Posted on 09/11/2005 3:30:23 PM PDT by Matchett-PI
Since the days of Huey Long, the scent of corruption has clung to Louisiana state politics.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004 Alan Sayre / Associated Press :
[[[ "Gov. Kathleen Blanco doesn't like the idea of calling New Jersey "Louisiana North," such as The Wall Street Journal did in a recent headline to go with a story about corruption in the northeastern state....
Louisiana's reputation has suffered over the past few years, especially in the case of former Gov. Edwin Edwards, who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for extorting riverboat casino license applicants. The state's bawdy political reputation dates back to the days of Huey Long -- an image long blamed for the state's problems in attracting new business.
Currently, federal investigations are being conducted into New Orleans City Hall and public schools, along with another probe into corruption within the judiciary in Jefferson Parish. The FBI also recently announced that it would set up a task force in Baton Rouge to conduct investigations into state government." ]]]
Blanco pursued a twenty-year career in public office as a Democratic politician supported by the residuals of the Huey Long machine, which was characterized by graft.
[[[ "Long was so determined to have his way that, bypassing the state legislature, he put considerable effort into ensuring that his own people controlled every level of the state political system, ensuring levels of graft that were outrageously high even by the standards of Louisiana politics.
His efforts in Louisiana were the subject of an IRS investigation; he had increased annual state government expenditure three-fold and the state debt over ten-fold. In 1929, he was impeached on charges of bribery and gross misconduct, but the state senate failed to convict him by a narrow margin of two votes. It was often alleged that Long had concentrated power to the point where he had become a dictator of sorts; this was unprecedented." ]]]
Early in her public life, Blanco served on Louisiana's powerful Public Service Commission, frequently a source of questionable contracts. She developed her political skills where public corruption is an accepted way of life.
[[[[ 08 16 05 Corruption Costs Jobs
"Unfortunately, Louisiana's notorious "weakness" in the economic development arena -- a decades-old reputation for widespread public corruption -- continues to undercut our efforts in competitive markets. Recent federal corruption investigations only reinforce that image.
The FBI says Louisiana last year ranked third in the nation in public corruption cases. Since the FBI sent in extra agents last October, Louisiana is one of only five FBI jurisdictions with two public corruption squads." ]]]]
Blanco was elected governor of Louisiana in the fall of 2003. According to Lew Rockwell, founder and president of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, upon taking the governorship, Blanco rewarded the old "populist" Huey Long cronies who had supported her political career with appointments to state employment.
[[[[ December 14, 2003 Memories of Huey Long
"The legacy of the Longs is keeping big business from investing there [Louisiana]. Populism lives on in La. They just elected Kathleen Blanco governor. She is a product of Populist La. politics and is busy appointing old pro-Long people to important posts even as I write this." ]]]]
The political divide in Louisiana is not so much between Republicans and Democrats, as it is between the Cajun whites who fought to keep Louisiana segregated, and the rising class of black polititians, both being factions within the Democratic party.
[[[[ "The Southern Manifesto was a document written in 1956 by legislators in the United States Congress opposed to racial integration....It was largely drawn up to counter the landmark Supreme Court 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which integrated public schools.
All of the Signers were southern members of the Democratic Party. School segregation laws were some of the most enduring and best-known of the Jim Crow laws that characterized the American South at the time." ]]]]
After the forced desegregation of the south, the white Democrats adopted a paternalistic stance toward the black population, expecting to keep them within the folds of the Democratic party by purchasing their loyalty with maintenance-level welfare doles. Trapped in a cycle of poor educational opportunities and limited access to business opportunity within the Cajun stranglehold on Louisiana resources (including patronage and graft), blacks seemed doomed to live in cycles of deprivation. With a 24% unemployment rate, New Orleans was among the worst metropolitan areas in America in terms of poverty, crime, drugs, and poor education.
In some quarters, Ray Nagin was seen as a breath of fresh air running as a reformer for the office of mayor in New Orleans. His bid for office was opposed by Cajun white Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, then Lieutenant Governor, who suported a rival candidate. From Gambit Weekly January 2002
[[[[ "We support Nagin for many reasons, but they all come down to this: this election is about change, and change is what Ray Nagin -- more than any other candidate -- will bring to City Hall.
New Orleans is being choked by grinding poverty, chronic budget deficits, blighted housing and, above all, Third World politics. Businesses are fleeing....
We need a real economic boost -- not just the traditional changing of the hogs at the public trough. As a business leader who literally turned around a troubled company, Nagin has the credibility and the know-how to restore business confidence in New Orleans.
Nagin is a certified public accountant who serves as vice president and general manager of Cox Communications, the local cable television company. He supervises more than 900 people and an annual budget of $200 million -- more than one third of the annual city operating budget.
As mayor, Nagin will eliminate many of the mayor's 300 unclassified appointees -- and use the savings to raise salaries for those that remain to attract a better pool of applicants. He also will cut waste, cronyism and patronage -- because he owes no political debts. He is underwriting almost his entire campaign himself.
The only knock against Nagin that we have heard is from admiring voters who worry that he cannot win. The truth is, Nagin can and will win -- if voters show the kind of independence in the voting booth that he has shown as a candidate. What have we got to lose -- other than our image as a backward, corrupt city?" ]]]]
On February 2, 2002 Ray Nagin was elected mayor of New Orleans. Struggling to assert black leadership in the decaying city against a backdrop of white Cajun domination in state politics, he took the unusual position of supporting the Republican candidate for governor, Indian American Bobby Jindal, who had served as a senior health-policy official in the Bush administration.
[[[[ November 17, 2003 "Blanco is a Cajun, of French descent, and is popular in the heavily Cajun precincts across southern Louisiana. She held her victory party in the heart of Acadiana, in Lafayette rather than New Orleans....
Blanco also did well with African-American voters, especially in New Orleans, in spite of a tradition-breaking endorsement of Jindal by black Mayor Ray Nagin..." ]]]]
At this point in the scenario the welfare of the people of New Orleans was in the hands of a reformist black mayor who had earned the enmity of the white-Cajun-machine governor of Louisiana. The political partisanship within the Democratic party that would prove fatal during Katrina's onslaught was in place.
Just as the Italian mafia long held a stranglehold on economic development in New York City, business opportunities in Cajun-dominated Louisiana are held hostage to a French mafia headquartered in Montreal, known as "La Francophonie" for its involvement of French-speaking populations. And just as the Italian mafia used criminal means to control civic entities in countries with Italian-speaking populations, La Francophonie is alleged to use criminal means to entrain governments of French-speaking peoples.
[[[[ "Could New Orleans's descent into quasi-revolutionary chaos be an indirect result of racketeering, kickbacks and procurement fraud by Democrat insiders with ties to a fast-growing organization called "La Francophonie"?
Of all the coastal regions struck by Katrina, only the State of Louisiana is in the clutches of La Francophonie. La Francophonie's detractors...describe it as a Montreal-based, racketeering influenced and corrupt organization (RICO) with outlandish claims to represent the interests of the French-speaking world, including such luminaries as the negotiator of America's abdication of its allies in South Vietnam, John Kerry, and the companion to Kofi Annan at the U.N's school for translators in Geneva, Teresa Heinz
In international relations, Louisiana’s foreign partners include the governments of France, the French community of Belgium, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Louisiana now participates in the sometimes-raucous Sommets de la Francophonie as an observer." ]]]]
It was in this environment of corruption, fraud, improper contracts, and kickbacks that public monies were expended to build, maintain, and repair the levees upon which so many lives depended. Washington was suspicious, and was in the process of investigating the honesty of the responsible public servants and the legitimacy of the contractors, among other things.
[[[[ Levee board under federal investigation before Katrina hit Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Rampant public corruption was doing big business in New Orleans long before Hurricane Katrina ever hit. What then Congressman, now Senator David Vitter calls "corrupt, good old boy" practices were apparent in the New Orleans Levee Board just one year before the collapse of regional levees, emergency communications and government services brought the Big Easy to the brink of anarchy. In fact, Senator David Vitter requested a federal investigation into improper practices of a number of public utilities, including the New Orleans Levee Board, and a new Task Force was to have been initiated in the Baton Rouge office, beginning in July 2004.
As Vice-Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee, which holds jurisdiction over the Justice Department, Vitter met with and actively encouraged Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller to establish an additional Public Corruption Task Force in their Louisiana offices.
With the focus on kickbacks and bogus contractors, who was heeding experts calling for a levee disaster from a major hurricane?
Could New Orleans’s descent into quasi-revolutionary chaos be an indirect result of racketeering, kickbacks and procurement fraud by Democrat insiders with ties to a fast-growing organization called "La Francophonie"? " ]]]]
At the time when it became obvious that a catastrophic hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans, the Louisiana National Guard had 65% of its members available for state missions. Only 3,700 were in Iraq. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had several thousand guards specifically trained for support during civil emergencies at her disposal to save the people of New Orleans. There were several hundred public school and transit authority buses in New Orleans which could have been driven by those guards. And those guards could have completely prevented the raping and looting. And Kathleen Babineaux Blanco dragged her feet. Why? The Red Cross was barred by state officials from bringing food and water into New Orleans. Why?
How better for the white Cajun political machine to show the black people of New Orleans that a reformist black mayor could not protect them, and that they needed to remain subservient to the power structure? The SuperDome may indeed have looked like the hold of a slave ship, but it was not a federal slave ship, and it was not a Republican slave ship. It was a slave ship captained by the southern Democrat white masters.
(((ping)))
Yes, I know that any investigative committee will be stacked one way or the other, but many things will be forced out into public view whether the hacks on the committee like it or not.
Thank God for the fact that nationwide talk radio, the internet and countless blogs are keeping the Katrina disaster from sinking all Republican ships.
Any kind of an investigation will help......and we have to keep a sharp eye out for all blame being shoved on the President and the feds. We can't let any appointed commission monkey business happen again.
Leni
My blood is boiling.
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