Corruption Killed New Orleans?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005 Corruption Killed New Orleans? How corrupt is Louisiana? Billy Tauzin once observed that "half the state is under water, the other half is under indictment." This history of corruption may be the proximate cause of the unravelling disaster that ultimately destroyed New Orleans. Policemen participating in looting rather than stopping it is merely the tip of this iceberg. Senator David Vitter had called for federal investigations into several Lousiana public utilities, among them the Orleans Parish Levee Board. The Levee Board was supposed to provide repairs and oversight of the levees. And so to further that end, they invested in, guess what . . . Casinos! That's right. Rather than raising taxes or floating municipal bonds to secure the levees, the Levee Board invested in a myriad of projects having nothing to do with flood control, with an eye towards feeding the patronage machine and rewarding political supporters. Where did the revenues go? No one seems to know. The Canada Free Press asks an interesting question regarding this: 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’? And get this: CIDA [which funds La Francophonie]was founded in 1968 by the ex-president of Power Corp. of Montreal, Maurice Strong, a paranoid, billionaire depopulationist who claims "rich, industrialized countries (America and the Anglosphere) are the greatest threat to the survival of the planet and therefore he, Maurice Strong, has a duty to force them into line. In the 1990s, Strong went on to become the godfather of the $trillion Kyoto trading scandal, with the financial clout to execute his dreams for La Francophonie. Via the invaluable John Batchelor show, featuring journalist Charles Gasparino of Newsweek. 10:50 PM | | |