What year are we even in now?

Earlier today, @NOPDChief & @mayorcantrell unveiled 40 brand new Harley-Davidson police motorcycles leased by the department to replace the outgoing fleet. This near $1 million investment provides #NOPD Traffic Division officers top-of-the-line vehicles for use in the field. pic.twitter.com/PSlinl1eJS

— NOPD (@NOPDNews) December 30, 2021

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.

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? 

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....

 

Just spoke with a nurse on the Children's Hospital covid testing hotline and she said they are not doing return-to-school tests as they are currently overwhelmed, so don't waste your time trying to get an appt.

— Molly Rouxdolph 🦌 (@hashtagmolly) December 29, 2021

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.

In case you would like to know what it’s like working at Starbucks https://t.co/ke1BhXegX2 pic.twitter.com/3lZ0qHSMg9

— Cory Doctorow MOSTLY AFK (@doctorow) December 24, 2021

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.  

'The government and your boss put you in harms way. We took away paid sick days and unemployment supplements. Better get vaccinated so you don't starve.'

I'm not a health comms person so I can't evaluate how effective this message is. pic.twitter.com/rHtsD4McYP

— Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) December 29, 2021

 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?