Thursday, July 08, 2010

How much damage can one man do?

If you're Ray Nagin...apparently you can destroy a city in 4 years.

Mayor Landrieu Faces $67 Million Budget Deficit With “Eyes Wide Open”

Not only did he leave us in a financial "hell hole" as Mayor Landrieu so accurately stated, even the physical legacy he left behind is a total fuck up:

Mayor Mitch Landrieu says Armstrong Park contractor AME has been taken off the job

I think Ray Nagin should apply for Tony Hayward's job...keep the peter principle alive and well.

3 comments:

Matthew Davis said...

Yes, Landrieu's speech made no mention of Nagin whatsoever, and yet hizzoner's ghost was so clearly hovering over the proceedings that there was obviously no need to mention it by name.

Anonymous said...

Has Louisiana Denied the existence of the "Dead Zone" so that they don't have to clean it up or regulate the Oil business?

Check this out, Is this true, That Louisiana won't admit we have Dead Zone? Why? We need some investigative Reporting.. http://www.healthygulf.org/20081013862/blog/healthy-waters-/-dead-zone/in-order-to-fix-the-dead-zone-louisiana-has-to-admit-to-it

Anonymous said...

Nagin is one guy. He was the head guy, and "the fish stinks from the head" (it sounds cooler in Yiddish), so of course, he is responsible.

But I'm mad that all those people who worked for Nagin in positions of responsibility and oversight are still working at City Hall, with stable pay checks, benefits, and someday even pensions.

People who were proud of their position, flashing their city hall business cards and other credentials around to get special treatment or to get out of trouble, are now batting their eyes and saying, "What, little ol' me? I barely met that man, I had no idea this was going on, I'm as pure as Ivory soap."

I have heard some of them do this.

It was their job to know what was going on, so "not knowing" marks them as just as incompetant as the ones who knew what was rotten because they were the rot.

Corruption and negligent performance of duty are both forms of untrustworthiness.

If everything was outsourced to contractors and no one was really doing the oversight that needed to be done, what work were they doing?

From reading this blog, I'd suspect they were busy lining up "side jobs" with the contractors and subcontractors they were supposed to be overseeing, getting their spouses and other relatives to do work for the city or for contractors who worked with the city (creating all sorts of conflicts of interest), hiding or destroying e-mails, going on vacations, eating at fancy restaurants, driving city cars hither and yon, and frequenting local strip clubs.

Hey, "innocent" Nagin staffers, if your co-workers were doing this, how could you have missed it?

I'd like Letten to lower the boom on these people.

I'd like Landrieu to get them off his team.

One man didn't do all this damage.

Nagin's whole team (and in some cases their family members) did this damage.

If you played for that team, you should have to account for what you did and did not do... and for what you did and did not choose to see others doing.