And the pitchforks, I hope, are being sharpened.

Last Thursday, the latest meeting of the Louisville-Southern Indiana Bridges Authority (or “NAMBLA” for short) took place at the New Albany campus of Indiana University Southeast. Due to a strong contingent of anti-toll protesters who, according to a Courier-Journal headline, “dominated” [sic] the meeting, public perception could finally be turning against the $4.1 billion public works boondoggle without me having to get out of bed and actually cover it. (Thanks, innernette!)

Beyond the meeting itself and the questionable legality of tolling, however, lurks an even more sinister possibility: That the project’s financing could be engineered by the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan or any other Wall Street criminal organization, which of course is great news. The sad part? Louisville only has one viable mayoral primary candidate (Tyler Allen) with the balls/sense to suggest the entire idea is a bad one for the city, the region or any other entity that isn’t taking a huge cut on the project’s already inflated costs.From The C-J’s Marcus Green (bold emphasis mine):

Foes of tolls on new and existing Ohio River bridges made their first significant appearance at a Louisville-Southern Indiana Bridges Authority meeting Thursday, dominating a shortened public comment period.

Authority leaders limited the remarks to about 20 minutes and allowed eight speakers. Seventeen had signed up to talk at the morning meeting, attended by about 100 people, at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany.

Speakers from the general public had been largely absent from the authority’s first three meetings, but increased attention to the possibility of tolls, including social media efforts on Facebook, drew a crowd Thursday.

Just one of the speakers, real estate developer David Nicklies, chairman of the Bridges Coalition, was in favor of using tolls to pay for the $4.1 billion Ohio River Bridges Project that would build two bridges and reconfigure the downtown Spaghetti Junction.

Opponents sat and stood silently, holding yellow signs that read, “NO TOLLS!” and “TOLLS R 4 TROLLS!” While many in attendance were toll opponents, others included potential bankers for the project and community leaders who support the overhaul.

Also featured were Independent candidate Jackie Green, whom will most likely be slaughtered in the general election if any of either parties’ pro-ORBP, deep-pocketed candidates get the nomination, as well as Democrat Tyler Allen, who in all honesty remains Louisville’s best chance for preventing the city’s checkbook from being handed over to largely unseen, out-of-state financiers and the Beshear/Daniels-appointed cronies whom they are courting. Of all the candidates in the field — including fellow long-shot Shannon White — they are the only ones who understand just how terrible the current incarnation of the ORBP really is, and why.

The rest of Green’s story is great, by the way, and you should read it, which makes me regret ever lumping him in with The Courier’s Xanax-addicted editorial board, whose patronizingly titled op-ed “Jumping the gun” shows that they’re so far out of touch with reality in this city that they’ll report a flash flood anytime Jerry Abramson takes a piss. They quote the only part of Green’s story that they actually managed to read and still fail to understand why this entire process is so utterly repugnant.

As Courier-Journal reporter Marcus Green wrote of the most recent meeting, a highway official also outlined other strategies for funding large projects, and those included traditional federal highway revenues, additional fees on parking and public transit, hotel and property taxes and other assessments. No silver bullets, as the official said. (Toll collecting, meanwhile can be very sophisticated these days, with procedures to ease the financial burden on frequent commuters.)

That line about “other strategies for funding?” Louisville History & Issues‘ Steve Magruder quotes an article by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who wrote about a very similar ORBP-esque process that went down in 2008 in (wait for it) Jefferson County, Alabama.

“What happened here in Jefferson County [Alabama],” writes Taibbi, “would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street…”

In their case, the giant device was a ridiculously over-priced sewer system.

The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, “We’re like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage.”

To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county’s staggering debt payments.

…

The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan’s history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn’t even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan “passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions.” In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.

Magruder, then, connects the ugly dots:

Hmmmm… of all the talk of cost increases for the Ohio River Bridges Project, has anyone even bothered to compare the ORBP’s reported cost increases to generally accepted inflation statistics? And if there are major differences, where do all those extra “costs” come from if the project has been essentially the same two-bridges “solution” since 1997? Would that really be just a matter of extremely rampant, yet honest underestimating, or would something else be afoot? Further, should we wonder if the Louisville region would even need to consider bridge tolling (especially of existing, paid-for bridges) if the ORBP had merely accelerated in cost according to the inflation rate, which has been relatively small since the late 1990s?

Let’s take a look at some statistics. We will use 1997 as the basis year, as this is the year the two bridges “solution” was initially approved at a projected cost of $517 million. This is according to Steve Wiser, a well-known local architect who attributes this figure to a 2007 Courier-Journal article. The comparison year we will use is 2008, when the latest ORBP projected cost figure of $4.1 billion was released. (Aside: Some today are saying the actual final number will be $8 billion.)

So, for starters, in 11 years, “ORBP Inflation” was 693%, which is over 20% annually, compounded. Can you imagine annual consumer inflation at 20% for eleven straight years? I sure can’t. That would mean that a $2.99 bottle of laundry detergent in 1997 (a reasonable cost for that time) would cost over $20 in 2008. I have a strong notion that a bottle of detergent in 2008 or even today was/is nowhere near 20 bucks.

The bi-state authority has already met with luminaries from Goldman Sachs & Co., so it’s not a far stretch to imagine that this time around they’d deal with us any differently.

“Other strategies for funding” of the ORBP can then include, but are not limited to, being gouged on an astronomical level by the very people who ran the American, Greek and Alabaman economies (plus many, many more) into the ground. In this sense, tolls should be the least of our worries, and for the city’s paper-of-record to completely ignore this very real and frightening possibility and in the same breath treat their readership like children for being impatient with a blatantly undemocratic dog-and-pony show would be laughably incomprehensible were it not for the Runyons’ obvious conflicts of interest. But hey, powerful families have always held sway here, and if it ain’t broke…

Citizens in this community would be very wise, I think, to pay more attention to the biggest swindling Louisville will have seen in ages, one that will make the snafu of the Sports and Social Club look like small potatoes by comparison and cripple our ability to pay for anything remotely nice in the foreseeable future. And for the 30-plus-percent of undecideds out there who don’t know Greg Fischer from a cybernetic organism with living tissue draped over its metal endoskeleton, keep in mind that mayoral endorsements shouldn’t really mean shit if the candidate is willing to go along with something like this, as most of the front-runners are — in which case, your options should be a lot easier come May 18th.