ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: SOME WILL FEAST, SOME WILL FREEZE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
September 8, 2005

Sen. Joe Carraro, R-Albuquerque made some news with his recent proposal to temporarily suspend the 17-cents-a-gallon state tax on gasoline — an idea also taken up by Santa Fe City Councilor David Pfeffer and poo-pooed by Gov. Bill Richardson.

But another Carraro energy proposal, made in the same news release as his tax holiday proposal last week, has gotten virtually no attention.

Carraro is calling for an investigation of Public Service Company of New Mexico for giving huge bonuses to its executives while increasing the cost of natural gas to its customers.

“Carraro said his constituents are complaining that PNM said natural gas bills could increase 60 percent this winter over last winter,” the release said. “They are asking the senator how the regulated company can be allowed to give its executives such huge bonuses at a time the consumer is hurting?

The release quotes Carraro: “I say, the PNM officials could earn their bonuses by lowering monthly bills for New Mexicans not because the bills are skyrocketing. Their company is making a lot of money because of the high price of natural gas, not because of any clever efforts by the PNM officials.”

An April Associated Press story said that bonus and salary compensation for PNM's top five executives totaled $3.1 million in 2004, up from $2.6 million the previous year. PNM chairman, president and CEO Jeff Sterba's salary rose 15 percent to $687,886, while his bonus increased by 84 percent to $910,000 for a total of $1,597,886, the wire service reported.

“All I know is that it causes problems when folks who are struggling because of the high prices of gas see other folks making so much money because of these uncalled for raises,” Carraro said.

He suggested that “outraged New Mexicans” call the state Public Regulation Commission for an explanation and called upon the PRC to investigate.

When the levee breaks: On Wednesday, Andy Lenderman and I had a story concerning U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici’s role as chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, which over the last few years, has slashed the budget for Army Corps of Engineers flood projects in Louisiana —- though not slashing it as much as the White House has recoomended.

News organizations, most notably the New Orleans Times-Picayune have noted the dramatic decrease in flood project funding, which began about the same time as the government geared up for the war in Iraq.

Domenci’s office responded to the story, saying that even if three major hurricane and flood-control projects in Louisiana had been completed, New Orleans still would have flooded.

A Domenici spokesman pointed to a recent statement by Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, Commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, during a media conference call on September 1.

“In fact, the levee failures we saw were in areas of the projects that were at their full project design... So that part of the project was in place, and had this project been fully complete ... (West Bank, Southeast Louisiana, and Lake Ponchartrain) it’s my opinion, based on the intensity of this storm, that the flooding of the Central Business District and the French Quarter would still have occurred. So I do not see that the level of funding is really a contributing factor in this case.”

Strock’s comments raised some eyebrows in Congress.

“What that, in essence, says is that you’re not going to worry about the biggest disasters that could occur, you’re only going to worry about the smaller ones,” Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee told The Washington Post this week.

A TREE FALLS IN HATTIESBURG

Filmmaker Robert Mugge e-mailed this photo of bluesman Vasti "Vast Eye" Jackson standing beside a huge tree that smashed his storage shed at his Hattiesburg, Miss. home during the hurricane last week.

Fortunately, Vasti -- and his guitar -- survived. Here's a photo, taken by Kathi Lee Jackson, used with permission. (And here's another Vasti link)

CHARMAINE'S NIGHTMARE

My friend and former neighbor Jimmie Lee Hannaford drew my attention to the harrowing account of singer Charmaine Neville, (yes, part of the famous New Orleans musical family), who helped rescue people stranded in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. (I took the liberty of breaking the transcript up into paragraphs to make it easier to read ... if not easier to take.)

"I was in my house when everything first started. ... When the hurricane came, it blew all of the left side of my house off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man, and myself, in the house with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was coming in too fast. So we ended up having to leave the house.

We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people on the roof. Later on we found a flat boat, and we went around the neighborhood in a flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people.

But then, things started getting really bad. By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food and no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming into our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters going across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us "Hi!" and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food or any water, or nothing.

Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes.

I tried to get the police to help us, but I realized, we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the 5th district police station. The guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places so they could be saved.

We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.

Finally it got to be too much, I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs that I rowed them from down there in that Ninth Ward to the French Quarters, and I went back and got more people.

There were groups of us, there were about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarters 'cause we heard that there was phones in the French Quarters, and that there wasn't any water. And they were right, there was phones but we couldn't get through.

I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come from the neighborhood where we were, that were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women [unintelligible] and they started killing, and I don't know who these people were. I'm not gonna tell you I know, because I don't.

But what I want people to understand is that, if we hadn't been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn't have resources to get out, we had no way to leave. When they gave the evacuation order, if we coulda left, we would have left.

There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their homes in the downtown area. When we finally did get to, in the 9th ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th wards, there are a lot of people still trapped down there... old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping them.

And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. WE would do SOS on the flashlights, we'd do everything, and it came to a point.

It really did come to a point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire they will stop then. But that didn’t help us. Nothing like that helped us.

Finally, I got to Canal St. with all of my people I had saved from back then. I, I don't want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus. But..."

{At this point she breaks down and is consoled by the priest.}

Here's a link to a video of this interview CLICK HERE

IN THE GHETTO

Being a critic with a fondness for music that falls into the big-umbrella category known as "alternative country" ("Whatever that is," No Depression magazine used to ask) one of the most irritating, over-used rockcrit cliches that drives me nuts is the term "the alt-country ghetto."

It had been a couple of years since I'd stumbled across this in print. Then yesterday I got the press bio on The Old 97s new live CD, written by 97s singer Rhett Miller himself.

"I'd only recently been exiled to the ghetto of alt-country (for some stupid reason, I'd thought that what we were doing was classic American rock and roll."

I swear to God, the only musicians quicker to shun a label are New Age musicians.

I did a Google search this morning for "alt-country ghetto" and got 116 hits. Here's some examples:

" ... Fulks' subsequent attempts to break out of the alt-country ghetto in his career ..."
Baltimore City Paper 2001

"While this may sound like typical rhetoric from upstarts trying to avoid being cast into the alt-country ghetto ..."
All Music Guide review of Tennessee by Lucero, 2002

"... and the music was eclectic enough to break him out of the alt-country ghetto ..."
All Music Guide review of Rock N Roll by Ryan Adams 2003

" ... gave Tweedy the musical muscle to make the leap from the alt-country ghetto to a richer pop universe ..."
The Portland Phoenix 2004

"Laura Veirs might be the bridge between the alt-country ghetto and the Sheryl Crow-revering mainstream."
Attributed to Mojo magazine in a 2005 press release for Laura Viers

"... (Tift Merrit) trades in bedtime tunes for stay-out-all-night rockers, busting out of the alt. country ghetto with a self-described "rock-soul throw down."
Austin Live Wire 2005

Others to rise from the Alt-Country Ghetto include Fred Eaglesmith, Dave Alvin, The Jayhawks, Jim Lauderdale, The Geraldine Fibbers and The Willard Grant Conspiracy.

In fact, I bet if you looked hard enough you could find that anyone I've ever played on The Santa Fe Opry, nay, anyone ever associated with alternative country has broken out of the Alt. Country Ghetto.

COWGIRL HURRICANE BENEFIT

Here's the line-up so far for the benefit performance for the Gulf Coast flood victims, at the Cowgirl BBQ, 319 S. Guadalupe Street, 8 p.m. Saturday.

Chris McCarty & Friends
Busy McCarroll & Baird Banner
Toho Dimitrov & the Blues Machine
Jon Gagan & Friends
Sapphire
Pat Malone
Matthew Andre
Round Mountain
Star Anaya
The Motor Kings
and more Special Guests

The cover charge of $10 will be donated directly to the American Red Cross.Musicians to perform (partial listing):

Musicians wanting to donate their talents for a few numbers, contact the Cowgirl, 982-2565