Real Progressives Support New Orleans...
Mon Nov 26, 2007 at 06:02:06 AM PDT
and that includes holding their conventions in that beautiful, historic city.
They'd recognize the fact that New Orleans needs all the help she can get. She is desperately scrounging for conventions. She and her hotels, eateries, shops and other businesses that benefit from tourism need the influx of visitors and cash such a convention would bring. It would provide work for New Orleanians. So this business is vitally needed.
Such a convention could also bring New Orleans the positive media attention that would show that she's open for business--good publicity invaluable to a recovering city that she so sorely needs. The buzz generated by her hosting such a convention could convince other organizations to hold their conventions there or hold other events in New Orleans in the future.
The hustle and bustle of being the site of such a convention, combined with the influx of visitors, money, jobs, positive press, and other perks would be a feel-good experience for New Orleans that could lift her spirits. It could be healing and give her the confidence to feel that better days could be ahead. Which could aid her recovery.
On top of the material benefits and psychological boost New Orleans would get from being a convention venue is the fact that holding their convention in New Orleans would have immense symbolic value both for her and for the progressives. It would publicly show that they stand firmly behind Louisiana in the face of BushCo's criminal neglect of New Orleans, its wholesale forgetting and abandonment of that city and her people, and its hostility against Louisiana. Which, ever since Gov. Blanco committed the unpardonable sin of making BushCo look bad during Katrina, BushCo has sought to punish.
This is why I am very sad and angry that New Orleans has been deprived of the opportunity to host such a convention. Because Netroots Nation passed over this far more deserving city with her one-of-a-kind culture and ambiance for bland, dull Austin, Texas. This was a travesty.
Read this Netroots Nation diary, which thanks to nolalily's originally posting this link I'm able to use as a resource here. I posted a comment there the other day in which I showed some remarkable restraint considering how I feel--had to, since I was on their "turf" and felt then like a voice crying in the wilderness.
At 7:55 am on Nov, 23 2007 Louisiana 1976 wrote:
To play the devil's advocate--you should have stuck with New Orleans and found a way to make going there work. I'm sure you could have if you'd worked hard enough.
Because real progressives not only support New Orleans, they put their money where their mouth is by holding their conventions in that beautiful historic city with her one--of-a- kind culture, which has far more to offer than Austin.
But reading what the diarist had said made me very upset, and I get more and more upset thinking about it. Because I believe that the diarist could have made New Orleans work as a convention venue had she put the effort into it.
It's difficult to buy what she says about New Orleans' hotels not being up to hosting that big a convention. Something about her story seems fishy. There's a gap in it. (More about this below.) Because post-Katrina New Orleans with her 24,000 hotel rooms has been home to JazzFest, the French Quarter Festival, and last but not least Mardi Gras. All of which have drawn very many thousands. And many other conventions and events.
Here's one thing that came out of New Orleans' rejection as a presidential debate venue last Monday. Its following so quickly on the heels of the Netroots Nation rejection called my attention to the systematic attack BushCo has been carrying out against Louisiana by taking away from her presidential debates as well as prestigious conventions like Netroots Nation 2008 that had been considering New Orleans as a venue. BushCo's behind-the-scenes maneuvering and dirty tricks including influencing these groups, driving them away from choosing New Orleans, is yet another part of its pattern of abuse against Louisiana.
It would not be surprising had this sort of thing been behind Netroots Nation's rejection of New Orleans. Because in the Netroots Nation diary its author says in effect that New Orleans had come extremely close to being a convention site. She says that
when we first starting looking at locations for 2008, at that time there was really only one location we considered, NoLa. There was strong netroots support to have the convention in New Orleans and as a board we wanted to go to New Orleans for all the obvious reasons.
We found what we thought would be a great venue for our convention in a hotel in New Orleans. That hotel was not union, but we couldn't ignore the overwhelming support that city enjoyed in our community.
The plan was to go over the '08 contract with the committee before, during or right after the convention, but we never found a time when one of us was not flying around some corner. But the problem with the NoLa venue arose during and immediately after our convention in Chicago because we realized it would be too small to hold our growing community. It was way too small. There was simply no way to make the main panel room work. We thought about simulcasting the main ballroom events in other meeting rooms to accommodate our size and we thought about shoe-horning ourselves into the space... but neither of those would have honestly worked.
I have to admit, when i got back from Chicago and I opened up the contract to take a hard look at it, I was devastated when I realized it would not work. Devastated because I was so looking forward to being a very small part of rebuilding NoLa's brand as a meeting destination. Devastated because I knew the community wanted it so badly. And devastated because I knew we were starting back at square one.
She adds that
Still working through INMEX, we went back to New Orleans with the hopes of finding a venue that would be large enough for our convention.
Moving on from New Orleans, we expanded our search.
Now here's what really bugs me. The gap in what she says. She doesn't specify why no other place in New Orleans would have worked or what hitch developed that made them look at other cities. So reading between the lines it's easy to figure that somewhere along the line she was, or other Netroots Nation members were, pressured into not having Netroots Nation 2008 convene in New Orleans.
So New Orleans' dual rejections by both the site selection commission and Netroots Nation are right out of the playbook of a BushCo involved in the moral equivalent of war against Louisiana. There is nothing BushCo would like better than for New Orleans to rot and Louisiana to drop dead. And BushCo wants to make its ethnic cleansing of Louisiana stick by inhibiting New Orleans' recovery. So they have been squelching New Orleans' ability to take advantage of opportunities that would allow her to show the world that she's very much alive and would help her become whole--hence the dual rejections.
As part of this BushCo has been carrying out a systematic anti-New Orleans, anti-Louisiana propaganda campaign that would have made Georg Goebbels of "Big Lie" fame green with envy. The Big Lie can be seen in the verbiage of Mr. Paul G. Kirk, Jr., when he said, as noted in "New Orleans Was Robbed" that New Orleans hasn't recovered enough from Katrina when his site selection commission denied her the opportunity to host a presidential debate. This is another way to say her tourist infrastructure wouldn't be up to hosting such an event. And it's--while not identical to what Netroots Nation said in rejecting New Orleans, it sounds very similar. So both are close enough to be out of BushCo's playbook.
Back to Austin, Texas. That city would be ideal not for something progressive like Netroots Nation 2008, but for a Young Republican convention. By the way, isn't Austin either the site of, or going to be the site of, the George W. Bush presidential library? And let us not forget who sat in the statehouse there, until he moved on up to the White House.
If New Orleans symbolizes freedom and progressive ideals, Austin symbolizes fascism--and the destruction of all we hold dear--including New Orleans, which BushCo, be depriving her of a presidential debate and of Netroots Nation 2008, is trying to accomplish. Netroots Nation's selection of Austin is the sort of crap we would expect from the Young Republicans. Not progressives.
This choice of a BushCo stronghold is also telling. Maybe Netroots Nation or at least their convention site selecters are not real progressives who support New Orleans and would hold a convention there. Perhaps this organization has even been infiltrated by BushCo supporters who want to finish in Louisiana the job that Katrina started. These Netroots Nation people don't really give a damn about New Orleans and about helping her recover. So they did exactly what BushCo would have wanted and rejected New Orleans for Austin.
It saddens me and makes me very upset that this Netroots Nation diarist was saying all that stuff about how much they supported New Orleans and her recovery. Yet, when it came to putting their money where their mouth is, they rejected her for Austin. They voted with their dollars against New Orleans--depriving her of the income and the enjoyment of being their convention venue.
This makes all those nice things the diarist said about New Orleans and about
strong netroots support to have the convention in New Orleans
as empty as Bush's Jackson Square promises. These self-called "supporters" of New Orleans have forgotten and abandoned her just like BushCo, the mainstream media, and almost everybody else. And this is inexcusable and unforgivable. It pisses me off.
After having read that Netroots Nation diary, I've changed my mind about calling for a boycott of Netroots Nation 2008 by those of us who love and care about New Orleans--which I did in a recent diary Such a boycott, by itself, wouldn't send a powerful enough message and probably wouldn't make that big a difference. It must take place in conjunction with other things. Because our voices won't be heard if all we do is stay away.
Instead, as Thomas Jefferson once said,
"A little revolution now and then is a good thing."
We need to start a little revolution against Netroots Nation's rejection of New Orleans for Austin. We need to let them know in no uncertain terms that New Orleans is the rightful choice--the only suitable venue for Netroots Nation 2008.
Everyone who feels as strongly about this travesty as I do needs to register as a member of the Netroots Nation website (which I needed to do in order to post my comment) so we all can make our voices heard. We need to flood Netroots Nation's website with messages calling for Netroots Nation 2008 in New Orleans. We need to plant serious doubts in the minds of the Netroots Nation people including the diarist and other decisionmakers as to the wisdom of their rejection of New Orleans. Above all we need to demand that these folks listen to their consciences (assuming they're not all closet BushCo plants, which would mean they have none!) and reconsider the only true progressive choice--New Orleans! For it would be unconscionable for them to go to Austin or anyplace other than New Orleans, for that matter. And we need to pass on in ours and in other blogs and on message boards the following:
WE DEMAND NETROOTS NATION 2008 IN NEW ORLEANS!
We need to demand better--because New Orleans deserves better.
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