Amid an ongoing power struggle between state Republicans and New Orleans Democrats, Gov. Jeff Landry said New Orleans is no longer as important to Louisiana’s economic success as it has been in the past.
“Used to be, the saying was, ‘Where goes New Orleans, where goes the state.’ Let me tell you what happened today. That has changed, ” Landry said Monday after a press conference announcing the expansion of an enormous Meta data center project in northeast Louisiana.
“Where goes Louisiana will determine the fate of New Orleans, okay?” the GOP governor said.
Landry’s remarks about New Orleans – the largest Democratic stronghold in Republican Louisiana – come after almost two weeks of feuding between the city’s leaders, the governor and Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, Landry’s closest political ally.
A New Orleans grand jury indicted Murrill shortly before the July 4 holiday over allegations of malfeasance in office and intimidation of New Orleans elected officials.
He believes the new Digital Cancer alley he’s creating via a $50B Meta Data center means no longer having to rely on New Orleans. Not an unreasonable scheme.
But the success vs becoming a $50B hole in the ground seems to depend in large part on the ability to provide better data for better AI training and then sell that data to other corporations who then sell those products to the public.
Which depends on being able to continue to further exploit people and communities (such as New Orleans) in the form of harvesting data for the data center to sell.
So if people in communities (such as New Orleans or anywhere in LA) were to say, idk “fuck you pay me” instead of allowing their data to be exploited, it could create quite a pickle in terms of the state no longer needing to depend on money generated by New Orleans for its own economic success…