Lock it up

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US, elected leaders at every level have struggled and failed to agree on an effective and consistent policy response to contain it. Rules promulgated for public gatherings, mask wearing, and business operations have had wide variance from town to town or state to state.  Over the past year, these rules have expanded and contracted again in "phases" shaped not so much by the public health interest as by political pressure from influential wealth holders.  

A mayor might shut down because the cases are spiking but keep inviting tourists to town anyway.  A school board might cave to pressure from bosses to open and deprive parents of an excuse not to come in to work. But if the virus spreads among the school population, officials have plenty of excuses on hand as to why that isn't their fault.

This is the sixth week that the district has reported cases on its website. While there have been new cases each week, officials say they are relatively small numbers and Avegno said new cases don’t appear to come from the classroom. 

“Where we are seeing cases is in gatherings and extracurricular activities outside school. So the slumber party … and we have seen some outbreaks on athletic teams,” she said, noting there hadn’t been athletic outbreaks in the two weeks.

“With teachers, if it’s more than one teacher, it’s if they went out to dinner after school,” Avegno said. “Just like office spread, like in a breakroom. That’s not anything unique to schools.”

Hotel stays, yes. "Slumber parties, no."  Bars and restaurants are open but only the ones that serve the tourists. The more local clientele had better stay home... especially if they happen to be teachers. And this has been the situation in every city and in every state. The resulting chaos has claimed hundreds of thousands more lives than were ever necessary while piling ever greater fortune upon the world's billionaire class. 

Remarkably this situation has only been made worse by the arrival of the vaccines this year.  Policymakers could have taken advantage of the clear "light at the end of the tunnel" offered by vaccination. They could have heeded the advice of most health experts to keep restrictions in place for a few more months until a significant portion of the population was vaccinated.  Instead they quickly shifted into Mission Accomplished mode and loosened the rules around all sorts of activities. It's quite likely that the resulting sense in the public that the pandemic is already over has slowed the pace of vaccinations thus extending the threat further and endangering even more lives. 

Now as the virus seems to be spreading once again, Governors and mayors are even more hesitant than before to take the steps necessary to stop it. Many of them, in fact, are giving up altogether. 

And this spring, many American mayors are explaining their decision to leave office with the same reason: that the pandemic response demanded so much that they could not both campaign and perform their duties; or that the work had become so stressful that their families had recommended that they step away.

“They are just spent,” said Katharine Lusk, executive director of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, which carries out an annual survey of mayors. Mayors surveyed last summer expressed deep anxiety about the effects of lost tax revenue on their budgets, as they juggled the pandemic, economic recovery and their core responsibilities.

Meanwhile the ones who have decided to stick it out are content to leave it all up to the vaccines and shift the blame for anything that goes wrong to the "personal responsibility" of individuals to take them. Inevitably this will mean more people will die than have to. But that's all part of the political cost/benefit analysis. 

Anyway it's only appropriate now that we're back to doing the bare minimum to protect the public health that the one thing we know we can do about the coronavirus is put it in jail. That is going about how you might expect.

Starting in March of last year, New York Times reporters tracked every known coronavirus case in every correctional setting in the United States, including state and federal prisons, immigrant detention centers, juvenile detention facilities, and county and regional jails.

We measured the pandemic’s excruciating impact on prisoners using records requests and interviews with people from all corners of the system. We spoke with incarcerated people and their families, prison wardens, jailers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil rights groups.

A year later, one in three inmates in state prisons are known to have had the virus, the data shows. In federal facilities, at least 39 percent of prisoners are known to have been infected. The true count is most likely higher because of a dearth of testing, but the findings align with reports from The Marshall Project and the Associated Press, U.C.L.A. Law and The COVID Prison Project that track Covid-19 in prisons.

The virus has caused misery and loss in many places, but its destructive power has been felt intensely among the incarcerated, who have been infected at rates several times higher than those of their surrounding communities.

Last week, The Lens reported that only a quarter of the  more than 800 people detained at the Orleans Parish jail have been vaccinated. That is a rate comparable with the city's population at large.  The state prisons are a bit behind.  But, as the same article points out, prison is a particularly dangerous place to be during a pandemic. 

Throughout the pandemic, prisons and jails have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 due to the inability of prisoners to social distance. There have been over 3,000 reported cases of the virus in Louisiana’s prisons, according to data from the DOC, and 36 people have died.

And so you may be thinking all of this should raise the obvious question, why are we still putting so many people in jail? Of course we should be asking that question anyway but especially now, under these circumstances, why are we needlessly endangering more lives?  Well, actually, that question was already asked of the mayor under arguably more dangerous circumstances during the height of the pandemic last year.  Here is what she said.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

Yesterday we watched yet another horrific instance of state cruelty in the form of body cam footage of yet another cop murdering yet another Black person for "breaking the damn law" against having an air freshener hanging from a mirror. Do those of us who are worried about that require a similar talking to from a "streetwise salty tongue?" Or is the summary death sentence for minor offense only acceptable when administered by virus instead of by gunshot?

It's not yet time to be hugged by any neanderthals

Again, I really am having trouble understanding why this is going on right now.  

NEW ORLEANS — The city of New Orleans will move to a Modified Phase-3 COVID order starting this Friday, March 12. The order in Orleans will mirror the state's Phase-3 measures in many ways, but differ in some key ways.

The State of Louisiana will allow full capacity at houses of worship, while Orleans will continue to limit capacity, now it will be 75 percent of capacity with social distancing and mask guidelines required. 

We just need another couple months to get the vax numbers up to something more comfortable.  People should be able to handle that kind of an ask by now.  Opening everything now is specifically the thing these public health experts warned everybody not to do just one week ago. 

But the next few months in the pandemic are critical. Concern is growing over moves by some states to lift restrictions already, while new variants of the virus are on the rise in the U.S. Experts warn that actions taken now risk delaying getting back to some semblance of normal.

Health officials are urging restrictions to remain in place for the final stretch, saying that it will not be much longer before the situation markedly improves, and it does not make sense to lift all restrictions when widespread vaccinations are in sight.   

The President of the United States has characterized the rush to lift restrictions during this final stretch as "neanderthal mentality."  Most experts agree that we can expect to reach herd immunity from COVID when somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of the population has been vaccinated.  The CDC expects that to happen in about three months if we don't do anything stupid right now such as drop the emergency restrictions. 

Thomas Tsai, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that by summer, “I think we can have a much more, I don’t want to say normal, but at least a 'new normal' summer."

But experts warn that the return to normal could actually be delayed if restrictions are lifted too soon, causing a new spike in cases in the near term.

Tsai likened the current situation to the seventh inning stretch of a baseball game. “Progress has been made; it’s OK to take stock of that,” he said. “How we play the next two innings determines if this is a single game or turns into a doubleheader.”

Sports analogies like that one are flying around this discourse right now.  We've heard it's the 7th inning, or the third quarter, or "maybe the end of halftime at a football game." But really the thing we would like to avoid right now is this. 

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According to this poll, a plurality of voters (34%) would prefer that restrictions remain in place until we reach 75 percent vaccinated and a majority (55%) would like to wait at least until we get 50 percent done. As of yesterday, CDC reports that just under 10 percent of the US population was currently vaccinated.  According to the Louisiana Department of Health, that number for Orleans Parish is 12.33%.  

So what are our local leaders doing with that information?  Well, first of all they are lying about it in their campaign emails.  But also they are throwing open the doors for all sorts of things that we really don't actually need to do right now.. especially with a new round of stimulus on the way.  Some days we really have to wonder if they are even want to end this thing.  In today's Advocate, Will Sutton writes that he wants to get back to hugging people again... but maybe not just yet.  

Yes, it’s true that the crackdowns have hurt us economically. And it’s true that far too many have lost jobs and income, adjusted, gross or otherwise. But I’m still seeing too many people not cooperating, and I’m not comfortable with guessing who out there has been vaccinated and who hasn’t. I know I’ll feel safer with more people fully vaccinated.

Let's take the guesswork anxiety out of this thing. It only takes a few more months.

Ripe for the picking

The race to stop COVID before the situation becomes much worse is more urgent than ever. We are told there is "no way to sugarcoat" that.  

If the variants alter the virus enough, tests, treatment and vaccines might not work as well, said Straif-Bourgeois. A new variant might be able to slip past antibodies, re-infecting someone who has already had COVID-19. Potentially, such a variant could complicate the path to herd immunity.

“There is no way to sugarcoat this,” said Garry. “It does look like some of the variants may not be as effectively blocked by the vaccine.”

The virus is leveling up. The longer these variants are out there unchecked, the more likely they are to develop into something that beats the vaccine. If those strains become dominant worldwide then we have to start all over. As of right now, we are told the vaccines are still effective against the so-called "UK variant" everyone is worried about.   But also that more infectious and deadlier strain has been detected in New Orleans already. So this is not the time to let up on our mask and distance precautions. It's not the time to pressure the schools to reopen. And it's definitely not the time to be welcoming visitors for Mardi Gras.  This is the time to get some shots into some arms, as they say. 

And for a minute there it seemed like that was indeed the plan.  But then a funny thing happened. 

The Biden administration has told Louisiana officials that shipments of the coronavirus vaccine won’t be increasing much for at least a month, the latest challenge to the state’s effort to ramp up vaccinations.

The revelation that shipments won’t be increasing — which has long been the promise made to states by federal officials — means Louisiana likely won’t be able to hold mass vaccination events anytime soon, Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a press conference Friday.

Vaccine shipments to the state this week and next are expected to remain flat at about 58,000 doses per week, with potentially only a 5% to 10% bump through most of February. Louisiana has received roughly flat shipments of vaccine doses for the past month, Edwards said, amid supply issues that are impacting distribution across the U.S.

Whoops! They took the Trump administration at their word and that turned out to be bullshit. Now the planned ramping up of vaccinations could be delayed by a month or so.  Do we have even that long before things get even more complicated?  Guess we'll find out. 

Either way the "post-pandemic era" is coming.  We might decide to mark its arrival at the time of our successfully containing the virus. Or we could call it when get a certain percentage of the population vaccinated. More than a few people might like to mark it at the end of Joe Biden's first 100 days in office.  It really depends on how soon you might want the checks to stop coming. But wherever we decide the pandemic ends, the conditions it will leave in its wake are setting us up for a cascade of further disasters which we are not likely prepared to mitigate. 

For example, I'm very curious where we decide to define the new level of "structural unemployment."   

The labor market has rebounded somewhat since the initial coronavirus wave in the spring. But of the 22 million jobs that disappeared, nearly 10 million remain lost.

“Compared to then, we are doing better,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the career site Indeed, referring to the spring. “But compared to the pre-Covid era, we still have so far to go.”

Consider that each of the last four recessions has occasioned a deeper and longer lasting period of job loss than its predecessor. The so-called "Great Recession" of 2008 was historically frightening.  Here is a somewhat famous very frightening graph of our declining economic resilience. 

These numbers do not even tell the whole story, of course. Each recession sets off a new exacerbation of precarities as the jobs that comprise each recovery are more exploitative and less secure with fewer hours, benefits. So even as the line eventually goes back up, material conditions continue to worsen. 

To dig ourselves out of that hole we are going to need a more aggressive and determined commitment from the federal government than we have seen in generations.  We will need real support and relief. That should come in the form of monthly payments to make up the income lost during stay-at-home orders. It should include a guarantee that your boss can't expose you to danger and that a landlord or a bank can't kick you out of your home.  We need to rescue our state and municipal governments before they collapse into bankruptcy exposing everyone to more chaos.

Unfortunately, none of the above is Joe Biden's priority. Making Mitch McConnell happy is. 

President-elect Joe Biden will seek a deal with Republicans on another round of Covid-19 relief, rather than attempting to ram a package through without their support, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The approach could mean a smaller initial package that features some priorities favored by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The idea is to forgo using a special budget process that would remove the need to get the support of at least 10 Republicans in the Senate, which will be split 50-50 and under Democratic control only thanks to the vice president’s vote.

Rather than taking the challenges of the pandemic-depression seriously, Biden's first concern is rehabilitating the image of the Republican Party after its leadership instigated a riot at the Capitol intended to disrupt the certification of his own election.  And since delivering justice or even just the hope of a better world isn't as important as making sure he's got a  "strong opposition party" around to do deals with, Joe is opening the negotiations at... one time checks for $1400. 

The stimulus package has a price tag above $1.5 trillion and includes a commitment for $1,400 stimulus checks, according to a source familiar with the proposal, and Biden is expected to commit to partner with private companies to increase the number of Americans getting vaccinated.

A significant portion of the additional financial resources will be dedicated to minority communities. “I think you will see a real emphasis on these underserved communities, where there is a lot of hard work to do,” said another transition official.

We'll examine that "emphasis on underserved communities" more closely when there are more details. But there isn't much reason to believe this is anything beyond the usual noble-sounding framing for unnecessary and counterproductive means testing.  More to the point, after everything that's happened, pushing people to accept $1400 as $2000 if you count the accrued $600 store credit from December is just shitty messaging. Even though we've shoveled trillions of dollars in tax cuts and subsidies for billionaires out the door all year, Joe wants you to know now that he is counting every penny you might get your grubby little hands on. 

The millionaires who comprise the Biden led faction of congressional Democrats may not feel this personally but their performative miserliness put on to please the op-ed writers does more than just insult people. It abandons whole communities to ravaging predators. 

The New Orleans area has earned an unwelcome financial distinction during the coronavirus pandemic: more homeowners here are at risk of losing their homes due to unpaid mortgages than in any other major American city.

More than one-in-ten borrowers in the New Orleans-Metairie metro area are now at least 30 days late with mortgage payments and could be at risk of foreclosure on their properties, according to federal data.

New Orleans was already being hollowed out and gentrified by predatory capital before the pandemic began.  Without drastic action, COVID will surely lead to an exponential expansion of that crisis. 

"Our numbers for folks seeking help with evictions already are through the roof — up 300% since the pandemic started," said Laura Tuggle, executive director of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a non-profit legal aid provider for low income Louisianans. "The deluge on mortgages is going to come."

With a relatively high concentration of low-income households, the New Orleans area already had one of the nation's highest mortgage delinquency rates before the pandemic, according to Andy Walden, economist and director of market research at Black Knight, a Jacksonville, Florida, firm that tracks mortgage trends nationwide.

That story is from a few weeks ago. There is a new one in today's paper that further confirms what's happening here. Housing sale prices are up in Orleans Parish by 16% this year.  But those numbers really just show us the rich getting richer.  Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, the broad numbers mask big discrepancies between the upper and lower end of the market, and some of the strains in housing across the area. According to federal data, more than one-in-ten borrowers in the New Orleans-Metairie metro area are at least 30 days late on their mortgage payments, putting them at risk of foreclosure.

About a month ago we wondered what was happening the "large portfolio of foreclosed properties" that had been held by the embattled Bank of Louisiana before the younger generation of management there began selling them off.  We wondered about that specifically because a foreclosure crisis is typically followed up by a wave of vulture capitalism that results in even more intense and damaging wealth consolidation. One can only assume that will get even worse now with so much of the city now ripe for the picking.

So we find ourselves, not only in a desperate race to stop the virus before it mutates beyond our control, but also in a race to protect working class New Orleanians from the ravages of the post-pandemic economy. At the beginning of the year we wrote that policy choices by both the mayor and the assessor indicate they intend to side with the asset speculators over the city's residents. In this month's Antigravity, MACCNO voices similar concerns about the assessor. 

Cutting property taxes for commercial property owners—who tend to be wealthier and whiter than the general population—without a corresponding benefit for commercial tenants, while simultaneously increasing residential property taxes and rent, would be a recipe for displacement and gentrification no matter when it happened. But during a pandemic that has already created economic disaster for musicians, small businesses, artists, and other members of the cultural community, the effects could be especially devastating. Williams himself acknowledges the situation he is creating but avoids responsibility, telling The Advocate he “is not the tax collector,” even though he doesn’t “see how everybody is going to be able to pay their taxes on time.”

Is anyone coming to help? It's not clear that they are. Biden's inaugural speech sounded a lot like a redux of his convention speech. Which is to say he was long on affected empathy for your suffering but short on any will to do anything about it. The "unity" talk even evoked unpleasant Mitch Landrieu "One City One Voice" flashbacks. Yes, of course, bad things are happening to you. Maybe you've lost your job. Maybe you can't pay for health care.  Maybe you are facing eviction. Maybe the planet is on fire and we're facing a future of diminishing prospects for most of us. We know about all of these things and acknowledge that they are bad.  But the one thing we really can't tolerate is any complaints.

So Joe Biden is going to open the schools in 100 days.  If we can't vaccinate people by then and the virus is still out of control, that is too bad. Someone will just find a way to blame the teachers. So New Orleans is open for Carnival visitors.  If cases start to spike because workers were compelled by their bosses to go serve food and drinks to tourists, that is too bad. They mayor will inevitably get on TV and yell at the residents again.  The post-pandemic is coming.  Hopefully it comes sooner than later because lives are at stake in that.  But, in its wake, the fortunes and livelihoods of the vulnerable working class are going to be exposed. And it's highly doubtful they'll find many friends in power willing to do anything about that.

They're up to something

Not clear exactly what yet but if you were listening to the press conference on Monday, there were some interesting quotes. 

Cantrell said the move ending the furloughs was the “first step on the city’s road to recovery.” She also indicated that it was also the first step in a larger plan to restructure the city’s workforce.

“We are making this move as a part of a much broader effort to restructure how we use our public servants, our public employees, in the city of New Orleans,” she said. “Everyone needs to have that shared sacrifice and do what it takes to move this city forward. … In the weeks ahead, we will come before you with specifics as it relates to emergency response, business response, community response and organizational changes as it relates to the City of New Orleans.”

They have some idea of how they want to "restructure" and it appears they may be using the emergency response and selective decisions about furloughs to get that implemented.  Kind of an ad-hoc budgeting process depending on how "optimistic" they get from month to month. 

Cantrell said the city was ending some furloughs with additional funds the city is projecting in a more optimistic outlook. If those funds don’t materialize, however, the move could cause layoffs later in the year, she said. 

The additional funds optimistically projected there refer to a possible new round of federal stimulus (which, yes, is exactly what we need but don't hold your breath) also stepped up sales tax collection if we get enough people vaccinated in time for that to help, and property tax collection which... it turns out... is now delayed by... wait for it... to much "optimism."

Waiting on your property tax bill in New Orleans? So is the rest of the city. Blame paperwork problems and overly optimistic city officials for holding up the annual notices telling property owners how much they need to pay.

Tax bills typically go out during the last weeks of December. But because of problems that prevented the certification of the tax rolls, the earliest they could now be sent is this week. None of the issues will change the taxes owed by residents. But City Hall said it will adjust the deadline for payments once the bills are sent out.

According to this, at least part of the problem comes from the way the bills were itemized. Apparently they were prepared in the expectation that the December millage reconfiguration would pass. It did not and so now things need to be revised. Of course the overall revenue doesn't change. So one would think there isn't much optimism/pessimism that comes into play.  Unless you were optimistically hoping to restructure your "emergency response, business response, community response and organizational changes as it relates to the City of New Orleans," and now you have to find an alternative means of accomplishing that.... perhaps through emergency measures. 

But we'll just have to wait and see as far as that goes.  There is one other matter in the story about the tax bills, though, and I'm not sure I understand it exactly.  

One potentially more substantive issue also is holding up the process: a disagreement between the assessor’s office and the Tax Commission about the value of “public service” property in the city, a category that largely encompasses property owned by utilities.

Under state law, those property values are set by the Tax Commission and passed along to local assessors, commission Chairman Lawrence Chehardy said. But in the final version of the tax rolls, the assessed value that the commission put on the total value of those properties is about $65,300 higher than what the assessor’s office estimated, Chehardy said. A meeting is set Wednesday to discuss the discrepancy and try to correct the problem, he said.

One way to read that is the city proposed to charge "public service" property... perhaps belonging to Entergy or maybe Cox or some such... less money than the state Tax Commission expected they should. I don't know if I'm reading that correctly but if I am then, given the assessor's recent tendency to give out tax breaks to large corporations, it's something to watch.

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.

In other words, he skipped bail

You have to admit it has a certain elegance to it. 

The Louisiana Supreme Court set up new rules this year to quell public criticism over its secretive system for disciplining judges accused of misconduct.

But the first judge to face public charges under those attempts at transparency, Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell, is about to run out the clock. He'll be leaving the bench and a stack of ethical complaints behind him -- with no public disciplinary hearing, much less a blot on his judicial record.

Judge Cantrell will leave the bench without having faced any consequences for his overly harsh, obnoxiously so, in fact, treatment of defendants and their lawyers who had the nerve to object to his bail policies even though a federal court found them to be unconstitutional. 

Among other things, Cantrell was accused of “willful misconduct” and “persistent and public conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute.”

From the bench, he launched or threatened contempt-of-court proceedings against defense attorneys who requested bond for their clients in amounts below a $2,500 floor that he’d adopted. That sparked a federal civil rights lawsuit that forced an overhaul of the court’s funding scheme.

And yet now it is Judge Cantrell who is skipping out on bail.  And that many not even be the biggest irony here.  For that we need to look at the reason the judge was able to postpone his matter past the expiration of his term.

Cantrell requested, and received, an extension to this week, saying that COVID-19 concerns had slowed depositions and subpoena returns. A new hearing date was set over three days to begin Monday. Recently, it was recently “continued without date.”

In and of itself, that seems proper.  But consider the judge's lack of consideration for accused persons in his own courtroom and it seems less like justice. Makes one wonder what his daughter-in-law might say.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

Misrule of the Lords

It's only November but already the matter of Carnival 2021 has fallen into chaos. The city has apparently outsourced its authority to make the major decisions to the individual eminences in charge of the parading krewes.

Clark Brennan, captain of the Krewe of Bacchus, says the mega-parade “definitely plans to roll down St. Charles Avenue” on Feb. 14, if the city gives the green light to Carnival parades in 2021.

“We have a theme, freshly painted floats as well as throws and costumes in production,” he wrote in a statement Thursday morning.

Brennan emphasized the krewe’s preparedness ahead of a meeting of the Mayor’s Mardi Gras Advisory Council, scheduled to take place on Thursday afternoon.

And why wouldn't it be this way?  If this year has proven anything to anyone it's that everything in this country is completely ungovernable.  COVID cases are spiking all over the world but the odds are your city or state is pressing on with plans to "reopen" schools and businesses. The election result points toward a divided government next year so don't expect there to be a plan out of Washington that would help us do anything differently.  As a result, municipal governments are going bankrupt. The elected leaders of those municipalities, whose job it had been to distribute favors and revenues their offices allow them to access as patronage to their backers among the social and business elite, suddenly find themselves with a lot less to give away. 

In a better world, this would signal a shift toward a more populist style of politics focused on protecting the working poor.  But our political system is utterly broken so what we have instead is a situation where we're still trying to pay off the elites by dismantling what remains of the social contract and selling off the parts. More tax breaks. More PILOTs, more "business incentive" plans. They're even inviting the oligarchs in to run the bribery operation themselves. It's a "major paradigm shift." 

It's why, despite the mayor's celebrated posing over maintaining stricter COVID guidelines here than in the rest of the state, Gayle Benson still gets to do whatever she wants. And it's why, despite our beloved "Teedy's" tough talk all year about maybe having to cancel Mardi Gras, in fact these decisions will all be left up to Clark Brennan and Jimmy Reiss and the rest of the council of aristocrats. 

Cantrell emphasized her proposals were meant only to inspire brainstorming, not as a template. The differences, she said, "are not going to come from me; they're going to come from you." 

And so Carnival policy is going to be treated the way everything else is under our elitist junta. Because the decisions will not be made by an ostensible representative of the people, their concerns will not have priority.  Instead, what we will get is a Mardi Gras for and by the "business leaders" in charge. You, for the most part, are not invited. 

Smaller walking parades would also be required to follow safety guidelines, she said.

Dr. Takeisha Davis, a member of the council and a rider with the Krewe of Femme Fatale, brought safety recommendations from a council subcommittee. The panel recommended that parade goers be required to wear masks and to stay with their group six feet from other groups. It also recommended that tents and other structures be prohibited on parade routes, that drinking be discouraged and that kegs be banned — all efforts to prevent crowds from gathering.

So the things we know we can expect to see at Carnival 2021 include some version of the Bacchus Parade, a socially distanced Rex Ball imbued with elements of hygiene theater, whatever else they can turn into a controlled, isolated event.  On the other hand, the real heart of Carnival, the thing where regular people walk around in the streets greeting their neighbors with snacks and cocktails, that's probably going to get you a fine.

Normalcy in our time, normalcy in our town

Did we talk about the Democratic convention on here yet?  It's been such a weird year in so many ways. Too often I find myself falling behind the noise before I can write enough of it down.  That's not good. Keeping good notes on this website has been such a useful tool for me in just holding it together over the years, I am afraid if I let it go for too long I might dissociate completely from reality.  Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.... 

Oh wait. Here it is. Just a quick summary because I was probably in a hurry. 

But one theme the Democrats pushed relentlessly was Joe Biden's capacity for "empathy."  In Zoom video after dimly lit Zoom video, speakers testified about the times Joe personally had reached out to someone to let them know how well he understood their trauma, how much he cared about and validated their pain.  Almost nothing was said about what he planned to do about any of it.  In fact, one may have come away from the convention with the impression that nothing can be done.  It's a strange thing to offer to voters but it does seem to be in line with the Democratic brand. 

They're basically saying, yeah we know, your life sucks right now. Look at Joe. He's out there feeling your pain. He understands. Meanwhile the policy program is full of little ways to make it easier for you to get used to and cope with the shittiness. We're not out to change the shitty conditions. We're here to valorize your experience of suffering through them.

The hallmarks of this ideology of free market fatalism are visible throughout the mainstream of the Democratic Party.  For example, the same tone was easily detectable in Mayor Cantrell's "State of the City" address delivered just around the time of the convention this year.

“We are all well-versed in the unwavering focus, the hope, and the strength it takes to rebuild from what can seem like disaster,” she said. “I’m here to deliver a message of hope and point the way forward to our future beyond this pandemic.”

The city is now five months past the initial outbreak, which trailed a range of side effects including rampant unemployment and evictions and a city budget now estimated to be more than $100 million in the red. Frequently harkening back to the 1853 yellow fever pandemic, which claimed 8,000 lives, and other, more recent tragedies, Cantrell framed the city and its people as among the most capable of rising to the challenge the current crisis presents.

“We are no strangers to trauma and disruption, you know better than me,” Cantrell said, noting next week will be the 15-year anniversary of the levee failures and flooding set off by Hurricane Katrina.

Again, the message is, our lives are marked by trauma but the mayor knows it and wants us to have "hope."  What, specifically, should we hope for? Well, it's murky.  She says we shouldn't have to worry about making rent.  But the policy response is not only inadequate but, critically, it is embedded in trickle-down economics and charitable fundraising projects administered by private non-profits.  And, above all else, great pains are taken to ensure we do not saddle our landlords with worries as well.

Acknowledging a tripling in the eviction rate, Cantrell touted various rental assistance programs — including a fundraising effort by the nonprofit set up for her transition into office — and said she is fighting for federal assistance.

“The time of a pandemic is not the time for our people to lay awake at night wondering how to make next month’s rent,” Cantrell said. “It is also not the time for landlords to face missing mortgage payments or losing investments they spent a lifetime to build.”

The Dem convention and Cantrell's speech took place a week prior to the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's arrival in New Orleans. That week, a New York Times feature called attention to the long term effects of that disaster and what everyone should know by now are the harmful consequences of the unjust and ineffectual "recovery" policies implemented in its wake.  Sorry to pull such a long quote here.

Pre-Katrina, there was already a considerable shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans. The situation has only become worse, as many of the affordable units the city had were never rebuilt after the storm and the urban core became whiter and wealthier.

New Orleans now has roughly 33,000 fewer affordable housing units than it needs, according to HousingNOLA, a local research and advocacy group. There are opportunities in every corner of the city to fix this, argued Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of HousingNOLA, when we met in her office in Mid-City on South Carrollton Avenue.

Most New Orleanians are renters. Pre-Katrina, the market rate for a one-bedroom apartment was around $578 monthly. It has roughly doubled since then, meaning a full-time worker must now earn about $18 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Real wages, however, have stalled, and many of the places that employ New Orleanians remain closed. Tens of thousands of workers in the city’s beloved music, drinks, food and tourism businesses — who were the most likely to lose their livelihoods both after the storm and now during the pandemic — make a minimum wage of $7.25.

In some other cities, Ms. Morris explained, unaffordable rent “is the result of a housing stock shortage, but in New Orleans we have a vacancy rate of about 20 percent!” In total, there are about 37,700 vacant units. I could feel it biking and driving through the curvilinear streets that weave from the river to the lake, passing by elegant, unfilled properties on otherwise vibrant blocks, then by neatly rebuilt houses sitting lonely in areas frozen in 2007: three empty lots for every six homes you see.

Residents like Terence Blanchard, the Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, who resides in a thriving midcentury neighborhood along Bayou St. John, live this dichotomy. “People talk about the recovery,” he told me as we stood on his dock overlooking the water and City Park. “But if you go to my mom’s house in Pontchartrain Park, there was no real recovery.”

The federal housing vouchers mostly known by the shorthand “Section 8” — which subsidize rent payments above 30 percent of participants’ income — fully cover “fair market rate rent,” which in New Orleans is calculated as $1,034 to $1,496 for a one-bedroom apartment. That means even in increasingly upscale, higher-ground areas of town there is little stopping developers and landlords with vacant properties from lowering rents by a few hundred dollars and still being able to generate revenue.

For Ms. Morris, the continued holdout by many landlords that want “a certain kind of family,” or Airbnb customers, has grown to “psychotic” levels of classism and racism. “At a certain point,” she said, “the math has to let you at least manage your prejudices.”

Whenever the post-2005 destruction and gentrification of New Orleans is discussed, I am obliged to point out again that none of it was an accident.  Since, literally days after Katrina landed, we were already trying to warn that this was going to happen and it would happen as a result of deliberate policy choices made by people who wield political power in New Orleans. Then it happened. It happened every day. Sometimes in very big ways and other times as part of a general creep. But the whole time, we were saying out loud to anyone who would listen, this is happening, the money power, the real estate, tourism and business owners were gutting the city.

And it didn't matter. They did what they wanted. Because that's what always happens. They have the power. We have nothing. You can see it. You can say it. You can object all you want. But they do whatever they want and you don't matter.  Even now. In the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of a depression. There is no such thing as housing justice. Because they can afford to be "psychotic" in their stubbornness. And no one with any political power will stop them

We can complain all we want, but even now, at the lowest point of crisis, political leaders still emphasize the concerns of landlords holding them equal to or greater than the housing stressed poor. Today, a week after a Category 2 hurricane ripped through and knocked out everyone's power we're still struggling with worries over whether or not the polling locations can operate.  Guess what was back up and running immediately, though.

Public transportation is down, power is out for 90% of the city, but eviction court is open. We have monitors headed in to watch how the judges handle evictions after a category 2 hurricane, during a pandemic.

— Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative (@JanePlaceCLT) October 29, 2020

One thing about New Orleans politics people most misunderstand is how fundamentally conservative it is. The governing ideology of all the major power centers and most political organizations is pro-police, pro-landlord, anti-labor. It's rare to find any observer, let alone someone from out of town, describe it this way, however. Which is why this New Yorker piece by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is refreshing. Taylor is writing primarily about the superficial racial politics of the Biden-Harris campaign but within that argument we find this passage.

There is little consideration of how a municipal administrator’s class standing may complicate solidarities with those it is simply assumed they will represent. This is especially true for Black elected officials, many of whom come from working-class origins but whose class standing shifts when they move into political office. In May, 2018, LaToya Cantrell became the first Black woman to be elected as mayor of New Orleans. Cantrell, who first moved to New Orleans in 1990, in order to attend Xavier, a historically Black university, was deeply involved in community organizing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and served on the city council for six years before ascending to the position of mayor. Despite this background of community engagement, Cantrell has stood on the sidelines during a strike by a small group of Black sanitation workers, over demands for hazard pay and P.P.E. during the pandemic. Sanitation work is outsourced in New Orleans, allowing contracting companies to pay workers less than the city’s living-wage ordinance allows. In this case, when the sanitation workers decided to strike, one of the subcontractors procured a contract for prison laborers, who worked for even less than the striking workers. Even as these “essential workers” have called upon the mayor to help them secure P.P.E. and better pay, Cantrell has refused to intervene directly, saying that these issues are between the contractor and the workers. There is no inherent solidarity along the lines of race, and, when class conflict is introduced into the calculation, it is even more fraught.

This is a city where only a person who promises not to take from the rich and give to the poor and "all that kind of crap" can be mayor.  Policy can only be formulated through a distinctly neoliberal lens. The only acceptable approach to every problem involves some sort of "business incentive" public-private partnership, or other such trickle down scheme to benefit the ruling classes.

Meanwhile, even within the (very small and insular) world of progressive activism you can't get agreement on basic principles like, for example, housing as a human right or that teachers deserve unions.  And, in any case, the decisions that matter get made at a 10,000 foot remove from any of that through deals between political careerists, tourism bosses, and real estate interests. The public side of the political process, such as it is, is just nonsensical theater.

Which brings us to today's elections.  If you've voted early, or if you've wandered into a polling location this afternoon, you may have noticed that there are a lot of things going on with your ballot besides just that dismal Presidential election.  What even is all that stuff?  Well, if you really want to know the details you should stop here and go read the excellent and extremely thorough Antigravity and DSA voter guides.  But if you want the short version, stay here and I will tell you. 

Basically three things are happening. A slate of reformist candidates mostly associated with the public defender's office is trying to win a bunch of judicial seats.  A few somewhat progressive minded challengers are trying to wrest at least one or two school board seats away from the charter school privatizers with national corporate backing who currently dominate there. And, all of this is happening in the context of various power brokering institutions trying to consolidate their positions as electoral and patronage gatekeepers ahead of next year's municipal elections. 

The linchpin in the insider tug of war is the DA's race where Mayor Cantrell's alliance with BOLD, which did very well in the legislative races last year, is backing Keva Landrum. You can read a little bit about the dynamics of the race in this Advocate story about the fundraising. Landrum has positioned herself as the more conservative "law and order" candidate compared to Jason Williams and Arthur Hunter who she has criticized as "backed by third party special interests" interested in reforming the criminal legal system more aggressively than she would like.

As I type this right now, the polls are open for another twenty minutes. But my strong suspicion is the establishment candidates will win most of these judicial and school board races and Landrum will run first in the DA race.  Overall the theme of the night is conservative establishment results at home to match the general "return to normalcy" nationwide as Joe Biden becomes the next President.

Maybe that is disappointing.  But disappointment has pretty much been baked into this since March. Here is what I told the kids yesterday on a parallel internet. We know that the Biden Presidency only represents the replacement of one kind of conservatism with another. We know that, regardless of the election result, we are no nearer to overcoming the massive obstacles to human happiness posed by poverty, racism, disease, empire, and climate catastrophe. And we know these are all deeply embedded consequences of systemic capitalist exploitation and that the work of rooting them out has not even begun. 

But I would ask you, if only for the sake of your own mental well being and that of your neighbors, not to deny yourself the chance to revel in the pure and absolute joy of seeing Donald Trump ejected from the White House. Fuck that guy. He's almost gone. It's okay to enjoy that.

You won't believe who is trying to defund the police now

Amazingly, it is New Orleans and Co. 

Facing a collapsed tourism industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, two publicly-funded tourism agencies in New Orleans have cut funding for supplemental security and infrastructure improvements in the French Quarter. And one of them is trying to take back millions of unspent funds it’s contributed in years past.

The agencies in question are the Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Convention Center — a public body — and New Orleans and Company, a private nonprofit group that serves as the marketing agency for the city’s tourism industry. Both organizations had signed agreements with the city that will expire in a few months.

New Orleans and Company, however, has already cancelled one of its contracts with the city. 

With the end of the agreements, the city stands to lose roughly $5.7 million that it had in 2019 for French Quarter security and improvements. The biggest chunk of that money, $2.5 million per year, has gone to pay for Louisiana State Police patrols in the French Quarter. Another $1.2 million per year went to the French Quarter Task Force — an initiative originally created by entrepreneur Sidney Torres that pays off-duty NOPD officers to patrol the quarter in blue-light Smart Cars.

Okay so it is the Convention Center and NO & Co. For its part, the Convention Center says they are all paid up and the deal that created this fund is expiring, all of which seems to be true. But also they have to decide how much money they want to give away to Ron Forman so you can see why that might be a priority. 

But NO & Co. is the agency that is actually trying to take some of the money back... although it will surprise no one to know that the city disputes the amount they've actually paid and says also that they may in fact be behind on these obligations.

While New Orleans and Company believes that the money should be returned, the city has recently argued that New Orleans and Company actually owes additional money to the improvement fund. At a June FQMD board meeting, Smith stated that “the City is still missing the New Orleans & Co. 2019 remittances that came to about $2,000,000.00 and they have been attempting to collect these since February,” according to meeting notes.

Disputed U-O-MEs notwithstanding, why not just let the thing drop?   It's time to start de-funding the police/surveillance state and the French Quarter is the most overly-policed and heavily surveiled neighborhood in our city.  Sounds like a great place to start. 

Not sure that's the city's plan, though. A .25 cent sales tax renewal on the ballot in December would continue supplemental patrols there. The only question, it seems, is who will be doing the patrolling. 

One of the two plans comes from Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who wants to use the money to fund a new security team made up of a mix of police officers and civilians. The other is being championed by the French Quarter Management District — a state created body whose board is largely made up of appointees from tourism industry groups and French Quarter business and neighborhood groups. It hopes to use the money to expand an existing security detail made up of off-duty New Orleans Police Department officers.

It seems like the dispute here is really about control over turf.  While FQMD's plan is to keep paying the task force (famously founded by Sidney Torres) the mayor wants to give it to something called a "Grounds Patrol" operated by the city's Homeland Security department.  The key difference is that the Grounds Patrol would deputize civilian "quality of life" officers relegated to code enforcement which, the claim is, would free up NOPD to focus on real police work.  This sounds dubious.  In fact, The Lens points out in that article that model is very much along the lines of a failed Landrieu Administration experiment known as NOLA Patrol which had to be discontinued after the citizen deputies were found out to have been issuing traffic tickets.  

Again, it would appear that this dispute isn't so much about how best to spend a shrinking pot of policing money.  It's about who controls the pot and how much extra patronage they can wring from it. 

But even if the tax is renewed, the city is projecting that collections will be significantly lower than in years past due to a shrinking tourism industry brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Current projections for 2021 are $1.8 million, compared to $3 million last year. 

But that level of funding would expand the current size of the French Quarter Task force if all the revenue is dedicated to FQMD, even if New Orleans and Company ceased their $1.2 million contribution to the French Quarter Task Force.

Under Cantrell’s plan, the first $1.3 million raised by the sales tax would go to the Unified French Quarter Patrol along with an additional $1.5 million in funding from the French Market Corporation. 

The remainder of the sales tax, estimated to be $500,000 in 2021, would be administered by a newly created French Quarter Economic Development Oversight Committee. That extra money would be used for other public safety and quality of life initiatives within the French Quarter.

"Other public safety and quality of life initiatives" = what, exactly?  Well, that's for you to find out.  Suffice to say anytime you see something disbursed in the name of "economic development" in this city, you can begin looking for the crony capitalists right then and there.

More to the point, though, all of this petty squabbling and attendant corruption could be avoided (and patrons of French Quarter businesses could get a sales tax break) if we would just agree to de-fund the wholly unnecessary police-surveillance apparatus altogether.   But for some reason nobody is talking about doing that except the tourism agencies.  Never thought we'd see the day.

Bad air makes for trouble breathing

We do so many terrible things to ourselves in this state and say it's for "the economy." Is it any wonder the political agitation to open up and just get used to COVID  is so strong here?  Risking our health so the bosses can make their money is just how we do things here. Which is what makes this so perfect. 

Hazardous air pollution may help explain the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in communities like West Baton Rouge Parish, home to Port Allen. With 39 deaths as of Sept. 7, the parish’s per-capita death rate from COVID-19 ranked it among the top 3% of all U.S. counties with at least 30 deaths. Several of its neighbors in Louisiana’s industrial corridor also rank near the top of the list.

There is a sensational story in the news this morning about public officials planning to "crack down" on open air street gatherings they have determined to be an intolerable public health threat.  Their idea is to punish individuals already suffering from unemployment and displacement by taking away their federal and state benefits. 

In addition to simply issuing tickets, Cantrell said she has city officials researching whether the city would be able to strip those found in violation of the restrictions of their unemployment benefits.

"I have asked whether individuals who will be issued a citation, could that put them in jeopardy of losing their unemployment benefits," Cantrell said. "It’s my opinion, you can’t receive public resources but at the same time violate public mandates to keep people safe in the city of New Orleans. These are the things we’re looking at."

The chemical plants that line the Mississippi River and endanger thousands of lives by spewing tons of hazardous pollution into the air receive billions of dollars in public resources every year.  Now that we see their activity directly exacerbates the threat from the pandemic, will anyone demand we take action against them?  Or do we prefer to take it all out on the poorest and most helpless among us?

Just get used to it

Apparently that was always the plan.   

On Friday, the carriageway doors to Pat O’Brien’s will swing open again, and staff wearing the bar's traditional emerald green jackets and new face masks will welcome people back to its famous French Quarter courtyard.

Three blocks away at Bayona, chef Susan Spicer and her crew will soon start cooking sherry mustard sweetbreads and smoked duck sandwiches, firing up a culinary gem that's been closed since March.

The two businesses usually have little more in common than proximity in the city's oldest neighborhood. But now they share one compulsion: the need to get open again, somehow. 

“At this point, we just feel like we have to do something,” said Shelly Oechsner Waguespack, president of Pat O’Brien’s.

It's not safer to do any of this now than it was back in March. The virus is still active and as dangerous as ever.  It isn't spreading quite as rapidly because more people are at home by default and when they do go out they are careful about distance and mask wearing.  But distance and mask wearing isn't a solution. It's a way to limit exposure when people have to be out for "essential" purposes.  Going out to have drinks at Pat O's isn't essential. 

It only begins to feel necessary because, despite the federal government's capacity to do so, it has refused to reimburse businesses for their losses or pay workers to stay home.  Although there is no vaccine yet, we could have this thing safely contained by now if the will to take the necessary action had been there. Instead we've chosen to test how much stress the system will bear if we deny people any option but to just go out there and get used to it. 

Now though, Waguespack said a limited return is better than staying closed altogether. With no end to the coronavirus crisis in sight, the business has to find a way to carry on, she said.

That’s a sentiment shared by many across the New Orleans hospitality sector now, especially around the French Quarter, where the shriveled travel business has had a staggering impact.

Who knows how many small businesses will survive the pandemic now?  Back in May a reported 100,000 or more had already been permanently closed nationwide.  It's no surprise that business would slow with customers staying at home, but relief, most notably through the convoluted Paycheck Protection Program, has been elusive. And commercial landlords continue to demand rent. So the squeeze is definitely on.  But since this is a situation that so easily could have been avoided, we have to ask if it is intentional. It may be true that a lot of independent businesses are going under. But that also means the economy that emerges at the end of the crisis will be dominated by fewer but much larger firms with deeper pockets. 

The Covid-19 pandemic will likely leave us with an economy in which larger companies play an expanded role, representing a higher share of both employment and revenue. The stock market illustrates the phenomenon: the biggest firms have seen smaller stock market declines, on average, than smaller ones have. It’s the corporate version of the Matthew effect: the strong get stronger.

This shift began before the pandemic came along. From 1995 to 2013, the share of U.S. workers employed by firms with 10,000 or more employees increased to about 28%, from 24%. McKinsey has found that “superstar” firms (whose average revenue is seven times the median) raised their employment share to 30% in 2014-16, from 28% in 1995-97. There’s been much debate over why this is happening, especially the role that higher productivity plays. The International Monetary Fund recently concluded that “technology-driven changes in the structure of many product markets” have made a bigger difference than have individual countries’ regulations or antitrust policies.

But the real plum for the oligarchs left standing after the mass burn off of mom-and-pops is the most desperate and compliant workforce in generations. I believe this is by design. I'm running out of ways to say this by now so I'll just repeat the mantra I've been on since March when it became apparent that Congress would refuse to help.  The bosses have won the pandemic.  

It's not just me saying it anymore. A couple of weeks ago, Libby Watson made the case plain in The New Republic.

We’re left to wonder why Washington isn’t doing anything. But why aren’t we doing anything, either? How is it that Mitch McConnell leaves his house without being pelted with rotten tomatoes? How can our leaders, and the people who work for them, continue to show their faces in public? When is the fire going to reach them? What has to give? And why hasn’t it happened yet? One answer may be that the rich, including not just billionaires but the ordinary affluent of America, are not in anywhere near as much peril. And our politics is tuned to their frequency, whatever’s happening to the poor.

She puts an even finer point on it, though, and explains that it's not just The Bosses... as in, like, people at the Bezos level... who are coming out on top here, but probably your boss in particular is doing much better than you are by comparison. 

But there’s a divide that’s been more difficult to talk about: The one between Americans earning about the median income or less and Americans who earn two or three times that wage. Life is vastly different for people who earn $30,000 and people who earn $300,000—not on the same scale as the distance between the average American and Jeff Bezos but distinct nonetheless. Life is also significantly different between people who earn $30,000 and people who earn $130,000.

These people are likely to have a good, if not perfect, situation going: They have decent jobs and are probably able to work from home. They have health insurance through their job, which also gives them paid vacation and sick leave. They have retirement accounts, though these might fail the CNBC test. They don’t know what it’s like to apply for Medicaid or low-income housing. They don’t live in food deserts. They can make frequent use of the services provided by our app underclass, getting food, groceries, or whatever they like delivered to their door.

It's been a rough year. But, really, it's only been rough for most of us. Relatively speaking, it's been less rough for a fortunate minority with access to the levers of power. And it's setting up such that the post-pandemic world will be a net plus for that small but politically dominant class. Insofar as it can be said that there has even been a coherent policy response to the pandemic, the purpose of that response has been to protect the position and wealth of the ruling class. Whatever conditions that policy imposes on the rest of us, our only option is to just get used to it.

All of this scales down from the national to the local level.  Maybe your neighborhood bar isn't going to make it through the crisis. But the odds are pretty good that Brennan's will be okay. And, in the same way that the political class in Washington only responds to the needs of the billionaires, so too does the local leadership only care about the local gentry.  Which is why we'll spend the summer deferring sales tax collections.  It's why we've chosen this moment to turn over land use policy to short term rental executives but hardly lift a finger to stop anyone being evicted from their home. Besides raising money through a private non-profit scheme to pay landlords, anyway.)   It's why we're going to look the other way as a politically influential private university accelerates the spread of the virus through its own selfish and irresponsible decisions...  Jeff Asher's attempt to cover for those decisions, notwithstanding.

It's why we're sending everyone's kids back to school now too. That's the general reason, anyway.  Specifically, the private schools are open for in-person instruction because they have to demonstrate to tuition-paying parents that they can deliver the exclusive value and sense of social superiority implied in that price tag.  The public schools are motivated by a different version of that prove-your-worth mentality too. But, also, if we're going to force parents to work under dangerous conditions, then we have to tell them they can put their kids somewhere.  

And so there are elaborate plans to make everyone feel like what is happening is normal. Last month OPSB announced the return to in-person learning would be phased in according to grade level. How that makes it any safer is unknown.  But that, plus a number of hygiene theater type measures create just enough of an impression that caution is being exercised. Of course, any of these safety guidelines can be discarded the moment we think they may become inconvenient.  

The NOLA Public Schools district will no longer require a sustained decrease in daily new COVID-19 positive cases to determine how it will reopen for in-person classes. The change is due to expanded testing in local universities, which is expected to lead to a higher daily case count, the district stated in a Thursday afternoon release. 

Up until now, district officials have said they would need to see two or more weeks of fewer than 50 new cases per day and a test positivity rate below five percent to reopen school buildings, a metric that was endorsed by city of New Orleans Health Director Jennifer Avegno.

Now, as schools approach a phased in-person opening beginning Sept. 14, district officials say that has changed. The plan calls for the youngest students to begin first, with older students starting in October. But when officials announced those plans, they said both would be dependent on the data on infections in the city. 

“With large increases in testing it is expected that the number of new cases may increase,” the statement said. “Our focus will remain on the city’s positive test rate and ensuring that it is at or below 5 percent, regardless of the volume of new tests.”

Since the mid-summer spike, the rate of new cases in Louisiana has been in decline.  But that's not the same as saying the thing is under control.  In Orleans, there has even been a bump up over the past week or so.  Still the schools and colleges are set on returning students to class. And with the state preparing to go to Phase 3 of its "reopening" protocol this month, the number of cases is almost certain to rise again. But we're well past the point where anyone is going to make a good faith effort to stop that.  Just be ready to keep getting used to it.