What happened?

We did it! We're back, everybody. 

Revenue projections

The Cantrell administration expects general fund revenue of more than $762 million, driven by sales taxes, property taxes, licensing and permitting fees, and more. The remainder of the operating budget is funded via revenues earmarked for specific purposes like federal and state grants and specific districts' property tax funds. Those revenue projections suggest that the majority of the city's revenue streams will return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Montaño.

A whole year ahead of time, according to 2021 Monatno, anyway. 

New Orleans is set to receive $388 million from this year’s coronavirus stimulus package, and while council members are calling to spend at least some of that money, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration is urging a slower approach.

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño on Monday resisted calls from the council to hold mid-year budget hearings on the funds and urged that the vast majority of the money be held back, with the first major round of spending not coming until next year. And even then, Montaño urged council members to take the long view and parcel out spending through 2025, when some projections say New Orleans will finally emerge from its pandemic-induced deficits.

At the time, Montaño and Cantrell were resisting calls to spend the federal relief money on housing and other support for service industry workers facing evictions. In other words they were being asked to use the funds to help poor people affected by the pandemic; the purpose they were actually intended for.  Instead, Montaño wanted to squirrel as much of it away to address his 5 year "projected" deficits.  

But, here we are. Not even 5 years down the road and the deficits seem to be over.  Maybe it's finally time to make good on the original promise of the American Rescue Plan? 

Or maybe not. As these counter-programmers to today's hearing pointed out, we're mostly spending it on cop stuff.

At a press conference outside City Hall before the mayor's budget presentation, advocates with the Big Easy Budget Coalition issued their demands once again.

"The American Rescue Plan dollars really offered New Orleans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move in a different direction and recover from the pandemic and recover from years of inequity," said Sarah Omojola, director of Vera Louisiana, a local initiative of the Vera Institute of Justice. "Instead the ARPA dollars— the American Rescue Plan dollars— were used to plug budget holes and invest in policing."

Cop Season

 Keeping with the wildlife theme, when is it not cop season in the Quarter?  

If the Audubon Society were to produce a field guide to Louisiana law enforcement, it would likely point to the Quarter and vicinity as a prime spot for sightings, a kind of Avery Island of cops. In addition to NOPD officers on foot, on bicycles, on horseback, on Harleys, and in sedans and SUVs, alert visitors can spot khaki-clad deputies from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, members of the Louisiana State Police in their distinctive hats, and representatives of the Federal Protective Service patrolling buildings like the U.S. Custom House on Canal Street. The Orleans Levee District Police and the Harbor Police are often out and about in one of the city’s few above-sea-level districts, and the retro all-caps italic insignia of the City’s Grounds Patrol isn’t an unfamiliar sight. A particularly eagle-eyed observer might see the occasional state fire marshal or deputy court constable—perhaps a bit more scarce after one such official was suspended for allegedly failing to respond to an eyewitness report of an ongoing rape, in a case that made national news—along with private security guards in a variety of uniforms. If there’s a French Quarter problem that can be solved by the application of police, it’s hard to believe it hasn’t already been thoroughly addressed.

That's a new Antigravity article about, not just the unchecked advance of over-policing and surveillance, but specifically about the shamelessness of the local media establishment in whipping up support for this program.  Relentless sensationalist fearmongering over crime by the local press all summer in concert with a lobbying campaign put on by the so-called "NOLA Coalition" of pretty much every business tyrant, real estate vampire, tourism boss and non-profit grifter in town has already generated a political response.

Juiced by an astroturfed stunt ostensibly aimed at recalling the mayor, the combined pressure of the oligarchs aligned in formation has caused the City Council to overturn a partial ban on surveillance technology.  This week the council will follow up on this by spending $700,000 for new cameras and license plate readers in the French Quarter which is already more blanketed by such devices than any other neighborhood in the city.  The crime panic lobby also appears to have spurred the mayor into a desperate proposal to just throw $80 million directly at a police department with no structural purpose besides "retention bonuses."

The pay package – which includes $30,000 bonuses for recruits who make a starting salary of $42,411– represents a massive injection of funding over the next three years into a force with a $215 million annual budget that already dwarfs other city agencies. And while it would be largely covered by federal pandemic relief funds, the package could run smack into competing priorities at the City Council, which must approve the plan. Some council members who have pushed for actions such as adding civilians to the force are skeptical that throwing money at cops will be enough to keep them on the job.

Cantrell is proposing that the city spend its American Rescue Plan allocation, money intended for cities to use in protecting its most vulnerable residents from the ongoing ravages of the pandemic, on perks and cash giveaways to the police instead.  The mayor's plan offers free health care, not to the poor and working class of New Orleans hit hardest by the pandemic, but to the police. The mayor's plan offers student loan relief, not to New Orleanians struggling with debts and rising costs of living in an economy on the verge of recession, but to the police. The mayor's plan offers rental assistance, not to New Orleanians facing evictions and being priced out of the city by tourism and real estate speculation, but to the police.  It's the most obscene and insulting thing imaginable to divert funds intended to help people victimized and immiserated by the pandemic to the police whose very function is to surveil, arrest, and suppress those same victims as deteriorating conditions drive them into further marginalization.  And yet, in this article, Cantrell says she believes this monstrous act to be the "best use" of the one-time COVID relief money.

Just as shocking here we have  this from Cantrell's CAO Gilbert Montano.

Under the city’s plan, all of the proposed $80 million package save $5 million would be covered by American Rescue Plan Act funds, according to Montaño. The federal stimulus act has sent $388 million to the city treasury, although most of that has already been committed to making up for lost tax revenue and other priorities.

“We’re once again looking at this as an investment. Without a safe habitable city, what good is a strong fund balance?" said Montaño.

Recall that this was the very same question displaced New Orleans workers, residents facing eviction, and citizens suffering diminished city services asked of Montaño last year. What good is a strong fund balance when people are left hungry and homeless and precarious by a global disaster? But he refused to budge for any of them opting instead to hold the relief money in reserve to cover imaginary budget deficits his spreadsheets projected five years into the future. 

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño on Monday resisted calls from the council to hold mid-year budget hearings on the funds and urged that the vast majority of the money be held back, with the first major round of spending not coming until next year. And even then, Montaño urged council members to take the long view and parcel out spending through 2025, when some projections say New Orleans will finally emerge from its pandemic-induced deficits.

And now here we are a year later, a year poorer, a year more desperate, and we're watching Gilbert Montaño and LaToya Cantrell hand the federal lifeline intended to relieve the poor and desperate over to the police instead.  Ordinarily, you'd think a city council might be eager to step in and oppose such a blatantly evil policy proposal offered up by a politically damaged administration. But they won't.  Which should tell you, among other things, that the organized campaign to subject the mayor to these political pressures is having its intended effect.

Will we ever Make It Right?

We have to say it's a remarkable trip the City of New Orleans has been on with short term rentals for the better part of the last decade only to end up right back where we started. We've been through years and years of hearings, hotly debated regulations that don't work, hotly debated revisions to those regulations that continue to not work, at one point we even decided to go the whole nine and turn enforcement responsibility over to an industry profiteer.  A whole lot of things have happened. But also nothing has changed.  This article says it's "inexplicable" but is it?  

With New Orleans' spring tourism season in full swing, the Cantrell administration’s stated plan to crack down on illegal short-term rentals is inexplicably stalled, leaving scofflaw operators to freely list unpermitted rentals on Airbnb and other online booking platforms.

Pinning down just how many unpermitted rentals are available is nigh impossible, but data provided by the technology firm Granicus, combined with City Hall's short-term rental registry, suggests they outnumber legitimate ones at least 3 to 1.

There's probably a very simple explanation, actually. Helena Moreno seems pretty close to getting it right here. 

Council member Helena Moreno said she is baffled by the administration’s flagging enforcement efforts. 

 “With the lack of enforcement and slow-walking of accountability measures, it makes me wonder whether this is purposeful,” Moreno said.

It's hard not to think that. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain why the city would be leaving so much money on the table. As Moreno also points out, the city has somehow never managed to give anyone a straight answer as to how much money it actually collects in fees and fines under the current STR enforcement regime. Strange behavior for an administration that has been otherwise diligent in chasing down drivers ticketed by its robots or shutting down any street parade or music venue not able to pay the premium fees. We know the city wants to collect its money.  It's just particular about who actually has to pay. 

Now I'm not honestly recommending that any normal person with actual things to do tries this, but, for those who really must, you can view last Wednesday's meeting of the city revenue estimating conference here.  Watching these meetings one gets a (rather grim) feel for what this administration's ideas are about the city's economy and who it is supposed to serve. For example, during a discussion on employment numbers, Gilbert Montano briefly references the "Great Resignation" to signal his sympathy with the "people don't want to work" myth popular among bosses these days. (Actually the labor participation rate is nearly back to pre-pandemic status now. But that isn't going to stop the ownership class from demanding we continue to shred what's left of the social safety net just in case any workers out there feel even the slightest hope.) At the REC, the Cantrell administration generally sound like they are the corporate board of a big hotel. Almost all of the metrics highlighted in their presentation are based on how well the tourism business is going; how many visitors fly in and out, how many hotel rooms are occupied, etc.  The first time I saw LaToya Cantrell speak publicly about short term rentals her comments were already very much shaped by a hospitality management mindset. Even while she assented to the point that they may be raising housing costs, she basically looked past that to assert that New Orleans is a "destination city" and that STRs are a source of revenue.

But Cantrell is "the mayor right now" and somehow all that revenue isn't finding its way into city coffers. Property values are up, rents are way way way up,  but according to city projections, property tax revenue is down slightly.  At the meeting, much of the discussion about that centered on assessor Erroll Williams. In September, Williams granted across the board breaks to property owners following Hurricane Ida.  The fact that Williams's office has apparently granted some invalid corporate exemptions was also mentioned. 

Near the end of 2020, three local government agencies denied tax breaks for planned improvements to the Folgers coffee plants in New Orleans East. But only now, more than a year later, has the assessor put the properties onto the tax rolls, making the company liable for $5.1 million in real estate levies.

Assessor Erroll Williams blames the Louisiana Department of Economic Development for the delay. That agency blames Williams.

That T-P story details circular arguments from the assessor and from LED about who is supposed to inform whom about ITEP denials. But, I dunno, I think one thing an assessor might do in a case like this  is call somebody and ask?

Williams said his office was following its standard practice: Don't put properties on the rolls while their applications for tax breaks are still pending. He said his office asked the state about Folgers in February because the state database did not yet show the tax breaks were denied and he had received no formal paperwork from any agency saying a decision on the breaks had been made.

"This office hasn’t gotten a letter from the School Board, city of New Orleans or the Sheriff’s Office that they’ve decided to vote the contract down, so I can’t put a taxpayer on the rolls based on what I read in the newspaper," Williams said.

The status was not changed to “denied” until March, at which point Williams said his staff began working to put the properties on the tax rolls.

The state agency said it “does not notify local taxing authorities about the actions of local government entities involved in the ITEP application review process. Questions about when and how the exemption is applied at the local level are best directed to each local taxing authority.”

Hard to believe these people can't all get together and talk one way or another. This just isn't that big a town.  Especially now that nobody actually lives here. Who can afford to, anyway?

Anyway, not to give the REC any more work to do but it turns out there are other places to dig for lost property tax money if they're feeling hard up. 

In total, Make It Right owes $14,972.81 in back taxes and fines, which are added to a property’s tax bill once they become delinquent. Most of that debt was accumulated in 2021, when the foundation failed to pay taxes on any one of its properties. And It’s possible that number will grow even higher for unpaid 2022 taxes, which are due today, March 31. 

According to the city’s online tax records database, the foundation owes $9,493 in 2022 property taxes. But The Lens was unable to confirm that the foundation has not paid that down. It appears that the city’s digital property tax records haven’t been updated to show whether property owners have yet paid their 2022 taxes. Officials did not respond to questions about the group’s 2022 property taxes.

Or maybe this is another thing where they've got to wait on Erroll to update the spreadsheet. 

One last point about the REC. Montano et al are still being extremely cautious with their use of the American Rescue Plan dollars by projecting it out over the course of a five year hypothetical revenue gap instead of applying it toward the addressing the city's numerous critical human services and infrastructure needs. (Notice how they are not shy about throwing that money at police as fast as they can, however.)  Back in August, we wrote more about how this administration's ideological conservatism informs its approach to budgeting.   On Wednesday, the projections we saw did not account for the next tranche of ARP dollars promised to cities because there was still talk in Washington about clawing those funds back in the next spending authorization.  As of this writing, though, it looks like that money is still coming.

Under the emerging deal, Mr. Romney, said, most of the $10 billion would be repurposed from the $1.9 trillion pandemic law Democrats muscled through without Republican support last March. But direct funds for state and local governments would likely not be touched, after Democrats balked at this money being clawed back. Mr. Romney said negotiators had discussed taking back some funding from a program that allowed states to give grants to local businesses.

That's pretty good news. But it could be better.  The way it looks right now the primary benefit of the federal bailout is it allows the city to keep letting wealthy property owners slide on their responsibility at the current rate. Without it, they'd still do that, of course. But they'd have to crack down even harder on the poor than they currently do to make up the difference.

The rent is too damn due

We've hit another first of the month again. There's one every month!  But this one has been the most first of the month that has yet firsted since pandemic crisis began.  And it has gotten dark.

NEW ORLEANS — Deputies with the First and Second City Courts of New Orleans will be required to get a coronavirus vaccination. Constable Edwin M. Shorty Jr. has mandated all commissioned deputies must be vaccinated as COVID-19 case counts are rising with the spread of the delta variant. All full-time and reserve deputies must meet this vaccination mandate by Aug. 16, the constable said.

Officials said vaccination rates among law enforcement entities are high, but it has not been mandatory in the past. The mandate will ensure SCC deputies are not leaving the public at risk when performing duties of the department and ensuring their personal safety, according to the constable. The use of personal protective equipment will also be mandated while remaining socially distanced when possible and minimizing interactions with other employees or the public when possible.

Shorty said he expects the courts to be at capacity in the coming weeks. He says that we are not out of the woods of the pandemic, and will make sure all CDC guidelines are followed in addition to the mandatory vaccination decision.

What duties will the constables and the courts be performing that will have them "at capacity in the coming weeks?"

Second City Court handles eviction cases for Algiers and the West Bank of Orleans Parish. This decision comes after the federal eviction moratorium expired over the weekend. First City Court officials confirm that all East Bank deputy constables for Orleans Parish are fully vaccinated, and any new deputy constable will be required to vaccinate as well.

Perhaps when the constables go about their busy work evicting people, they could bring some vaccines with them.  It's about time we get a bona-fide door-to-door vax program going in this city that actually reaches the most vulnerable.  Of course this would be the way it happens. 

Evictions are  not just about to spike in New Orleans. They're about to spike nationwide. Some parts of the nation will be spiking harder than others, though. You will not be surprised to see which they are.  The maps in this NYT opinion piece by Sema K. Sgaier and Aaron Dibner-Dunlap show how many renters are behind and how far behind they are on rent in each US county or parish. 

Just the other night someone reminded us, as the South goes, so too goes the nation. The South is not going well at the moment. In Orleans Parish (which, despite much contrary popular myth making, is located in the South) 19.6% of renters currently owe back rent according to numbers cited in that NYT article. The average amount owed is $3,187. Sgaier and Dibner-Dunlap write that state and local governments "can prevent this rental crisis from becoming a homelessness crisis" by speeding up distribution of Emergency Rental Assistance funds made available by the stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan passed earlier this year by Congress.  But we already know that isn't going to be enough. 

As of last Thursday, the Times-Picayune reported the City of New Orleans had already run through $18 million of the $52 million in rental assistance that has so far been distributed for the entire state processing only 5,000 of 16,000 applications. The state has another $87 million to disperse but it's not clear how that gets divided. That total will still not be sufficient to meet the need so, no matter what, everyone will be waiting on the feds to release the second tranche of ARP funds. But, as we will see, that tranche may not arrive at all. 

Meanwhile, we learn by that same T-P article there are approximately 400 evictions cases queued up to file as soon as the moratorium ends.  This story says 58 were filed on Monday. Which is a very bad time for that to happen because it follows right on the heels of this.

Louisiana residents will no longer receive an extra $300 a week on top of the state’s maximum $247 benefit. The state will also pull out of federal programs that provided jobless aid to self-employed workers and gig workers and allowed people to get jobless benefits past the 26-week state cap.

The benefits were made available by Congress until Labor Day, but Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, ordered Louisiana to stop accepting the federal payments effective July 31 in exchange for support from GOP lawmakers and business groups for a permanent $28 hike to the state’s weekly unemployment benefits, beginning in six months.

The move spells the end to jobless aid for nearly 86,000 residents who make their living as self-employed contractors, musicians, tour guides or gig workers. Another 65,000 residents who have exceeded the state’s 26-week-long limit on unemployment benefits will also get the boot, according to data from the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

For the 35,000 residents who will remain on unemployment rolls, weekly checks will be cut in half – as Louisiana joins 25 Republican-led states that have rejected the $300 supplemental payments under pressure from business groups who argue the payments are discouraging employees from returning to work. 

Is that $300 pittance discouraging people from returning to their demeaning and dangerous service jobs in the middle of a fourth wave COVID spike? So far there isn't any solid evidence that cutting those benefits has sent them all rushing back. 

So far, early data suggests that cutting the benefits given to Americans who lost their jobs during the covid-19 pandemic has not led to a big pickup in hiring. The 20 states that reduced benefits in June had the same pace of hiring as the mostly Democrat-led states that kept the extra $300-a-week unemployment payments in place, according to state-level data from the Labor Department. Survey data from the Census Bureau and Gusto’s small-business payroll data show similar results. 

Many economists and business owners say other issues such as health concerns, child-care problems and workers reassessing their career choices appear to be larger factors keeping them home.

The same week that the governor is cutting off the $300 is also the week the landlord wants that $3,000 average back rent or thousands of people are going to be be put out. Hard to imagine they're all jumping on one of those $8 or $10 an hour jobs so they can hope not to get sick before figuring out the math isn't gonna work.  What are people supposed to do?

For much of the past week, the President's message has been that he isn't supposed to do anything. Last week, he insisted that a month old Supreme Court ruling prevented him extending the moratorium without congressional action. On Friday, as congressional leaders were giving up trying to take that action and punting the problem back to him, Biden turned the blame onto governors and mayors saying in this statement, "there can be no excuse for any state or locality not accelerating funds to landlords and tenants who have been hurt during this pandemic." Biden's statement also contained a passive aggressive suggestion that the mayors and governors, "should also be aware that there is no legal barrier to moratorium at the state and local level." 

Neither John Bel Edwards nor LaToya Cantrell has imposed or even spoken in favor of a local moratorium on evictions. Maybe they didn't think Biden was talking to them.  We've already mentioned they seem to be doing an adequate (relatively speaking.. not objectively great) job of spending the rental assistance money so he probably wasn't talking to them about that either. And it's true there are states doing a much worse job. For example, Florida, under the psychopathic governorship of Ron DeSantis, has withheld 98% of its allotted rental assistance funds in what we have to assume is an act of deliberate cruelty. 

Having said all that, we should point out that governors and mayors (not just DeSantis types) are nonetheless reluctant to spend their stimulus funds. Partially this is because Joe Biden and the bi-partisan infrastructure deal making its way through Congress now is about to yank a bunch of it back.  That has already become an issue in New Orleans city government as the Cantrell administration discussed its plans to spend its stimulus funds with the City Council last week.

But officials said they are resisting the urge to spend the windfall immediately to supplement the $633 million budget for 2021. They recommend the money be stretched out until revenue improves. That’s particularly crucial because the forecast calls for the lost revenue from 2020 to total more than $290 million by 2025 -- more than City Hall has received so far from the stimulus, codified in the American Rescue Plan.

“Even if we’re using that ARP money, we could still end up in a deficit,” City Council member Helena Moreno said.

City officials are nervously eying negotiations over President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan. While such a plan would likely mean more federal money for New Orleans, city officials worry that Congress might cancel the second stimulus payments to cities and counties to help pay for infrastructure.

They aren't at all wrong to be worried. That's exactly what the current version of the infrastructure bill is set to do. And that's not really even the worst of it. The infrastructure bill is best understood as a privatization bill.  The American Prospect's David Dayen explains in this breakdown. He actually thinks it's been improved in the latest negotiation. I'm less encouraged and will explain in a bit. Here is what Dayen has to say.

The revenue offsets did change quite a bit. We knew about Republicans ditching the tax enforcement piece. But there was a big victory here for progressives. A few weeks ago, it looked as if much of the bill would be financed by selling off public assets and allowing investment firms long-term concessions of roads and water and power systems and whatever else they could land. The privatization agenda was extremely dangerous, and in my view enough to oppose the effort entirely.

But it has mostly vanished in this new version. After significant pushback from the left, a good deal of the privatization schemes are gone. That was an important show of force.

There is $100 million in “asset concession incentive” grants to help cities establish public-private partnerships (P3s). Some larger transportation projects will also be required to evaluate a P3 option, to ensure it’s given “a fair shot.” Tipping the scales to P3s is bad news, and these measures give them a foot in the door. But there was talk that the overall bill would save up to $100 billion by offloading the investment to P3s, which would really have been a fire sale. This is definitely more minor.

It's clear that someone in Gilbert Montano's office keeps a close eye on these developments. Not only has the city been anticipating the ARP claw backs from the very beginning of the infrastructure negotiations, they've also started the ball rolling on a "framework" for the privatization component of the bill as well.

Anyway, Dayen's description of the reduced emphasis on privatization is too optimistic. These changes he is describing are just the fluid argument over how to write the bill. The purpose remains the same. To put it plainly, public-private-partnerships (P3s) are privatization. Just putting them into the process this way practically guarantees they will get implemented through the regular corrupt local patronage networks. And the way New Orleans spends public money is especially suited to just that kind of arrangement.

A good little book to check out on this topic is Aaron Schneider's Renew Orleans?: Globalized Development and Worker Resistance after Katrina (2018) There, we find an analysis of the city budget based on the processes and institutions in place during the late 00s, which haven't changed a whole lot since then. The big takeaway is there's a lot of activity that goes on "off the books."  A quick excerpt summarizing this point:

The most important finding of this simple comparison (of New Orleans finances to those of similarly sized and situated cities) was that New Orleans taxes not too far below what is to be expected but has far fewer revenues and even lower expenditures. Taxes were only $7 million less than predicted by the model, but revenues were approximately $100 million lower and expenditures were almost $250 million lower than expected. New Orleans appears to tax its citizens the same but undertake less public action than other cities. 

A reasonable explanation is the proliferation of satellite entities, many of which are off-budget, difficult to monitor, and undertake significant fiscal action in the form of revenues, expenditures, and accumulation of assets. To explore these entities, data were drawn from 2007 and 2008, gathering information from city budget documents, Louisiana Legislative Auditor reports, and accounting documents collected directly from some entities. City budget totals include revenues and outlays by some boards, commissions, and public-benefit corporations, as they are considered component units of city government, and therefore government accounting practices require them to be included in the city's comprehensive financial report. Not all entities are so considered, however, and they vary in the degree to which their accounts appear in the public record. Some provide comprehensive financial reports to the Legislative Auditor's Office, others keep accounts according to government accounting standards but do not report them anywhere, and still others do not keep accounts in any easily comparable fashion. 

What this says in so many words is that New Orleans is crawling with public private partnerships and conceded public assets already. The city is run through an impenetrable network of semi privatized commissions and non profits who operate with almost zero public transparency. Schneider's analysis in fact shows this is actually the largest sector for public expenditures.

Take for example tourism promotion agencies like the mostly private New Orleans and Company seen here preparing to spend millions of dollars in public money on an ad campaign encouraging more people to travel and gather here during a pandemic.  Back in February, NO and CO's head Stephen Perry sent out an inflammatory email to agency clients wherein he blamed local COVID victims for preventing the cabal of tourism owners from making money. Here we see the Convention Center arguing over how to spread half a billion public dollars around to contractors and cronies to renovate and expand its facilities and develop whole new "entertainment district" for private profit while hundreds of New Orleanians are about to be evicted.  And still the Cantrell Administration insists the city gets its #fairshare from these agencies.  Maybe this is because dispersing public money through private conduits and expecting it to trickle down is precisely their idea of "fair."

It's important to understand this context because when you see administrators claim there are multi-year deficits which obligate them to hold back federal relief funds rather than use them to help people now,  you have to question where they actually intend those funds to go.  People are going to be evicted on August 1, 2021  October 3, 2021... actually the moratorium doesn't cover everyone and evictions have been ongoing this entire time. What good does it do them if we are hiding money away until 2025?

The administration is considering setting aside whatever money it might need for the latest 2025 estimates first and then work backward, only adding to next year’s plan at the end, Montaño said. 

Given that we know the city is preparing to implement the privatizing functions of the infrastructure bill, and given that Montano is arguing here that the City Council should butt out of his budget process, we have to conclude that the purpose is to consolidate as much of the pub-private patronage power through the mayor's office as possible.  At least that is one way to read this "efficiencies gained through the pandemic process," comment.

“It’s easiest to go back to the way you were and its easiest to go back to normal, but I’m not willing to lose the efficiencies we gained through this pandemic process,” he said. He added that the council reopening the process “takes away executive authority. The mayor gets to propose what we’re putting in the budget, not an agency director.”

Actually that's pretty much just a naked admission.  It would also explain why the same administration expressing concern over the ARP claw backs is simultaneously promoting the passage of the bill that will make them happen.  They don't care if there is less money than people actually need so long as they get to be in charge of passing it out. 

Why is this acceptable?  Or more critically, why does our political system allow this state of affairs to obtain?  To answer that, let us refer to a book by Arizona Senator and budding professional troll, Kyrsten Sinema. The book, by the bearer of the now famous "fuck off" ring, is titled Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last, funnily enough. In this excerpt, Sinema relays to us some important lessons she learned serving in the Arizona State Legislature. 

I showed up all right. And for the first several months, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, coming to work every morning full of vim and vigor, ready to face off for justice—which made me rather annoying. I’d stand up four or five times a week on the floor of the house and give scathing speeches about how this bill and that bill were complete and utter travesties of justice, and the paper would capture one or two of the quotes, and then we’d vote on the offending bills and they’d pass with supermajorities. I’d get righteously indignant and head back to my office, incensed that my colleagues could not only write but actually support and vote for such horrid policies!

Meanwhile, everyone else went to lunch. In short, my first legislative session was a bust. I’d spent all my time being a crusader for justice, a patron saint for lost causes, and I’d missed out on the opportunity to form meaningful relationships with fellow members in the legislature, lobbyists, and other state actors. I hadn’t gotten any of my great policy ideas enacted into law, and I’d seen lots of stuff I didn’t like become law. It was just plain sad.

At this point the reader may begin to wonder. Is Kyrsten "just plain sad" that the bad laws are passing? Or is this more about missing out on all those terrific sounding social opportunities?  It's not entirely clear yet, but it's not a great sign that the "offending bills" and "horrid policies" are left undefined while the author's self-image and personal comfort level becomes the center of the narrative. Anyway let's read on.

I spent the summer figuring out what I wanted to change. I knew that I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing because it wasn’t working for me and I hated it. I had, without actually planning to do so, fallen quite easily into the role of the loyal opposition, the righteously indignant crusader, the bomb thrower. In legislative lingo, a bomb thrower is a legislator who chooses to yell from the sidelines, cackle at the rest of the body, and generally raise hell from the corner of the room. A person who chooses to be a bomb thrower in the legislature is choosing to remove himself or herself from the work of the body: negotiating on bills, working to find compromises, and sometimes teaming up with unusual allies to promote or kill legislation. This person plays an important role at the capitol because he or she calls out the body on a regular basis (which is needed, especially considering that the general public hears or reads roughly 0.3 percent of what happens each day inside the legislature). However, the bomb thrower has made a choice—whether consciously or not—to be excluded from the actual process of negotiating proposed legislation. You can’t play both roles in the legislature; if you choose to be a bomb thrower, you will not get the opportunity to amend bills, participate in bipartisan meetings to craft good legislation, or work with people on the other side of the aisle to kill bad legislation. I unwittingly chose to be a bomb thrower my first session, which led to my unhappiness and regret.

Over the summer, I consciously chose to reject the bomb thrower role. For me, it was not a hard choice to make. I was miserable as a bomb thrower. And since I hadn’t consciously chosen that role, I was even more depressed when I realized that I had become a bomb thrower and worked my way right into that lonely corner. It didn’t fit me. I do love to give fiery speeches. But I also love people. I love talking with people, working together, and making friends. The bomb thrower doesn’t get to make friends much (understandably so), and she certainly doesn’t get to work with all the people she’s throwing bombs toward.

Remarkably, the younger Sinema was wrong about all of this.  Now at the apex of her career she has figured out you really can throw bombs and make friends at the same time.  As long as you make sure the bombs fall on the appropriate people outside of the Senate, you'll never be lonely inside of it.  

There's a kind of class politics at work here. But it's the politics of a consensus class within the halls of power charged with managing the hyper-concentration of societal wealth into ever more exclusive circles.  That retreat has been going on since the 1970s but it took a significant turn in the response to the 2008 financial crisis. That's when we learned capitalism can sustain itself just by passing around federally guaranteed credit among the wealth hoarding class and leaving a growing class of surplus humans to more or less fend for themselves. As we've tried to show over the past year, the pandemic response has been a continuation of this project. Anyway that's why a completely captured political apparatus can be indifferent to a homelessness crisis and cut off already miserly safety net payments in the height of a pandemic. It's just doing its work of laying down terms of the harsher readjusted social contract. 

So that about sets the table for the rest of the year. We're looking at another round of political buck passing to cover for a national policy of austerity and privatization. Locally, this will set off a bonanza of petty patronage delivered through local pub-private and non-profit networks. Come October, the new moratorium will expire. By that time, nothing will have fundamentally changed for the renters facing eviction, and we'll have another version of this same argument. Only by then, Biden will have celebrated the success of his bipartisan Infrastructure Week, Sinema will be back from vacation, and, in New Orleans, the same mayor and  (basically same) city council who are running with no meaningful opposition will be on their way to reelection.  And so at every level of government, the next round of calls to "do something" will be one degree easier to ignore. 

Of course the rent will still be due.  Just like every month.

Who audits the auditors?

This is more from that David Hammer series on building inspections we mentioned the other day. All of this has gotten more attention after the Hard Rock collapse but it is important to remember that the trouble at New Orleans Safety and Permits began before that. There were have been competing investigations run by the city, by the feds, and by the Inpector General underway for well over a year. 

Hammer's report focuses on an internal audit of Safety and Permits run by City Hall. Not sure how it relates to the multiple other investigations, exactly, but according to Hammer's source, there are problems. 

Now, the results of the full audit, obtained by WWL-TV last month through a public records request, suggest that the audit itself had several issues.

The sample of 720 inspection files reviewed in the audit showed around 20% noncompliance, as Montaño said. But the audit turned out to be composed of what one auditor who spoke to WWL-TV called a “haphazard” mixture of inspections conducted by in-house city inspectors — with GPS data to track whether they showed up at construction sites — and inspections conducted by private, third-party inspectors with no GPS data to track their whereabouts.

According to the auditor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the audit also didn't employ a regimented process to review the inspection files. Each auditor did it their own way, the auditor said, making it much harder to determine if the city had indeed made the type of progress Montaño touted.

“It shows an incohesive, improper audit,” the auditor said. “It was not a proper, across-the-board, cohesive methodology to determine which inspections were accurate and which ones need (additional) review.”

The other bit of context here is that this was taking place at the same time the city was reorganizing the whole Safety and Permits department into a new entity run by a short term rental executive. At that time the declared purpose of the new agency was to "shift the paradigm"of Safety regulation toward helping businesses and landlords "get creative" with the rules.

“Instead of someone saying no immediately, it’s someone saying, ‘Let’s find a way to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish and still stay within our rules and guidelines, not skirt the system, but let’s get creative on how we can help you succeed. Because you succeeding is us succeeding.’ “

Hammer's story concludes by noting the new agency will "focus continually on auditing the inspectors' work." Very reassuring.

Keeping the faith 2021

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite worries about the city’s bottom line, Cantrell announced on Tuesday that the city would waive all penalties for late sales tax payments from businesses for the next 60 days. That measure is intended to make sure businesses have the money on hand to keep paying their employees while state and city closures are in place during the height of the outbreak.

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

Given the strains to the city budget, Cantrell urged those businesses who are remaining open and can pay their sales taxes to do so, to lighten the burden on city government. Asked about concerns that businesses would simply pocket the money, not turning it over to their workers or to the government, Cantrell said she choose to look at the situation from an optimistic perspective.

“I’m not being negative at all and thinking that our businesses or employers will not do the right thing,” Cantrell said. “This is all with the expectation that they’ll do the right thing.”

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

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

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

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

Austerity isn't just an accident of nature

It is city budget season.  Happy Holidays. There will be quite a few of those in the future for these folks.  Unpaid, of course. 

Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño told City Council members in a special meeting Monday that under the budget plan set out by Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her administration, furloughs that took effect this month for employees should continue through next year. 

Employees would be furloughed for one day per pay period, or 26 furlough days over the course of the year, Montaño said. People who earn less than $30,000 a year would be excluded from the pay cut. 

The city's public safety departments, such as police and fire, will also take a 6% and 8% cut to their overall budgets, while other departments could see up to a 40% cut, he said.

Wow. Especially sucks to be the "other departments".  

The hardest hit departments include Public Works, which will see its funding drop more than 40% to $34 million. That decrease includes cutting about 10% of its total positions.

The City Planning Commission, which is responsible for reviewing development proposals, is also slated for a 40% cut, will lose 6 of its 26 positions. The Vieux Carre Commission, the small agency that enforces the historic preservation rules in the French Quarter, is facing the deepest cut in the city at 42%, will lose two of its six spots.

To explain itself, the administration cites the obvious.  A compounding crisis of pandemic-induced depression has caused a sudden drop in expected revenues.  The federal government has failed to respond adequately and what aid it has made available has been watered down and diverted at the state level.  

All of this is, regrettably, true. But it's important to also keep in mind that many of the consequences of that disaster are still left to our local lords to decide. There are individuals in charge right now who impose their values on the question of who suffers the most during the disaster.   The above mentioned cuts in this budget are one example. The pandemic didn't decide the cut Public Works by one amount but NOPD by another.  Similarly, the pandemic didn't decide that businesses shouldn't have to pay the sales taxes they collected during Mardi Gras. Their lobbyists told the mayor that's what they wanted and she agreed to it.   The pandemic didn't decide it was time to give corporate landlords a big tax break paid for by residents and through layoffs. The assessor made that call.  

And, of course, we know the pandemic can't read the city ordinances but we are pretty sure that wasn't who decided to ignore this (admittedly toothless) city council decree that we would no longer stiff the Public Defender's office.  A person did that. On purpose.

Actually they don't CARE about us at all

I know Gilbert Montaño is employing a kind of corporate-politcal-speak here intended to persuade upper level pricks into not being quite as prickish as they want to be.  But it still sounds naive as a public statement.

Louisiana as a whole received about $1.8 billion from the stimulus, $800 million of which is supposed to be passed on to local governments.

Montaño suggested there could be changes to that program in the future and that he didn’t think the intention was to leave out cities like New Orleans, which has a population of about 391,000.

“I don’t think the framers (of the CARES Act) thought New Orleans would fall below the threshold,” he said. “Place like New Orleans, Atlanta, I don’t think were anticipated to fall into the smaller city category.”

Actually the framers of the CARES Act (Republicans in the US Senate) mean for every state and every city to fall into crisis mode. The cascading disaster can only benefit the wealthiest Americans who Congress exists to serve in the first place.  There's no shaming them away from this purpose.  The President is already articulating their political rationale.

In an interview with the New York Post, Trump expressed reluctance to use a new stimulus bill to aid the states hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis. “I think Congress is inclined to do a lot of things but I don’t think they’re inclined to do bailouts,” he said.

He went on to say the states shouldn't get cash in part because they have Democratic leaders. “It’s not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help — they’re run by Democrats in every case,” Trump said.

That sounds like absolute nonsense. Every state needs help regardless of who is in charge right now. It makes more sense when you understand that the Republicans in every state want to dismantle and sell off public services and infrastructure. The COVID caucus of Republican hardliners in the Louisiana legislature are already moving austerity budget measures intended to accelerate that process.

The purpose is to leverage the pandemic into a shock doctrine scenario that will force states and cities to lay off their workforce, sell off their assets, and privatize what remains of their public services by handing them over to for-profit entities. It's already happening in New York.

NEWS: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will chair a commission that re-imagines how New York operates, @NYGovCuomo announced.

Schmidt says he will focus on Telehealth, remote learning and expanding broadband access. pic.twitter.com/NM7Pw7fMrZ

— Jimmy Vielkind (@JimmyVielkind) May 6, 2020

And, unless something is done, it's likely to happen in New Orleans as well, under Montaño's direction.  

One possibility that’s being considered to increase those savings is offering incentives to city workers for retiring early, he said. The details of that plan are still being worked out and would depend in part on how much the city would need to pay out for unused time-off, he said.

The city could also save between $10 million and $12 million this year from reduced overtime costs from public safety workers, largely due to the cancellation of festivals and other major events, Montaño said.

The bosses won the pandemic.  They've got hardline Republicans in Washington and Baton Rouge to smash what remains of your dwindling public services and infrastructure. And they'll have neo-liberal Democrats in your cities to "partner" with the private profiteers who will scavenge and hoard the broken pieces. Despite Montaño's attempt to appeal to a better nature, this is what the "framers of the CARES Act" intended.  A few weeks ago, the mayor described the situation at a press conference. The CARES Act, she said, "doesn’t make me feel like we’re cared about if that’s all that’s going to come down from the federal government to the city of New Orleans.”  I think that's probably the most accurate take on all of this.

Dispatch from the doom: Every single thing is on fire

Where to even begin today?

Let's try here.

With the coronavirus crisis having already affected large swaths of American culture and the economy, there's no real reason to think that the world's largest retailer will be spared. Amazon is facing pressure from three different sides: Increased demand from consumers, the very real potential of coronavirus spreading through a warehouse, and supply chain interruptions.

Ports that receive goods from overseas have seen major slowdowns as the Chinese stall manufacturing. While Trump’s European travel ban does not currently include trade, imports from Europe could come to a halt if things change as they already are overnight. Already, Amazon is seeing shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes.

Every single thing in the world is on fire now and it's only beginning to sink in.  The American luxury consumer life runs on extracting maximum value out of poor people on a global scale while ignoring the misery imposed by that system.  The pandemic interrupts all of this.  It has a power that workers have long been deprived of. The power to shut it all down.  Perhaps you are tempted to think this is an "opportunity" to build a better world. It isn't. The virus, having no agenda beyond self replication, hasn't stopped the world to make demands. Like all preceding disasters of the 21st Century, this one only promises to bring new hardships.

Right now the entire economy is seized up.  This seizure is different even from the 2008 financial meltdown where a speculative market based on creating fake value out of whole cloth could be propped back up by inserting trillions of newly printed fake dollars.  But to be clear what "propped back up" means, the fake dollars went right to the bankers who caused the problem in the first place and allowed scores of criminals to cash themselves out of their schemes while leaving ordinary Americans ruined for decades. So hurray for that.  The crisis we're looking at now is and will be... worse. The response to this needs to be immediate. It needs to be massive. And it needs to be directed to people and not to banks or corporations. Unsurprisingly it is taking American politics a very long time to figure this out.

A relief package in the House supposedly aimed at providing American workers with sick leave will, in fact, cover only about 20% of them. Tuesday morning we read that Nancy Pelosi, after scolding reporters about the importance of means testing things, has negotiated with the Trump Administration to further scale back the scope of bill. Kamala Harris is tweeting out a previous plan of hers to give *some* people virtually nothing.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for President said during a debate on Sunday that free health care is still a bad idea because countries that have it also have the virus. Democrats are so corrupted by their corporate donors and confounded by their own resigned ideology of better-things-aren't-possible have none of the tools necessary to deal with the problem realistically.  They can't even make hollow promises that capture anyone's attention anymore.

This makes them quite different from the huckster Donald Trump, unfortunately, who is all too happy to step in with Great Big Checks For Everybody.

WASHINGTON — President Trump called on Congress on Tuesday to quickly approve a sweeping economic stimulus package that would include sending checks directly to Americans within weeks, as large sections of the economy shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to go big,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House, adding that he had instructed Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, to introduce measures that would provide more immediate economic support over the payroll tax cut holiday that he had been promoting.

Thank goodness they've talked him out of the payroll tax thing... for now.  It's a terrible idea that a) won't help anybody who is not receiving a paycheck and b) is a direct stab at Social Security, Medicare and what remains of the federal social safety net that most of us are going to have to rely on now more than ever.  Ultimately we know the Republicans will come back for all of that. But right now they are outflanking the Democrats to the left which is something that should never happen in the midst of a worldwide crisis when there is also a national election pending.

Sure, we all know that Republicans are going to insist on ridiculous corporate bailouts for the airlines, for the oil industry, and for anyone who puts money in their, or especially Trump's, pocket. On Friday, Trump presided over a nightmare scene at the Rose Garden where he presented the CEOs of Walmart, CVS, Target as well as medical industrialists including, of all people, disgraced former Louisiana head of Health and Human Services Bruce Greenstein to talk about the "public-private partnerships" by which they all expect to get rich off of the pandemic disaster. Senate leader and greatest villain of the 21st Century, Mitch McConnell is saying it will take "significant and bold new steps" to pass the next relief bill. That doesn't necessarily bode well either.

In the meantime, there is an election to win. So Trump is going to send everyone a much needed relief check (it won't be enough but it will be welcome) and cruise to a win over the guy who has spent his whole career trying to cut your Social Security. The punchline is, afterward, Trump will then come back and cut your Social Security.  Because the "liberal" party is so helplessly moribund, the only direction for the country to go now is further into a populist fascism. Offer people some bread up front, turn the whole state over to the oligarchs next.

It didn't have to be like this. If only Democrats could have backed a campaign proposing a major overhaul of the entire US economy based on eliminating stifling debts, expanding social services like health care and mobilizing all resources to fight climate change. If only they didn't mobilize their entire corrupt party infrastructure to stop that from being their platform.  Unfortunately some people were mean to some well to do liberals on Twitter and so now this is what we get. Seems fair.

Hey speaking of oligarchs, meanwhile in New Orleans....

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's director of economic development, Jeff Schwartz, led a Monday morning conference call with about 40 leaders from business and economic development organizations, including the Business Council of New Orleans, New Orleans Business Alliance, GNO Inc., economic agencies from parishes in the metropolitan area, as well as the black, Hispanic and other chambers of commerce.

The problem in New Orleans, much like the problem in Washington, is the people who will have the ear of government leadership throughout and after the crisis are the ownership class. This is why, for example, the rules for keeping bars and restaurants open the mayor issued Sunday were written by the Louisiana Restaurant Association's lobbyists. Those rules were quickly obsoleted by the Governor's subsequent shutdown order. But it's clear where the local policy is being drawn up.

In the same way Trump's policy is directed by cronies like those assembled in the Rose Garden last week, Cantrell's is dictated by the "business and economic development organizations" like those listed above as well as the tourism promotion entity known as New Orleans and Company which, along with the Convention Center, pulls down something like $20 million dollars a year in public funds.

The tourism cabal has more than $200 million in surplus sitting around in a slush fund recently legitimized by Cantrell's #FairShare deal. Given the current state of the tourism market, they will be needing exactly zero of those dollars for any of their pet projects. It should all be spent on emergency relief for displaced hospitality workers.  Of course that isn't what's happening. Instead the interchangeable plutocrats who populate all of these organizations have set up "philanthropic" funds like this one run by the New Orleans Business Alliance. Its conditions are absurdly restrictive and its expected benefits are miserly. But all the right people get to manage it and cover themselves in glory in the process. They've thrown in $100,000 so far so congrats on that.

But it's not only a corrupt deference to ruling class influence that parallels Cantrell's emergency response with Trump's. She's also continues to emulate his authoritarian sneer in her rhetoric.  On Sunday, she took time out from her aggressive lecturing of everybody about the "social distancing" directives to also yell at the news media for... asking her questions in order to confirm information?

Cantrell is now talking about journalism. "Quality journalism matters," Cantrell said. She's upset about journalists calling the office trying to get confirmation about what sources have said.

— Della Hasselle (@dellahasselle) March 15, 2020

The context of that was never explained. It was bizarre to say the least.  The next day, she bristled at a reporter's perfectly reasonable question about whether or not NOPD should be throwing people in jail for non-violent offenses given the health hazards of crowding into confined spaces. The public defender's office has already asked them to cease such arrests in a letter this week. If you watch the presser you can hear the contempt in Cantrell's immediate response, "Uh no."  She then invited Police Chief Ferguson to give everyone a brief lecture about "law and order."

Today it was announced that future press conferences won't have any press at all. Instead the mayor will retreat to a bunker and send out a recorded message.

... Moving forward, future City Hall news conferences will be videoed with a single pool camera. Copies will be distributed to all media.

— Tegan Wendland (@TeganWendland) March 17, 2020

But that will be the case after one last hurrah today where Cantrell appeared, flanked by CAO Gilbert Montano and representatives of the NO & Co brain trust to announce that the tourism related businesses were getting a tax holiday.

Despite worries about the city’s bottom line, Cantrell announced on Tuesday that the city would waive all penalties for late sales tax payments from businesses for the next 60 days. That measure is intended to make sure businesses have the money on hand to keep paying their employees while state and city closures are in place during the height of the outbreak.

Cantrell, again in her now standard aggressively condescending tone, emphasized that these tax breaks, which, realistically, can only be expected to keep some businesses afloat for a few weeks at best, were being granted in the full knowledge that they will drastically alter the way the city operates for months and years into the future.

Decisions on how to cut government expenses could be made in the coming days, Cantrell said. That could include everything from cutting contracts or other expenses to furloughs or layoffs for city workers, she said.

“We’re looking at how this will impact the city and our operations, we’re looking beyond not just the next six months but the next 12 months,” Cantrell said. “The impact to our bottom line will be significant and will be felt even a year from now.”

This is a deliberate structural change intended to affect the way the city operates in the years after the virus crisis has passed. By that time, the current crop of hospitality workers Cantrell falsely claims to care about will have been long fired and displaced.  But the ownership class will remain largely intact. And at that point they will be expected to support even fewer of the paltry services the city can offer residents on its current shoestring budget.  It's a classic austerity strategy written up by the very owners who will benefit from it.  "Shock Doctrine" seems like such a cliche at this point but, once again, here we are. No crisis ever goes to waste.

When asked by a reporter why, given the entire history of everything, why anyone should expect to trust that just handing over more money and power to the already rich and powerful with no accountability will work out well for everybody this one time, Cantrell was again characteristically curt. 

Asked about concerns that businesses would simply pocket the money, not turning it over to their workers or to the government, Cantrell said she choose to look at the situation from an optimistic perspective.

“I’m not being negative at all and thinking that our businesses or employers will not do the right thing,” Cantrell said. “This is all with the expectation that they’ll do the right thing.”

In Cantrell's impossibly small conception of politics, if there is ever economic or class based conflict at all, it is forever subsumed by the greater imperative of personal deference. The worst offense is "being negative" enough to ask that authority be held to account.

The corona crisis is already a staggering calamity. But it's the authoritarian quality of our local and national governments that makes it uniquely dangerous. Every shock of the past twenty years has left the changed world a few degrees harsher in its wake. But this is the one that really feels as though it threatens to break us. It's already broken so much. 

No one can produce anything. No one can consume anything. The world economy is shuttered. The grifters are picking apart its bones. We are all holed up in isolation. The oceans are rising. The city of New Orleans is physically sinking into the sea. The system has glitched out. And our concluding communication, the clanging yawp of our death reflex is a stream of recommended local eateries spammed out from the social media of our office holders.

It's comforting to know that when a global crisis pushes civilization to the very brink local government converts to spam advertising mode pic.twitter.com/F8yJrvD6iT

— skooks (@skooks) March 18, 2020

 

We can't sustain ourselves like this. Nobody has any money. Nobody has any answers. Stop asking the mayor for any. She will only yell at you.