Seasonal rituals

I think I'm getting more superstitious in my old age. Or at least I'm making more of an effort to keep to the rituals. Or maybe I'm just set in my ways.  What I'm saying is that, as the year goes along, I'm trying to make sure I do the things. 

For example, we've been in the habit of seeing the skeletons sing at Ghost Manor every year. So it was time to do that again and there we were.  

Halloween is first and foremost a children's holiday even if the grown ups don't always see it that way. It's about processing fear and even the idea of death by allowing it to stimulate our sense of wonder and imagination. Heck we might even call it a social #Resilience exercise.  

But that doesn't mean there aren't also true horrors waiting around the corner. 

The City Council is taking up Entergy New Orleans’ request to raise customer bills because of the $170 million in costs the utility racked up during Hurricane Ida.

Utility committee members voted Wednesday to consider the proposal, originally made in June, which along with another request to replenish a depleted storm reserve fund would raise bills by $4.40 per month for the average customer.

At-large Council member JP Morrell, the committee chair, said it was only the beginning of a process with a deadline of August 2023.

The rate hikes might be months away but, in the meantime Entergy plans to resume shutting service off to residents behind on their bills this week. Although if you call them, maybe they can work something out. 

Entergy New Orleans customers seeking payment assistance may call (800) 368-3749 to sign up for a 4-month deferred payment plan. Customer service agents are also available Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to discuss additional payment assistance, including levelized billing.

But then maybe you've seen this horror flick before and don't necessarily trust where this plot might take you. Maybe you'd like to try something different than just walking down that dark alley alone where the monster picks off victims one by one.  Maybe there's more safety in numbers. 

That is the idea behind this proposed debt strike. 

A debt strike works to get Entergy’s attention by hitting them where it hurts: their bottom line! By acting together and disrupting Entergy’s cash flow, they risk becoming less profitable. Entergy’s biggest fear is a cascading effect that could erase millions in profits from C-suite executives, hedge fund managers, and others that make a dollar off of our struggles to pay.

Entergy’s stocks are built off of our high bills and their continual disinvestment in our infrastructure. Without collective action, there are no collective gains. It’s time we stand up and fight back together with a debt strike.

Right now the goal is to get 10,000 people to pledge to participate before moving forward.  Remember that's how many signatures the mayoral recall campaign claims to have now.  (I seriously doubt they have even that many but they have enough that they feel like they can say that.) So it's not impossible to at least come close enough to that number to claim it.

In the meantime, we're just trying to ward off the evil spirits the old fashioned way. Ironically, a lot of the time, this is the only way you can light your home around here.  No doubt they'll figure out a way to bill me for it.

 

 

In other news of the occult-adjacent, we caught the beginning of the Anne Rice memorial second line today in the Garden District. 

Rice, the author of the 1976 blockbuster “Interview with the Vampire,” several sequels, and dozens of other novels, died in December at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, where she’d lived for the past few years. Her remains were subsequently flown back to New Orleans, her hometown, where she was buried with a private ceremony at Lake Lawn cemetery.

Leaders of the Vampire Lestat Fan Club, named for Rice’s iconic antihero, decided that the day before Halloween was the perfect time to mark her passing, New Orleans style. They conceived a traditional, group-participation, funeral parade that would begin at the Garden District Bookstore, where Rice once famously arrived for a book signing in a coffin.

Here they are turning on to Washington Avenue.

 

And that's pretty much what that looked like. The parade made a quick cycle to Rice's old house on First Street and then back again.  All told we only missed the third quarter of the Saints game to see it. 

I did feel obligated to check it out, though. After all I'd just re-watched Interview With The Vampire (1994) and re-read Interview With The Vampire © 1976  last week in order to prepare for this discussion on the latest CBC episode.  All in all I'd say we did our part this year. Happy Halloween.

The people's park vs Troy Henry

The Six Flags saga is once again in the news. You might say, it's been something of a roller coaster ride.

One year after Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced Bayou Phoenix had won the right redevelop the former Six Flags amusement park site in New Orleans East, lease negotiations to give the group control over the site appear to be on shaky ground.

Actually the ground at the Six Flags site is the least shaky element in all of this.  At least that's one thing we learned watching the 2021 documentary Closed For Storm for the latest episode of CBC last week.  At least one person interviewed in the film says the park's foundation is structurally sound on strong piers and can be built on again.  (Of course this person may have been Tonya Pope so... grain of salt. But it seems correct.)

On the podcast, we specifically talked about why the park is of public interest and why the many attempts at redevelopment have necessarily been part of a public process. Not only does it affect the people who live in the surrounding area, not only does it matter to the well being of the city in general, but also because the initial investment... the one that built the strong foundation on those study piers... was massive amounts of public money.

We also talked about Troy Henry's background as a corporate leech and privatizing ideologue. And well, danged if that isn't the issue now.

Henry said he is still moving forward with pre-development work on the assumption that the project will move forward, but he would not say whether he believes NORA would eventually soften its stance.

"We are hoping they come back with something a little more amenable," Henry said. "But look, there are some fundamental things that we will not waver on. And if we can't control our own project, it's not our project."

But it isn't his project. This is a property and a facility that spiritually belongs to the people and in financial terms was literally built by the people. The people and their elected representatives should retain control over its destiny and benefit from its use.  Troy doesn't get to bully us into granting him the right to private profits from public investment without oversight. But that's what he's about now. It's what he's always been about.

When all you have is a hammer

There sure is a lot of violence in New Orleans lately. What could possibly be causing it? Nobody seems to know. 

HousingNOLA Executive Director Andreanicia Morris told WDSU, "The first two failing grades were a warning of things to come when you look at what's happening with inflation, housing is at the core of the crisis."

The report says the city of New Orleans has seen the median rent price rise to $1,082 while the median income for the city decreased by almost $4,000 since 2019.

HousingNOLA also said that 30% of homeowners pay more than 30% of their income toward housing.

"More than half the people who live here can't afford to actually live here," Morris said. 

Must be some kind of "cultural" issue. Maybe there's a bad video game or something. Someone should really look into it, though. Because maybe if we knew what the problem was, we would know how to address it. Or at the very least we would know how not to go about exacerbating it. 

A deputy constable and a property manager were shot Wednesday while serving an eviction notice at an apartment complex in the West Lake Forest area of New Orleans, authorities said.

So until someone can come up with a reason this sort of thing happens, we won't be able to come up with an effective policy response to keep it from happening in the future. Until then, I guess we'll just keep going with what we know. 

Police had received an anonymous tip that the suspect in the shooting that injured a deputy constable and a property manager in the Lake Forest area of New Orleans was in Mid-City, Officer Reese Harper confirmed. After shutting down several blocks of Canal Street and locking down multiple nearby schools, authorities detained the suspect after a brief standoff. Nobody was injured in the apprehension.

A massive police presence snarled traffic as police searched behind a house in the 3200 block of Iberville Street and used a megaphone to try and convince a man to come out of a backyard with his hands raised.

How many more Delawares?

How many Delawares do we have left to give to the Gulf of Mexico? This question is raised in  a recent T-P story highlighting the very-nearly-approved status of the long awaited Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project.  "Decades in the making," says this article and that's certainly true.  "Game changing," it says also. Well, maybe it would have been if this and five or six other projects like it had begun decades ago.  But now it is much more likely too little too late. The coast has been neglected for too long and the seas are now rising too quickly. Eventually we are going to run out of Delawares.

Louisiana has lost land roughly equivalent to the size of Delaware since the 1930s. It could lose two more Delawares in the next half-century if no action is taken to stop it.

The catastrophe is no longer a pending event contingent on actions we can take anymore. It is already here. We see it all the time. We hardly even need to be told about it anymore, but we do love to read about it anyway. Here is a story from July of this year telling us one of our favorite tales.  The Louisiana coast, according to a new study from the US Geological Survey, is DOOMED. 

As the state's saltwater wetlands migrate inland due to sea level rise fueled by global warming, they will cause a loss of freshwater wetlands at a rate that is likely to be the highest in the nation, the study shows.

The study also raises serious concerns about the consequences of not keeping worldwide temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, which could result in global water heights of as much as 8.2 feet. In Louisiana, with subsidence, the water heights could be as much as 10 feet above present levels.

That worst-case sea level rise scenario would result in saltwater intrusion causing the collapse of thousands of miles of existing saltwater and freshwater wetlands, again exacerbated by human-caused barriers to their migration inland. 

2100 is not that very far into the future. 

2050 is even nearer.

It’s no surprise that Louisiana, where the seas are swelling and land is sinking, faces a daunting loss of property in the years to come. The Climate Central analysis estimated that more than 25,000 properties, totaling nearly 2.5 million acres in the state, could fall wholly below tidal boundary lines by 2050 — a number that far exceeds any other place in the nation. That would amount to 8.7 percent of Louisiana’s total land area, the report found.

Insurers have already decided what all of this means. They've decided it's time to cut and run. 

Louisiana Citizens Insurance Corp., the state’s insurer of last resort, wants to raise its already-high prices by more than half, following a dramatic increase in demand for coverage after eight private insurers collapsed [update: it is nine now]and nearly a dozen others exited the state.

The organization has asked the Louisiana Department of Insurance for a 63% rate increase for personal property coverage, which would hit its more than 102,000 homeowners policies, records show. If approved, the rate increase could generate as much as $158 million that officials say is needed to cover their risk.

The last rate increase Louisiana Citizens received, by comparison, was 4.8% for new and renewing policyholders. It went into effect June 1.

The wave of hurricanes that began in 2020 triggered a chain of events that’s putting more pressure on Louisiana’s troubled insurance marketplace. Several insurers, crippled by a staggering number of claims, have gone out of business or pulled out of the state. They’ve left behind desperate consumers who are now flocking to Louisiana Citizens in numbers not seen in years.

The solution, just about everybody in politics seems to agree, is "resilience."

But what does resilience mean, exactly? It may sound like it has something to do with preserving vulnerable communities and infrastructure but it does not.  In the context of the cascading disasters of the 21st Century, "resilience" is a shell game of shifting risks. Its rhetorical purpose is to move the burden of mitigating and responding to the growing hazards of environmental damage and climate change away from the institutions responsible and onto the individual victims of that damage. "Resilience" is a politician's call for the powerless to bear the cost of crimes committed by the powerful.

It's a grift that can work in several ways. Last year, Entergy provided us with one example. At the time we had been told the private utility giant had agreed to front the money to build Sewerage and Water Board a new power station intended to finally obviate its reliance on the famous antiquated turbine system that powers the city's drainage pumps.*  But later in the year, they backed out of that agreement claiming that emergency response to Hurricane Ida had eaten too far into their cash.  So, naturally, the city then stepped in and used American Rescue Plan funds originally intended for COVID relief to pay for the station.  

*(note: even the initial promise here was suspicious at the time but since they broke it anyway that's a bit of a moot point now)

But 2021 actually turned out to be a great year for Entergy cash-wise. They had so much floating around that they barely knew what to do with it. They paid out $1.5 billion to shareholders. Entergy CEO Leo Denault received $17 million in compensation that year.  It is only to protect these pay-outs that the city was manipulated into spending COVID relief funds making up for Entergy's broken commitment. In other words, we ended up paying for the resilience of the company's profits by foregoing investment in the resilience of our own people. 

This isn't an unusual event. It's actually very much in line with emerging global economic strategy. Economist Daniela Gabor reported from the COP26 international climate summit last year that policymakers are financializing the climate response by blending public resources (like federal COVID relief to cities, for example) with "bankable projects" (such as Entergy's operations) that create returns for investors.  It turns out the global strategy is to shift the costs and risks associated with the ravages of climate change downward onto the many subjects of capitalism in order to protect the profits of its masters.

This is the Wall Street Consensus mantra: the state and development aid, including multilateral development banks, should escort the trillions managed by private finance into climate or the Sustainable Development Goals asset classes. The state derisks or “blends” by using public resources (official aid or local fiscal revenues) to align the risk-return profile of those assets (“bankable projects”) with investor preferences or mandates. Transforming climate or nature into asset classes necessitates the commodification and financialization of public goods and social infrastructure, beyond water, electricity and transportation, and including housing, education, healthcare; these have to generate cash flows that pay institutional investors. The consensus understands the state as a derisking agent: its fiscal arm enters public-private partnerships to render them bankable by transferring some of the risks to the balance sheet of the sovereign, while its monetary arm protects investors from liquidity and exchange rate risk.

And so there is a whole class of financial speculation based on this.

It's called Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) investment. So-called "woke capital." 

Increasingly, big investors and fund managers are positioning themselves as ethical intermediaries at the center of a new movement for “impact investing” — investments that claim to prioritize environmental, social, and governance concerns. BlackRock, Invesco, Aberdeen, and Vanguard — all of whom who have signed on to the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment — promise that they can help align people’s money with their values.

“Socially responsible investing” has been around for decades, but it’s taken off recently. Sustainable assets under management are now estimated to be around $30 trillion. So-called green bonds — fixed income instruments used to fund green projects such as wind farms or low-impact housing — have proliferated. Even entire countries — Belgium, France, Poland, Indonesia — are issuing them.

Meanwhile, companies like Vanguard have set up new “green” exchange-traded funds that exclude oil and gas companies and nuclear power. Although funds that avoid “sin stocks” (adult entertainment, alcohol, tobacco, weapons, gambling) are an old idea, their pivot toward supposed green investments has proven extremely popular, fueling an expansion worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

How, you might ask, do investors and money managers determine if a company is really green? Back in the ’90s, the small number of investors interested in “corporate social responsibility” used metrics provided by the Global Reporting Initiative. These days CSR (corporate social responsibility) has been replaced with ESG (environmental, social, and governance) numbers that include data on emissions, labor practices, diversity, board independence, and supply chain information — the vast majority of which is self-reported by companies.

Maybe you can sense the turn that article (titled "Green Investing is a Sham") is about to take.  The point we'd like to make, though, is that it is also a  "resilience" strategy for finance. Former Blackrock investment strategist Tariq Fancy published a series of essays called “Secret Diary of a Sustainable Investor”  Here is what he says ESG investment is about.

Meanwhile, ESG 1.0 pollutes our airwaves, masquerading as the business community’s best and most honest answer to society’s challenges. One of the most ridiculous premises on which this rests is the bizarre conflation between fighting climate change and fighting climate risks. This is important: fighting climate risks in financial portfolios is not the same thing as fighting climate change itself. A friend of mine who lives in Miami was buying a house recently and seemed happy that my previous work was so heavily focused on climate risks, including extreme weather events that affect Miami. I felt bad breaking it to him: “Carlos, we’re not trying to save Miami from getting wrecked by climate change. We’re trying to get our money out before it hits.”

New Orleans is not going to be saved from climate change either. Instead it will be squeezed more and more tightly by tourism and real estate until the last profits are wrung out of whatever exploited and beaten down population can remain.. until they can't anymore.

"Resilience," then, is a long process of forcing you to adjust to increasing precarity. Some examples from this year: Over the summer, a judge ruled that insurance companies don't have to cover your evacuation expenses.  You have to be resilient. FEMA says changes to its flood insurance program are intended to price out something like one million people. Only those "resilient" enough to hack it in the coastal regions that have been their home can afford to remain. No one will help them move out of harm's way, of course.  Individuals bear the brunt of things like the rising costs of mortgages, insurance, and energy bills in New Orleans. We take on more of the risk of just trying to live here.

Here's a Times-Pic article from July 4 of this year where the reporter talks to people about what that feels like. I want to emphasize the allocative effect of these markets on who can and cannot weather the storm, so to speak. The spike in rates is specifically bad for individuals "who must rely on loans" to buy a home. 

“I just had a client get a $10,000 quote on homeowners insurance,” said (realtor Bryan) Jourdain. Before his client made an offer on the target house, Jourdain met with the existing owners and learned that they were paying $2,800 annually for coverage.

“I knew the buyer would have to pay more, but I guessed that the premium might be around $5,000,” he said. “$10,000 is ludicrous.”

For buyers who can afford such surprises, the jumps in cost probably won’t come between them and a new home. But for first-time buyers like Latiker and others who must rely on loans to close deals, such unexpected cost hikes can be deal killers.

On the other hand, for large investment firms that pay cash to turn houses into hotels... or more to the point, who seek to quickly flip properties as assets based on their potential profits as such... The cost of the transaction is not much changed. 

By leaving climate unmitigated, and by leaving the social costs to be borne by individuals experiencing "market forces" rather than as a community facing collective destruction, we have chosen, as a matter of policy, to sacrifice New Orleans as we know it to corporate profit "Resilience" it turns out, is a luxury good.

Anyway, we talked about this and more in episode 2 of CBC after having watched the straight-to-DVD classic "Hurricane Season" staring Forrest Whitaker.  It's a bit long but it's here if you're interested.