Eta is enough

Louisiana's inclusion in Hurricane Eta's "cone of uncertainty" marks the eighth (Eta-ghth?) time we've been there this year.  It's been quite a ride, folks.

Listen to the raving bearded guy rocking back and forth in front of his phone

Maybe this format isn't for everybody, but, for me at least, Christman's Twitch streams have been helpful in keeping things in perspective throughout the pandemic.  And this one where he grapples with the implications of this election result covers a lot of ground that deserves attention. 

The 2020 Democratic primary was a last gasp attempt at making class-based mass politics work again. But what we found out in the process was that class-based mass politics hasn't been a meaningful thing in the US since the 1970s at the very latest. Instead everything is broken. And it is likely way more broken than many of us previously imagined.   So what do we do now?  Unclear.  But Matt has a lot of insightful things to say about where we are that might somehow prove useful.. if anything can.

Normalcy in our time, normalcy in our town

Did we talk about the Democratic convention on here yet?  It's been such a weird year in so many ways. Too often I find myself falling behind the noise before I can write enough of it down.  That's not good. Keeping good notes on this website has been such a useful tool for me in just holding it together over the years, I am afraid if I let it go for too long I might dissociate completely from reality.  Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.... 

Oh wait. Here it is. Just a quick summary because I was probably in a hurry. 

But one theme the Democrats pushed relentlessly was Joe Biden's capacity for "empathy."  In Zoom video after dimly lit Zoom video, speakers testified about the times Joe personally had reached out to someone to let them know how well he understood their trauma, how much he cared about and validated their pain.  Almost nothing was said about what he planned to do about any of it.  In fact, one may have come away from the convention with the impression that nothing can be done.  It's a strange thing to offer to voters but it does seem to be in line with the Democratic brand. 

They're basically saying, yeah we know, your life sucks right now. Look at Joe. He's out there feeling your pain. He understands. Meanwhile the policy program is full of little ways to make it easier for you to get used to and cope with the shittiness. We're not out to change the shitty conditions. We're here to valorize your experience of suffering through them.

The hallmarks of this ideology of free market fatalism are visible throughout the mainstream of the Democratic Party.  For example, the same tone was easily detectable in Mayor Cantrell's "State of the City" address delivered just around the time of the convention this year.

“We are all well-versed in the unwavering focus, the hope, and the strength it takes to rebuild from what can seem like disaster,” she said. “I’m here to deliver a message of hope and point the way forward to our future beyond this pandemic.”

The city is now five months past the initial outbreak, which trailed a range of side effects including rampant unemployment and evictions and a city budget now estimated to be more than $100 million in the red. Frequently harkening back to the 1853 yellow fever pandemic, which claimed 8,000 lives, and other, more recent tragedies, Cantrell framed the city and its people as among the most capable of rising to the challenge the current crisis presents.

“We are no strangers to trauma and disruption, you know better than me,” Cantrell said, noting next week will be the 15-year anniversary of the levee failures and flooding set off by Hurricane Katrina.

Again, the message is, our lives are marked by trauma but the mayor knows it and wants us to have "hope."  What, specifically, should we hope for? Well, it's murky.  She says we shouldn't have to worry about making rent.  But her policy response is embedded in trickle-down economics and charitable fundraising projects administered by private non-profits.  And, above all else, great pains are taken to ensure we do not saddle our landlords with worries of their own.

Acknowledging a tripling in the eviction rate, Cantrell touted various rental assistance programs — including a fundraising effort by the nonprofit set up for her transition into office — and said she is fighting for federal assistance.

“The time of a pandemic is not the time for our people to lay awake at night wondering how to make next month’s rent,” Cantrell said. “It is also not the time for landlords to face missing mortgage payments or losing investments they spent a lifetime to build.”

The Dem convention and Cantrell's speech took place a week prior to the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's arrival in New Orleans. That week, a New York Times feature called attention to the long term effects of that disaster and what everyone should know by now are the harmful consequences of the unjust and ineffectual "recovery" policies implemented in its wake.  Sorry to pull such a long quote here.

Pre-Katrina, there was already a considerable shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans. The situation has only become worse, as many of the affordable units the city had were never rebuilt after the storm and the urban core became whiter and wealthier.

New Orleans now has roughly 33,000 fewer affordable housing units than it needs, according to HousingNOLA, a local research and advocacy group. There are opportunities in every corner of the city to fix this, argued Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of HousingNOLA, when we met in her office in Mid-City on South Carrollton Avenue.

Most New Orleanians are renters. Pre-Katrina, the market rate for a one-bedroom apartment was around $578 monthly. It has roughly doubled since then, meaning a full-time worker must now earn about $18 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Real wages, however, have stalled, and many of the places that employ New Orleanians remain closed. Tens of thousands of workers in the city’s beloved music, drinks, food and tourism businesses — who were the most likely to lose their livelihoods both after the storm and now during the pandemic — make a minimum wage of $7.25.

In some other cities, Ms. Morris explained, unaffordable rent “is the result of a housing stock shortage, but in New Orleans we have a vacancy rate of about 20 percent!” In total, there are about 37,700 vacant units. I could feel it biking and driving through the curvilinear streets that weave from the river to the lake, passing by elegant, unfilled properties on otherwise vibrant blocks, then by neatly rebuilt houses sitting lonely in areas frozen in 2007: three empty lots for every six homes you see.

Residents like Terence Blanchard, the Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, who resides in a thriving midcentury neighborhood along Bayou St. John, live this dichotomy. “People talk about the recovery,” he told me as we stood on his dock overlooking the water and City Park. “But if you go to my mom’s house in Pontchartrain Park, there was no real recovery.”

The federal housing vouchers mostly known by the shorthand “Section 8” — which subsidize rent payments above 30 percent of participants’ income — fully cover “fair market rate rent,” which in New Orleans is calculated as $1,034 to $1,496 for a one-bedroom apartment. That means even in increasingly upscale, higher-ground areas of town there is little stopping developers and landlords with vacant properties from lowering rents by a few hundred dollars and still being able to generate revenue.

For Ms. Morris, the continued holdout by many landlords that want “a certain kind of family,” or Airbnb customers, has grown to “psychotic” levels of classism and racism. “At a certain point,” she said, “the math has to let you at least manage your prejudices.”

Whenever the post-2005 destruction and gentrification of New Orleans is discussed, I am obliged to point out again that none of it was an accident.  Since, literally days after Katrina landed, we were already trying to warn that this was going to happen and it would happen as a result of deliberate policy choices made by people who wield political power in New Orleans. Then it happened. It happened every day. Sometimes in very big ways and other times as part of a general creep. But the whole time, we were saying out loud to anyone who would listen, this is happening, the money power, the real estate, tourism and business owners were gutting the city.

And it didn't matter. They did what they wanted. Because that's what always happens. They have the power. We have nothing. You can see it, you can say it, you can object all you want. But they do whatever they want and you don't matter.  Even now, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a depression, there is no such thing as housing justice. Because they can afford to be "psychotic" in their stubbornness and no one with any political power will stop them.

Even at the lowest point of crisis, political leaders emphasize the concerns of landlords holding them equal to or greater than the housing stressed poor. Today, a week after a Category 2 hurricane ripped through and knocked out everyone's power we're still struggling with worries over whether or not the polling locations can operate.  Guess what was back up and running immediately, though.

Public transportation is down, power is out for 90% of the city, but eviction court is open. We have monitors headed in to watch how the judges handle evictions after a category 2 hurricane, during a pandemic.

— Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative (@JanePlaceCLT) October 29, 2020

The thing about New Orleans politics people most misunderstand is how fundamentally conservative it is. The governing ideology in all the major power centers is pro-police, pro-landlord, anti-labor. It's rare to find any observer, let alone someone from out of town, describe it this way, though. Which is why this New Yorker piece by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is refreshing. Taylor is writing primarily about the superficial racial politics of the Biden-Harris campaign but within that argument we find this passage.

There is little consideration of how a municipal administrator’s class standing may complicate solidarities with those it is simply assumed they will represent. This is especially true for Black elected officials, many of whom come from working-class origins but whose class standing shifts when they move into political office. In May, 2018, LaToya Cantrell became the first Black woman to be elected as mayor of New Orleans. Cantrell, who first moved to New Orleans in 1990, in order to attend Xavier, a historically Black university, was deeply involved in community organizing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and served on the city council for six years before ascending to the position of mayor. Despite this background of community engagement, Cantrell has stood on the sidelines during a strike by a small group of Black sanitation workers, over demands for hazard pay and P.P.E. during the pandemic. Sanitation work is outsourced in New Orleans, allowing contracting companies to pay workers less than the city’s living-wage ordinance allows. In this case, when the sanitation workers decided to strike, one of the subcontractors procured a contract for prison laborers, who worked for even less than the striking workers. Even as these “essential workers” have called upon the mayor to help them secure P.P.E. and better pay, Cantrell has refused to intervene directly, saying that these issues are between the contractor and the workers. There is no inherent solidarity along the lines of race, and, when class conflict is introduced into the calculation, it is even more fraught.

This is a city where only a person who promises not to take from the rich and give to the poor and "all that kind of crap" can be mayor.  Policy can only be formulated through a distinctly neoliberal lens. Every problem can only be met with some sort of "business incentive" public-private partnership, or other such trickle down scheme to benefit the ruling classes.

Meanwhile, even within the (very small and insular) world of progressive activism you can't get agreement on basic principles like, for example, housing as a human right or that teachers deserve unions.  And, in any case, the decisions that matter get made at a 10,000 foot remove from any of that through deals between political careerists, tourism bosses, and real estate interests. The public side of the political process, such as it is, is just nonsensical theater.

Which brings us to today's elections.  If you've voted early, or if you've wandered into a polling location this afternoon, you may have noticed that there are a lot of things going on with your ballot besides just that dismal Presidential election.  What even is all that stuff?  Well, if you really want to know the details you should stop here and go read the excellent and extremely thorough Antigravity and DSA voter guides.  But if you want the short version, stay here and I will tell you. 

Basically three things are happening. A slate of reformist candidates mostly associated with the public defender's office is trying to win a bunch of judicial seats.  A few somewhat progressive minded challengers are trying to wrest one or two school board seats away from incumbent charter school privatizers with national corporate backing. And, all of this is happening in the context of various power brokering institutions trying to consolidate their positions as electoral and patronage gatekeepers ahead of next year's municipal elections. 

The linchpin in the insider tug of war is the DA's race where Mayor Cantrell's alliance with BOLD, which did very well in the legislative races last year, is backing Keva Landrum. You can read a little bit about the dynamics of the race in this Advocate story about the fundraising. Landrum has positioned herself as the more conservative "law and order" candidate compared to Jason Williams and Arthur Hunter who she has criticized as "backed by third party special interests." Each of their platforms is invested in reforming the criminal legal system more aggressively than she would like.

As I type this right now, the polls are open for another twenty minutes. But my strong suspicion is the establishment candidates will win most of these judicial and school board races and Landrum will run first in the DA race.  Overall the theme of the night is conservative establishment results at home to match the general "return to normalcy" nationwide as Joe Biden becomes the next President.

Maybe that is disappointing.  But disappointment has pretty much been baked into this since March. Here is what I told the kids yesterday on a parallel internet. We know that the Biden Presidency only represents the replacement of one kind of conservatism with another. We know that, regardless of the election result, we are no nearer to overcoming the massive obstacles to human happiness posed by poverty, racism, disease, empire, and climate catastrophe. And we know these are all deeply embedded consequences of systemic capitalist exploitation and that the work of rooting them out has not even begun. 

But, if only for the sake of your own mental well being and that of your neighbors, please do not deny yourself the chance to revel in the pure and absolute joy of seeing Donald Trump ejected from the White House. Fuck that guy. He's almost gone. It's okay to enjoy that.

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.

Something about words and actions

There's a saying about that somewhere I know I've heard before.  Maybe it applies here. 

California’s governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has announced he has “no time for climate change deniers” despite approving some forty-eight new fracking permits since April (fracking having been strongly linked to an increase in global emissions). Nancy Pelosi, having derisively dismissed the Green New Deal (“The green dream or whatever they call it”), blames climate change for both her home state’s raging wildfires and last month’s hurricane on the Gulf Coast.

Barack Obama, in characteristically elliptical fashion, took to Twitter to declare: “The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does.” During Obama’s two terms at the head of the most powerful office in the world, US gas production increased some 35 percent while production of crude oil grew by an astonishing 80 percent — a fact the former president has actually taken to boasting about.

These examples, and many others like them, underscore the need for a new understanding of climate change denial that goes beyond mere acknowledgment of scientific reality. The fact is, while more US politicians than ever now pay lip service to the basic conclusions of environmental science, the leaders of both parties continue to preside over a consensus of complacency determined to dismiss transformative prescriptions like the Green New Deal as utopian or too expensive.

It's been a busy month thanks to... *gestures at all of everything*... so I haven't had time to finish writing about the Democratic and Republican conventions. But one theme the Democrats pushed relentlessly was Joe Biden's capacity for "empathy."  In Zoom video after dimly lit Zoom video, speakers testified about the times Joe personally had reached out to someone to let them know how well he understood their trauma, how much he cared about and validated their pain.  Almost nothing was said about what he planned to do about any of it.  In fact, one may have come away from the convention with the impression that nothing can be done.  It's a strange thing to offer to voters but it does seem to be in line with the Democratic brand.

We always skip ahead to Thermidor

I know that to most cable news audiences it feels like there's a lot of chaos and stuff going on right now. But, in reality, US politics has been and remains a reliably steady edifice.  The ruling establishment can't be displaced by social upheaval because it is so thoroughly disconnected from it.  The population at large can suffer tremendously but most of them don't matter in the calculus. 

There can be unrest in the streets all summer. People can lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose their lives to an uncontrolled disease, even. But, while those are the problems of the people, generally they are not the problems of the electorate. The electorate is worried about the blowback from all that other stuff. And that is what our politics responds to. Which is why, in times of crisis, the message that goes up the flagpole isn't so much that we need to address the crisis itself but instead that we need to keep the reaction to it under control.  

So, in a Presidential election conducted under these circumstances, the candidates compete to "win the week" by best reflecting their targeted voters' fear of the people. Which is why this week we have one candidate accusing the other of being a "radical left anarchist" who will not keep you "safe."

In formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, Trump laid out a central attack line for his campaign: accusing the Democratic Party of standing with "anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters and flag burners." 

Trump claimed that a victory Nov. 3 by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would usher in an era of lawlessness. "No one will be safe in Biden's America," the president said.

While the other candidate is buying ads to reassure his targeted voters that, no no that is not it at all, in fact he hates the radical agitators as much as the other guy.  Moreso, maybe.  

Mr. Biden has repeatedly condemned instances in which protests for racial justice have burst into violence, accusing Mr. Trump of stoking divisions and laying blame for any chaos on the current occupant of the White House.

But the ad — part of a $45 million one-week television and digital purchase that is by far the campaign’s largest to date — is the first time that Mr. Biden has put this pushback on issues of crime and public safety into a major paid advertising program.

“I want to make it absolutely clear,” Mr. Biden says as images flash of burned-out cars and buildings and a confrontation with the police. “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”

It's been a rough summer for a lot of reasons. But the fact that a lot of people ran out into the streets to be punched and gassed by cops is destined to be remembered only as.. that summer when people got punched and gassed by cops.  Because the next step of connecting that upheaval to a political movement for change is impossible in this system.  It can only be incorporated in terms of the reaction against it. We skip right past the revolution every time.

Joe says your complaint doesn't count

Appeal thrown out on a technicality. Oh well, we tried.  

Joe Biden: "Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting." pic.twitter.com/gGjazceXRq

— The Hill (@thehill) August 31, 2020

In addition to just being flat out wrong, Biden, here, is giving every right wing troll asking, "when will Joe disavow.." all week exactly what they want. It will not stop them from asking that. It will not stop them from continuing to throw up videos of things on fire and saying, "Joe Biden's America" over and over.  

It will further alienate the Democratic Party from the poor and working class people it claims to represent. It says to all the people getting gassed and punched and shot by cops all summer for expressing their grievance against racism and police violence that Joe Biden doesn't think it technically counts as a protest.   Okay. Thanks for that. 

Anyway, you may have heard, the country is not having the greatest year. In addition to all the racist police murders (kind of a long standing baseline feature, anyway) there are millions out of work, a deadly virus burning through the population, wildfires, hurricanes... Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? The people in the streets are the victims of these compound disasters. They are asking for justice. They are asking for help.  They are receiving a lecture about how the are doing it wrong.

I'm not a big fancy well paid political strategy guy, so I don't know. But that doesn't really strike me as a winner. 

RNC Night 3

That was supposed to be the night where they scare everybody about the radical islamo-mexican-BLM-antifa terror that was coming to drag them away in the night.  Instead they let Mike Pence talk for 45 minutes.  Nobody wants to see that.  Not even Republican voters. I still have no idea who any of this is for.

RNC Night 2

Nobody knows what is going to happen in the future.  Also I am aware that I am not the intended audience for either party's convention infomercial.  But two nights into the RNC, and already they have me thinking Trump is going to lose.  

Again.

I am thinking that again, now. 

Not that I have any idea what will happen. Can't emphasize that enough. But these conventions give the impression that both parties are in competition to see who can be the most out of touch with the moment. The Democrats spent a week sitting in the dark and being sad. The Republicans are better lit but somehow still matching that energy. This shit is boorrring. 

The 2016 RNC was a non-stop barrage of blood and soil lunacy.  In 2020 they're presenting the meandering mumblings of various Trump family members interspersed with, like a parade of dead weight business guys.  

 

Nobody is tuning in to see that.  They are coming here to see some troops and cops scream about "antifa" and "radical Islam" and stuff.  And, no, it doesn't count if a coked up Trump son is saying it.  Trump voters want to own some libs about "#obamagate" or bray about the "hypocrisy" of  the Biden family's equivalent corruption.  They do not want to sit though Pam Bondi's droning on and on about any of that, though.  

This is extremely boring content and I have no idea who it is for. We know the Democratic convention was deliberately trying to appeal to Republicans.  According to this CBS poll that got a lot of attention this week, that might not have been the best idea. Only 5% of Republicans responding said they plan to vote for Biden now. 

 

No surprise to see the Democrats fail. But at least we know what they are up to.  What is this RNC trying to accomplish?  Monday night's closing speech by South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was a dopey talk about "shooting for the moon" to reach your American Dream or whatever.  Scott talked about how trickle down policies like Opportunity Zones and tax credits bring "private sector investment into distressed communities."  It was a speech a Democrat would give if he were trying and failing to attract Republican voters. We heard several at the DNC just like it.  Tuesday ended on Melania Trump, who CNN definitely grades on a curve, speaking (for 25 minutes!) empty aphorisms about "civility" and "sympathy" with no notion of how to actually go about helping anyone. This, again, would have fit right in on the DNC program.  

Why are they wasting their time with this? Why is either party? Nothing in any of this messaging connects to the material world that Americans are living in today.  170,000 + dead of an uncontrolled pandemic.  Millions unemployed with no relief in sight.  Almost nightly acts of violent suppression committed against calls for racial justice. Neither party is speaking to any of that. None of what they offer is for us.  Who is it for?

RNC opening night

Overall, not great. I mean that in the normal sense as in, some very bad people talked badly about bad things.  But I mean it also in the broken-brained political punditry sense as in, the bad people didn't put on a particularly compelling show likely to move voters.  At least, as far as I can tell they didn't.  I realize none of this is for my benefit. 

What even happened?  Let's see.. Don Jr.'s girlfriend yelled really loud at us.  Don Jr., himself, appeared to be crying the whole time. Steve Scalise and Nikki Haley spoke in fake southern accents for some reason.  Herschel Walker was there. So were Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones and Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik in order to make the, "Ha ha who is the real racist now?" joke over and over.  

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was supposed to bring that theme home at the end but his speech sounded like it would have put the audience to sleep had there actually been one in the room. Although, it should be said, the Republicans' decision to stage their speakers as though they were addressing a full hall come off a little bit better than the Democrats' hodge podge of Zoom videos filmed from a series of half-lit elementary school rooms.  

As for the content, neither side has an edge.  The Democrats' message last week was, essentially, empathy.. but helplessness. Everyone's life is hard right now. It feels like it's getting harder. The Democrats get it. But they aren't necessarily promising to do anything about it. The Republicans are selling helplessness too.. but also resentment. While the Democrats feel really bad about the bad things that happen to the poor and vulnerable, Republicans show them open hostility.  Either approach amounts to a denial of serious structural problems. Americans prefer to blame individuals for their problems.  Our political leaders can either empathize with you or they can yell at you, but don't expect much help. 

Is either side "winning" right now?  Who knows. I know I'm not the intended audience, but last night the Republicans bored the hell out of me. Guilfoyle's speech was loud and nutty but, on a scale of recent GOP nuttiness, it probably rates about a 5 out of 10. It doesn't even approach Rudy Giuliani's 2016 performance, for example.  This Louisiana doctor showed up to tell us about the fantastic job Donald Trump is doing. But who could think that makes any sense? 

The United States has failed to contain the coronavirus as effectively as many other developed countries. After experiencing a surge in cases in many parts of the country this spring, the virus roared back in the South in the summer. As of Monday the virus had killed 177,176 people in the U.S., and the country had logged 5.7 million cases.

Support for Trump’s handling of the pandemic has lagged as infections and deaths continue to climb, dropping from 44% approval in March to 31% in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Monday.

Similarly, Republican speakers talked about all the jobs Trump has brought us. But checking back in with reality, we have to ask, who is this message for?  

But nearly half a year later, many of the jobs that were stuck in purgatory are being lost forever. About 33 percent of the employees put on furlough in March were laid off for good by July, according to Gusto, a payroll and benefits firm whose clients include small businesses in all 50 states and D.C. Only 37 percent have been called back to their previous employer.

There were 3.7 million U.S. unemployed who had permanently lost their previous job as of July, according to the Labor Department. That figure doubled from February to June, held steady in July, and is expected to hit between 6.2 million and 8.7 million by late this year, according to a new analysis from economists Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of Harvard University and John Coglianese of the Federal Reserve Board.

Again, I know the audience isn't me but it can't possibly be anyone experiencing the agony of job loss or death of a loved one by COVID either.  Can it?  Likely both parties are talking to a narrow strip of voters who see themselves as insulated from the worst of the pandemic; the wealthy, sure, but also middle class people with relatively secure jobs they can do from home.  Only that population is likely to see any of this empty showmanship and mistake it for substance. Anyone else can only despair. 

Cancel culture

2020 is the year the virus ate everybody's homework. No need to worry about those deadlines, folks. All of the things have been cancelled.

School is cancelled.

The festivals are cancelled.

Jail is cancelled.

Your water bill is cancelled.

The Farmer's Market is... still on

Even the election is cancelled.

The presidential primary elections in Louisiana slated for April will be delayed by two months, the latest in a series of dramatic steps government leaders have taken to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

Sec. of State Kyle Ardoin was set to announce the delay at 11:30 a.m. Friday, using a provision of state law that allows him to move any election in an emergency situation.

Gov. John Bel Edwards' administration confirmed the governor will grant the delay Friday. Christina Stephens, an Edwards spokeswoman, said it's an "extraordinary measure but one we feel is prudent."

So, you know, everybody chill. 

Orrr if you were ever interested in just up and declaring yourself President, this might be a good time for that as well.

A world restored

Trying to come up with a pithier explication of Super Tuesday than this and failing to find one.

Dow surges more than 600 points at the open as Biden Super Tuesday victories boost health care stocks https://t.co/RfHHB5XY84 pic.twitter.com/CZzbCxlzcL

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) March 4, 2020

Anyway on to the long death march, now.  I don't want to go on at length about the 2020 primary because what is the point of putting any more of that #content on the internet right now?  I mean I think there are probably one or two things I could say that not many other people around me are saying today.. maybe?

But I already did a tweets about that.

Massive wealth redistribution

Bloomberg has so much to give. And there are so many needs.

This transactional, corrupt favor-trading is as unacceptable as anything we see in Trump’s Washington. It’s abetted by an orgy of spending unseen in modern political history, a corporate-run, corporate-marketed Potemkin village of a campaign (where the talking points are so road-tested they’re plagiarized). Bloomberg has perfected an unrebutted, unsoiled image outside the primary fray (“I'm not running against the other Democratic candidates,” he has said at his canned, catered events, “I'm running to beat Donald Trump”). It calls to mind television networks’ unfiltered broadcasts of Trump’s speeches in 2016, only Bloomberg, unlike Trump, is paying for the time. And unsurprisingly it works; corporations use advertising for a reason. At the same time that he’s deluging the airwaves with his own dollars, he’s also leaning on his pals in the plutocracy to starve competitors seeking big-money dollars. He’s paying Instagram influencers to say nice things about him, and paying meme-makers to boost his image. Fake social-media content to cultivate support? Mike will get it done.

I'm still trying to get a bead on how many of the sudden Bloomberg employees are just in it for the cash windfall. You hear the occasional  anecdote about this or that person who is getting the $6,000 a month and the free computer from Mike but is actually out knocking on doors for Warren or whatever.  But you have to figure that can't be most of them, right?

Anyway we'll know more when the mayoral endorsements come rolling in.  A few have already but there are some we're watching with particular interest.

In spring 2018, the Jackson mayor held a town hall with Sanders before the Vermont senator announced his intentions to again seek the presidency.

Although Lumumba has not signaled whether he will make an endorsement, several Bloomberg staffers have ties to the capital city’s mayor.

Just remember to keep a list

The Bloomberg phenomenon is fascinating.  Rarely are we presented with such a perfect opportunity, not only to observe the depth and breadth of the moral rot within the professional political class, but also to see so many of the sellouts clearly identify themselves.  Many of your local professional Democrats are amoral grifters who don't give a shit about the problems of poor and working class people or whatever the Democrats still half-assedly claim their brand to be about. They're just in it to suck as much money as can be had out of the process.  And, sure, you know, "everyone's gotta eat." But maybe we can find a better meal ticket than the guy who literally doesn't want people to be able to eat.

Anyway, like I said, the "Bloomberg Effect" may sound at first like a reason to despair but it is actually an opportunity. Every dirtbag who takes his money is telling you something essential about who they are. Make sure you remember to take down their names.

The Bloomberg Louisiana team includes Richard Carbo, who just ran Gov. John Bel Edwards’ re-election campaign; Ryan Berni, a longtime aide to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; and Bill Rouselle, a long-time strategist who worked on campaigns for Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, among others.

Bloomberg, 77, is a billionaire and former mayor of New York City. He's been running an aggressive, TV-driven campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Carbo will lead the campaign’s efforts in Louisiana as state director.

Bloomberg’s Louisiana operations will include 5 regional offices and more than 20 staffers.

"We are building the most robust presidential campaign operation in the state's history with a team that has a proven track record of helping Democrats win in Louisiana,” Berni said in a statement.

Other members of the team include: Telley Savalas Madina, Organizing Director; Kia Bickham, Political Director; Micah Cormier, Communications Director; Tyler Walker, Digital Director; Emilie Tenenbaum, Operations Director.

Hey! There's a new Hampshire

I suppose that since I made a guess at how Iowa would go I should do the same thing for New Hampshire.  Making guesses is always a bad idea, of course, because you almost never get it right. And then everyone else who is also an idiot who did not get it right can plainly see that you are an idiot who is not getting it right.

What I did not get right about Iowa was, although, like everyone else on the planet, I've been expecting Biden to crater, I didn't think he would do that right away. I've also been pretty clear that I don't believe there's any way in hell the Democrats are going to let Bernie Sanders be their nominee so I'm thoroughly expecting them to fuck him over in any way possible. However I also did not expect that to happen right away.  But both of those things happened and now here we are!

So it's all happening so fast.  Before now the name of the game has been, what happens to all the party insiders after the inevitable Biden collapse? But I think at this point the answer is obvious. They've all been pre-bought by Bloomberg.  Assuming that Sanders doesn't stumble too badly in the months ahead, and assuming the Democrats can't hop on any of the other horses in the race and make them happen, we're more than likely headed for a brokered convention where Bloomberg would theoretically have the greatest advantage.  Would the Democrats really nominate him, though?  Boy would that ever be a hoot.

Anyway, the way it sounds watching the cable news is that Bernie is having a harder time in New Hampshire than he was supposed to.  Let's assume it doesn't go too poorly for him, though. Here is a reasonable assumption


Bernie: 25
Pete: 22
Amy: 15
Liz: 12
Joe: 10

Could be an early end of the line for Biden there. Maybe after this, Bloomberg can hire the remaining 15 percent of professional Democrats he isn't paying already. 

The politics grifter industrial complex

All of these "bugs" are features. It's how an entire class of politically oriented professional/managerial types sustain themselves.  And it isn't just a quirk of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the national politics grifter industrial complex.  It's not something that you just see on the cable news that operates at a great remove from you. It's here in your city fucking your shit up too. The rot in the national political expression is a function of the local level corruption from which the national parties are built.  And that's what we've been describing here in New Orleans for... well.. for a very long time now.

This McGowan person and the various Obama/Hillaryites who circled in and around her company are no different from the cast of amoral crooks circling in and around the halls of power in your home town.  The game is exactly the same.  Make yourself rich pretending your for-profit service or app or whatever can or should replace basic social welfare functions. 

Unlike most digital strategists, her operation is what the IRS classifies as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit — meaning a majority of its funds must be used to promote “social welfare.” And yet, Acronym has a web of for-profit companies beneath it: a campaign consulting firm (Lockwood Strategy), a political tech company with a peer-to-peer texting product (Shadow) and a media company investing in local left-leaning outlets (FWIW Media). In the works is an apparel arm (Rogue Swag) that would be the first major liberal answer to conservative companies that skirt campaign finance laws by selling politically branded clothing over Facebook and elsewhere — spreading political messaging without having to report the spending.

It means the nonprofit Acronym is able to raise money, invest in for-profit companies to advance progressive aims and then return any profits back into its mission. “People don’t understand why I am creating a model that I can’t get very rich off of. Because I don’t own the companies; the (c)(4) does,” she says. And that’s a huge threat to political consultants’ bank accounts

The emphasis in that quote is mine because it is horseshit as anyone who understands how money laundering works can see.

[Update: For more on how the money laundering works, see Pareene here.]

But to return to the point, this isn't a new phenomenon. It isn't an aberration.  It's how things are done in the age of neoliberalism.  LaToya Cantrell expressed this quite emphatically to her supporters on election night 2017. 

 "I’m not talking now about taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all that kind of crap," Cantrell said at a victory speech Saturday night. "What I’m talking about is creating balance so everyone feels like they’re winners.

We can't tax rich people and use the money to provide basic public services anymore.  Instead we leave it to "entrepreneurs" to flatter "philanthropists" into funding a series of amusements, and shiny things that we pretend will mitigate the social ills caused by the lack of those services. The important people make more money that way. Especially when we subsidize the process through public-private partnerships.

As long as "everyone feels like they're winners," the con can perpetuate itself.  An associate of Irvin Mayfield once described this as "volunteer entrepreneurism."  We've described that in as much detail as we could muster quite a few times. Here is the one I'm thinking of currently.  It is the dominant ideology that is currently eroding your democracy. And the erosion begins here in your backyard.

Shadow government

I guess the first thing we need to dispense with is the notion that somebody "hacked" the Iowa results in order to change the number of votes or something.  Nobody is claiming that. The only places I've seen that argument appear, in fact, have been accusations of "conspiracy theory" coming from Dem Party hacks offering bad faith misrepresentations of what critics are actually saying. Don't listen to those people.

Here is what critics are actually saying about what's going on.

The Iowa State Democratic Party decided it would be a good idea to have caucus results reported via an app created by a secretive fly-by-night vendor named (apparently for the sole purpose of being hilarious) Shadow Inc.  This is a failure of basic integrity in that it follows an all too commonplace practice of handing out services contracts to consultants and cronies of various party insiders.  Which is to say it is a symbol of the very corruption that under-girds the party and which the Sanders campaign is running to dismantle in the first place.

State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech company that joined with Acronym last year, more than $60,000 for “website development” over two installments in November and December of last year. A Democratic source with knowledge of the process said those payments were for the app that caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locales.

Gerard Niemira, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is the head of Shadow. He previously served as chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Acronym, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2019, David Plouffe, one of the chief architects of President Barack Obama’s wins, joined the board of advisers for Acronym.

The introduction of Shadow's "bullshit" app is also a failure of basic competence in that it presented scores of caucus leaders with an unnecessary, unvetted, unsecure tool many of them were likely unprepared to use.

Reports suggest that the app was engineered in just the past two months. According to cybersecurity consultants and academics interviewed by the Times, the app was not tested at statewide scale or vetted by the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency. And even if the app was working just fine, reports suggest the roll out of the tool was bungled, to the point where those tasked with reporting via the app weren’t trained to know how to use it.

Most importantly, it is a failure of democracy because when the results are released (and again nobody is claiming or has claimed that the results will be anything but accurate) that result will then be tainted in the public's mind by the chaos created by the app. Ironically what's likely to happen going forward is when we do hear complaints about the accuracy of the results themselves they will come from the same *Russiagate* bleating centrist hacks currently accusing critics of spreading conspiracy theory.

In fact, one would be forgiven for thinking this is exactly what is being encouraged. As of this writing, the party has, for some reason, decided to publicize 62% of the caucus results and then pause there for a news cycle or two. At present, those results show Pete Buttigieg in what is loosely interpreted to be "the lead" although he does, in fact, trail if we count the popular vote. Anyway, it's been just enough time for several rounds of "Gee Whiz Mayor Pete is strong" takes to make their way around the cable news circuit.  If at some point in the coming hours (days?) we learn that Bernie has actually finished first, it just makes everything look that much more uncertain.


This is unfortunate because, in all honesty, it doesn't matter that much what the delegate count coming out of Iowa is. The only reason anybody pays any attention to what happens there at all is because it is the state that goes first. The only reason that is even significant is because, once upon a time, Jimmy Carter convinced everybody that a media narrative about "momentum" was more important than the substance of how many delegates were won from a small electorate not particularly representative of the country at large. In other words, the whole point of Iowa is tone setting and perception management. Otherwise nobody would give a shit.

And now, thanks to this clusterfuck, the likely winner of the caucus (Bernie) is denied the prize typically granted to the winner via the standard punditry. Instead that goes, a little bit to Pete, but mostly to chaos. So, you know, good for them.  The good news for Sanders is, his campaign isn't really about impressing pundits and generating narratives. Instead it will head to New Hampshire now where it has a strong showing in most polls and, of course, a teeming grass roots movement as fired up now as ever.

And then it's on to Nevada where they're trying to figure out the next cool caucus app now. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

Oh also how is Joe Biden doing? Has he dropped out yet?

Horse race season

Time to let the candidates loose and see how they actually run.  I'll spare you my harangue about how and why they're not going to let Bernie get the nomination. (For now, anyway. There is plenty time left for that.)  But today is not a a day for it. Instead let's play the stupid pundit game and place some bets on Iowa.  Here's what I've got.

Bernie 28
Biden 23
Warren 20
Pete 16

That way there is plenty of room for all the cable news talkers to pick whichever candidate they like and declare that person the "real winner." 

The people for whom none of this means a thing

Speaks volumes about the Democratic Party in Louisiana. 

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has selected a team of prominent Louisiana campaign veterans to work on his 2020 efforts.

The Bloomberg Louisiana team includes Richard Carbo, who just ran Gov. John Bel Edwards’ re-election campaign; Ryan Berni, a longtime aide to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; and Bill Rouselle, a long-time strategist who worked on campaigns for Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, among others.

The pinnacle of success for your most influential political consultants is about electing a meal ticket. Anyone who is in this because they actually care about things is a chump. 

Why do so many people want to burn it all down? It's a mystery.