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."
— Jake Offenhartz (@jangelooff) January 28, 2021
“This fair share is a bullshit concept," he shouts. "It’s a way of attacking wealthy people." pic.twitter.com/zFW6o1MFND
Look at that. The both sides came together and found a compromise solution.
The commission has also received recommendations to divide some of the more prominent streets, picking different names depending on the neighborhood - an idea with significant racial overtones. For example, the commission’s current recommendation is to rename Robert E. Lee Boulevard for musician Allen Toussaint, but an alternative would call it Toussaint in the Black neighborhoods of Gentilly and Hibernia or Lake Boulevard in the majority-white areas of Lakeview.
This project that was begun in order to correct a shameful legacy of white supremacy now proposes to do that by coding the notion that all the Black people live over here and all the White people live over there right into the name(s) of the street. That's what this was all about, right?
Susan Brooks runs a string of four bars under the Igor’s name as well as Brooks Seahorse Tavern by the Fair Grounds and the legendary Uptown dive The Club Ms. Mae’s, which she bought last summer to preserve a local institution.
She has kept all of them closed since the city’s last rule changes in December, and they will remain closed for now, foregoing even go-cup service.
“It seemed like the responsible thing to do,” said Brooks
However, she said it is demoralizing to watch customers lining up to visit other businesses still continuing under looser restrictions.
“I do wish that it was more of a shared burden, if everybody was doing the same thing we would bend the curve a lot faster and we could all get back to business,” she said.
We could have all agreed at the beginning of this that we'd all get back to business faster by sharing the burden. We could have locked down every lock downable thing and paid everyone to stay home and be safe. We could have preserved just about everyone's job. We could have saved every city and state government from bankruptcy. We could have protected every homeowner and renter from eviction. We chose not to do these things because the bosses and banks and landlords preferred to win the pandemic. And now look where we are.
Anyway, we're not going to change tactics now. It's already clear the new Congress and President aren't going to send us the kind of relief bill that would help us share the burden. This weekend the city is going right back into its chaotic pattern of shifting rules and blame according to whims and political alliances. Because local powerbrokers are in position to win the pandemic too. Or at least they will get to pick who shares the burden and who reaps the benefits.
We could have licked this thing a long time ago. But to do that would have meant truly behaving as though we were all in it together. But no one with the power to make these decisions actually believes that.
House floats are popping up all over town I've seen a few of these. But in the COVID times one only travels a short distance along the same route every day with fewer stops in between so I can't say I've seen a lot of them yet. I'm sure I'll get out and take some pictures sooner or later. I have noticed a number of different takes on the phenomenon over the past few weeks. The class politics of it are a little bit fraught. One could complain that it's a high barrier to entry kind of event. In order to have your own display, you gotta own a house and afford to pay for the art. The inherent tie to home ownership can signify gentrification, especially given what we've been told about high enthusiasm among wealthy young transplants for participating.
But, when you think about it, regular Mardi Gras basically works the same way. The floats and riders represent a certain wealth holding class. Although, we should note, there is wide variation there that has become elaborated over time. Once there were only krewes comprised of white elites. Now there is basically a krewe for every sub-strata, race, or gender of the upper middle class. So, you know, progress. But, as always, the real event is in the party that chaotically evolves from public participation all around it. The parade of blue bloods (or moderately well off so and sos) is just a reason to be there. It's the people dancing and shouting and drinking and just standing around talking to their neighbors that we're all there to see. Obviously we can't have that this year. Not the way we are used to, anyway. Look what happened last time.
We did walk out to see the Phorty Phunny Phellows on Twelfth Night thinking it would be the closest anyone would come to seeing a real live Carnival thing happen this year. A larger (but still sparse and well distanced) crowd than usual showed out probably thinking the same thing. It was a weird vibe. Uneasy, uncomfortable and concerned that maybe this anti-climactic non-event we usually take in as an ironic amusement would be the most celebrating we would do all season.
We have to have something, though. Our spiritual health demands that. And house floats are as good a place as any to start. Maybe there are other kinds of public art and just ways of hanging out that can embellish that central event. Back in the normal universe from which we are currently estranged, Krewe Du Vieux would have been parading this weekend. Instead they are offering a "virutal parade" on their website as well as a series of house float style art installations in various locations across the city. See their website for a map. Hopefully we'll see more events like this. Sooner or later we're going to learn that lots of things besides houses can probably be floats.
The good news, in the meantime, is that it's proving to be a way to keep artists working this year who otherwise wouldn't be.
Devin DeWolf then took the concept a step further and focused specifically on job creation with his website HireAMardiGrasArtist.com. “Caroline Thomas knew that I had organized Feed the Frontline NOLA, which brought 90,000 restaurant meals and 10,000 coffees to local health workers as a moral boost. We hired unemployed local musicians as delivery people,” said DeWolf, who is also the organizer and founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, and the charity project Feed the Second Line.
“Red Beans has a lot of members who care about the community and are very grass roots, so when Caroline Thomas had the idea to crowdfund Mardi Gras worker jobs back, she turned to us,” said DeWolf. HireAMardiGrasArtist.com collects donations of all sizes. “And every time we raise $15,000, we raffle off a house float to someone who donated. We also take commissions from people and businesses who want to hire artists to create $15,000 projects. We’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars in just a month, and are currently employing 45 full-time artists at a minimum of $30-per-hour. We’ve completed 22 float houses since December 5th when we announced the idea.”
What this proof of concept suggests, though, is that we could go bigger. Imagine a COVID stimulus bill that includes a WPA style program for hiring artists and other participants in the so-called cultural economy to keep this sort of work going. Not year-round house floats, per se. Carnival does come to an end, after all. But surely there are other creative ways to employ creative people who haven't been able to do their ordinary work during the pandemic. There are unique talents and resources in New Orleans. We should learn from this unusual Carnival season that they are talents worth investing in.
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.
Important to remember that these personages who push themselves into public prominence and manage to remain there are not doing that for anyone's benefit but their own.
Thus, the two Tony Faucis were born: one, the shrewd political operator who has survived six presidential administrations, as Roberts wrote, “an A-list party get in D.C. social circles” who moves “freely between TV green rooms, think-tanks and the city’s tonier salons, mixing easily among both Democrats and Republicans;” the other, the humble man of science, the blunt truth-teller, who couldn’t possibly know or care about the petty striving and mudslinging of the world of smoked-filled rooms. This approach, I suspect, has profited both Fauci and the presidents he has served. His pristine, apolitical reputation lends credibility to the White House during a health crisis, but his appreciation for realpolitik means they can rely on him to appreciate the circumstances when science must take a backseat to politics. “The folks I know who know Fauci tend to respect and/or admire him,” tweeted Nicholas G. Evans, a bioethicist at UMass Lowell. “But no one denies he’s more Game of Thrones than Mr Rogers [sic].”
In another moment of lucidity in May 2020, Trump said of Fauci, “He wants to play all sides of the equation.” I think that’s right. In the past, Fauci has plausibly played all sides to the benefit of the public. His shrewd AIDS advocacy assuaged homophobic politicians, motivated apolitical scientists, and met the demands of activists and patients. In the case of Covid-19, it’s harder to see how Fauci’s machinations have helped anyone — except Anthony Fauci.
The medicine and policy part of the job can always be done without stepping in front of a single TV camera. The being a celebrity part of the job, not so much. And since the being a celebrity part of the job means lending credibility to the most evil and wretched sorts in government, what, ultimately, does that make you?
