Dispatch from the doom: Every single thing is on fire

Where to even begin today?

Let's try here.

With the coronavirus crisis having already affected large swaths of American culture and the economy, there's no real reason to think that the world's largest retailer will be spared. Amazon is facing pressure from three different sides: Increased demand from consumers, the very real potential of coronavirus spreading through a warehouse, and supply chain interruptions.

Ports that receive goods from overseas have seen major slowdowns as the Chinese stall manufacturing. While Trump’s European travel ban does not currently include trade, imports from Europe could come to a halt if things change as they already are overnight. Already, Amazon is seeing shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes.

Every single thing in the world is on fire now and it's only beginning to sink in.  The American luxury consumer life runs on extracting maximum value out of poor people on a global scale while ignoring the misery imposed by that system.  The pandemic interrupts all of this.  It has a power that workers have long been deprived of. The power to shut it all down.  Perhaps you are tempted to think this is an "opportunity" to build a better world. It isn't. The virus, having no agenda beyond self replication, hasn't stopped the world to make demands. Like all preceding disasters of the 21st Century, this one only promises to bring new hardships.

Right now the entire economy is seized up.  This seizure is different even from the 2008 financial meltdown where a speculative market based on creating fake value out of whole cloth could be propped back up by inserting trillions of newly printed fake dollars.  But to be clear what "propped back up" means, the fake dollars went right to the bankers who caused the problem in the first place and allowed scores of criminals to cash themselves out of their schemes while leaving ordinary Americans ruined for decades. So hurray for that.  The crisis we're looking at now is and will be... worse. The response to this needs to be immediate. It needs to be massive. And it needs to be directed to people and not to banks or corporations. Unsurprisingly it is taking American politics a very long time to figure this out.

A relief package in the House supposedly aimed at providing American workers with sick leave will, in fact, cover only about 20% of them. Tuesday morning we read that Nancy Pelosi, after scolding reporters about the importance of means testing things, has negotiated with the Trump Administration to further scale back the scope of bill. Kamala Harris is tweeting out a previous plan of hers to give *some* people virtually nothing.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for President said during a debate on Sunday that free health care is still a bad idea because countries that have it also have the virus. Democrats are so corrupted by their corporate donors and confounded by their own resigned ideology of better-things-aren't-possible have none of the tools necessary to deal with the problem realistically.  They can't even make hollow promises that capture anyone's attention anymore.

This makes them quite different from the huckster Donald Trump, unfortunately, who is all too happy to step in with Great Big Checks For Everybody.

WASHINGTON — President Trump called on Congress on Tuesday to quickly approve a sweeping economic stimulus package that would include sending checks directly to Americans within weeks, as large sections of the economy shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to go big,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House, adding that he had instructed Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, to introduce measures that would provide more immediate economic support over the payroll tax cut holiday that he had been promoting.

Thank goodness they've talked him out of the payroll tax thing... for now.  It's a terrible idea that a) won't help anybody who is not receiving a paycheck and b) is a direct stab at Social Security, Medicare and what remains of the federal social safety net that most of us are going to have to rely on now more than ever.  Ultimately we know the Republicans will come back for all of that. But right now they are outflanking the Democrats to the left which is something that should never happen in the midst of a worldwide crisis when there is also a national election pending.

Sure, we all know that Republicans are going to insist on ridiculous corporate bailouts for the airlines, for the oil industry, and for anyone who puts money in their, or especially Trump's, pocket. On Friday, Trump presided over a nightmare scene at the Rose Garden where he presented the CEOs of Walmart, CVS, Target as well as medical industrialists including, of all people, disgraced former Louisiana head of Health and Human Services Bruce Greenstein to talk about the "public-private partnerships" by which they all expect to get rich off of the pandemic disaster. Senate leader and greatest villain of the 21st Century, Mitch McConnell is saying it will take "significant and bold new steps" to pass the next relief bill. That doesn't necessarily bode well either.

In the meantime, there is an election to win. So Trump is going to send everyone a much needed relief check (it won't be enough but it will be welcome) and cruise to a win over the guy who has spent his whole career trying to cut your Social Security. The punchline is, afterward, Trump will then come back and cut your Social Security.  Because the "liberal" party is so helplessly moribund, the only direction for the country to go now is further into a populist fascism. Offer people some bread up front, turn the whole state over to the oligarchs next.

It didn't have to be like this. If only Democrats could have backed a campaign proposing a major overhaul of the entire US economy based on eliminating stifling debts, expanding social services like health care and mobilizing all resources to fight climate change. If only they didn't mobilize their entire corrupt party infrastructure to stop that from being their platform.  Unfortunately some people were mean to some well to do liberals on Twitter and so now this is what we get. Seems fair.

Hey speaking of oligarchs, meanwhile in New Orleans....

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's director of economic development, Jeff Schwartz, led a Monday morning conference call with about 40 leaders from business and economic development organizations, including the Business Council of New Orleans, New Orleans Business Alliance, GNO Inc., economic agencies from parishes in the metropolitan area, as well as the black, Hispanic and other chambers of commerce.

The problem in New Orleans, much like the problem in Washington, is the people who will have the ear of government leadership throughout and after the crisis are the ownership class. This is why, for example, the rules for keeping bars and restaurants open the mayor issued Sunday were written by the Louisiana Restaurant Association's lobbyists. Those rules were quickly obsoleted by the Governor's subsequent shutdown order. But it's clear where the local policy is being drawn up.

In the same way Trump's policy is directed by cronies like those assembled in the Rose Garden last week, Cantrell's is dictated by the "business and economic development organizations" like those listed above as well as the tourism promotion entity known as New Orleans and Company which, along with the Convention Center, pulls down something like $20 million dollars a year in public funds.

The tourism cabal has more than $200 million in surplus sitting around in a slush fund recently legitimized by Cantrell's #FairShare deal. Given the current state of the tourism market, they will be needing exactly zero of those dollars for any of their pet projects. It should all be spent on emergency relief for displaced hospitality workers.  Of course that isn't what's happening. Instead the interchangeable plutocrats who populate all of these organizations have set up "philanthropic" funds like this one run by the New Orleans Business Alliance. Its conditions are absurdly restrictive and its expected benefits are miserly. But all the right people get to manage it and cover themselves in glory in the process. They've thrown in $100,000 so far so congrats on that.

But it's not only a corrupt deference to ruling class influence that parallels Cantrell's emergency response with Trump's. She's also continues to emulate his authoritarian sneer in her rhetoric.  On Sunday, she took time out from her aggressive lecturing of everybody about the "social distancing" directives to also yell at the news media for... asking her questions in order to confirm information?

Cantrell is now talking about journalism. "Quality journalism matters," Cantrell said. She's upset about journalists calling the office trying to get confirmation about what sources have said.

— Della Hasselle (@dellahasselle) March 15, 2020

The context of that was never explained. It was bizarre to say the least.  The next day, she bristled at a reporter's perfectly reasonable question about whether or not NOPD should be throwing people in jail for non-violent offenses given the health hazards of crowding into confined spaces. The public defender's office has already asked them to cease such arrests in a letter this week. If you watch the presser you can hear the contempt in Cantrell's immediate response, "Uh no."  She then invited Police Chief Ferguson to give everyone a brief lecture about "law and order."

Today it was announced that future press conferences won't have any press at all. Instead the mayor will retreat to a bunker and send out a recorded message.

... Moving forward, future City Hall news conferences will be videoed with a single pool camera. Copies will be distributed to all media.

— Tegan Wendland (@TeganWendland) March 17, 2020

But that will be the case after one last hurrah today where Cantrell appeared, flanked by CAO Gilbert Montano and representatives of the NO & Co brain trust to announce that the tourism related businesses were getting a tax holiday.

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.

Cantrell, again in her now standard aggressively condescending tone, emphasized that these tax breaks, which, realistically, can only be expected to keep some businesses afloat for a few weeks at best, were being granted in the full knowledge that they will drastically alter the way the city operates for months and years into the future.

Decisions on how to cut government expenses could be made in the coming days, Cantrell said. That could include everything from cutting contracts or other expenses to furloughs or layoffs for city workers, she said.

“We’re looking at how this will impact the city and our operations, we’re looking beyond not just the next six months but the next 12 months,” Cantrell said. “The impact to our bottom line will be significant and will be felt even a year from now.”

This is a deliberate structural change intended to affect the way the city operates in the years after the virus crisis has passed. By that time, the current crop of hospitality workers Cantrell falsely claims to care about will have been long fired and displaced.  But the ownership class will remain largely intact. And at that point they will be expected to support even fewer of the paltry services the city can offer residents on its current shoestring budget.  It's a classic austerity strategy written up by the very owners who will benefit from it.  "Shock Doctrine" seems like such a cliche at this point but, once again, here we are. No crisis ever goes to waste.

When asked by a reporter why, given the entire history of everything, why anyone should expect to trust that just handing over more money and power to the already rich and powerful with no accountability will work out well for everybody this one time, Cantrell was again characteristically curt. 

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.”

In Cantrell's impossibly small conception of politics, if there is ever economic or class based conflict at all, it is forever subsumed by the greater imperative of personal deference. The worst offense is "being negative" enough to ask that authority be held to account.

The corona crisis is already a staggering calamity. But it's the authoritarian quality of our local and national governments that makes it uniquely dangerous. Every shock of the past twenty years has left the changed world a few degrees harsher in its wake. But this is the one that really feels as though it threatens to break us. It's already broken so much. 

No one can produce anything. No one can consume anything. The world economy is shuttered. The grifters are picking apart its bones. We are all holed up in isolation. The oceans are rising. The city of New Orleans is physically sinking into the sea. The system has glitched out. And our concluding communication, the clanging yawp of our death reflex is a stream of recommended local eateries spammed out from the social media of our office holders.

It's comforting to know that when a global crisis pushes civilization to the very brink local government converts to spam advertising mode pic.twitter.com/F8yJrvD6iT

— skooks (@skooks) March 18, 2020

 

We can't sustain ourselves like this. Nobody has any money. Nobody has any answers. Stop asking the mayor for any. She will only yell at you.