Someone should stop the crime that is in progress

 I'd call the police but it looks like they are in on it.

The NOPD has lobbied for new space for years, and Kirkpatrick has made it a top priority since taking over the department in October. Initial lease terms were agreed to in January, but some council members said they had been blindsided when it was unveiled to them in March.

Now a revised lease, up for council consideration in a special meeting on Wednesday, would add significantly more space at a higher cost per square foot. The latest draft adds a third floor to the space at 1615 Poydras Street and increases the total square footage from about 45,000 to 69,000.

The lease rate increases from an average of $170 to $180 per square foot over a decade.

If the New Orleans Police Department occupies the space at 1615 Poydras for all 10 years, the city will pay a total of $12.4 million, an increase from $7.7 million under the initial deal for the smaller space earlier this year. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday as to why it wants to add more space and agreed to pay a higher rate.

Good luck getting an answer out of them. Maybe it will be on the next podcast. Otherwise maybe FOIA some emails. You know, while that is still legal. 

Anyway... previously on Flip This Office Tower we learned the city had been in talks over this lease for at least six months before Frank Stewart sold the building.  Not sure where this sudden escalator clause came in.  We keep hearing that downtown office space is a soft market. What happened?

Rats gotta eat

First of all we'd like to thank NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick for choosing to drop this Weed Rats meme on us just after Mardi Gras.  It means that everyone who might have had to scramble for ideas a few weeks ago will now have a full year to really sit with the image and decide whether or not it is truly the costume for them. 

Heavy mold and deteriorating elevators, HVAC units and plumbing are some of the issues that have been plaguing New Orleans Police Department headquarters.

But those aren't the only problems at aging police facilities around the criminal justice complex near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street. Don't forget the vermin, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee on Monday.

"The rats are eating our marijuana," Kirkpatrick said. "They're all high."

The great thing about the weed rats is everybody immediately loves them. But also nobody actually believes they are a thing. I mean, sure, there are rats at police headquarters. That's easy enough to believe. But, if anything is being stolen from the evidence room there, it's far more likely the culprits are in uniform.*  Even more dubious is Kirkpatrick's claim that the rats are "high." Rats can and do get high. We learn that from this study where rats were observed with increased appetite and laziness after exposure to cannabis vapor.  The key bit, however, is the vapor. Could the rats get high from just eating the raw plants?  I don't think it works like that. 

Anyway, why is this colorful fantasy being brought to our attention now?  Well, you see, NOPD wants a new headquarters. Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  They aren't necessarily asking for a new building. We just know they want to move out of the one they have. 

A plan to relocate New Orleans Police Department headquarters into two floors of a downtown office tower is a large piece of a wider vision to leave behind the city’s crumbling justice complex in Mid-City, said chief administrative officer Gilbert Montaño on Wednesday.

About 400 police department staffers are slated to relocate with the pending move to the 17th and 18th floors of 1615 Poydras Street, called the DXC building, he said. The draft 10-year lease, which awaits City Council approval, calls for a May 1 move-in date.

The plan is to abandon the current HQ located in the (geographic) center of the city with its proximity to the criminal courthouse and central lockup and move, instead, into an office tower downtown with limited public access and practically no parking. Oh and also now the city doesn't control the building and is paying rent to a private landlord for at least 10 years. This is short sighted, minor league city type stuff. The police aren't even "allowed" to do police business in the police office. 

Lahasky said the lease will not allow NOPD to conduct interrogations or make arrests within the office building.

“Our agreement with NOPD is that the offices will be utilized as administrative offices, and that certain uses such as interrogations and lineups and things that outsiders perceive as maybe not the kind of uses you’d like to see in an office building” won't be allowed, he said. “Those particular uses are to be held off-site.”

Nothing about this makes any sense in terms of public service.  It does make sense if you come at it from the point of view that the city government exists solely to facilitate real estate deals that benefit the succession plans of fading oligarchs like Frank Stewart.  Which is precisely the sort of thing you might think if you are Gilbert Montaño. 

Negotiations began in earnest about six months ago, Montaño said, when the building was still owned by businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart. The Monroe businessmen who bought it at the end of last year, brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, also own Orleans Tower, the former Amoco Building a few blocks away. The city leases space in that building for the Department of Safety and Permits, Civil District Court clerk and Civil Service Commission, among others. 

Frank Stewart, for those who need a refresher, is a billionaire investor whose fortune derives from his family's funeral home business.  The "philanthropist" descriptor he gets in articles like the one above is an inevitable result of owning lots of things (downtown office towers, for example) and making use of as many tax write-offs as possible.  In recent years, his "charity" work garnering the most attention was his leadership of the Monumental Task Force's attempts to maintain the city's Confederate statues. In 2017, he took out a full page ad in the newspaper denouncing Mitch Landrieu's efforts to have them removed.  Mitch was on his way out of office and working on his national profile at the time.  Because of this, he could afford to ignore Stewart's provincial concerns.  The same could not be said for Stewart's ambitious local ally in the monumental "lost cause," Councilwoman and soon to be Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

On Dec. 17, 2015, the day the City Council voted to remove the monuments, Cantrell, then a council member, gave a speech that must have been music to the ears of the pro-monument crowd, chastising then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu for bringing the issue to light. Amazingly, within the same hour she joined the majority of the council in voting for removal.

In early 2018, within a few months of being elected mayor, Cantrell empowered a secretive working group of Confederate monument supporters to decide the future location of the warehoused monuments. One of her spokesmen stated, “She believes that the future of the former monuments belongs in the hands of those who care about them.”

It’s highly likely that the only reason the mayor didn’t go through with the group’s relocation plan, moving them to another prominent location, was the exposure she received in an article by Kevin Litten published in The Times-Picayune. The article exposed Cantrell’s willingness to placate the side of the argument endorsed by some of the most moneyed and powerful people in the city — the side she voted against as a City Council member.

None of that was surprising. Both mayors (and a number of other state and local politicians) have done plenty of favors for Stewart over the years. In 2017, the same year the monuments controversy came to a head, they all helped swing the deal that gave Stewart's building its "DXC" moniker. That $120 million deal committed the city and the state to a package of subsidies and incentives including an agreement to rebate the payroll of software company DXC in exchange for its promise to occupy ten floors of Stewart's tower. The company and the politicians promised as many as 2,000 new "tech" jobs.

Of course, there were those of us who, just days after the announcement, observed that DXC appeared to be taking advantage of the state's generous corporate welfare offerings in order to facilitate its own global downsizing and outsourcing scheme to cut jobs and wages. But nobody ever listens to those of us who say such things. Anyway as time went on, it became clear that DXC was never committed to hiring locally. Over the following years, they would repeatedly miss the goals set forth in the original agreement. As of 2022, they had nearly scuttled the entire thing and were looking to sub-lease much of their office space in the tower.

In the meantime, The Cantrell Administration has spent plenty of time and energy trying to figure out ways to plug the hole in Stewart's revenue stream.  At one point they even considered moving City Hall into the building.  Which brings us up to last year when we find an aging Stewart trying to liquidate his asset portfolio in a slow market for downtown office space. At the time of the sale, the building was roughly 50 percent vacant. But its buyers, Eddie and Joseph Hakim were strangely bullish on its prospects. Likely the, by then, well underway negotiations over a guaranteed NOPD tenant had something to do with that.

All of this is typical New Orleans cronyism. But it also reflects the conservative ideology at the heart of the Cantrell administration. Gilbert Montano said recently that "the future" of city government should rely more on regressive user fee-based budgeting rather than a reliable tax base for dependable services. Under that kind of regime, there can be no real investment in social or physical infrastructure. City services will exist under continual threat of cuts. City departments won't own their own buildings.  Not even the police.  The only dependable revenue streams created go the other direction. Out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporate landlords.

For his part, (potential mayoral candidate) Oliver Thomas wants to put a pause on the NOPD lease because he doesn't feel adequately communicated toward.

“Not only was there a lack of communication about this viable move, but it seems like there was not a lot of thought put into multiple locations that would provide the best access to the men and women that utilize the headquarters, as well as the citizens to whom access is extremely important,” Councilmember Thomas said in his letter to Montano and Chief Kirkpatrick.

Thomas wants to “take a step back” to review other possible locations for the new NOPD headquarters.

He says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that is more “community-oriented” with easier parking and that could become a more permanent spot that would add “value to the community.” He also says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that would add overall access to residents in the city.

The kids are already joking that maybe Thomas will suggest putting the new HQ at the Six Flags site his friend Troy Henry is supposed to be redeveloping. But it occurs to us that this would put us a step closer to the New Orleans Cop City we've already speculated that Mayor OT might build one day. So maybe it's not that funny. In any case, it wouldn't represent a change in governing philosophy so much as a slight adjustment in the direction of the spoils.  It's never really a question of whether the rats are going to get a piece of the stash so much as it is which rats in particular.

 *That link references an evidence room scandal from 15 years ago.  When I started writing this post, I hadn't yet seen the latest one out just today.  Interesting that after the weed rats got their fifteen minutes of fame, NOPD has moved right along to blaming the conveniently deceased for what is clearly a systemic issue.

I suppose we can kick off 2024 with a quick told-you-so

The building we've come to know in recent years as "DXC Tower" has been sold. 

Two Monroe businessmen and real estate investors, the brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, have purchased one of New Orleans' most visible office buildings: the green granite high-rise at 1615 Poydras St. currently named for its anchor tenant, DXC.

The Hakims bought the 23-story building from its longtime owner, businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart, late Friday. The price was not disclosed.

It's the second Poydras Street high-rise for the Hakims. In 2013, they bought the 20-story Orleans Tower, formerly the Amoco Building, for $16 million and breathed new life into the aging tower, located across from City Hall. They renovated it and raised its occupancy from about 45% to more than 80% today.

The article does its best to suggest that somehow this sale indicates the market for New Orleans downtown office real estate is bucking trends.  It says the sale is a "bright spot" in a local office market where occupancy rates are still below pre-COVID levels but "better than in many larger cities." 

Anyway it's all nonsense. Read further and we see the real reason this building is being sold now is because Frank Stewart is dumping properties, possibly at a financial loss.  

Now 89, Stewart has been trying to downsize his real estate portfolio in recent months and has spent much of 2023 quietly marketing 1615 Poydras for sale. Those efforts got a boost in late September, when Stone’s firm listed the building publicly.

No asking price was specified, but an online flier said the building was less than 52% occupied and being marketed “in cooperation with the lender ... at debt amount.” In real estate terms, that meant Stewart and his partners in Stewart Capital were working with their lender to sell it, even if at a loss, in hopes of avoiding a default on the mortgage.

It is unclear how much Stewart and his partners still owed on the building at the time of the sale.

Read even further than that and we get an update on the status of the building's current titular tenant. 

Since 2017, the building has been named for DXC Technology Co., the Ashburn, Virginia-based firm that opened a regional office in the high-rise amid great fanfare and a promise of up to 2,000 jobs. The company hired only a fraction of its promised workforce and has since downsized its footprint in the building.

DXC continues to honor its lease on the building, which runs through 2031, but is currently trying to sublease four of its six floors, according to online real estate listings. Lahasky said the family has not had any conversations with the company but that meeting with DXC to discuss the lease will be a priority.

Of course, DXC didn't merely "open a regional office" there.  The "great fanfare" referenced in that passage also included a hefty public subsidy from the state and the city. The deal looked incredibly shady to us, especially given the company's outsourcing and downsizing strategy at the time. We did say so. 

Anyway, nobody remembers any of that. On to the next boondoggle, I'm sure. 

And now the shocking conclusion

Great big publicly funded corporate downsizing and stock priming scam that any idiot could have told you was going to be a scam turns out to indeed have been a scam. 

But now, DXC appears to be scaling back those ambitions. Records show that as of last year, the Virginia-based company had hired just 300 local workers. The company is only occupying three of the 10 floors it leased in the granite Poydras Street skyscraper that bears its name, and is actively seeking to sublet four of those floors.

And last month, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne signed a May agreement between Louisiana Economic Development and DXC that ended an $18.6 million incentive package because of DXC's repeated failure to meet job creation and payroll benchmarks.

The terminated agreement and DXC's lackluster hiring underscore the challenges New Orleans leaders have faced in recent years trying to lure major employers to the city and then keep them here.

"This was going to be a really big thing," said Peter Ricchiuti, a business professor at Tulane University, of the DXC deal. "When you get a big company like this, it spins off other tech entrepreneurs. Even just having a smaller footprint, giving back office space, is not encouraging."

It was never "going to be a really big thing." It was a scam from the beginning and anybody who was not being paid to believe otherwise could see it from the beginning.

Does anybody remember DXC?

I wonder if anyone understands that DXC was never going to hit its stated hiring targets.  I wonder if they understand that even with when we consider the clawbacks described here that the city and the state are still spending millions of dollars to subsidize this company. 

That explanation didn't stop Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration from cutting DXC's first-year incentives payout by 45%, the amount its payroll fell short. That's in line with rules meant to ensure an economic return on the $6.5 million the city invested in the deal.

Similarly, the state, which was due to reimburse more than $3 million of DXC's first-year expenses, is likely to withhold about $235,000 of that amount, according to records at Louisiana Economic Development. 

The low payroll was discussed at a meeting of the city's Industrial Development Board last week. The public board must pay a portion of the money New Orleans has committed to DXC over the next decade. It will also cut its first-year share by 45%.

I wonder if anyone understands this entire deal happened in the first place because it serves DXC's global cost cutting strategy. DXC is still getting everything it wanted.  It wanted to lay off workers worldwide and move the remaining bits of its hacked up operations to "lower cost labor markets." That was where we came in.  We were the lower cost labor market. Well, that and we were the suckers who agreed to just subsidize their payroll costs regardless. It's fine with DXC if it doesn't pull down the full subsidy because it doesn't really need to hire 2000 people.

But to fake a little bit of good faith, they did manage to hit a first year target of 300.  You'll never guess how they did that.

“This newly formed IT services company will create thousands of job opportunities for New Orleanians, adding to our rapidly growing digital economy,” then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in 2017, when the deal was announced.

But over the next two years, they filed more than 150 documents asking for federal approval to hire workers from overseas.

According to a Lens review of data from the U.S. Department of Labor, DXC has filed 152 applications for H-1B visas for foreign workers in New Orleans in the last fiscal year. Some of the applications were for up to 24 employees, but it’s not clear how many DXC is actually trying to hire.

DXC spokesman Richard Adamonis did not respond to The Lens’ questions about how many foreign workers DXC is planning to hire, or how many of the 300 hired this year were on H-1B visas. Most of the applications had starting dates in the fall of 2019. He instead provided a brief written statement.

“Our agreements with the State and City establish specific goals for job creation within the Greater New Orleans region, without regard to employee origin,” Adamonis’ statement said in part. “Many of these new hires join DXC through our local educational partners.”

Ha ha joke's on us, I guess. Failed to read the fine print. Maybe that's what the local educational partners will teach the future hires.. if there are any.  Anyway, wow, what a totally trustworthy partner Mitch and John Bel and LaToya have chosen for us.

At least LaToya says she had a hand in it.  Here she is during the final 2017 mayoral debate saying she played a role in landing the DXC deal as a city councilmember. She also goes on to talk about how she wants to "depoliticize" the process by which these corporate giveaways are handed out. This is the same line taken by LABI and Republican agitators in Baton Rouge who spent the 2019 election complaining that John Bel's changes to the Industrial Tax Exemption process allow for too much democracy. It's possible the current mayor is even more right wing than either the governor or her predecessor.

Meanwhile, we read at the bottom of this story that DXC fired its CEO in September. It's hard to read between the lines here but it sounds like the shareholders are convinced his cost-cutting strategy that brought the company here was good for them in the long run. Even if it was "brutal," it was also "effective."

Lawrie had led the legacy Computer Sciences Corp. through a turbulent period for the IT services industry, which had to deal with low-cost competition from India and elsewhere.

But DXC shares have since recovered to nearly $38 as analysts began to recognize the change was necessary.

“Lawrie’s tenure is commonly acknowledged to have been brutal in style (even if) it was effective,” according to Rachael Stormonth, an analyst at Nelson Hall, a consultancy. Salvino, on the other hand, immediately emphasized that he would seek to rebuild morale, and he is thought to have a good grasp of the "solutions" approach needed in the industry now, Stormonth said.

And now the job is to "rebuild morale."  Probably should start in the PR department. 

Privacy is important to Google

The company monetizing every bit of personal data about everybody on earth is very careful about what information it shares about itself.

Last May, officials in Midlothian, Tex., a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered Toys R Us warehouse.

That day was the first time officials had spoken publicly about an enigmatic developer’s plans to build a sprawling data center. The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier, went by the name Sharka LLC. City officials declined at the time to say who was behind Sharka.

The mystery company was Google — a fact the city revealed two months later, after the project was formally approved. Larry Barnett, president of Midlothian Economic Development, one of the agencies that negotiated the data center deal, said he knew at the time the tech giant was the one seeking a decade of tax giveaways for the project, but he was prohibited from disclosing it because the company had demanded secrecy.

A very long time ago Google was more or less just a website you used to search for information.  Like if you wanted to know about who your elected representatives were about to shower favors and tax breaks upon, you might use Google to do some of that research.  You can still do that. But Google is hoping you won't find what they're up to until it's too late.

Why are they so worried? Well, it turns out that showering favors and tax breaks onto mega-corporations and international oligarchs isn't the no-brainer political winner it used to be.

The inevitability of Amazon’s arrival, however, had formed a strong common sense. Many acknowledged that it was a crummy deal – including, at times, the plan’s own architects – but urged New Yorkers to resign themselves to its eventuality. Just two days ago, the New York Times published an editorial by historian Kenneth Jackson that granted the subsidies’ absurdity, but suggested still that the city capitulate, stating: “this is how the game is played.” A few weeks earlier, Governor Cuomo, in an interview with Brian Lehrer, said that in a perfect world a company should not have states bidding against one another, but that: “We pray for the perfect, we live in the real.”

In other words, the deal may stink but our hands are tied. Mayor de Blasio acknowledged the obscenity of tax breaks for Bezos, but insisted that the deal was democratic because its key negotiators — the mayor and governor — were democratically elected. The message to New Yorkers was clear: sit down, there is no alternative.

And then, on Valentine’s Day, New Yorkers proved them all wrong. They burst the ideological bubble the establishment was floating, and showed that they will not accept the trickle-down, supply-side urban economics under the vague and misleading banner of “progressive” policy. This demonstrates that we can — and we must — do more than “play the game,” “pray for the perfect,” and follow the leaders.

God bless the kids who write this stuff for Jacobin.  They really do try like hell to convey a sense that great things are happening and victory is right around the corner and man is that ever annoying.  But that doesn't mean they're wrong about what happened. People in New York got together and said they'd had just about enough of this shit in so loudly that it ran the world's richest man right out of town.  So good job, those guys.  How's the rest of the world making out, though?  Not so good.

Making out especially not so good are we here in Louisiana where we're still very much invested in a model of governance that requires us to shower favors on the wealthy first and then hope for good things to come from that.

Maybe they can run Bezos off in New York but we can barely reserve the right to review the occasional industrial tax exemption. Not a single person in New Orleans questioned the cash payroll subsidies handed out to DXC Technology in 2017.  The Sonder STR hotel project is going to have full city council backing. 

In New York they told the world's richest man to fuck off. We can't even stand up to Torres and Motwani and Joe Jaeger. Jaeger just bought himself a dang plantation.  But all indications are we're going to subsidize his downtown hotel with money that could be better spent on shoring up our infrastructure.

What's worse is all of this stuff happens right out in the open where we can read about it in the local papers and whatnot.  What would happen if the local oligarchs started getting all huffy about their privacy when anybody tried to hold them accountable.

Show em what they've won

So who among us could have predicted that the year long Amazon HQ2 grift would have a happy ending?  It sort of does, anyway.  I mean, from the looks of things, Amazon, the global behemoth built on horrific labor exploitation and led by the world's richest man, is still going to get its multi-billion dollar gift from the public coffers of three states.  The happy news, though, is that a growing portion of what we might call the media and political mainstream is beginning to recognize that this is a bad thing.

Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich East Coast?

All good questions. But here’s the big one: Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?

Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. That’s more than the federal government spends on housing, education, or infrastructure. And since cities and states can’t print money or run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything local governments would otherwise pay for, such as schools, roads, police, and prisons.

In New York, where the Governor offered to change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" in what we hope was a joke, the criticism has extended now into the state house and even the US House of Representatives. Those voices remain significantly marginalized, of course. But it's a positive step.  We're still making the super-rich super-richer at the great expense of everybody else. But it's now somewhat accecptable to be critical of that.

Even in Louisiana, you start to see the tide begin to turn a little bit.  It's not happening fast enough, obviously.  Here, for example, is the Governor still happy to hand out public money and favors to hotel developers. Legislators are proud of their restrained compromise decision to only give away $180 million a year to movie productions. All of New Orleans continues unquestioningly to celebrate the Amazon-style package it bestowed on DXC last year in order to help subsidize that company's international cost-cutting and downsizing strategy. And, of course, Louisiana entered its own gift package into the Amazon sweepstakes worth an estimated $6.5 billion.

But even here there are signs of a developing pushback.  For exaple, last year J.P. Morrell, who unfortunately continues to support a lot of these tax incentive deals, at least began to subject them to greater scrutiny.   Also last December, the Advocate ran a major in-depth report by Rebekah Allen on the Industrial Tax Exemption which has been one of Louisina's most costly giveaways and particularly damaging to local municipalities and school districts.  The Governor has granted local taxing authorities more discretion to approve or deny ITEP requests as of late. Some of them have even begun to exercise this discretion. Most notably, the Orleans Parish School Board recently denied such a request from Bollinger.  Baton Rouge teachers actually voted to walk out on Halloween in order to protest an ITEP break  for Exxon.  That issue is currently on hold.

So the good news is there's progress.  We're still losing but people are finding their voices have more reach than they once did.  Speaking of which, here is a video.

Basically, Stacy called them whores

When I wrote about the strip club thing last week, I left this bit out because I wasn't 100 percent sure I heard her correctly.  But, yes, it turns out  Stacy Head did indeed imply that the strippers who showed up to testify against her attempt to put them out of a job were prostituting themselves.

City Councilwoman Stacy Head, who failed last week to persuade her colleagues to put a limit on the number of Bourbon Street strip clubs, is rarely shy about expressing her opinions on the council dais.

So it might have come as no surprise Thursday when she chided some of the two dozen dancers who spoke out against the proposed cap on the clubs for accepting a financial incentive from their employers in exchange for their opposition.

Head said two clubs under the Larry Flynt brand, Hustler and Barely Legal, offered to waive 10 so-called “house fees” for any dancer who showed up to oppose the cap. Dancers must pay such a fee to the clubs each time they perform on stage.

“That’s selling yourselves out,” she said.

You see this sort of thing pretty often. It's a common trope among conservative plutocrat types seeking to deligitimize popular opposition.  This is why we are told the March For Our Lives this weekend was secretly organized by "Soros" or some nefarious actor.  The other night I saw a lady on Twitter accuse Airbnb critics of shilling for  "the hotel industry." In New Orleans we hear often from the Stacy Heads of the world that council chambers have been packed with "paid protesters" over any number of issues.  It's a small glimpse at the contempt with which the politcal insiders and City Hall regulars regard anyone outside of their own social class. 

Stacy is an accute and often cartoonish example of this.  Last week, she suggested that policymakers should consider homeless New Orleanians as though they are of lesser "value" than other residents.  Clearly she has similar notions about the Bourbon Street dancers.  But while Head is particulary nasty, it's worth noting these attitudes are spread more widely than that. I dare say they hold a majority among our political class many of whom would be advised to reflect on their own actions before accusing others of "selling themselves out."

Crying at work is the new normal

I'd love it if it were possible to boycott the omnipotent leviathan that Amazon has become but I think maybe the better path would be to take some sort of state action against these kinds of abuses.

Employees who spoke with Business Insider said the walks have instilled fear across every department of Whole Foods’ stores.

“I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about maps and inventory, and when regional leadership is going to come in and see one thing wrong, and fail the team,” a supervisor at a West Coast Whole Foods said. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.”

The maps this employee referenced are diagrams drawn up by Whole Foods’ corporate office that dictate where every item in the store should be placed.

“The fear of chastisement, punishment, and retribution is very real and pervasive,” another worker said.

Of course that's also not likely to happen. Last I checked our elected representatives were bending over backwards to subsidize the behemoth with public funds.

Florida said he admires Amazon as a company and believes some incentives for tech jobs can be a good idea. But he said research suggests that offering big subsidies to large companies rarely drives economic growth, and Florida worries that a new precedent is being set, one in which public officials feel obliged to hand over increasingly larger magnitudes of money to corporations.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has proposed $5 billion in incentives, while New Jersey has offered a reported $7 billion subsidy deal to bring the company to Newark. Other cities and states have yet to make public their bids; they could be offering even more. Hogan called the Amazon project “the single greatest economic development opportunity in a generation,” for its potential to bring a Fortune 100 corporate nameplate, high-paying jobs and economic growth to the state.

“The level of incentives that some communities were talking about were overdoing it and not fiscally prudent,” Florida said. “Even worse, I was worried that the Amazon search was signaling to the environment that megadeals and megadeal competition is the new normal.”

As usual, Richard Florida is behind the curve. Public bribes to billionaires isn't the "new normal." It's just normal. Your so called progressive local politicians are likely to call it economic development. LaToya Cantrell's recent campaign for mayor centered around her enthusiasm for offering "incentives" to developers and employers like Amazon. She was quick to tout her role in facilitating the much publicized package handed over to DXC recently. It's not clear just how involved she actually was in that. But her eagerness to take credit tells you something about just how normal it is for your representatives to do these deals with the devil.

And, yeah, Amazon is definitely the devil. 

Companies love using the latest and greatest technology to keep track of employees, even when they’re at home. But Amazon’s new idea goes to extremes to treat employees like fleshy robots. The Seattle-based company was just granted two patents for employee wristbands that look like something from dystopian science fiction.

The two new patents, first spotted by Geekwire, are for wristbands that track where a given warehouse workers’ hands are at all times. You read that correctly. I have seen the future, and it’s just rows and rows of low-paid workers in endless warehouses being told to stop picking their noses. Or to get back from their bathroom break, as it were.

People want to let this company fix health care now too.  Sounds like a fantastic idea. 

The company store

The Amazon Sweepstakes was always going to get out of control. And yet, we regret we must still inform you that the Amazon Sweepstakes is out of control.

The e-commerce giant said last month that it had attracted 238 offers from cities that want to be the location for Amazon’s second headquarters. The company says it will spend $5bn (£3.8bn) on the new base, known as “HQ2”, which will employ 50,000 people.

Several of the cities’ bids have been published, revealing the lengths that authorities are willing to go to lay out the red carpet for big businesses.

Chicago and the state authorities of Illinois have jointly offered to hand Amazon more than $2bn in tax breaks, including $1.32bn of its workers’ income taxes. The scheme, known as a personal income tax diversion, would mean Amazon workers pay full income taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads and other public services, Amazon would keep it.

A 2012 report by the Good Jobs First non-profit organisation said such practices mean that “workers are, in effect, paying taxes to their boss”.

Has New Orleans's proposal to Amazon been published? All I can find is Mitch's cover letter where he talks up our nearly all-charter school system.  Odd that the "data-driven" mayor would leave out the latest performance ratings for some reason.  Maybe it's because he's coming around to the absurdity of the grading system. Probably it's something else, though. We'd love to see what the city has actually offered.  No doubt it's well in line with the proto-fascist "best practices" Chicago and others have put in play where everyone who works for the state sponsored billion dollar company also pays directly for that privilege.

You can find similar characteristics in the much ballyhooed deal with DXC where the state and city guarantee a package of tax incentives (including a "payroll rebate") to a company bringing (possibly) 300 jobs to town next year as part of what looks more or less like a stock-fluffing stunt/downsizing strategy.  Everyone was very proud of that.

This includes Mayor-elect Cantrell, naturally.  During the final televised debate, she made certain to claim that she, "definitely had a hand in making (the DXC deal) happen." She didn't offer any specifics about her role, though.  She did spend a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about how she wanted to "depoliticize" the process by which these "incentives" are doled out. This means she prefers to remove even the possibility of public oversight from the disbursement of public money to private interests. On December 13, LaToya will address the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting at the Hyatt.  No doubt she'll have some fascinating insights to offer on all of this.

Happy Cyber Monday!

Gabbo details

Here's what Governor Edwards and an assembly of VIPs told us yesteray afternoon about the DXC subsidy. 

About $25 million of the state's estimated $120 million in economic incentives for DXC is being targeted at the local higher education system. The money will go toward grants over five years for faculty, curriculum and other instructional resources linked to DXC.

The state also offered the company $18.7 million in performance-based grants payable over five years, a $2.2 million parking assistance grant and a $1.5 million demolition grant.

DXC will also take part in Louisiana Economic Development's FastStart program, which assists new or relocating companies in ramping up their work force.

The company is also expected to use Louisiana's Quality Jobs Program, which provides up to a 6 percent cash rebate on 80 percent of gross payroll for new direct jobs for up to 10 years. Starting July 1, 2018, the rebate will be available for 100 percent of gross annual payroll. The program also offers a rebate on capital expenditures or a 1.5 percent project facility expense rebate on the total capital investment, excluding tax-exempted items.

That's at the bottom so you have to read all the way past John Bel's and Mitch's and Michael Hecht's bullshit to get to it. None of them has the courage or the basic moral decency.. not that it requires much.. to say what is actually happening.

What is actually happening is the state of Louisiana is using taxpayer money to subsidize the profit-taking operations of a downsizing and outsourcing vector formed from the remnant bits of two other tech companies. DXC was formed this year out of a merger of parts of CSC and HP. Their strategy since that time has involved a series of big "cost-cutting" announcements designed to keep investors interested. These are mostly about slashing pensions, cutting staff, and "consolidating" real estate holdings. They're in New Orleans as part of that strategy.  

DXC, created earlier this year by the combination of CSC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Enterprise Service business, has been working to reduce its expenses since the merger.

On a conference call, DXC executives said cost-cutting efforts are proceeding according to plan, including workforce reductions, reducing real estate and facility expenses, and implementing "supply chain efficiencies and consolidations."

"We continue to achieve key merger integration milestones," president and CEO Mike Lawrie said. "We're executing our synergy plan, and we're on track to meet our targets of $1 billion of year-one cost savings, as well as a billion and a half [dollars] of run-rate cost savings exiting the year."

Lawrie said the company cut its costs by $110 million in the quarter, including reducing its workforce by about 4 percent.

The move to New Orleans demonstrates to shareholders an effort is being made to reduce labor costs. 

But in an earnings call to investors on Nov. 7, DXC chairman president and CEO John Michael Lawrie suggested the company would be opening new facilities in U.S markets where labor costs are lower.

This is accomplished in part because a tech company can afford to pay lower wages here, and in part because of the "incentive package" including a cash payroll rebate from the state.  Also, and this is important, they don't even have to actually ramp all the way up to "2,000 jobs" in New Orleans in order to meet their strategic goals.  All they really have to do is show the shareholders that they are executing a "synergy plan."

In other words, it means as much or more to DXC to announce that they are making this move than it does that they actually make it. It remains to be seen just how committed the company is to bringing "2,000 tech jobs" here. Next year they plan to hire 300.

DXC plans to fill 300 jobs — largely information technology and business positions — in 2018, then ramp up to 2,000 jobs over five years. Its local payroll is expected to exceed $133 million by 2025.

But, really, there's no need for them to go all the way there. The case of IBM's Baton Rouge Client Innovation Center isn't precisely analogous. But it is close enough to note that just because a company is willing to take advantage of your subsidy, this doesn't mean it's going to deliver everything you expect in return.

The DXC case, though, looks especially suspicious. The one thing that might be okay about it is it activates grant funding that can go toward STEM fields at local universities. But even that shouldn't be so tightly tied to corporate "partnership." But really, the primary beneficiaries are DXC and its stockholders. The secondary beneficiaries are our preening political idiots who take credit for "2000 tech jobs" in the face of practically zero critical thinking from our docile and booster-heavy media. The tertiary beneficiaries are probably real estate vampires in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, most New Orleanians, who are not in tech, and aren't going to "learn to code" all of a sudden, are left behind by a high profile economic development effort that basically ignores them. This is materially important but also symbolically important. It sends a signal as to which kinds of citizens the political leadership actually considers a priority. And, of course, our tax burden continues to fall heavily on poor people who disproportionately pay more than anyone through sales taxes, regressive fees, etc. The state is turning around and handing that money to DXC in subsidies. So you get an upward wealth redistribution effect on top of everything else.

In a Guardian op-ed this week about the so-called "Paradise Papers" story, Occupy Wall Street organizer Micah White  reminds us of the importance of thinking globally.

The fundamental lesson of the Panama and Paradise Papers is twofold. First, the people everywhere, regardless of whether they live in Russia or America, are being oppressed by the same minuscule social circle of wealthy elites who unduly control our governments, corporations, universities and culture.

We now know without a doubt – thanks to the incontrovertible evidence provided by the Panama and Paradise Papers – that there is a global plutocracy who employ the same handful of companies to hide their money and share more in common with each other than with the citizens of their countries. This sets the stage for a global social movement.

Second, and most importantly, these leaks indicate that our earth has bifurcated into two separate and unequal worlds: one inhabited by 200,000 ultra high-net-worth individuals and the other by the 7 billion left behind.

It is only when we see the larger context that we understand where we fit into this picture. In this  case the state and city are being used as pawns in, at best, an international downsizing strategy. At worst, they're being used as pawns in a stock primping strategy. Either way, it's at least in part dependent on questionable uses of public money.  And yet we're going spend the rest of the week watching every elected official (and candidate) pat themselves on the back for it mostly to cheering applause.  Be sure and congratulate them when you see them. They worked really hard on this.

Gabbo is coming

What is it? Who is it? What does it want from us? Will it please just tell us what to do?

Gov. John Bel Edwards is set to make a major economic development announcement Monday (Nov. 13) afternoon, according to a press release, which called the upcoming news "one of the most significant economic development announcements in Louisiana history."

The press release was light on details, noting only the time and location of the announcement: 2 p.m. outside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

No, I don't think it's Amazon. That is, unless it's one of Amazon's hellish, labor exploitative distribution centers. But even that isn't likely.  Probably something oil and gas related. Either that or  a monorail. There's always room for monorails.

Update: Show them what they've won!

Daily Report has confirmed that the major economic development announcement Gov. John Bel Edwards will make in New Orleans this afternoon involves Virginia-based DXC Technology, which will set up operations in the Crescent City and eventually create 2,000 permanent high tech jobs.

2,000 jobs is nice. Probably not much immediate help for local New Orleanians in that number. Some. If you happen to be in the "high tech" field. Are you?  Oh well. It's okay, they'll bring in some people. 

See, DXC's strategy here is all about finding "low cost" labor in "lower-cost facilities."

But in an earnings call to investors on Nov. 7, DXC chairman president and CEO John Michael Lawrie suggested the company would be opening new facilities in U.S markets where labor costs are lower.

Lawrie told investors the company was “rethinking how you bring people in … and it’s about a whole different approach to where we set up our locations. I’ve said before we are looking at creating some lower-cost facilities in the United States and moving some of our workload there.”

What this means is they're looking to locate in places where the cost of living compares favorably with national tech hubs such that workers will take less in wages to relocate and still come out ahead. You might need to get out of their way, though.  In any case, congratulations on being fodder for the  big workforce and real estate cost reduction efficiency finding synergy plan.

On a conference call, DXC executives said cost-cutting efforts are proceeding according to plan, including workforce reductions, reducing real estate and facility expenses, and implementing "supply chain efficiencies and consolidations."

"We continue to achieve key merger integration milestones," president and CEO Mike Lawrie said. "We're executing our synergy plan, and we're on track to meet our targets of $1 billion of year-one cost savings, as well as a billion and a half [dollars] of run-rate cost savings exiting the year."

Meanwhile, we still don't know how much of your ever-increasing sales taxes will go to the "incentive" package that subsidizes all of this. Guess that's what the big press conference is all about.

By the way, the headline writers are already took the bait provided by the Governor's PR department last night calling this "one of the most significant economic development announcements in Louisiana history."  This clearly does not come close to meeting that expectation.  Today we're seeing the qualifying correction.  I wonder if anyone will notice.

The business expansion represents "the most permanent jobs for a single LED (Louisiana Economic Development) project in state history," said the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

 Maybe this is specifically LED's biggest whale. That's not saying a whole lot though.