The Source's freewheeling, self-styled moguls appear to routinely write checks to themselves for parties, jewelry, exotic trips and other things — with little or no record-keeping.

"Borrower's records of checks and wire have little or no back-up and [the] borrower appears to have no internal controls," claims the suit filed by Textron's attorney Thomas Finn.

"Senior management seriously mismanages borrower's cash," claims the suit.

The suit says that in the first half of 2005, auditors unearthed nearly $1 million in unauthorized expenditures. The figure comprised $422,000 in payments to company insiders, $357,000 to travel agents, and $80,000 for "promotional jewelry."

The suit estimates 2005 sales at $20.7 million, a decrease of $5.1 million from 2004. The suit alleges that the company's net loss widened from $831,000 in 2004 to $2.26 million in 2005.

On top of that, the flagship magazine has seen its circulation plunge.

The Source was selling 500,000 copies per month in 2002 and 2003, and is now selling about 250,000 copies a month, the suit claims. Part of the reason for the decline was that the company did not put out the January 2005 issue and has failed to mail at least 140,000 subscriber copies this year.

Reached yesterday, Mays insisted that everything was under control.

"The company is going through a restructuring, which many companies are doing today due to the economy."

He said The Source has been "hurt because of what is going on in the hip-hop world."

There are "monopolies" driving hip-hop record labels to merge or go out of business, drying up an advertising base, he said. At the same time, the number of hip-hop clothing lines is shrinking.

"We're downsizing our space and finding ways to cut our operating costs," said Mays.

"Hey there, Last Thursday we received some distressing news--the kind of news that made our very bones ache when we heard it; the kind of news that felt so significant we simply couldn't function after it sank in. With a few days time and the ability to process it, we decided it's news worth sharing: It was a letter from the president of the Independent Press Association, the not-for-profit organization that owns the company that distributes the majority of Punk Planet's copies, BigTop Newsstand Services. The letter acknowledged the truth of a rumor that had been running through indie publishing circles for months now: the distributor was having cash flow problems..."

GENTRIFYING DISASTER
By Mike Davis

In a recent email to Louisiana officials, FEMA curtly turned down the state’s request for funding to notify displaced residents that they could cast absentee ballots in the city’s crucial February mayoral election. FEMA also declined to share data with local authorities about the current
addresses of evacuees.

In the eyes of many local activists, FEMA’s refusal to support the voting rights of evacuees is consistent with a larger pattern of federal inaction and delay that seems transparently designed to discourage the return of Black residents to the city. As one Associated Press dispatch presciently warned, “Hurricane Katrina [may] prove to be the most brutal urban-renewal project Black America has ever seen.”

ETHNIC CLEANSING, GOP-STYLE

In the weeks since Bush’s Jackson Square speech, FEMA has alarmingly failed to advance any plan for the return of evacuees to temporary housing within the city or to connect displaced locals with reconstruction jobs. Moreover for lack of a tax base or emergency federal funding, local governments in afflicted areas have been forced to lay off thousands of employees and are unable to restore many essential public services.

Bush’s promise to promptly help the region’s unemployed – 282,000 in Louisiana alone - has turned into slow-moving House legislation that would benefit less than one-quarter of those made jobless by Katrina. The powerful House Republican Study Group has vowed to support only relief measures that buttress the private sector and are offset by reductions in national social programs such as food stamps, student loans, and Medicaid.

The Bush administration accordingly has blocked bipartisan legislation to extend Medicaid coverage to all low-income hurricane victims and imposed unprecedented demands for loan repayment upon local governments. Katrina’s victims, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, have been “nickeled and dimed” to an extent that casts grave doubt over whether large-scale reconstruction “will really materialize.”

In the meantime more than two-thirds of FEMA contracts (according to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco) has gone to out-of-state firms, with a blatant bias toward Halliburton and other Texas-based investors in Bush Inc. Simultaneously, unscrupulous employers have saturated Latino neighborhoods in Houston and other southwestern cities with fliers advertising a cornucopia of jobs in New Orleans and Gulfport.

With Davis-Bacon and affirmative-action requirements suspended by executive order, immigrant workers – housed in tents and working under appalling conditions – have flocked to jobs sites in the city, largely unaware that tens of thousands of blue-collar evacuees who would relish these jobs are unable to return for lack of family housing and federal support. Ethnic tensions are artificially inflamed by speculations about a “population swap” and impending ‘Latinization” of the workforce.

New barriers, meanwhile, are being erected against the return of evacuees. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metro New Orleans, landlords – galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values- are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)

Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned “to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.”

Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Public-housing and Section 8 residents recently protested that “the agencies in charge of these housing complexes [including HUD] are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a very blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.”

Minority homeowners also face relentless pressures not to return. Insurance compensation, for example, is typically too small to allow homeowners in the eastern wards of New Orleans to rebuild if and when authorities re-open their neighborhoods.

Similarly, the Small Business Administration – so efficient in recapitalizing the San Fernando Valley in the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake – has so far dispensed only a few million dollars despite increasingly desperate pleas from tens of thousands of homeowners and small business people facing imminent foreclosure or bankruptcy.

As a result, not just the Black working class, but also the Black professional and business middle classes are now facing economic extinction while Washington dawdles. Tens of thousands of blue-collar white, Asian and Latino residents of afflicted Gulf communities also face de facto expulsion from the region, but only the removal of African-Americans is actually being advocated as policy.

Since Katrina made landfall, conservatives – beginning with Rep. Richard Baker’s infamous comments about God having ”finally cleaned up the housing projects in New Orleans” - have openly gloated over the possibilities for remaking New Orleans in a GOP image. (Medically, this might be considered akin to a mass outbreak of Tourette Syndrome, whose official symptoms include “the overwhelming urge to use a racial epithet.”)

Republican interest in reducing the Black Democratic vote in New Orleans – the balance of power in state elections – resonates with the oft-expressed desire of local elites to purge the city of “problem people.” As one major French Quarter landowner told Der Spiegel: “The hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city and we hope they don’t come back. The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the United States.”

Nor are downsizing and gentrification necessarily offensive to Democratic neo-liberals who have long advocated breaking up concentrated poverty and dispersing the black poor into older suburbs. The HOPE VI program, the showpiece of Clinton-era urban policy, demolished traditional public housing and ‘vouchered out’ residents in order to make way for mixed-use, market-rate developments like the St. Thomas redevelopment in New Orleans in the late 1990s that has become the prototype for elite visions of the city’s future.

There exists, in other words, a sinister consensus of powerful interests about the benefits of an urban ‘triage’ that abandons historical centers of Black political power like the Ninth Ward while rebuilding million-dollar homes along the disaster-prone shores of Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi Sound.


THE NEW URBANISM MEETS THE OLD SOUTH

Into this fraught and sinister situation now blunders the circus-like spectacle of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU): the architectural cult founded by Miami designers Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Twenty years ago, when Duany was first barnstorming the nation’s architectural schools and preservation societies, the New Urbanism seemed to offer an attractive model for building socially diverse and environmentally sustainable communities based on a systematization of older ‘city beautiful’ principles such as pedestrian scale, traditional street grids, an abundance of open space, and a mixture of landuses, income groups and building forms.

In practice, however, this diversity has never been achieved. Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s Seaside – the Florida suburb so brilliantly caricatured in the 1998 film “The Truman Show” – was an early warning that kitsch would usually triumph over democracy in New Urbanist designs.

Despite the populist language of the CNU manifesto, moreover, Duany has always courted corporate imaginers, mega-developers and politicians. In the mid-1990s, HUD under Secretary Henry Cisneros incorporated New Urbanist ideas into many of its HOPE VI projects.

Originally conceived as replacement housing for the poor, HOPE VI quickly morphed into a new strategy for replacing the poor themselves. Strategically-sited public-housing projects like New Orleans St. Thomas homes were demolished to make way for neo-traditionalist townhouses and stores (in the St. Thomas case, a giant Wal-Mart) in the New Urbanist spirit.

These “mixed-use, mixed-income” developments were typically advertised as little utopias of diversity, but – as in the St. Thomas case – the real dynamic was exclusionary rather than inclusionary, with only a few project residents being rehoused on site. Nationally, HOPE VI led to a net loss of more than 50,000 units of desperately needed low-income housing.

Smart developers accordingly have been quick to put New Urbanist halos over their otherwise rampant landgrabs and neighborhood demolitions. Likewise, shrewd conservatives like Paul Weyrich have come to recognize the obvious congruence between political traditionalism and architectural nostalgia.

Weyrich, the founding president of the Heritage Foundation, recently wrote that the “new urbanism needs to be part of the next conservatism,” a conservatism that remakes cities by purging their criminal underclasses.

(After Katrina, Weyrich strongly defended House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s questioning of whether New Orleans – “with its welfare state and entitlement mentality… a prototype for Liberals” –should be rebuilt at all.)

Weyrich was the spiritual bridesmaid during the recent nuptials between the CNU’s Andreas Duany and Harley Barbour, the sleazy former tobacco lobbyist and Republican chair, who became governor of Mississippi by wrapping himself in the Confederate battle flag.

Barbour, long King of K Street, is nobody’s fool, and he is trying to extract as much long-term political and economic advantage from Katrina as possible. One of his declared priorities, for example, is bringing the casinos ashore into larger, more Las Vegas-like settings; another is to rapidly restore shoreline property values and squelch any debate about resettling the population on defensible higher ground (north of I-10, for example).

It was thus a rather brilliant stroke for Barbour to invite the CNU to help Mississippi rebuild its Gulf Coast “the right way.” The first phase was the so-called “mega-charrette’, 11-18 October, that brought 120 New Urbanists together with local officials and business groups to brainstorm strategies for the physical reconstruction of their communities.

Duany, as usual, whipped up a revivalistic fervor that must have been pleasing to Barbour and other descendants of the slave masters: “The architectural heritage of Mississippi is fabulous .. really, really marvelous.”

With Gone with the Wind as their apparent script, the CNU teams spent a frenzied week trying to show the locals how they could replace their dismal strip malls with glorious Greek Revival casinos and townhouses that would rival any of those that once existed on MGM’s backlot. The entire exercise stayed firmly within the parameters of a gambling-driven ‘heritage’ economy with casinos “woven into the community fabric” and neo-Taras rebuilt on the beach.

In the end, however, what was important was not the actual content of the charrette, nor the genuine idealism of many participants, but simply the legitimacy and publicity that CNU gave to Barbour’s agenda. Duany, who never misses an opportunity to push his panaceas to those in power, has foolishly made himself an accomplice to the Republicans’ evil social experiment on the Gulf Coast.

(25 October)

"...the first business decision of the long-rumored new company, which now owns City Pages? Feed the scoop to the New York Times, not its own reporters. So much for our vaunted "online efforts"...

Alt-weeklies mostly emerged as a way of meeting great goals: 1) providing a progressive foil against the mainstream, 2) representing lefty politics, and cutting-edge arts and culture of local communities through covering stories never told by the corporate mainstream media, and 3) building an enlightened business model -- by becoming a marketing vehicle for local, small businesses, and people-connecting mechanisms (i.e. personal ads!) -- in other words, being a manifestation of the whole "small is beautiful" ethic.

I recently spent the day in Silver Spring, Md., at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post and a vet center, talking to two veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom who are about to leave the service and make their way back into civilian life.

Both have grievous wounds. One is an amputee, the other has metal plates in his back and a head full of brutal memories.

There was the day he was sent out to lead a patrol with poorly armored vehicles, no intel briefing, no maps, no communication systems, and just two magazines of ammunition -- one with only tracers. It was a misbegotten mission that got one of his men killed, and he'll never forget it.

Both soldiers, with the help of incredibly dedicated counselors, are trying to figure out how to live with their emotional wounds as they make the transition out of a military culture that still stigmatizes post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then into a civilian population that can't possibly understand what they've been through.

The reason that I've been listening to their stories is that my character B.D. is now at that precise point in his own life, and I need to learn about what that must feel like before I can write about it.

When and if I finally do, I have to do another terrible thing: I have to make it funny. And I have to find a way of doing so without contributing to the suffering that these young veterans are enduring.

The following teams have been eliminated this postseason, and their payroll follows.

The Yankees - $208.3 million
The Red Sox - $123.5 million
The Angels - $97.7 million
The Braves - $86.4 million

(Source: USA Today Salary Database)

And if the Cardinals follow suit, they have a $92.1 million total in 2005 salaries. Those are five of the top 10 teams in total payroll in the majors. The Yankees and Red Sox being 1-2 and the Angels being fourth.

What does this say? A huge payroll may buy you a look at the playoffs, but it doesn't guarantee you anything.

And I know a lot of you have said that a huge payroll doesn't bother you, but I like to root for underdogs and any team with $22 million less in total salary is a team I'm going to cheer for.

Sinking under a host of socio-economic problems and still in mourning after the Katrina catastrophe, the African-American community is in deep pain. It finds itself directionless, losing ground and lacking the world-class leadership it needs to right itself.

In other words: Black America is in desperate need of a hero. And Friday afternoon, a hero returned.

In an emotional, see-saw speech, former U.S. Congressman Ron Dellums announced to a deliriously happy crowd of 500 that next year he will run for Mayor of Oakland.

The announcement was a dramatic turn-about, since he mounted the podium apparently intending to say no.

A grassroots movement had sprung up to draft him, collecting 8,000 signatures using only volunteer labor. But Dellums, the hero of the anti-apartheid struggle and mentor to anti-war Congresswoman Barbara Lee, has been working for the past few years as a well-paid D.C. lobbyist. Though he looks like a fit man of 50, he is actually almost 70 years old.

In other words, he is finally earning some money. And no one could fairly begrudge him the chance to spend his twilight years unburdened by all the problems of urban America. Oakland has one of the highest crime and murder rates in America. Its schools are crumbling and in receivership. The city council is dysfunctional and firmly in the pocket of big developers. No one in his right mind would willingly take on the challenge of turning this town around.

Rumors had begun circulating earlier in the week that Dellums was going to attend the culmination of the signature-gathering, thank the volunteers and then decline to run. And so I was not surprised as Dellums stood before the expectant crowd and began working through reasons that he might not seek the office.

But as the crowd screamed, stomped, chanted and wept, the old lion began talking himself into making a very different announcement.

He began to speculate about the impact of Oakland as a model city, providing health coverage for all its residents, and setting an example for the nation. The crowd began cheering.

He talked about the need to fix the schools, preserve economic diversity in the gentrifying city and to embrace the young men hanging on street corners. The applause was overwhelming, thunderous. Black women were weeping in the aisles.

Dellums looked out into the crowd, surveying the sea of tearful, hopeful faces. "Like a jazz player, I honestly didn't know what I was going to say today, how this song was going to end until the very last note," he said. "But I can see your pain."

He hesitated, looked at his wife. And then he said: "And if Ron Dellums running for mayor will bring you some hope ... then let's do it." Bedlam.

Whether the on-stage decision-making was authentic or high theatre, it was a powerful and cathartic drama for all who witnessed it. And it is the first sign of hope in Black America in a very, very long time. The cries of joy and relief and hope that swept the room were testimony to the pent-up need for heroic leadership in times like these.

Cynics will say that we have been down this road before, with promising Black mayors disappointing their urban constituents. And Oakland in particular has suffered from eight years of a celebrity mayor named Jerry Brown, who did little to help the poor and much to aid the developers. Furthermore, Dellums' announcement essentially sinks the very worthy candidacies of progressives Greg Hodge and Nancy Nadel -- both of whom have labored in the local vineyards for years, while Dellums grew rich inside the beltway. All valid points.

But Black America needed someone larger than life to step up to the plate, right now. As one man said, "Well, we couldn't save New Orleans. But maybe we can save Oakland."

I believe that the candidacy of Ron Dellums is a signal event in a post-Katrina resurgence of progressive Black politics. Oakland will emerge as a laboratory for a very different kind of social policy than we have seen in this country for a very long time. And his tenure will give ample room and space to further groom a newer crop of leaders, who can take over upon his retirement.

And I believe this, not just because of the kind of person Ron Dellums is.

I believe it is true because of the kind of people Oaklanders are.

With the prospect a city hall on the side of the people, and not in the pocket of big developers, this town has a fighting chance again. And, through Oakland's bright example, so do we all.

"When I'm gone from this world, I hope my grandchildren can go to a library and see Joe Conzo images," he said. "I am carrying on in the legacy of my grandmother, photographing music and the community. I don't think I'll get rich off this. But having this legacy is worth more than money."