CulturePAC

        LIVE TO DANCE & DANCE TO LIVE!                                                

                                                                                               Blow Your Horn, Baby!   Blow it Loud!

   We are in an historical era of change in America and New Orleans is in a unique position to effect positive change in our own community and influence change nationally and internationally, to create a more just and equitable planet.

   The late artist John Scott said it best, at the end of the PBS American Experience
episode on New Orleans ~

The promise of that city is the lesson that can be learned from that city. At its best,  when the people are doing what they do naturally--blending a seamless culture it has a oneness about it that very few places in the rest of this country has. New Orleans' promise is we can teach America how to be America.  If anybody's listening.

  CulturePAC is being formed to make sure America is listening, because the people of New Orleans have too much to offer the rest of the nation and the world to not be heard.   We are creative, innovative, possessed of an 'improvisational impulse' second to none.  As Katrina showed, we know how to employ our improvisational impulse to creatively adapt, transform, transcend and triumph over adversity.  As America attempts to cope with extreme economic adversity and an ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, New Orleans and CulturePAC stands ready to, as John Scott said, "... teach America how to be America" , in this historical moment of change to help make our city and our nation one of opportunity again.

GETTING REAL =  OLD ECONOMY - NEW ECONOMY

Click on the image above for more on Summer 2009: The New Economy

New Economy, New Ways to Work  from YES! magazine

   As a social public action coalition, CulturePAC will be intensely involved in a variety of local and national initiatives for change, including the recently announced public private economic development initiative between the City of New Orleans and the Horizon Initiative.  It is imperative on a local level that we become and stay involved in this developing initiative, as economic development processes in New Orleans have historically been of an exclusive nature and  thus lacking in innovation.  The region's high level of poverty indicates the ineffectiveness of past economic development efforts.  

   More than a year ago the Horizon Initiative commissioned the Rand Corporation to conduct a study of economic development in New Orleans.  Their report, " An Economic Development Architecture for New Orleans ", makes the following recommendation:

The process of developing and implementing the city’s economic development program should be both transparent (open to public scrutiny) and inclusive (incorporating input from a diverse range of stakeholders).

    As this initiative moves forward CulturePAC intends to make certain this crucial recommendation is adhered to, as the initiative stands to receive $6 million from the City during its 3 year development and implementation phase.  (See the Times Picayune article on the week-long series of public meetings). However, during these recent public hearings where the selection process for the board was outlined, it seems this effort may be more of the same old, same old with the usual suspects controlliing the vision, the money, the process and our future. 

• Click here to read or download a copy of the Powerpoint presentation promoting the City of New Orleans Horizon Initiative Public Private Partnership at public meetings held during the first week of December, 2008.
  

    New Orleans has two separate distinct economies, one the dominant formal economy and a large informal off-the-books economy.  Needless to say, all capital flows to the formal economy, but the real innovation in New Orleans lies within the informal social realm, thus the most innovative and idea-driven sector of the city's economy remains devoid of capital as all capital continues to consolidate upward to the city's economic elite.  CulturePAC seeks to remedy this long standing inadequecy and introduce a new more inclusive vision, new ideas, new ways of doing 'business' that are more in keeping with notions of social economy, as put forth by Martin Hess and Karl Polany,

Activities that began as social i.e. of a non-market economy with their forms of reciprocal and redistributive exchange, were constituted on the basis of shared values and norms that had their roots in social and cultural bonds rather than monetary goals, societies based on market exchange reflect only those underlying values and norms that consider price. They do not recognize any other obligations. Therefore, Polanyi conceived market economies as disembedded from the social-structural and cultural-structural elements of society.
…… while historically preceding economies were embedded in society and its social and cultural foundations, Polanyi argues that modern market economies are not only disembedded, but ‘instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system’ (Polanyi, 1944: 57).

‘Spatial’ relationships? Towards a reconceptualization of embeddedness, for the journal Progress in Human Geography, Martin Hess, 2004

   The City's new public private economic development partnership does not acknowledge the city's two economies, nor does it contain a mechanism for including and developing this sector toward eventual integration into the overall economy of the region.  Most of informal sector  is made up of creative cultural enterprises, informal groups working project to project - working on one project, reforming into another group and working on the next project.   Similarly there is no mechanism for increasing wealth of the community, but rather only the wealth of individual business owners.  To remedy this, CulturePAC seeks to include strategies for the development of worker and producer coperatives within the strategic plan, and to specifically include a revenue stream that will fund the development of worker and producer cooperatives,  facilitating a necessary move toward a more equitable distribution of the public funds and a more equitable and just socially democratic economy for the region and alleviating the region's historically high levels of poverty.

   CulturePAC came into being as a result of similar disbursements of public funds that should have been distributed more equitably, specifically the approximately $28 million that Congress,  in the Fall of 2006, ordered  FEMA to provide Louisiana to 'market the state' in order to revive the tourism industry following Katrina.  In New Orleans these funds went to two agencies, the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, both of which have substantial budgets to the tune of more than $7 million annually, yet New Orleans touring musicians have always been the most effective marketers of the state by far, and always on their own dime.  By all rights, these touring  music groups should have been provided with funds to underwrite their tours.... it is the music and the culture that brings the conventions and visitors and fuels our city's economy.  Capital is clearly going to the wrong place in this town.

 For More on how public economic development funds are being spent -------

Read about the $750,000. 00 Federal Grant the Downtown Development District has received to boost the "industries of the mind" , which includes New Orleans creative & cultural  industries......to  "use the two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration to develop a strategy to make the Central Business District and nearby neighborhoods a "destination of choice" for creative industries."

The Times Picayune

  Sign-up and Join CulturePAC today, work with CulturePAC, lend us your time and talents....... so the next time this kind of money comes down the pike, we can stand with a strong united voice and make sure the our public monies are used wisely to the benefit of all, rather than a select few!