-->

Friday, December 31, 2021

What year are we even in now?



Really great to see we're focusing on what matters. See we spend all this money on police when... wait a second... Computer, enhance.

 


 

   Okay enhance again.

 


 

My God we're right back at the beginning. It is still 2005 or 2008 or whatever and the mayor is still a cop. 

We're never getting out of this loop. Happy New Year.

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Here we go around again

Looking forward to 2022 in New Orleans when we will be turning more public investment into private profit despite our chronic housing crisis as has been done over and over in exactly this fashion.  

The property is zoned CBD-1, which calls for high-density and mixed-use developments downtown. The buildings, constructed in the mid-1800s, are eligible for Federal and State Historic Tax Credits and located in a qualified Opportunity Zone, a flyer for the listing said.

The purchase price was not disclosed. The listed price was $4.7 million. Siegel, along with William Sadler and Jeff Cohn, represented the sellers, listed as New Orleans residents Rosemonde Kuntz Capomazza, Carlo Capomazza, and Stefano Capomazza, in the transaction.
Whatever will they do with that property in that downtown neighborhood? 
Asked about plans for the Baronne and Union streets buildings, Phil Winton, a spokesman for GBX Group, said in an emailed statement that “We don’t comment on future plans until we have them buttoned up. Rest assured, the historic building will be preserved.”

Mixed-use, multifamily, short-term rentals and hotel redevelopment projects are abundant in the area. Developers have used tax incentives and creative funding measures to overhaul vacant properties, many of which were used as office space in their past lives.
Don't worry. The building will be fine. That's really the point of all this, right?

One other note from this story. GBX Group is also in possession of the deteriorating jazz landmark buildings that face S. Rampart Street. According to the Times-Picayune, the plans are to redevelop the whole block into an "entertainment district" anchored by a "'jazz-themed' hotel/convention venue along Loyola Avenue."  One assumes that means the river side of Loyola Avenue which is currently occupied by surface level parking lots. So it's not clear that City Hall which is currently located across the street would have to move out of the way for that but they are trying.   Here is their latest idea for that

The 23-story office tower at 1615 Poydras St., originally known as the Freeport McMoRan Building, is currently the headquarters for DXC Technology. It sits across the street from Caesars Superdome and is two blocks from the current City Hall.

The building is owned by Stewart Capitol, which is controlled by New Orleans investor Frank Stewart, according to the company’s website. According the Orleans Parish Assessor's Office website, it last sold for $30 million in 2000, according to assessor's records. Mohammad Motahari with Stewart Enterprises told WDSU Friday the city reached out about potentially selling. He added that the company will listen to all officers, but no offer has yet been made. The memo says the prospective timeline would depend in part on the financing process.
Just as an incidental note, Frank Stewart, we may recall, spent much of 2017 throwing a public fit over the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces in the city.  Thankfully, the city didn't bow to Stewart's faction. Well, not entirely, anyway. LaToya Cantrell certainly gave them a lot of consideration. After all, it wouldn't make sense not to listen to your business partners, no matter how filthy racist they are, right? 

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

New heights

 Records are made to be broken

Louisiana reported the highest single-day increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

There were 6,199 confirmed COVID cases and an additional 3,179 probable COVID cases reported in the Department of Health's noon update.

The 6,199 confirmed cases mark the largest single day increase ever in Louisiana.

Interestingly this is happening within a context of  under-reported data be it from increased use of at home tests or just flat out lying by local medical examiners

In Lafayette Parish, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death in 134 fatalities in 2020, even though there were 419 “excess deaths” – the number of deaths that exceed a normal, pre-pandemic year. The gap between these two numbers means hundreds more people probably died of COVID-19, researchers said. 

Deaths attributed to diseases that are often tied to COVID-19 increased. Deaths at home from hypertensive heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all increased 30% or more in 2020. Those deaths, especially those that weren’t properly investigated, make up at least some of Lafayette’s missing COVID-19 deaths, according to experts.

Especially concerning are deaths in the community attributed to nonspecific causes, known as “garbage codes.” For example, 40 people in the parish who died at home since 2020 were certified as dead of “heart failure, unspecified.”

Meanwhile it looks like we're back to just waiting to see if it all blows over as a policy response. I saw some city agencies are reimposing mask mandates and the councilmembers are back on Zoom.  Everyone else is basically at the mercy of their boss for direction going forward.  Hope you don't work for the schools....

 

Gotta get NHIF back on the ballot

Will have more to say about this if I ever get that elections post done. But this shouldn't have been allowed to happen

For decades, tax proceeds went to the city’s Neighborhood Housing Improvement Fund, or NHIF, which has been used in recent years for emergency rental assistance, repairing storm damage, assisting first time home buyers and incentivizing new housing developments.

It was a narrow defeat. With 50.8 percent of voters casting “no” ballots, the margin was fewer than 1,000 votes. And already, some are calling for another vote to restart the tax.

Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center, argued that support for the NHIF remains high in New Orleans, and that the renewal’s defeat could be largely blamed on the extremely low profile nature of the race, and the near total lack of institutional support from government officials. 

“No one put any resources into educating the public on the fund and what it’s accomplished,” Hill said. “The NHIF has always had broad support whenever it’s been polled. But it’s also clear that many people had no idea that the NHIF was on the ballot, even in the weeks before the election. So it suggests that this very disappointing result was about a lack of education.”

The only PR effort that made any impact at all was BGR's absurdly conservative opposition which got broadcast all over town more or less unchallenged. That argument is what Andreanecia Morris is referring to at the end of this article. 

But Morris also argued that the focus on accountability was partially due to a deeply ingrained bias that makes people particularly suspicious of government spending on affordable housing.

She argued that similar issues can be found throughout city government, but that some people’s deep-seated association of affordable housing with corruption and crime put much greater scrutiny on housing programs. 

“Why does housing get this fake purity test?” she said. “Please name for me a pot of money that’s perfectly managed.”

The failure to renew this millage will result in a reduction in revenue for the housing fund from $12.9 million to $3.1 million in 2022 according to the city budget projection.  The Lens notes that source of that $3.1 isn't clearly indicated. However, we do know that it relies now on fees collected from short term rental licensing which, in addition to being a difficult figure to get a handle on, is also builds in a perverse incentive for funding affordable housing by allowing STRs to proliferate.  

So it's imperative that we figure out a way to get an affordable housing millage back on the ballot. It is not at all clear that the incoming city council will be interested in doing something like that, though. But maybe that's something else to save for an election recap.

The boss will decide if you are too sick to work

They will say they are citing CDC guidance, of course. But one thing that has become abundantly clear over the course of the pandemic is who the CDC actually works for

A union for flight attendants is accusing the CDC of loosening rules for quarantine after Covid-19 exposure at the behest of the airline industry, as the Omicron variant continues to rage across the globe.

"We said we wanted to hear from medical professionals on the best guidance for quarantine, not from corporate America advocating for a shortened period due to staffing shortages,” said Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson following the CDC announcement shortening the recommended quarantine duration from 10 days to five days.

“The CDC gave a medical explanation about why the agency has decided to reduce the quarantine requirements from 10 to five days, but the fact that it aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America is less than reassuring,” Nelson said.

It really isn't even a big secret. When pressed on the matter, CDC leadership openly admits they are considering factors besides the public health question. They are, instead, prioritizing an agenda pushed corporate lobbyists which insists that sick leave time is a threat to"societal function.

The decision to cut the recommended isolation time in half, which was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts, reflects the increasingly tough decisions health officials navigate as they seek to strike the right balance between vigilance and normalcy as the nation heads into the pandemic’s third year. Even with a surging variant, President Biden has said he is not looking at lockdowns and stressed that people who are vaccinated and boosted do not need to fundamentally change their lives as they did at the start of the pandemic.

The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post. “There were starting to be limitations in society, not just in our health-care workforce but in other parts of society. We were seeing infections in many places that we realized this could be a harbinger of many other essential workers we needed.”

"There were starting to be limitations in society." In other words, workers were demanding to be treated as though their lives actually meant something and we just can't have that.  

Starbucks' union drive comes amid much a broader national labor movement spanning multiple industries across the country. Last month, in a strike wave known as "Striketober," tens of thousands of workers at companies like John Deere, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg, and McDonald's organized work stoppages over unethical working conditions and low pay. 

According to Cornell's Labor Action Tracker, the share of workers on strike last month jumped to 25,000 – a marked departure from the three months prior, which saw an average of 10,000. Many experts and labor advocates told Salon that strikes are being driven largely by a growing sense of dissatisfaction amongst essential workers as the pandemic wanes.  

Corrina A. Christensen, Director of Public Relations & Communications of the BCTGM International Union, which represents workers at Frito-Lay, Kellogg, and Nabisco, said that the strikes have "everything to do with workers being fed up with employers bent on disrespecting their work and demanding take-aways in wages, benefits, forcing overtime…after they were upheld as 'essential.'"

That is the line the CDC is trying to hold. The bosses who have the ears of policymakers have succeeded in defining 5 days of additional sick leave as a "societal threat" so large that it actually outweighs the threat of pandemic COVID. The article quoted above is primarily about the organizing effort at Starbucks in Buffalo. In this article, the workers involved in that campaign refer to the "fear culture" brought to bear against them by management. 

Most of the workers I talk to are almost immediately on board,” Murray says. He joined the organizing effort two months ago, and has been talking to his coworkers ever since. He says that not only do organizers have to educate everyone on what a union is all about, they also face a latent level of fear among employees that they could be targeted for retaliation, particularly now that the union drive has gone public. 

[Coworkers] were saying, I’m scared, can Starbucks do something to us?’ That broke my heart, because that fear culture has already been cultivated,” says Gianna Reeve, a shift supervisor who has been helping with the organizing effort. It really hurts. This is an opportunity that we can be stronger.”

Fear of retaliation is the greatest weapon the bosses have against workers. And it permeates the atmosphere of most service industry jobs like Starbucks where the boss can demand not only compliance in deed but also in attitude. Standards in service jobs are subjective. Workers can be made accountable not only for the amount of work they produce but for arbitrarily defined perceptions of that work. Here is what that looks like in practice.


Did you show up for that twelve hour shift on a holiday? Were you on your feet the whole time mixing hundreds of pumpkin spice lattes during the fall rush? Ahhh but see you weren't quite "WARM AND WELCOMING" enough as you went about that so we are going to have to punish you again. 

Service industry bosses are absolute tyrants. Workers organizing against that kind of intense intimidation need all the help and encouragement they can get. Which is why having a strong labor influence in the halls of power is so important. When a government agency has a chance to step in and put its thumb on the scale, it can make a big difference.  Joe Biden's CDC has chosen to intervene on behalf of the bosses. It even seems like they are rubbing it in the workers' faces by amplifying the bosses' intimidating rhetoric.  

 According to this CDC ad, workers have a clear choice. Their health or their job. If you are one of the good ones, the poster implies you will choose to work your shifts. If you are one of the good ones, in fact, you may not even "tolerate being at home."  At least that's what CDC says.

“Our guidance was conservative before. It had said 10 days of isolation,” Walensky told CNN. “But in the context of the fact that we were going to have so many more cases — many of those would be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic — people would feel well enough to be at work, they would not necessarily tolerate being home, and that they may not comply with being home, this was the moment that we needed to make that decision and those changes.”

Clearly these people care about your well being. 

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Do more posts

Not to go too far into the realm of self-actualized blogging but I am aware that I haven't posted as much here during the back half of 2021 as I would have liked to. There are reasons for that. Being "busy" is relative to a bunch of stuff and I don't need to explain it in too much detail. But lately I've been specifically busy in ways that take me away from typing out paragraphs on the yellow web page. Either that or I've been lazy. In any case it's been easier these past months to just tweet out whatever is the thing that comes up than it has been to write it all down before the next distraction occurs. 

Sometimes that's fine, but also it is a problem.  While it's loads of fun to argue with people on Twitter, the actual constructive reason for posting things on the internet is to share information and to take notes. Twitter is good for sharing immediately. It's less good for taking notes for future reference.  Too often I find myself half-remembering something I read and tweeted out a week or a month or even a year ago but not being able to dig it back up easily.  I can only find the real deep cuts if I've blogged them, tagged them, and hopefully synthesized a few ideas about them here.  Let too much of that slip away into the ether and you start to feel like you're losing your grip a little bit.  It's not healthy. 

So I'm gonna try to get back to doing posts in 2022.  I don't want to lose as much of it as I lost this year. In the meantime, I do, in fact, still have some 2021 notes I will try to salvage. Another consequence of not getting the little posts out day by day is those notes get stored away in unfinished draft posts that get bigger and bigger and more difficult to finish as time goes by.  Presently this blog has 788 "drafts" where I've shoved at least a few links and sentences that I must have thought at the time would be good to pull out at some point.  I'll probably never go back through all of that. But  there are at least four that have the skeletons of long-ish posts about big topics from this year I probably ought to finish if I can.  One is about the pandemic, one is about infrastructure, one is about tourism, and one is about this year's elections.  I'll try to get those done just for my own peace of mind, if not by the end of this week, then at least within the next month.  That might tie a bow on the year so we can move on. 

Also more blurting out of random things. Let's get back to that if we can.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Bill Cassidy's victory tour

Much like Troy Carter, Bill now gets to go on a tour of the state doing a bunch of ceremonial groundbreakings and/or aspirational ribbon cuttings for stuff in the infrastructure bill that *might* build infrastructure but will definitely line the pockets of some important <strike>donors</strike> "private partners while at least seeming to try to build things.  For Troy, it just means a fun year of being a new Congressman-for-life.  But for Bill, it could very well be the opening round of his campaign for Governor

Cassidy may have an easier time winning the governor’s mansion in 2023 than reelection to the Senate in 2026. Gubernatorial elections are more often about candidate qualities and local issues, while U.S. Senate races tend to track national partisan fights. This could lessen Trump’s influence in a contest for governor.

If Cassidy runs for governor and makes a runoff against a Republican, he could win the faceoff with support from Democrats, independents and his remaining personal base among Republicans.

Conversely — if he makes the runoff against a Democrat, he could win with votes from Republicans, independents and conservative Democrats. Even most Trump die-hards would hold their noses and cast ballots for Cassidy, a Republican with an 83% conservative voting record, rather than vote for a left-leaning Democrat.

That Ron Faucheux column doesn't really even mention Bill's support for (and significant role in crafting) the "bipartisan" infrastructure package. But he sure does get a ton of credit for it from the Advocate's ostensibly liberal  opinion writer. So much, in fact, one would think she has some sort of quota to fill.  All of which is to say that should Cassidy run for governor, he will be a very well positioned candidate on paper... or in the paper, as it were. 

But that doesn't always mean everything. Faucheux does point out also Bill isn't the most popular guy among so-called "Trump Republicans." And given that the term Trump Republicans pretty much just means Republicans then that could be a problem. Also, as has been famously noted, the "dude is weird."

Rep. Cedric Richmond, a dapper politician from New Orleans and key Landrieu supporter, was more blunt. “He’s weird. Dude is weird,” Richmond said. “He’s not what Louisiana is. He’s not personable, he’s not charismatic.” 

Of course that is far from the only issue with Bill. He's not just a "weird dude." He's a weird dude who protects the chemical industry from consequences when they poison our air and water. 

Under federal law, Louisiana must develop a “state implementation plan” outlining actions that plants must take to reduce emissions below that standard. As part of that process, the Department of Environmental Quality in 2017 and 2018 ordered Rain to adopt a plan to change its manufacturing processes to keep sulfur dioxide levels in check.

Rain balked, however, saying it was having trouble figuring out how to monitor the heat and flow of gases and other materials at its plant because conventional meters kept melting. In 2019, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., intervened on behalf of the company and joined the state agency in successfully lobbying the EPA to delay implementation of the plan.

Still, if he does run, he's going to be the favorite candidate of the Advocate editorial page.  But that also isn't surprising given the company line over there with regard to protecting the environment.

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Troy Carter's victory tour

It may be true that Congress is so wracked with corruption and indifference that it can't protect voting rights, or labor rights or get us our health care and child care bills we desperately need. It is nonetheless a great time to be an incumbent congressman.  This is especially true if you happen to be a freshman incumbent congressman like Troy Carter. 

Troy doesn't really figure in to the high level back room negotiations over anything in the deadlocked megabills that comprise the work of the modern congress.  Because of this doesn't own any of the failures. But, because the last two years of perpetual crisis have forced through little bit more non-military federal spending than would otherwise have been possible,  he still gets to go around the state cutting ribbons for the next two years

Carter said the bridge is his first stop on his tour that will see him announce various infrastructure investments across the 2nd Congressional District, which covers almost all of New Orleans and stretches north and west along the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge. 

His next stop is Thursday in Grammercy, where he will announce tens of millions of dollars in repairs for the Veterans Memorial Bridge, he said. 

It's a fantastic time to get the job.

Monday, December 06, 2021

Police pipleline

Thinking back to the beginning of this year and all of the problems facing this city with an election season looming.  A pandemic, a budget crisis, a housing crisis, poverty, general corruption... rascalism, etc. And here we are at the end of democratic process, through which we are supposed to resolve these issues and all our prospective representatives can talk about is how much they want to lock people up and hire more cops.  

Okay that's not all they can talk about. Sometimes they can argue about casserole recipes. But mainly the District B candidates are arguing about who can be the biggest cop

Much of the city's crime problem can be traced to repeat offenders who receive what amounts to a slap on the wrist by the district attorney before they are let back out on the street, Banks said. Instead of boosting the New Orleans Police Department's budget to fight crime, as Harris advocates, he would work to create criteria that every lawbreaker must meet before they are released from jail, he said.   

However, Harris, 46, said she wouldn't pull from other departments to better fund the cops. Instead, she'd push NOPD to apply for federal grants that could help employ more officers.

The department could also boost recruitment by partnering with universities to offer free or low-cost tuition for new officers, and by providing tax credits to first responders who live in the city, she said. She'd also tap a task force to identify crime prevention strategies.  

None of that is especially coherent.  Banks should and probably does know that a city councilman doesn't have a whole lot to say about sentencing. A councilperson does have something to say about the police budget, though, which makes Harris's threat to give the more money at least credible.  But.. "tax credits" for cops too?  We may have reached a new level of neoliberal brain poisoning. 

Meanwhile in District E, Oliver Thomas has dispensed with the complexities of tax incentives or dubious notions about deterrence and taken a more direct approach to producing more cops.  OT is going to build a "pipeline" directly from the schools.

To prevent crime, Thomas wants to create a "youth-to-law-enforcement pipeline" that would see NOPD partner with local schools to recruit new officers. The department could also rely on the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office and other entities to issue misdemeanors for low-level offenses, so that more of the force's time is freed to focus on violent offenses.  

Dream big, kids.  Just like your inspiring political leaders do.

"If any"

Page Cortez sure sounds fired up about taking steps to deal with our out of control State Police force next spring.  That is, "if any" need to be taken.  They might just wait and see what the Superintendent can find out about that first.

Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, named the committee of four Republicans and three Democrats with a goal of delivering a report by Oct. 31. Foil said he hopes to get a report ready prior to the Legislature returning in March of its regular legislative session.

“The creation of this oversight committee came about at the request of Senate members in order to find out what the agency has learned over the last few years, what they have done to change their policies and what, if any, bills that may need to be filed in the upcoming session in order to improve our agency,” Cortez said.

Davis said he started with a top-to-bottom review conducted internally. He discontinued that review and went to find outside analysts to oversee the report. He hopes to sign the contract early next year and have a definitive report before the end of 2022.

Yeah that report might take a while. I mean.. there's a lot to review

An AP review of internal investigative records and newly obtained videos identified at least a dozen cases over the past decade in which Louisiana State Police troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct.

AP's review — coming amid a widening federal investigation into state police misconduct — found troopers have made a habit of turning off or muting body cameras during pursuits. When footage is recorded, the agency routinely refuses to release it. And a recently retired supervisor who oversaw a particularly violent clique of troopers told internal investigators this year that it was his "common practice" to rubber-stamp officers' use-of-force reports without reviewing body-camera video.

In some cases, troopers omitted uses of force such as blows to the head from official reports, and in others troopers sought to justify their actions by claiming suspects were violent, resisting or escaping, all of which were contradicted by video footage.

"Hyper-aggressiveness is winked upon and nodded and allowed to go on," said Andrew Scott, a former Boca Raton, Florida, police chief and use-of-force expert who reviewed videos obtained by AP. "It's very clear that the agency accepts that type of behavior."

So okay we'll wait until all that gets sorted to see "if any bills need to be filed."   OR Davis also floated this idea instead. 

With 924 troopers on staff, Davis said he needs 200 more to decrease the amount of work individuals have to do. “We are expecting them to do more with less,” he said.

Because sure maybe what we've got right now is a 1000 strong armed death squad acting with what appears to be complete impunity. But, hear me out, what if we had 200 more of them?

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Why not say what they actually do?

I don't mean to pick too much of nit with this article about Cantrell's City Council endorsements. I will say that I appreciate the headline doesn't blast the phrase "MAYOR LATOYA CANTRELL..." at us for SEO purposes the way almost every bit of news that even tangentially mentions her tends to do. And there's nothing really wrong with the story.  It's just that, I think sometimes when we describe these candidates in one or two sentences it would be helpful if we mentioned the very relevant fact that some of them are realtors and landlords. 

So here we have Freddie King described as " a lawyer, youth mentor and former constituent services director in the district." 

In District C, Cantrell said King -- a lawyer, youth mentor and former constituent services director in the district -- “works in the trenches and understands the issues that matter.”

"Freddie knows constituent services and knows that you have to be responsive to the people you serve," Cantrell said. 

That's three whole things! You can shove a lot of information in between those dashes when you know what you're doing.  So maybe let's find a way to also say that he is a realtor. The notoriously verbose DSA voter guide got it in there. It only took a couple of sentences. 

It’s unclear how King vows to Fight the Red Tape of City Hall and Review the Permitting Process,” or what that even means. However it is clear in his duties of City Council that he will be one of the arbiters of land use and zoning, and pass regulation on matters around short term rentals. He formerly worked for then-Councilmember Nadine Ramsey as a coordinator of constituent services. Ramsey was notoriously awful when it came to affordable housing, and worked to remove minimum affordability requirements for big developers. That’s a big red flag for renters and housing advocates hoping to advance a rental registry.

King is a lawyer who lives in Algiers with his wife, Casandra. Together they own and operate LeBeouf Street Properties, a Gretna-based real estate company with a handful of properties in Algiers.

Anyway, we just mentioned Monday that King, who says, "I believe in a capatalistic society" is all in on shoving more Airbnbs into the French Quarter.  So this little bit about how he makes his money seems relevant.

There's another one of those in here whose real estate money might be even more relevant.  But it's hard to know that. The article only says he's a "veteran" of the politics wars. 

The first of Cantrell’s endorsements came Monday, when she threw her support behind the 31-year-old Glover, who also claims support from several former primary rivals and other community leaders. Glover, a former St. Roch neighborhood association leader and current nonprofit director, is taking on Eugene Green, a veteran of local politics and government who is twice Glover’s age.

Again, I don't really want to pick on this article, the T-P or any reporters in particular. They actually often do mention that Eugene Green is a real estate broker. They just did it yesterday, in fact.  

The other candidate in that race, real estate broker Eugene Green, said he would allocate city funds to support programs that turn blighted properties into affordable housing.

Green's assertion about wanting to create "affordable housing" demands interrogation, though.  Especially given the nature of his business interests.  Green isn't just a realtor. He's a landlord. Again, one sentence from the DSA guide

He is the president and owner of the generic-branded Nationwide Real Estate Corporation, making him a massive property manager throughout the city.

Have the properties Green owns and operates been a safe and healthy answer to the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans?  Might want to ask his tenants about that.

Monday, November 22, 2021

Nobody actually lives here

 Happy Holidays

Erath took over the business from the previous owners after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with a pledge to keep the shop open. And he kept that promise, keeping the store open for the last 16 years. However, as time progressed, Erath says that less people are walking the French Quarter.

"We're totally dependent on tourists. Over the years, fewer and fewer locals because fewer and fewer residents in the French Quarter," Erath said.

Erath's fondest memories are seeing people reminiscence when they enter the shop for a visit.

"Most gratifying thing is year after year, people coming in with their kids. We have adults in here saying they come with their grandparents," Erath said.

Erath is encouraging people if they would like a Santa's Quarters ornament to do so before Christmas before inventory runs out.   

The other night there was a forum featuring the two candidates competing in the city council runoff for  District C. This district includes Algiers, Bywater, and the French Quarter so naturally the short term rental plague is an issue.

Speaking to a crowded room at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel on St. Louis Street, the two District C candidates agreed that Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration has not adequately enforced city laws aimed at curbing the rentals and keeping noise at bearable levels in the district. 

Bridges said she would use the council's power over the city's budget to compel Cantrell to do so. Neighbors also need to bring their complaints to City Hall, she added.

"I can hold public hearings from here to Timbuktu, but unless I have the community behind me, nothing will be changed," she said.

King said he would require the city's code enforcement department to regularly update the council on its operations. He would also allocate money for more code enforcement officers. "Every month, they need to give us an update on what they are doing," he said. 

But the pair disagreed on what changes to existing laws were needed.

"I believe in a capitalistic society, and I think you should have short-term rentals in commercial areas," said King. Specifically, the retail and entertainment strip that faces the Mississippi River in the quarter would be ideal for AirBnB listings, he said. 

Even at this late stage in the process, where the damage done and the need for action are plainly evident, our politicians are capable only of maintaining the status quo or backsliding.  Neither of those answers is acceptable.

The problem now is not, as Bridges asserts, that the law is being poorly enforced. The problem is with the law itself.  We went into greater detail about this at the time the regulations were passed, but to summarize, the types of STR licenses it creates and the way those licenses are tied to zoning, actually allows..  a lot of high density short term rentals in a lot of  places a layperson might assume are "residential neighborhoods."  Also, the real heads will recall that because the City Council decided not to freeze permits for the few months time between the passage of the law and the date it went into effect, the gold rush on irrevocable permits during that time have left us with a large number of STRs that are now grandfathered in.  So any current councilmember or candidate who won't commit now to a new and stricter STR ordinance, is not serious about limiting STRs. 

That, of course, means none of them is serious about it.  Instead we have self-described believers in "a capitalistic society" like King who not only doesn't seem to know the current law already allows STRs in commercial zones but also doesn't seem to know how capitalism works.  Real estate speculators haven't been turning the Seventh Ward and Treme into blocks and blocks of de-facto hotels because they've been barred from the French Quarter. They're doing it because that's where they can get the highest return on their initial investment. That isn't going to stop unless we stop it.  But from the looks of things the next District C councilperson won't be in much of a hurry to do that. 

Update: I typed up this little blurb about District C candidates before I saw that this week's Gambit has a long feature story on the state of STR enforcement.  There are comments from current and future councilmembers as well as some people in the mayor's administration. The article looks at how other cities in the US and around the world are dealing with the problem and hints at the reasons some of those solutions might or might not apply here. Also, there is this. 

Only a few months after the new regulations went into effect, the pandemic struck New Orleans. With travel restricted amid stay-at-home orders, the bottom fell out of the STR industry around the world, making it difficult to fully understand the impact the city’s new regulations have had. Housing groups, like JPNSI, have been focused more on fighting evictions during the pandemic, but they certainly are keeping an eye on the STR issue, particularly as tourism builds back up in New Orleans.

“Through 2020, we saw a decrease in license registrations for new short-term rentals, and that’s been creeping back up through 2021,” says Russell Moran, JPNSI’s program and operations manager. “But I think one of the things that we did see is as cities were in lockdown, folks who operate short-term rentals were actually then renting those apartments to tenants and converting them to long-term tenants.”

But that trend is already reversing as Covid restrictions have eased, Moran says. 

"Sadly, now we’ve started to see in eviction court, landlords evicting tenants so they can return to short-term rentals,” Moran says. “[Landlords] aren’t outright coming to say that — we have tenants who have called us and said specifically that my landlord is putting me through the eviction process for whatever reasons but has made it clear that they’re going back to short-term rentals.”

The first of the month is coming again next week...

Saturday, November 13, 2021

Be sure and vote real hard

Supposedly, it matters

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Election malaise

It's been a long hard slog here in post-Ida (and pre-post-COVID.. maybe?... but not really) New Orleans.  October was basically our second "Lost Month" in two years. But worse because I've barely been posting anything. It's not been a great time, okay?  We're just trying to hang on but maybe we are getting somewhere. Halloween was kind of encouraging.. almost normal, even.  You can see here where I tried to render the Superdome on fire (remember that? it was a thing that happened this year!) in the traditional lighted gourd medium. 

 

Flaming Dome

 

Only moderate success with that, I am afraid. We'll try and do better, though. 

Anyway, if you're anything like me, you're probably still too immersed in the "malaise" to get super psyched up for this weekend's elections.  In which case, it is a good idea to check in with our friends at Antigravity to see if they can pep us up. Let's see... who is running for, oh I dunno.. Assessor? 

Beyond the two name changes, (Anthony "(Low Tax)") Gressett has fairly frequently used the court system to address grievances, including at least two slip-and-fall injuries, multiple altercations with police, an argument with a Southwest flight attendant he alleges threw bagged peanuts at him, and at least three disputes arising from work by contractors or movers at his own home.

According to court records, Gressett hired a Metairie-based painting and renovation company to do work on his home last year. He alleged the company’s workers violated the contract by showing up early, smoking on his property, playing music, using spray paint where the contract called for hand painting, and not properly cleaning up. That included using his “family’s personal residential garbage cans” for disposing of job waste and going into a storage area they weren’t supposed to access, where they took the family’s “private residential broom and dust pan” to clean up. After multiple disagreements with the workers, he alleged they “sprayed graffiti” on his house, applying “unauthorized writings,” and deliberately delayed the job. The situation made it “almost impossible” to have the house ready for Christmas card photos and even caused Gressett concern he wouldn’t be able to raise his tenants’ rent, according to his court filings. The case appears to still be pending in Jefferson Parish court.

In another incident, Gressett and his wife Bam sued a moving company they hired in 2016. When the movers arrived, Gressett alleged in court, they repeatedly claimed services he thought were covered by the contract weren’t, “and these episodes went on from almost beginning to end of the contracted work shift until the defendants finally wrecked the moving truck into the plaintiffs’ home…” The case was ultimately settled, according to court records.

It goes on from there so enjoy that little pick-me-up.  Makes you feel a little bit better about the world for a minute.

Now let's see what our friendly neighborhood comrades at the DSA can do to keep us on that high. 

Take a look around New Orleans in late 2021 and you will find it much worse for all the wear. The pandemic has left our service workers more precarious even as the ownership class of the tourism industry is better funded through public dollars. Housing costs are higher than ever while the real estate interests who fund our politics have even more wealth. There are surveillance cameras everywhere but the traffic signals don’t work. The streets still flood. The intelligentsia speculates about an indefinable sense of “malaise.” If one were to travel the gauntlet of malfunctioning lights along Loyola Avenue from the collapsed Hard Rock site to the collapsing Plaza Tower, one would inevitably pass City Hall along the way. The mayor who goes to work there every day recently said to anyone who might find a reason amid all of this to complain that “maybe New Orleans is not for you.”

But is LaToya Cantrell for New Orleans? There is the question that this election should have addressed. But given the field of challengers, it very likely will not.

Oh man.  Well okay back to bed for now, I guess. 

Tuesday, October 05, 2021

Surveillance state

In what is probably the final bit of fallout from Leon Cannizzaro's "fake subpoena" scandal, Jason Williams's office has entered into a settlement with plaintiffs in the civil rights lawsuit that came out of the scandal.  We don't need to re-hash the details of all of that here too much.  The Lens article runs us through the paces of summarizing it anyway. But anybody reading this already knows about Cannizzaro's use of fraudulent subpoenas and abuse of material witness warrants to compel testimony from crime victims.  The upshot here is Williams, who was elected DA based in large part on his promise not to do that stuff anymore, has agreed to 42 months of "monitoring" to ensure that he doesn't.  The joke is this now means we've hit a golden trifecta of criminal justice consent decree type arrangements in Orleans Parish now. 

The New Orleans Police Department and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office are also under court-appointed monitorships, and have been since federal consent decrees were first approved for the agencies in 2013.

The agreement with the DA’s office is different from those other agreements, however. For instance, the U.S. Department of Justice is a party to both the police and Sheriff’s Office consent decrees, as a plaintiff. Williams’ agreement is only between his office, the individual plaintiffs and their attorneys. 

In addition, the monitoring periods for both the police and the Sheriff’s Office are indefinite. Both keep monitors in place until, and for a period after, the agencies reach substantial compliance with their consent decrees.

The DA’s office, however, will only be under a monitor’s supervision for 42 months. And since both sides have agreed on Schwartzmann, there will not be a lengthy, politically fraught search for a monitor in this case.

The Schwartzmann referenced in that quote is civil rights attorney Katie Schwartzmann who has been named to head the "monitoring" effort.  This article doesn't go into the details of her position, though. We don't know from this how much she is paid or what the total cost of the monitoring will be. One assumes whatever it is comes out of the DA's budget and that it is in addition to the amounts paid out here according to the terms of the settlement. 

In consideration of the remaining plaintiffs, Williams’ office will pay $120,000 to the ACLU Foundation, in two $60,000 installments over the next year. The allocation of that money will be determined by the plaintiffs and their attorneys. And the office must create a new procedure for victims and witnesses to file grievances over their treatment by DA’s office employees.

Anyway maybe they will tell us more about who gets paid and for what.  Recent experience tells us that's at least as important as whether or not the monitoring program actually accomplishes its stated purpose. 

Monday, October 04, 2021

Re-opening soon

Stay safe

Much like the ol' wash and fold here, I figure it's about time to take the boards back down off the windows of the blog. Didn't mean to be away from it all month but, well, many things happened.  I think the last thing I promised here was a synthesis of the post-Ida notes. So we'll get to that in a few days. And then it's on to the very dismal election season, I guess. 

But for now, all of this is superseded by yet another emergency that certainly no one could possibly have predicted. 



Unfortunate. But there was just no way to know...

Thursday, September 02, 2021

Bad ju-ju

I'm still only able to post from the phone. I have plenty of Ida notes but might wait until I can type with two hands to push them out. In the meantime here is the potato chip story.

Monday, August 30, 2021

We've already done this drill

 I think I mentioned yesterday that the situation with the power in New Orleans is a repeat of what happened during Hurricane Gustav. I wasn't making that up.

This is not the first time the utility's transmission lines into the city have failed during a significant storm. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav knocked out all but one of Entergy's lines into the city, leaving nearly a million homes and businesses without power. Only about 41 percent of the customers who lost power during Gustav had power back within 10 days.

 The utility faced criticism in the aftermath of that storm for not doing more to upgrade and maintain its lines to give them the strength to survive a severe storm. And similar questions are likely to arise in the coming weeks and months from the New Orleans City Council, Entergy New Orleans' primary regulator.
 
There was supposed to have been a fix for this problem by now but it turns out what was sold as a fix is actually barely even a "plan B" now. 

Entergy's "Plan B" would be to start restoring customers with power supplied directly by its New Orleans East and Westwego Ninemile 6 power plants.

 Entergy's argument when it got approval for the controversial New Orleans East gas-fired plant from the City Council three years ago was that it would be available for crises like the present one. 

Well that happened

 Posting on a phone is not ideal. Also phone needs to be charged so I'll keep it short.  

Basically a category 4 hurricane came up on the New Orleans area from the Lafourche Parish side and just sat there for six hours without diminishing very much.  That is, not only the worst case scenario imaginable, it is also more or less unprecedented.  Luckily New Orleans appears to have "fought the last war" well enough. The flood control system seems to have held and storm surge has not inundated the city.

The same is not true for areas outside of the system however.  There are nightmarish reports of flooding coming in from the river parishes and total devastation to the south. We'll know more about that soon. It will not be good.

In town, there is no power and probably won't be for weeks.  Entergy says there is catastrophic damage to main transmission lines which sounds similar to what happened during Gustav.  Which is frustrating because after that event we were promised that problem would be solved.  

Miraculously,  SWB says they have turbine power. The pumps are working (sort of) and the water is safe to drink.  There are problems, however with the sewerage lift stations which..good lord I hope they can fix that soon.

Other random damage reports so far. Municipal and traffic court buildings apparently had their roofs ripped off so lol there. Both of the new Metal Shark ferries got loose on the river last night. No idea what happened to them. Other than that, it's too early to know the scope of the damage.  Assuming the worst. But yesterday at a press conference, a clearly frustrated LaToya Cantrell loudly shouted, "You can be calm!" at us so we are doing that now.

More when I can post again. Gotta figure out how to charge this phone right now. Then we'll figure out how to put the city back together.  We've done it before (sort of.)

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Staying for the storm

 Well, you know, once again, here we are.

Stay Through The Storm

And not a minute to spare, either

Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Friday said that with little time left before Hurricane Ida reaches Louisiana, residents should get ready to hunker down and ride out the storm.

She told a news conference there wasn't enough time to establish the highway contraflow procedures necessary to move all residents out of the city before the storm's expected landfall Sunday afternoon. 

"We are not calling for a mandatory evacuation because the time simply is not on our side. We do not want to have people on the road, and therefore in greater danger,” Cantrell said. 

She reiterated that New Orleanians inside the city's levee protection system are safe, but said that residents outside of the levees were under a mandatory evacuation order and should get out as soon as possible.

There are a couple things to say about this.  The first, I suppose, is that the mayor is correct about the timing. Calling and executing a mandatory evacuation that activates the city assisted service and highway contraflow system takes far longer to accomplish than the basically one day they had to throw it together after getting a bead on what this storm was going to do.  During the Saturday afternoon press conference, a Washington Post reporter hit LaToya with a dumb hypothetical "what would you have done if everything was different" question.  She handled it okay by talking nonsense in turn. But expect more of that kind of thing if something goes wrong over the next 48 hours.

This does not mean the city has done a terrific job being on top of things. One of the Cantrell Administration's biggest weaknesses is its inconsiderate treatment of its working class residents and that has again been on display in the pre-storm planning. It doesn't do very many people any good to call for "voluntary evacuations" without also making sure that they have the time and certainty necessary to plan those trips. On Friday, the mayor recommended voluntary evacuations for anyone who might feel they need to get out.  “If you have medical needs or wish to voluntarily evacuate on your own, now is the time to start,” she said.  However, no one heeding the mayor's call at that time was given any certainty that they were in fact free to go, nor were they given any guidance for when best to return.  City offices had not yet been closed.  The public schools were still in session.  If you were a parent, a teacher, or a city employee looking to voluntarily evacuate, you had none of the information you needed to do that.

A city executing its emergency plan should have closures and estimated re-opening dates already in place by the time it issues any sort of evacuation order. It should set the standard also for private businesses responsible for dismissing employees and guaranteeing their return as well.  But, because the Cantrell Administration views workers as problems rather than as people, none of this happened.  There's no doubt the mayor is going to come in for a lot of unfair criticism from bad faith or just plain ignorant commenters from outside of the city. That always happens in these situations. But she also will receive far too much credit from local libertarian types who share her abusive boss mentality. Hopefully the stakes of this remain in the realm of the frustrating political rhetoric we're used to seeing happen around this administration and do not extend to anything that actually affects life and death during the emergency. 

But the default implied position of policymakers is as close to, "y'all are on your own" as they can possibly get away with.  At several moments during her press conferences over the past few days, the mayor has stressed this talking point. 

“What we learned during Hurricane Katrina is we are all first-responders,” Ms. Cantrell said. “It’s about taking care of one another.”

She seems to enjoy that one.  And it sounds kind of nice at first run.  It's colored with the suggestion of community spirit and mutual aid.  Those are laudable values for the public to promote among themselves. But when you hear the government charged with actually providing these services use it as an excuse to fob off its responsibility, it becomes something more sinister. Ultimately what we are being told is not to expect help from a regime that does not respect its end of the social contract. We are expected to obey orders we are not given the tools to fulfill.  

Evacuating is hard enough as it is. It's definitely not the right call for every person. It can be dangerous for many reasons. Perhaps your vehicle (if you have one in the first place) isn't in highway shape. Perhaps you don't have anywhere to go and stay.  Hotels are expensive. Gas is expensive. Running off into an open ended trek into the unknown is really not something you want to do unless you absolutely have to. People who don't live through these events might not understand this. 

We've decided to stay this time and I think our reasons  for staying now are good.  I have a strong bias toward staying through almost any storm but there are still some factors to consider in order to get to that decision logically. Here is how that breaks out. 

1) Can the levees handle the storm surge?

It's about 11 pm on Saturday night while I'm typing this.  The latest track forecast is bringing the storm closer to New Orleans than it has all day. Yeah we're a bit worried about that. But what has not changed at all has been the storm surge modeling. The prediction there has consistently called for 7-11 feet along Lake Borgne and 5-8 feet in Lake Pontchartrain.  The flood protection system protecting New Orleans is supposed to be able to handle 25 feet.  The system ("in name only") that failed during Katrina was far worse and Katrina's surge was over 20 feet.  Anyway, even if we do not have the utmost faith in the new system, it's well within reason to expect it will do the job. 

2) What about the pumps?

Again, the storm surge is the big worry with any hurricane. But the more familiar sort of flooding we've had to deal with in recent years is caused by our fabulously dysfunctional drainage system. Over the last few days, we've been repeatedly assured by the SWB wizards that they expect to supply sufficient power to the pumps running on an improvised combination of the recently repaired Turbine 5, the somewhat undersized Turbine 6, and a series of temporary generators and frequency changers.  PLUS they just might still be able to revive our old friend Turbine 4 in the nick of time which would be very exciting indeed. They say they don't absolutely need it but sometime a turbine wants to be a hero and who can deny it that chance.  

Now maybe SWB is full of shit about all of this. It wouldn't be the first time.  But there are some mitigating factors.  It's worrisome to be on the "wet" side of the storm, and Ida could drop over 10 inches on us.  But it's worth noting that Ida isn't expected to stall over us so that rainfall projection is a maximum.  And under those circumstances, hurricane rainfall isn't as likely to cause the kind of flash flooding that a typical summertime thunderstorm does around here. Very likely, the pumps can handle it. Most importantly, our street has only flooded badly from rainfall once. And even then all we had to do was move the cars up onto to sidewalk for a while. So, again, as far as we are concerned, it's reasonable to expect we can handle whatever street flooding might occur in the event of a pumping failure. 

3) The winds will go whoooosh, though!

Yes, this is the scariest part.  Especially now that we might get some intensity in the city.  But most likely we won't see any sustained winds here exceeding tropical storm range. The gusts will be higher than that and it will probably be a bit rough at times. But if you can tolerate a little excitement, then it's still a better deal than the massive headaches that come with an evacuation.  That doesn't mean there is no danger. There is a chance of damage to the building. But even then, I prefer to be where I can keep an eye on things; seal up a broken window, put a bucket under a leak if need be. 

4) The power will go out

That does suck.  After Gustav in 2008 we were without power for a week.  After Zeta last year we were down for a few days. It's uncomfortable being without a/c in late August. But we know how to do it and are ready.  Are we ready to do it for three weeks?  Hell no! But we do welcome the fight we're going to have with Entergy if they are serious about that.

Anyway that all adds up to staying in town for us.  Not everyone will have come to the same conclusion and that is fine.  Different people have different situations that will cause them to answer the above questions differently.  But we're still here, us.  Just after midnight on August 29th appropriately facing down another catastrophic hurricane.  They are saying the first effects should be noticeable in the morning. I'll try to update then. 

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Disposable people

Absolute inhumanity on display here.   

Between the time of his arrest and the plea deal that sent him to Angola prison on a 20-year sentence for manslaughter, Farrell remained behind bars at Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans jail. It was there that the funny, active, energetic son I knew fell gravely ill. First his feet went numb, then the numbness traveled up his legs and started to impede his movement. By the time Farrell was transferred to prison, he was using a wheelchair, but hadn’t yet received the kind of medical attention that could lead to a diagnosis. 

Eventually, he would be diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder of the spine typically caused by infection. Farrell and I both suspected the disease was triggered by unsanitary conditions in the jail. Around the same time his symptoms began, the city of New Orleans was hammered hard by Hurricane Isaac. Farrell told me that the storm had pushed ankle-deep sewage water into many of the cells.

 When they brought Farrell to Angola, they put him in hospice care. He and I were both confused. He didn’t have a diagnosis yet, but there was no reason to believe he was terminally ill or in the last weeks of his life. As it turns out, Angola uses their hospice program, featured in rosy documentaries, to manage care for patients perfectly capable of treatment and even full recovery, as Farrell was. Most transverse myelitis patients recover at least partially, and some completely. 

It hurt — the idea of my 45-year-old son in hospice — but I thought, at least there, Farrell would be well taken care of. I cared for many terminally ill patients over my career, and I hadn’t seen a bad hospice yet — until I saw the one at Angola.

This only happens when a system just determines that the people in its care are disposable.  How is such a thing allowed to happen in the so-called civilized world?  Perhaps it begins with our enlightened political leadership....

I manage to get on the calendar of the current mayor, LaToya Cantrell. When we talk, I remind her that our last encounter was five years ago in Northern Italy—at a conference on disaster recovery, of all things. She chuckles grimly at the parallel between then and now, New Orleans and Northern Italy, two hot spots in a global pandemic. Katrina made Cantrell’s political career, establishing her in her early 30s as a spitfire rabble-rouser in the city’s Broadmoor community. From there it was on to the City Council and, in 2018, the mayor’s office of the nation’s 50th largest city.

I press her about her decision to let Mardi Gras roll. And she explains, as others have confirmed, that no one at the CDC—or anywhere else in the federal establishment or in Baton Rouge—was saying she should cancel the city’s biggest tourist draw.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

On the other hand maybe it starts with the craven media establishment who can't help but fawn over the "streetwise salty tongue" of a brute callously deciding who lives and who dies like this.

Monday, August 16, 2021

Please do not mistake us for good people

After a few weeks of surging COVID numbers and increasing public outcry, New Orleans and Co. has finally decided to pull a tone deaf ad campaign it has been running since this spring that invite people from all over the country to come into the viral hot zone where they can contract and/or spread more COVID. 

But just in case anyone is confused as to the purpose of this decision, in case anyone might happen to think that it might be motivated by an actual concern for the public health, NO and Co has issued the following statement. 

“National polls told us that traveler sentiment is decreasing and some people are reluctant to travel due to delta all over the country,” Shultz said. “So we made a strategic decision to pause advertising so that we are getting the best return on every dollar invested. Also the shift was made because we were not planning to advertise in October, when the city was scheduled to be full with Jazz Fest and other events, but now we need to work to drive October visitation.”

New Orleans & Co. also recently announced that a multimillion-dollar campaign targeted at conventions and business travelers is in the works. 

The Lens asked Schulz if New Orleans & Company’s decision to pause the campaign was just based on reserving advertising dollars for October, or whether the agency was also concerned about the potential that tourists, particularly unvaccinated tourists, could increase the spread of the virus in the New Orleans area.

“It is not accurate to report that our decision was based on tourists coming from areas of the country with low vaccination rates,” she said. “It was paused because of the low vaccination rates here in Louisiana and the spike of local infections. And to ensure that we get the best value on every advertising dollar.

"It's not accurate to report" that this privatized agency feels any responsibility to preserve or promote the health of the community from which it takes public money.  It is only thinking in terms of what makes the most business sense to its clients.  

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Bipartisanship: the breakfast of champions

 Getting both sides of the power elite together to make policies they can all agree on

Mr. Cuomo had confided earlier that year to Alison Hirsh, then a top political adviser to a powerful union, that he did not want to put the Democrats fully in charge of the Senate ahead of that year’s budget. Ms. Hirsh recalled Mr. Cuomo telling her that was because Senator Liz Krueger, a liberal Manhattan Democrat, would push to increase taxes and that another, Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic leader, would “give free breakfast to all Black people.” Ms. Stewart-Cousins is Black.

Just proving the system can work through compromise. 

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Howling in the wires

In August of 2007, Sam Jasper wrote this

The lies and the greed and the corruption in this country, from the Prez at top of the ladder to the "great hope for New Orleans" councilman, have taken this country from the top of the heap to the depths of dysfunction. Things like infrastructure for this country are tabled in order to take our tax dollars and funnel them into corporate cronies' pockets to rebuild infrastructure that we blew up elsewhere. The feds say it's the states' responsibility to take care of the infrastructure once it's built, and some states can't afford to do that. The feds can. But instead they tsk tsk, shake an accusing finger at the local leaders and go on to their meeting with some war profiteering contractor---behind closed doors, no press allowed, and no logs of the meeting kept.

Forget about any kind of social services, we can't keep our levees and bridges up.

We're all so used to it that we skim the articles, rant over dinner if we're in our cups, and go on to work the next day because lord knows the insurance companies who never have to really, I mean REALLY, take on any risk have to be paid and the energy companies who get bailouts have to be paid, and the mortgage has to be paid to keep a roof over both the mortgage company's head (even if they made hideously stupid loans for the last several years, planting false hope in many family's futures--"No PROBLEM, the balloon payment won't come up for five years!") and our own, and we have to pay our taxes next April so they won't attach our paychecks or put a lien on our house to collect the bucks they want from us so they can rebuild that fucking bridge in Baghdad for the ninth, tenth, eleventh time. Don't take a breath. Keep running, Joe, like a hamster on a wheel, you're getting older now and you have no stock portfolio, no health insurance, no retirement savings, you don't have time to do anything about the lies. Remember, though, Joe, all those bucks you're sending in with your 1040 won't do you any good if a disaster strikes, whether it be a hurricane or a heart attack.

There is no social contract. Faith in government will surely break your heart. Faith in companies will break your heart. 

Interestingly, what prompted that particular moment of exhaustion and outrage at an entire system was then councilman Oliver Thomas's announcement that he was resigning after the discovery of his having accepted roughly $19,000 in bribes from Pampy Barre.  That might seem to some today like blowing a matter of petty local corruption out of proportion. But at the time, this sort of thing made the  national news.  

As the New York Times article linked above demonstrates, all eyes were on New Orleans. Mostly those eyes were scrutinizing us to discover reasons the very bad thing that happened to us in 2005 was actually our own fault somehow.  All too happy to aid in that project were an over-stimulated gang of federal prosecutors waiting to provide grandstanding quotes like these at a moment's notice.

Some 30 school system employees have been indicted. And the United States attorney here, James B. Letten, said Monday that a long-running investigation into corruption at City Hall in the Morial administration, which has already yielded 16 convictions, would continue.

“It’s just brazen down here,” James Bernazzani, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s special agent in charge, said at a news conference after Mr. Thomas entered his plea.

In Louisiana they skim the cream, steal the milk, hijack the bottle and look for the cow,” said Mr. Bernazzani, who noted that his district ranked second in the nation in public corruption convictions and indictments — despite its relatively small population.

But this is cause to refer again to Sam's crisis of faith in institutions. Mr. Bernazzani, for example, would eventually go looking for a cow of his own

The indictment also alleges Mayfield sent $150,000 in library donations to the Youth Rescue Initiative. It claims he routed that money to the Jazz Orchestra, and himself, throughout 2012. One payment from the YRI, for $77,000, came in December 2012, the feds allege, after Mayfield had officially left the YRI board.

The president of the YRI at the time was Jim Bernazzani, former FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's local office. After Mayfield served on the YRI board, he made Bernazzani an advisory board member for the Public Library Foundation without official board approval, according to comments made last year by the current Library Foundation chairman, Bob Brown.

WWL-TV asked Bernazzani last year about Mayfield’s transfers and his use of an “Irvin Account.” Bernazzani insisted the federal investigation would show "there's nothing there."

The station called Bernazzani about the latest indictment and did not hear back.

The corruption of global capitalism is intertwined with the corruption of local politics. The same forces act on each and they feed back into each other.  Every now and then there comes along a moment of trauma so severe that the cultural bafflements and social silos that keep us from seeing these connections are removed. Such moments are irrefutably bad but they are also revelatory.  The post-Katrina period in New Orleans was such a moment.

People like Sam spent that moment looking for ways to break out of the pattern of "skimming the articles and ranting over dinner in our cups."  But they never really did. This wasn't their fault, of course. The universally embedded death drive of capitalism is bigger than any of us and will inevitably swallow us all. But that doesn't mean that communities under threat should just lie down and take it. So they did the thing that any threatened community tries to do. They reached out to neighbors. They shared information and experiences. They tried to, at least, provide a space where others could come together and build real organizing capacity.  

Mostly they wrote things down and posted them on the internet. (Which was a fairly novel tool at the time!)  A lot of that, like Sam's 2007 post about OT, is still there. But a lot of it isn't.  Around the time of the last Rising Tide, Sam approached a few of us and told us we needed to curate and preserve as much of that material as we could before time and link rot consigned it all to oblivion.  After all, sacrificing the collected cultural memories of a trauma only heighten the risk that they will be repeated.  We didn't know how to do any of that, though. We probably should have tried harder to figure it out.  

Sorry, Sam.

Monday, August 09, 2021

Well, I've got some bad news and some bad news

 First the bad news. Via the IPCC report.

Limiting global warming to 1.5C is ambitious – but is not fanciful. In the 2019 amendment to the Climate Change Act, the UK showed the intent required and committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Still, achieving that aim will be a challenge. The climate crisis is as much a rural problem as an urban one. It is both economic and human, domestic and international. This means transformation is required at every level of society: individuals, employers, institutions and international partners will need to work together to understand the trade-offs, agree compromises and seize opportunities. And just as scientists are pooling insights from diverse fields of expertise, policymakers will need to work in new ways, sharing ideas across disciplines to plot a clear path from here to net zero. This is a whole systems challenge. Tackling it will require a systemic approach. 

And now the bad news.  Societal "transformation" on the scale required here is not and has never been brought about by deliberate action toward the purpose of avoiding catastrophe.  Instead, societal transformation is a purely reactionary process brought about through ad-hoc responses to and conflicts generated by catastrophe itself.  In other words, we're not going to change in order to avoid the worst affects of the climate disaster.  Instead the disaster is going to impose changes on us. Mostly through violence. This is always how it was going to happen.  There is nothing in human society and politics that can make it operate any other way. 

Anyway, it's Monday.  How is everyone?

Saturday, August 07, 2021

Congratulations?

It now looks like they are (probably) going to pass the bi-partisan infrastructure-privatization bill.  Hooray? 

While it's nice to think they might move ahead with putting some money into highways and bridges and water systems, there are fundamental problems with the way this bill would deliver such projects. We talked a little bit about that the other day and I'm sure there will be plenty opportunities to bring it up again once the consequences become apparent.  But at the moment most commentators are skipping over those details to raise questions about the process.   Like, for example, what was even the point of all this?

What may appear to be an imminent victory for bipartisan deal-making was in fact a drawn-out demonstration of how broken the Senate is as an institution. The Senate (with the White House’s support) wasted months cajoling and rehabilitating a handful of key Republicans only to pass a smaller version of something Democrats could theoretically have passed entirely on their own. Moving the bill forward only looks like a victory if one accepts the sclerosis and dysfunction of the Senate as a natural obstacle to be overcome with cunning and patience, not a self-imposed limitation on effective and responsive governance.

They could have chosen to just put all of the "infrastructure" through reconciliation and be done with it.  Instead they stripped out all the best parts and put those on a shelf that they promise...really.. fingers crossed and all... to pass right after they get this shitty thing through and pretend it's an accomplishment. 

What incentive do either of the famous trouble-Dems Sinema and Manchin have to pass the reconciliation bill now, though?  I have no idea.  Neither of them has committed to it. And then, of course, there are the labor and voting rights items the whole future of this congress and Presidency rest upon still sitting out there to be taken up later.  Does anyone think any of that is going to get done now?  I'd love to hear how.

Friday, August 06, 2021

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.