Corruption in New Orleans. Who knew?

An article written in the Washington Post last week talks about a New Orleans rife with corruption and racial dissent. Even the reconstruction commission New Orleans mayor Ray Nagen created has been fraught with internal fighting, and there are fears that the commission could be “reduced to irrelevancy because of the state government's own commission and the recent appointment of Donald E. Powell, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., to oversee federal relief work.”

New Orleans's fractured leadership has struggled for years to keep its finances in order and to bolster its clout in Baton Rouge and Washington... In a recent Louisiana State University poll of 419 business executives, corruption was ranked among the worst aspects of doing business in Louisiana. Investors and managers elsewhere are reluctant to come "because they don't want to pay the corruption tax," said Rafael C. Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission.

"We've seen every type of corruption imaginable," said U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, whose office indicted 44 public officials in the past fiscal year alone. He pointed to skimming, bribery and shakedowns across a spectrum of government employment: judges, police, teachers, administrators and traffic court workers.

In August, FBI agents raided the Washington and New Orleans homes of eight-term Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), suspecting he had illegally pocketed an investor's money. They reportedly found a large amount of cash in a freezer. The same month, a grand jury charged Glenn Haydel, uncle of former mayor Marc Morial, with skimming $550,000 in city money.

In a development that offers little comfort for funders of the post-Katrina rebuilding project, three Louisiana emergency-preparedness officials are awaiting trial on charges that they tried to block federal auditors from uncovering the alleged misuse of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. FEMA is demanding that the state repay $30 million, alleging that the money was mishandled.

Asked recently how he would make sure the requestedfederal money for rebuilding would be spent wisely, Nagin replied "You know about our colorful past?" and laughed for a full five seconds.

A full five seconds! Because corruption is real funny! Perhaps New Orleans has such horrible crime and ghettos because the money that is supposed to be being spent on urban development is getting pocketed by public officials. The article goes on to talk about the failing school system in New Orleans stating that 73 of the more than 120 city schools are considered to be failing.

A significant uncertainty is how large the city will be, and how many of its more than 450,000 residents will return, given an economic base that has been shrinking for years, especially since the oil and gas business migrated to Houston. The Port of New Orleans, for generations an economic engine, is so mechanized that it needs just 2,500 workers on an average day. New Orleans has one Fortune 500 company.

Analysts doubt that the largely unskilled workforce, even if it does come back, can sustain a prosperous modern economy. One in four adults has no high school diploma. The poverty rate in New Orleans is more than twice the national average, and the crime rate is among the nation's worst. Forty-six percent of Orleans Parish households bring home less than $25,000 per year.

"People are tired of sending money there, and it never goes for what it's intended. Outside New Orleans, they would bet the farm that it would be stolen or wasted," the Baton Rouge political analyst said. "A lot of people ask how Orleans Parish will be a better place based on what we've seen in the last 30 years."

The people in southern Louisiana have been talking about the corruption in New Orleans for decades. Decades! That would suggest that people knew about the problem. So the question is: why wasn’t anything done about it? Because the checks and balances of the city are obviously corrupt. Unfortunately, there cannot be honest government without checks and balances.