Think of the children... or the economy

The mayor and the superintendent are probably going to announce today that the schools aren't ready to open. At least they will tell us that's what the numbers say.  

The city has set benchmarks of fewer than 50 new cases per day and a sustained decline in new cases for 14 consecutive days before moving to new reopening phases, and Avegno said the district should also consider these for reopening schools.

She also said she wants positivity rates to remain below 5% of people tested.

An analysis of the city's health data shows that in recent days New Orleans has come nowhere near meeting most of those goals.

Case numbers have been rising since late June, shortly after Phase 2 was implemented. The last time Orleans Parish showed fewer than 50 new cases in a day was July 6.

There were nearly twice as many cases in the 14 days that ended Friday -- 1,129 -- than there were in the 14 days prior, when the city saw 583 cases. The percent of residents who test positive hovered between 5 and 7 this past week.

"No other country has reopened schools with the level of community transmission that today is happening in America," Avegno told school leaders on Wednesday.

What they end up actually doing is another matter. Probably they will say they're looking for the safest plan but still holding out hope the schools can open.  This isn't because they are indecisive so much as they are, like everyone else right now, waiting for better options.  Because, once again, thanks to the complete lack of support from the federal government the virus is out of control all over the country and cities and states are left to twist in the wind. And with little sign that any of that is going to change, our local decision-makers are at the mercy of political pressures born of public anxiety they should not have to confront right now. This is what they mean when they say the situation is "fluid."  It means we've all been left to drown.

But, hey, sometimes you just gotta take it.  You know, for The Economy.

School Board member Sarah Usdin said the health department will have to balance the economy and safety.

"I just feel like there’s no right answer," Usdin said. "This is such an incredibly hard, hard time for everyone. It's unprecedented and we want what’s best for everyone. And there’s no way to have what’s best for everyone."

"There's no way to have what's best for everyone."  Would love to hear Usdin elaborate on this.  Some people want safety but other people want to make money, is what it sounds like she is saying. Such a difficult choice! Can't imagine there being a "right answer" to that.

Update:  Really needed to append this Elizabeth Warren op-ed here because it provides a direct "right answer" to Usdin.

Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.

Warren goes on to list a number of things that need to happen in the next federal relief bill, including direct aid to local school districts, so that we don't have to listen to false frames like the one Usdin presents us with.  Not counting on any of that coming to pass, of course. But it's important to make sure people know they're being denied solutions rather than simply tell them none exist.   

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. 

Happy days are here

Excellent news for Louisiana's petro-based economy! - The Advocate Editorial Page, probably.

LONDON — The price of oil surged Friday on concerns that Iran might respond to the killing of its top general by the United States by disrupting global supplies of energy from the Mideast.

If sustained, the rise in oil prices could lead to more expensive car fuel, heating and electricity bills, stifling the global economy at a time when it is already slowing.

One thing I am thankful for during this particular cycle is that there is no cable news channel blaring in my household.  Just because the rest of America is being bombarded with war opinions from people who should be in prison doesn't mean you have to listen to it too.  Most people's TVs still come with an off button. Might as well make use of it while you still can.

Meanwhile, your Democratic Presidential candidates are weighing in. That includes those among them who have been a troop.

Mayor Pete doesn’t oppose the Trump administration assassinating an Iranian government official on Iraqi territory, he’s just not sure is was done in the best way.

This sort of response is why democrats might be the worst opposition party in history. https://t.co/G1ta3phb47

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 3, 2020

Pete is just going to accept, on its face, the premise that the US launching an assassination attack on a high ranking Iranian military and government officer is a justified action.  Anything he says after that is pointless. It would be one thing if it were just Pete. But it's also coming from every other Democrat to have weighed in so far.

Well.. not every one of them.

Sanders took a different tone, one drawn from a wing of the party that has opposed American wars since Vietnam.

“Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars,” Sanders said in a statement, after noting his opposition to the Iraq war and without mentioning Soleimani by name. “Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action puts us on the path to another one.”

Gotta love the way they write, "a wing of the party that has opposed American wars since Vietnam," as if that's a bad thing.

Apologies to the vultures, but the body has already been picked clean

Now that the body of the Kamala For President campaign has officially floated on out to sea, everybody wants to know who benefits. The immediate answer is nobody. The eventual answer might be a little bit different.

The immediate problem is there aren't very many Kamala supporters to divide up at this point. So there isn't much for any candidate to pick up now that she's gone. If Warren was the second choice among most Harris supporters as the polling seems to have indicated, most of those supporters had probably already gone over.  I wouldn't expect Warren to gain an obvious bump now that Harris is out. However it probably helps her down the road.

The game right now is about figuring out where the Biden voters are going to go after Biden inevitably implodes which is what everybody... including a lot of Biden supporters.... expects to happen at some point. Biden is the nominal front runner but his support is softer than conventional punditry suggests. It also is not monolithic. Conventional punditry assumes the majority of the voters considering Biden are "centrists" in search of a conservative Clinton style candidate but this ultimately may not be the case. Because the Biden campaign isn't really about anything besides name recognition, there are many different kinds of  Biden supporters who will end up making many different kinds of choices when the Biden campaign ends.  That doesn't mean the majority of them will land with the most ideologically comparable candidate to Joe Biden.  The Biden campaign isn't about ideology. Voters won't necessarily be drawn to their second choice for the same reasons they have been drawn to Joe.

The main reason the Biden campaign is associated with the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party has to do with its network of surrogates tied to the party power structure. Apparatchiks like Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond for example, are with Biden now because it's the professionally appropriate place for them to be. For the time being, the Biden campaign is the de-facto home of the institutional Democratic Party. A broad base of party insiders are hanging around it at the moment because it suits their personal ambition, or at least their general sense of obligation in some way. After Joe drops out, they're all free to move on, of course. But, unlike the free agent Biden voters among the general public, the party insider class is much more likely to land on a single second choice.

Early on, Kamala was a good bet to become the safe Biden replacement. She cultivated a similar appeal to conservatives and professional class Democrats. And she was never shy about courting wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists. Despite all this she never got it together for a bunch of complicated reasons. Last week's NYT feature shines a light on some of the inside baseball.  There were other problems as well with regard to the "messaging" and "positioning" that cynical political analysts like to fixate on.  But when you boil all of that down what you find is an elitist, conservative, corporate-friendly prosecutor failing to convince enough donors that she can lie her way around that effectively. When you think about it, it's pretty wild that the main idea behind Harris for President in the first place was that a lot of people liked the faces she made on TV during the Kavanaugh hearings. But then again, the current President is a game show host so who are we to say that this is any less valid as a marketing gimmick. Anyway it didn't work out.

Now that she's gone, the game is still about catching the windfall when Biden drops out. Kamala's goal was to be the obvious landing place for ex-Bidenites when the time came. But her campaign never demonstrated any growth as Kamala-curious Bidenites started kicking the tires on Warren instead. And in recent weeks, it looks like voters she might also have targeted began gravitating toward Mayor Pete.

But the bulk of the voters waiting to move are still tentatively with Biden. Which is why having Kamala out of the way is probably helpful to Warren down the road a bit. I also believe it opens up some possibilities for Bernie but nobody seems to want to hear that right now. Maybe we'll come back to that later, though.

Of course Bernie will never be the new favorite of the party insiders once Biden is out.  That is a thing that Pete and Warren are battling over behind the scenes. Expect that little campaign will only intensify now.

Gotta get everything or else you get nothing

There are two campaigns in the running for the Democratic Presidential nomination presenting a  (kinda sorta) left-ish policy platform.  There are key differences of detail between those two policy platforms that deserve your attention but the more significant matter of distinction has to do with building power. If the next President is committed to turning campaign plans into lasting and impactful change, they're going to need some muscle to get it done.  And that comes from having been elected on the strength of an actual mandate. Fostering a continuing movement outside of the government is the only way to overcome the inertia on the inside.

Because if the next President has to walk into this mess with no one to have their back, then we're all in for a whole lot of nothing happening.

Most Democrats expect the governing agenda of the next Democratic president to be set by, well, whomever that next president might be. Ben Cardin, Democratic senator from Maryland, has other ideas.

“I think we’ll take up our own proposals,” Cardin told The Hill on Tuesday. Asked if he would vote for a “Medicare for All” package — a policy supported by the two most popular 2020 contenders in the Iowa caucuses ― the 76-year-old Cardin suggested the bill wouldn’t even be granted a vote.

He's running!

Last week the New York Times gave us one of those obligatory "Democratic Donor Class Is Panicked" articles that start coming out every quarter or so once we reach this stage of the Presidential pre-primary. Oh no are the candidates "too far to the left"?  Why haven't the piggies begun to rally around Amy Klobuchar's stern lectures about what they can't have yet?  Somebody has to do something about this. Who could we call on?

Would Hillary Clinton get in, the contributors wondered, and how about Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor? One person even mused whether Michelle Obama would consider a late entry, according to two people who attended the event, which was hosted by the progressive group American Bridge.

Hey you know that might work. Uncle Joe's exploding eyeballs may have embarrassed the hell out of everyone by yelling at Warren on stage last week.  But here is Hillary with her idea to yell at a completely different person instead.  Should they give that a go?   Maybe.

But hey, look who else appears in this article for some reason.

“I can see it, I can feel it, I can hear it,” Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, said of the unease within the party. He said he thinks Mr. Biden is best positioned to defeat Mr. Trump but called the former vice president’s fund-raising “a real concern.”

It's a "real concern," but like a lot of these establishment Democrats, Mitch is still a Bidenite. Or, at least, he is until he is given permission not to be anymore.  When Joe finally accedes to the concerns of his fundraisers and drops out of the race, all of the career supplicants backing him out of obligation will be free to adopt whatever the next company line might be.

The early odds may have had them all landing on Kamala. But, more recently, one could argue they may cynically gravitate toward Warren.  Right now that seems like a logical evolution of the evergreen strategy of co-opting and crowding out the left. See this excellent analysis by Matt Karp for more on that.

Yet while she is sometimes described as an “economic populist,” Warren’s chief function in the primary race against Bernie Sanders has been to take the populism out of progressive economics. While formally embracing much of Sanders’s 2016 platform, the Warren campaign distinguished itself not by underlining the necessity of popular struggle, but by advertising the comprehensive wonkery of her policy agenda: “She has a plan for that!” Warren’s planfulness is Democratic savior politics in the style of Obama or Hillary Clinton. It does not summon the will of the masses; it says, “Chill out, she’s got this.”

The emphasis here is on the reasonableness of the plans, not the boldness of the demands. Even Warren’s most daring stroke on this front, a 2 percent tax on fortunes over $50 million, elicits chants of “two cents, two cents!” — with the campaign and its supporters alike practically fetishizing the modest limits of the request.

When Warren does vow to challenge the power the wealthy, her rhetoric often works not to stoke the popular mind against America’s inequality but to naturalize it as a fact of national life: “In America, there are gonna be people who are richer and people who are not so rich. And the rich are gonna own more shoes, and they’re gonna own more cars, and they may even own more houses. But they shouldn’t own more of our democracy.”

This isn’t economic populism; it’s closer to a folksy progressive riff on “there is no alternative.” Nor does such a cabined understanding of “democracy” — a question of fair procedures, walled off from the world of material goods — open much room for questioning the tyranny of bosses under capitalism.

Speaking of never questioning the tyranny of bosses, the New Orleans Times-Picayune-Dot-Nola-Dot-Com-Georges-Advoco-Gambit tells us that Mitch Landrieu is back in town to "formally launch" the same foundation he already formally launched a year ago.

Landrieu will formally launch the E Pluribus Unum initiative on Friday, an effort with influential backers including former President Bill Clinton that seeks to reshape the country's conversation about race. The goal, he says, is to more effectively reach out and help people gain a better understanding of racism in modern America.

The message is geared mainly toward the white community.

Mitch has been running around the country meeting with Lauren Powell Jobs, with Bill Clinton, with scores of corporate donors to see how much money he can pile up in the name of talking to white people about racism. That can't possibly mean he's even remotely within the universe of potential emergency Presidential candidates Democratic donors are supposed to be casting about for at the moment. Right?  Well just to be sure let's ask.

With years of work ahead to make a go of his new foundation, Landrieu brushed away suggestions that he might be seeking a position in the administration of any of the presidential contenders, using similar language to the incalculable times he was asked whether he had aspirations for the Oval Office.

“I don’t have any expectations of being in the next president’s cabinet,” he said.

Pretty cryptic! Maybe he's still waiting on the right call.  On the other hand, if Karp is correct about corporate Democrats warming up to an accommodation with Warren, it would mean that the Biden-Harris-Hillary-Mitch mode of centrist campaigning is no longer the new hotness.  But old habits die hard. Let's see how they feel after the convention.

Fair Sham

During last week's CNN climate forum, Elizabeth Warren hit a home run. Warren was asked about the Trump administration's decision to reverse Obama era efficiency standards for light bulbs. Her answer brought out a point that Democrats, even the "good Democrats" often fail to make about where the true onus for effective climate action lies.

“Oh, come on, give me a break,” Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said during CNN’s Town Hall forum on climate change. “Look, there are a lot of ways that we try to change our energy consumption and our pollution, and God bless all of those ways. Some of it is with lightbulbs, some of it is on straws, some of it, dang, is on cheeseburgers.”

“That’s what they want us to talk about,” Warren said, before noting that, in her estimation, the fossil fuel industry wanted to cast the climate fight as “your problem.” She continued: “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your lightbulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”

The industries Warren mentioned are the oil industry, the electric power industry and the building industry, according to The New York Times.

In other words we aren't going to solve a problem caused by institutional corruption and  mismanagement by shaming the individual victims of that mismanagement into submission.  We're not going to reduce carbon emissions by drinking out of paper straws. Anyone who tells you differently is not really on your side. 

Similarly, in New Orleans, we aren't going to relieve decades worth of decay and negligence visited on our drainage system by shaming people into picking up their trash. But for some reason, LaToya Cantrell can't help but to do just that at every opportunity. Even, here, where the topic is really more about expanding the Department of Public Works, she can't help but get in a dig.

Officials outlined more on how they plan to spend money from the "fair share" deal. The money will help the Department of Public Works hire 42 extra employees and fund more tasks being brought in house. They'll bring in five more maintenance inspectors and 28 new pieces of equipment, including vac trucks, pothole patchers, dump trucks, excavators, pickup trucks and trailers.

"We are owning our responsibilities and seamlessly working together," Cantrell said. "It's a shared responsibility. We're not being reactive because we're doing the work every single day and have been doing it every single day since I've been in office."

Cantrell ask citizens to do their part by cleaning up the city and dumping trash appropriately. Someone recently dumped three boats on Martin Luther King Avenue.

"You can't make it up," Cantrell said. "It's present. It's there."

What does a boat left in the street have to do with causing people to need... boats in the street every time it rains?  I really have no idea.  But it's obviously evidence that we've done something wrong.

It's notable, also, that Cantrell's hostility toward the citizenry appears here in a story about her so-called "fair share" deal with the hospitality industry.  She's very proud of her grand bargain. She's so proud, in fact, that #FairShare has already transcended its original meaning to become a catch-all mantra applicable to whatever the mayor happens to be talking about at the time.  A new gambit at extracting patronage dollars out of the French Market is about “...getting our fair share, based on what’s coming back to the city, and these are assets we control.” A scheme to skim fees off of other governmental agencies for tax collection services is apparently about getting a "fair share."  The city raised the fees it charges to Bayou Boogaloo saying they also need to pay a "fair share."  LaToya's PAC is using it as the title of a fundraising campaign.  The city's and the mayor's official Twitter feeds frequently tag random messages about anything and nothing with #FairShare.  It's basically LaToya's #MAGA now.  More to the point, Cantrell's muddled, scattershot use of the phrase now indicates she never grasped its value in the first place.

The original context was the structural inequality of the tourism industry in New Orleans. An obscene portion of the wealth generated by tourism accrues to a cohort of owners and oligarchs while the majority of workers who make that wealth possible struggle for low wages, poor benefits and minimal job security. Moreover, the tax revenue collected off the backs of these workers feeds directly back into systems and institutions meant to further line the pockets of the very same oligarchs. A "fair share" of that revenue should be used to support the city's working class. It should build affordable housing. It should fund better schools, better transit, better city services. It should help the city build and maintain the basic infrastructure that makes life possible here without further burdening its poorest and most vulnerable people. 

So does Cantrell's "fair share" deal actually do any of that?  Not really. The city does receive the temporary windfall of a one-time payment plus a share of one or two new revenue streams (depending on future developments.) But the new money is grossly insufficient to the need.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s hard-fought “fair share” infrastructure deal could provide more than $20 million a year for the struggling Sewerage and Water Board over the next decade. But that doesn’t come close to meeting the $3 billion in funding required by the Sewerage and Water Board’s 10-Year Capital Improvement Plan.

That was revealed by Cantrell administration officials on Monday at the first meeting of the City Council’s Ad Valorem and Special Dedicated Revenue Committee. The committee aims to take a bird’s eye view of the city’s finances and release a public report in early 2020. 

“Oh wow, so every year, you’re hundreds of millions of dollars short leading up to 2028?” Councilwoman Helena Moreno asked at the meeting.

Sure, $3 billion over 10 years is a tall order. In a better world, every city in America would have ample support from a federally funded and guided Green New Deal initiative to repair crumbling infrastructure and stem the tide against the threat of climate change.  But until we get there we have to depend on our local leadership to do the best they can. The #FairShare isn't the best we can do in New Orleans.

In fact, it was never intended to be. The closest description of what it actually was intended to do came from Stephanie Grace all the way back in June. Her key observation at that time was that all of the recurring revenues generated by the deal do not come from the tourism industry giving up any of its accustomed share. Instead they come from new taxes on the "man behind the tree." 

The latest evidence that it always helps to have some metaphorical man behind some imagined tree is the deal to send more money to New Orleans to help rebuild its aging infrastructure, which has apparently cleared all remaining hurdles in the state Legislature. Despite a period of tense, on-again, off-again negotiations among New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, Gov. John Bel Edwards, legislative leaders and representatives of the tourism industry, all sides emerged with much of what they wanted.

"All sides" got what they wanted.  True! But that requires some explanation of which "sides" wanted what. Let's look at how the spoils are divided.

Number one on the list was the Convention Center wanted to build their publicly funded but privately profitable hotel. Check. Walt Leger got that for them.

House Bill 617, passed by the Senate on a 33-0 vote on Sunday, authorizes the Convention Center to build and own the $550 million, 1,200-room hotel proposed for the upriver end of the giant exhibition hall. The bill also clears the way for the Convention Center to develop other vacant land it owns next to the site.

Number two was the tourism cabal wanted less public scrutiny over the marketing and convention brokering agencies they control.  Check.  The technically public New Orleans Tourism Marking Corp will be folded into the technically private (but publicly funded) New Orleans and Company.  The city's "infrastructure fund" gets a cut NOTMC's corpse.  But the lion's #FairShare of that still goes to the NO and Co.

About $5.5 million of the Marketing Corp.’s budget, which comes from a nightly fee charged on hotel rooms, would be redirected to the city’s infrastructure fund as part of the overall deal. Other money the group receives, including $2 million a year from Harrah’s Casino and its hotel and $7.8 million from a self-assessment by hotels in the city, would go to New Orleans and Co.

The key difference, though, is that these operations will be more fully privatized under the new regime.  The city had a direct oversight role with NOTMC.  The new entity says it will "invite" them to sit in on the back bench at some of their meetings.

Oversight of the combined organizations is another detail being worked out. In an internal company email sent Wednesday and shared with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, Perry said New Orleans and Co. intends to invite the two City Council district members and a rotating at-large member to serve on an “ex-office” basis with New Orleans & Co. Perry later clarified that his group is still working out the details for a formal City Council presence on the board, but his plan is to invite council members to serve on a leisure marketing committee run by Romig.

Number three was the city wanted to pull in more recurring revenue from local hotel/motel taxes. This, more than anything, was the core of the "fair share" argument. And they did sort of get what they wanted.  But the trick is in how they got it. What the city is getting is a completely new tax based on a revival of a so-called "lost penny" that hadn't been collected since 1966.  In other words, the tourism agencies aren't "sharing" their previous take at all.  The "man behind the tree" is.

Number four was various parties for various reasons wanted a new tax on Short Term Rentals.  The hotel industry wanted it in order to equalize the tax paid on STRs with that applied to hotel rooms.  The STR industry, while not happy about being taxed, is happier on balance with becoming a critical revenue generating industry the city will be reluctant to crack down on in the future. The city, again, just wants to get paid.  And they will. Maybe. The new tax still has to be approved by voters on the November ballot this year.  Also the city is having difficulty projecting just how much revenue it's going to actually see from it.  One thing we do know is whatever amount the tax does eventually produce, we still have to "fair share" 25 percent of it back to NO and Co. So, congratulations on that as well. 

Number five on the wish list was the Convention Center wanted to ret-con its legally questionable collection of a tax originally intended to pay for its Phase IV construction. Over the years, that money has become a kind of slush fund the city's elite have used to pass money around among themselves for their own pet projects and those of their cronies.  So, yeah, in exchange for a paltry $50 million one time payment, they get to keep doing that now.   Already, they've got big plans. 

New Orleans tourism officials' plans for a massive entertainment district on empty land upriver from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center are back on the table.

The Convention Center's board, which finally won approval in June to build a 1,200-room hotel on part of the land after lengthy political wrangling, has asked interested firms to submit ideas by Oct. 4 for how to develop the 20 acres adjacent to the hotel site.

In its request for new master plan proposals, the Convention Center said it "expects the development to be reflective of the unique culture and history of New Orleans and include elements not commonly found in other parts of the nation."

They're putting out for bids on a shiny new entertainment district to go with their hotel. It will be built on some of the highest ground in the city convenient to downtown. Ideal for building affordable housing, maybe.  But that would only happen if the city were serious about giving its workers a "fair share" of the benefit their labor actually produces. LaToya Cantrell's fair sham deal was never really supposed to do that.


The mayor herself even admitted the fair sham isn't going to be enough last week when city officials laid out their plans for some of the money they know they will have on hand.  The deal left far too much money and power in the hands of the tourism cabal. So, naturally, she is asking you to make up the difference.

But she said it will take far more than the "fair share" deal’s millions to fix all the roads, canals and pipes that have crumbled during years of deferred maintenance and that are being further battered by the effects of climate change. She said that’s precisely why voters should pull the lever for a trio of infrastructure funding initiatives on Nov. 16. 

Part of what voters will consider is tied in with the fair share deal: a tax on short-term rentals whose proceeds will help to fund city infrastructure.  The other initiatives include a 3-mill tax to pay for repairs and maintenance of infrastructure, a $500 million package of infrastructure bonds and another $10 million in bonds for maintenance work.

When they do get down to fixing the canals and pipes, however they pay for it, let's hope they get it right this time.  The last big drainage project only just recently wrapped up. And already people are raising questions about that one.

The SELA improvements all stem from widespread flooding on May 8, 1995. The resulting $3.1 billion in insurance claims set a record at the time for an unnamed storm event, and the federal flood insurance program had to foot the bill for repairs.

So, Congress responded by authorizing $1.5 billion in drainage improvements over the next 20 years, with the idea that improving the infrastructure would prevent rising flood-repair costs in the future. The Uptown culverts were among the last pieces of that puzzle.

But after this summer’s floods, there are questions about whether those improvements have had unintended consequences for New Orleans’ antiquated drainage system.

When the Corps completed the SELA culverts, they were turned over to the Sewerage & Water Board. The board’s executive director, Ghassan Korban, doesn’t believe the increased capacity in the SELA culverts would have any negative impact on surrounding drainage, but he said he’s hired an outside engineering firm to analyze the flow and determine if it’s causing any bottlenecks.

A couple of independent engineers quoted in that story think maybe the SELA work is making the flooding worse. Sewerage and Water Board is skeptical but they say they'll check it out.  Last year we read in The Lens that the new culverts are "large enough to accommodate three city buses side-by-side."At the time that seemed like a colorful description but, really, who knows what might be down there. 

Whatever they find, though, it's important to understand, the mayor is not going to ask the city's ruling classes to pay to dig it out.  According to her version of events, they are paying their fair share.  So, obviously, we must be the problem now.

Joey Wagner, the Corps’ senior project manager for the SELA projects, bristled when WWL-TV asked what he would tell Bossier and others who think the construction has contributed to recent flooding.

“Like the mayor says, move your cars to the neutral ground," he said. "We all know there are certain areas of the city that are going to flood. And it’s going to continue to flood until the system is totally overhauled.”

And Mayor LaToya Cantrell backed up Wagner at a news conference last week: “Until the city, until we start dealing with our local issues relative to infrastructure, then we will not see the system working as intended.”

She focused her ire on the large amounts of debris New Orleanians regularly dump into the drainage system, and then blamed the intensifying rainfall.

To quote Senator Warren again, come on, give me a break.

Liz was the Ken Feinberg of Dow Chemical

The reason these claims clearinghouse operations is to limit the financial damages and liability incurred by the offending party. Probably the most familiar case of this for us would be the Gulf Coast Claims Facility set up by Kenneth Feinberg in the wake of the BP disaster of 2010.  For those unfamiliar with how that played out, there are archives here and here and, yeah, here too. 

In this case it's Dow Chemical looking to limit the size of its payout after having put a thousands of people's health at risk.  Liz was there to help them put out the fires.

When Dow Corning faced thousands of lawsuits in the 1990s from women saying they’d become sick from the company’s silicone gel breast implants, its parent firm, Dow Chemical, turned to one of the country’s leading experts in corporate bankruptcies: Professor Elizabeth Warren.

Warren, now a Democratic presidential candidate, has never publicly discussed her role in the case. Her campaign said she was “a consultant to ensure adequate compensation for women who claimed injury” from the implants and that a $2.3 billion fund for the women was started “thanks in part to Elizabeth’s efforts.”

But participants on both sides of the matter say that description mischaracterizes Warren’s work, in which she advised a company intent on limiting payments to the women.

“She was on the wrong side of the table,” said Sybil Goldrich, who co-founded a support group for women with implants and battled the companies for years. Goldrich said Dow Corning and its parent “used every trick in the book” to limit the size of payouts to women. The companies, she added, “were not easy to deal with at all.”

NIMBY Nation

This Huff-Po article about the increasingly reactionary nature of urban land use politics in major US cities got a fair amount of attention this weekend. I don't know exactly why the author insists on defining the backlash as a generational thing. I know "Boomer" is lately the shorthand for middle-class, middle aged conservatives.  But it confuses the issue for too many people. What we're really trying to describe here is the tipping point in urban politics that naturally follows years of policies specifically designed to fill the cities with nice things for rich people while everyone else is left to fend for themselves.  If only rich people can live in the city, eventually the city's politics will reflect the rich people's interests.

"We have mountains of data showing that cities need more housing and better transit and shelters for homeless people,” said Matthew Lewis, the director of communications for California YIMBY, a pro-housing nonprofit. And yet cities often give in to neighborhood groups opposing this much-needed infrastructure. The proposed homeless shelter booed by Salt Lake City residents in 2017 was canceled the next day. Schwartz’s lawsuit has succeeded in delaying the bus lane on 14th Street. The tantrum-throwing Seattleites eventually won the repeal of the tax they were shouting about.

“It’s frustrating,” Lewis said. “The people with the most privilege pack the meetings, shout over everybody else and get their way.”

These organized opposition groups could also, in the longer term, form a conservative coalition in cities and pull them to the right. This is already happening in cities with high rates of homelessness, where nominally progressive residents have formed interest groups that echo conservative talking points on personal responsibility and cracking down on drug users.

“This is not an anti-homeless march,” Barry Vince, an attorney, told reporters from the local television station as he participated in an “anti-crime march” in Long Beach, California. “We’re here to march against criminals, and we want the bad guys taken down.

Lewis said he’s seen similar rhetoric begin to appear in public hearings over housing and transportation.

“It’s a pretty short leap from ‘We don’t want homeless people living here’ to ‘We don’t want refugees’ or ‘We don’t want immigrants,’” Lewis said. “I’ve seen lifelong hippies who drive electric vehicles stand up at these meetings and say, ‘There’s too many people here already.’ It’s like you’re at a Trump rally.”

Maybe it's that thing about "lifelong hippies" that prompts the "Boomer" framing in the article.  But the critical dividing line isn't based in culture or age cohort so much as class. Didn't we already know hippies grow up to be yuppies the minute they get a hold of the slightest semblance of wealth?  The article alludes to that as well but quickly takes it in the wrong direction.

Cities can also redesign community outreach to encourage input from groups that have traditionally been excluded. According to a 2017 study, older male homeowners are more likely to participate in town hall meetings and other public participation processes than other demographic groups. Another, published this month, found that becoming a property owner motivated individuals to participate in politics and to express their views on housing, traffic and development to elected leaders more often.

This is followed by a consideration of whether or not cities should limit or deflect public feedback at government meetings.  But that's just more of the anti-democratic neoliberal impulse that got us here in the first place. The issue isn't really about process. It is about political power. And right now rich people have too much of it. That's not a new problem. Nor is it a generational problem the way the article wants you to think it might be. It's just the timeless process of wealth accumulating and then defending itself.

A proper analysis of this goes beyond simple questions of YIMBY vs NIMBY.  You can't describe the politics of who is allowed to live where by whom solely in terms of cold hard "supply and demand." There are real live power relationships to consider. In New Orleans, for example, big decisions are heavily influenced by real estate developers, of course. But also there are neighborhood organizations (dominated by property owners) and historic preservationists (property owners with the kind of money that gets you onto the "philanthropy" circuit) who have stifled equitable housing and transportation policies for ages. More often than not they operate with some sort of progressive sounding rationalization.

Under the pretense of "quality of life promotion," neighborhood associations hire private police with public funds,  shut down bars and music venues, shoo the homeless away,  and ensure that bus stations doesn't have too many public restrooms. When the City Council voted to demolish the Big Four housing projects after Katrina, we were told by NIMBY liberals the cause was humanitarian. 

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

New Orleans's most prominent beneficiary of those demolitions was mega-developer Pres Kabacoff. Here is an article by Roberta Gratz who, even in an article critical of the displacement for which Pres is hugely responsible, can't help but give him props as a preservationist.

Ironically, Kabacoff and his company, Historic Restoration Inc., are responsible for some of the best of the preservation projects that have helped downtown retain its traditional feel.

There's nothing "ironic" about it, though.  Preservation and gentrification often align with the same policy agenda. Which is often carried, we were reminded again today, by high powered liberal politicians.

Warren will meet “with activists, influencers and community leaders,” a campaign spokeswoman said, but didn’t provide specifics.

One of her leading supporters in the state is Pres Kabacoff, a New Orleans real estate developer who said he reached out to Warren because of her support for well-regulated capitalism.

But most of the time these are battles fought out block by block and one planning meeting at a time. Recently this mixed use development faced a gauntlet of intense neighborhood opposition in Bywater. And the Touro-Bouligny association is currently stalling a HANO project Uptown aided, we should note, by the addition of the building in question to a list of "Endangered Landmarks" maintained by a local preservationist society.

Interestingly the mayor rarely weighs in on any of this.  Over the course of her first year in office she's been more focused on the tourism grand bargain, police affairs, the traffic camera controversy, and the Sewerage and Water Board follies than zoning and housing questions. That might change at any moment. The STR wars are moving toward a conclusion... of the current phase anyway.  We may see the mayor get involved in that at some point.  But whenever she does decide to put a thumb on the scale of one of these land use matters, surely the fact that she got her start in politics as a neighborhood association president will have at least some bearing on which way that scale might tip. Just something to watch for, anyway.

Is Joe Biden cancelled yet?

It's only a matter of time.

Former Vice President Joe Biden assured rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected.

Biden told donors at an event at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday evening that he would not “demonize” the rich and promised that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” Bloomberg News reported.

Biden’s assurance to donors in New York came shortly after his appearance at the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum in Washington on Monday.

Well, okay, maybe that's not going to be enough to get it done.  Usually, cozying up to wealthy donors is good for a candidate's staying power.  We could pick at this as an example of the "saying the quiet part loud" faux-pas but that's not typically a campaign killer either.



 Maybe this will be, though.

Speaking at a New York fundraiser Tuesday evening (June 18), he pointed to long-dead segregationist senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia to argue that Washington functioned more smoothly a generation ago than under today’s “broken” hyperpartisanship.

"We didn't agree on much of anything," Biden said of the two men, who were prominent senators when Biden was elected in 1972. Biden described Talmadge as "one of the meanest guys I ever knew" and said Eastland called him "son," though not "boy," a reference to the racist way many whites addressed black men at the time.

Yet even in that Senate, Biden said, "At least there was some civility. We got things done."

That's no guarantee either, of course.  Certainly nothing is more impressive to the political press than a politician who is willing to put aside "principles" like say a commitment to racial justice in order to
"get things done" like say cutting Social Security. And it has long been understood that the party leaders themselves are willing  to "get more racist" or, at least, adjust their branding in order to appeal more to racist voters.

But it looks like at least some of the other Democratic candidates this year are willing to hang on tot their principles for once see if they can score some quick points lighting up Joe. 

Sen. Cory Booker, one of two major black candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, said Biden's "relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people and for everyone," and he called for the Biden to apologize.

"I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together," the New Jersey Democrat said in a statement that was especially notable coming from a candidate who entered the 2020 primary with a sunny message, vowing to highlight "the best of who we are and not the worst."

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democratic presidential candidate and a white man who is married to a black woman, also offered a sharp retort. "It's 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of 'civility' typified by James Eastland," de Blasio tweeted Wednesday, along with a picture of his family. "Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal."

The mayor added that "it's past time for apologies or evolution" from Biden, whom de Blasio cast as "out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party."

Not Cedric Richmond, though.  He's already on board as a Biden campaign spokesperson and isn't ready to jump ship just yet. 

Cedric Richmond, Biden's campaign co-chairman and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, pushed back, saying Biden's opponents are deliberately ignoring the full context of his argument for a more functional government.

"Maybe there's a better way to say it, but we have to work with people, and that's a fact," Richmond said, noting he recently dealt with President Donald Trump to pass a long-sought criminal justice overhaul. "I question his racial sensitivity, a whole bunch of things about his character ... but we worked together."

But give it time.  Biden sounds almost like he's trying to fail early. He's not. This is just who he is. Which is why it is extremely difficult to imagine he's going to make it all the way to the nomination this year. At some point he's going to cancel himself... if he hasn't already.

Don't worry about Cedric, though.  He's got plenty of options available for later.

Can't keep doing the same thing

As we prepare to welcome the time of the dark lord (pictured*) this weekend, it's time for the highly compensated political professionals who run the Democratic Party... and who failed miserably in 2016... to start figuring out how to do better.  There isn't a whole lot of cause for optimism.

The DNC apparatus runs on money.  Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.  But the people who have been in charge of raising that money only know how to get it by cozying up to banks, and tech billionaires and multinational corporations which in turn become the source of the corruption which most people see as Exhibit A in the case of "Why Dems Lose Elections."  The problem is that the people in charge would very much like to remain in charge. But the party can't make the kind of transformation it needs to make unless they are relieved of duty. 

Okay so you've got your pitchfork and your torch and you are ready to go round up some #HillaryMen. The problem, then, is what next? Unless you replace the Democratic Party establishment, you can't repeal the Democratic Party establishment. The object is to find new ways of doing stuff or else the default machinery just keeps chugging right along. As with most things, this is easier said than done.

American Poli Sci 101 theory holds that the parties go through cycles of emphasis; that they can either choose to be the Presidential Party or the Congressional Party. It often works out this way... our constitutional structure all but invites it to, actually.. but I don't think it necessarily has to be like this. In any case, I would argue that the GOP has been the "stronger" party in terms of raw policy influence in recent decades even during the years when Democrats have held the White House.

This week, PBS Frontline ran a pretty okay four hour retrospective of the Obama years. I have quibbles with some of the points of emphasis and interpretations of events.  But it does a fair job of documenting the political (ugh) narrative of this Presidency. The film doesn't set out to make this point as explicitly as it should but the Obama years should serve as an object lesson in how to run an effective opposition. The pattern worked as follows:  1) Republicans stake out an unreasonable, obstructionist position. 2) Obama rushes to meet them halfway 3) This not only fails to satisfy them but they go on shouting and screaming that he won't meet them all the way because socialist/Muslim/Kenya.. yargle bargle and so on.  4) The press shakes its head at all the "polarization" because both sides. The Republicans more or less control the agenda in this fashion. This was all obvious and many of us identified it at the very beginning.

While that went on unchecked, Republicans used the perception of powerlessness as a rallying cry at election time to build strength in the Congress and in state houses across the country. Meanwhile the Democrats' sole focus on the Presidency only exacerbated their failures everywhere else. The party was built to raise money from big donors to run big Presidential campaigns every four years with money trickled out strategically to select "winnable" districts elsewhere. Over time such districts became fewer and fewer.

So it takes more than just winning Presidential elections in order to make a real difference.   Keith Ellison, currently bidding to chair the DNC, understands that. Or, at least, he says he does.

I think the reason that we've had those losses is because the DNC is viewed more as a presidential campaign apparatus rather than a program or an agency designed to get Democrats elected up and down the ballot all the time. The DNC really should be the instrument for the rank-and-file Democrat all over the country — in Idaho, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Florida. But we treat it like it's not the Democratic National Committee; we treat it like it's the Democratic Presidential National Committee. Because of that, we have not really had the outreach and the door knocking and the engagement year-round that we need to have. That's too bad. 

The thing is that before 2008, we had the 50-state strategy, and that is in fact still pretty popular among DNC members. As you notice, we did pretty well in 2006; we did pretty well in 2008. I think that's because we still had enough connectivity in place from that 50-state strategy, but as time wore on, the tremendous popularity of Barack Obama, his amazing rhetorical skills, his just unparalleled ability to explain things and to inspire people really is the fuel that we lived on. Because of that, we lost a lot.

Good luck to him. The so-called Hillary Wing is already circling the wagons. 

Third Way is joining a crowded field of Democratic organizations which are redefining themselves in reaction to the upending results of the November election and trying to map out a path forward. Many outside groups that backed Hillary Clinton during the campaign are now vying to become the nerve center of the anti-Trump opposition in Washington, D.C., ready to fight him on everything from Cabinet nominations to key legislative battles like the upcoming showdown over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

The liberal, non-profit Center for American Progress, led by Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, has reorganized itself with the mission of resisting Trump’s legislative efforts. Clinton defender David Brock is also relaunching his super PAC, American Bridge, to act as a watchdog group monitoring Trump. And the super PAC that spent close to $200 million to support Clinton’s presidential bid, Priorities USA, is also rebranding itself as an opposition group to the president-elect, with the longer term goal of bringing voters back to the party.

Naturally, their "rebranding" strategy involves moving the party even further to the right. 

Part of the economic message the group is driving -- which is in line with its centrist ideology -- is to steer the Democratic Party away from being led into a populist lurch to the left by leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“Populism is inherently anti-government,” Cowan said. “That works if you’re a right-wing conservative, like Donald Trump. That doesn’t work if you’re the party of government." He added: "You can’t meet right-wing populism effectively as a matter of politics or governing with big government liberal populism, or 1990s centrism. You have to do something entirely new for a new era.”

Did any of that make sense to you?  No, me neither. "Populism" = "anti-government" so you can't do "big government populism." This is what marketing ghouls who care nothing about people's actual problems sound like. They're definitely going to "do something entirely new for a new era," though, these same people who have been running things forever.

So far the "something new" is an amazingly new level of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand these wealthy bundlers are branding themselves as a #Resistance to an administration they have labeled illegitimate and traitorous. (I'm open to that rhetoric, by the way. But not on the unsubstantiated conspiracy grounds they are currently pushing.) On the other hand they are fighting tooth and nail to defend the very ideology the incoming right wing government is animated by. In other words, they are allowing their own cynical ambition to snuff out whatever meaningful "resistance" their slogan purports to offer.

The worst thing about all of this is it's very likely the conservatives are going to win and the Tandens and Brocks of the world will continue to run whatever is left of the Democratic Party machine as long as it pulls in enough money.  As far as they're concerned, that's Mission Accomplished. They're the pros. They can do this forever. The rest of us can't go on doing the same thing, though.  It's costing us too much.

So the outlook isn't good but the best advice I can offer Democrats, if they want any, is this. Protest everything (GOP is about to make that difficult for you), obstruct whatever you can (difficult with no control of any branch of government), and dump your corporate faction as soon as you can. That last bit might actually be the easiest one, all things considered.  Today is a good time to get started.

*Actually the monster in the photo is David Simon encountered on Mardi Gras Day 2016.  Turns out you never know who you're #Standing with at the parade.

Now is not the time to punch the hippies

If you find yourself talking about the need for "unity," stop.

If you find yourself saying there are any circumstances under which you are ready to "work with" the con man, you are already failing.

If you are going through the motions of delivering empty platitudes about healing "the divisions"  you are not helping.

If you are smugly talking down to the outraged kids in the street, please shut the fuck up.

Basically if you are setting up any sort of narrative that involves the notion that anyone should "give the new President a chance" you are a garbage human.  Or at least you are someone comfortable enough to not to have to worry about, say, the end of Medicare.  See also, this entire list.

Now is not the time for "healing."  Don't punch the hippies. Let them fucking march.  If they topple a few confederate monuments along the way, that's all the better.

Meanwhile back at the not-at-all liberal Democratic Party

Nancy Pelosi doesn't want the banksters to worry.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) disagrees with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) notion that the Obama administration is too soft on Wall Street.

While Warren has been a vocal critic of how some of President Obama’s top lieutenants policing Wall Street have done their job, Pelosi cast her perspective as an outlier among her colleagues.

When asked in a CNBC interview if the president is too soft on Wall Street, Pelosi replied, “The financial industry doesn’t agree with that.

“There may be a couple people who say that, but that is not the consensus in our party,” she added.

Warren has been a thorn in the side of the Obama administration on all things financial. She led the charge to scuttle a top Treasury Department nominee over his extensive ties to the financial sector, and earlier this month, she detailed her perceived failures in Mary Jo White, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But Pelosi was quick to caution anyone from taking Warren’s argument and applying it to the entire Democratic Party.

“People will express themselves the way they do. That doesn’t mean they speak for the whole party,” she said.

 What the hell are they even any good for?

When can we talk about TPP?

Does anyone remember the admittedly weak and stupid but still very public national debate we had over the North American Free Trade Agreement?  At least that was enough to get us a primetime match-up between Al Gore and Ross Perot on the Larry King show. Thanks to Perot's... um... eccentricities, this wasn't the debate we needed at the time but at least it was a debate.

Also, too, Perot was right.

Two decades later, we're on the verge of finalizing a new, even more egregious, major trade agreement designed to suppress labor, consumer, and environmental protections across international borders under the false banner of "free trade."

The basic story here is a very simple one. There are merits to reducing trade barriers, but traditional trade deals will have winners and losers. If this is hard to understand, imagine that we had a free trade deal in physicians' services so that a flood of foreign doctors cut the pay of doctors by 50 percent (@$125,000 a year on average). This would make most of us winners, since we will pay less for health care, but doctors would be big losers. Most traditional trade deals have this character. So people, including economist people, may reasonably oppose them if they think the losers will be hurt so much that it offsets the gains from the deal. (Yes, we can do redistribution, but that is a children's story. We don't.)

But the key point here is that neither the TPP or TTIP is a traditional trade deal. The formal trade barriers between the parties to these deals are already low, which means there is not much room to lower them further. These deals are mostly about putting in place a business friendly structure of regulation. Some of this business friendly regulation involves increasing barriers in the form of stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. (Yes, that is "protection," as in protectionism.)

And yet, outside of the thoroughly marginalized echo chamber of the progressive media and blogosphere, the TPP barely gets any notice. Why? Because, everyone who matters agrees, it's a perfectly bi-partisan and sensible inevitability. 

This is a bipartisan effort if ever there was one; George Will has called the TPP “Obama’s best idea.” Thus we see the administration, along with pro-business Democrats and Republicans, trying to bulletproof the deal. Last week, a bill was introduced that would give the president “fast-track authority” on the TPP. If that passes, Congress could vote only up or down on the deal, not amend it. That’s quite a bit of presidential power for a scheme that would have a striking impact on the global economy — and the food on our table. 

So, because the pro-corporate President and the pro-corporate Republicans in Congress are not at each other's throats about some absurd political side-issue, the MSM threshold for "controversy" has not been met. That's part of the problem right there.  When the contours of a debate range outside of the standard framing, the lazy press quickly loses interest.

But, likely, the chief reason we're not having a public debate about TPP is because the public has been deliberately excluded from the process altogether.

On Saturday, Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) responded with a letter essentially telling Obama to put up or shut up. If the deal is so great, Warren and Brown wrote, the administration should make the full negotiation texts public before Congress votes on a "fast track" bill that would strip the legislative branch of its authority to amend it.

"Members of Congress should be able to discuss the agreement with our constituents and to participate in a robust public debate, instead of being muzzled by classification rules," Warren and Brown wrote in the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

Democrats and some Republican critics have been particularly frustrated by Obama's decision to treat the TPP documents as classified information, which prevents them from responding to Obama's claims about the pact in detail.

"Your Administration has deemed the draft text of the agreement classified and kept it hidden from public view, thereby making it a secret deal," the letter reads. "It is currently illegal for the press, experts, advocates, or the general public to review the text of this agreement. And while you noted that Members of Congress may 'walk over ... and read the text of the agreement' -- as we have done -- you neglected to mention that we are prohibited by law from discussing the specifics of that text in public."

Maybe we'll talk about it during the 2016 election.  But by then it will be a done deal and, in all likelihood, yet another Obama policy for "populist" Republicans to rail against.

Punch the rich

If only Warren Buffet were correct about this.

He continued that while there are “plenty of other candidates” whose political style he doesn’t agree with, “I do think it’s — I think it’s a mistake to get angry with your, with people that disagree with you,” he said of her. “In the end we do have to work together… And it does not help when you demonize or get too violent with the people you’re talking to.”

As much as I'm enjoying the mental image of Elizabeth Warren running around punching billionaires in the face, I am sorry to say I don't think she's actually as threatening to them as Buffet imagines.  Warren's role is to provide disgruntled liberals with the illusion that someone in the Democratic party gets them so that they will at least remain engaged enough to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in 2016.

If they knew

Elizabeth Warren's source might actually be overestimating us here.

On Wednesday night in DC, at Public Citizen’s annual gala, Warren spoke about the trade deals in some of her most direct remarks to date on the issue—and revealed some inside details about the debate in Congress.

“From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the deal in the upcoming trade talks. So the question is, Why are the trade talks secret? You’ll love this answer. Boy, the things you learn on Capitol Hill,” Warren said. “I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.’”

I wouldn't go that far.  What that person really means is they'd have to spend some money on an ad campaign.  And right now all that money is tied up in fake Obamacare horror stories.

I'd say wait until after the midterms but then it's time to start getting the Benghazi movie ready for 2016.  So, ok, yeah, maybe just keep it hush hush for now.

What the post-partisan grown-ups think

Actually... who cares what these people think. Just please stop calling them "centrists" as if that means they're some sort of disinterested wise observers of all our dirty arguing.

Moment of Zen

Watch Elizabeth Warren calmly fend off this multi-directional attack of screaming stupid.

Yes, please

I don't have anything to add here. But, more like this, please.

WASHINGTON -- Students taking out government loans to help pay for college should pay the same rock-bottom interest rate that the Federal Reserve charges big banks, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed Wednesday.

More like this

Remember, Elizabeth Warren was the appointee Obama refused to fight for.