The year without ritual

Once upon a time, in a city we used to live in, Halloween marked the beginning of the "fun" or, at least, the more socially significant part of the year that stretched on through the Holidays and Carnival and.. depending on who you ask... would end with the close of one or another spring festival. 

But this is not where we live anymore.  Instead we live in perpetual detention.  The calendar moves but the rituals we mark it with are not fully available to us. They exist, but only as bizarre echoes of themselves; some more dark than others.  We only kind of see them happen but don't fully participate. And what we do observe is robbed of its meaning. Shape without form, shade without color, etc. etc.  Sporting events in empty stadiums broadcast over the sound of a simulated crowd. 

Saturday night we did everything we usually do to prepare for Trick-Or-Treaters.  We bought our candy and carved our jack-o-lanterns (see this year's deep Greek hurricane season represented above.)  When we read on September 30 that the mayor had answered a 7 year old's email with a promise that Halloween would happen, we were determined not to let her down.  And then when we read a couple of days later that the mayor had revised and embellished the story saying in the new version that it was a 12 year old who had sent the email, we were even more inspired than before. 

We weren't sure how to improvise a socially-distanced plan, though.  We bought a box of latex gloves and some of those plastic face shields to wear over our regular masks in case that made any sort of difference. But as the evening drew nearer, we grew less confident that we were doing the right thing.  Our corner is typically very busy on Halloween night. We look forward to it every year.  We thought we were ready to participate in this comforting ritual with our neighbors again but couldn't stop worrying that too many interactions with too many random people might be a risk to everybody. 

We decided not to go out. I thought about putting the candy outside the door in a bowl but something about that seemed even more wrong, another empty ritual. Something missing between the idea and the reality, etc. etc.   Better to just admit this wasn't the year for it.

Restoration

 Yeah it's gonna bleak either way. 

If a return to “normalcy” means having the same old politicians that are responsible for endless wars, that work for the corporate elite, that lack the courage to implement real structural change required for major issues such as healthcare and the environment, then a call for “normalcy” is nothing more than a call to return to the same deprived conditions that led to our current crisis. Such a return with amplified conditions and circumstances, could set the stage for the return of an administration with dangers that could possibly even exceed those posed by the current one in terms of launching new wars.

Like we said the other day, that's what happens when the Democrats take back over every time there's been a hard right push from a Republican wrecking ball.  They just go about normalizing the damage done and softly acclimating everyone to the shittier conditions. It's not gonna be fun.  But that doesn't change the fact that Trump still gotta go.  In all likelihood he is on the way out.  Don't forget to feel good about that. Even if there is much else to worry about.

No, there is not going to be a "general strike"

I do hope to have some time to elaborate on this over the weekend but my expectations for the coming elections are significantly different from what I read every day in the online chatter.  I mean that with regard to the local elections as well as the Presidential race.  In each case I think we are going to see a very normal sort of event unfold. 

Despite some excitement about insurgent movements like #FlipTheBench and #EraseTheBoard, the judicial and school board elections are still going to be determined by conventional power brokers making their usual endorsements and GOTV efforts. Some candidates associated with those movements will succeed. But only those who have strong support through establishment actors. 

The Presidential election is going to Joe Biden. The polls have said so for months and months and have not fluctuated.  People don't want to believe polls because DON'T YOU REMEMBER 2016?  but that's a classic case of "fighting the last war."  2020 is a different election with different candidates in different roles. And the polls, even if they aren't perfect, tell you different information about different voters now than they did then. Read 2020 as 2020. Biden is doing far better than Hillary was. Voters have different feelings about him than they did about her. 

Also, they have different feelings about Trump now than they did in 2016.  Four years ago the world was on fire and millions of Americans were sinking further and further into precarity. The Democrats were the incumbent party running on a message that basically told people everything was going just great the way it was.  Trump had just demolished one hated institution, the Republican Party, and, whatever else he may have promised, for a lot of disaffected voters he represented a vehicle for smashing things up even more.  And here is the part where it is important to say, DO NOT GET ME WRONG, this is no defense of Donald Trump or even of people who would vote for Donald Trump. It is only to say that in 2016 a significant number of voters were looking at their diminishing prospects and a world on fire and said, "Well let's try something crazy.  It can't get any worse than this." Four years later, it is worse. 

And that is the problem now for Trump. In 2020 the world is on fire and millions of Americans are sinking further and further into precarity. Donald Trump is the incumbent running on a message that basically tells people an unchecked pandemic that has killed a quarter of a million people this year is going great the way it is.  The incumbent President is not polling over 50 percent in any of the key battleground states he will need to win in order to be reelected.  It's not going to happen for him.  

Is there a cogent counter-narrative that tells us Trump could win anyway? Of course there is! But I don't believe it and will, briefly, explain why. 

A Trump reelection story begins by asking not simply are things better than they were four years ago but specifically for whom are they better?  If you are a part of the corporate-ruling class in this country, Trump has been one of the most effective Presidents for your agenda in living memory. Trump passed a gigantic tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. His administration has ruthlessly gutted federal environmental and worker protections. And, of course, there are all these judges.

Barrett, 48, was confirmed with Republican-only votes Monday night, cementing a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. She will be the 220th federal judge confirmed under the Trump presidency and the McConnell-led Senate — a figure that includes not only her and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, but also 53 circuit court judges, 162 district court judges and two to the U.S. Court of International Trade.

For the first time in more than four decades, there were no vacancies on the circuit court level, where approximately 30 percent of those sitting on the bench have been nominated by Trump. (That changed Monday with the death of Judge Juan R. Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.) Only President Jimmy Carter had more circuit court judges, as well as a larger share of the entire federal appellate bench, confirmed in his first term, and that was before the number of seats in the circuit courts was expanded.

Even the pandemic has worked out quite nicely for the upper classes.  

The billionaire class has been an all-too-visible villain during our crisis year, having carted off an additional $434 billion during the pandemic while millions of others have lost everything. It is trivially easy for them to avoid the virus; they can hunker down in one of several mansions or compounds with armies of staff to bring them what they need. Critics on the left have, probably wisely, focused on these oligarchs as the source of our societal woes in recent years. It is easy to illustrate the problem of inequality by noting the incredible difference between a hundred thousand dollars and a hundred billion dollars. No one should have a billion dollars; those who do can use their wealth to disproportionately influence the political system to maintain the status quo.

Whenever I worry that, despite all the polling evidence, Trump might still win this thing. I think that is the reason. Simply put, he's been very good for the oligarchs. Why wouldn't he be rewarded for that?  

The answer comes down to whether you believe democracy is completely dead already or if you think we still need to pretend it sort of exists in order to let off steam. Maybe the former is true but the latter sure does sound easier.  Trump has burned a lot of things down to the great advantage of the country's ruling classes but that could also mean they don't need him anymore.  If Trump has, in fact, expended his usefulness, then the ratchet effect theory suggests now the billionaires would be better served by a calming figurehead who will send the anxious middle class "back to brunch."  (The poor, as we all are well aware, are politically irrelevant.) 

So, narratively, Trump could win because he has done everything possible to please the wealth class which determines who gets to hold power.  But if he's at a point where he is more trouble than he is worth, then it's just as fine to dump him now and count up the winnings.  Objectively the reason Trump won't win is because... well, he is losing.

This is not to say, of course, that it won't be messy.  No one needs me to recite here the election week scenario every news organization and pundit has tried to game out in every publication this month.  It will take a few days to count all the votes. Trump will complain that they should have stopped counting at some arbitrary point in time. Then the courts involved, etc. etc.  And I'm sure Trump will do the complaining part of that. He will probably spend the rest of his life complaining about it, in fact. But it won't make a difference. 

Biden's lead is too real and too large for this election result to validate any of the apocalyptic fantasies of the right... or the left.  And thank goodness for that. Because this is definitely not something anyone should be hoping to try. 

US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election result showing a Joe Biden victory.

Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.

Just the phrase, "US unions have been discussing..." is doing a lot of work in that lede. The US union movement has never been particularly monolithic and today it has almost no cohesion whatsoever.  There's nobody with the authority to call a "general strike," and certainly there is no organization with the capacity to successfully execute one. Not even, as this quote, however pessimistically, suggests the "established labor movement" which one figures must mean AFL-CIO leadership and infrastructure is in any shape to do that.

Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, said: “So much of the conversation on the left about general strikes in this country is kind of a romanticized, people are going to rise up.” But Loomis added: “If there is ever any general strike in this country, it’s probably going to come out of the established labor movement. The only group capable of running the thing is the established labor movement.” If there is a general strike, union leaders say, they hope college students, Blacks Lives Matter activists, women’s and environmental groups and many others will join in.

Welcome to General Strike 2021. What is it? Who is running it?  We don't know but we hope a bunch of people from a scattered hodge podge of differently interested activist concerns just kind of join in.  Can't wait to see how that goes.  If it performs half as well as #FlipTheBench then maybe we'll get a solid two or three well argued letters to the editor out of it.

The wind wooshed around a lot

Yesterday I got out on the bike for a little while to see how bad it was around us.  It wasn't all that bad, really. A lot of tree debris everywhere. Most not quite as extreme as the photo above but I didn't go very far.  The roads were okay by the time I was out. But the night of the storm, one person was electrocuted by downed power lines which is horrifying.  A lot of people still don't have power.  325,000 Entergy customers are still down as of this morning.  But, generally speaking, for a high category 2 hurricane passing directly over the city, things could have been a lot worse.

It's not over yet, though. Sewerage and Water Board certainly had themselves a night on Wednesday. 

Yet another New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board turbine failed Wednesday during Hurricane Zeta, although a spokesperson for the public utility said loss of that power source did not impair drainage.

Turbine 3 was brought online at the height of the storm but went down after “it reached its capacity,” S&WB spokesperson Courtney Barnes said. The turbine has typically been reserved for emergency use in recent years but was pressed into normal service for Zeta because Turbine 4, the largest of the S&WB’s operational turbines, broke Sunday.

Turbine 3 appears to have been activated as a back up for pumps that would have taken Entergy power under normal circumstances. But they made the switch when either that power or some other equipment failed.  Anyway, it sounds like they were able to juggle and jerry rig their way through it. Happily, the storm moved quickly enough that the rainfall didn't put the pumping capacity to a serious test. 

Yesterday, the city and SWB were asking people to use less water until they could be assured of full sewerage pumping capacity.  But the details of that and several other issues were still incredibly vague as of this morning. McBride enumerates a few in this FB post.  In the meantime, while it is still highly doubtful that there will be any Mardi Gras parades in 2021, I think several krewes have asked Turbine 6 to ride  as a Grand Marshall

We are hearing some concerns about water being safe to drink due to power loss across the city. Power at our Carrollton Water Plant, where water is purified, maintained power throughout impacts from Zeta thanks to Turbine 6.

— SWB New Orleans (@SWBNewOrleans) October 29, 2020

This afternoon the Entergy map is still looking pretty Christamassy.  Eyballing it, I think that looks like we might be close to 50% restored in Orleans Parish. 

The Lens reports that the clerk of court needs 48 hours advance notice if we have to move any polling locations for Tuesday. 54 of them were without power as of today. Also in that article we read that the city is starting to get estimates as to the general cost of repairs. (It also happens to be city budget season and the outlook is not good.)  As is the usual case with a major disaster, we would expect the federal government to reimburse these expenses.  How much they pay out, though, might depend on certain data. 

FEMA hasn’t approved a major disaster declaration for Hurricane Zeta yet, according to The Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, and is awaiting more complete damage assessments.

Cantrell said that the National Hurricane Center would also be reviewing data as to whether the storm was indeed at Category 2 or if it had slipped over the Category 3 threshold. That would have reimbursement implications, she said. Green said the city was also looking into federal assistance for individual residents over lost food.

It has been widely reported that Zeta's maximum winds may have been just 1 mph below the threshold for what we would consider a Category 3.  If we had known at the time that this would make a difference, maybe we could have all gone out and waved some fans.

What did Zion say to Zeta?

Let's dance.

Man, I don't know about y'all but I haven't felt this giddy since February. Finally, something different is happening.  It's happening fast too. This thing is hauling ass across the Gulf.  Yesterday we were told to expect it to come in after 7 PM so people have planned their day according to that. City offices are open until noon. Schools haven't cancelled their virtual classes. This morning while I was out I saw the regular joggers jogging, the commuting, the panhandlers handling pans. People are determined to business up until the last possible businessing minute. 

That's probably not the appropriate way to behave. And the current scenario where we see a hurricane accelerate and strengthen unexpectedly is a perfect example of why.  The recent years of near misses followed by talk radio wise-assses complaining about "lazy" people taking the days off shouldn't have bullied us into this. But that's what happens when leadership is too sensitive to that kind of nonsense. I mean, you want them to be responsive to vox populi, but you also want to err on the side of safety whenever possible. 

Hopefully it all works out. I always end up having to calm down the people around me in situations like this and one thing I try to do is remind them how little agency they have in any of it. Most events in this world transpire in total independence of our individual choices.  The Saints win the game or they don't. The roof blows off of your house or it doesn't.  It's just stuff that happens. Sometimes it affects you and sometimes it doesn't. But none of it is about you at all. Once you get that, you worry less. 

Anyway, I had been planning to hit the grocery store one more time before the power goes out.  I wonder if they are open.

Austerity isn't just an accident of nature

It is city budget season.  Happy Holidays. There will be quite a few of those in the future for these folks.  Unpaid, of course. 

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño told City Council members in a special meeting Monday that under the budget plan set out by Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her administration, furloughs that took effect this month for employees should continue through next year. 

Employees would be furloughed for one day per pay period, or 26 furlough days over the course of the year, Montaño said. People who earn less than $30,000 a year would be excluded from the pay cut. 

The city's public safety departments, such as police and fire, will also take a 6% and 8% cut to their overall budgets, while other departments could see up to a 40% cut, he said.

Wow. Especially sucks to be the "other departments".  

The hardest hit departments include Public Works, which will see its funding drop more than 40% to $34 million. That decrease includes cutting about 10% of its total positions.

The City Planning Commission, which is responsible for reviewing development proposals, is also slated for a 40% cut, will lose 6 of its 26 positions. The Vieux Carre Commission, the small agency that enforces the historic preservation rules in the French Quarter, is facing the deepest cut in the city at 42%, will lose two of its six spots.

To explain itself, the administration cites the obvious.  A compounding crisis of pandemic-induced depression has caused a sudden drop in expected revenues.  The federal government has failed to respond adequately and what aid it has made available has been watered down and diverted at the state level.  

All of this is, regrettably, true. But it's important to also keep in mind that many of the consequences of that disaster are still left to our local lords to decide. There are individuals in charge right now who impose their values on the question of who suffers the most during the disaster.   The above mentioned cuts in this budget are one example. The pandemic didn't decide the cut Public Works by one amount but NOPD by another.  Similarly, the pandemic didn't decide that businesses shouldn't have to pay the sales taxes they collected during Mardi Gras. Their lobbyists told the mayor that's what they wanted and she agreed to it.   The pandemic didn't decide it was time to give corporate landlords a big tax break paid for by residents and through layoffs. The assessor made that call.  

And, of course, we know the pandemic can't read the city ordinances but we are pretty sure that wasn't who decided to ignore this (admittedly toothless) city council decree that we would no longer stiff the Public Defender's office.  A person did that. On purpose.

We all just laugh

Look, we all knew there would have to be a Hurricane Zeta because there was just no way that the year 2020 A.D. was going out with the second most named storms in history.  Got to tie that record at least.  We also all knew that it had to make at least one serious run at Southeast Louisiana before this was over. 

But we'll wait and see if it can follow through.  So far, its aim has not been particularly impressive.