Can we please just wait another month or so?

This morning I opened Twitter and saw that practically everyone who had fingers to post was posting that they are making appointments right now to get vaccinated. That is a thing that you do very much in fact love to see.  The surge comes as the Governor announces a major expansion of eligibility to those over 16 years old who can claim any of a list of conditions some of which are quite expansive.  For example you can now get a vaccine appointment if you are a smoker or if you are "overweight" as measured by a BMI number that pretty much includes everyone. 

That's great news but it's a little bit sudden given what we had been hearing about vaccine supplies and various plans for "intentional" distribution strategies over the last few weeks. It's enough to cause one to wonder if there's even a bit of panic behind it. 

The expansion comes as Louisiana enters a familiar — and perhaps foreboding — stage of the now year-long pandemic: hospitalizations, deaths and the rate of positive tests have all plateaued after declining from a post-holiday surge. Paired with rising case counts of the more transmissible variant of the virus from the United Kingdom, health officials worry another spike is lurking around the corner.

“We’ve stopped improving, and in every previous instance when that has happened there was another surge,” Edwards said. “We are literally in a race against transmission of the virus —  especially the new variants.”

Why is it, then, that given all of this experience with "foreboding" plateaus and concern about the new variants, that the state and the city are once again rushing to relax precautionary restrictions?

New Orleans officials plan to announce details on eased coronavirus restrictions on Wednesday as cases in the city have slumped in recent weeks. 

"All the numbers are moving in the right direction, and we do anticipate an additional easement of the guidelines," said City Hall spokesperson Beau Tidwell during a press conference Tuesday.

Wait a minute, the governor just got finished saying the numbers had stopped moving in the right direction and plateaued. Which is it?  Anyway, if we really are in a "race against transmission of the virus," doesn't it make sense to keep doing everything we can to keep our opponent  in that race moving as slowly as possible?   Just keep the restrictions where they are until we get more people vaccinated.  It looks like the plan is for that to start happening quickly enough.  We've waited a year. What's a few more months?

Cancel Jim Bernhard's sub-contract thingy

This wide ranging scandal at LSU involving systemic sexual misconduct and institutional cover-up is  pretty shocking. 

The 150-page report from law firm Husch Blackwell, which includes 100 additional pages of exhibits, is a damning indictment of LSU’s many failures in protecting its students.

Among its three key findings: LSU did not follow federal laws, best practices or even its own policies in cases of reported sexual misconduct; LSU’s athletic department incidents were not properly reported; and LSU has never appropriately staffed its Title IX office, which investigates such allegations.

Interim LSU President Tom Galligan released the report Friday to the LSU board of supervisors, describing it as “hard to hear and even harder to read” and pledging to right the many wrongs it illuminated. Galligan placed two athletic department employees on brief unpaid suspensions Friday, and he said LSU would adopt all 17 recommendations in the Husch Blackwell report.

The blame here goes all the way to the top.  Among the worst actors are former head football coach Les Miles and university administrators who tried to keep his actions quiet. It appears as though the institutional policy was to suppress any and every suggestion of sexual harassment or violence associated with the program.  

The Husch Blackwell report took a deep look at several incidents, including how LSU handled reports of sexual assaults from former star running back Derrius Guice, domestic violence from former wide receiver Drake Davis, reports of sexual harassment by Miles and dozens of other complaints involving other students and athletes.

In some cases, LSU took great pains to keep the bad behavior secret. When LSU engaged the local law firm Taylor Porter to conduct a sexual harassment investigation into Miles in 2013, for example, the university kept no file on the investigation and intentionally stored it off-site, Husch Blackwell found.

One example not cited in today's article was the subject of another report back in November. Multi-gagillionaire and LSU booster Jim Berhard played a major role in these cover-ups.  

When LSU Police investigated allegations in 2018 that a football player was abusing the tennis player he was dating, multiple witnesses told officers they were afraid of coming forward because they feared repercussions from influential Baton Rouge businessman and Democratic political donor Jim Bernhard.

Bernhard is mentioned by name in seven separate instances in police reports about former LSU wide receiver Drake Davis’ abuse of LSU tennis player Jade Lewis, who has recently spoken out publicly for the first time. Bernhard, the wealthy chief executive officer of Bernhard Capital Partners and former CEO of the Fortune 500 contracting firm known as The Shaw Group, took in Davis when he was growing up and helped raise him.

Had the university taken any of these multiple scandals as seriously as it claims to be taking them now, it would have cut ties with Bernhard a long time ago.  Instead, just last month, it announced a deal (cut in secret) to grant his company a lucrative piece of a major facilities contract.    

The LSU Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to split an $810 million energy deal between two contractors, Enwave Energy Corp. and a joint venture that includes Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard and the national firm Johnson Controls Inc.

The LSU board did not disclose the price of the deal during the meeting, but LSU officials confirmed it afterward. The agreement calls for the university to pay Enwave $27 million per year over the next three decades. How much money Enwave makes off the deal will fluctuate annually based on natural gas prices and the price of the energy Enwave produces for LSU, said LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard.

Enwave will pay Louisiana Energy Partners — the name of the joint venture between Bernhard LLC and Johnson Controls — directly, instead of LSU paying both entities, Ballard said.

Prior to the deal, the Bernhard group and Enwave had been competitors for the whole contract. Bernhard was so intent on getting it, in fact, he had to turn down a position he figured he had already purchased. 

Two months before LSU started negotiating with Bernhard and Enwave, Gov. John Bel Edwards offered Jim Bernhard an appointment to the LSU Board of Supervisors. But Bernhard, a major supporter of the governor and political donor to the Democratic Party, turned down the seat without explanation.

Sitting on the LSU board would have prohibited him from doing business directly with the university.

That bit about "doing business directly with the university" is interesting. It raises the question as to whether Bernhard's arrangement to be paid by Enwave leaves the door open for him to take that Board of Supervisors' seat after all.  

It's clear he expects the Governor owes him. People with even longer memories will recall that there had been rumblings in 2019 that Bernhard was considering challenging John Bel for reelection that year. But it turned out that those ambitions were sated by... another massive state contract.  

Louisiana will enter into a complex agreement that could lead to the widespread privatization of energy systems at state agencies and universities throughout the state, after lawmakers reviewed the deal for a final time Tuesday.

Gov. John Bel Edwards' administration struck the deal with LA Energy Partners, a joint venture between Johnson Controls Inc. and Bernhard Energy Solutions, one of several companies controlled by Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard.

And now, of course, comes the LSU deal and.. maybe still the possibility of a seat on the board.  All of this for one of the worst enablers of a system of abuse that runs through the entirety of the school administration and athletic department. If no action is taken against Bernhard now, what does that say about LSU's commitment to putting any of this right?  What, in fact, does it say about the Governor's responsibility as well?

Gator blood on Fridays

The oddball Catholicism of New Orleans is so ingrained in the city's routines that it's ironically easy to forget about. I mean, yes, there are many ways in which it is obvious. But most of the time it is like background radiation subtly influencing the events, culture and politics that affect everyone here regardless of one's own personal faith.  

But sometimes it just blows up in great big mushroom plumes. Consider the 2011 funeral of Archbishop Hannan. Thousands of people turned out in the streets to watch a massive procession of marching bands and celebrities and politicians that practically shut down the city.  

People also stood or sat on the ground watching the final farewell to Hannan, who was the most active of the city's archbishops for his 23 years, and remained active during his retirement.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, state and parish lawmakers were among the mourners as was Victoria Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Among the honorary pall bearers were former U.S. Rep. Lindy Boggs and New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson and Xavier University president Norman C. Francis.

Boggs, 95, said she had been friends with Hannan for many years and said he would have been thrilled with the ceremony.

"When I was a member of congress he came often to Washington," Boggs said. "He would have loved the service today."

Consider Boggs' funeral a few years later in that same Cathedral where the Mayor of New Orleans delivered this performance.

Consider also the peculiar rituals kept by the current mayor in her City Hall office.  In fact, here is a product you can order to celebrate her expression of faith.

There's plenty of other stuff to cite. Real 80s kids out there will remember this deep cut. 

In 2010 there was much rejoicing when the Archbishop granted area communicants this very special Lenten dispensation. 

Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but seafood is allowed. Three years ago, when Jim Piculas was trying to settle a debate among his friends about whether gator qualified as seafood, he wrote a letter to the archbishop of New Orleans to ask.

His letter must have been pretty zealous, because not long after he wrote it, he got a response from Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond saying: "Yes, the alligator's considered in the fish family, and I agree with you — God has created a magnificent creature that is important to the state of Louisiana, and it is considered seafood."

Mysteries of the faith continue to abound, however. Because while we see the Archdiocese is willing to indulge the gustatory covetousness of the flock, it turns out this week, that it is less permissive with regard to their means of healing.

The day after the Federal Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization to a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, the Archdiocese of New Orleans issued a statement urging Catholics to choose, if they can, the other two available vaccines.

According to a statement released Sunday morning, the archdiocese instructs Catholics “that the latest vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson is morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing.”

The statement says that the decision to take that vaccine “remains one of individual conscience in consultation with one’s healthcare provider.”

I suppose we should commend the Archdiocese on its refreshingly "pro-choice" approach to the question.  Trouble is, it's not even a question anybody asked.  The Vatican has already told Catholics worldwide that it is "morally acceptable" to take the J&J shot if it is what is offered.  This message is echoed by bishops in Lafayette and Baton Rouge as well as by our very Catholic Governor who had this to say. 

"You do have to weigh this with the common good of ending a pandemic," Edwards said in a Tuesday afternoon press conference. "There's an imperative that we do this. The fastest way to do this is to deploy all of the vaccines and have the uptake of the vaccine be as great as possible. ... I'm encouraging everyone out there to take the first vaccine that is available to them whether it's Pfizer or Moderna or whether its Johnson & Johnson."

So, if you are a practicing Catholic in New Orleans, you have it on very good authority that the life saving medicines on offer do not simultaneously pose any threat to your soul. Instead consider them in the terms Archbishop Aymond used to describe the alligator. These medicines are "magnificent creatures" created for you to use. 

Someday, in fact, the next such.. um.. miracle may be derived from the blessed gator itself!

Chemists in Louisiana found that blood from the American alligator can successfully destroy 23 strains of bacteria, including strains known to be resistant to antibiotics.

In addition, the blood was able to deplete and destroy a significant amount of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Study co-author Lancia Darville at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge believes that peptides—fragments of proteins—within alligator blood help the animals stave off fatal infections.

In which case, we expect, that not only would the Archdiocese approve of such a drug, they would also permit it to be administered during Lent.

Choose your own impropriety

You can get mad at John Bel for appointing his nephew to the UL Board of Supervisors or not. It's up to you.  It's not technically an ethics violation of any sort. 

The UL System governs nine colleges and universities, including Southeastern Louisiana University, the University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Stevens, the son of the governor's sister Alice, is a graduate of SLU.

The governor's selection would not run afoul of the state code of government ethics against nepotism -- preference for relatives in hiring.

The ban generally applies to members of a government official's immediate family, including children, the spouses of the children, brothers and sisters, the spouses of the officials' brothers and sisters, his or her parents and his or her spouse.

Anyway, it could have been worse.  A year ago John Bel tried to appoint Jim Bernhard to the LSU Board. Bernhard declined. Which seemed to make some sense at the time simply because we could assume it was a case of overkill.  After all Edwards had already awarded Bernhard's new company a lucrative contract to privatize energy systems at state buildings. Seems like more than enough repayment the Governor could offer Bernhard for the gentlemanly favor of deciding not run against him in 2019. 

Bernhard Energy Solutions partnered with the HVAC company Johnson Controls at the request of the Edwards administration after both firms submitted proposals to the state. Bernhard Energy Solutions is one of several companies controlled by Bernhard Capital Partners, a private equity firm run by former Shaw Group chief executive and Democratic Party official Jim Bernhard, who was floated as a potential candidate for governor before ruling it out last year.

But it turns out Bernhard didn't turn the LSU board position down out of contentedness. He was actually angling to grab another deal for his company. 

Since then, the competition over the massive contract — which several board members described as having a value of $855 million over decades — has grown increasingly fierce. Five Board of Supervisors members told The Times-Picayune and The Advocate that LSU staffers have tried to steer them toward the Canadian company, Enwave, which offered a less expensive deal but may also lack a necessary license to do the work.

Bernhard, however, wields immense political power and ties to LSU and its football program, and board members said that’s made him a controversial choice for the contract. He seems to want the deal badly: In fact, he turned down an invitation from Gov. John Bel Edwards to serve on the Board of Supervisors that would have prevented him from getting the energy contract. Meanwhile, Bernhard Energy Solutions has partnered with Johnson Controls Inc. for similar projects, creating a new entity called LA Energy Partners. And they also formed a subsidiary called Tiger Energy Partners specifically to vie for the LSU contract.

So which is it worse for John Bel to appoint his law partner/nephew to a higher ed board position? Or is it worse that he and LSU continue doing business with this guy?  

Even without serving on the board, Bernhard has cast a long shadow over LSU. As LSU police investigated allegations two years ago that LSU football wide receiver Drake Davis had abused his girlfriend, several witnesses in the case told police that they feared coming forward because they feared retribution from Davis’ powerful adoptive father — Bernhard. Bernhard has said he did not threaten any retaliation in the case.

Bernhard also touted in a 2015 news release that a cogeneration plant his companies built on LSU’s campus “continues to help reduce LSU’s energy expenses by millions of dollars annually.” But LSU attorneys said the opposite in 2006, when the university and Bernhard Mechanical sued one another over the plant.

LSU claimed the cogeneration system meant to save money actually increased the university’s utility bill by more than $2 million a year. LSU attorneys said then that Bernhard had promised energy savings totaling between $7 million and $44 million over 20 years.

“Since the cogeneration system began operation in late December 2004, the cost of operating the system has exceeded by more than $2 million what the same energy would have cost LSU had the new system not been built,” LSU’s attorneys alleged.

Who knows? The Ethics Board doesn't offer much guidance either way.

Keeping the Faith 2021

Happy New Year! Pandemic is over now. Congratulations to all who participated. 

(CNN)President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on live television Monday afternoon and reassured Americans of the vaccine's safety.

The shot, which Biden received in his left arm, was administered at ChristianaCare's Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, by Tabe Mase, who is a nurse practitioner and the head of employee health services at the hospital, according to the Biden transition team. 

 

"We owe these folks an awful lot," Biden said, thanking those involved in the vaccine's development and distribution and front-line health care workers. 

 

Biden said the Trump administration deserved "some credit" for Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's vaccine program, and their role in making coronavirus vaccinations possible.

Certainly we do love to get up every day and remember to give Trump "some credit" for everything that's gone on this year.  But let's try to remember that.. popular and electoral vote counts notwithstanding... he isn't the only winner. 

The real winners are the bosses. The bosses have won the pandemic.  They actually have been the winners since the very beginning but if you read this website you would have seen us bleating about it many times over already.  We could already see how they were going to win early as March. Before the CARES act even passed it was clear that first shot at a federal response was going to be the one opportunity for a just outcome . And it was just as clear we were well on the way to missing it.  I didn't explicitly use the phrase "bosses are winning the pandemic" until about a month later but anyone could tell what was happening. By May we had the whole picture and it has not changed since. 

Eventually they're just going to make everyone go back to work. The Brennans will send a six foot rabbit to force us there at the point of a sword. Those of us there are even jobs for, that is. Those of us that can be used under whatever temporary and tenuous conditions that are set down. It will happen before anyone is safe from the virus. If there is no further action from congress and the status quo order is already maintained, everything will still be as broken as it is now and we will all be several orders of magnitude poorer for it.  Poorer workers are cheaper workers. When unemployment is high they are more disposable. The conditions that force them to work despite the danger make them easily exploitable. The bosses have won the pandemic.

I don't bring that up to get in a cheap I-told-you-so. If you read this website you also know nothing I can tell you matters.  I just want to point out how obvious all of this has always been even to an idiot blogger who only knows what he reads in John Geroges's newspapers. 

From the moment the pandemic hit, the most likely thing to happen, as has been the case with every of our century's many disasters, was yet another concentration of wealth and power at the very top and a further immiseration and impoverishment of the vast majority.  Jesus I said that too way back in March.  Look, if you are wondering why there has been less and less posting on the yellow blog as this year has gone along it's because fewer and fewer new things have happened as it's gone along.

 Anyway here we are a few days before the end of the year and how is all that going? 

Meanwhile, America’s wealthiest have seen their fortunes soar. The 100 richest people in the U.S. added about $600 billion to their wealth in 2020, enough to send a $2,800 check to every adult in the country. One, Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, ended 2020 six times richer than at the beginning of the year.

Individual billionaires getting more billions? Check.  The engines that siphon the billions upward continue to crush and devour everything in their path?  Check on that too. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers. In a report published last month, we found that many of America’s top retail and grocery companies have raked in billions during the pandemic but shared little of that windfall with their frontline workers, who risk their lives each day for wages that are often so low they can’t support a family. This is especially true of Amazon and Walmart, the country’s two largest companies. Together, they have earned an extra $10.7 billion over last year’s profits during (and largely because of) the pandemic—a stunning 56% increase. Despite this surge, we ranked Amazon and Walmart among the least generous of the 13 large retail and grocery companies studied in our report. The two companies could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.”

Sounds about like mission accomplished, right?  Well, they're almost there.  As I type this right now, I'm watching Mitch McConnell fend off a last minute attempt by Bernie Sanders to tack a one-time $2,000 payment to individuals onto the jumble of giveaways to Wall Street firms and defense contractors that just passed as the (likely final) COVID relief bill.

They wouldn't even be there had our ingeniously unstable President not thrown one last incoherent fit during which he happened to mention that $2,000 is a larger amount than $600. Before Trump opened his mouth, the deal was already closed. Our leading opinion makers were well on their way to lionizing the moonshine sipping centrists who brought it to us and explaining that it was "good enough" the way it was. Who would have thought we might actually miss having Trump around to light random things on fire like this?  Going back to brunch is going to suck. 

Or maybe it doesn't matter. McConnell seems to have the situation well in hand. 

McConnell introduced the parallel pandemic relief bill on Tuesday, S.5085, which would include the $600 to $2,000 increase in checks to individual Americans, but tacks on a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 and funding for a commission to investigate voter fraud. Both of these additions to McConnell's surprise bill are demands which have been made by Trump for months. The Section 230 repeal would pull back protections for internet companies and allow such media companies as Twitter and Facebook to be sued if users feel wronged by messages on the platform.

Aside from maybe Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st Century.  Over the course of the previous two Presidential administrations, McConnell has completely turned over the federal judiciary. He delivered trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the corporate ruling class.  Now he is leveraging the pandemic to crush workers' rights and bankrupt every state and municipal government which will result in radical austerity nationwide. When future historians write about the dawning of the American neo-feudal age, McConnell will be remembered as a prime architect.

Not to give him too much credit.  I mean being an insider hatchet man for the establishment is always an easier job than trying to protect the disenfranchised.  That's kind of the definition of how power works. McConnell isn't engaging in any dark wizardry. He's just making obvious moves that no one can muster the effort to counter.  It's very easy to muck up something everyone wants by tying it to something else everyone know cannot pass.  State and local governments need relief but McConnell killed that by tying it to liability shields for bosses who callously expose workers to danger during the pandemic. And now he has blocked these one time survival checks by tying them to internet censorship and Trump election conspiracy crap. Being a jerk really isn't that hard as long as you are sufficiently insulated from any consequences.  

So McConnell isn't the definitive US politician of the moment just because he happens to be the guy in position to pull the lever on the machine that feeds the abattoir. It's more the fact that he, or any person who would get to work those controls embodies the universal ethic of the governing class. It's a power that only does one thing. And so anyone who seeks to wield that power necessarily wants to do that thing. Which is another way of saying they're all like this. None of them is here to help.  In fact as I'm continuing to type now, I see the Democrats in the Senate have, in fact, caved on their gambit for the $2000. It looks like they decided it was more important to continue funding the current push for war with Iran.  Here's Joe Biden barely acknowledging the issue while literally turning his back and walking away.  You're not going to get a clearer image of where the Democrats are than that.

Of course, a one time check for $2,000 or even the $2,800 we could have by splitting up the billionaires' profits from this year is still an insult. A just pandemic response policy would pay people to stay home, protect them from their exploitative bosses and rapacious landlords, guarantee treatments and vaccinations are free, and "re-start the economy" through continued fiscal stimulus on the back end.  But we'll never do any of that. All we care about, even at this very late stage of the game, is keeping the military and police state funded while also giving away billions of dollars to rich people. 

WASHINGTON — Tucked away in the 5,593-page spending bill that Congress rushed through on Monday night is a provision that some tax experts call a $200 billion giveaway to the rich.

It involves the tens of thousands of businesses that received loans from the federal government this spring with the promise that the loans would be forgiven, tax free, if they agreed to keep employees on the payroll through the coronavirus pandemic.

But for some businesses and their high-paid accountants, that was not enough. They went to Congress with another request: Not only should the forgiven loans not be taxed as income, but the expenditures used with those loans should be tax deductible.

The truly remarkable thing now is how little it matters that the supply side philosophy guiding such policy has been repeatedly discredited over the course of our 50 year experiment with it. Tax privileges for the one percent do not magically raise revenues. They do not end racial inequality. They do not "create jobs" or raise the general standard of living.  No matter. Our leaders will press on with it as an article of faith. It's the central creed of both parties from Congress all the way down to your local City Council. Giving money to rich people is the reason our electeds are called to service.  The hours are running short on the year now. But real quick, here are a few of our favorite examples of neoliberal gospel preached in 2020. 

Just last week, Governor John Bel proudly announced a plan to give away $3 million in state funds to a company owned by the world's richest man who proposes to "create jobs" paying $32,000 on average.

Besides the access to Interstate 49 and 10, Amazon is eligible for a performance-based grant from Louisiana Economic Development of $3 million. The grant is payable over two years and can offset facility infrastructure costs. The state will also give Amazon access to LED FastStart, the state's workforce training program, which has given 463,000 training hours to more than 29,000 employees since 2008.

In October, with Orleans Parish homeowners still reeling from last year's property tax assessment, and renters facing a wave of evictions as CARES act protections and unemployment benefits ran out, Erroll Williams announced a $42 million tax cut for corporate owners of downtown commercial properties. 

According to data compiled by the Downtown Development District, almost a third of the total cut in commercial sector valuations — or about $90 million — is accounted for by 10 downtown properties, including the cluster of properties at the river end of Canal Street owned by Harrah's New Orleans Casino, a division of Caesars Entertainment of Las Vegas. Harrah's valuations were more than halved to about $15.3 million, which will reduce its property tax bill by an estimated $2.4 million, according to the assessor's office.

Similarly, the Marriott Hotel on Canal, the Sheraton, the Intercontinental, the Crowne Plaza, the Roosevelt and the Ritz-Carlton will see their property taxes halved.

All are owned by national hotel management groups, suggesting that any tax savings will head to corporate coffers outside of the city.

This gift to out of state mega-landlords will be paid for by about a $12 million dollar drop in revenues meant for public schools and services while homeowners and renters will have to pay $30 million more collectively. 

But let's not get too caught up in the distinction between businesses and neighborhoods. Because another thing we learned this year is that the city's official position is that neighborhood ARE businesses. 

“I really want to be thoughtful on the term business, because we were worried that there may be criticism that we only are thinking of businesses. I say business as a very global perspective where neighborhoods are businesses in my mind. People that have never been through this process and want to expand their gate, those individuals, those customers are businesses. So it’s not just ‘hey let’s help big business.’ “

That is New Orleans CAO Gilbert Montano employing a special kind of capitalism-inflected gobbledygook to talk about his plan to reorganize city planning, permitting and land use departments under something called the Office of Business and External Services. The scheme, which Montano describes as a "paradigm shift," would essentially change the mission of these agencies from protecting  public safety and quality of life from the hazards of profit-driven development to assisting the profit-seekers in getting around those protections.  

As if to drive the point home, the person they hired to implement this new vision made his own fortune monetizing the gentrification of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

Bowen’s new position caught the attention of some affordable housing advocates on Monday due to his former job as general manager of Sonder — a San Francisco-based company that has grown to be one of the largest operators of short-term rentals in New Orleans. In the resume he submitted for the job, Bowen claimed that during his tenure at Sonder he “Blitz Scaled the New Orleans market for Sonder from launch to 1,000 apartments (2,500 rooms) in under 36 months.” 

A report from March 2018 by Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, an affordable housing group that opposed the expansion of the legal short-term rental market in the city, found that Sonder had more listings on Airbnb than any other short-term rental operator in the city with 124.

Neighborhoods are businesses.  They are fodder for "blitz-scaled" profits regardless of whether anybody can actually live there.  It probably helps if they don't, in fact. That way they won't need things like public libraries which, incidentally, the city proposed to de-fund in order to pay for Bowen's new neighborhood monetization department. That proposal was killed by voters. But it's only a temporary set-back. It's clear where the city's priorities lie. Eventually they'll get the budget to follow. 

To expect anything different would be to expect a sudden conversion of the entire political class away from its religious belief in trickle-down economics.  But why would that happen when our priests continue to reaffirm their orthodoxy over and over?  As our final example, we have here one of Mayor Cantrell's very first actions in response to the emergency way back in March. She decided to give businesses a tax break. 

Despite worries about the city’s bottom line, Cantrell announced on Tuesday that the city would waive all penalties for late sales tax payments from businesses for the next 60 days. That measure is intended to make sure businesses have the money on hand to keep paying their employees while state and city closures are in place during the height of the outbreak.

What could possibly go wrong? Well they did ask her that. 

Given the strains to the city budget, Cantrell urged those businesses who are remaining open and can pay their sales taxes to do so, to lighten the burden on city government. Asked about concerns that businesses would simply pocket the money, not turning it over to their workers or to the government, Cantrell said she choose to look at the situation from an optimistic perspective.

“I’m not being negative at all and thinking that our businesses or employers will not do the right thing,” Cantrell said. “This is all with the expectation that they’ll do the right thing.”

Don't be "negative." Always keep the faith that doing nice things for those at the top of the ladder will result in nice things for those at the bottom. For ever and ever amen. Anyway, the true believers only need to hold out a bit longer. The sooner we can declare the pandemic over, the sooner we can dismiss any heresy that suggests that poor people have anyone besides themselves to blame. 

The savior is coming in the form of a vaccine... eventually... maybe.

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

Well, they'll figure it out.  After all, as Joe Biden might say, we gotta give Trump some credit. Just have a little faith.

Fast pass

Kudos to the Times-Picayune/Advocate for polling its stable of "influencers" on the... well.. the kind of things the influencers might think about.  This question, for example, is just not the sort of thing the ordinary non-influential Joe or Jane might have to consider. 

We also asked a speculative question: If allowed, how much would respondents pay to be one of the first people vaccinated? More than half wouldn't bite.

Just this week the Governor laid out the state's plan to administer as many as 159,000 vaccinations by the end of the month. That number may be optimistic depending on how many doses become available and when.  The first batch of 39,000 injections could happen as early as this weekend.  But it will take many more months to get the vaccine out to everyone so we have had to prioritize health care workers. 

Between 200,000 and 215,000 people are estimated to be in the first priority group for the vaccines, according to state Health Department figures. That includes 75,000 to 80,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities and between 125,000 and 135,000 health workers.

The T-P Power Poll question doesn't only presuppose that the blessed elect should have the option of skipping this line. It goes straight on past that and asks them how much would they pay to have that privilege validated.  Turns out that's extremely valuable to some of them!

Byron LeBlanc, president of LeBlanc & Schuster Public Relations, said he'd consider it: "I'd probably be willing to pay more than $100 for the vaccine if it meant I could get a wrist band or something that would let me do away with the masks and resume normal behavior and travel."

What is this, Disney World? I just want to ride on the planes again.  Please let me buy a fast pass. Actually, going super-early would not allow you to "do away with masks and resume normal behavior."  Because vaccinations, much like masks and social distance precautions, are only effective when everyone has them.  Until that happens, early vaccine recipients who aren't being careful around others could be even more dangerous. 

Only people who have virus teeming in their nose and throat would be expected to transmit the virus, and the lack of symptoms in the immunized people who became infected suggests that the vaccine may have kept the virus levels in check.

But some studies have suggested that even people with no symptoms can have high amounts of coronavirus in their nose, noted Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who represents the American Academy of Pediatrics at meetings of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The first person confirmed to be reinfected with the coronavirus, a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong, also did not have symptoms, but harbored enough virus to infect others.

Vaccinated people who have a high viral load but don’t have symptoms “would actually be, in some ways, even worse spreaders because they may be under a false sense of security,” Dr. Maldonado said.

As with so many human problems, no one is really safe from COVID until we all are safe from COVID.  Elites such as those identified by the Times-Picayune as "influencers" tend to think they can buy their way out of that social contract. A lot of the time this makes them suckers.  But mostly it just makes things difficult for the rest of us.

Death Cult Coup 2020

Hey look at that. They did the thing.

House Speaker Clay Schexnayder and the House Republican delegation have thrown their support behind a controversial petition to lift all of Louisiana’s coronavirus restrictions, an effort aimed at kneecapping Gov. John Bel Edwards’ rules that is expected to be decided in court.

The petition, which previously had only circulated among the most conservative House members, only requires the majority of the House to go into effect. It was expected to win the support of a majority of the House Friday after Schexnayder’s support. The Legislature was also supposed to end the special session Friday.

House GOP Delegation Chair Blake Miguez, R-Erath, said the petition, supported by Schexnayder, has the support of a majority of the House Republicans, who comprise 68 of 105 seats.

We did not think they would do this thing.  All signs pointed toward them not doing the thing, in fact.  They spent most of the session working on a whole bill instead of this petition. That bill only gives them the opportunity to complain about the emergency declaration. It doesn't actually rescind it. Also it will certainly be vetoed. We figured that must be what they wanted. They wanted to write a strongly worded letter of disapproval .  That way they can go on complaining in public, making dumb videos, riling up the folks without having to deal with the consequences of undermining the governor's public health policy.  I mean, does Blake Miguez really want to be Governor right now? The "third wave" is already starting.

But now they've gone ahead and signed their petition anyway.  Why would they do that?  Maybe it is because they finally figured out that the petition does not really do anything after all. 

If successful, it would only suspend Edwards’ ability to issue emergency rules for a week. However, it is likely to be challenged in court, and even Republican leadership has conceded it may be unconstitutional. That means it might not have an immediate effect unless a judge allows the petition to go into effect as the court case plays out, assuming it goes to court.

Perfect.  In the meantime, everybody can go on with their performative histrionics.  Which, really was the point of this entire special session to begin with.  Well, that and stealing whatever money they could find in the couch cushions, which of course they managed to do as well.

They sent him something he can veto

The legislature already has the power to rescind the governor's emergency declaration.  This was the case at the beginning of the special session and it is the case now. The question we asked then, and must continue to ask now is, do they really want to do that? Or do they just want a pretext for continuing to play victim while the Governor keeps doing the actual work of managing the public health crisis?  

Because they still can't get enough signatures together to override the emergency, BUT can pass a bill like this that Governor can easily veto, we are inclined to believe the answer is, they just want to complain. Heck, this even says they can't do anything about an emergency declaration until 30 days have passed.

Wright’s bill would come into play if a governor renews a state of disaster or emergency declaration beyond the first 30 days of the proclamation. Edwards has repeatedly renewed his public health emergency declaration and coronavirus restrictions for months, since first issuing them in March.

Under the measure, if one of the top two elected leaders of both the House and Senate agree that provisions of a governor’s renewed order exceed his authority or “are not narrowly tailored to address the disaster,” they could ask lawmakers to vote by mailed ballot on whether to revoke individual sections of that order. That means a majority of the House and Senate could pick and choose which of Edwards’ coronavirus restrictions they want to end.

In this case the 30 day waiting period is up. But even so, it sets off a process of picking one issue at a time, having a public argument about it, then beginning another drawn out process of voting on it, hilariously, by mail. Remember this is the same bunch who made Kyle Ardoin cry in public because they hated his vote-by-mail plan for this year's elections.  They can't be choosing that option for themselves now because they believe it will work in a timely and efficient manner now.  Can they? 

Much more likely they are deliberately sending Edwards a bill he can veto specifically so that he will veto it.  And then they can do all the public whining they want, themselves.

Maybe just let them make a YouTube channel

You really have to hand it to the legislature for bringing the grifter energy to this emergency special session it has called.  Ostensibly, they are there to deal with the COVID emergency and the consequences of expiring benefits and a dwindling unemployment insurance trust fund.  But they're taking the opportunity to also run through a stack of tax breaks for businesses, including and especially oil and gas, to further de-fund public education and various other schemes. Always good to get em in there when nobody is paying attention. 

Even the marquee item on the agenda isn't quite what it seems.  They sound like they are saying they are there to shut down the Governor's emergency order because freedom and democracy or something. 

The push to give lawmakers a say in coronavirus rules started taking shape. Republican lawmakers are circulating petitions to end the emergency health declaration that underlies a sheaf of directives to lessen the spread of the deadly COVID-19, but also have led to widespread shutdowns of business activities and unprecedented unemployment. GOP legislators – including Senate President Page Cortez and House Speaker Clay Schexnayder – want to give the Legislature a seat at the table in emergency powers. 

"The Legislature is a co-equal branch of government ... and we should have a seat at the table," Cortez said.

But, as we've already found out, those petitions are difficult to complete. In part, this is because potential signatories have trouble coming up with specific aspects of the response they would want to do differently. 

Asked what specific components of Edwards' coronavirus restrictions he objects to, Cortez said merely that lawmakers want a "seat at the table." Republicans have railed against a host of the rules, including restrictions on bars and restaurants and visits to nursing homes.

They just want a seat at the table.  They don't actually want to do anything from that seat, though. As Karlin points out in this article (and then highlights again in a tweet thread) this bill would actually make cancelling the emergency order more difficult by adding the requirement of a second petition.  

So it turns out these Republicans, despite holding super-majority status in the state legislature, really just wanted a platform from which they can be seen complaining.  It's nice to be heard, I guess.

Can't wait to see what they come up with

Expiring benefits and the diminishing reserves of Louisiana's unemployment trust fund is a pretty big problem in the middle of a pandemic-induced depression.  It's not the only problem but it is a big one. So the legislature is going to try and solve it. 

That's what they're trying to solve, right?  Or is it something else? 

Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, said while the 70-item list of items in the call is "expansive," lawmakers wanted to give themselves plenty of flexibility.

House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, pointedly said a significant number of House members believe the governor's rules to combat the virus represent "an imbalance of power."

"This special session will not end without a solution to this problem," Schexnayder said Monday.

Edwards said the state Constitution clearly invests him with the authority to take steps during a public health emergency and he has no intention of surrendering it. "I don't think they are going to be successful in doing that," he said.

When in doubt, everybody yell at the Governor. 

The 70-item session call is here.  The phrase "during an emergency or disaster" comes up in several contexts where it looks like we may be making excuses to sidestep health and safety or environmental regulation, or just fast track money they haven't been able to steal yet.  There is an item in there about classifying workers as employees or "independent contractors." Wonder what that's about.

There's a bunch of stuff that seems like it might could wait until the next regular session. They want to tinker around with public school funding.   There is an item about "licenses and fees." Several items look like they are tied to specific pet projects including "surplus property in Jackson Parish," and "certain contracts involving state parks," among others. There is one that mentions the hotel/motel tax in Jefferson Parish for some reason.

A few items look like they might affect governmental transparency. And, of course, there are the usual  tax cuts for businesses and for oil and gas production. 

There aren't any bills filed yet, but... yeah.. can't wait to see what they come up with. 

Phase 2 and a half

The Governor is supposed to talk later today about the COVID numbers and the status of the "phased reopneing."  Currently, Phase 2 is scheduled to end this coming Friday, but we have every reason to believe that will be extended again. That seems to be making some folks in Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes cranky but the numbers are what they are and they say it isn't time yet. 

Of course, this isn't really an argument about numbers.  Instead it is about power.  Specifically it is about the power of individuals who, by virtue of their economic status, are less at risk to the virus than the people they want to force back into dangerous jobs for their benefit.  

In Jefferson, some council members said they understand waiting to gauge the fallout from school reopenings and the Laura evacuations, but they were united in believing Jefferson is in good enough shape to reopen. In St. Tammany, one council member voted against the request.

Several Jefferson council members own small businesses or come from families that do, and local business groups spoke of impending financial disaster for bars, restaurants and other small businesses and their owners and employees.

Much of this moot if congress had implemented a national policy of aid to small business and direct payments to workers to protect everyone during the health crisis.  Instead we've chosen this bloody struggle in the chaos. The only outcome under that circumstance can be more precarious working conditions for everyone. And the only way to send everyone out when it isn't safe to be there is if we pretend that it is. And it turns out, for some people, that's pretty easy to do now. 

(Tulane epidemiologist Susan) Hassig said many pushing for a faster opening often haven’t had first-hand experience with severe cases of the disease, which exact their terrible toll away from public view in the intensive care units of hospitals.

Those who died during the 1918 influenza epidemic, on the other hand, “if they weren’t in your apartment, they were in the row house next to you, and you saw the body out on the curb.”

“It’s not fake; it’s real,” she said. “The challenge is that people see relatively small numbers in terms of fatalities as a proportion of infections … but when you start thinking about opening up and allowing virus to spread, that impact grows really quickly.”

And, of course, this fit is occurring at the exact moment that schools and universities are running their own experiments with classroom instruction for the fall. Hassig says in this article that that alone equates to about a "reopening" for about 20 percent of the population. We're in Phase 2 and half right now.  Maybe let's not take this moment to try and rush on through to Phase 3.

Kyle's tears

Sec of State Kyle Ardoin broke down and cried during a legislative Governmental Affairs meeting this week because the Governor won't approve his plan to make you get a COVID test and send it to him if you want to vote by mail. Now it's probably going to be up to a federal judge to write our elections plan. Kyle is upset, though, because he tried very very hard to do something nice and vote-supressiony that his Republican pals would like.  But now he can't have that because... partisanship is bad. 

We'll see what the judge says but the most likely outcome is Ardoin's plan gets approved plus some sort of expanded vote by mail option.  And since it takes the decision out of his hands, it's hard to understand why Ardoin would be upset over it.

Decisions

There are things some of us have the power to choose.

Gov. John Bel Edwards is requiring unemployed workers once again to apply for jobs each week as a condition for receiving jobless benefits – at a time when almost 1 in every 4 workers in Louisiana is collecting unemployment pay.

The governor’s decision comes just days after some 450,000 out-of-work residents in Louisiana lost their eligibility to receive a $600 weekly supplemental payment from the federal government that expired on July 31.

Of course we argue slapping the work search requirement back on is just insult added to the injury of having the $600 expire. But why do that when we can choose not to?

They don't really care, do you?

Why are they still doing this?

The video Louisiana’s attorney general is promoting says “you don’t need a mask” because “there is a cure” for covid-19–hyrdroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that several recent studies have shown doesn’t work to treat covid. #lalege #lagov https://t.co/94TPKR0Wj0

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 28, 2020

 
Okay now watch how exhausting this is to even say.  Actually, Jeff, there is not a "cure" for COVID-19 and if there were one we know it would not be hydroxychloroquine.

Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus has "absolutely no benefit" and "proves to be ineffective," Dr. Chris Thomas, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, said in an interview Monday.

Thomas, appearing on WBRP-FM in Baton Rouge, said four randomized, controlled trials have proven that that the once highly touted drug "for sure" doesn't work for hospitalized patients.

But why even bother engaging with it?  None of this is happening in good faith.  So much of the political theater of COVID is, like the conservative culture war tradition it draws upon, is just noise without content.

It is hard to ignore, though.  In fact its persistent dominance of the narrative is a fascinating experiment we're conducting right now.  I think it's supposed to measure the actual degree of separation between governing elites and the actual needs and concerns of the people they govern.

I mean it seems like Brian Kemp must be pandering to.. somebody here. But it can't be the thousands of people whose lives he's endangering.

Washington (CNN) On Wednesday in Georgia, there were almost 4,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Almost 2,800 people are hospitalized due to Covid-19, the highest number in the state's ongoing battle against the virus. A total of 37 people died, the highest number of daily deaths since June 25, according to data from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

How did Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) respond to this obvious surge in Covid-19 in his state? By signing an executive order banning cities and counties from mandating that people have to wear a mask when in public.

Kemp's order was defied by Atlanta mayor and cop enthusiast Keisha Lance Bottoms setting up yet a whole news cycle of tedious back-and-forth between the authoritarians who "believe in science" and the other authoritarians who "defend your freedom."  (These, of course, are stupid slogans of performative groupthink and not at all reflective of any genuinely held ideological or ontological belief.  Please do not @ me.)  The skirmish did little to advance the cause of coherent public health policy. But it sure did emphasize the respective brands of the combatants and their acolytes.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, Jeff Landry  issued an opinion that the Governor's recent mask mandate is "likely unconstitutional and unenforceable."

"Although the mask mandate and the 50-person limit may be good recommendations for personal safety, they may not be enforced with financial or criminal penalties," Landry wrote. "Both businesses acting under color of law as mask police and actual police acting as mask police could face liability if individual civil rights are violated due to the proclamation."

What's interesting about Landry's wording here is that it isn't all that different in spirit from the Governor's actual announcement. It was clear that John Bel's purpose was to get everyone on the same page about what to expect of one another as we all struggle to slow the virus down.  This wasn't a rule anyone wanted to have to enforce. He even said as much. 

In a press conference Saturday afternoon, Gov. Edwards said of implementing a state mask mandate that “we know that face masks work, it really is that simple.” Regarding enforcement, he said businesses will have to urge customers to wear them. “If someone refuses to wear a mask, they should be asked to leave. If not, they are trespassing.” He added that “citations will be against businesses for not enforcing mask requirements,” but that “we aren’t going to be out there with a goal to write citations.” 

So Landry is pandering to somebody. But it can't be to people who are afraid of being carted off to gulag because they left their bandana in the car or something.  Because that just isn't happening.

He's certainly not pandering to the scores of essential workers in Louisiana forced into unsafe environments by employers who he says can't be compelled to comply with the mandate. According to a law the Governor just signed, "essential" businesses are shielded from liability if their workers get sick under the conditions the bosses subject them to. Landry is now compounding that by opining that the same bosses could face liability if they make those conditions safer by enforcing a mask policy.

Another interesting fact about Landry's opinion is that it was issued a day after he tested positive for COVID himself. If there's a point to any of this it can't have anything to do with actually protecting people from the virus. Landry is clearly looking past that hazard in service of some other cause. But what is that cause? 

Supposedly Landry's opinion was meant to bolster an effort among Republican legislators to revoke the Governor's emergency order. At the time it was thought they were on the verge of actually doing it. We see here hospital administrators in Baton Rouge were already preparing to deal with the consequences.  See Lamar White's Daily Beast article for more on the Republican coup. It  seems to have been quashed for now but they can keep adding signatures to their petition as long as the emergency order remains in effect. (The Governor extended Phase II again this week until August 28.)

But the quest to show up John Bel is just another sideshow like the continuing Tony Spell follies or whatever Louie Gohmert's problem is.

PLAYBOOK PM: After we reported that @replouiegohmert was positive, we got an email from a Gohmert aide. pic.twitter.com/x31CSOdkLf

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 29, 2020

 
Or... good lord..

Bar owner suing @LouisianaGov to overturn coronavirus restrictions is missing court hearing in lawsuit b/c of coronavirus. Background on case: https://t.co/2gfXSDzLsk https://t.co/0f2mIMq7uH

— Bryn Stole (@brynstole) August 5, 2020

The cause being advanced by all of this nonsense is that of the bosses who are winning the pandemic.  While our political leadership fashions a farcical public debate out of obstinate stupidity vs. police-scolding individual behavior, the actual policies they're implementing are throwing millions of people out of work and then denying them benefits. They're obliging those who still have jobs to quietly accept more intrusive and tenuous and unsafe working conditions.  They're allowing people to be evicted from their homes. They're devolving the public schools into a libertarian pay-to-play private tutoring chaos.

The entire social contract is being dismantled right now and we have no avenue of popular response beyond figuring out which bar to call the cops on first. Other than that, good luck getting anyone with any power to listen to anything you have to say anymore.  Just keep watching the circus and hope for the best.

Not my problem

John Bel:  Well if Formosa wants to keep collecting state subsidies to dump poison everywhere, that's really not any of our business.

Edwards said he has spoken often with Chuck Carr Brown, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, and expects the permits will survive the legal challenges.

"You have standards in place, and, if an application is put in that meets the applicable standards, then you permit it," Edwards said. "I mean, that's the way this works, and, if they'd like to change the standards, then that's something that EPA needs to look at."

Maybe people should be better protected from the racist condescension,  anti-speech bullying and global climate disaster wrought by malevolent actors like Formosa.  But it's not anything John Bel is going to lift a finger to do anything about so long as they filled out the forms okay.

Getting all the kids infected so we can own the libs

Just in case the fast approaching benefits expiration and evictions cliff wasn't enough stress for everyone to handle at once, we've also got this.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will consider “minimum health and safety standards” for reopening Louisiana schools — triggered by a new law — during a special meeting Tuesday.

The public got a glimpse of what those standards will look like — and which could be up for debate — when Louisiana Department of Education State Superintendent Cade Brumley and BESE President Sandy Holloway spoke before the House Committee on Education Monday. The standards, drafted as emergency replacement bulletins for traditional schools and charter schools, include limits on class size, bus capacity, social distancing and cleaning requirements and largely reflect guidelines previously released by the LDOE.

The "standards" are, like the rules under which everything else has been operating under these circumstances, deliberately loose. Because we really are all just making this up as we go along.

Face coverings — which are, for now, required in businesses and public buildings for anyone over the age of eight as part of an executive order effective Monday — are a point of major political contention in the state and around the country. BESE’s draft language stops short of a mask mandate. It appears to offer schools some flexibility, saying children older than eight and adults inside a school building “must wear a face covering to the greatest extent possible and practical within the local community context.”

All of which is completely understandable. Everyone really is trying to feel their way through this. It might be a bit easier to figure out what is "possible and practical within the local community context," if we hadn't designed such a convoluted context to begin with.

Until this point, local and state guidelines have been largely based on federal guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have been packaged as suggestions, not mandates. Local Education Agencies, or LEAs, are in charge of their own plans. In New Orleans, most charter schools are considered their own LEAs and it’s been unclear what role the district might play in reviewing or authorizing any reopening plans.

The district did not respond to inquiries regarding whether it would be approving individual charter group plans.

The thing is, though, a virus doesn't care about any of this stuff.  So while it's fine for state agencies and charter boards to differentiate their "local contexts" and spheres of authority, ideally their plans for containing the virus should all be relatively uniform.  This is precisely the reason the governor has had to issue a statewide mask mandate.  Exceptions and discretion are going to come into play as a matter of course, but the baseline rules need to have some clarity. Devolving all the authority to individual school districts and charter boards is just inviting more chaos.

Keep in mind, also, inviting chaos may actually be the point.  At least from Betsy DeVos's perspective.

BASH: You're the Secretary of Education. So why do you not have guidance on what schools should do if there's a coronavirus outbreak just weeks before you want them to reopen?

DeVOS: There are really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/RBFxZ5OeFw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

All the schools MUST OPEN...  and, you know, we're sure they will figure out how.  Why would they be so deliberately cruel and disruptive? The short answer is, screw you, that is why.

Every push to "reopen" anything right now, be it a school or a hotel or a fish tank, or whatever is a push by the bosses to blame the workers they subject to unsafe conditions for their own peril.  A bill John Bel just signed into law protects certain employers, including school districts from liability if their workers or the people they serve get sick.  The Trump administration is pushing for similar measures to go into the next round of  federal "relief" legislation.

What is your company or organization telling you right now about leave time? What are the mixed messages they are sending you about "safety" on the job vs. your obligation to show up and put yourself and others in danger? That kind of chaos is happening in every workplace forced by policy makers in Washington to "reopen" with minimal guidance or support. The goal of the policy, as always, is a more frightened and compliant labor pool.

And it is being implemented with little or no regard for your safety or the safety of your children. 

All they can offer us is shame

The "second wave" is here. It happened during "Phase 2" of reopening.

Louisiana reported another 1,467 known coronavirus cases Sunday, bringing its total to 56,236 as the disease’s dogged resurgence continued across much of the state.

Sunday's numbers reflected a two-day lag in reporting because the Louisiana Department of Health did not update totals on Saturday due to a planned power outage. But they again climbing cases within and outside of the New Orleans area and more hospitalizations and deaths due to the disease.

"Planned power outage."  The virus was spreading too quickly so they tried turning the Health Department off and then turning it back on.   It didn't help.

Even less helpful has been the behavior of the death cult caucus that has emerged from among the Republican ranks of the Louisiana Legislature. Last week they all posed for a photo together.

A group of Republican lawmakers who have flirted with a petition to revoke the state’s emergency declaration since early May revived the effort this week. Several Republicans spoke out against Edwards’ extension on the House floor Thursday, and later more than 20 gathered shoulder to shoulder on the State Capitol steps, without masks, for a photo op.

The petition, circulated by Rep. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, needs 53 signatures in the House. It would repeal the governor’s public health emergency declaration, which Edwards contends would put federal aid at risk, though Republicans challenge that.

“Quite frankly, it’s gone on long enough,” Seabaugh said of the restrictions.

It's disgusting that Seabaugh, et al would participate in a trolling event intended to discourage the wearing of masks which, it has been shown, is one of the few things most of us can do that actually makes a difference.  It's egregiously offensive for them to complain that the reopening guidelines have been too restrictive even as the news is breaking that plan has led to a massive new outbreak of the virus.  In fact, it's absurd for any of these Republicans to criticize the failed plans given that, by and large, they were written by panels assembled by the Governor, the Legislature, and by localities, deliberately loaded with political and business insiders so that the rules would be as unrestrictive and"business-friendly" as possible.

Probably the Republican lawmakers are just trying to see what they can get away with. They've got these new super-majorities to play with and if that means they have the numbers to overturn a governor's emergency order, it's hard for them not to see if they can actually pull something like that off. Besides, this is less of an argument now about how best to contain the virus than it is about what people can be made to endure. More to the point, it is about asking, when the designed-to-fail system indeed fails, where can we most easily direct the blame?

If we were really going to stop the spread of the virus we would do this. The US Congress would follow the advice of economists, like Stephanie Kelton here, and fire up the money printer so we can pay everyone to stay home until the virus is isolated or vaccinated. That is it. That's the only thing that would stop it.  But they didn't want to do that because our politics isn't really capable of doing anything but protecting the interests of wealth. So here is what happened instead.

Congress did print up some money. But that was only so they could send trillions of dollars to things like airlines, cruise ship companies, and the massively fraud based financial sector of the US economy.  The rest of us were left at the mercy of our bosses, the business tyrants who wanted to "reopen the economy" and politicians who wanted to "balance" that death drive with the perception that they care about protecting the public health. Hence, the "phased reopening" plans drawn up by all of those panels of worthies.

But if you "reopen," if you tell everyone to go back out under strange new circumstances where they must re-invent their operations on the fly while most misunderstand and some completely ignore the rules, then the virus is definitely going to spread. And so, guess what, now the virus is spreading.  Again, the only thing to stop it is to pay everyone to stay home but they still don't want to do that. So instead, now we must make a policy that will identify and penalize one individual scapegoat after another even as the virus continues to spread. And so that is what we are doing.

New Orleans-area leaders took a harder line against the coronavirus Monday amid rising infections in the region, with Mayor LaToya Cantrell warning of possible stricter restrictions on businesses in the city and Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng mandating mask-wearing for the first time.

Cantrell said Monday that more stringent rules in the city could come ahead of Independence Day weekend, after a task force she appointed last week found cases of non-compliance with current mask rules at local grocery stores and other businesses.

It's not that they're wrong to tell people to wear masks. It's just that every office holder with the charge to offer support and encouragement to the public during this time has failed to do that in multiple and compounding ways. And now all they can offer us is shame.

Here is John Bel this past weekend reacting to the very bad news about the rate of spread.

96 percent of today’s reported cases are associated with community spread, rather than congregate settings.

43 percent of today’s cases are from people 29 years old or younger.

It’s on all of us to stop the spread of COVID-19 in Louisiana. #lagov #lalege https://t.co/LbaBFwjOpu

— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) June 28, 2020

It's "on all of us" to stop it now. Is it, though?  The governors and mayors and senators and presidents who actually have the power to make policy, shouldn't this be on them? They've been pretending it is on "all of us" because that's what they need to say in order to rationalize these bogus reopening phases. But the phases don't seem to be working.  Turning around and telling every individual that it's on you to make the unworkable plans they've drawn up work is an abdication of responsibility. Politicians and bosses love to talk about "personal responsibility" when it applies to the powerless. But when those so-called leaders have already set up the objects of these sermons to fail, the admonition amounts to little more than bullying.

We did the right thing by going into lockdown. When the governor and the mayor ordered everyone to stay home back in March, we stayed home. But that was when we needed assurances from those holding power that they were in this with us.  We needed some guarantee of support. We needed to have our income supplemented with better than temporary unemployment benefits and a one time check.  We needed our housing stabilized.  We needed our jobs protected.  None of that happened.

It wasn't allowed to happen because wealth controls all the levers of power. Because Congress abandoned everyone and left the states and cities whose budgets were devastated by the shutdown to twist in the wind. Because desperate local business people yelled and screamed at the governor and mayor to "reopen the economy" and because the desperate governor and mayor obliged. And so the reopening, quite predictably, led to the virus coming back. But we're now not supposed to blame the governor or the mayor or the rich people they listen to. Nope. Instead "it's on all of us." Which is to say all (or any) of us can be blamed at any moment so long as it isn't anyone with any real power.

The insidious thing about this rhetorical trick is that part of it rings true. In certain ways, we really can say it is on "all of us" to deal with this. We should all wear masks and do social distancing when we are out. We should be checking on our neighbors. We should be looking for ways we can help one another. But none of this is a "personal responsibility." It's a collective responsibility. We all need to do it together. We need to support one another in the effort. "Personal" responsibility implies that we are each doing it in isolation where we are subject to bullying and shaming. The situation calls for mutual aid and trust. Not more policing and punishment.

We shouldn't have to endure the pandemic while also living in perpetual fear of a boss or a landlord or a cop.  We need to be able to trust each other. We need to be able to say "it's on all of us" and believe that in good faith. Unfortunately, it's quite clear our leaders are incapable of anything like that.