New Orleans’ recovery is the picture of what happens when you have a culture entrenched in corruption with a welfare entitlement mentality.  There is no one to blame other than themselves and I’m tired of hearing them whine.  When you have people who continually re-elect corrupt officials they get what they deserve. 

Here’s a commentary where the writer admits to the corruption and failures but still wants to blame others expecting “someone” to fix decades of this entrenchment.  If I was the head of an insurance company I wouldn’t cover the area either.  Local  and state officials want to rebuild (with my tax dollars of course) in an area doomed to be flooded again.  Corruption will once again fail to properly build levees and damns yet these officials have the audacity to blame President Bush.  When Louisiana does have a competent politician (Rep. Bobby Jindahl) what do they do?  They smear and spread lies through commercials about him.  Hopefully the entrenched Democrats won’t succeed in their smear tactics and the people in Louisiana outside of New Orleans will prevail to elect a politician who is competent and untainted.

Editor: Pay Heed to New Orleans’ Plight

snip….Nearly two years later, New Orleans is neither better nor stronger, and a bureaucratic stranglehold is choking off its recovery.

From a tinted window 25 stories above the New Orleans business district, I can see the city rotting from the inside out.

Across the street, Dominion Tower, once bustling with office workers and sprinkled with upscale retailers, is abandoned.

The adjacent Hyatt Hotel, where Super Bowl, Sugar Bowl and NCAA Final Four fans relaxed, also is empty.

Rows of camouflaged Humvees wait in a nearby parking lot for the military police who patrol lawless neighborhoods.

Just out of sight are wastelands where people live in cramped trailers or try to rebuild as best they can.

The only attention the city gets these days is as a campaign prop for some of the presidential contenders.

Among citizens, there is anger. There should be. For those who see New Orleans as someone else’s agony, a caution: This kind of governmental and political nonchalance could greet you at your most dire moment.

The main program to help homeowners rebuild from Katrina - the $8 billion federally funded, state-administered and inaptly named Road Home - is going broke and may be short as much as $4 billion. Public schools, firehouses, police stations and transit routes are closed. Hospitals have not returned to normal capacity, and those that are open say they are losing millions of dollars providing medical care for the poor. There is little political will to build a levee system that would prevent the kind of flooding Katrina caused.

snip…If Katrina was the perfect storm, New Orleans was the perfect victim. Political corruption and incompetence in city government and an anemic economy made the city as vulnerable to turmoil as the levees that failed.

Sadly, the situation has worsened, and many of the leaders New Orleans must count on are fading from the scene or mired in scandal.

snip….Perhaps taking cues from the leaderless, chaotic recovery, a crisis of confidence has tainted the local corporate contingent. Companies have heaped charitable contributions on the city, but some are pulling jobs out. There are murmurs that more may do so. Companies have a hard time getting executives to transfer here. Meanwhile, a University of New Orleans poll showed public sentiment is so bad that 29 percent of the current resident population may leave.

America should not allow New Orleans to die a slow death.

“No one in government has a true sense of the reality of what is happening here,'’ Powell observed.

A great American city is withering. The people with power must be made to care.

There are thousands of volunteers who have gone and continue to go to NOLA they aren’t leaving it to the government to fix everything. Maybe New Orleans needs to die in order to rise up and shake off the culture of corruption and welfare entitlement.

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