to study it as mayor, and did you find it was helpful, have you found people tell you it's helpful him giving these announcements in spanish? >> some people have said it's helpful. i think it's helpful, i'm happy he's reaching out to the hispanic community and trying to speak spanish, i was just poking a little fun. >> what advice would you have to politicians making their way into the by lingual world of reports? >> surround yourself with spanish-speaking people so that, you know, your diction can improve and you can pronounce words, you know, correctly. >> i'm going to send anthony reyes down to city hall. rachel figueroa-levin, thank you very much for joining us tonight. el bloombito lives, thank you, rachel. >> thank you. >> you can follow my tweets in

english @lawrence. "the rachel maddow show" is up next. good evening, melissa. >> gracias, lawrence. >> de nada. thanks to you at home for staying with us for the next hour, rachel has the night off. remember when this happened, remember when mitt romney formerly announced he was running for president and nobody noticed because the sarah palin bus tour stopped in new hampshire or how about when rick perry used the same weekend as the ames, iowa, straw poll to kick off his campaign. you mean there are other people doing this running for president thing too? we around the newsroom today recalled when the white house announced that president obama planned to give his big jobs speech before a joint session of congress one week from tonight, which is when the republican presidential candidates are all planning to debate right here on msnbc. not just on the same night but

at the exact same time. now, the debate has been scheduled for quite a long time, and lots of people have been saying that president obama needs to get tougher with the opposition, especially in his negotiations with republicans who over and over again seem to walk away, getting everything they want. well, here he is acting like a republican, right? here's president obama stepping on gop presidential candidates and reminding them that he is, after all, already president. except john boehner is also already speaker of the house, so in a high-level date book duel, the speaker tells the president in a letter this afternoon that basically the night of september 7 doesn't work for him, how about september 8 instead, yeah, we really like september 8, nothing else going on september 8, right? oh, yeah, apart from the nfl kickoff, my beloved saints are playing the reigning champs from

green bay. i think it's clear what the public will be watching on the 8th. so the white house says they cleared the date with speaker boehner before going public, something the speaker's office denies. as of an hour ago both sides were reportedly meeting, trying to figure something out. either way, this kind of public tit for tat appears to be unavoidable. while he thinks these disagreements have happened in the past, they've taken place behind doors, the kind of fighting that went on today, well, that kind that we all know about, that looks like it's never happened before. being president may give you control of a lot of things, but apparently control of congress is not one of them. here to talk about who's going to save the date here, eugene robinson, pulitzer prize winning columnist and msnbc political analyst. good to see you tonight, gene.

>> good to see you tonight, melissa. >> wow, have you ever heard of a refusal of a request like this from the president of the united states? >> not publicly, no. we haven't heard of it. if you think about it, there must have been times when presidents wanted to come and do a joint session on a certain day and either the speaker of the house or the senate majority leader or both or somebody thought that was the wrong day and they worked it out, but i have never seen this sort of public dissing of a presidential request, nor, frankly, have i seen a presidential request that so clearly was designed to big foot the other party. >> yeah. clearly there's politics going on here, and, you know, clearly part of that politics is about the president, you know, stepping into this moment, but the fact is that boehner, as speaker of the house, is not

actually part of the gop presidential primaries here, so is he just protecting these fellow republicans despite the fact that he doesn't, in fact, have any responsibility over them, or is there something more insidious going on with the speaker? >> well, two possibilities. one, he's protecting his party, his party's big night, it's rick perry's debate debut, and he could be the nominee, and you want somebody to watch him, and if the president is on at the same time, nobody's going to watch him. so it could be that, or it could be a warm up for the recession the actual jobs plan is going to get when it comes to capitol hill, which is probably going to be no, we really don't like that color, and this is too large and that's too small, and we won't do any of them. >> look, it seems like this is clearly been a relationship between the speaker and the president where the speaker

bending is not really part of what happens, so why pick a fight, why sort of demonstrate again the unbendingness of the speaker. doesn't this put the president in a position of once again having to be in a conciliatory relationship when he could have just chosen another night? >> well, he could have. one, he could have believed that the speaker had no choice but to acquiesce, after all, it's a request from the president of the united states and speakers usually do acquiesce, second, you know, if it were me, and i were the president, which would be awful for the country, but if i were the president, i would be tempted to say well, you know, look, look at congress. they don't even want to hear my jobs plan, and so you get yourself an auditorium some place and get a nice-looking crowd there and you call the networks and you get on every

other network, unfortunately, except msnbc, which is going to be covering the debate, and you give your speech. that's, you know, that would be one way to approach this. >> speaking of which, when the president does actually make this speech, what do you expect to hear from him? >> well, we know -- we know the components of it, or some of the components of it. we just don't know how big they are going to be. we know there's going to be an infrastructure bank proposal of some sort. we know there may be some mortgage relief. we know we're going to hear about extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday. we kind of know the bits and pieces, but does he go big or does he go small? sources at the white house have told me that progressives will, when they look at the totality of the plan, agree that the president has, in fact, gone big

when you add it all up. that's what i've heard, so -- but i haven't seen the plan or heard any numbers, so we'll have to see. >> sure, eugene robinson, msnbc contributor. i hope at some point we get to talk about the republican debate together. that would be fun. >> that would be a -- >> pulitzer prize winning -- >> that would be a lot of fun, melissa, but i don't know if september 7 works for me. i don't know, we'll have to work on that date. >> i don't know. have a good one, gene. >> you too. with all this big footing going on, the fact remains that it is ordinary americans who are getting stepped on as corporations smack them around. average unemployed or working two jobs to make ends meet americans are being asked to give more, sacrifice more, so corporations and rich people can give less, so bottom line incorporated and its ceo get to keep more of their money. now, despite insisting they oppose any tax increases,

several republican presidential candidates, as well as the republican leadership on capitol hill, are proposing that we raise taxes on the poor and working class while cutting taxes on corporations and rich people all in the name of job creation. jon huntsman said today that as president he'd want to focus on long-term job growth by creating a simpler tax system. simplify it by eliminating the taxes people pay on investment income altogether by reducing taxes corporations have to pay and shuffling all individuals into only three tax brackets, 8, 14, or 23%, which means if you're rich, under this plan you're likely to get richer. simplicity, it seems, is more important than fairness. and if you're a corporation that makes things, you do better under rick santorum's job plan which calls for zero, zip, nada.

>> eliminate the corporate tax if you manufacture here in this country. that will bring a lot of those jobs back. >> maybe if you can find a way to pay americans $3 a day that they'd get doing the same work overseas, all this talk is rooted in one claim. if corporations get more tax breaks, they'll hire more workers, but here's the thing, corporations in this country are not hurting. far from it. in this current economic climate with three years now sustained high unemployment, we can actually see corporations continuing to make massive profits, never been higher, and it's not just the corporations who are profiting, but the guys who run them. today we learned in a new report 25 ceos took home more than their companies paid in federal income taxes. in fact, the head of one of our parent companies, general electric was one of them. corporations have one

responsibility, earn a profit. can't be mad at them for doing their job and it's easy to measure if they are succeeding or failing, it's only one metric to measure. one they've made big profits with a smaller workforce, they are never going back to hiring more people. when you can keep wages low and overwork the employees you do have, why would you cut into your bottom line and hire more people? there's no incentive to get corporations already making billions to hire more employees for what, the goodness of their hearts? corporations are not people, they are profit-making machines for better and worse. here to chat with me a bit about this, i'm joined by jerad bernstein, former member of president obama's economic team and former economic advisor to vice president biden. mr. bernstein is a senior fellow at the center of budget and

policy priorities. thank you for joining me tonight. is there any evidence, any evidence, that corporate tax cuts create jobs? >> there's really not. the way you set this up is exactly right. let me just explain more about what current conditions corporations are facing. if you look at their profits as a share of gdp, they are extremely high before the great depression, then they took a loss like everybody else. of course, working people got whacked hard as well. if you now go back and you look in the most recent data, the first half of this year, corporate profits as a share of the economy haven't just gotten back to where they were, they surpassed their prior peak. there's nothing wrong with that as you stated in your introduction, except the following, compensation paychecks is the lowest it's

been since the year i was born, which was a long time ago, 1955, to be precise. >> yeah, look, i mean corporations are geared towards this one goal of profit making, but i'm about to print up a t-shirt with what i heard you say earlier to one of our producers, which is profitability does not create jobs. corporate profitability does not create jobs. if that's true, what are the incentives, how will we get out of this kwaquagmire? >> we're stuck in the midst of very high profitability. look, corporations are not, you know, evil scientists trying to figure out how to screw the public. what they are trying to do, as you suggested, is to make the highest profits that they can, and right now that means selling into economies that are growing, emerging markets. which economy is not growing? this one. in the first half of the year,

gdp growth was less than 1%. we're kind of bumping along the bottom. what do we need? we need people to get back to work. this is not rocket science. whether it's a giant corporation or the small business on the corner, if customers are coming through the door, i guarantee you they'll start restocking their shelves and selling into domestic markets, they'll start hiring people once again. that's why the president's jobs plan is so important because it's geared at getting people back to work. remember, this is a 70% consumption economy, and if people are not working and if their paychecks aren't growing, the economy is stuck in the mud and that's where we are. it's also why your conversation with gene robinson was not exactly the most uplifting in terms of hope of where this is heading. >> indeed, i think you have now giving me the back of the t-shirt. front will say corporate froftibility will not create jobs and the back will say growing gdp does.

jerad bernstein, msnbc contributor, thanks so much for clarifying that for us tonight. >> my pleasure. speaking of jobs, jobs, jobs, president obama had this to say from the rose garden this morning. >> it's inexcusable to put more jobs at risk in an industry that's already been one of the hardest hit in the last decade. >> the president is talking about construction. there's an easy way to help, but somebody's standing in the way. if by somebody you mean the gop, the story is next.

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if you've been paying any attention to american politics over the last decade or so, you'd be forgiven for thinking the only basis members of congress vote, their only rational is party identification, whether they are a democrat or republican, but if you know a member of congress' political party and you can predict most anything on how they are going to vote on most issues, the fact is that's not always how it's been. up until fairly recently, there's been some points of consensus that bring members of opposing parties together. one of these points has been geography, it used to be, for example, that democrats and republicans from agricultural states sort of voted the same on agricultural issues. didn't necessarily matter all that much what party they were

from, same from politicians for manufacturing issues. there's always been these geographic concerns that trumped party affiliation. separately, there were also areas of consensus that no matter where you were from, no matter what your ideology, no matter what your political party, there were things everyone could agree were good ideas, things that passed congressingi margins. let take, for example, highways, the highway system that tens of millions of americans travel on every single day of the week, highways were something that had to be voted into existence. it's the result of the federal aid highway act of 1956, which was signed into law from president dwight eisenhower, a republican president, along with a democratic-controlled house and senate, came together and said hey, building highways is a great idea for the country, let's do it.

the interstate highway system was one of the largest public works projects in american history. it was signed into law by a republican president. the interstate highway system wasn't just about putting people to work, it was also seen as a national defense priority. remember, dwight eisenhower knew that it was imperative to be able to move things from state to state on high-quality roads in order to be able to protect this country. but the other thing the interstate highway system did is it helped expand the middle class in this country, it allowed people to move out of high-rent districts in the middle of cities and into suburbia, it presented ur ban enclaves for people to live outside of cities where they had access to things like high-quality schools. building and repairing highways that link the country is not just make work, it's integral to all these other aspects to how we think about our society, and it's for that reason that

funding highway projects is something that's just made sense over the years, it has transcended party affiliation. eisenhower's interstate highway act of 1956 passed the senate by a vote of 89 to 1. decades later, once highway funding became a routine congressional matter, it always enjoyed big bipartisan support. the highway funding bill signed into law first by president bush in 1991 passed the senate by a vote of 79 to 8. when president clinton signed the next bill into law in 1998, it passed the senate 88 to 5. the highway funding bill signed by george w. bush in 2005 passed the senate 91 to 4. this has been such a consensus activity, this has been seen as such a net positive for the country that some members of congress even named these bills after beloved family members.

that 2005 bill was called "safe accountable effective transportation equity act, a legacy for users." it went by the nickname safety lou. don young of alaska had the "lu" added at the end to honor his departed wife. these bills have added jobs, expanded access to rural communities, and as a result they've been really, really popular among members of congress. that is, until now. >> president obama now just moments away from pushing congress to pass a new highway transportation bill next week might not sound sexy, but there are worries this morning it will lead to another impasse that could shut down washington. >> house republicans, at a time when this country desperately needs jobs, has proposed gutting job-creating highway funding at

a time when our roads and bridges are at a state of disrepair. in 2002 the united states ranked 5th in the world in the quality of our infrastructure. watch what's happened since then. we've dropped down to 23rd in the world, and now the president of the united states finds himself at the position of nearly begging republicans in congress to do this thing they've always done, this thing that we need, this thing that creates jobs. >> when it comes to our nation's infrastructure, our roads, our railways, mass transit, airports, we shouldn't just be playing patch-up or catch-up, we should be leading the world. at a time when interest rates are low and workers are unemployed, the best time to make those investments is right now. not once another levy fails or another bridge falls, right now is when we need to be making these decisions.

>> 30 days from right now, the funding for our great american highways, the highways that helped build this country, will run out. 4,000 americans will lose their jobs immediately. according to the department of transportation, and nearly one million more americans can lose their jobs if funding isn't restored by the end of the year. this is one issue republicans and democrats have been able to agree on even as our politics have grown more and more partisan. what will republicans do this time? tick, tick, tick. or the accolades. no, it was good because you told us so. the chevy model year wrap up. get in on our greatest model year yet. just announced -- celebrate labor day with an additional $500 bonus cash. with all other offers, including the all-star edition discount, that's a total value of $6,500. ♪ our greatest model year yet is wrapping up.

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this literally just in, in the battle of september 7, presidential speech versus gop debate, it appears the republicans have won. the white house press secretary saying in a statement tonight that president obama will be giving his speech before a joint session of congress on september 8, thursday, instead of wednesday september 7 like he'd originally requested. yes, that is on the same night as the first nfl game of the season. here at msnbc we're starting to feel more confident that we can plan out next week's coverage in ink instead of pencil. there's that. [ ticking ]

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pop quiz, how do you know that a state law is onerous, how do you know it creates unreasonable obstacles and will make exercising your rights of citizenship more, not less, difficult. here's a few things to be on the lookout for, does the interpretation of the law make you think of civil rights

violations? two, does the federal government have to step in to protect people's rights, and three, does the governor have to make a pledge to personally attend the transportation needs of every single state resident? if you've answered yes to any of these questions, you just might be a south carolinaen. south carolina's republican-controlled state legislature and republican governor have passed and signed a new voter i.d. law to have a photo i.d. in order to vote, which is something almost 200,000 people in the state don't have. 200,000 people who are otherwise qualified to vote. 200,000 people who, if an election were held today, could not vote in the state of south carolina. in the absence of any evidence of systemic voter fraud in any election at any level, people are comparing this latest barrier to voting to the notorious jim crow laws of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and

it's because of those laws set out to disenfranchise african-americans that nine states, including south carolina, have to get voting laws approved by the federal government, so this week the federal government pulled the emergency brake on south carolina's voter i.d. bill. the justice department wrote in a letter to the state asking it to clarify some things. for example, how do people get a voter registration card, how will they know about the changes, how will election officials be trained? all good questions, none of which the department of justice thinks has been adequately answered. as for how will people get voter registration cards, republican governor nikki haley offered to drive each and every single one of them to get i.d.s. "find me those people who think this is invading their rights, find them and i'll take them to the dmv myself and help them get that picture i.d." but that's not how things have worked out.

rather than the governor being inconvenienced, it's tax payers who will have to pay for them to get there and eligible voters who will have to be the ones being inconvenienced. governor nikki haley announced the creation of the state identification card day. so here's what you, mr. or ms. south carolina voter need to do if you want a state-issued voter i.d. card, which you'll need to vote, if you don't already have a picture i.d. >> we are having a photo identification day on september 28 that we will allow to help people get the picture i.d.s they need. >> individual will pick up the phone and dial a number 1-855-state-i.d. during an initial call, our employs will ask you for your name, address, and contact information and a dmv employee

will describe the requirements. we are going to call you back and confirm. during the confirmation call, we will give you a two-hour window for pick up. we're going to talk you through what documents are required to get you your i.d. we're looking for a birth certificate, we're looking for a social security card, and we're looking for proof of residency. on the 28th of september, our license examiners will come to your house to pick you up. >> you got all that? no problem, right? especially if you're elderly, disabled, work shifts, have kids, care for a sick parent. joining us now is congresswoman terri sewell, democrat of alabama, a state with its own brand new voter i.d. law this year. congresswoman sewell, thank you so much for being here. >> thank you so much, melissa. >> now, it is not just south carolina. at least 34 states have proposed voter i.d. bills this session, and you, from alabama, you know,

from the district that represents phelma, you also have a new voter i.d. law. what are your concerns around your state's new law? >> well, my state's new law would actually be very similar to south carolina's law, in which they would require valid photo i.d. in order to vote, and frankly, i think that it really will disenfranchise, especially our seniors, many of whom don't drive, many of whom are use the to showing their social security card, which doesn't have a photo i.d., yet it is a validly-issued government i.d., so i think there's something in the air that is really looking to disenfranchise and really make sure certain segments of the population don't get out to vote. >> precisely on this question about certain segments of the population, i know when you talked to producers earlier

today, you were talking specifically about a member of your family you felt could be disenfranchised by this sort of bill. >> absolutely, melissa. see, i grew up in alabama, my dad has had several strokes and is currently in a wheelchair and has been for the past six years, and he votes using his social security card. dad doesn't have a valid photo i.d. or driver's license because he doesn't drive anymore, and it's really a hardship to try to get to make sure he gets a photo i.d. luckily, we have home help, and my mom is in good health and we can, obviously, get my dad somewhere, but there are so many people in my district who will not be able to get a valid photo i.d. i think that this is unfair and really i'm hoping that just as in south carolina, the justice department will intervene when it comes to alabama's law as well. i think that it is not fair to so many people in my district who are either elderly, disabled, some of our young

folks don't have photo i.d.s, so i think it's really important that we encourage voter participation and not discourage it, especially in the civil rights district that i represent. >> congresswoman sewell, when you talk about the people in your district, i always hear this sense of empathy that you have for them. i remember you being interviewed after the tornados that affected your district as well, and i feel like when i've heard proponents and supporters of the voter i.d. bill talk it's without that empathy. they say things like you need a photo i.d. to go to a bar or get on a plane. of course, going to a bar and getting on a plane is not part of your rights as a citizen. what do you think are the real reasons for a law like this? >> i just think that it's very curious that lately, melissa, we've seen across this united states, especially in -- in states that are now run by the gop, an effort to systemically try to find these voter i.d.

suppression laws that will actually discourage voter participation. people across this nation fought and died for the right to vote. it is a fundamental right, and we shouldn't be looking for opportunities to discourage voter participation. instead, we should be encouraging it. i know that in this particular district, people are so cognizant of it. >> congresswoman sewell, democrat of alabama, thanks so much for joining me and reminding all of us how important it is to keep our eyes on this. >> thank you so much, melissa.

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there it is. [ man ] so i used mine to get a whole new perspective. ♪ [ male announcer ] the new citi thankyou premier card gives you more ways to earn points. what's your story? citi can help you write it. we are not yet in the place in this country where the first responders can talk with one another. ten years after 9/11, we are not yet at the place where we know who's in charge at the site of a disaster. >> that, the sobering message from the national security preparedness group. at a time when we're having yet another debate about the role of government following a disaster, in this case, hurricane irene, even hard core libertarians agree that the most basic tenet

of american government is to take citizens safe. here we are, ten years after 9/11, a government still incapable of getting its act together. we sent hundreds of thousands of men and women to war to keep us safer, yet still at home our government is still not doing all it can to keep its citizens safe. rachel has been working with nbc news chief correspondent richard engel about not 9/11 itself, but the decade after, how 9/11 has changed the country, what we've done and how we're different now because of it. here now is a short clip from that piece, take a look. >> the uniting and strengthening america by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism act of 2001, better known as the usa patriot act, tears down many of the walls constructed over the years between law enforcement and spying. walls designed to protect american citizens from being spied on by our own government.

designed ultimately to protect the presumption of innocence. walls that came crumbling down on brandon mayfield. when did you first have a sense that you and your family might have been subject to direct surveillance by the government? >> a footprint on the floor that were bigger than any shoe size we had, so we could only surmise somebody had been in the house. >> mayfield and his wife, mona were living a quiet life, but in may 2004, after weeks of secret government search and surveillance, federal authorities come knocking on mayfield's door. >> i said if you have any question to ask me, put them to me in writing, and i could tell right away that wasn't going to make them go away. >> in march 2004, a terrorist attack on trains in madrid, spain, have killed 191 people. spanish police found a

fingerprint near the scene on a bag of detonators. they sent a photo copy of that print to the fbi. the fbi decided that fingerprint matched brandon mayfield. >> they started physically forcibly making their way into my office. i proceeded to forcibly handcuff me. >> while you were being taken into custody at your office, were they also at your house? >> they had a search warrant at my house. my wife was home. they had insinuated i was a terrorist. >> meanwhile, you had been taken into custody, did your family know where you were? >> no. >> federal prosecutors pledging to get a conviction, mayfield's legal team grows more concern about his status. >> i was arrested under a statute created to protect witnesses, but the attorney general's office flipped it on its head and used it as an investigative tool, to arrest somebody without rights, without

probable cause to gather more information. >> you were never charged? >> i was never charged at that point. >> had you ever been to spain? >> no. >> do you speak spanish? >> no, my daughter does. they found some of my daughter's spanish homework. >> to be clear, when they say they confiscated spanish language materials from your house, that was your daughter's spanish homework? >> yes. >> as his legal team prepares his defense, they also learn what else had been used to justify his arrest beyond that latent fingerprint. >> virtually everything that was cited as a reason to arrest me had to do with my being a muslim or associating with muslims. i was married to mona mayfield, aka mohammad, an egyptian national. i attended a local mosque. one can only surmise one of the reasons i was arrested is i was muslim.

>> ultimately, the case is dismissed against brandon mayfield, who later sues the federal government. his legal challenge of the federal patriot act is dismissed but federal authorities release apologies. >> i grew up in kansas, so a handshake and an apology means something to me. >> you reflect on what this decade has been like, how would you describe the overall experience? >> it was the darkest, most harrowing ordeal on myself or my family ever had to experience. to quote benjamin franklin, "those who would give up liberty for security will lose both and deserve neither." >> that's part of a two-part series that premiers tomorrow night at 9:00, "day of destruction, decade of war." we hope you'll watch. don't go away. my name is robin.

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this is often the part of the show where we do the best new thing in the world. but since i'm down here in the big easy, i'm going to change it up a little bit today. the best new orleans thing in the world today is this city's survivor spirit. we are the country still experiencing the brutal effects of hurricane irene. it's a real current ongoing crisis on the eastern seaboard. recovery will not be a matter of months, it's likely to be a matter of years. it's been six years this week since hurricane katrina struck. just about this time six years ago, the horror of a major american city drowning before our eyes was still unfolding. six years later, so many people are left behind here in the city after the broken levees wreaked

havoc on entire communities. here's the thing. there are so ideas out there for making things right. and so many people with the will to get us there. which is great, because we here in new orleans need it all. in fact just this week, the nonprofit group kiva opened a program in new orleans. and in its first 24 hours, kiva said that all 14 small business projects seeking funding got all the money they were looking for. then there's people like actor wendell pierce. you know him from "the wire." now he's a trombone player for "lemay." wendell pierce is the real thing. he was born and raised right here in new orleans. and ladies and gentlemen, he is the survivor spirit. and that is what makes wendell

pierce the best new orleans thing. he is helping to rebuild the city around questions of politics, of economics. he's looking in his neighborhood. childhood neighborhood of pontchartrain park. as president of the pontchartrain park community development corporation. which is building energy efficient and solar houses. he's trying to build grocery stores for the underserved lower ninth ward. this is complicated it's going to take a lot of determination, but wendell pierce i know you well enough to know you are exactly the sort of person to get it done. >> thank you very much. i really appreciate that. >> thanks for being here tonight. >> thank you. >> you and i have been political opponents at various points. there was a point where i was mean mugging you in green rooms in the back. one thing i know for certain about you, is that you have a profound commitment to this

city. to your city. when you think about how tough it is here, after the storm, is it the kind of tough you expected, or is it something different? >> it's the tough i expected. i realized this wasn't going to be a recovery happening within a week, a month, or even a year. our recovery is going to be measured in decades, unfortunately. have you to realize that 80% of this great american city was destroyed. the one thing i knew that we had here in new orleans. and that is on display now is the greatest display of the american esthetic of fortitude and resilience that we haven't seen since the end of world war ii. the difference here, it's not from government, it's the grassroots, from people down on the the ground in the trenches. and building from the ground up, and so i wanted to be a part of that, i wanted to be able to answer that question that many of us are going to ask years from now, what did you do in new orleans' darkest hours, i wanted

to have an answer. >> you talk about the esthetic. i think for you as an artist. that's really a critical part of this, you have a bit of art imitating life going on here, right? starting in tremay where the city is working to recover. >> it is art imitating life. that's the role of life. what the thoughts are to the individual, where you reflect on who you are, where you've been. where you hope to go. that's the forum of art. we reflect on where we are. that's something we grew up with in pontchartrain park. we were given a baton from that moses legacy where african-americans didn't have the access to affordable homes during segregation. because of their march for social justice, we were able to create a mayberry that was able to send so many of my generation

out into the world and become successful men and women. when i came back to new orleans, i knew i wanted to create that. it was our responsibility to create that. to those much is given, much is expected. i knew we had it within our ranks to do it ourself. that's why we put together pontchartrain park community redevelopment corporation. housing is one thing, then i decided to also do food. >> let me ask you about the comprehensive piece. what we're seeing here, the spirit of the people of new orleans is is the best thing, and yet i think you and i would both say we see these amazing nonprofits, these incredible entrepreneurs, people just doing work on the ground for six years. also often running smack into government another the local, state and federal level. how do we scale the spirit of people to something so that food desert -- your grocery store could be an amazing thing, but how do we make sure there's

grocery stores in every corner. >> when i decided to create the food store and put them in the food deserts, where people don't have access to rich greens. the one thing i learned doing pontchartrain park, the interface of government can be tough. more than tough. it can be an oxymoron at times. there was money delivered here to the state of louisiana for the reconstruction of new orleans that the state put a prohibition on. money to recover new orleans, but you can't use it for new construction. people can't use it to meet basic flood elevation. you get the grant but you can't use it for new construction. that sort of frustration and barriers you run up against, i decided at the same time, we have this effort going on. when it comes to