Congress to cities: Drop dead

The bosses have won the pandemic.  Already the emergency has occasioned a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest tranche of American plutocrats and, yet another, re-writing of every rule of finance for the benefit of bankers and stockholders.  Already we've seen massive unemployment met with only temporary relief drizzled out through a broken benefits delivery system and a one time check that many may never see.  The bosses don't care about your problems.  They just want a more compliant workforce. "The age of coddling is over," is their motto now.

And so it will continue to be. Municipal and state governments everywhere have been sent reeling by the economic interruption.  New Orleans is facing an estimated $150 million budget deficit now. But it is not alone. Every state and every city needs, at least, the same immediate federal injection of funds that have been afforded to the banking system. Otherwise, the basic services and infrastructure you depend on (your schools, your streets, your EMS and fire departments, your freaking water management) will be left to collapse. This is a choice that policymakers can make now.  And look what they are choosing.

A key sticking point remains, however: Money for state and local governments struggling to deal with the economic fallout from the virus’ lockdowns. On Friday night, Democrats offered Mnuchin money for the Paycheck Protection Program, hospitals as well as $150 billion for state and localities. On Friday night, Democrats proposed to Mnuchin providing the $250 billion on the table for the Paycheck Protection Program as well as more money for hospitals, plus $150 billion for state and localities.

But according to two Republicans following the talks, money for state and local governments is a red line for the GOP and would likely trigger opposition that would derail any agreement. Because Congress is on recess until May 4, any member can object to a deal. And conservative senators are likely to tank any agreement that delivers a large increase in funds for state and local governments, Republicans said.

This is what they want.  They want a cowed and compliant workforce suffering under a civic regime dissolved entirely into the hands of private profiteers. The pandemic has been a big win on that front.  Congratulations.

Every state and local government is in an austerity trap

Some of that is because state houses are full of reactionary conservatives and city halls are steeped in public-private neoliberal ideology. But there is also a major structural factor that makes all of that seem sort of rational.

The problem is that unlike the federal government, nearly all state and local governments face balanced budget rules for their current activities, with most needing to pass bond referenda for specific projects in order to borrow money.  So when the revenues fall short, which they shortly will start to do for all these state governments, they will face the choice of cutting spending and laying off workers or raising taxes on populations facing sharply reduced incomes and employment.  The sooner the federal government recognizes this and starts to do something, the better, although probably for now natonal politicians are hoping this will all be over before too much damage happens to the local governments, to the extent they are thinking about this at all, which I doubt.

In a crisis this forces local officials to make drastic decisions that threaten their own workforce and cripple their future capacity to serve the public.  A lot of them feel like they're doing the right or only thing. But that's because they're working with a limited concept of normal operations.  These are not normal times.  It is time to imagine a much better world with a wider range of possibilities.

Maxine Waters is trying to do that.

Waters' proposal, described in a memo to House Democrats, calls for direct cash payments — larger and longer lasting than in other proposals — and suspension of nearly all consumer and small business debt payments, supported by reimbursements to creditors through the Federal Reserve.

It calls for billions of dollars in grants to small businesses, boosting emergency homelessness assistance funds by billions, cutting all federal student loans by $10,000, and pumping $100 billion into public housing to kickstart the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic passes.

Waters, D-Calif., is calling for $2,000 a month in cash payments to most adults, and $1,000 a month for each child, for the duration of the pandemic. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has floated a $500 billion direct cash injection, but as a one-time offer, not the continuing monthly payments Waters proposes.

The Waters memo.. you can read it here... should be the standard by which all policy response is measured. It enumerates relief efforts that put people first. It offers real support to the scores of laid off. Instead of the narrow focus on sick leave or means-tested tax credits for middle class workers or massive bailouts for corporate criminals, the Waters memo considers the whole economy of part-time workers, gig workers and people who depend on informal cash only arrangements.

It also recognizes the dire situation that local governments find themselves in and offers immediate help.  These provisions would stand up cities that are already starting to furlough workers and cut services.

20.Support State, Territory, and Local Government Financing. This provision would authorize a program that requires the Federal Reserve to support state, territory, and local debt issuance in response to the coronavirus outbreak given the critical role these governments are playing.

21.Waive Matching Requirements for Municipal Governments. This provision would waive the requirement that state, territory or local governments first obtain matching funds prior to receiving certain federal grants.

There are provisions in the Waters plan beyond this that empower cities to rebuild their economies through small business aid and housing grants.  Everything is on fire right now. The Waters plan not only moves immediately to douse those fires it shows us the fastest and most equitable route to recovery.  It needs to happen and it needs to happen like yesterday. Call your congresspeople today and tell them that.

Summer reading

The beginning of June is probably a good time to roll out a few book recommendations. I'm getting the brain worms in my early old age now and I find I need to do a better job of keeping a record of what I've been reading. I used to have a Library Thing account for that. And there's still a Goodreads linked here on this very blog but I haven't used that in ages. Recently I've reverted to just keeping a boring old spreadsheet. But I'm going to try posting books here more often.  Otherwise, like everything else in life, if I don't take a second to write it down, I'll never remember any of  it happened.  So here are some titles I've finished over the past few months.  If I remember to do this more frequently, these posts won't be quite so long.  

• Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age Of Revolutions by Rashauna Johnson (2016)
  
  There is a long overdue movement in the treatment of slavery in popular history writing to place it in its proper context as a (if not the) founding institution of modern global capitalism.  Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire are a couple of relatively recent popular books I can recommend here. Also here is a two part episode of The Dig podcast recorded during this "Slavery's Hinterlands" symposium at Brown University.
  
  Johnson's book contributes something to this as it traces the movement of enslaved people to, through, and from New Orleans during a pivotal period centered around the Haitian revolution. The context of this book is global but most of the focus is local. Slavery marked every aspect of life in the city. Johnson describes its effect on domestic living patterns in the city's neighborhoods. She discusses its influence on popular culture and entertainment. One example of ths is an explicit characterization of the sometimes romanticized raquette matches played near Hunter's Field during this period as a brutal and exploitative use of black bodies.  She also writes about the local jail's role as an aggregator and lessor of slave labor (some things never change.)
  
  Here also is a brief WWNO interview with Johnson from last May.



• The Parade by Dave Eggers (2019)
  
  This is a short novel you can read in a day or two if you want to. I'm not sure you actually have to, though. The style is a faux parable where two main characters (their names are not given) go to work for a contractor building a new road across a recently war-torn country (also unnamed) supposedly located somewhere in the global south. Things happen along the way but it ends pretty much the way you expect.  Imagine if Dave Eggers had tried to write The Road by Cormac McCarthy and this is what you would get.



• The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson (2018)
  
  This is a juvenile/YA novel that will probably show up on a lot of middle school summer reading lists this year. A young girl and her mother spend the summer away from their home in Atlanta at her grandmother's house in a small town in South Carolina. She discovers a letter in the attic that leads her and a neighbor boy to investigate a mystery from the town's past. That premise frames a story built around fictionalized historical episodes from the segregationist South combined with a sort of Count Of Monte Cristo story.  Explores themes of racial justice and LGBTQ acceptance.



• Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
  
  Data driven systems for intake and management of social services make poor people easier targets for police. Eubanks describes experiments with screening systems for welfare benefits in Indiana and homeless services in Los Angeles as well as a "predictive" tool for assessing the risk of child abuse in Allegheny County, PA. She argues that these and systems like them constitute a "digital poorhouse" and an insidious expansion of the 21st Century police state.
  
  This is all very much worth paying attention to for New Orleanians as the City Council and Mayor implement so-called "tough love" homeless management and juvenile justice policies that can end up doing a lot of harm to vulnerable people under the very likely bad faith offer of aid.



• She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore (2018)
  
  This week, protesters took to the streets in Monrovia to express frustrations with the Liberian government headed by former soccer star George Weah.
  

  Among protesters’ main gripes: a stagnant economy in which most still live in deep poverty and a scandal in which the country last year lost $100 million in newly printed bank notes destined for the central bank.
  
  “Weah is not governing our state the right way,” said Ishmael Hassan, who voted for Weah in 2017 but has since become disillusioned. “The economic situation in our country is going down the drain.”

  Weah's election had been seen as a relief from the stagnation and corruption of the EJ Sirleaf government. Sirleaf came into power with high hopes after years of civil war under the dominant influence of Charles Taylor. Taylor came into power having led a revolt against the corrupt Samuel Doe. Doe came in... look this goes back a ways. Maybe we should start from the beginning.
  
  Okay so the nation we know as Liberia finds its origin in the efforts of the, ostensibly abolitionist, but primarily white supremacist American Colonization Society.  The idea behind ACS was to remove as many Americans of African descent as possible from the US by sending freed slaves to a newly founded colony on the West African coast. The Americo-Liberian colonists clashed with and quickly came to dominate the indigenous tribes living there. This continued on into the Twentieth Century as the elite colonizing classes collaborated with international corporations (most notably Firestone) to exploit Liberia's natural resources.  Basically, it was run as a big rubber plantation. Later, like pretty much every Third World nation, Liberia became a pawn in the US/Soviet Cold War rivalry until that played itself out at which point matters really began to deteriorate.
  
  You won't learn any of this by reading She Would Be King. But Moore's magical realist novel does attempt to relay some of the essence of Liberia's founding elements. Her three main characters are basically avatars of the country's ethnic mix embodied as folk heroes. They begin their stories living separate and oppressed lives in Virginia, Jamaica and the African back country.  Each discovers a unique magical gift as they move along on their journeys before coming together at the moment of the nation's independence.  The novel is successful in creating a mock folk legend about the people of Liberia. It's less compelling as a beginning-to-end narrative but that's not really the primary aim.



• Cities: The First 6000 Years by Monica Smith (2019)
  
  This is a quick and engaging survey of the archaeology of urban places that isn't anywhere near as ambitious as the title might sound. It's really more a personal summary of the author's observations and general theories based on her own work in the field. Most of which is quite fascinating although here and there the reader gets a sense of a creeping Pinkerist message. Trash is good, actually. Capitalism and class hierarchy are good and permanent fixtures of human society, actually. Things that seem bad now are actually not that bad because they are not new.  Probably the author doesn't mean for this to come through quite so explicitly. But if you are a reader who is sensitive to that sort of thing you might grow a little suspicious. Don't let that detract too much from what is really a delightful book, though. You're probably overthinking it. 

Resilient Cities

As we've been saying for a while that the main thrust of urban development the past ten or fifteen years has mostly been about building nice things for rich people.

The fastest growth was in those lower-density suburbs. Those counties grew by 1.3 percent in 2016, the fastest rate since 2008, when the housing bust put an end to rapid homebuilding in these areas. In the South and West, growth in large-metro lower-density suburbs topped 2 percent in 2016, led by counties such as Kendall and Comal north of San Antonio; Hays near Austin; and Forsyth, north of Atlanta.³

Those figures run counter to the “urban revival” narrative that has been widely discussed in recent years. That revival is real, but it has mostly been for rich, educated people in particular hyperurban neighborhoods rather than a broad-based return to city living. To be sure, college-educated millennials — at least those without school-age kids — took to the city, and better-paying jobs have shifted there, too. But other groups — older adults, families with kids in school, and people of all ages with lower incomes — either can’t afford or don’t want an urban address.

Remember when Pres Kabacoff told us we needed to push out the poors because they are a "drag on the city's economy"?  This is what he was talking about.  Rich people are better at being "resilient." 

Distinction without a difference

Sometimes Atrios can be one smug asshole.

Gentrification often isn't about rich people in, it's about people moving in period. And, yes, that can eventually start driving up rents and property values as the act of people moving in begins to improve a neighborhood. Existing owners may decide to cash out, and existing renters may be driven out. So, yes, there might be victims of gentrification in that sense. But if you're genuinely concerned about housing options for poor people you should be concerned about the fact that most places effectively don't let them live there, not that some students and hipsters begin reversing the depopulation trend that hit a lot of urban areas.

And the difference there would be what, exactly? I guess if you're someone who lives comfortably in a gentrified city neighborhood already, it's easy to imagine we should be concerned with some unnamed way in which cities "don't let (poor people) live there". But in the real world, poor people are forced out of neighborhoods by gentri-fucking-fication. And speaking as an actual poor person who has watched the house across my street be converted from low rent apartments to time share condos over the past year, this worries me.