New Orleans: Doomed by Corruption?

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

12/6/12

 

A major corruption investigation is underway in New Orleans. One by one, businessmen and city officials are being brought to trial under corruption allegations, many of them dating back to former Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration. The Wall Street Journal‘s sources suggest that a broader corruption investigation aimed at Nagin himself may be underway:

 

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If these allegations are true—and that’s looking likely—then they upend the established narrative about Hurricane Katrina. The media wanted to tell the Katrina story as a morality play about the evil and incompetent Bush Administration (to be fair, there was plenty of incompetence to point at). But the real story in southern Louisiana in 2005 was about the costs of decades of corruption, machine politics, and general negligence by the politicians of the region, who were repeatedly re-elected by voters who had blinded themselves to the deterioration of their own institutions. The allegations against Mayor Nagin might just be what is needed to wake people up to just how murderous and dangerous the climate of corruption and negligence was in New Orleans.

 

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Some will see these corruption stories as stories about race. They are wrong. Political machines have been capturing municipal governments in American politics since the 19th century. The majority of these machines have been run by whites, and there is nothing racial about the sociological and political forces that create political systems like those in 19th-century Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and in some of our cities today.

 

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[Argyle58]

Another corruption scandal in New Orleans?!?! Who'da thunk......New Orleans has only been known as the most corrupt city in the Americas since it was a French colony. There is a reason why they refuse to this day to accept English Common Law as their legal base; no one else in the country really understands the legal concepts prevalent under the Napoleonic Code.