Stuck on stupid woke NO causing own problems

If there’s a textbook example of Louisiana elected officials stuck on stupid, look no further than Democrat New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her lapdog City Council whose mistakes point to the city’s bleak future.

Cantrell has caught more heat than usual in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida’s blustery attack. The storm plunged the city into darkness for days, an aftermath which itself serves as an indicator of Cantrell’s idiocy because she and the all-Democrat Council have steered deliberately away from provision of reliable power by their fixation on renewable energy.

Yet as this problem became slowly and haltingly resolved, another began to pile up. Trash, and lots of it, some from the storm but also the normal output from households and businesses began accumulating because the city wouldn’t pick it up. Worse, the problem began days prior to Ida’s landfall.

On this, a Council committee heard an earful from residents, causing the panel of campaigners – all elected councilors are striving to remain on the Council for another term to be decided this fall – to express outrage at the growing crisis. Members blustered about how the Cantrell Administration needed to step up collection.

Predictably, Cantrell’s mandarins disclaimed responsibility with protestations akin to dogs-eating-homework. They outlined a litany of attempts to supplement pickup capacity, but ultimately blamed microbes and Mother Nature for thwarting all of these. The city has faced labor shortages for months, which officials alleged exacerbated by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and now the storm.

Buncombe. New Orleans policy-makers created their own problems by their ideologically-driven subpar policy decisions, and now they are trying to evade responsibility for their stupidity.

To begin with, the city idiotically has a “living wage” ordinance that applies to all contractors that has the impact of artificially raising wages in some instances beyond the actual worth of that work to society. Right off the bat, this discourages some contractors who don’t have the financial resources to accept contracts featuring margins made needlessly narrower by this edict.

Also, they haven’t gotten any help from their ideological compatriots in Washington – Democrats in the White House and running Congress. Their fellow leftists have unleashed an orgy of benefits for not working, first in the form of enhanced unemployment benefits argued necessary as a result of the pandemic even months after economic recovery and now a child tax credit that acts like universal basic income, explaining why the labor shortage has persisted and accelerated.

However, the coup de grace came from Cantrell, willingly accepted by the Council, when she declared a nonsensical vaccine passport in force that extended to contractors. This squeezes the labor market even more from people opting out of working, directly or indirectly, for a government telling them what to do with their bodies that increases by zero the ability to stop spread of the virus.

It's not the virus or anything exogenous to leftist policy causing the city’s inability to marshal waste pickup resources; it is leftist policy championed by – to be charitable – mediocrities serving as mayor and councilors. Unfortunately, the lineup of candidates for their jobs is – to be charitable – uninspiring, leaving voters with little other than inferior choices for the next four years.

As such, mounting trash serves as the shape of things to come in the city that will become less and less able to provide basic services competently. Until its voters stop tolerating woke political morons as candidates and in office who stay stuck on stupid, it will get worse before it gets better.