Chicago as Corrupt as New Orleans?

Slate has a piece on Chicago corruption
written by Dan Engber that covers some of the bases and points out that LA and Miami actually have higher elected-official crime rates than the Windy City.

I had a vivid little sojourn into the fringes of Chicago politics when I raised $100K from Amoco to push for NAFTA at a time early in '93 when the Clinton push for a free trade area was stuck in a slough of despond. Using my old CSIS contacts, we set up a big successful conference in DC with Bill Bradley and Bill Richardson among the star participants. Somehow the process kick-started itself shortly thereafter and I have at least timeline-evidence that I did my tiny part to get the eventual NAFTA legislation before Congress.

Subsequently, a year later a lawyer friend of mine who was a partner of William Daley, brother of the mayor [and shortly to become Sec'y of Commerce], got me an hour-long meeting with Bill at their sumptuous law digs. The meeting was cut short as Daley quickly ascertained that my ability to raise Amoco money for NAFTA [Amoco had a Mexico Entry Strategy at the time] did not extend to more political areas of pecuniary dispensation. So Bill Daley scuttled out about 20 minutes later, but not without subtely disparaging Amoco's [and my own] role in the NAFTA runup to passage.
Strangely, he himself appeared not very excited about NAFTA either.

My point in bringing this up lies in the bottom-line nature of Chicago politics nowadays. Actually, I had several chances to handshake Dick Daley's hand and he is much more affable and politically adept than his brother---at least from my continuing observations of the Chicago political to-and-fro.

My final question is wondering why Bill Daley acquiesced when Clinton ordered Commerce to delete any ethnic background descriptions of European ancestry from the 2000 census. His own kin, the Irish, already numbered 50 million, second only to around 60 million Americans of German ancestry. The English lagged behind at third place. Was Clinton worried about the Catholic conservatism of the Irish or the natural conservatism of the Germans being stimulated by ethnic self-awareness?

Finally, a military vet friend of mine down here in Boca had a grandfather who was in charge of the Corps of Engineers maintaining the dikes in New Orleans. My friend says the NO dikes were weak because long ago corrupt NO pols began requiring the COE to bid out the required building and maintenance to local contractors, who naturally dispensed generously to said local pols, and of course, oversight was lenient to these contractors.

So blaming Katrina on Bush is as sensible as blaming 9/11 on Bush. Democratic chicanery and malfeasance in both cases is far more responsible for the twin disasters the Dems are trying to pin on GWB.