Keeping the faith 2021

Happy New Year! Pandemic is over now. Congratulations to all who participated. 

(CNN)President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on live television Monday afternoon and reassured Americans of the vaccine's safety.

The shot, which Biden received in his left arm, was administered at ChristianaCare's Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, by Tabe Mase, who is a nurse practitioner and the head of employee health services at the hospital, according to the Biden transition team. 

 

"We owe these folks an awful lot," Biden said, thanking those involved in the vaccine's development and distribution and front-line health care workers. 

 

Biden said the Trump administration deserved "some credit" for Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's vaccine program, and their role in making coronavirus vaccinations possible.

Certainly we do love to get up every day and remember to give Trump "some credit" for everything that's gone on this year.  But let's try to remember that.. popular and electoral vote counts notwithstanding... he isn't the only winner. 

The real winners are the bosses. The bosses have won the pandemic.  They actually have been the winners since the very beginning but if you read this website you would have seen us bleating about it many times over already.  We could already see how they were going to win early as March. Before the CARES act even passed it was clear that first shot at a federal response was going to be the one opportunity for a just outcome . And it was just as clear we were well on the way to missing it.  I didn't explicitly use the phrase "bosses are winning the pandemic" until about a month later but anyone could tell what was happening. By May we had the whole picture and it has not changed since. 

Eventually they're just going to make everyone go back to work. The Brennans will send a six foot rabbit to force us there at the point of a sword. Those of us there are even jobs for, that is. Those of us that can be used under whatever temporary and tenuous conditions that are set down. It will happen before anyone is safe from the virus. If there is no further action from congress and the status quo order is already maintained, everything will still be as broken as it is now and we will all be several orders of magnitude poorer for it.  Poorer workers are cheaper workers. When unemployment is high they are more disposable. The conditions that force them to work despite the danger make them easily exploitable. The bosses have won the pandemic.

I don't bring that up to get in a cheap I-told-you-so. If you read this website you also know nothing I can tell you matters.  I just want to point out how obvious all of this has always been even to an idiot blogger who only knows what he reads in John Geroges's newspapers. 

From the moment the pandemic hit, the most likely thing to happen, as has been the case with every of our century's many disasters, was yet another concentration of wealth and power at the very top and a further immiseration and impoverishment of the vast majority.  Jesus I said that too way back in March.  Look, if you are wondering why there has been less and less posting on the yellow blog as this year has gone along it's because fewer and fewer new things have happened as it's gone along.

 Anyway here we are a few days before the end of the year and how is all that going? 

Meanwhile, America’s wealthiest have seen their fortunes soar. The 100 richest people in the U.S. added about $600 billion to their wealth in 2020, enough to send a $2,800 check to every adult in the country. One, Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, ended 2020 six times richer than at the beginning of the year.

Individual billionaires getting more billions? Check.  The engines that siphon the billions upward continue to crush and devour everything in their path?  Check on that too. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers. In a report published last month, we found that many of America’s top retail and grocery companies have raked in billions during the pandemic but shared little of that windfall with their frontline workers, who risk their lives each day for wages that are often so low they can’t support a family. This is especially true of Amazon and Walmart, the country’s two largest companies. Together, they have earned an extra $10.7 billion over last year’s profits during (and largely because of) the pandemic—a stunning 56% increase. Despite this surge, we ranked Amazon and Walmart among the least generous of the 13 large retail and grocery companies studied in our report. The two companies could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.”

Sounds about like mission accomplished, right?  Well, they're almost there.  As I type this right now, I'm watching Mitch McConnell fend off a last minute attempt by Bernie Sanders to tack a one-time $2,000 payment to individuals onto the jumble of giveaways to Wall Street firms and defense contractors that just passed as the (likely final) COVID relief bill.

They wouldn't even be there had our ingeniously unstable President not thrown one last incoherent fit during which he happened to mention that $2,000 is a larger amount than $600. Before Trump opened his mouth, the deal was already closed. Our leading opinion makers were well on their way to lionizing the moonshine sipping centrists who brought it to us and explaining that it was "good enough" the way it was. Who would have thought we might actually miss having Trump around to light random things on fire like this?  Going back to brunch is going to suck. 

Or maybe it doesn't matter. McConnell seems to have the situation well in hand. 

McConnell introduced the parallel pandemic relief bill on Tuesday, S.5085, which would include the $600 to $2,000 increase in checks to individual Americans, but tacks on a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 and funding for a commission to investigate voter fraud. Both of these additions to McConnell's surprise bill are demands which have been made by Trump for months. The Section 230 repeal would pull back protections for internet companies and allow such media companies as Twitter and Facebook to be sued if users feel wronged by messages on the platform.

Aside from maybe Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st Century.  Over the course of the previous two Presidential administrations, McConnell has completely turned over the federal judiciary. He delivered trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the corporate ruling class.  Now he is leveraging the pandemic to crush workers' rights and bankrupt every state and municipal government which will result in radical austerity nationwide. When future historians write about the dawning of the American neo-feudal age, McConnell will be remembered as a prime architect.

Not to give him too much credit.  I mean being an insider hatchet man for the establishment is always an easier job than trying to protect the disenfranchised.  That's kind of the definition of how power works. McConnell isn't engaging in any dark wizardry. He's just making obvious moves that no one can muster the effort to counter.  It's very easy to muck up something everyone wants by tying it to something else everyone know cannot pass.  State and local governments need relief but McConnell killed that by tying it to liability shields for bosses who callously expose workers to danger during the pandemic. And now he has blocked these one time survival checks by tying them to internet censorship and Trump election conspiracy crap. Being a jerk really isn't that hard as long as you are sufficiently insulated from any consequences.  

So McConnell isn't the definitive US politician of the moment just because he happens to be the guy in position to pull the lever on the machine that feeds the abattoir. It's more the fact that he, or any person who would get to work those controls embodies the universal ethic of the governing class. It's a power that only does one thing. And so anyone who seeks to wield that power necessarily wants to do that thing. Which is another way of saying they're all like this. None of them is here to help.  In fact as I'm continuing to type now, I see the Democrats in the Senate have, in fact, caved on their gambit for the $2000. It looks like they decided it was more important to continue funding the current push for war with Iran.  Here's Joe Biden barely acknowledging the issue while literally turning his back and walking away.  You're not going to get a clearer image of where the Democrats are than that.

Of course, a one time check for $2,000 or even the $2,800 we could have by splitting up the billionaires' profits from this year is still an insult. A just pandemic response policy would pay people to stay home, protect them from their exploitative bosses and rapacious landlords, guarantee treatments and vaccinations are free, and "re-start the economy" through continued fiscal stimulus on the back end.  But we'll never do any of that. All we care about, even at this very late stage of the game, is keeping the military and police state funded while also giving away billions of dollars to rich people. 

WASHINGTON — Tucked away in the 5,593-page spending bill that Congress rushed through on Monday night is a provision that some tax experts call a $200 billion giveaway to the rich.

It involves the tens of thousands of businesses that received loans from the federal government this spring with the promise that the loans would be forgiven, tax free, if they agreed to keep employees on the payroll through the coronavirus pandemic.

But for some businesses and their high-paid accountants, that was not enough. They went to Congress with another request: Not only should the forgiven loans not be taxed as income, but the expenditures used with those loans should be tax deductible.

The truly remarkable thing now is how little it matters that the supply side philosophy guiding such policy has been repeatedly discredited over the course of our 50 year experiment with it. Tax privileges for the one percent do not magically raise revenues. They do not end racial inequality. They do not "create jobs" or raise the general standard of living.  No matter. Our leaders will press on with it as an article of faith. It's the central creed of both parties from Congress all the way down to your local City Council. Giving money to rich people is the reason our electeds are called to service.  The hours are running short on the year now. But real quick, here are a few of our favorite local examples of neoliberal gospel preached in 2020. 

Just last week, Governor John Bel proudly announced a plan to give away $3 million in state funds to a company owned by the world's richest man who proposes to "create jobs" paying $32,000 on average.

Besides the access to Interstate 49 and 10, Amazon is eligible for a performance-based grant from Louisiana Economic Development of $3 million. The grant is payable over two years and can offset facility infrastructure costs. The state will also give Amazon access to LED FastStart, the state's workforce training program, which has given 463,000 training hours to more than 29,000 employees since 2008.

In October, with Orleans Parish homeowners still reeling from last year's property tax assessment, and renters facing a wave of evictions as CARES act protections and unemployment benefits ran out, Erroll Williams announced a $42 million tax cut for corporate owners of downtown commercial properties. 

According to data compiled by the Downtown Development District, almost a third of the total cut in commercial sector valuations — or about $90 million — is accounted for by 10 downtown properties, including the cluster of properties at the river end of Canal Street owned by Harrah's New Orleans Casino, a division of Caesars Entertainment of Las Vegas. Harrah's valuations were more than halved to about $15.3 million, which will reduce its property tax bill by an estimated $2.4 million, according to the assessor's office.

Similarly, the Marriott Hotel on Canal, the Sheraton, the Intercontinental, the Crowne Plaza, the Roosevelt and the Ritz-Carlton will see their property taxes halved.

All are owned by national hotel management groups, suggesting that any tax savings will head to corporate coffers outside of the city.

This gift to out of state mega-landlords will be paid for by about a $12 million dollar drop in revenues meant for public schools and services while homeowners and renters will have to pay $30 million more collectively. 

But let's not get too caught up in the distinction between businesses and neighborhoods. Because another thing we learned this year is that the city's official position is that neighborhood ARE businesses. 

“I really want to be thoughtful on the term business, because we were worried that there may be criticism that we only are thinking of businesses. I say business as a very global perspective where neighborhoods are businesses in my mind. People that have never been through this process and want to expand their gate, those individuals, those customers are businesses. So it’s not just ‘hey let’s help big business.’ “

That is New Orleans CAO Gilbert Montano employing a special kind of capitalism-inflected gobbledygook to talk about his plan to reorganize city planning, permitting and land use departments under something called the Office of Business and External Services. The scheme, which Montano describes as a "paradigm shift," would essentially change the mission of these agencies from protecting  public safety and quality of life from the hazards of profit-driven development to assisting the profit-seekers in getting around those protections.  

As if to drive the point home, the person they hired to implement this new vision made his own fortune monetizing the gentrification of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

Bowen’s new position caught the attention of some affordable housing advocates on Monday due to his former job as general manager of Sonder — a San Francisco-based company that has grown to be one of the largest operators of short-term rentals in New Orleans. In the resume he submitted for the job, Bowen claimed that during his tenure at Sonder he “Blitz Scaled the New Orleans market for Sonder from launch to 1,000 apartments (2,500 rooms) in under 36 months.” 

A report from March 2018 by Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, an affordable housing group that opposed the expansion of the legal short-term rental market in the city, found that Sonder had more listings on Airbnb than any other short-term rental operator in the city with 124.

Neighborhoods are businesses.  They are fodder for "blitz-scaled" profits regardless of whether anybody can actually live there.  It probably helps if they don't, in fact. That way they won't need things like public libraries which, incidentally, the city proposed to de-fund in order to pay for Bowen's new neighborhood monetization department. That proposal was killed by voters. But it's only a temporary set-back. It's clear where the city's priorities lie. Eventually they'll get the budget to follow. 

To expect anything different would be to expect a sudden conversion of the entire political class away from its religious belief in trickle-down economics.  But why would that happen when our priests continue to reaffirm their orthodoxy over and over?  As our final example, we have here one of Mayor Cantrell's very first actions in response to the emergency way back in March. She decided to give businesses a tax break. 

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.

What could possibly go wrong? Well they did ask her that. 

Given the strains to the city budget, Cantrell urged those businesses who are remaining open and can pay their sales taxes to do so, to lighten the burden on city government. 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.”

Don't be "negative." Just hold fast to the belief that doing nice things for those at the top of the ladder will result in nice things for those at the bottom. For ever and ever amen. Anyway, the true believers only need to hold out a bit longer. The sooner we can declare the pandemic over, the sooner we can dismiss any heresy that suggests that poor people have anyone besides themselves to blame. 

The savior is coming in the form of a vaccine... eventually... maybe.

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

Well, they'll figure it out.  After all, as Joe Biden might say, we gotta give Trump some credit. Just have a little faith.