagined, hoped for or feared today may not be so distant, however. What might the world look like only a little more than a decade ahead, in 2020? Here are two scenarios. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001 - this is his 350th column

2020, future one: an age of insurgencies

Show me some ID, so I can kill you

Jim Gabour

Another murderer taken off the street. Another case resolved.

This is how we handle killers now, especially gang members - we identify them, publicise their names and faces, and then leave them on the streets until they are killed by their own.

Saves police time and court costs. Just send out the wagon and pick up the bodies.Jim Gabour's articles for openDemocracy - plus four new columns - are collected in the fourth edition of the openDemocracy Quarterly

For details of Undercurrent: Life after Katrina, click here

A random headline, random example: the murder of an 18-year-old man who was himself wanted for killing two other "gangbangers" on Christmas night 2007. Four additional people were also wounded in that first shooting, as the thin wooden walls of a traditional New Orleans "shotgun"-style house were repeatedly raked by extended bursts of fire from an assault rifle.

Like other armed-gang thugs, his favourite prey were the easy targets: university students and music-club patrons returning to their cars and homes in the early hours after a night's entertainment.

Police tagged Eldrin George as the shooter. He was already dubbed the "Mole Robber" because of a large blemish on his face, and thus had been easily identified in over a dozen violent armed robberies during an earlier one-week binge in mid-December, and a number of other murders and burglaries, plus two incidents of auto theft and a bust on heroin possession, all within the last months of 2007.

The dude with the mole

A police photo of George staring down the mugshot camera had been circulating across the city for weeks, presumably released by the New Orleans police department (NOPD), and chatter on the street and web identified him as the perpetrator in the gang shooting. Police searched in earnest for a person now tagged as one of the city's highest-profile criminals, even storming a Mississippi River ferry when they thought he was aboard. He was not.

Eldrin George and his mole have been underground since those Christmas murders.

And now comes another dead man. Shot to death gang-style.

A body with a large mole under his right ear is brought to the New Orleans coroner.Jim Gabour is an award-winning film producer, writer and director, whose work focuses primarily on music and the diversity of cultures. He lives in New Orleans, where he is artist-in-residence and professor of video technology at Loyola University. His website is here

A selection of Jim Gabour's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"This is personal" (23 April 2007)

"Cutting loose" (4 May 2007)

"Mahatma 189" (11 May 2007)

"Undercurrent" (22 June 2007)

"Cry Oncle!" (12 July 2007)

"Lessons in the classics" (6 August 2007)

"The recurring anniversary of wilderness" (28 August 2007)

"Native to America" (26 September 2007)

"Number One with a bullet" (22 October 2007)

"The upper crust" (8 November 2007)

"Windfall" (17 December 2007)

"Jesus pulls a right cross" (25 February 2008)

At first the only clue to the identity of the criminal is that prominent birthmark. But then a name is attached to the mole. It is that same dangerous teenager named Eldrin George.

The attorney who represented him in the heroin-possession and stolen-vehicle cases claimed that he did not know of his client's other activities. He was quoted as saying that George was "always polite and well-dressed."

The lawyer had not seen the flyers with the mugshot. George was being sought "in connection with" multiple murders and other felonies. But everyone in the neighbourhood knew the gangbanger was him. The dude with the mole. The dude in the picture. The dude with Attitude.

Word was that retaliation for that Attitude was inevitable.

Word, bro.

Then, without a word, his street sentence was handed down. His fate, however, was an inefficient execution, and though he was shot multiple times in the chest and legs, George was still able to run half a block before collapsing and then bleeding to death two hours later in an emergency room.

That was then.

This is now. Now, most everything above is a lie.

Now George is not dead.

Eldrin George had tightly-cut hair and a goatee and a mole under his ear larger than an inch in diameter. Altheus Myers had tightly-cut hair and a goatee and a mole under his ear less than an inch in diameter.

Myers is dead, George is not.

Or so police came to say. Though only twenty-four hours ago half a dozen proud "police sources" were extolling the street justice in the violent death of one of the city's most wanted murderers. Today those same sources are quiet, and official spokespeople acknowledge that the victim was Myers, though they now contend that he was indeed the intended prey, and was not a victim of mistaken identity.

A month later they had come up with no criminal record to justify that claim. There is only the mugshot. A guy with a buzz-cut. And a goatee. And a mole.

Just like in their picture.

The man with the plan

Myers was in the process of moving, with his mother, out of the crime-riddled Central City neighbourhood where he died. The family was relocating to the quieter Westbank of New Orleans, to a neighbourhood that did not flood during Katrina. By the first of the new month they were to be in a new home, out of harm's way. But yesterday, yesterday Altheus Myers walked to the corner store and never came back.

His picture did not accompany the news of his death.

Interesting, this game of murderous musical chairs. George perceives some slight received from rivals. The music starts up. The man with the mole then shoots up the house of that rival gang, killing and wounding half a dozen total. A chair is pulled out, and the music continues. A picture of a guy with a mole shows up on the street, saying the NOPD is after him. The guy looks tough. Another chair is pulled out. The offended gang tracks and guns down a man with a mole, but it is not the man with the mole, and they merely end up spawning another, divergent burst of vengeance and hate from the family of the victim. Another chair, more music.

Meanwhile, George figures out that his original enemies were of course really trying to murder him, so he goes back to his arsenal to try and get rid of the shooters before they succeed. More music, fewer chairs. Things were getting too hot, even for George. He went further underground.

His face featured again on a national television programme, America's Most Wanted. A reward was offered for his capture. Now, four months after George's murderous "binge", police have him in custody, having found him hiding in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Today, a giant billboard on Claiborne Avenue, a forty-foot-wide Crimestoppers sign that sports the mugshots of four of New Orleans's most wanted criminals, has a wide banner pasted across Eldrin's face that says "apprehended".

He is still out there. On the streets.

Eldrin George has a mole under his ear. So did Altheus Myers.

At 18 George is now in prison, and will more than likely grow old there.

At 18 Myers is dead and will get no older.

And now, folks, there are no chairs left.

Can democracy save the planet?

John Elkington and John Lotherington

This article reports on a Consultation on Democracy and Sustainability held at the Science Museum in London on 18 March 2008. It was convened by the Environment Foundation, the 21st Century Trust and SustainAbility, and was supported by the Esmée Fairbairn FoundationIs democracy necessary for sustainable development - or does it get in the way? The political world is full of evidence that can be used to argue for either view. The lengthy and lively United States presidential competition between Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama has, for example, engaged an unusually high proportion of citizens in debating some of the great issues of the day; it also offers the unprecedented and hopeful spectacle of all three candidates for the presidency acknowledging the vital importance of global climate change.

Climate change and the public sphere

Andrew Dobson

It might seem a long way from public toilets to the politics of climate change, but there's an important relationship between what is happening to such public spaces and what is happening to the climate. As so often, it is one of the "rich" countries where the notion of the public realm has been most corroded by individualist, marketised ideology - Britain - that provides a vivid illustration of a more general international trend.

Jesus pulls a right cross

Jim Gabour

Lundi Gras - the "fat Monday" before Mardi Gras, "fat Tuesday" - dawns dry and perfectly blue, though dampened by official predictions of storms and fluctuating temperatures on the Big Day. I stop being a working stiff for the moment, however brief that was to be, and spend my time indoors, ignoring work and the cats, working on my costume. I consult by phone with other members of my marching krewe, the infamous Society of Sainte Anne. Who are surprised to find that I am still alive. There is a uniform exchange at the beginning of each conversation.

Climate security: the new determinism

Mike Hulme

There is a new form of climatic determinism on the rise and the allure of this thinking for the naïve or for the mischievous is dangerous. It finds its expression in some of the balder claims made about the future impacts of climate change: 180 million people in Africa to die from hunger; 40% of known species to be wiped out; 20% of global GDP to be lost. But such determinism is perhaps at its most insidious when found in the new discourse about climate (in)security. Here are only five recent examples, among an increasing number:

Was Bali a success?

Andrew Dobson, Camilla Toulmin, David Steven, Oliver Tickell, Saleemul Huq, and Alun Anderson

Saleemul Huq & Camilla Toulmin
Oliver Tickell
John Elkington
Alun Anderson
David Steven
Andrew Dobson

Who gains from global warming?

John Jackson

It seems that the climate of our planet is reverting rapidly to that which has persisted for much of the last 300 million years. Average temperatures and sea levels were higher, there were no polar ice-caps and temperature differences between poles and the equator were lower. The rate of this reversion, certainly in so far as it is connected with greenhouse gases, is being accelerated by humans and their activities and to such an extent that their must be a risk of "overshoot" into a situation which is entirely new.

John Jackson chairs the law firm Mishcon de Reya, is a director of openDemocracy and History Today and is on the committee of Unlock Democracy

Among John Jackson's articles in openDemocracy:

"Write the constitution down!" (17 February 2005)

"A democracy in trouble" (1 March 2006)

"Alice Wheeldon and the attorney-general" (17 April 2007)

"From deliberative to determinative democracy" (15 October 2007)

Windfall

Jim Gabour

Dead, they were all dead.

Spring 2006 was marked in New Orleans by the appearance, in patios and yards everywhere, of thick carpets composed of unmoving migratory butterflies, jewelled dragonflies, moths and honeybees.

Jim Gabour is an award-winning film producer, writer and director, whose work focuses primarily on music and the diversity of cultures. He lives in New Orleans, where he is artist-in-residence and professor of video technology at Loyola University.

His website is here

A selection of Jim Gabour's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"This is personal" (23 April 2007)

"Cutting loose" (4 May 2007)

"Mahatma 189" (11 May 2007)

"Undercurrent" (22 June 2007)

"Cry Oncle!"(12 July 2007)

"Lessons in the classics" (6 August 2007)

"The recurring anniversary of wilderness" (28 August 2007)

"Native to America" (26 September 2007)

"Number One with a bullet" (22 October 2007)

"The upper crust" (8 November 2007)

The Malthusian energy-trap: old Europe, new China

Christoph Neidhart

The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Christoph Neidhart is a Swiss writer and journalist based in Tokyo. He was previously a research fellow at Harvard's Davis Center of Russian Studies and (1990-97) Moscow bureau chief of Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.

His books include Russia's Carnival: The Smells, Sights and Sounds of Transition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Ostsee, das Meer in unserer Mitte (Marebuchverlag, 2003)

Also by Christoph Neidhart in openDemocracy:

"Vladimir Putin, ‘Soviet man' who missed class" (24 October 2006)

"Tokyo's change, Moscow's echo" (28 September 2007)

The world and climate change: all together now

Tom Burke

The "global" problem of climate change is endlessly discussed, but rarely looked at in a cold light. The crux of the matter is that all of us, everywhere, share this same monumental problem. To prosper we need energy security; but if we persist in using fossil-fuels with current technologies, our prosperity will founder. The roadmap drawn up at the Bali climate-change convention on 3-14 December 2007 will show what we need to do to establish the post-Kyoto regime. But to get through the ferocious complexity of the process, we will need a change of mindset. Moving away from a focus on who is to blame and who should act first, we must gain a new political maturity.