Well, then

Listening to irate New York hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman on CNBC right now lamenting people "sitting at home getting their checks from the government, trading their stocks."

“This fair share is a bullshit concept," he shouts. "It’s a way of attacking wealthy people." pic.twitter.com/zFW6o1MFND

— Jake Offenhartz (@jangelooff) January 28, 2021

Hey at least there's still a way to attack wealthy people.  (Don't worry they'll fix that soon enough.)

The game is stopped

The thing about the stock market being a big absurd bubble that doesn't have anything to do with measuring actual value in the economy is that everyone knows that already and it is boring to point it out. The interesting point lies instead in how obvious it is that no one will ever do anything about it and nothing will ever change.

We've reached a fundamental terminus of development. There is no real economy to return to anymore. We don't create wealth at all. We just concentrate it through arbitrage and "disruption" and recycled imaginary capital. And so public policy isn't what we traditionally understood it to be anymore. It's not about promoting growth or fighting inflation. Instead it is all about rigging the system to protect the hoarded assets. Everything is frozen in place and the churn of the markets is just an illusion. If the bubble "pops" there's literally nothing there. The bubble cannot fail us anymore. We can only fail the bubble. 

And again the really interesting thing is people know this. Even people who don't have an academic sense of how the economy works understand it intuitively. That's why this whole Gamestop fiasco isn't shocking anyone into action. If this had happened at a less broken stage, the point would have been to expose the absurdity of the system so it can be shamed into reform. But everybody already knew the system was rigged. We were way past the point where shock or satire would make any difference.

It's like that thing where Donald Trump became President. You'd think that would have been a wake up call indicating something was deeply flawed with our version of democracy. But what it really demonstrated was that there wasn't anything there to rescue either and that everyone knew it. That's what Gamestop and AMC going "to the moon" is like. It's like just letting Donald Trump be President. It just shows that everyone knows it's all rot anyway.

Noblesse Oblige

It's not quite the techno-feudal state we're headed toward just yet but it is beginning to take on some of those characteristics. 

If there’s anything that substantiates the allegation that the United States is a failed state, it is Bill Pulte’s Twitter mentions. To read them is to grasp the cruelty and irrationality of American capitalism.

For five full decades, the nation has undergone a systematic, large-scale upward redistribution of wealth. Meanwhile, for reasons ranging from public relations to personal gratification and absolution, the rich are occasionally obliged to engage in a little charity, which is acceptable to them so long as it is in the amount and to the beneficiary of their choosing. Public records reveal that Bill Pulte donates exclusively to Republican candidates — a bleeding heart in the streets, a fiscal conservative in the sheets.

Disquieting in ordinary times, the spectacle of Twitter philanthropy is bone-chilling during the COVID-19 crisis, when an uneven and insufficient government economic response has left tens of millions of people high and dry.

Stimulus for some

Now seems like a terrific time to place more capital into the no-doubt soon to be booming indoor golf arcade business. 

After construction delays caused by money trouble at its corporate parent, work on the Drive Shack driving-range complex at the site of the former Times-Picayune building on Howard Avenue appears to be back on track.

The "golf-entertainment" venue, which is being built on a site owned by developer Joe Jaeger and partners, has been beset by difficulties since it was announced two-and-a-half years ago, the latest being a series of lawsuits by contractors demanding payment on overdue bills that had stacked up during the coronavirus pandemic.

But on Monday, Drive Shack's New York-based owner said it had sold its Rancho San Joaquin golf course, located in Irvine, California, for $34.5 million, giving it funds to continue work on the stalled $29 million New Orleans project as well as a mini-golf venture in Dallas known as The Puttery.

Seems a bizarre decision but, then, it is their money...

Wait, what's that?  Oh sorry, no, turns out that it's also public money.   (from 2018)

The developers who want to turn the former Times-Picayune building on Howard Avenue in New Orleans into a three-story indoor golf attraction received final approval Tuesday (Aug. 14) on a plan that basically freezes their property taxes for a dozen years.

The Industrial Development Board, which must sign off on such tax incentives, agreed to lock in land and building values for Drive Shack. The 62,000-square-foot, $29 million facility will include 90 golf ball hitting bays, a restaurant, bar, arcade and conference rooms. To the rear of the building, 183,000 square feet of artificial turf will cover the driving range. Plans call for 265 parking spaces on the property and additional off-site parking under the Broad Street overpass.

Still, who are we expecting will want to spend money on this amusement?  Even after (if!) we arrive at a moment when people generally feel safe going to crowded indoor venues again, will anyone even be able to afford it?  Maybe Drew Brees?  But we read here that he is already building his own private Drive Shack so I guess he is out. 

According to the breathless TMZ report, “Drew's new pad is coming with ALL the bells and whistles … from private access to a bar/lounge to a golf simulator room."

The likely answer is, a lot fewer people will be able to afford to pay for anything. And that in turn leads to a lot more fewer people able to pay for things.  And that can get... very bad. 

But as lockdowns have been lifted in most of the country and businesses have been able to reopen, that supply shock has waned, only for a new problem to emerge: weak demand. In other words, a supply shock has been replaced by a shock to demand.

Some of the weakness in demand is because we’re on the verge of a classic recessionary cycle: Since the stimulus payments to unemployed workers ended in July, people either have less money to spend or are worried about spending it, which means businesses have less revenue, which makes them cut back on hiring and investment, which means less spending.

One very simple solution to this would be to just give people money so they can buy things.  It's what you do when you want to.. stimulate.. the economy.  Is that what we want to do? Besides, given that we've already decided to give a great big tax subsidy to Drive Shack and its developers, there should be no problem loading up their potential customers as well.  You would think it is but, the evidence of that sure is scarce.  Or at least it changes day-to-day. 

We're never coming back from this

Not sure if it's really sinking in for people yet, but "the economy" on the other side of COVID just isn't going to have as many full time jobs as it did before. 

There are still 10.7 million fewer people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, although just over half of the jobs lost in March and April have now been recovered. At this rate, it would take the economy another 16 months to gain back those jobs, although economists say that job gains get more difficult for every month that the recession lasts.

All 10.7 million of those jobs are not coming back.  That isn't part of the plan. The bosses have already won the pandemic and are going to be fine without most of us.

We aren't in the early, completely catastrophic early days of the crisis anymore. People making above $60k are basically back to work, according to the Opportunity Insights Data. The group that is still badly struggling is low-wage service workers. pic.twitter.com/XSRhjokFTc

— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) October 1, 2020

What's left to do now is for the rest of us to "just get used to" the new slightly shittier normal. Which is why, even today, as the nation woke up the news that the President himself has tested positive for the virus, the push is on to end the emergency and impose a sense that the current state of affairs is just the way we live now and that it's time to get on with that.  

Which is why, despite Nancy Pelosi's performative "optimism" that the Trump diagnosis changes the political dynamic, the thing to understand is that help is not on the way.  The US economy... insofar as what it can produce for the benefit of poor and working class people... slid completely off the edge of help in 2008 and has not been brought back from that.  The pandemic is just another step in normalizing the status to which most of us have been relegated.  We're never coming back from this.  We aren't really even expected to.

The problem

This is an article about the advance of workplace surveillance technologies.  Paranoid, profit-driven bosses are able to marshal a terrifying array of all seeing and all knowing machines to gain complete and intimate knowledge of workers' actions, associations and habits in order to predict and manipulate their behaviors.  We live in hell.

But we have always lived in hell.  Your boss may have super powerful computers and cameras to track you with now but the impetus to control and squeeze the absolute most value out of workers is a practice that stretches back to slavery.

In 1750, wealthy slave owners in Jamaica and Barbados would meticulously track and manage enslaved workers in order to maximize their productive output. What business schools today call “scientific management” actually has its very roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Plantation owners were determined to extract every last bit of labor they could get from enslaved workers, meticulously tracking, documenting, and analyzing their every move in order to maximize productivity and profit. According to Harvard Business School researcher Caitlin Rosenthal, these techniques were then adopted widely in the United States after a slave owner named Thomas Affleck advanced those surveillance techniques to include “sophisticated calculations” that “measure productivity in a standardized way,” thus allowing “planters to determine how far they could push their workers to get the most profit.” After years of capitalist development, the plantation owners and capitalist executives of today are armed with more intelligent technology that can, in a millisecond, do what Affleck once did with only his eyes and a hand-written spreadsheet. High-tech corporate monitoring of workers today undoubtedly stems from this legacy of meticulous and detailed tracking of enslaved workers in order to extract the most profit from them, and to quell potential rebellion and collective action.

And, of course, the COVID crisis has provided yet another opportunity to expand these practices. Bosses conflate their own desire to track workers' movements with the public health concern over "contact tracing" in order to deploy new and intrusive technologies.  The bosses win the pandemic again.

Anyway the real reason I flagged this article is that it contains a single paragraph that can be cut out and inserted into any story about any social and political conflict going on in the United States in the 21st Century and it will serve as the essential context for what is really being fought over.

Due to advances in workplace technology following World War II, the productivity of the workforce has skyrocketed. Yet wages grew to a lesser extent until 1973, when output soared and wages stagnated even further. Since 1978, CEOs’ salaries have increased by 970 percent, making nearly 300 times more than their average worker. While companies are increasing their profit with these technologies, workers aren’t seeing any corresponding increase in their wages. Instead, those profits are going directly into the pockets of corporate executives.

We may live in hell and have always lived in hell, but the specific bit of hell we're in right now extends from our failure to overcome this problem in particular.  One might expect a situation like that to become unsustainable the longer it persists.  And *gestures widely at everything around us unraveling* could indicate that, yeah, it's not holding up so well at the moment.  The new surveillance technologies are one response meant to hold the fraying system together. They may work too! But, until the underlying is resolved,  we can expect that more draconian and frightening responses than even this will undoubtedly appear.

Just remember 2020 was the good year

After the current golden age ends it starts to get really dicey.

Scott, of PAR, worries of a crisis in New Orleans, in particular. At the end of July, supercharged unemployment benefits of $600 a week on top of the state’s cap of $247 a week will end. Evictions have resumed after being suspended for months. The Paycheck Protection Program funds for many businesses are being exhausted, and the customer base for a significant chunk of New Orleans’ economy, tourists, have vanished.

“You could end up with both a financial crisis for government services and also a real struggle for the human condition,” Scott said.

The Dread Index

Ten days ago, in keeping with the (obviously very well thought out, very safe and successful) "Phase 2" reopening process, the First and Second City Courts of New Orleans once again began accepting evictions filings from landlords. The response was...  impressive.

Last week, some courts and justices of the peace accepted eviction requests, but didn’t begin assigning them court dates. Badon waited until Tuesday, the first full day after Edwards’ order lifted.

Badon said his clerks on Tuesday received 63 requests for evictions, compared to about 25 on a normal day.

And that's after having turned away an apparently sizeable number of landlords who are still constrained by the federal rules that pause evictions on certain properties until August 25.  The city courts had been urged to push back their moratorium to match the federal guidelines but they decided to move ahead anyway.

It's hard to know what the reasoning is there. But there has obviously been pressure from property owners. We know they've been talking to the mayor, at least. In this interview back in April she was already talking about the coming eviction crisis in terms of having to "find a balance" with the needs of "our landlords."

Clearly she was still thinking about "our landlords" this week when she extended the deadlines for short term rental license applications and permit extensions. This extension even applies to STR licenses that were set to expire anyway due to a recent change in city regulations. It's basically using COVID as an excuse to keep STRs operating even while we are allowing people to evicted from their homes. That's one hell of a way to strike a "balance."

Anyway thanks to these policy decisions our leadership has made on purpose, a wave of evictions is coming soon.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - As the coronavirus pandemic persists it is feared that many low-income families in Louisiana and around the country could face eviction soon and as a result homelessness.

The Center for Planning Excellence of Baton Rouge and Urban Footprint released their analysis of the housing crisis amid the pandemic.

Camille Manning-Broome is President of the Center for Planning Excellence.

“In Louisiana, our development patterns are increasing the likelihood of this, of homelessness and high-risk burden because many areas your combined housing and transportation costs had up to more than 50 percent of your income,” Manning-Broome said.

The analysis found that Louisiana ranks 3rd in the nation for having a high risk for evictions due to job losses. Further it says 130,000 households across Louisiana are at risk of evictions and it shows the parishes most in need of rental assistance beyond July 31 when federal protections and assistance expire are in order of need, Orleans, Jefferson, East Baton Rouge, Caddo, Lafayette, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Calcasieu, Ouachita, and Bossier.

For further context, here is a cheering analysis of the Census Bureau's "Household Pulse" survey which finds:

Based on the Household Pulse Survey results released on June 17, which examined responses between June 4 and June 9, almost one-third of all households expect to experience a loss of employment income over the coming four weeks. Fully 10 percent of American families—that’s 25 million, half of which have children at home—did not have enough food to eat in the prior week. Even more disturbing, one in five households—over 50 million in total—are doubtful that they will be able to afford sufficient food in the coming month. And of the nation’s 65,000,0000 renters, almost 20 percent were unable to pay their rent last month and an even higher percentage—close to 30 percent—doubt that they will be able to pay their rent in the coming month. 

This week, another one million plus new unemployment claims were filed.  So it's staggering to think how many households are currently trying to calculate, according to their savings if they have any, how much time they might have between the day they are laid off and the day they are evicted. Call it the Dread Index.  And it's a frighteningly short number now that the courts are ready to hear evictions again.