Boosting The Morale and
The Economy of America

The TRUE Patriot-Act

Helping New Orleans

After Hurricane Katrina we offered the program to the authorities of Louisiana. We wanted to help them, and as importantly, to prepare the program for future "Big One" crisis.

For that reason, we wanted to go the EXTRA few miles and not only do enough to help New Orleans but to actually IMPRESS! We wanted to leave a great impression on the entire country!

The program was not originally designed for a situation such as after Hurricane Katrina. However, it was worth changing it in order to help the local community. It seemed that they could use any help they could get. We were very proud of the fact that it is a very easy program that could easily be modified to fit new situations. We had no problems of making those modifications within just few days.

There were number of advantages of using the project in helping the travel industry of New Orleans:

1) We expected from the people of New Orleans much greater level of patriotism than what we saw in Hawaii. We were sure that this by itself would make the program a successful one in Louisiana.

2) Had plenty of time (2-4 months) to prepare it!

Our normal vision for the program is to use it immediately after a crisis in very high level in order to defeat any negative momentum. Normally, we would push the projects within days. However, the situation of New Orleans - the fact that it was not even safe to send people there for number of weeks and because there was some physical recovery that had to take place before we could send tourists - forced us to offer a different proposal: Start only by December and start slow and allow few more weeks before we reach its highest level. That should have made it much easier to develop.

3) The entire burden of the preparation, funding and execution will fall on communities outside of Louisiana! This is important because the people of Louisiana had more urgent things to take care of.

Our vision was to put most of the burden on the people of New York, California and Florida. We even wanted other states (including Hawaii) and countries (including Israel) to share some of the burden.

We also visioned the driving people, to push this program, to be from outside of Louisiana. We were hoping that people such as Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Wal-Mart, Governor Schuarzinegger, mayor Bloomberg and others would push for this program. All we asked the authorities of Louisiana is to introduce the program to potential leaders around the country.

This perfectly fits our philosophy that at time of crises, we need to shift some of the burden away from those who are victims. This just makes sense.

We contacted many parties in Louisiana and around the country (including the White House, state of Hawaii and the government of Israel) as early as the second week of September 2005. We did not want to loose any momentum.

We offered them a proposal that we did not believe they could refuse:

1) To send New Orleans as many visitors as they need (NOT want*) as early as they need (NOT want*)! I came with the offer of 60,000 visitors a week by the end of the year for a period of 10 weeks. However, those numbers were just suggestions.

* We made it clear in our letters that whatever Louisiana asks for, we will push the case to send even more. We already told others that whatever they ask for; we will force for 10-20% more and within at least a week or two sooner.

This is because we already had a 4-year experience with government and realized that they set very low goals. We asked for the most ambitious people to lead this program and set goals with significantly higher than those of Louisiana.

Our concern was that the local leaders would plan to first rebuild the city and then deal with the travel industry. We made the point clear (we wanted to impress with very ambitious goals!) that we wanted to send 60,000 visitors a week (within what we considered to be a realistic notice) and force the local community to be ready! We visioned it completely opposite from the dominant plan.

We were not shy to say that we wanted this project not only to bring the travel industry to 105% recovery within few months but to use it in order to push the entire recovery of New Orleans. Our intentions were to put pressure on their businesses - and especially hotels, restaurants, Museums, transportation, etc) to be ready and indirectly, also on the residence.

We wanted to force travel related businesses to hurry with their recovery efforts, finding accommodation solutions (both for the visitors and for the employees that will provide services) and even forcing the physical recovery of the buildings and clean-up!

We predicted as early as September that otherwise, if things will go according to government, the recovery would be very slow.

2) Since the authorities of Louisiana are overwhelmed with physical damage and recovery efforts, we offered to download this program of their hands. We expected this to be the most attractive part of this entire proposal.

We only needed them to announce their specific needs. Even for this simple task we suggested them to choose a dignitary outside the government; maybe a former mayor (Only month later, when the LT governor run for mayor and I learned that the person I was looking for all alone was his father who is a former mayor of New Orleans). This is the same problem we had with Hawaii, Louisiana and other government agencies: they do not know how to delicate authority.

3) Our proposal should have cost NOTHING to the people of Louisiana. The entire financial burden should have been assumed by the private sector of other communities.

4) Use this program as an opportunity to bring into the crisis some of the most successful and winner personals!

We may have been the first to be (due to our experience with government in the previous 4 years) concerned regarding the government ability to deal with crises. We knew that this is a character issue while government usually deals with crises on the finance level. We were expecting Chaos!

One of our main concerns at the time was that the special interests would take control over the $200B bailout, which will get them into a comfort zone that will actually slow down the recovery. Read what we wrote about the airline bailout of September 11th in order to understand better those concerns.