Murdered Gulf

BP really got away with one.  Who woulda thought, right? 

Published in the journal PLOS One in June, Montagna’s full analysis of his 10-year-old samples showed damage to seafloor organisms stretching across at least 124 square miles. That’s nearly two times larger than the 66-square-mile footprint described in the abbreviated report Montagna turned over for the disaster’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment.

The NRDA process helped determine how much BP owed for the harm done to marine organisms, from the little mud-dwelling creatures Montagna studied to the dead dolphins and oil-drenched pelicans that washed up on Louisiana’s shores. In April 2016, the case was settled for $8.8 billion. It was both the largest environmental settlement in the nation’s history and the biggest infusion of cash for restoration purposes the state had ever seen.

But it might have been larger had the full scope of the damage been known.

“BP got a good deal by settling early,” Montagna said.

How did they get away with it? Well one thing they did was exercise control over the scope of the research that eventually determined their liability. 

Keeping watch over every step was a BP representative.

“He asked a lot of questions, and was with us 24-7,” she said.

Company officials carefully documented each sample’s chain of custody.

“BP didn’t want anybody spiking the samples with oil,” Montagna said.

BP and Montagna “had many difficult conversations” over how to conduct the sampling. BP wanted a narrow focus, concentrating the sampling close to the well. Montagna wanted to travel farther afield, gathering cores from a wider area. Montagna won out on the scope, but not on which samples to analyze for the damage assessment. On that count, BP got its way, zooming the focus on the 58 samples taken closest to the well.

The company used that tighter scope to its advantage. In a statement in 2013, BP said the 58 samples “confirm that potential injury to the deep sea soft sediment ecosystem was limited to a small area in the immediate vicinity of the Macondo well-head.”

BP required all the samples to be kept in a locked cage in a secure, air-conditioned storage room. That is, until the settlement was reached.

“There was zero interest the next day,” Montagna said. “No one cared.”

As for the lasting environmental damage done to the sea floor, we're still learning about how bad it really is.  But, well, it's bad. 

Montagna says plenty of evidence is waiting quietly at the bottom of the Gulf. Recent check-ins by other scientists have revealed little improvement since 2010. Slow to degrade thanks to the deep sea’s cold, dark and sterile conditions, the oil remains nearly as potent as the day it soaked into the mud and formed black pools on the seafloor.

“There’s been almost zero recovery, and it’ll likely stay that way for a long, long time,” Montagna said.

Bollinger ICE raid

Not sure what, exactly, is going on here but the possibility that a company with so many critical ties to the Republican Party in general and to Donald Trump's campaign in particular, might be calling out ICE on its own employees probably needs consideration.

Federal agents staged an extensive search of the Bollinger Shipyards facilities in Lockport on Tuesday as part of an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" led by the Department of Homeland Security and also detained several immigrants in the country illegally at the facility, authorities said.

The operation at the Lafourche Parish shipyard on Tuesday was led by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. Cox referred additional questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser declined comment.

Cox said federal agents also arrested 19 "unlawfully present foreign nationals" at the Bollinger Shipyards location. Five of those people were placed in ICE detention while the other 14 were processed and released after being placed into deportation proceedings in federal immigration court, Cox said.

Of course it also says there is an "ongoing federal criminal investigation"  and it's the sort of thing that has ensnared other Republican Party figures in the state already.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

These are the guys who yell and scream about how we need tough immigration enforcement practices while they themselves are the ones profiting from the exploitation of migrant labor.  You ever wonder if maybe they just like to be able to threaten their workers?

What could we do differently that would be better?

In a word, everything.

In mid-April, Representative Ilhan Omar introduced legislation to cancel rents and mortgages for the duration of the public health crisis. The legislation would also offer financial relief to tenants and small landlords, and establish a fund to finance the purchase of private rental housing by local governments, public housing authorities, nonprofits, and community land trusts.

In addition to its legislative cosponsors, the bill has been endorsed by over three dozen community and labor organizations.

A statement on Omar’s website emphasizes that “due to layoffs and mass unemployment, renters and mortgage holders are accruing mountains of debt, despite many not having a steady income for the foreseeable future. We must take bold action now that extends the same financial assistance and protections to our struggling citizens as has been offered to profit-driven corporations.”

Unlike many of the mitigation proposals advanced by other lawmakers, Omar’s bill not only addresses the cause of the current eviction crisis, but lays out a path to eliminating housing insecurity and ensuring housing as a right. That’s exactly the right approach. Unless we cancel rent and mortgage obligations during the pandemic and enact policies to guarantee housing for all, we will be placing the burden of the coronavirus pandemic on those who can least afford it.

Don't really see anyone advocating for that sort of land use policy locally.  Maybe ask the nearest "founding entrepreneur" what they think. 

It's going great

Everybody fired. Everybody being more than previously reported.

Recent news analyses have sketched out a dire picture of the scope of the jobless crisis in Louisiana and the extent of the expected damage that the state’s economy as the federal boost to unemployment benefits lapses.

But the true picture is actually worse than some of those reports have outlined. For instance, a Sunday story in The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate noted that more than 313,000 laid-off Louisianans had filed for state unemployment benefits as of July 18, the most recent data for which the state provided complete data. But that figure didn’t include the thousands of freelancers, independent contractors and so-called “gig” workers thrown out of jobs by the coronavirus crisis.

That latter group includes more than 152,000 out-of-work Louisianans who, although not normally covered by the unemployment insurance system, have been able to file for jobless benefits under a special federal expansion of the program to address the massive job losses during the pandemic.

Oh boy.  That's just Louisiana, of course. But this story cites a Brookings report that says New Orleans will be the third "hardest hit" metro in the country by the looming benefits expiration. On the other hand, the rest of the country is... well, it's not going so great there either. 

The number of Americans filing new claims for state unemployment benefits totaled 1.43 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

It was the 19th straight week that the tally exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the coronavirus pandemic. And it was the second weekly increase in a row after nearly four months of declines, a sign of how the rebound in cases has undercut the economy’s nascent recovery. Claims for the previous week totaled 1.42 million.

For those of you who are among the ever-dwindling number of still employed persons, let's try an exercise.  Please raise your hand if you have been obligated out of fear or lack of options to keep going in to work during the pandemic while becoming more frightened and demoralized with news of each death or of the rate of spread.

Okay well if your hand is up, Mitch McConnell says your boss should sue you now. 

The most obnoxious provision of the GOP proposal is one that shifts the liability in COVID cases from the employer to employee. This provision allows employers to sue employees or their representatives for bringing a claim for a COVID infection and offering to settle out of court.

Most specifically, the measure mentions "demand letters." These are communications to a prospective defendant setting forth the facts of the claim, evidence assembled by the plaintiff, a reckoning of the potential damages and a statement of how much the plaintiff would accept to make the case go away. Here's a sample letter published by the San Francisco law firm Rouda Feder Tietjen & McGuinn.

These documents are often designed as an opening brief in a negotiation; since neither side in an injury case really wants to go to trial, they make sense. The GOP bill would make anyone offering to settle, either through a demand letter or otherwise, liable to be sued for damages if the case they're making is "meritless." That's another term that's undefined in the measure.

Unlike the limitation on damages elsewhere in the bill, by the way, the punitive damages that can be awarded to employers bringing these lawsuits aren't capped.

The measure also gives the attorney general the right to bring his own lawsuit in such cases. As a result, Kennerly observes, Atty. Gen. William Barr would get the right "to sue unions, labor activists, lawyers, doctors — everyone involved in coronavirus claims."

Congress is choosing to send millions of people off of a cliff right now because 1) Republicans are openly hostile to everyone except the bosses and millionaires and 2) Democrats are running an election campaign based on the hope that they can get away doing nothing if everyone is miserable enough, because they just might blame the Republicans for it.

The first of the month is coming. (There's one every month!) But this time we're going in while deliberately cutting off everyone's income. Also the federal evictions moratorium is expiring and the courts are open.. or are they?

Billyvision

Let's take a break from our doomscrolling for a minute to visit with Louisiana's tourism promoter-in-chief for a few minutes of that good ol' irrational exuberance.

.@LouisianaLtGov Billy Nungesser says on talk radio this morning that the state will move to phase three in the coming weeks and that “We’re going to have Mardi Gras, we’re going to have football." #lalege #lagov

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 29, 2020

 

Oh man does that feel good or what. Football and Mardi Gras are back, baby! Because Billy believes in it.  Give us some more of those beautiful visions, Billy.  What other lovely things do you see in the future?

Nungesser, on whether he'll run for governor next cycle: "“We’re going to look at it. Obviously i’m going to consider it.” #lalege #lagov

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 29, 2020

 

Ohhhhkaaay thanks. This has been refreshing. We'll check back with Captain Optimism later as the need arises.

Hygiene theater

Here we have another direct consequence of there being no national good faith strategy to contain the virus and support people in the process.  Every state, every municipality, every school system, every individual business is left to figure the entire thing out for itself. And within that, is a chaos of fifty million isolated power relationships between owners and workers that drives the decision-making in a decidedly unsafe, or at least insincere, direction.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

But what if this is all just a huge waste of time?

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

There is a historical echo here. After 9/11, physical security became a national obsession, especially in airports, where the Transportation Security Administration patted down the crotches of innumerable grandmothers for possible explosives. My colleague Jim Fallows repeatedly referred to this wasteful bonanza as “security theater.”

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

A lot of this originates with institutions desperate to come up with and present evidence that they are Doing Something, even if that thing they are doing turns out to be nonsense. A nonsensical policy can have remarkable staying power even after it is discredited. And, like we said, on top of that is a host of actors with suddenly empowered to move on agendas that might have been problematic before.

Looking forward to this 2004 US Senate campaign the Louisiana Democrats are running

Shreveport mayor Adrian Perkins qualified last week to run for Senate. Several observers were immediately and simultaneously impressed with his "sterling resume"

In running against Cassidy, @AdrianDPerkins will be first big-name Democrat to get into #lasen race. Other Dem challengers across country have raised big $$ to run against GOP incumbents. We'll see if Perkins can do same. He has sterling resume, but it's safe Repub seat #lagov

— Tyler Bridges (@tegbridges) July 22, 2020

It was immediately predicted that he would "excite" Democrats

I'll be more blunt about the Senate race. @BillCassidy has drawn an opponent that Democrats can take seriously in Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins. West Point/Harvard grad who is young and Black? Tough for him to win, but he'll excite the Dems. #lasen https://t.co/Hiz6affazU

— Julie O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) July 22, 2020

Because, apparently, the things that most excite and "compel" Democrats are Ivy League credentials and being a troop.

Shreveport mayor Adrian Perkins--former class president at West Point and student body president at Harvard Law--will challenge U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R). Pretty compelling story. Could be an interesting race if he can raise some money. #lalege #lasen https://t.co/hgKET0rJIS

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 22, 2020

 

At least that seemed to be the script everyone was reading from.  Uncanny?  Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, they did tell us who emailed it to them.

Perkins picks up two @JohnBelEdwards alumni, Kia Bickham and @micahjcormier, along with a few Gumbo PAC alumni, for his team, per release. #lalege #lasen

— Sam Karlin (@samkarlin) July 22, 2020

 

Can he win?  Well, reading between the lines here, it doesn't seem likely that is even the point.  See, while the Senate very well may be in play this year, the pros who run the Democratic Party juggernaut do not really expect Louisiana to be a part of that.  BUT since there's likely to be a ton of money flowing their way this fall, it's a good idea to throw as many vessels for receiving and then distributing that money down to professional campaign staff into the mix as possible.  And when Democrats need a placeholder-money sponge to fit into a race like that, well, meritocratic-neoliberal-millitary is the type they prefer.

But, hey don't take it from me...

We need a new generation of leadership in Washington. Looking forward to working with @PerkinsforLA. https://t.co/hfCatBCUkE

— Amy McGrath (@AmyMcGrathKY) July 22, 2020

 

It's good to see @PerkinsforLA stepping forward to run for Senate. His perspective as a mayor on the front lines of leadership (plus as a veteran, and one of a new generation of dynamic Black elected leaders) is more timely than ever. https://t.co/y6Ef6Rh1Fm

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) July 23, 2020

Sounds very exciting and compelling, right?  Can't you just imagine him facing down some Republican nonsense in the Senate right now?  Wouldn't you like to see a guy like that stand up and ask Mitch McConnell or Tom Cotton if they have "no sense of decency sir?"   What if he had been there on the Senate floor during this term? What might that have looked like?

On Aug. 29th, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Diane Feistein received a letter from eight recent or current members of Harvard Law’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA), including Shreveport mayoral candidate Adrian Perkins, in support of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The Bayou Brief contacted Perkins, both directly and through his campaign, and, as of the time of publication, has yet to receive a response.

The letter praises Kavanaugh, a staunchly pro-life conservative who is now confronting credible allegations of sexual assault, for meeting with African-American students in March and providing them “his insights and advice” on how to secure a judicial clerkship. “The students who have signed below write to express appreciation for the Judge’s enthusiasm on this issue and hope that his efforts will be taken into consideration,” the letter reads.

Oh dear.

Well, to contextualize this a bit, the young Harvard men are often asked to sign letters like this on behalf of fellow Harvard men seeking advancement in various arenas.  It's a think Harvard men are expected to do for one another.  And at the time of this letter, the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh were not widely known so it's probable that Perkins just signed the thing because that's part of what it means to be in the club of Harvard men. Kavanaugh had shared with them some of his own "insights and advice" on how to get ahead themselves and so they would want to pay it back in whatever way they can.

Does that make signing your name to a letter supporting the installation of a right wing ideologue to the Supreme Court any better?  Probably if you are the sort of Democrat who is "excited" by a resume like Perkins's it does.  Not really sure who else it is supposed to impress, though.

Whiplash

Start here with...

Gov. John Bel Edwards is schedule to give his latest update on the fight against coronavirus in Louisiana on Tuesday afternoon.

The press conference will start at 4 p.m. from Baton Rouge.

News broke Monday that multiple bars across the state were shut down due to repeated violations of coronavirus restrictions.

The White House has recommended that Louisiana roll back indoor dining, by further restricting indoor occupancy percentages.

But then, immediately notice.... 

Film production will resume in New Orleans next week for the first time since the city shut down in March to combat the coronavirus pandemic, City Hall said on Tuesday.

The industry has become a major employer and financial contributor to the city, with around 12,000 mostly local workers producing movies and television shows that add an estimated $1.2 billion to the economy each year, according to an economic impact study by the state.

"With each film crew consisting of 85% local workers, the return of productions means getting our residents back to work in an industry that will ensure that they are safe,” said Carroll Morton, the director of Film New Orleans, the municipal government office that oversees the industry.

Most of these decisions are about public safety.... but then some of them seem to be driven by some overriding factor. I wonder what that is.... 

It's no utopia

The federal monitors say Gusman's jail is still not ready to come out of.. uh.. detention.  A few months ago, Gusamn complained that he was being held to an unreasonable "jail utopia" standard. But this seems like the bar he's failing to clear is a good deal lower than that.

Reviews of deaths and near-death attempts like suicide attempts “remain perfunctory and they lack self-critical analysis,” according to the report.

Meanwhile, despite reams of policies and years of concern around suicide attempts, precautions remain lacking. Although the monitors conducted their tour of the jail in late May virtually due to the coronavirus outbreak, they still saw obvious shortfalls.

On one virtual round of the jail’s mental health unit, the monitors spotted an inmate making a rope out of a blanket, and a nursing assistant was chatting with a deputy instead of monitoring inmates on suicide watch.

Maybe next time if they find inmates trying to tunnel out with spoons rather than fashion ropes out of blankets, that will be a sign that morale is up at least. 

Ideally, we wouldn't put anybody in jail at all.  But our political leadership has demonstrated at several points that even during a pandemic, their first priority is "law and order" and punishing people, in general.

This doesn't say anything about the jail budget.  The city has indicated that it believes the jail may be ready to come out from under the consent decree.  And the mayor has even more emphatically called for an end to federal monitoring of NOPD. But in both cases the city's position seems primarily motivated by cost.

Others have argued that it would save a lot of money to de-fund the police and get rid of the jail altogether. But, again, no one in leadership here takes any of that seriously.

In-corona-herence

Political leadership: The virus is spreading! Everybody needs to stop going out and getting into big crowds and line-ups and stuff in public. Stay inside! Preferably under something.  Don't make us have to take away your go-cups. Okay well, see, we are taking away your co-cups now.


Also political leadership:  What's the matter with you people? Don't you know you're supposed to get out and go to work in our groceries and classrooms and places where people get into big crowds and line-ups and stuff in public? If you're going to just sit at home, don't expect us to help you.

Many Republicans detest the supplemental jobless aid, put in place by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, arguing that it is a disincentive to returning to work because it exceeds what some workers can earn in regular wages. The Republican proposal, which has badly divided the party, envisions eventually shifting to a new system of calculating benefits that would cap payments at about 70 percent of a worker’s prior income, which would also amount to about $200 per week.

The problem

This is an article about the advance of workplace surveillance technologies.  Paranoid, profit-driven bosses are able to marshal a terrifying array of all seeing and all knowing machines to gain complete and intimate knowledge of workers' actions, associations and habits in order to predict and manipulate their behaviors.  We live in hell.

But we have always lived in hell.  Your boss may have super powerful computers and cameras to track you with now but the impetus to control and squeeze the absolute most value out of workers is a practice that stretches back to slavery.

In 1750, wealthy slave owners in Jamaica and Barbados would meticulously track and manage enslaved workers in order to maximize their productive output. What business schools today call “scientific management” actually has its very roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Plantation owners were determined to extract every last bit of labor they could get from enslaved workers, meticulously tracking, documenting, and analyzing their every move in order to maximize productivity and profit. According to Harvard Business School researcher Caitlin Rosenthal, these techniques were then adopted widely in the United States after a slave owner named Thomas Affleck advanced those surveillance techniques to include “sophisticated calculations” that “measure productivity in a standardized way,” thus allowing “planters to determine how far they could push their workers to get the most profit.” After years of capitalist development, the plantation owners and capitalist executives of today are armed with more intelligent technology that can, in a millisecond, do what Affleck once did with only his eyes and a hand-written spreadsheet. High-tech corporate monitoring of workers today undoubtedly stems from this legacy of meticulous and detailed tracking of enslaved workers in order to extract the most profit from them, and to quell potential rebellion and collective action.

And, of course, the COVID crisis has provided yet another opportunity to expand these practices. Bosses conflate their own desire to track workers' movements with the public health concern over "contact tracing" in order to deploy new and intrusive technologies.  The bosses win the pandemic again.

Anyway the real reason I flagged this article is that it contains a single paragraph that can be cut out and inserted into any story about any social and political conflict going on in the United States in the 21st Century and it will serve as the essential context for what is really being fought over.

Due to advances in workplace technology following World War II, the productivity of the workforce has skyrocketed. Yet wages grew to a lesser extent until 1973, when output soared and wages stagnated even further. Since 1978, CEOs’ salaries have increased by 970 percent, making nearly 300 times more than their average worker. While companies are increasing their profit with these technologies, workers aren’t seeing any corresponding increase in their wages. Instead, those profits are going directly into the pockets of corporate executives.

We may live in hell and have always lived in hell, but the specific bit of hell we're in right now extends from our failure to overcome this problem in particular.  One might expect a situation like that to become unsustainable the longer it persists.  And *gestures widely at everything around us unraveling* could indicate that, yeah, it's not holding up so well at the moment.  The new surveillance technologies are one response meant to hold the fraying system together. They may work too! But, until the underlying is resolved, more draconian and frightening responses than even this will undoubtedly appear.

Too much world burning down at once

Sorry this space has been a bit sparse as of late. I took the whole weekend to just try and catch up on various projects and got zero of them accomplished. I'll get it all straight soon. I think. I did prove that a person can get drunk on a Saturday night despite there being zero bars in operation so that's something, at least.

Seems like a useful skill to have in the coming weeks when all hell really starts to break loose.

Kudlow, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," said the 70% wage-replacement formula would be "quite generous by any standard."

But Pelosi predicted that the need for an individual calculation of benefits for each jobless recipient would quickly gum up states' unemployment systems, already groaning under the weight of 20 million to 30 million jobless claims. In many states, including California, workers have waited weeks to start receiving benefits.

"The reason we had $600 was its simplicity," Pelosi said. "So why don't we just keep it simple?"

They don't want to "keep it simple," though.  The bosses are trying to win the pandemic.  The more thoroughly they can destroy any sense of security in what's left of the social safety net, the bigger the win for them.

The whole point is to keep as many workers as desperate as possible. Without a true system of public benefits to rely on, workers are at the mercy of the boss for whatever wages and terms of employment there are to be had. And when there are none, they have nowhere to turn for aid except to... "philanthropy" outlets under the private management of the same class of bosses they're already begging from.  Is it really any surprise to find such offerings inadequate to the need?

"We have been leaning in to raise the money and get it out the door as quickly as we can," Greater New Orleans Foundation CEO Andy Kopplin said. "But it’s impossible for philanthropy to close the massive gap that would come from the expiration of federal unemployment assistance."

The philanthropic group has raised more than $3 million for low-income families and the nonprofits who serve them since the pandemic began, but Kopplin said that's a drop in the bucket compared to the need.

Of course it's a drop in the bucket. That's the whole point. There is no one coming to help. We're just supposed to get used to it.

That and the evictions. August is always the shittiest month of any year. This one is gonna be one for the record books.

It's Friday, are we tuned?

Are we staying that way?

In his last two campaigns for DA, Cannizzaro filed to run on the first day of qualifying, according to records from the Louisiana Secretary of State. Reached by phone, Billy Schultz, who has worked as a political consultant for Cannizzaro, said he didn’t have any information about the DA’s plans.

“Stay tuned,” he said, “that’s all I can tell ya.”

If Leon really is bowing out, that could open up the dynamics of the DA race quite a bit.  Candidates will now have to build their cases as to what sort of "reform" they might stand for beyond just putting Not-Leon in the office. This article finds each of the announced candidates going out of their way to brag a little bit about their willingness to put people in jail, though. So we're not especially optimistic.  But, hey, stay tuned. 

Update:  Kind of an anti-climax here. 

In a statement posted on his office's website, he said “I have proudly devoted the past 42 years of my life to the cause of making New Orleans a safer place to live, work, raise families and visit. But after long discussions with my wife and family, it became apparent that my interest in serving another term has waned, outweighed by a desire to spend more time with my family, especially my nine grandchildren born since I first took office. This was not an easy decision, but it is the one with which I’m most at peace."

People had all sorts of wild theories going about Leon getting a federal appointment or running for some other office. But no, he's gonna spend more time with the fam.   That's what we had to stay tuned for?

goddammit

I am tired of virus now

NEW ORLEANS — As lawmakers consider another wave of economic aid for those hit hard by the pandemic, some local businesses are hitting a wall and are closing.  Workers at St. Charles Tavern packed up boxes Thursday.  The bar and restaurant, which has been in business for 103 years, is tapped out.

In a tourist town, there aren’t enough locals to support a place like this, especially during a pandemic.  

I'm not sure about that last line. I mean there are locals who don't have the money or sense of security to spend a lot of nights eating out (even casually) right now.  Plus there is a virus out there and, I don't know about you but I have not been in the mood to go have a celebratory meal in a room full of strangers lately.  



Anyway, August is coming.  Congress is about to let everyone's unemployment benefits expire and replace them with... something worse. Because despite everything, we aren't suffering quite enough yet.

Can you "get used to" $400 a month?

Whatever they come up with will be worse than the deliberately difficult situation they are currently subjecting people to.  But how much worse? This much?

Republicans are considering extending the enhanced unemployment insurance benefit at a dramatically reduced level of $400 per month, or $100 a week, through the rest of the year, sources told CNBC.

There's no technical reason it has to be worse. Technically the Fed could "mint the coin" and let us pay everybody $2,000 a month until the pandemic abates. But we don't want to do that. We'd much prefer to hurt people just because they need help.

No end in sight

It's going great

“I have never seen infection in which you have such a broad range literally no symptoms at all in a substantial proportion of the population to some who get ill with minor symptoms to some who get ill enough to be in bed for weeks,” he said. “Others get hospitalized, require oxygen, intensive care, ventilation and death. The involvement with the same pathogen is very unique.”

Fauci said officials have to do better in containing the virus as states attempt to reopen. On Tuesday, he said state officials should adopt mask mandates and close bars. He said Wednesday that U.S. health officials do not see “an end in sight” to the pandemic.

“We are certainly not at the end of the game” of the pandemic, Fauci said. “Certainly we are not winning the game right now. We are not beating it.”

If we're going to be here a while we could choose to use this time to devise better ways of taking care of each other and protecting the most vulnerable.  OR we can just tell everyone to "get used to it."  Can we just get used to a more dangerous and unstable life where work is scarce and government support services are basically non-existent?  It sure looks like that is what we're trying to find out.

Louisiana in 1993 paid off the $1.3 billion it borrowed in 1987. Two years later, in a plan crafted by Richardson with business and labor leaders, the Legislature put the trust fund on solid footing -- until now -- by establishing the tax that businesses would pay and the amount that the unemployed would receive.

The plan included a trigger that would raise the business tax and lower the benefit payment if the trust fund went below $750 million.

Richardson said the trigger, with a delay, will take effect in January, with businesses paying about 10% more in taxes and the unemployed receiving about 10% less in benefits.

They rigged it to self-destruct during an emergency. Whatever scheme they replace it with will likely be worse. Congressional Republicans are arguing right now over how much worse it should be. As we've seen many times before, though, it can get pretty bad.  Benefits can be slashed, unions can be broken, scores of services people rely on can be eliminated or privatized. Everything is on the table when these situations arise. And they do seem to arise with greater and greater frequency.

.@nhannahjones: "I'm very worried. Some of the data I've seen show that Black kids are going to lose the most."

She compares the situation to New Orleans after Katrina or Puerto Rico after Maria and cautions that there are some that will take advantage to push privatization.

— Meghan Mangrum (@memangrum) July 22, 2020

They will definitely do this

Even if they find later that they can't get away with it entirely, congress is definitely willing to try letting unemployment benefits lapse. Just to see what happens if for no other reason.

Congress returned from recess this week to consider a new relief package, which could include at least a partial extension of the extra unemployment benefits. Senate Republicans and the White House are considering a roughly $1 trillion package that would retain the program but scale it back. Democrats are pressing to continue paying the full $600 a week.

But Congress seems unlikely to act before benefits lapse. And because of the antiquated computer systems in many state unemployment offices, which do the processing, it could take weeks to restart payments. That means that millions are likely to see their income drop at least temporarily.

If something gets thrown together later to replace the $600 a week, it will certainly be less.  Neither party can be held accountable.  It's just another round of Republicans accusing the American worker of being a lazy freeloader and Democrats apologizing for it while tacitly agreeing. This is the most natural set of motions our national body politic can make. It reaffirms everything we already know and expect of ourselves.

There are few things more central to the American political creed than the belief that people are poor because they are losers or unemployed because they don't want to work. It's more deeply embedded now than it's ever been.   There is no crisis or calamity that can shake us of that notion.  Individual Americans will suffer tremendous personal deprivation just to demonstrate their own commitment to "self-sufficiency." Likely the isolation and paranoia brought on by the pandemic has only exacerbated this quality. People are much more afraid of losing their job ... of "failing at life" than they are of dying of a disease.  This is incredibly easy for an elite political class to exploit. They're about to do just that with this next shock.  

Maybe at the end of this round, there will still be unemployment checks.  They won't be as much. And we will pay for them either with cuts to our retirement, or by sacrificing basic worker safety protections to some legal immunity scheme. In any case, we're going to be worse off. The bosses won the pandemic. This is how they reap the spoils now.  And once they see how much they get from this pass, they'll be back again for more.

Think of the children... or the economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can't they just write angry letters to the editor?

It was an oddity when Scurlock did it the other day. But it's starting to look now like this politicians-sue-the-newspaper thing is a deliberate tactic. 

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Jefferson Hughes III has filed a defamation lawsuit against The Advocate’s parent company, alleging that the newspaper knowingly published false and damaging information last year about his actions in a decades-old child abuse and custody case that led to a lengthy FBI investigation.

Ordinarily there are a range of options available to a political figure who doesn't  like what the press was saying about them. You can wait out the news cycle and ignore it altogether. That's usually the smart move. If the story persists a little too long, then you Issue A Statement. This can be a letter to the offending outlet which, most of the time, they will happily publish for you.  Or, if you want an actual audience for your side of the story, just post something on social media.

But, really, the thing to do most of the time is let it die quietly.  Any other tactic, including filing a lawsuit, by the way, just puts the whole story back in the public eye. So killing the story is never the purpose of these things.  If your purpose is to kill (or at least intimidate) the free press, on the other hand, well, this might be a thing you choose to do.

Could face a ballot challenge from whom?

Qualifying for the November 3 elections begins this Wednesday. This will be a very long ballot.  In New Orleans we will be electing a District Attorney, (is Leon in or no?) a new school board (will the schools even be open by then?),  one US Senate seat (eyes are still on Adrian Perkins, who hasn't decided, and Mitch Landrieu who sometimes changes his mind about these things, and even KCP, maybe?) every US House seat, as always, and of course the Presidential election is in here too but it won't matter in Louisiana.  Also there are many many judges to elect as well.

One thing we're all accustomed to watching out for around this time is the backstage maneuvering meant to dissuade certain people from entering the races or to get them immediately disqualified from the ballot.  If you are seeking to become a candidate and your voter registration isn't up to date, or you didn't dot all the i's on your income tax return two years ago, someone is probably going to challenge your standing to run.

More often that not, that someone is going to be Ike Spears.  Which is why it's interesting that we read in the Advocate last week that someone could challenge potential Criminal District Court judicial candidate Deidre Pierce Kelly. Apparently Kelly lost her bar certification for a period of time four or five years ago and, even though, she has been reinstated for a while, that might still have some bearing on something.  

In 2015, Kelly was suspended for a year from practicing law on the order of the Louisiana Supreme Court, and it ended up taking 19 months for her to be reinstated. If that time under suspension counts towards the eight years, she'd meet the requirement. But if it doesn't, she would fall short.

Reasonable people may ask what is the difference.  The lawyers on Twitter seemed to take it pretty seriously the other day. But that just makes me even less convinced. We'll never be initiated into the many mysteries of the credentialed law talking profession, though, so we can only assume they know what they're doing...

Anyway what is interesting here is we don't know who might issue a challenge against Kelly nor do we know who brought this matter to the attention of the Advocate since it says in the first paragraph, "Kelly has the backing of prominent defense attorneys, a slew of local politicians and influential political consultant Ike Spears," we assume it wasn't him.  Still, it says, "the suspension leaves open the possibility that a lawsuit attempting to knock Kelly off the ballot could be filed after next week." A lawsuit "could be filed" by... somebody. It doesn't say who.  Somebody must have told them they might file one though.  Guess we'll find out if it happens.

Okay well thanks for pointing that out

Frank wants everyone to know that he was not arrested but instead only cited for lewd conduct in the back of an Uber in Los Angeles in 2018.  It is very important that we, as we now recall the various other details of that incident which many of had put out of our minds, that we remember this one fact in particular.

The lawsuit does not discuss or dispute the specifics of that incident, instead focusing on the newspaper’s use of the word “arrest” and asserting that he was never arrested. The allegation that he was arrested “is injurious to Scurlock’s personal and professional reputation,” the suit says.

The rent is too damn high

The first of the month is coming.  How is your piggy bank holding up?

People looking for a two-bedroom apartment in New Orleans need to earn about $20.73 an hour to live comfortably, according to a report released Tuesday, well above what most renters make in the city even before the economic disruptions stemming from the coronavirus.

The average renter in New Orleans earns only $16.25 per hour. And if you're only earning the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage, you'd have to work almost three full-time jobs to afford that two-bedroom space, according to the report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Meanwhile, there is still no guarantee that congress is going to do anything about extending unemployment benefits. If it happens, don't be surprised if Republicans take it out of your Social Security on the back end.  Locally, there is still no sign the state or the city has any interest in reinstating an evictions moratorium.  Probably still trying to find some "balance" for our "smalltime landlords"

Oh well, fingers crossed someone will come up with something.

What's been happening in Portland?

Here's an independent reporter's summary of what the protests have been like there.

The abduction filmed on the 15th did not happen in a vacuum. As other local reporters have noted, it was the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators. I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot. Before the national press unleashes a flood of new stories based on their first few hours in town, I’d like to explain what’s been happening:

State and Federal law enforcement are at war with the people of Portland.

Basically, the police there have been beating and gassing people in the streets for a few months now.  And now a federal secret police force is there kidnapping people as well.  But it's awfully rich to hear the mayor and police officials who have been waging the war against their own people all this time complain now.  Nothing wrong with a police state, so long as it's their police state.

First of the month is coming back around

There's one every month.  But this one will be worse if unemployment benefits are not extended and if evictions are allowed to proceed.  In the meantime, this state relief program is already out of money. It was never going to be enough in the first place.

The housing advocacy group HousingLOUISIANA said the inundation of the program was to be expected, given an estimated 142,000 unemployed renters across the state who are in need of its services.

"(HousingLOUISIANA has) said from the beginning that $250 million is the minimum amount needed for rental assistance through the end of 2020,” the group said in a written statement.

The group’s president, Andreanecia Morris, said when the program was unveiled Thursday that most Louisiana renters, particularly those in New Orleans, were already making below the salaries they needed to afford the costs of living across the state before the pandemic.

Outside agitators

Looks like we found them at last

While the protesters have repeatedly decried the city’s own police tactics, Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as police commissioner, and other leaders have united in calls for federal agencies to stay away. City commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty went to join protesters gathered outside the county Justice Center downtown, saying the city will “not allow armed military forces to attack our people.”

“Today we show the country and the world that the city of Portland, even as much as we fight among ourselves, will come together to stand up for our Constitutional rights,” Ms. Hardesty said Friday.

Perhaps if mayors and local political leaders all over the country like Wheeler hadn't spent the past several decades beefing up police forces with military equipment and installing surveillance cameras everywhere they would have some moral standing to say anything now. Instead we have this thing where the mayors can only complain about federal troops abusing and disappearing people because, "hey that's our job!"

There shouldn't even be a DHS in the first place. Maybe I'm old now and 20 years seems like five seconds. But it really was practically yesterday that George Bush took advantage of post 9/11 xenophobic, racist paranoia in order to consolidate the the national police/surveillance state.  All I've seen local politicians do ever since then is brag about all the DHS grant programs to militarize police they've been on hand to oversee. Nobody who has been a part of creating that monster can credibly claim they have a plan to stop it now.

Also I know it's only been a day since this story broke but has anyone tried to determine the identity of anyone detained by these feds or where they've been taken yet?

Just cancel it

Tell the Corps to go run the dang money printer.  We've got enough problems here as it is.

Louisiana may significantly trim the $100 million annual bill it pays to cover its share of the $14.6 billion post-Katrina New Orleans area hurricane protection system if a gambit by the state's congressional delegation to require the Army Corps of Engineers to renegotiate the state's terms is successful.

On Wednesday, a House Transportation subcommittee agreed to include a renegotiation requirement authored by Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, in the House version of the 2020 Water Resources Development Act, which includes various projects overseen by the Corps. The provision also was supported by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans.

Besides it will give us a leg up on paying off the next massive levee project that will definitely have to be built in the next 5-10 years anyway if we are going to continue living here.

Okay well check back next week

Tyler Bridges writes this in a pretty definitive tone so maybe it really is set in stone this time.  But, you know, Mitch has a habit of jumping into things at the last minute so maybe let's check back during qualifying just to be sure.

Mitch Landrieu, who served two terms as mayor of New Orleans, was elected statewide twice as lieutenant governor and has a national following after taking the lead in removing four Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans, long before the death of George Floyd led to a rethinking about racial injustice in the United States. Landrieu also had a personal reason to run – he could have avenged his sister’s defeat in 2014.

But Landrieu is staying out, even though national Democrats tried to coax him in, said a person close to the former mayor.

Landrieu did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did his chief political adviser in Louisiana, Ryan Berni.

Also there was something of a buzz going around last week that KCP might be looking into a run at this after she stepped down as state party chair. But that might have just been light speculation.

Anyway, one would think that, despite the seemingly long odds, the Democrats would want to fight for every available Senate seat this year.  But, well, you know..

Not gonna "implicit bias" train your way to justice

Systemic racism is a material condition that obtains through the numerous inequities linked to the development of institutions and governments over the long course of history.  Redress against its embedded corrosive effects demands a complete societal overhaul of the ways we distribute wealth and administer justice. It's a collective project of building a better world for everyone.

Very likely, though, your organization... and in particular your boss... is not interested in doing any of that.  Which is why they develop tools for re-casting the problem as a matter of individual virtue.

It’s not a coincidence that corporate human resources departments love to contract diversity consultants like DiAngelo to do anti-bias trainings. Trainings more than pay for themselves if they can demonstrate a commitment to an inclusive workplace in the event of later anti-discrimination lawsuits. They’re also a lot cheaper than paying workers better and addressing structural inequalities. The more that blame for discrimination can be shifted on to individual racist “Karens”, the less onus there is on powerful corporations, and the politicians who defend them, to make real changes.

We do know, for example, of a tool far more useful than unconscious bias trainings in creating respect and equality: unions. Recent work in the American Journal of Political Science notes that union membership reduced racial resentment among white workers and made them more likely to support policies that benefit black Americans.

The difference is between offering workers a collective path to improving the actual conditions of their lives vs. forcing them to take "personal responsibility" for proving to the boss that they are on board with a performative company PR plan.  It is a choice between establishing justice or defending capitalism. And the latter route always requires that we heap the burden onto relatively powerless individuals.

So it's no surprise to find irretrievably racist institutions like police departments, when confronted with demands to surrender their funding and their authority in order that a more equitable and supportive means of societal justice can be implemented, respond thusly.

New Orleans – The NOPD is proud to announce its participation in the “Implicit vs. Explicit Bias & the Impact of Social Media” training program led by LSU School of Public Health and RacialBias.org.  The university and 501(c)3 organization worked in collaboration to design coursework to better equip law enforcement officers with the tools necessary to better understand and empathize with the citizens they serve.

Will events and like these serve their purpose?  Likely, they will.  But do not be deceived that the purpose is to actually alleviate or eliminate racial injustice.  Instead it is to preserve the racist institutions themselves.

Krewe of Diaspora

I think I have seen former Nyx members say here and there that they've already joined other clubs.  When the Krewe of Themis announced its (possibly 600 member strong) existence the other day I wondered if maybe they'd all end up coming back together there.

But, come to find out, the options continue to expand.

The Knights of Sparta, a 300-member, all-male New Orleans parading krewe that first hit the streets 40 years ago, is welcoming into its parading ranks a new group called the Mystical Order of the Phoenix, founded by 10 former members of the all-female Nyx. The new members will parade with Sparta as the Sisters of the Knights of Sparta.

The Phoenixes didn't tell MacCash how many members they are actually bringing over to Sparta. Nor did they mention why on earth they would have passed up the opportunity to name themselves "Phoe-Nyx."  It sounds like the Phoenixes are fewer than the Themises, though.  I suppose, since Sparta (potentially) has a permit to parade in 2021 (if there is a 2021 parade season at all) that it's possible some are doing both. But I don't know. It sounds like these might be different circles of people.

I mean, Themis's branding seems a little more mission-driven. 

The new krewe is named for Themis, the Greek goddess of fairness and divine justice. Her symbols are the scales of justice and a sword.

Themis president Kimya Holmes said that the need for the new organization stemmed from “the utter disappointment with the krewe we paraded with.”

Whereas the Phoenix group says they were maybe holding out hope a little bit longer. 

Phoenix co-founder Gigi Saak said the women who conceived the new krewe were among the last to leave Nyx during the controversy that followed captain Lea’s polarizing posts. They’d hoped, she said, to somehow salvage the organization. But when it became obvious that was impossible, they joined the exodus.

Anyway, one thing we knew about Nyx is that they sure did have a lot of members. So it's possible we'll see them start to pop up in more formations than just these. And, of course, all of this assumes there's eventually going to be a Mardi Gras at all sometime before the city falls away into the Gulf. From here, it is still difficult to see.

50 failed states

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had an op-ed published in the New York Times yesterday.  He says he wants us to run the dang money printer.

States and localities are in desperate need of additional federal intervention before the bulk of the CARES Act funding expires this summer. Budget gaps like the one in New Jersey cannot be closed by austerity alone. Multiply New Jersey’s problems to reflect the experiences of 50 state governments and thousands of local governments and the result, without more help from Congress, could be a significantly worse and protracted recession.

The CARES Act allocated $150 billion to state and local governments. This new aid package must be significantly larger and provide not only assistance for state and local governments but also continued support for the unemployed, investments in public health and aid as needed to stabilize aggregate demand and restore full employment.

As it stands right now, unfortunately, there isn't much to suggest that we're actually going to see the kind of action Bernanke is calling for.  If anything the Trump administration is leaning toward more austerity. Consider the sabotage going on at the Post Office, for example.

The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.

The Postal Service’s future needs to be as a low-cost package carrier, industry analysts contend, as parcels make up a growing portion of the agency’s volume and profits, and paper mail volumes continue to decline as coupons and bills increasingly move online. Postal leaders project the agency could run out of money between March and October 2021.

“If this is true, it would be a real concern to customers if service were slowed, especially in light of the fact that the Postal Service may get more rate authority, meaning higher rates, later this year or early next year,” said Art Sackler, manager of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, an industry group whose members include Amazon, eBay, Hallmark and other commercial mailers.

“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”

There are no such thing as public services in the hellworld we've built.  Everything that isn't an all-out grift, just isn't viable.  We've already seen the hostility with which conservatives are attacking public education. This week's threatening demands that schools reopen under dangerous circumstances is only the latest round of that particular gaslighting operation.  Yesterday, Senator Kennedy responded to the pleas for the safety of teachers and students from education professionals by inviting them to "kiss my ass."   Meanwhile, Stephanie Grace picked up on another startling comment from the Vice President during his visit yesterday.

And between congratulating the state for having flattened the curve (before it unflattened) and offering the obligatory paean to LSU football (Coach O was in the house), Pence offered this genuinely shocking statement: “We don’t want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don’t reopen their schools.”

Even if the Centers for Disease Control’s guidance suggests they can’t be reopened safely just yet in some places, and under some circumstances? Really, Mr. VP?

Yes, really, according to the administration’s push to get localities to fall in line with President Donald Trump’s insistence that all is basically well, despite an alarming increase in coronavirus cases in Louisiana and many other states. Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and others said that of course schools would have to be opened safely, but avoided getting into the specifics.

Those specifics, of course, are at the heart of what federal agencies such as the CDC do; assessing risk is a key part of their mission. Does Pence also think we should ignore warnings from the National Hurricane Center if we’d rather not evacuate? Take unproven medications without worrying about side effects? Start smoking, because the Surgeon General can’t tell us what to do?

Apparently, yes, that is precisely the point.  Not only does the Trump administration mean to ignore the advice of CDC, it wants to cut the agency out of the loop entirely.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Under the same sort of logic that brought us, "If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases,” we now have, if CDC can't give us any advice, then we won't have to follow it.

Yesterday, John Barry wrote that, as cases spike, we are now facing a "second chance" to get the shutdown right.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, almost every city closed down much of its activity. Fear and caring for sick family members did the rest; absenteeism even in war industries exceeded 50 percent and eviscerated the economy. Many cities reopened too soon and had to close a second time — sometimes a third time — and faced intense resistance. But lives were saved.

Had we done it right the first time, we’d be operating at near 100 percent now, schools would be preparing for a nearly normal school year, football teams would be preparing to practice — and tens of thousands of Americans would not have died.

But getting the response "right" this time would require our leaders to take seriously their roles as stewards of public health and safety.  It would mean extending public services rather than gutting them. It would mean protecting teachers rather than bullying them. And it would mean listening to doctors rather than silencing them. The Trump administration is doing none of that.

Worst of all, despite Benrnake's plea, the Congress is no nearer to offering the states the support they will need to see their people through the economic consequences of a second shutdown. In fact, this week, Republicans there are demanding even more austerity measures as unemployment benefits are set to expire. All the conditions are in place to leave us with 50 failed states grappling with an even bigger pandemic come the end of the year.  Barry closes out his article about the second chance by writing, "we won't get a third."  But from the looks of things, we're going to have to at least hope there is a chance number two and half in there somewhere.

Getting all the kids infected so we can own the libs

Just in case the fast approaching benefits expiration and evictions cliff wasn't enough stress for everyone to handle at once, we've also got this.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will consider “minimum health and safety standards” for reopening Louisiana schools — triggered by a new law — during a special meeting Tuesday.

The public got a glimpse of what those standards will look like — and which could be up for debate — when Louisiana Department of Education State Superintendent Cade Brumley and BESE President Sandy Holloway spoke before the House Committee on Education Monday. The standards, drafted as emergency replacement bulletins for traditional schools and charter schools, include limits on class size, bus capacity, social distancing and cleaning requirements and largely reflect guidelines previously released by the LDOE.

The "standards" are, like the rules under which everything else has been operating under these circumstances, deliberately loose. Because we really are all just making this up as we go along.

Face coverings — which are, for now, required in businesses and public buildings for anyone over the age of eight as part of an executive order effective Monday — are a point of major political contention in the state and around the country. BESE’s draft language stops short of a mask mandate. It appears to offer schools some flexibility, saying children older than eight and adults inside a school building “must wear a face covering to the greatest extent possible and practical within the local community context.”

All of which is completely understandable. Everyone really is trying to feel their way through this. It might be a bit easier to figure out what is "possible and practical within the local community context," if we hadn't designed such a convoluted context to begin with.

Until this point, local and state guidelines have been largely based on federal guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have been packaged as suggestions, not mandates. Local Education Agencies, or LEAs, are in charge of their own plans. In New Orleans, most charter schools are considered their own LEAs and it’s been unclear what role the district might play in reviewing or authorizing any reopening plans.

The district did not respond to inquiries regarding whether it would be approving individual charter group plans.

The thing is, though, a virus doesn't care about any of this stuff.  So while it's fine for state agencies and charter boards to differentiate their "local contexts" and spheres of authority, ideally their plans for containing the virus should all be relatively uniform.  This is precisely the reason the governor has had to issue a statewide mask mandate.  Exceptions and discretion are going to come into play as a matter of course, but the baseline rules need to have some clarity. Devolving all the authority to individual school districts and charter boards is just inviting more chaos.

Keep in mind, also, inviting chaos may actually be the point.  At least from Betsy DeVos's perspective.

BASH: You're the Secretary of Education. So why do you not have guidance on what schools should do if there's a coronavirus outbreak just weeks before you want them to reopen?

DeVOS: There are really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/RBFxZ5OeFw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

All the schools MUST OPEN...  and, you know, we're sure they will figure out how.  Why would they be so deliberately cruel and disruptive? The short answer is, screw you, that is why.

Every push to "reopen" anything right now, be it a school or a hotel or a fish tank, or whatever is a push by the bosses to blame the workers they subject to unsafe conditions for their own peril.  A bill John Bel just signed into law protects certain employers, including school districts from liability if their workers or the people they serve get sick.  The Trump administration is pushing for similar measures to go into the next round of  federal "relief" legislation.

What is your company or organization telling you right now about leave time? What are the mixed messages they are sending you about "safety" on the job vs. your obligation to show up and put yourself and others in danger? That kind of chaos is happening in every workplace forced by policy makers in Washington to "reopen" with minimal guidance or support. The goal of the policy, as always, is a more frightened and compliant labor pool.

And it is being implemented with little or no regard for your safety or the safety of your children. 

Lost a landmark

K-Paul's was among the first of the major French Quarter restaurants to get back up and operating after Katrina. It hasn't survived COVID.

Now one of the most famous and influential restaurants in New Orleans has shut down permanently amid hard times from the coronavirus crisis.

The restaurant created by the legendary late chef Paul Prudhomme had been in business for four decades. But closure orders and restrictions from the coronavirus response and the prospects for difficult days ahead forced the decision to shutter the restaurant, its owners said.

This article says the current owners planned to close within the next five years anyway. But this is still pretty significant. Also it's worth noting that the PPP loan wasn't enough to see them through the summer.  So there's another handful of layoffs to throw on the pile. But, no worries. Some < $1200 "targeted" one time payments are on their way.

Anyway, instead of saying more about the significance of K-Paul's, I'll just link back to something I wrote when Prudhomme passed away in 2015.  Apparently today would have been his birthday.

Never turn left on Tulane ever again

What if it were not just legally prohibited but also physically impossible?

And then there are candidates that could lead to other, much more significant name change fights, most notably Tulane Avenue, named after Paul Tulane.

Tulane is most often remembered as a philanthropist, and technically that’s true; he funded higher education. But according to the city researchers, the New Jersey native was also the largest donor to the Confederate States of America. He also bought the University of Louisiana — which would unsurprisingly be renamed after him — and privatized it.

Surprised to see this one on there only because it opens a wider discussion about the intersection of racism and "philanthropy" particularly with regard to New Orleans's social and political hierarchy that I would certainly love to see us have out in the open. But I wonder if any of these decisionmakers really want all that stuff aired out fully.

Judge nullification

Maybe this seems tacky to some but anything that strips away the myth that judges are somehow a-political or act outside of the influence of the interests who elect them is good.  If, for example, you are suing the oil and gas industry over the irreparable damage it has inflicted on your parish's coastal environment and you know the judge presiding over your case works for the oil companies, well then you ought to do what you can to get that judge out of the way. 

Will Crain, who was elected to one of the seven seats on the Supreme Court late last year after a bitter race, has been the subject of three recusal motions from the Talbot, Carmouche and Marcello law firm since the start of the year.

The firm often represents landowners or governments in coastal and property damage lawsuits against oil and gas companies. In asking for Crain's recusal, the firm's attorneys have pointed to a mailer from Crain’s campaign that targeted attorney John Carmouche and questioned his spending in support of Crain’s opponent, appeals court judge Hans Liljeberg. Carmouche’s firm has argued that the mailer, which warned voters “don’t be deceived” by Carmouche, showed that Crain harbors “actual bias” against him.

Yes, there is some transitory reasoning at work here.  But that's how politics works. Before you understand anything else, make sure you figure out who is giving money to whom and why.  (Remember this, also, as the First City Court runoff develops.  There is likely to be an awful lot of real estate money interested in that outcome.)