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 now. But consider 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.

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. 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 group. 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 our first reaction to the crisis was deferring Mardi Gras 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.