The price of crawfish

A group of seafood processing workers in Breaux Bridge are suing to get rid of a loophole that allows plant owners to pay a lower "prevailing wage" because they employ some migrant workers who are on H-2B visas.  

Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.

The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one small way the rules are deliberately written to take advantage of workers the government confers a more precarious status upon to lower the standard for everyone. It's an example of how allowing any class of workers to be exploited causes everyone to suffer. The lawsuit estimates the overall effect depresses wages by as much as $5 an hour. 

Of course, as we've seen before, the real costs of this system can be much higher. 

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Feels like a Monday

Try not to go too hard out there. 

A vehicle fire in the eastbound high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes of the Crescent City Connection is snarling traffic on the West Bank, Monday morning.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development reported the fire just after 8 a.m.

I'm certainly not one of these people declaring a return to post-pandemic normalcy yet.. especially with only 25 percent of Louisianians fully vaccinated (31% with at least one shot) as of today.  But certain of the old familiar comforts of home, such as everything being on fire, do seem to be returning. 

Oh also, was there an election over the weekend or something? I found all this trash laying around. 

We'll definitely have to talk about this one later. There are so many bad takes flying around today it's hard to pick out the absolute worst. But this is a contender. 

James Carville, the New Orleans-based political strategist, believes the outcome has national implications, noting that Peterson had the advantage of her side spending more money and a low turnout special election (16.6%) that typically favors candidates who seek to excite their party’s most fervent supporters.

“Voters voted against wokeness,” said Carville. “They just did. Woke did very, very poorly.”

I mean, it isn't very surprising that Carville has adopted the pejorative form of "wokeness" to mean any political platform to the left of, say, Ronald Reagan.  But he's also wrong (or lying, if you prefer to call it what it is) to claim this result is a rejection of such a platform instead of a candidate.   But, more on that later.  

In the meantime try to avoid getting exploded by anything.

Who is Tonya Pope's secret partner this time?

Tonya Pope is appealing (well, at least making  a public appeal through the media) the city's decision to exclude her from the list of finalists in the latest Six Flags redevelopment sweepstakes. 

TPC-NOLA Inc., which has long sought to revive the former Jazzland theme park at the Six Flags site, said in a formal protest Friday that the selection committee used "inconsistent, subjective and biased scoring" when judging six proposals for the abandoned property.

"Inconsistent, subjective, biased," maybe! That doesn't necessarily have to mean gender bias, specifically, although Pope does claim that too.  But, again, maybe. There certainly seemed to be some degree of favoritism involved when the finalists were announced.  And, besides, Pope knows more about this process than just about anybody by now.  Her company has been one of the very very many who have put together multiple proposals over the course of very very many attempts by the city to snag a developer for this cursed property.  

In the most recent round prior to this one, her plan involved... some kind of wax museum or something? Maybe that sounds wacky, but it's hardly the craziest thing that's been proposed so far. Nor is it any stranger than what the current front-runners have on the table. What's intriguing, though, about Pope's current bid is that the city says she was docked points in the evaluation process for not disclosing an important financial backer.

TPC-NOLA received 328 points. Committee member Nicole Heyman criticized that group for failing to identify its partner company, while committee member Jeff Schwartz rapped it for failing to prove it had obtained financing to build its proposal.  

Pope, the company president, said Friday that while her group did not want to out its partner at the public selection meeting, it is willing to provide that information to committee members privately.

Well who wouldn't be reassured by that?   It's not like Pope's partners in previous bids could have raised any questions.  The wax museum project was supposed to involve former Governor Edwin Edwards.  And in 2014, her proposal was backed by a certain financial outfit of note. 

Paidia's bid calls for a $50 million initial phase that would reconstruct the heart of the Jazzland park by next spring. Much of the money would come from a $25 million construction loan financed by First NBC Bank and federal tax credits for revitalization projects in impoverished neighborhoods. Paidia is also counting on another $10 million in private financing for equipment, $8 million in state tax incentives and $2 million in corporate sponsorships, according to its proposal.

 Really, in hindsight, it's remarkable that one didn't get done.  

Anyway, let's hope the committee takes Pope's complaint seriously enough to giver her another chance. If only so we can find out who the heck she's got on the team this time. 

Doing it the hard way

 Looks like the Bricolage board is choosing the way of pain. 

Bricolage Academy Educators United, a group of Bricolage educators seeking union recognition from the Esplanade Avenue charter school’s board, has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board after the charter’s nonprofit board failed to respond to the group’s February request for voluntary union recognition.

Since receiving the group’s Feb. 24 letter, the board has only met once. At that meeting, on March 10, the board met in a closed door session with its lawyers for advice on the union drive. After the private discussion, board president Yvette Jones said the board must do its “due diligence” before it would take a vote on whether to recognize the union. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Well it's April now and they still haven't finished the "due diligence" delaying so the teachers have to ask for an NLRB election which is an arduous process that is more or less designed to prevent an organizing campaign from succeeding. That doesn't mean the teachers can't win.  The International School staff unionized via an election in 2016 but not without a fight. And the Lusher board actually beat back a similar effort.

Of course, the PRO Act legislation waiting for action in the US Congress would make things easier. Call or text your Senator.

Name some names, Tanner

Only a week in but this is already the worst Louisiana Legislature I've ever had to watch.  The characters on display during committee hearings on the tax reform bills yesterday fell into three categories: the ignorant, the bought, and a few who are clearly bewildered and intimidated by the ignorant and the bought.  

But more on all that later. That's not really why I opened up the blogging program this morning. Instead, I just wanted to note this comment from one legislator on how ignorant the ignorant caucus is. 

But given how politicized mask-wearing and even the COVID vaccines have become, lawmakers are unlikely to require students in Louisiana to take the COVID vaccines.

“No, it won’t happen,” said Rep. Tanner Magee of Houma, the second-ranking Republican in the Louisiana House. “The political climate right now with vaccines, just the hysteria around it, won’t allow for any sort of mandate,” he said in an interview.

In distributing the vaccines, he added, “We honestly have some legislators who think that we really are implanting 5G chips into people.” 

I'm not usually into getting anyone to rat on their friends but I'm afraid Tanner is going to have to give us some names there.  Or, at least, get us an idea of how many "some legislators" is so we know the size of what we're dealing with. 

Or maybe he doesn't have to. The Advocate already tried to get a handle on the number of anti-vaxxers in the Capitol last week.  But these numbers and the possible reasons for them are open to interpretation. 

Among 142 lawmakers polled, 98 said they had availed themselves of the jab, while 30 said they have yet to be vaccinated. A handful said they had recently recovered from COVID-19 and plan to take the vaccine soon.

The two most powerful lawmakers – House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, and Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette – refused to say whether they had been vaccinated. They joined a dozen other GOP lawmakers who wouldn’t answer the question, with some calling the survey an invasion of privacy.

I think when they say "invasion of privacy," they mean they are vaccinated but are afraid that might hurt them with their constituents. At least, that's what I read between these lines in particular. 

Some political leaders are content to stay out of those conversations. 

"I don't want my constituents to be influenced one way or another by my decision,” said Rep. Jonathan Goudeau, R-Lafayette, who refused to answer whether he had been vaccinated. 

“That’s a private health matter that I wouldn’t want to discuss publicly,” said Rep. Philip Tarver, R-Lake Charles.

And the reason I lean that way is that, typically, the legislators aren't so shy about sharing their weird ideas.  The ones who aren't getting vaccinated seem like they are happy to tell you why.  And... oh man.. let's see some of those. 

Some lawmakers referenced misinformation about the vaccine, which has been particularly potent on social media, in their decision not to get vaccinated.  

Rep. Beryl Amedee, R-Houma, said she was concerned the vaccine could cause spontaneous miscarriages among women — a claim that exploded online in March but was promptly debunked by medical experts as untrue. 

Sen. Mike Fesi, R-Houma, claimed that a family friend died from the vaccine, though a spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Health said the state has not confirmed any deaths from any of the vaccines administered in Louisiana.

That's only two of the 30 unvaccinated lawmakers running around up in Baton Rouge right now. This article says five of those have already had COVID and think they have natural immunity. That's not really supported by the research which says the vaccines are the more sure way to go. But you can kind of see why a reasonable person might think that at first. What we really need to know is how many of them are spreading pure conspiracy nuttery (and possibly COVID itself, not to mention) like Amedee there.  Maybe Tanner can tell us more.

Decommissioning in place

I now have a new phrase for describing my system of leaving clothes on the floor until laundry day. 

The GAO found that the offshore oil and gas industry has left behind about 18,000 miles of inactive pipeline in the Gulf since the 1960s. While federal rules require removal of decommissioned pipelines except in special cases, the GAO found that 97% of pipelines have been allowed to stay on the seafloor.

“Such a high rate of approval indicates that this is not an exception ... but rather that decommissioning-in-place has been the norm for decades,” the report said.

This, by the way, is exactly what a "market driven" transition to a greener economy is going to look like. Abandoned, rotting infrastructure leaking poisons into the water with no one left to take any responsibility.  Ideally the alternative is a mitigation initiative funded by something like a federal Green New Deal bill. But that ain't happening anytime soon. 

Maybe we can get something written into the Fossil Fuel Sanctuary State Act that politely asks the protected class to pick up after itself every now and again. 

Someone is always out to get Billy

Billy Nungesser gave a speech this week where he attempted to frame the latest in what has been a string of FBI inquiries into his various dealings over the years, as politically motivated attempt to keep him out of the Governor's race in 2023. Maybe.  But the article also does a good job of reminding us those federal investigations are a long running feature of Billy's career. 

Nungesser has come across the FBI’s radar before. The agency has in recent years investigated Nungesser’s contracts and public works projects while he was Plaquemines Parish president.

Much like in that case, Nungesser said the new probe is politically motivated.

“I don't know who's behind all this investigation stuff. Is it a PAC? Is it because they don't like my political stance? All I want is the truth,” Nungesser said. “The FBI's got a job to do when they get a complaint. But I've been through this before with people that didn't want to see me be parish president. I only want to do the right thing. But you wonder why people don't run.”

Nungesser’s use of a Lower Pontalba apartment and space in other state buildings in the French Quarter has come under scrutiny before. The former Louisiana State Museum’s interim director, who resigned in protest in 2017, claimed Nungesser was using those assets for his personal benefit. That was around the same time sources told the Advocate the FBI was probing Nungesser’s administration as parish president years earlier.

But just because Billy is paranoid doesn't mean.. yadda yadda yadda.  There really is a fair amount of jostling going on right now for the next election. Republicans are arguing over whether or not to change Louisiana's open primary elections system.  The current theory there is that a closed primary will enforce more ideological discipline and promote more right wing candidates than currently advance to runoffs if one can even imagine such a thing.  Also the conservatives promoting this theory might not even be right about their assumptions, but that's an argument for another time. 

The interesting thing here is that we suddenly live in a world where Billy Nungesser appears to be on the moderate side of an intra-party political disagreement. If nothing else it's a measure of just how far off the map we are.

Lock it up

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US, elected leaders at every level have struggled and failed to agree on an effective and consistent policy response to contain it. Rules promulgated for public gatherings, mask wearing, and business operations have had wide variance from town to town or state to state.  Over the past year, these rules have expanded and contracted again in "phases" shaped not so much by the public health interest as by political pressure from influential wealth holders.  

A mayor might shut down some events because the cases are spiking but keep inviting tourists to town anyway.  A school board might cave to pressure from bosses to open and deprive parents of an excuse not to come in to work. But if the virus spreads among the school population, officials have plenty of excuses on hand as to why that isn't their fault.

This is the sixth week that the district has reported cases on its website. While there have been new cases each week, officials say they are relatively small numbers and Avegno said new cases don’t appear to come from the classroom. 

“Where we are seeing cases is in gatherings and extracurricular activities outside school. So the slumber party … and we have seen some outbreaks on athletic teams,” she said, noting there hadn’t been athletic outbreaks in the two weeks.

“With teachers, if it’s more than one teacher, it’s if they went out to dinner after school,” Avegno said. “Just like office spread, like in a breakroom. That’s not anything unique to schools.”

Hotel stays, yes. "Slumber parties," no.  Bars and restaurants are open but only the ones that serve the tourists. The more local clientele had better stay home... especially if they happen to be teachers. And this has been the situation in every city and in every state. The resulting chaos has claimed hundreds of thousands more lives than were ever necessary while piling ever greater fortune upon the world's billionaire class. 

Remarkably this situation has only been made worse by the arrival of the vaccines this year.  Policymakers could have taken advantage of the clear "light at the end of the tunnel" offered by vaccination. They could have heeded the advice of most health experts to keep restrictions in place for a few more months until a significant portion of the population was vaccinated.  Instead they quickly shifted into Mission Accomplished mode and loosened the rules around all sorts of activities. It's quite likely that the resulting sense in the public that the pandemic is already over has slowed the pace of vaccinations thus extending the threat further and endangering even more lives. 

Now as the virus seems to be spreading once again, Governors and mayors are even more hesitant than before to take the steps necessary to stop it. Many of them, in fact, are giving up altogether. 

And this spring, many American mayors are explaining their decision to leave office with the same reason: that the pandemic response demanded so much that they could not both campaign and perform their duties; or that the work had become so stressful that their families had recommended that they step away.

“They are just spent,” said Katharine Lusk, executive director of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, which carries out an annual survey of mayors. Mayors surveyed last summer expressed deep anxiety about the effects of lost tax revenue on their budgets, as they juggled the pandemic, economic recovery and their core responsibilities.

Meanwhile the ones who have decided to stick it out are content to leave it all up to the vaccines and shift the blame for anything that goes wrong to the "personal responsibility" of individuals to take them. Inevitably this will mean more people will die than have to. But that's all part of the political cost/benefit analysis. 

Anyway it's only appropriate now that we're back to doing the bare minimum to protect the public health that the one thing we know we can do about the coronavirus is put it in jail. That is going about how you might expect.

Starting in March of last year, New York Times reporters tracked every known coronavirus case in every correctional setting in the United States, including state and federal prisons, immigrant detention centers, juvenile detention facilities, and county and regional jails.

We measured the pandemic’s excruciating impact on prisoners using records requests and interviews with people from all corners of the system. We spoke with incarcerated people and their families, prison wardens, jailers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil rights groups.

A year later, one in three inmates in state prisons are known to have had the virus, the data shows. In federal facilities, at least 39 percent of prisoners are known to have been infected. The true count is most likely higher because of a dearth of testing, but the findings align with reports from The Marshall Project and the Associated Press, U.C.L.A. Law and The COVID Prison Project that track Covid-19 in prisons.

The virus has caused misery and loss in many places, but its destructive power has been felt intensely among the incarcerated, who have been infected at rates several times higher than those of their surrounding communities.

Last week, The Lens reported that only a quarter of the  more than 800 people detained at the Orleans Parish jail have been vaccinated. That is a rate comparable with the city's population at large.  The state prisons are a bit behind.  But, as the same article points out, prison is a particularly dangerous place to be during a pandemic. 

Throughout the pandemic, prisons and jails have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 due to the inability of prisoners to social distance. There have been over 3,000 reported cases of the virus in Louisiana’s prisons, according to data from the DOC, and 36 people have died.

And so you may be thinking all of this should raise the obvious question, why are we still putting so many people in jail? Of course we should be asking that question anyway but especially now, under these circumstances, why are we needlessly endangering more lives?  Well, actually, that question was already asked of the mayor under arguably more dangerous circumstances during the height of the pandemic last year.  Here is what she said.

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.

Yesterday we watched yet another horrific instance of state cruelty in the form of body cam footage of yet another cop murdering yet another Black person for "breaking the damn law" against having an air freshener hanging from a mirror. Do those of us who are worried about that require a similar talking to from a "streetwise salty tongue?" Or is the summary death sentence for minor offense only acceptable when administered by virus instead of by gunshot?

Can't have any fundamental changes going on out there

Jane McAlevey's postmortem on the always doomed Amazon organizing campaign also explains why the PRO Act can never ever ever be allowed to pass.

The conditions most workers in the United States endure when trying to form a union make the recent actions by Georgia’s legislature to institute further voter suppression seem tame. If the Senate passes the PRO Act, there’s no question the unionization rate would increase quickly, which is one reason winning its passage in the near future seems oddly distant. Despite the nation having the most pro-union president in nearly 100 years, the Senate remains immovable on issues far less challenging than major labor law reform; it wouldn’t even accept a federally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage. And progressives have been trying to pass labor law since Jimmy Carter’s presidency—without success.

And, no, the answer isn't "because Joe Manchin." There are a ton of things the Democratic Party led by this so-called "most pro-union president in nearly 100 years" could do to rein that guy in.  They choose not to, though.  A strong labor law would "fundamentally change" the power relationships workers have with their bosses and boost the political power of the working class in general.  But that's not what these Democrats were elected to do. 

What would single payer health care look like in the US?

You might think it's not possible but I'm here to tell you that it is.  It's just not possible as the thing you are thinking about. Instead it's this. 

The fragmentation of American health care has kept Big Data from being fully harnessed as it is in other industries, like online commerce. But Optum’s acquisition of Change heralds the end of that status quo and the emergence of a new “Big Tech” of health care. With the Change data, Optum/UnitedHealth will own the data, providers, and the network through which people receive care. It’s not a stretch to see an analogy to Amazon, and how that corporation uses data from its platform to undercut third parties while keeping all its consumers in a panopticon of data.

The next step is up to the Department of Justice, which has jurisdiction over the acquisition (through an informal agreement, the DOJ monitors health insurance and other industries, while the FTC handles hospital mergers, pharmaceuticals, and more). The longer the review takes, the more likely it is that the public starts to realize that, as Dartmouth health policy professor Dr. Elliott Fisher said, “the harms are likely to outweigh the benefits.”

It's not politically possible to get the benevolent One Giant Public Health Behemoth controlling costs and care on behalf of patients.  So we will have to settle for the One Giant Private Health Behemoth controlling everything on behalf of executive profits. But at least it will be a "market-driven" solution that gets us there so it must be good. 

And there is the catch

Sorry to say this but the only reason anyone with any power can even imagine taking the Claiborne Expressway down now is the same reason it was erected in the first place. It is because we have reached a point in the cycle where tearing it down can and will benefit wealth.  This is going to be the same point I made ten years ago when the gentrification taking place in Treme first set the planners' sights on gussying up the convenient real estate they had buried under that bridge decades before.  But taking down the expressway, in and of itself is not going to magically restore the neighborhood that was broken apart by its construction. 

The 20th Century was a long time ago.  Other things are happening now and they are not great things for poor and working class people in cities. The political game now is all about moving those people out of the way, isolating them in far flung suburbs, and even taxing them if they try to drive back.  The cities (and especially this city) aren't for poor people anymore. Instead they (especially this one) are playgrounds for rich people and tourists where nobody actually lives. All of the planning and policy decisions made now are intentionally meant to facilitate this.  

For years the Claiborne overpass was a public health and "quality of life" detriment to poor people living near it. Nobody who could do anything about that cared.  But now it is in the way of real estate development so it's apparently time to take that problem seriously. 

Anyway, the Washington Post got in touch with Amy Stelly to for its story on the infrastructure bill that might fund the highway's removal. She's obviously very much aware of the problem.

While activists’ goal, in many cases, is to remove a highway, they say they also want communities most harmed by their construction to enjoy the benefits as their neighborhoods become more desirable. That could mean help for renters to buy their homes or property tax advantages.

“We can’t remove highways in neighborhoods that would otherwise have been very desirable and leave it to the real estate market to govern,” Stelly said. “The people of Tremé should have the right to return when it’s beautiful.”

And, well, that's the catch, isn't it.