Breaking Down Race For New Orleans Mayor

Hy and Christopher breakdown the current NOLA Mayoral race and pose the question of how high African-American turnout will be? If it’s low, Helena Moreno will teeter on the verge of a first primary victory. If it’s moderate, Royce Duplessis has a chance to make the runoff— and unify African-American voters behind him in November.We then talk about the various Orleans Council races, and after the break, we break down the Slidell Mayor’s race. The major controversy is over buying a former outlet mall, with local government raising sales taxes to buy a private business.It leads us to a discussion of how Donald Trump is acquiring federal ownership of private corporations, and Nigel Farage, darling of the British right, wants to nationalize companies. Are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher turning over in their graves?Finally, moving on to another piece of conservative heresy, we discuss a program that many thought a GOP accomplishment of the 1980s, the H-1B visas. Hy and Christopher agree on a criticism Donald Trump, for once—the $100,000 is too high a fee.The True Cost of $100,000 H-1B FeeBy Christopher TidmoreIn another two months, the midyear engineering and finance graduate students will receive their diplomas from Tulane, Loyola, and Louisiana’s state universities. A plurality of these STEM students are foreign-born but have lived in the Pelican State for years. Then, upon receiving their diplomas, a disproportionate number of them will be forced to leave the country—after the United States government has invested thousands of dollars in their education through federal funding of postgrad science-based curricula.The reason, starting in 2026, these recent graduated will have to pay $100,000 just for the chance to apply for a job. On Friday, September 19, President Trump signed an executive order that requires a $100,000 payment to accompany any new H-1B visa petition, representing a huge jump in costs, up from a few thousand dollars previously. As the White House argued, Trump instituted the new fee to curb abuse in an H-1B system that has been “deliberately exploited to re-place, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”In practice, however, the H-1B visas are determined from the lottery of 85,000 applicants which mostly favors individuals educated at American graduate schools. In other words, the program tends to select for a plurarity of individuals educated domestically thanks to large federal appropriations to engineering, science, and high-tech University programs.The federal government has now embarked on a course to invest federal tax dollars to educate individuals which ICE will then will seek to deport. This is not only a morally bankrupt policy, it is economic idiocy. We are paying for schooling of the world‘s best and brightest whom we subsequently cast out of our nation.Moreover, in the interconnected world of the Internet economy, it is as if these individuals will not get hired elsewhere, often by the very US firms which would have employed them domestically. They just will not pay US income or local property taxes or contribute to the American economy in a fashion necessary to repay the federal tax dollars invested in their education.The Thursday, September 25, 2025 edition of the Wall Street Journalquoted Ezra Gershanok, chief executive and co-founder of subleasing marketplace Ohana. He said that he does not expect to sponsor more H-IB visas now that the petition fee jumped to $100,000 under President Trump's new rules. He will hire contractors abroad instead.“If the intended purpose is to have more domestic hiring, that is not going to be the case for us," Gershanok told the WSJ.As the financial newspaper went on note, founders of venture-backedUS startups have begun to rethink hiring plans following the imposition of the whopping new fee on H-IB visa petitions. Some founders expect to bring on foreign workers remotely or to rely more on international offices. Ohana, which has raised $6 million in venture funding, now employs 11 people. Six are based in New York, including a new hire in a business development role who is a U.K. citizen and won the H-1B lottery earlier this year, Gershanok said. The other five people at Ohana are international contractors working in South Africa and Portugal.Admittedly, amongst some of the well-funded companies, some refuse to rule out paying the high fee in rare cases. However, the real worry is the loss of the talents these bright young people could bring into the US economy by fulfilling their own dreams and aspirations. Venture investors express a worry to the Journal that immigration roadblocks will deter the foreign-born, yet American educated, from starting companies in the US.Trump defends the $100,000 application fee declaring that many Democrats have called for limits on H-IB visa petitions in the past, yet previous Democratic presidents proved smart enough ...