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.