By Malcolm Suber
There’s an old saying that you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. If we use this as a measure of our mayor-elect, LaToya Cantrell, we can safely predict that New Orleans workers have four years of hard struggle ahead. Cantrell styled herself as the people’s candidate during her mayoral campaign. She was widely embraced by a number of self-proclaimed progressives like Step-Up Louisiana as being on the side of the workers. Her campaign even issued a statement about forming a people’s transition team that would include residents from all walks of life and social classes.
What we find of course is a transition team made up of the usual suspects, members of rich white ruling class and their most loyal lackeys. The transition team is co-chaired by Walter Issacson, former head of the Aspen Institute; Norman Francis, former President of Xavier University; and Gayle Benson, wife of Saints owner Tom Benson, Louisiana’s favorite charity who became a billionaire on our tax subsidies to his empire. A few community people were thrown in as window dressing.
This ruling class transition team will help mayor-elect Cantrell develop policies for her administration. The make-up of this committee tells us that New Orleans workers cannot put any faith into Cantrell’s mantra that “we’re moving forward together” and that she is a “bottom up organizer”. Hardly. Workers will discover that Cantrell, as all the mayors before her, are solidly in the hands of the developers and local capitalist class that stand for low wages, racism, police terror, mass incarceration, sexism and gentrification. Cantrell will be new wine in an old bottle.
On top of all the above, Cantrell is requiring those who join her transition team to sign “disclosure agreement” which forbids them to discuss transition team proceedings. So much for being transparent and welcoming all points of view.
We in the New Orleans Workers Group are not swayed by sloganeering and empty promises. We will continue to organize and prepare New Orleans workers for a fight against the bosses and their newest servant-mayor LaToya Cantrell.