Showing posts with label chicanery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chicanery. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Joshua Poe explains how those "public input" meetings are kept meaningless to maintain pre-determined outcomes.


We've spoken often about public input meetings that actually aren't, especially the ones pertaining to development and redevelopment projects, and the way city officials -- including our own Team Gahan, but by no means restricted to New Albany's ruling elite -- stage manage the process to give the illusion of meaningfulness.

Before allowing Joshua Poe to explain how this process of public input meeting deception really works, a bit from 2013 in which our Jeff Gillenwater discusses Poe and his work.

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Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often.

He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

A city divided: Louisville’s urban landscape rooted in segregation, by Joshua Poe, LEO

Author and journalist George R. Leighton visited Louisville during the mid 1930s, after which he opined in Harper’s Magazine that the River City was a place that paid great “attention to food and drink, but for the rest, let well enough alone.”

Eight decades later, the city’s dining scene continues to thrive while many of the same problems that long ago plagued Louisville’s urban landscape persist — namely, the physical barriers that isolate west Louisville, dividing this city by race and class.

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Yesterday on Twitter, Poe explained "How to control community input, manage optics & corral expectations in public meetings for redevelopment efforts."

1) Encourage participants to focus only on “positivity & solutions.” So important to prevent any accountability. Dismiss dissenters as “playing the blame game.”

2) Divide participants into groups & ask them to list the “problems in their community.”

3) Now ask them what developers can do about those problems.

4) Now ask them how the public sector can help.

5) Overuse the words “equitable” “responsible” “inclusive” and “empower.”

6) Invite local government & NGOs to watch over the meeting. Make sure people feel like they’re looking over they’re shoulders at all times, b/c they are.

7) Invite people from the community to help lead the discussion to establish trust.

8) Wrap up - Praise yourself for your efforts toward inclusion. You can now justify all public spending on your private projects as being “based on community input” & at the request of “the community.” No need for follow-up meeting but promise one anyway.

9) Draft “public/private partnership” proposal where developer receives land giveaways & $ incentives for revitalization along w/ increased police budget for project’s security force (public safety). Announce that proposal is response to what community asked for.

Monday, June 24, 2019

Department of City-Owned Chicanery: Why did the city pay $300,000 for this (now) vacant lot at the corner of Culbertson and E. 5th?

Gone, but at a ridiculously inflated price.

The 502 Culbertson property facing Fairview Cemetery was purchased in 2017 for $350,000, two-and-a-half-times the price paid by the previous owner in 2011. It was a horribly maintained slumlord property recently boarded up. A few months ago the building was demolished and seeded, and now it's (yet another) vacant lot.



According to Elevate, the city of New Albany purchased the property in January for $300,000. There are derelict houses on all sides, and even the assessed value of a mere $47,800 seems too high -- so why has the city paid more than six times the assessed value to own it?

I'm intentionally withholding the name of the previous owner; let is suffice to say that he owns seemingly half of Southern Indiana.

Please forward to your council representative with a question: What sort of chicanery is taking place at 502 Culbertson?

(Thanks to B for the tip)

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

LIVE TO EAT: "The restaurant owner who asked for 1-star Yelp reviews."


This guy reminds me of me, at least back in the day before I mellowed. This is a must read.

The restaurant owner who asked for 1-star Yelp reviews, by Zachary Crockett (The Hustle)

How one small business owner flipped the online review ecosystem on its head.

In 2014, chef Davide Cerretini advertised a special that would forever change his fate: Anyone who left his restaurant a 1-star review on Yelp would get 25% off a pizza.

See, his Bay Area-based Italian joint, Botto Bistro, was at a crossroads. Like many small businesses, it was enslaved to the whims of online reviewers, whose public dispatches could make or break its reputation.

He’d had enough: It was time to pry the stars from the “cold, grubby hands of Yelpers” and take control of his own destiny.

But the move would set Cerretini at the center of a long-standing battle between Yelp and disgruntled business owners — a battle including cries of “extortion,” review manipulation, and predatory advertising tactics ...

Monday, September 24, 2018

People first? The reign of a strongman leader in the Maldives ends at the ballot box as he tries to rig an election but loses anyway.


We begin this report about an election upset in the Maldives with the gratuitous use of the "L" word.

Unrivalled luxury, stunning white-sand beaches and an amazing underwater world make Maldives an obvious choice for a true holiday of a lifetime.

One million annual tourists visit the islands, which have a population of a little more than 420,000.

The Maldives is a republic lies south-west of the Indian sub-continent. It is made up of a chain of nearly 1,200 islands, most of them uninhabited.

None of the coral islands stand more than 1.8 metres (six feet) above sea level, making the country vulnerable to any rise in sea levels associated with global warming.

The economy revolves around tourism, and scores of islands have been developed for the top end of the tourist market.

Its political history has been unsettled since the electoral defeat of long-serving President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom in 2008.

Back to that election.

President in paradise: An election upset in the Maldives (The Economist)

Abdulla Yameen, the strongman president, lost to a diminished opposition

THE last time Abdulla Yameen looked on the verge of losing power, in February, he declared a state of emergency and locked up two Supreme Court justices, members of parliament and even his own half-brother. His preparations for the presidential election on September 23rd appeared just as thorough. The most prominent leaders of the opposition remained in jail or in exile. The government had showered voters with pre-election goodies, such as waiving rent fines and trimming prison sentences. The police went as far as to raid the opposition alliance’s headquarters the day before the vote.

What could possibly go wrong for Yameen?

And yet, when the results came in, to general astonishment, Mr Yameen was declared to have lost, with only 42% of the vote. The winner was the unassuming but unjailed Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, the leader of the diminished opposition in parliament. Mr Yameen, who had appeared determined to cling to power just six months before, conceded without protest.

Solih eloquently placed his victory into context.

“For many of us this has been a difficult journey, a journey that has led to prison cells or exile. “It’s been a journey that has ended at the ballot box.”

It seems that luxury projects and accompanying corruption scandals were a hallmark of the defeated Yameen.

Many of Mr Yameen’s big schemes will doubtless receive the scrutiny parliament was unable to give them previously. Some of his strongman policies, such as the re-introduction of the death penalty and the re-criminalisation of defamation, may be rolled back. And the corruption scandals and unexplained murders of critics that marred his rule are likely to be investigated more thoroughly.

When power-hungry candidates lose, it lifts one's spirits.

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "Down with chicanery -- long live the chicane!"

Welcome to another installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

Around this time each week, anguished wails begin seeping out of the bunker's ventilation ducts: Why all these newfangled words?

Why not the old, familiar, comforting words, the ones that sufficed during the glory days, in those simpler times before inexplicably naked greed kicked in like a bond-issue-percentage speedball, knocking you back into the turnbuckles but feeling oh so fine, and now, as the Great Elongated and Exasperated Obfuscator of comic book series fame (can Disney World be far behind?) you teach detailed principles of banking to bankers, at least when not otherwise occupied making healthy deposits into your own account?

Thankfully, even if one toils for the Beloved and Respected Leader, a healthy vocabulary isn't about intimidation through erudition. No, not at all. Rather, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

Even municipal corporate attorneys reaping handsome remuneration to suppress information and to squelch community dialogue can benefit from this enlightening expansion of personal horizons, and really, as we contemplate CPIs, IUDs and IOUs, all we really have is time -- and the opportunity to learn something, if we're so inclined.

Let's introduce today's word by looking at pictures.

Aviary
Granary
Chicanery
Yes, this week's word will be familiar to anyone who ever attended a Chicanery ... er, make that a Redevelopment Commission meeting. But first, a step back from chicanery to the root word, itself quite ironic in the New Albanian sense.

Chicane (Wikipedia)


A chicane is an artificial feature creating extra turns in a road, used in motor racing and on streets to slow traffic for safety. For example, one form of chicane is a short, shallow S-shaped turn, requiring the driver to turn slightly left and then right again to stay on the road, which slows them down. Chicane comes from the French verb chicaner, which means "to quibble" or "to prevent justice".

Justice through prevention? Sounds reasonable to me. The photo (credit to Wikipedia) shows a chicane as a "type of 'horizontal deflection' used in traffic calming schemes to reduce the speed of traffic." Just our luck. Chicanery's everywhere in New Albany, when what we really need are (in the immortal words of Slim Pickens) a shitload of chicanes.

chicanery
[shi-key-nuh-ree, chi-]

noun, plural chicaneries

1. trickery or deception by quibbling or sophistry: He resorted to the worst flattery and chicanery to win the job

2. a quibble or subterfuge used to trick, deceive, or evade

Origin of chicanery

1605-1615; < French chicanerie. See chicane, -ery

Someone make a banner: "Down with chicanery -- long live the chicane!" We could tie it to a tree ... are any left standing?