September 26, 2025 • 48 mins
This week, we revisit two stories we brought you over the past year and discuss what has changed since then. How has trade between the US and Mexico shifted since President Donald Trump took office, and where do Canadian auto parts fit into the trade spat between the North American countries? And, how one manufacturing plant in Fargo, North Dakota is navigating legal immigration challenges that impact its workforce. Later, how did New Orleans come back twenty years after the city’s worst disaster?
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
This is a special anniversary episode of Wall Street Week.
I'm David Weston bringing you Stories of Capitalism. It was
just a year ago that we debuted this new version
of our program. It's been through several lives since Lewis
Rockeyiser first broadcast his original version on PBS back in
November of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Good evening, I'm Lewis Rugeiser. This is Wall Street Week.
Welcome back, Well folks, it's New Year's again. Habby, Welcome back.
You've made this walk ten times. I think you know
the way.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Thank you, Lucy.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
A lot has changed in the fifty five years since then,
in the media world, in the worlds of markets and finance,
and in the world at large. You our audience have
largely remained the same, smart, serious investors. But since you
now have so many ways of staying up to date
on the markets, we took the program in a new direction,
(01:15):
focusing on timely but longer term stories told from a
range of perspectives.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Still stories of.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Capitalism, but not quite as much what you need to
know as what you need to think about. This week,
we go to New Orleans for a different sort of anniversary.
The Extraordinary Story of the rebirth of a city that
came close to death's door when Hurricane Katrina struck twenty
years ago, what it took to survive, how far it's
come back, and what the future may hold for its residents,
(01:45):
its businesses, and its economy. But we start with two
updates on two stories we brought you over the last year,
stories that drew your particular attention and that remained every
bit as timely as when we first aired them. Starting
with what we called the story about Potential, the potential
for further integration across the border between the United States
(02:06):
and Mexico. When we first told the story in October
of last year, President Trump had not yet been elected,
creating uncertainty about the future of US trade with Mexico
and the USMCA trade agreement. Now, nearly a year later,
the potential we talked about is still there, but so
is the uncertainty.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
The plastic comes from pipings.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Baldwin Britain is a manufacturer based in Monterey, trying to
seize what some are calling the Mexican moment.
Speaker 5 (02:35):
And everything comes as as pellets and it gets melted
in this machine.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
As CEO of Classic Exports, he runs several factories in
northern Mexico making plastic components and finished consumer products in
his newest plant kitchen containers.
Speaker 5 (02:51):
So this is for consumer products that we're selling to
the United States that basically came from near sharing projects.
So these products were previously made in China and they're
relocating into Mexico.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
This closer integration between Mexico and the United States was
jump started by the North American Free Trade Agreement or
NAFTA back in nineteen ninety four, covering Canada as well
as the US and Mexico. Britain is willing to bet
you'll find something he makes in your home. As a
longtime supplier of parts to US and European home appliance companies,
(03:27):
his new customers are just as likely to be Chinese
multinationals you've never heard of.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Thirty years ago, we saw a lot of shifts of
business from Mexico to China, and the last four years
we have seen the shift come back to Mexico.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Are Chinese company is coming in to compete with you?
Speaker 5 (03:45):
Yes, they are coming. They're setting up plants in Mexico
as a matter of fact. And lebolon the state of
Leboleone which is an industrial help of Mexico. They're setting
up so that basically forced US companies like us to
be in our a game to compete.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Shannon O'Neil is Senior Vice president of the Council on
Foreign Relations. She sees the window of opportunity others do,
but also some troublesome risks for investors. As you talked
to investors in Mexico, how concerned are they about some
of the issues you identified, like judicial reform for example.
Speaker 6 (04:17):
These really are front and center, and investor's mind is,
so the justice reform will mean that judges are now elected,
and so businesses worry that those judges could be bought
or influenced by the government in particular cases.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
What about security in particular, because it wasn't that long
ago that it felt like some of the individual Mexican
states were almost in a state of civil war with
the cartels.
Speaker 6 (04:39):
Security has worsened under this last government. Homicide rates have
remained at near record highs, but things like extortion, embezzlement,
and other kidnappings have grown.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
One of the things an investor tends not to like
is uncertainty, and.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
It's building an uncertainty that happened under the last administration.
It's continuing and even deepening, and we've seen it in
the investment. You know what Mexicans were hoping twenty twenty
four would be a record highs in terms of investment,
and most of it has been frozen, both international investment,
foreign investment, but also domestic investments. So this is a
time of uncertainty in Mexico, even as companies are looking
(05:16):
for alternatives to Asia.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
And if that weren't enough, the USMCA itself, that successor
agreement to NAFTA underpinning the near showing system, will be
up for review in twenty twenty six. With new governments
in both the United States and Mexico.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
I do think these are going to be pretty difficult negotiations.
The really looming issue for the review of the USMCA
is China and where does China fit into supply chains
in North America and where does China fit into production
more broadly in North America.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Marcelo Abrard is the new Minister for the Economy for
President Shanebaum, coming to the job after serving as Mayor
of Mexico City and as Foreign Minister under President Andres
Manuel Lopez. Obrador. A broads appointment itself could be assigned
the President. Shanebaum welcomes further US investment and supports more
economic integration. In the last administration abroad lead negotiations for
(06:12):
the US Mexico Canada Agreement.
Speaker 7 (06:16):
Well, we are extremely linked with the United States companies
and market. So if you put chariffs on Mexico exports,
for instance, those charists are going to translate in a
high prices for consumers in the United States. So I
think we have a strong argreement in order to reduce
(06:39):
this possibility to have tariffs in our experts to the
United States. Because there are American companies exporting the United States.
You don't solve any wars between US. Doesn't make sense
because it's the same economy practically.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I know you have some terris still for example from China.
At this point, how do you see the role of tariffs?
When do they make sense? When do they not make sense?
Speaker 7 (07:06):
Well, it's easy to abuse about tariffs, to put tariffs
for any kind of article. At the same time, we
are not especially friendly with the tariffs for several fields
because can be costly for our economy, even for the
United States economy. So we need to have a common
(07:27):
policy with US. Let's see what happens in the next
election in order to have a conversation about the competition
with China. Let's do something really effective, because you are
not going to solve competitiveness through tarifts.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
But in the end, Minister Abroad recognizes that the real
potential of the Mexican economy and it's further integration with
the United States will depend on its ability to attract
private capital, and he can see a world where that
integration transforms the world of Mexican exports.
Speaker 7 (08:03):
There are no other way to do it because we
are not going to find new resources from oil or no,
it doesn't exist. Everything is going to depend on our
capacities to produce better and more.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
How far can you go? How much progress can you
make building the Mexican economy through integration with the United States.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
I think that if we are agree, if we have
a comminbition with let's say the private capital in the
United States, this can be something near twenty five percent
of the imports from North America. So you can imagine
the impact of this Mexico. You can change the country
(08:53):
in ten years.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Why not since we spoke with Minister Abroad in Monterey
last October. President Trump has gone forward with tariffs on steel, aluminum,
and auto imports, though they apply only to the non
US parts of vehicles imported under the USMCA. What this
means for auto companies and their parts suppliers is still
playing out, but Ontario based manufacturer Martian Rea is seeing
(09:18):
the ramifications in Canada, Mexico and in the United States.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Martin Raya, the Tier one auto supplier, were leaders in
structural parts, lightweight structures, and propulsion systems. We make parts
for cars. We're one of the larger suppliers in North America.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Rob Wildebor is the executive chairman of the auto parts
company he co founded in nineteen ninety three. He says
the tariffs have been disruptive up and down the supply chain.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
Parts on average can cross the border anywhere from six
to eight times. But certainly we make parts that go
into assemblies that go into vehicles, so I'd say a
lot of our parts probably probably too three.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Times that flow has been disrupted by President Trump's imposition
of a twenty five percent tax on foreign vehicles. In turn,
Canada announced a tariff on US assembled vehicles. Companies like
Martin Rea are collateral damage in the diplomatic feud between neighbors.
Speaker 8 (10:16):
So effectively, on average, Canadian assembled vehicles have fifty percent
or more US parts, so effectively you're paying half the
nominal tariff, and our argument is that we should basically
move to get rid of that. The interesting thing between
Canada and the United States is that when you look
at assembled vehicles, Canada buys less from the United States
(10:37):
and the US buys from Canada. But when you look
at the parts, the US actually has a surplus with
Canada in auto so parts plus assembly. And that's in
part because vehicles assembled in Canada that go to the
US have at least fifty percent US parts. So there's
not a trade disparity in that sense between Canada and
United States, contrary to what you often see in the papers.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
And so now, for the first time in thirty years,
Canada imports more vehicles from Mexico than from the United States.
But what sounds like a win for Mexico might be
a loss for the long standing trade relationship among the
North American countries.
Speaker 8 (11:15):
This is what works for North America. You need a
fortress North America approach. We shouldn't have tariffs on vehicles
because we make vehicles together, and we shouldn't have tariffs
on parts, and for most auto parts there are no
teriffs right now. If you put tariffs on auto parts,
you would shut down the industry because there would be
suppliers that do not cross the border. The second thing
(11:36):
we need is stronger North American content, which the US
wants and so the supply base wants. The third thing
is we need a penalty for not complying with that
North American content. Right now it's two and a half percent.
It should be higher because if you have a low penalty,
people essentially.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Don't follow the rules.
Speaker 8 (11:55):
The fourth thing is, I think it's good to have
a tariff or some measure to OEMs in Europe, Japan,
and Korea to make more vehicles here, and the US
has done that with terris. I think ultimately you will
see more assembly in North America because of that. And
then the fifth thing is, I think you've got to
(12:16):
keep China out in terms of OEMs and parts as
well as investment, because China doesn't play by the same
rules as the rest of the world does. When you
have that, you're going to effectively have a regime that
really works. So our advocacy, whether it's at Martin Area
or whether it's part of the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council
or the Autoparts Manufacturers Association or MIMA, all these associations
(12:40):
that we're members of, we basically say, what really works
for North America and the competitiveness of our vehicle industry
is tari free movement. And that will get cheaper vehicles
to consumers, which is what we all want, and it
will make our industry as efficient as it can possibly be.
So with respect to the tariff song Canadian assembled vehicles
(13:03):
going into the US and Mexican assembled vehicles going into
the US, we've got to work towards a zero percent tariff.
Is quite frankly, that's how the integrated supply chain works.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
The history of the North American auto industry is rooted
in tariffs. Canada's auto industry began in nineteen oh four
when Henry Ford went to his neighbor in Windsor, Ontario
to establish the Ford Motor Company of Canada to avoid
Canadian tariffs on US autos. As it turns out, history
is repeating itself or at least rhyming for the auto industry.
(13:39):
Up next, another story we covered this year that is
very much in the news today, the Trump Administration's efforts
to expel undocumented immigrants and what it means for our workforce.
(14:03):
Last October, we told you a story about our neighbors,
neighbors integrated into our communities and businesses that have come
from abroad. Neighbors like Anna Yore of North Dakota.
Speaker 9 (14:16):
You can work in gold Glass without noisperien, without know.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
English, what's for amigrant and anyone in it job. My
job with Missine technician, I'm making.
Speaker 9 (14:36):
Spots of the window at this so you make it
and then put that glaff on.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
You're moved from South Sudan to the city of Fargo
fourteen years ago, seeking a better life. In twenty thirteen,
she started working at Cardinal Glass and has been an
employee there ever since.
Speaker 10 (14:54):
Have Minni immigrant.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
We worked like a family, a friend and teamwork and
we help we support each other.
Speaker 11 (15:06):
So here in Fargo we have three hundred and forty
seven teammates. About seventy percent of our team is comprised
of people born outside of the United States.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Plant manager Mike Arnsen has worked at Cardinal Glass Fargo
since it opened in nineteen ninety eight. The company manufactures
residential glass for windows and doors, with ten thousand employees
across its forty nine locations. In Fargo alone, it employs
about four hundred workers.
Speaker 11 (15:35):
What we want to do is attract and hire the
most qualified, the best qualified.
Speaker 10 (15:41):
Teammates that we can attract.
Speaker 11 (15:44):
And it just so happens that a lot of those
folks that we're attracting happy.
Speaker 10 (15:48):
To be immigrants, and we're more than happy to have
them here.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Dakota has
the worst worker shortage in America, with only thirty work
for every one hundred available jobs. That's well below the
national average of ninety five workers for every one hundred jobs.
Speaker 12 (16:08):
There are thirty thousand open jobs in North Dakota, and
although our workforce continues to grow, if we get every
high school and college graduate, every individual coming out of
our correction system, every person on disability into the workforce tomorrow,
we would still have thousands of open jobs. And so
(16:29):
we really do need to be looking outside of our
states borders and outside of our nation's borders to help
identify how we can recruit workers to fill the jobs
that we have available.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Katie Ralston Howe is director of North Dakota's Workforce Division,
overseeing the newly created Office of Legal Immigration. Their goal
to bring together immigrants seeking employment and companies that need workers.
Speaker 12 (16:54):
With the political climate that we're in, immigration has become
a really hot topic, and when we talk about the
work that we're doing through the Office of Legal Immigration,
a lot of times the conversation does go to conversations
around the border or illegal immigration, and that's really not
what we're doing. Really, our focus is proactively identifying appropriate
(17:16):
pathways and programs that we can utilize to help fill
jobs in North Dakota. Employers have been responding really well.
There's a ton of enthusiasm around the work that we're doing.
Communities are responding well too, and so we've been able
to really work with those who are already working in
this space.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
North Dakota may be the extreme case, but its shortage
of workers can be seen in various forms across the country.
According to the US Chamber of Commerce, labor shortages affect
just about every industry in nearly every state. Although shortages
have become less significant over the past two years. The
latest national data show that we still have over eight
(17:56):
million job openings in the US and fewer than seven
million people looking for those jobs. North Dakota businesses like
Cardinal Glass have no doubts about how important immigrant workers
are to the success of its operations and to the
North Dakota economy overall.
Speaker 11 (18:14):
As the economy grows, we need people to move to
Farga morehead to help us run our businesses. And whether
they come from Kansas City or New York City, or
Los Angeles, or Somalia or Bosnia, we just need people
to move here to help keep our economy growing. You
(18:35):
don't even have to speak English to come work at Cardinaliji.
Speaker 10 (18:39):
We've cracked the code on that.
Speaker 11 (18:41):
We have master trainers that are multilingual, that can train
our new teammates in their native language. And so we
have entry level jobs where we can get people contributing
right away, and as they grow in their comfort in
those entry level jobs, then they can graduate on jobs
(19:01):
with a little more difficulty, a little more skills required,
and probably within the course of a year, they can
be contributing in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Since we first talked with Arnstein, President Trump came to
office and his administration has deported what it says are
over three hundred and fifty thousand immigrants. We returned a
year later to see what effect the administration's actions may
have had on an employer like Cardinal Glass.
Speaker 10 (19:31):
We have three hundred and fifty teammates here.
Speaker 11 (19:33):
Seventy percent of those teammates were born outside the United States,
but they're all legal immigrants, so it's had minimal effect
so far. But there is a question about Haitian Temporary
Protected status. We have a number of Haitian teammates here,
and about two dozen of those teammates are here still
(19:54):
on a TPS status temporary protected status, and so well
they may be asked to move back to Haiti next
February unless something changes. Hopefully that Haitian TPS gets extended
beyond February. We are working at sponsoring those teammates, but
(20:15):
that's a very very long process, and I hope we
can get it done by February, but I'm not sure
that that's going to be possible.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
One of those Haitian teammates is Joseph Fleury, who has
been in the United States since twenty ten under temporary
Protected status a status that is likely to end in
February twenty twenty six.
Speaker 9 (20:37):
I got eleven years work in here. I like to stay,
but for it the government mad right now, so I'm
scared because I got TPS and then they want to
change everything. So I don't know how I can I stay.
(21:02):
I hope to stay because my bountry so bad now.
It's so bad because the gun kill people, kidnap people.
So it's very difficult to go with it. If I go,
how I can leave over it?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
From your point of view, is somebody who employs these
workers and others from outside.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
The United States?
Speaker 1 (21:27):
What comes next to the United States? What should come next?
How should we treat the immigration problem?
Speaker 11 (21:33):
You know, demographically, we are entering a major workforce shortage,
and really there's four ways to mitigate that shortage.
Speaker 10 (21:45):
Automation, local workforce development.
Speaker 11 (21:48):
Which we're already at seventy two workforce participation rate, importing
goods or inputs from other countries, and that with the tariffs, that's.
Speaker 10 (22:01):
Kind of slowing down. And then immigration important workers from
ound the countries.
Speaker 11 (22:07):
And so we have to keep up with workforce demands
or it's going to affect our economy negatively.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
How much stress will that put on you, particularly if
there's a worker shortage overall.
Speaker 11 (22:18):
In North Dakota, Well, we're gonna have to find twenty
five more teammates to hire. Fargo Moorehead has a seventy
two workforce participation rate, so it's the highest in the country.
We have like a one point two percent unemployment rate
here in Fargmorehead. For every unemployed worker, there are two
point four open jobs here in Fargo Moorehead.
Speaker 10 (22:39):
So it's not easy to find new teammates when you
need them.
Speaker 11 (22:43):
And so if if two dozen of my teammates and
I don't know how many other Haitian folks are here
in Fargmorehead under temporary protected status, if they all have
to move back to Haiti, it's going to leave a
big hole.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Despite the TPA extension being up in the air, the
Fargo economy remains strong, an economy driven in part by
immigrant workers.
Speaker 11 (23:08):
Our economy continues to grow. You know, we're doing really well.
Workers are moving to the region because of the great
job opportunities here.
Speaker 10 (23:19):
You know, at Cardinal I g and.
Speaker 11 (23:20):
Fargo, our wages are forty five percent above what the
nation nationwide averages for light industrial workers. So we are
attracting probably more than our fair share of workers, but
it's just not fast enough to keep up with our
growing economy.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Coming up twenty years after Katrina laid waste too much
of New Orleans, we return to the Big Easy to
see what was done to rebuild, where it is today
in its recovery, and what future it hopes to achieve.
(24:06):
This is a story about coming back to life. Two
decades ago, the city of New Orleans was nearly lost
when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural
disaster in American history and one of the deadliest. On
the twentieth anniversary of the hurricane, we went back to
New Orleans to see what it took for the people
and businesses who stayed to rebuild their shattered city.
Speaker 6 (24:32):
At this hour, monster storm Hurricane Katrina bears down on
New Orleans.
Speaker 13 (24:38):
There's a lot of aid surging toward those who have
been affected, a lot of people working hard.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
The results are not acceptable.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
We took a helicopter and landed at the super Dome
and I could see my home on Napoleon Avenue.
Speaker 10 (24:53):
I grew up.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
It's really still under water, and I started crying.
Speaker 14 (24:58):
It was the largest disaster by a long shot in
the US in many, many, many decades.
Speaker 15 (25:04):
Right, I lost everything, just like everyone else. I had
thirty napis thirty. I knew all of them. Today I
have four.
Speaker 16 (25:14):
My business is in the street of New Orleans, and
it's like, oh, what do I do now?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Nearly eighty percent of New Orleans flooded and more than
eighteen hundred lives were lost. The economic toll over two
hundred billion dollars in damage adjusted for inflation. But as
stunning as the video and the overall numbers are, the
real story of what happened to New Orleans in August
of two thousand and five is told in the experiences
(25:41):
of the individual people living there.
Speaker 15 (25:44):
You all right, all right, you get bad, you got
out at somebody.
Speaker 16 (25:49):
This whole area, all full floors above it were all destroyed.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
People like Rick Blount, who runs the iconic French Quarter
restaurant Antoine's, owned by his family since his great great
grandfather founded it in eighteen forty.
Speaker 16 (26:04):
It was way worse than I could have imagined. I
thought that a wall had fallen down, and I thought.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
We could fix a wall.
Speaker 16 (26:11):
But when we got into the building, the entire building
looked like it was going to fall any second, and
I didn't know what to do about that.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Given the devastation, Blount, along with so many of those
in New Orleans, had to make a choice. Cut his losses,
move on, move out, or rebuild, knowing that a new
New Orleans would never be the same.
Speaker 16 (26:34):
And some of the spokes were broken.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
For Blount, the decision was an easy one. Did it
ever occur to you? I'm sorry, it just can't be
done it. No, I don't think I had that luxury.
Speaker 16 (26:49):
Maybe I did and I didn't know it, but I
didn't ever have that feeling. I had the feeling that
it was my duty to rebuild it. Antoine's needed to
be what Antoine's always was. Right after Katrina, when the
city was still flooded and the only people that we
hear were military and police and reporters. So when the
(27:10):
reporters would ask, you know, what are you going to do?
You know this has got to be the end. If
my great grandfather could have survived the Civil War, and
my great grandfather could survive the First World War and
Prohibition and the Second World War, it's.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Been a lot.
Speaker 16 (27:26):
This happened to Antoines.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
I think we could figure out a.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Hurricane and figure it out. They did, but it wasn't simple.
It took a lot of money and time for BLOGNT
to rebuild, as it did for the rest of the city.
Roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars in federal aid
poured in, with the government spending nearly fifteen billion dollars
to rebuild and improve the levees, flood walls, gates, and pumps.
Speaker 14 (27:52):
One of the biggest investments was in the levee system,
so we now have the best levees in the country.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Alison Plier is the chief demographer at the Data Center,
a nonprofit that since Katrina has compiled a biannual New
Orleans index keeping track of the city's progress.
Speaker 14 (28:12):
A lot of the money, of course, went to homeowners
to rebuild their homes, and that's contributed substantially to the
recovery of the population. It would be the city would
be virtually depopulated had we not gotten a lot of
funding to support homeowners in rebuilding their homes. And then
of course we had to rebuild schools, hospitals, all of it.
Those kind of investments were absolutely critical for getting the
(28:34):
city back on its feet. When we're thinking about how
to justify that or if it was worth it, you
have to think about the role that the city and
the metro plays in the nation's economy. The shipping, although
doesn't produce a lot of jobs, the shipping and ports
here are critical for the exporting of all of the
grain and other food stuffs from the Midwest. The oil
(28:55):
and gas that is drilled off our coast is an
enormous contribution to the national economy.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Standing here in the square, you kind of see all
the pillars of No Orleans.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Walter Isaacson was there from the start of the reconstruction efforts.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Isaacson left the city
to build a career as an acclaimed biographer, as well
as running Time magazine, CNN, and the Aspen Institute. But
when Katrina hit he answered the call to return home
and pitch in. Today, he's a professor of history at
(29:28):
Tulane University.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
The governor called and said, will you be the vice
chair of the Recovery Authority?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I said sure, but who's the chair?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And she said Norman Francis, And he's a living saint
here forty years head of the largest historically black university here,
and so together we said we're going to have to
unite the city black and white, Democrat Republican, because we're
all in the same boat.
Speaker 13 (29:51):
Now, how did you do that? Unite the city? You
know a crisis should do it, meaning in the same boat,
you say, all right, we don't care where you're from,
or what your beliefs or anything else.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
I think we did it by saying, look, put every
agenda side, put all partisanship aside.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
How did you take apart the problem and say we
need to do this first, this second, this third.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Well, first of all, we needed to get the electricity
back on. And we were in the back room of
Mother's Restaurant, a Poe Boy restaurant to fare when President.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
Bush came down and Laura Bush was with us.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Everybody's going around the table, and somebody said, well, the
traffic lights aren't working in Saint Bernard Lower nine, and
somebody said, well, that's because the electricity is not back on,
and people kept going around the table talking. Ms Bush
turned to me and said, wait a minute, the electricity
is not back on. And so the FEMA director, who
is no hero there, said well, we're trying to figure
out whether the generators were capital or other typics, and
(30:53):
George Bush said, get the electricity back on, so that
was step one. Then we had two big jobs. One
was the school system and one was housing.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
As Walter Isaacson was working with his commission to get
the electricity back on and houses and schools rebuilt, Rick
Blond had his own task of putting antoines back together.
Although the restaurant was able to partly reopen towards the
end of two thousand and five, it was years before
the Historic Establishment was back to its former self.
Speaker 16 (31:24):
We had a huge amount of water damage because we
lost the whole roof structure.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
The main building is four stores.
Speaker 16 (31:30):
The top two floors of the east side collapsed and
collapsed into the street, and so that sort of collapsed
the entire inside of the building. All the floors sort
of fell down on top of themselves, all four floors
of them, push down onto the first floor and caused
(31:51):
a massive, massive amount of damage to that building.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
But in order to get back up and running, you
need labor, and even among those who wanted to stay
and work in the city, there were no easy options.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Even if you hadn't left for the storm.
Speaker 16 (32:06):
You were now completely flooded and you had to be evacuated.
You were taken out of New Orleans. We had to
figure out housing for people so that we could bring
them into New Orleans to work. Within a matter of weeks,
all of our employees were calling and stopping in and
trying to figure out their lives and wondering how we
(32:29):
were doing. And we figured out pretty soon that they
needed two things. They needed health insurance, which we kept
them all on health insurance, and then we tried to
hire them all. We tried to bring them all back in.
So I had several of my waiters. They had a
ship that the corp of Engineers had parked in the port,
and they were renting bunks in the ship for people
to sleep. So I was housing a handful of my
(32:51):
waiters in there, and we're using my own staff to rebuild,
to do all of the labor work that were here.
And we had these really great skilled craftsmen, this team
of curial gentlemen from Western Louisiana that literally saved that building,
that saved our building from collapsing. And I even to
(33:14):
this day, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude
for their expertise and their patients and their dedication to
preserving a building that I think should have been preserved,
and they got it done. This is the dining room
that in eighteen fifty six when Antoine bought this building,
(33:37):
that he was operating Antoine Truster, And this is a
building that had all the major damage in Katrina. And
this building and these beams above her head were made
of cypress, and when the building came apart, it put
all the pressure, all the weight of the building down
on these cypress beams above these columns.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
As devastating as Hurricane Katrina was for Antoine's and the
French Quarter, the rest of the city, it was the
Lower ninth Ward that was hit the hardest, not by
Katrina itself, but by the pressure of the storm put
on the levees, which eventually broke.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
One reason the Lower ninth is called that is because
it's lower on the river and it's beyond the levees
on the Industrial Canal. In other words, if you're upriver
from the levees, you're in the Upper Ninth, or you're
in the seventh Ward or other places, that makes it
harder to protect.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
It's further downriver. Its lower level.
Speaker 14 (34:32):
The difference with the Lower ninth Ward was that the
levees broke in such a way as the rush of
water pushed the houses off their foundations. Unfortunately, that makes
it much more difficult to rebuild. Lower ninth Ward has
therefore had much slower recovery rates than much of the
rest of the city. I think about a third of
the population is back, and it's incredibly sad because that
(34:55):
was an area that had higher home ownership rates than
the city average. Lot of folks there who were craftsmen,
helped build across the city, built their own homes, and
a lot of the properties were handed down to grandkids
and great grandkids.
Speaker 15 (35:13):
All this grass and high weeds, all that was houses
and businesses we had.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
One of those residents who did come back is Brunelle Cotlin.
He grew up here and spent his life savings to
open the only grocery store in the Lower ninth Ward.
Speaker 15 (35:27):
My childhood dream was to be a policeman, so I
ended up joining the United States Army and I was
the police of all places in Germany. But unfortunately I
came home just in time for Hurricane Katrina. After I
rebuilt my personal home, I noticed we.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Didn't have anything.
Speaker 15 (35:44):
We didn't have any grocery stores. We had nothing. I
called up every big box store you can think of,
and I begged them to open up a grocery store
here in the lower night board. So I said, well,
you know what says they're not going to build anything,
I'm gonna build it before I open up these doors.
I had a small grocery store window this right in
the back. I opened that window up in two thousand
(36:05):
and nine. I was selling everything out this little bitty window,
and I had to save all my money before I
had enough money open up these stores. I sold everything
out this window. Milk, eggs, bread, cheese, you name it.
It all went out this window. Right back there is
where I collected money, the cashcage. And I'm not going
to see the lady's name because she still shots today.
But she came then. She had her grandkids with her.
(36:28):
She had like a gallon of milk, some chipped in candy,
and she swiped her card and it declined, and she said,
mister bee, can I do it again? And see I
tried again and it declined again, and she spoke around
the tips right behind me to start crying. So I
came out of the cash caage. I did something my
boy was supposed to do. I gave a hug and
I said, when you get your stimless money or your unemployment, whatever,
(36:50):
you come back and pay. And I saw it again
and again and again. So what I did. I took
out a little tablet and I started a journal and
I would write down customers name and how much they owe.
Some came back and on at de tabs unfolded some dayton.
It was hard in this steel haart even.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Today, despite the devastation, despite all the lives lost and
companies driven to the point of extinction, New Orleans did
come back thanks to people like Brunell Cotlin, and Rick
Blount and Walter Isaacson, turning the city back into a
living and breathing version of what it had once been
with the hope of a brighter future. And that's where
(37:30):
we turn next to the state of the city today
and its prospects for tomorrow. There was nothing easy about
(37:51):
the long way back that New Orleans faced in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Speaker 14 (37:57):
When you're thinking about a city and whether it's being
resilient is whether it can rebound to its pre disaster trends, right,
So we're kind of rebounded to our pre disaster trends,
but we haven't really transformed where we're actually improving those trends.
And that's some of the big challenges that we've got
going forward.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
So how is the city at the foot of the
Mississippi different from what it was twenty years ago? Alison
Plier says, one way to find out is to look
at jobs and the population.
Speaker 14 (38:26):
The city has about ten percent, or the metro, i
should say, has about ten percent fewer jobs than it
did before Katrina. The population has been declining as well
across the metro, and it's now about seven percent less
than it was pre Katrina. We don't have the kind
of jobs that pay wages that would help folks to
build wealth. And that has to do really with something
(38:47):
that people don't talk about that much about New Orleans,
which is that we continue to focus on older industries.
So New Orleans is kind of like Detroit in the
way that we're looking at these old industries oil and gas, petrochemical, manufacturing, shipping,
all of which are replacing workers with automation.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
What about wealth and income disparity? Is it getting better?
Is it getting worse.
Speaker 14 (39:13):
It's not getting better. I'd say, we do know that
white households in New Orleans and in the New Orleans
metro have about ten times the wealth of Black households
and about six times the wealth of Hispanic households. You know,
one of the challenges is that our tourism industry continues
to pay lower wages, and that makes it really hard
for the people of color who are in a lot
(39:34):
of the hospitality occupations to accumulate wealth and have the
kind of wealth necessary sometimes even to buy homes or
put their kids through college, etc. The tourism industry is
still the number one driver industry of the region, and
again it pays lower wages. But it too, like oil
and gas and shipping and logistics and petrochemical, is declining
(39:57):
in jobs because workers are being replaced my computers, various
kinds of automation. So that makes it really hard for
people to generate wealth.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
One driving factor behind getting a good job is having
access to education. And one of the projects that Walter
Isaacson took on was using the tragedy of Katrina to
rethink the entire school system.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
We decided to have sort of like you'd call charter schools,
but that's a loaded word.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
So we gave all the schools autonomy.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
They got to run themselves, they got to try to
attract students, and they got funded based on how many
students they attracted. So is a competitive system based on
parents having a choice, and that made it so some
of the schools said, well, we're going to stay up
until five pm, because dumping a kid on the streets
at three PM's not a great idea, and they would
(40:49):
end up getting more students. So it was just that
simple thing of letting parents have choice that helped upgrade
the school system.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You rebuild the school system. Is it working and is
it working better than before?
Speaker 4 (41:00):
How do you know it used to be?
Speaker 3 (41:02):
You know New Orleans school system was at the bottom
of the state, at the bottom of the nation. The
increase in reading scores just this past year, I mean
every year it gets better because we.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
Still have the same system.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
If people don't like the school, they can move their
kid to another school. And so the reading and mass
scolers have had double digit gains, more than any school
in the state, and putting New Orleans now in the
center of the pack at least nationally, which may not
be the best, but it ain't.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
The bottom of the pack.
Speaker 14 (41:33):
We have nine universities and colleges in New Orleans, everything
from Tulane University in Loyola University to historically black colleges
and universities like Dillard and Xavier. Xavier produces more graduates
who go on to medical school than any university in
the country. The university has really worked together post Katrina
to increase the knowledge that we all have about resilience
(41:56):
and how to be resilient in the face of shocks.
They employ a lot of folks and in the last
about ten years they've increased the educational entertainment of our
adult population, so we're now on par with the nation.
Speaker 16 (42:11):
Huge water damage in Katrina.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Rick Blunt's restaurant, Antoine's, has come a long way back
from the damage of Hurricane Katrina. But in twenty twenty,
the restaurant was hit with another big blow, one affecting
not just New Orleans but the entire world. In twenty twenty,
you had the pandemic hit. What did that do your business?
Speaker 16 (42:29):
That one was also very painful and very painful from
our staff too. The force closure of a business at
covid I had about two hundred employees.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
It wasn't quite.
Speaker 16 (42:39):
Two hundred families. But let's you say one hundred and
fifty families, but there's one hundred and fifty families that
depend on getting a paycheck on Friday from this business.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Are you fully recovered from that in terms of a business.
Speaker 16 (42:52):
I think we're now ready to turn a financial page
from COVID. It took substantially longer for the economy to
reach build in New Orleans. There was a lot of
damage it was, and a lot of damage to the economy.
So it took years and years longer for New Orleans
to recover from Katrina than it did for New Orleans
to recover from COVID.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
We're just a.
Speaker 16 (43:13):
Little picture of this bigger picture, which is our community.
We live and die by the success or the failure
of that community. One of the wonderful things to reflect
on twenty years later is how well damned community's done.
And I'm very, very proud of that. I think that
(43:36):
I think New Orleanians ought to be proud of it.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Even in the ninth ward, there's been some progress, though
still nowhere near as close to the rest of the city.
Speaker 15 (43:45):
In this building right here I have a barber shop,
I have a hasse line of a sweet shop, a
snowball stand thanks to Ellen Degenius, a laundromat, and the
most important thing, the grocery store. This is the only
business here twenty years later.
Speaker 4 (44:01):
This is it.
Speaker 15 (44:03):
If you want something to eat, you're coming to see me.
You want to wash your clothes, You're coming to see
me today. I have four four neighbors. So I tell people,
if you have a community, you have a store, you
have a neighbors or outside to hug your neighbors, hug
your store. Just be grateful, appreciate that you have all
(44:23):
of that, because not have anything. I don't wish this
on anybody. If I wasn't here, this community wouldn't have anything.
You cannot live your life in fear. You're here for
a reason. You have to find your purpose. I found
my purpose of life. My purpose is serviced, so you
have to embrace it. So I just like I served
my country, not to serve my community. And you can't
(44:44):
be afraid. So I'm not afraid of another hurricane. I'm
not afraid or not that of nobody. You just have
to keep on going.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
The City of New Orleans and its people have seen
some of the worst mother nature can offer. Its survived
and reclaimed a good part of what it will. But
what's next.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
The schools the better, the entrepreneurial spirits better, the politics,
the sense that we're all in this together is better.
What we have to do is start growing our population,
growing our business, and growing the number of jobs we
have for young people.
Speaker 14 (45:18):
I do think it's really important that the folks working
on economic development in Louisiana and in the New Orleans
area really start to have a forward vision. They continue
to really emphasize and incentivize these older industries that are
just replacing workers with automation. As they said, oil and
gas has fifty percent fewer jobs than it did twenty
(45:40):
five years ago, and that's because of automation. And so
I think here in New Orleans, just like across the country,
we really have to look carefully at what industries are
growing jobs and invest in those industries rather than industries
of the past.
Speaker 4 (45:56):
We have a creative industry.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
We have all sorts of musicians and artists and even
writers like myself or whatever.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
But it makes for in a creative economy. We had
to celebrate that.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Our biggest hope is that so many young and educated
people have come down here, which is wild of teaching
my class at Tulane, and these people are starting businesses
and I think you're going to see an entrepreneurial economy here.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
So what's the case for investor to say invest in
New Orleans as supposed to some alternatives that they have.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
I think what you need to invest in New Orleans
is for small, medium size and startup companies that are
doing great things in biotech, tropical medicine, diseases, carbon capture, energy,
where we have great strengths here. We have great engineering
coming out of Tulane now, but we also have people
who are very experienced in oil and gas and energy
(46:50):
and for that matter, tropical diseases, medicine, biotechnology. So I
don't think people are going to be building huge operations here,
but I do think that having the type of funds
we now have, the venture funds we now have, we're
getting a lot of people to start businesses here.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
New Orleans has been through an ordeal few American cities
have faced, and it's taken a lot of money and
hard work and hope to bring it back to where
it is now. And yes, maybe just a bit of providence.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
I thought the city for a moment, we thought we've lost. Boy,
I get sil choke up feeling that way. And then
we made a deal with the Good Lord. We said,
all right, bring the city back and have the Saints
win the super Bowl. And then the Saints won the
super Bowl, and that's when we knew we were coming back.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
That does it for us here at Wall Street Week,
I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories
of capitalism.
This is a special anniversary episode of Wall Street Week.
I'm David Weston bringing you Stories of Capitalism. It was
just a year ago that we debuted this new version
of our program. It's been through several lives since Lewis
Rockeyiser first broadcast his original version on PBS back in
November of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Good evening, I'm Lewis Rugeiser. This is Wall Street Week.
Welcome back, Well folks, it's New Year's again. Habby, Welcome back.
You've made this walk ten times. I think you know
the way.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Thank you, Lucy.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
A lot has changed in the fifty five years since then,
in the media world, in the worlds of markets and finance,
and in the world at large. You our audience have
largely remained the same, smart, serious investors. But since you
now have so many ways of staying up to date
on the markets, we took the program in a new direction,
(01:15):
focusing on timely but longer term stories told from a
range of perspectives.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Still stories of.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Capitalism, but not quite as much what you need to
know as what you need to think about. This week,
we go to New Orleans for a different sort of anniversary.
The Extraordinary Story of the rebirth of a city that
came close to death's door when Hurricane Katrina struck twenty
years ago, what it took to survive, how far it's
come back, and what the future may hold for its residents,
(01:45):
its businesses, and its economy. But we start with two
updates on two stories we brought you over the last year,
stories that drew your particular attention and that remained every
bit as timely as when we first aired them. Starting
with what we called the story about Potential, the potential
for further integration across the border between the United States
(02:06):
and Mexico. When we first told the story in October
of last year, President Trump had not yet been elected,
creating uncertainty about the future of US trade with Mexico
and the USMCA trade agreement. Now, nearly a year later,
the potential we talked about is still there, but so
is the uncertainty.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
The plastic comes from pipings.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Baldwin Britain is a manufacturer based in Monterey, trying to
seize what some are calling the Mexican moment.
Speaker 5 (02:35):
And everything comes as as pellets and it gets melted
in this machine.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
As CEO of Classic Exports, he runs several factories in
northern Mexico making plastic components and finished consumer products in
his newest plant kitchen containers.
Speaker 5 (02:51):
So this is for consumer products that we're selling to
the United States that basically came from near sharing projects.
So these products were previously made in China and they're
relocating into Mexico.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
This closer integration between Mexico and the United States was
jump started by the North American Free Trade Agreement or
NAFTA back in nineteen ninety four, covering Canada as well
as the US and Mexico. Britain is willing to bet
you'll find something he makes in your home. As a
longtime supplier of parts to US and European home appliance companies,
(03:27):
his new customers are just as likely to be Chinese
multinationals you've never heard of.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Thirty years ago, we saw a lot of shifts of
business from Mexico to China, and the last four years
we have seen the shift come back to Mexico.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Are Chinese company is coming in to compete with you?
Speaker 5 (03:45):
Yes, they are coming. They're setting up plants in Mexico
as a matter of fact. And lebolon the state of
Leboleone which is an industrial help of Mexico. They're setting
up so that basically forced US companies like us to
be in our a game to compete.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Shannon O'Neil is Senior Vice president of the Council on
Foreign Relations. She sees the window of opportunity others do,
but also some troublesome risks for investors. As you talked
to investors in Mexico, how concerned are they about some
of the issues you identified, like judicial reform for example.
Speaker 6 (04:17):
These really are front and center, and investor's mind is,
so the justice reform will mean that judges are now elected,
and so businesses worry that those judges could be bought
or influenced by the government in particular cases.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
What about security in particular, because it wasn't that long
ago that it felt like some of the individual Mexican
states were almost in a state of civil war with
the cartels.
Speaker 6 (04:39):
Security has worsened under this last government. Homicide rates have
remained at near record highs, but things like extortion, embezzlement,
and other kidnappings have grown.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
One of the things an investor tends not to like
is uncertainty, and.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
It's building an uncertainty that happened under the last administration.
It's continuing and even deepening, and we've seen it in
the investment. You know what Mexicans were hoping twenty twenty
four would be a record highs in terms of investment,
and most of it has been frozen, both international investment,
foreign investment, but also domestic investments. So this is a
time of uncertainty in Mexico, even as companies are looking
(05:16):
for alternatives to Asia.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
And if that weren't enough, the USMCA itself, that successor
agreement to NAFTA underpinning the near showing system, will be
up for review in twenty twenty six. With new governments
in both the United States and Mexico.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
I do think these are going to be pretty difficult negotiations.
The really looming issue for the review of the USMCA
is China and where does China fit into supply chains
in North America and where does China fit into production
more broadly in North America.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Marcelo Abrard is the new Minister for the Economy for
President Shanebaum, coming to the job after serving as Mayor
of Mexico City and as Foreign Minister under President Andres
Manuel Lopez. Obrador. A broads appointment itself could be assigned
the President. Shanebaum welcomes further US investment and supports more
economic integration. In the last administration abroad lead negotiations for
(06:12):
the US Mexico Canada Agreement.
Speaker 7 (06:16):
Well, we are extremely linked with the United States companies
and market. So if you put chariffs on Mexico exports,
for instance, those charists are going to translate in a
high prices for consumers in the United States. So I
think we have a strong argreement in order to reduce
(06:39):
this possibility to have tariffs in our experts to the
United States. Because there are American companies exporting the United States.
You don't solve any wars between US. Doesn't make sense
because it's the same economy practically.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I know you have some terris still for example from China.
At this point, how do you see the role of tariffs?
When do they make sense? When do they not make sense?
Speaker 7 (07:06):
Well, it's easy to abuse about tariffs, to put tariffs
for any kind of article. At the same time, we
are not especially friendly with the tariffs for several fields
because can be costly for our economy, even for the
United States economy. So we need to have a common
(07:27):
policy with US. Let's see what happens in the next
election in order to have a conversation about the competition
with China. Let's do something really effective, because you are
not going to solve competitiveness through tarifts.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
But in the end, Minister Abroad recognizes that the real
potential of the Mexican economy and it's further integration with
the United States will depend on its ability to attract
private capital, and he can see a world where that
integration transforms the world of Mexican exports.
Speaker 7 (08:03):
There are no other way to do it because we
are not going to find new resources from oil or no,
it doesn't exist. Everything is going to depend on our
capacities to produce better and more.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
How far can you go? How much progress can you
make building the Mexican economy through integration with the United States.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
I think that if we are agree, if we have
a comminbition with let's say the private capital in the
United States, this can be something near twenty five percent
of the imports from North America. So you can imagine
the impact of this Mexico. You can change the country
(08:53):
in ten years.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Why not since we spoke with Minister Abroad in Monterey
last October. President Trump has gone forward with tariffs on steel, aluminum,
and auto imports, though they apply only to the non
US parts of vehicles imported under the USMCA. What this
means for auto companies and their parts suppliers is still
playing out, but Ontario based manufacturer Martian Rea is seeing
(09:18):
the ramifications in Canada, Mexico and in the United States.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Martin Raya, the Tier one auto supplier, were leaders in
structural parts, lightweight structures, and propulsion systems. We make parts
for cars. We're one of the larger suppliers in North America.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Rob Wildebor is the executive chairman of the auto parts
company he co founded in nineteen ninety three. He says
the tariffs have been disruptive up and down the supply chain.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
Parts on average can cross the border anywhere from six
to eight times. But certainly we make parts that go
into assemblies that go into vehicles, so I'd say a
lot of our parts probably probably too three.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Times that flow has been disrupted by President Trump's imposition
of a twenty five percent tax on foreign vehicles. In turn,
Canada announced a tariff on US assembled vehicles. Companies like
Martin Rea are collateral damage in the diplomatic feud between neighbors.
Speaker 8 (10:16):
So effectively, on average, Canadian assembled vehicles have fifty percent
or more US parts, so effectively you're paying half the
nominal tariff, and our argument is that we should basically
move to get rid of that. The interesting thing between
Canada and the United States is that when you look
at assembled vehicles, Canada buys less from the United States
(10:37):
and the US buys from Canada. But when you look
at the parts, the US actually has a surplus with
Canada in auto so parts plus assembly. And that's in
part because vehicles assembled in Canada that go to the
US have at least fifty percent US parts. So there's
not a trade disparity in that sense between Canada and
United States, contrary to what you often see in the papers.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
And so now, for the first time in thirty years,
Canada imports more vehicles from Mexico than from the United States.
But what sounds like a win for Mexico might be
a loss for the long standing trade relationship among the
North American countries.
Speaker 8 (11:15):
This is what works for North America. You need a
fortress North America approach. We shouldn't have tariffs on vehicles
because we make vehicles together, and we shouldn't have tariffs
on parts, and for most auto parts there are no
teriffs right now. If you put tariffs on auto parts,
you would shut down the industry because there would be
suppliers that do not cross the border. The second thing
(11:36):
we need is stronger North American content, which the US
wants and so the supply base wants. The third thing
is we need a penalty for not complying with that
North American content. Right now it's two and a half percent.
It should be higher because if you have a low penalty,
people essentially.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Don't follow the rules.
Speaker 8 (11:55):
The fourth thing is, I think it's good to have
a tariff or some measure to OEMs in Europe, Japan,
and Korea to make more vehicles here, and the US
has done that with terris. I think ultimately you will
see more assembly in North America because of that. And
then the fifth thing is, I think you've got to
(12:16):
keep China out in terms of OEMs and parts as
well as investment, because China doesn't play by the same
rules as the rest of the world does. When you
have that, you're going to effectively have a regime that
really works. So our advocacy, whether it's at Martin Area
or whether it's part of the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council
or the Autoparts Manufacturers Association or MIMA, all these associations
(12:40):
that we're members of, we basically say, what really works
for North America and the competitiveness of our vehicle industry
is tari free movement. And that will get cheaper vehicles
to consumers, which is what we all want, and it
will make our industry as efficient as it can possibly be.
So with respect to the tariff song Canadian assembled vehicles
(13:03):
going into the US and Mexican assembled vehicles going into
the US, we've got to work towards a zero percent tariff.
Is quite frankly, that's how the integrated supply chain works.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
The history of the North American auto industry is rooted
in tariffs. Canada's auto industry began in nineteen oh four
when Henry Ford went to his neighbor in Windsor, Ontario
to establish the Ford Motor Company of Canada to avoid
Canadian tariffs on US autos. As it turns out, history
is repeating itself or at least rhyming for the auto industry.
(13:39):
Up next, another story we covered this year that is
very much in the news today, the Trump Administration's efforts
to expel undocumented immigrants and what it means for our workforce.
(14:03):
Last October, we told you a story about our neighbors,
neighbors integrated into our communities and businesses that have come
from abroad. Neighbors like Anna Yore of North Dakota.
Speaker 9 (14:16):
You can work in gold Glass without noisperien, without know.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
English, what's for amigrant and anyone in it job. My
job with Missine technician, I'm making.
Speaker 9 (14:36):
Spots of the window at this so you make it
and then put that glaff on.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
You're moved from South Sudan to the city of Fargo
fourteen years ago, seeking a better life. In twenty thirteen,
she started working at Cardinal Glass and has been an
employee there ever since.
Speaker 10 (14:54):
Have Minni immigrant.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
We worked like a family, a friend and teamwork and
we help we support each other.
Speaker 11 (15:06):
So here in Fargo we have three hundred and forty
seven teammates. About seventy percent of our team is comprised
of people born outside of the United States.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Plant manager Mike Arnsen has worked at Cardinal Glass Fargo
since it opened in nineteen ninety eight. The company manufactures
residential glass for windows and doors, with ten thousand employees
across its forty nine locations. In Fargo alone, it employs
about four hundred workers.
Speaker 11 (15:35):
What we want to do is attract and hire the
most qualified, the best qualified.
Speaker 10 (15:41):
Teammates that we can attract.
Speaker 11 (15:44):
And it just so happens that a lot of those
folks that we're attracting happy.
Speaker 10 (15:48):
To be immigrants, and we're more than happy to have
them here.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Dakota has
the worst worker shortage in America, with only thirty work
for every one hundred available jobs. That's well below the
national average of ninety five workers for every one hundred jobs.
Speaker 12 (16:08):
There are thirty thousand open jobs in North Dakota, and
although our workforce continues to grow, if we get every
high school and college graduate, every individual coming out of
our correction system, every person on disability into the workforce tomorrow,
we would still have thousands of open jobs. And so
(16:29):
we really do need to be looking outside of our
states borders and outside of our nation's borders to help
identify how we can recruit workers to fill the jobs
that we have available.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Katie Ralston Howe is director of North Dakota's Workforce Division,
overseeing the newly created Office of Legal Immigration. Their goal
to bring together immigrants seeking employment and companies that need workers.
Speaker 12 (16:54):
With the political climate that we're in, immigration has become
a really hot topic, and when we talk about the
work that we're doing through the Office of Legal Immigration,
a lot of times the conversation does go to conversations
around the border or illegal immigration, and that's really not
what we're doing. Really, our focus is proactively identifying appropriate
(17:16):
pathways and programs that we can utilize to help fill
jobs in North Dakota. Employers have been responding really well.
There's a ton of enthusiasm around the work that we're doing.
Communities are responding well too, and so we've been able
to really work with those who are already working in
this space.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
North Dakota may be the extreme case, but its shortage
of workers can be seen in various forms across the country.
According to the US Chamber of Commerce, labor shortages affect
just about every industry in nearly every state. Although shortages
have become less significant over the past two years. The
latest national data show that we still have over eight
(17:56):
million job openings in the US and fewer than seven
million people looking for those jobs. North Dakota businesses like
Cardinal Glass have no doubts about how important immigrant workers
are to the success of its operations and to the
North Dakota economy overall.
Speaker 11 (18:14):
As the economy grows, we need people to move to
Farga morehead to help us run our businesses. And whether
they come from Kansas City or New York City, or
Los Angeles, or Somalia or Bosnia, we just need people
to move here to help keep our economy growing. You
(18:35):
don't even have to speak English to come work at Cardinaliji.
Speaker 10 (18:39):
We've cracked the code on that.
Speaker 11 (18:41):
We have master trainers that are multilingual, that can train
our new teammates in their native language. And so we
have entry level jobs where we can get people contributing
right away, and as they grow in their comfort in
those entry level jobs, then they can graduate on jobs
(19:01):
with a little more difficulty, a little more skills required,
and probably within the course of a year, they can
be contributing in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Since we first talked with Arnstein, President Trump came to
office and his administration has deported what it says are
over three hundred and fifty thousand immigrants. We returned a
year later to see what effect the administration's actions may
have had on an employer like Cardinal Glass.
Speaker 10 (19:31):
We have three hundred and fifty teammates here.
Speaker 11 (19:33):
Seventy percent of those teammates were born outside the United States,
but they're all legal immigrants, so it's had minimal effect
so far. But there is a question about Haitian Temporary
Protected status. We have a number of Haitian teammates here,
and about two dozen of those teammates are here still
(19:54):
on a TPS status temporary protected status, and so well
they may be asked to move back to Haiti next
February unless something changes. Hopefully that Haitian TPS gets extended
beyond February. We are working at sponsoring those teammates, but
(20:15):
that's a very very long process, and I hope we
can get it done by February, but I'm not sure
that that's going to be possible.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
One of those Haitian teammates is Joseph Fleury, who has
been in the United States since twenty ten under temporary
Protected status a status that is likely to end in
February twenty twenty six.
Speaker 9 (20:37):
I got eleven years work in here. I like to stay,
but for it the government mad right now, so I'm
scared because I got TPS and then they want to
change everything. So I don't know how I can I stay.
(21:02):
I hope to stay because my bountry so bad now.
It's so bad because the gun kill people, kidnap people.
So it's very difficult to go with it. If I go,
how I can leave over it?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
From your point of view, is somebody who employs these
workers and others from outside.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
The United States?
Speaker 1 (21:27):
What comes next to the United States? What should come next?
How should we treat the immigration problem?
Speaker 11 (21:33):
You know, demographically, we are entering a major workforce shortage,
and really there's four ways to mitigate that shortage.
Speaker 10 (21:45):
Automation, local workforce development.
Speaker 11 (21:48):
Which we're already at seventy two workforce participation rate, importing
goods or inputs from other countries, and that with the tariffs, that's.
Speaker 10 (22:01):
Kind of slowing down. And then immigration important workers from
ound the countries.
Speaker 11 (22:07):
And so we have to keep up with workforce demands
or it's going to affect our economy negatively.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
How much stress will that put on you, particularly if
there's a worker shortage overall.
Speaker 11 (22:18):
In North Dakota, Well, we're gonna have to find twenty
five more teammates to hire. Fargo Moorehead has a seventy
two workforce participation rate, so it's the highest in the country.
We have like a one point two percent unemployment rate
here in Fargmorehead. For every unemployed worker, there are two
point four open jobs here in Fargo Moorehead.
Speaker 10 (22:39):
So it's not easy to find new teammates when you
need them.
Speaker 11 (22:43):
And so if if two dozen of my teammates and
I don't know how many other Haitian folks are here
in Fargmorehead under temporary protected status, if they all have
to move back to Haiti, it's going to leave a
big hole.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Despite the TPA extension being up in the air, the
Fargo economy remains strong, an economy driven in part by
immigrant workers.
Speaker 11 (23:08):
Our economy continues to grow. You know, we're doing really well.
Workers are moving to the region because of the great
job opportunities here.
Speaker 10 (23:19):
You know, at Cardinal I g and.
Speaker 11 (23:20):
Fargo, our wages are forty five percent above what the
nation nationwide averages for light industrial workers. So we are
attracting probably more than our fair share of workers, but
it's just not fast enough to keep up with our
growing economy.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Coming up twenty years after Katrina laid waste too much
of New Orleans, we return to the Big Easy to
see what was done to rebuild, where it is today
in its recovery, and what future it hopes to achieve.
(24:06):
This is a story about coming back to life. Two
decades ago, the city of New Orleans was nearly lost
when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural
disaster in American history and one of the deadliest. On
the twentieth anniversary of the hurricane, we went back to
New Orleans to see what it took for the people
and businesses who stayed to rebuild their shattered city.
Speaker 6 (24:32):
At this hour, monster storm Hurricane Katrina bears down on
New Orleans.
Speaker 13 (24:38):
There's a lot of aid surging toward those who have
been affected, a lot of people working hard.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
The results are not acceptable.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
We took a helicopter and landed at the super Dome
and I could see my home on Napoleon Avenue.
Speaker 10 (24:53):
I grew up.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
It's really still under water, and I started crying.
Speaker 14 (24:58):
It was the largest disaster by a long shot in
the US in many, many, many decades.
Speaker 15 (25:04):
Right, I lost everything, just like everyone else. I had
thirty napis thirty. I knew all of them. Today I
have four.
Speaker 16 (25:14):
My business is in the street of New Orleans, and
it's like, oh, what do I do now?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Nearly eighty percent of New Orleans flooded and more than
eighteen hundred lives were lost. The economic toll over two
hundred billion dollars in damage adjusted for inflation. But as
stunning as the video and the overall numbers are, the
real story of what happened to New Orleans in August
of two thousand and five is told in the experiences
(25:41):
of the individual people living there.
Speaker 15 (25:44):
You all right, all right, you get bad, you got
out at somebody.
Speaker 16 (25:49):
This whole area, all full floors above it were all destroyed.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
People like Rick Blount, who runs the iconic French Quarter
restaurant Antoine's, owned by his family since his great great
grandfather founded it in eighteen forty.
Speaker 16 (26:04):
It was way worse than I could have imagined. I
thought that a wall had fallen down, and I thought.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
We could fix a wall.
Speaker 16 (26:11):
But when we got into the building, the entire building
looked like it was going to fall any second, and
I didn't know what to do about that.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Given the devastation, Blount, along with so many of those
in New Orleans, had to make a choice. Cut his losses,
move on, move out, or rebuild, knowing that a new
New Orleans would never be the same.
Speaker 16 (26:34):
And some of the spokes were broken.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
For Blount, the decision was an easy one. Did it
ever occur to you? I'm sorry, it just can't be
done it. No, I don't think I had that luxury.
Speaker 16 (26:49):
Maybe I did and I didn't know it, but I
didn't ever have that feeling. I had the feeling that
it was my duty to rebuild it. Antoine's needed to
be what Antoine's always was. Right after Katrina, when the
city was still flooded and the only people that we
hear were military and police and reporters. So when the
(27:10):
reporters would ask, you know, what are you going to do?
You know this has got to be the end. If
my great grandfather could have survived the Civil War, and
my great grandfather could survive the First World War and
Prohibition and the Second World War, it's.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Been a lot.
Speaker 16 (27:26):
This happened to Antoines.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
I think we could figure out a.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Hurricane and figure it out. They did, but it wasn't simple.
It took a lot of money and time for BLOGNT
to rebuild, as it did for the rest of the city.
Roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars in federal aid
poured in, with the government spending nearly fifteen billion dollars
to rebuild and improve the levees, flood walls, gates, and pumps.
Speaker 14 (27:52):
One of the biggest investments was in the levee system,
so we now have the best levees in the country.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Alison Plier is the chief demographer at the Data Center,
a nonprofit that since Katrina has compiled a biannual New
Orleans index keeping track of the city's progress.
Speaker 14 (28:12):
A lot of the money, of course, went to homeowners
to rebuild their homes, and that's contributed substantially to the
recovery of the population. It would be the city would
be virtually depopulated had we not gotten a lot of
funding to support homeowners in rebuilding their homes. And then
of course we had to rebuild schools, hospitals, all of it.
Those kind of investments were absolutely critical for getting the
(28:34):
city back on its feet. When we're thinking about how
to justify that or if it was worth it, you
have to think about the role that the city and
the metro plays in the nation's economy. The shipping, although
doesn't produce a lot of jobs, the shipping and ports
here are critical for the exporting of all of the
grain and other food stuffs from the Midwest. The oil
(28:55):
and gas that is drilled off our coast is an
enormous contribution to the national economy.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Standing here in the square, you kind of see all
the pillars of No Orleans.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Walter Isaacson was there from the start of the reconstruction efforts.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Isaacson left the city
to build a career as an acclaimed biographer, as well
as running Time magazine, CNN, and the Aspen Institute. But
when Katrina hit he answered the call to return home
and pitch in. Today, he's a professor of history at
(29:28):
Tulane University.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
The governor called and said, will you be the vice
chair of the Recovery Authority?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I said sure, but who's the chair?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And she said Norman Francis, And he's a living saint
here forty years head of the largest historically black university here,
and so together we said we're going to have to
unite the city black and white, Democrat Republican, because we're
all in the same boat.
Speaker 13 (29:51):
Now, how did you do that? Unite the city? You
know a crisis should do it, meaning in the same boat,
you say, all right, we don't care where you're from,
or what your beliefs or anything else.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
I think we did it by saying, look, put every
agenda side, put all partisanship aside.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
How did you take apart the problem and say we
need to do this first, this second, this third.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Well, first of all, we needed to get the electricity
back on. And we were in the back room of
Mother's Restaurant, a Poe Boy restaurant to fare when President.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
Bush came down and Laura Bush was with us.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Everybody's going around the table, and somebody said, well, the
traffic lights aren't working in Saint Bernard Lower nine, and
somebody said, well, that's because the electricity is not back on,
and people kept going around the table talking. Ms Bush
turned to me and said, wait a minute, the electricity
is not back on. And so the FEMA director, who
is no hero there, said well, we're trying to figure
out whether the generators were capital or other typics, and
(30:53):
George Bush said, get the electricity back on, so that
was step one. Then we had two big jobs. One
was the school system and one was housing.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
As Walter Isaacson was working with his commission to get
the electricity back on and houses and schools rebuilt, Rick
Blond had his own task of putting antoines back together.
Although the restaurant was able to partly reopen towards the
end of two thousand and five, it was years before
the Historic Establishment was back to its former self.
Speaker 16 (31:24):
We had a huge amount of water damage because we
lost the whole roof structure.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
The main building is four stores.
Speaker 16 (31:30):
The top two floors of the east side collapsed and
collapsed into the street, and so that sort of collapsed
the entire inside of the building. All the floors sort
of fell down on top of themselves, all four floors
of them, push down onto the first floor and caused
(31:51):
a massive, massive amount of damage to that building.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
But in order to get back up and running, you
need labor, and even among those who wanted to stay
and work in the city, there were no easy options.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Even if you hadn't left for the storm.
Speaker 16 (32:06):
You were now completely flooded and you had to be evacuated.
You were taken out of New Orleans. We had to
figure out housing for people so that we could bring
them into New Orleans to work. Within a matter of weeks,
all of our employees were calling and stopping in and
trying to figure out their lives and wondering how we
(32:29):
were doing. And we figured out pretty soon that they
needed two things. They needed health insurance, which we kept
them all on health insurance, and then we tried to
hire them all. We tried to bring them all back in.
So I had several of my waiters. They had a
ship that the corp of Engineers had parked in the port,
and they were renting bunks in the ship for people
to sleep. So I was housing a handful of my
(32:51):
waiters in there, and we're using my own staff to rebuild,
to do all of the labor work that were here.
And we had these really great skilled craftsmen, this team
of curial gentlemen from Western Louisiana that literally saved that building,
that saved our building from collapsing. And I even to
(33:14):
this day, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude
for their expertise and their patients and their dedication to
preserving a building that I think should have been preserved,
and they got it done. This is the dining room
that in eighteen fifty six when Antoine bought this building,
(33:37):
that he was operating Antoine Truster, And this is a
building that had all the major damage in Katrina. And
this building and these beams above her head were made
of cypress, and when the building came apart, it put
all the pressure, all the weight of the building down
on these cypress beams above these columns.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
As devastating as Hurricane Katrina was for Antoine's and the
French Quarter, the rest of the city, it was the
Lower ninth Ward that was hit the hardest, not by
Katrina itself, but by the pressure of the storm put
on the levees, which eventually broke.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
One reason the Lower ninth is called that is because
it's lower on the river and it's beyond the levees
on the Industrial Canal. In other words, if you're upriver
from the levees, you're in the Upper Ninth, or you're
in the seventh Ward or other places, that makes it
harder to protect.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
It's further downriver. Its lower level.
Speaker 14 (34:32):
The difference with the Lower ninth Ward was that the
levees broke in such a way as the rush of
water pushed the houses off their foundations. Unfortunately, that makes
it much more difficult to rebuild. Lower ninth Ward has
therefore had much slower recovery rates than much of the
rest of the city. I think about a third of
the population is back, and it's incredibly sad because that
(34:55):
was an area that had higher home ownership rates than
the city average. Lot of folks there who were craftsmen,
helped build across the city, built their own homes, and
a lot of the properties were handed down to grandkids
and great grandkids.
Speaker 15 (35:13):
All this grass and high weeds, all that was houses
and businesses we had.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
One of those residents who did come back is Brunelle Cotlin.
He grew up here and spent his life savings to
open the only grocery store in the Lower ninth Ward.
Speaker 15 (35:27):
My childhood dream was to be a policeman, so I
ended up joining the United States Army and I was
the police of all places in Germany. But unfortunately I
came home just in time for Hurricane Katrina. After I
rebuilt my personal home, I noticed we.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Didn't have anything.
Speaker 15 (35:44):
We didn't have any grocery stores. We had nothing. I
called up every big box store you can think of,
and I begged them to open up a grocery store
here in the lower night board. So I said, well,
you know what says they're not going to build anything,
I'm gonna build it before I open up these doors.
I had a small grocery store window this right in
the back. I opened that window up in two thousand
(36:05):
and nine. I was selling everything out this little bitty window,
and I had to save all my money before I
had enough money open up these stores. I sold everything
out this window. Milk, eggs, bread, cheese, you name it.
It all went out this window. Right back there is
where I collected money, the cashcage. And I'm not going
to see the lady's name because she still shots today.
But she came then. She had her grandkids with her.
(36:28):
She had like a gallon of milk, some chipped in candy,
and she swiped her card and it declined, and she said,
mister bee, can I do it again? And see I
tried again and it declined again, and she spoke around
the tips right behind me to start crying. So I
came out of the cash caage. I did something my
boy was supposed to do. I gave a hug and
I said, when you get your stimless money or your unemployment, whatever,
(36:50):
you come back and pay. And I saw it again
and again and again. So what I did. I took
out a little tablet and I started a journal and
I would write down customers name and how much they owe.
Some came back and on at de tabs unfolded some dayton.
It was hard in this steel haart even.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Today, despite the devastation, despite all the lives lost and
companies driven to the point of extinction, New Orleans did
come back thanks to people like Brunell Cotlin, and Rick
Blount and Walter Isaacson, turning the city back into a
living and breathing version of what it had once been
with the hope of a brighter future. And that's where
(37:30):
we turn next to the state of the city today
and its prospects for tomorrow. There was nothing easy about
(37:51):
the long way back that New Orleans faced in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Speaker 14 (37:57):
When you're thinking about a city and whether it's being
resilient is whether it can rebound to its pre disaster trends, right,
So we're kind of rebounded to our pre disaster trends,
but we haven't really transformed where we're actually improving those trends.
And that's some of the big challenges that we've got
going forward.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
So how is the city at the foot of the
Mississippi different from what it was twenty years ago? Alison
Plier says, one way to find out is to look
at jobs and the population.
Speaker 14 (38:26):
The city has about ten percent, or the metro, i
should say, has about ten percent fewer jobs than it
did before Katrina. The population has been declining as well
across the metro, and it's now about seven percent less
than it was pre Katrina. We don't have the kind
of jobs that pay wages that would help folks to
build wealth. And that has to do really with something
(38:47):
that people don't talk about that much about New Orleans,
which is that we continue to focus on older industries.
So New Orleans is kind of like Detroit in the
way that we're looking at these old industries oil and gas, petrochemical, manufacturing, shipping,
all of which are replacing workers with automation.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
What about wealth and income disparity? Is it getting better?
Is it getting worse.
Speaker 14 (39:13):
It's not getting better. I'd say, we do know that
white households in New Orleans and in the New Orleans
metro have about ten times the wealth of Black households
and about six times the wealth of Hispanic households. You know,
one of the challenges is that our tourism industry continues
to pay lower wages, and that makes it really hard
for the people of color who are in a lot
(39:34):
of the hospitality occupations to accumulate wealth and have the
kind of wealth necessary sometimes even to buy homes or
put their kids through college, etc. The tourism industry is
still the number one driver industry of the region, and
again it pays lower wages. But it too, like oil
and gas and shipping and logistics and petrochemical, is declining
(39:57):
in jobs because workers are being replaced my computers, various
kinds of automation. So that makes it really hard for
people to generate wealth.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
One driving factor behind getting a good job is having
access to education. And one of the projects that Walter
Isaacson took on was using the tragedy of Katrina to
rethink the entire school system.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
We decided to have sort of like you'd call charter schools,
but that's a loaded word.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
So we gave all the schools autonomy.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
They got to run themselves, they got to try to
attract students, and they got funded based on how many
students they attracted. So is a competitive system based on
parents having a choice, and that made it so some
of the schools said, well, we're going to stay up
until five pm, because dumping a kid on the streets
at three PM's not a great idea, and they would
(40:49):
end up getting more students. So it was just that
simple thing of letting parents have choice that helped upgrade
the school system.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You rebuild the school system. Is it working and is
it working better than before?
Speaker 4 (41:00):
How do you know it used to be?
Speaker 3 (41:02):
You know New Orleans school system was at the bottom
of the state, at the bottom of the nation. The
increase in reading scores just this past year, I mean
every year it gets better because we.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
Still have the same system.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
If people don't like the school, they can move their
kid to another school. And so the reading and mass
scolers have had double digit gains, more than any school
in the state, and putting New Orleans now in the
center of the pack at least nationally, which may not
be the best, but it ain't.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
The bottom of the pack.
Speaker 14 (41:33):
We have nine universities and colleges in New Orleans, everything
from Tulane University in Loyola University to historically black colleges
and universities like Dillard and Xavier. Xavier produces more graduates
who go on to medical school than any university in
the country. The university has really worked together post Katrina
to increase the knowledge that we all have about resilience
(41:56):
and how to be resilient in the face of shocks.
They employ a lot of folks and in the last
about ten years they've increased the educational entertainment of our
adult population, so we're now on par with the nation.
Speaker 16 (42:11):
Huge water damage in Katrina.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Rick Blunt's restaurant, Antoine's, has come a long way back
from the damage of Hurricane Katrina. But in twenty twenty,
the restaurant was hit with another big blow, one affecting
not just New Orleans but the entire world. In twenty twenty,
you had the pandemic hit. What did that do your business?
Speaker 16 (42:29):
That one was also very painful and very painful from
our staff too. The force closure of a business at
covid I had about two hundred employees.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
It wasn't quite.
Speaker 16 (42:39):
Two hundred families. But let's you say one hundred and
fifty families, but there's one hundred and fifty families that
depend on getting a paycheck on Friday from this business.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Are you fully recovered from that in terms of a business.
Speaker 16 (42:52):
I think we're now ready to turn a financial page
from COVID. It took substantially longer for the economy to
reach build in New Orleans. There was a lot of
damage it was, and a lot of damage to the economy.
So it took years and years longer for New Orleans
to recover from Katrina than it did for New Orleans
to recover from COVID.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
We're just a.
Speaker 16 (43:13):
Little picture of this bigger picture, which is our community.
We live and die by the success or the failure
of that community. One of the wonderful things to reflect
on twenty years later is how well damned community's done.
And I'm very, very proud of that. I think that
(43:36):
I think New Orleanians ought to be proud of it.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Even in the ninth ward, there's been some progress, though
still nowhere near as close to the rest of the city.
Speaker 15 (43:45):
In this building right here I have a barber shop,
I have a hasse line of a sweet shop, a
snowball stand thanks to Ellen Degenius, a laundromat, and the
most important thing, the grocery store. This is the only
business here twenty years later.
Speaker 4 (44:01):
This is it.
Speaker 15 (44:03):
If you want something to eat, you're coming to see me.
You want to wash your clothes, You're coming to see
me today. I have four four neighbors. So I tell people,
if you have a community, you have a store, you
have a neighbors or outside to hug your neighbors, hug
your store. Just be grateful, appreciate that you have all
(44:23):
of that, because not have anything. I don't wish this
on anybody. If I wasn't here, this community wouldn't have anything.
You cannot live your life in fear. You're here for
a reason. You have to find your purpose. I found
my purpose of life. My purpose is serviced, so you
have to embrace it. So I just like I served
my country, not to serve my community. And you can't
(44:44):
be afraid. So I'm not afraid of another hurricane. I'm
not afraid or not that of nobody. You just have
to keep on going.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
The City of New Orleans and its people have seen
some of the worst mother nature can offer. Its survived
and reclaimed a good part of what it will. But
what's next.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
The schools the better, the entrepreneurial spirits better, the politics,
the sense that we're all in this together is better.
What we have to do is start growing our population,
growing our business, and growing the number of jobs we
have for young people.
Speaker 14 (45:18):
I do think it's really important that the folks working
on economic development in Louisiana and in the New Orleans
area really start to have a forward vision. They continue
to really emphasize and incentivize these older industries that are
just replacing workers with automation. As they said, oil and
gas has fifty percent fewer jobs than it did twenty
(45:40):
five years ago, and that's because of automation. And so
I think here in New Orleans, just like across the country,
we really have to look carefully at what industries are
growing jobs and invest in those industries rather than industries
of the past.
Speaker 4 (45:56):
We have a creative industry.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
We have all sorts of musicians and artists and even
writers like myself or whatever.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
But it makes for in a creative economy. We had
to celebrate that.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Our biggest hope is that so many young and educated
people have come down here, which is wild of teaching
my class at Tulane, and these people are starting businesses
and I think you're going to see an entrepreneurial economy here.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
So what's the case for investor to say invest in
New Orleans as supposed to some alternatives that they have.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
I think what you need to invest in New Orleans
is for small, medium size and startup companies that are
doing great things in biotech, tropical medicine, diseases, carbon capture, energy,
where we have great strengths here. We have great engineering
coming out of Tulane now, but we also have people
who are very experienced in oil and gas and energy
(46:50):
and for that matter, tropical diseases, medicine, biotechnology. So I
don't think people are going to be building huge operations here,
but I do think that having the type of funds
we now have, the venture funds we now have, we're
getting a lot of people to start businesses here.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
New Orleans has been through an ordeal few American cities
have faced, and it's taken a lot of money and
hard work and hope to bring it back to where
it is now. And yes, maybe just a bit of providence.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
I thought the city for a moment, we thought we've lost. Boy,
I get sil choke up feeling that way. And then
we made a deal with the Good Lord. We said,
all right, bring the city back and have the Saints
win the super Bowl. And then the Saints won the
super Bowl, and that's when we knew we were coming back.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
That does it for us here at Wall Street Week,
I'm David Weston. See you next week for more stories
of capitalism.
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