Rebuilding The Big Easy

It seems to me there is an element of the ant and the grasshopper in this whole New Orleans debacle. For many, many years experts of various disciplines warned that a big hurricane could prove disastrous to the below sea level Crescent City. How did the governor and mayor respond? Graft, indolence, business as usual in the Big Easy. In fact they used the potential of imminent disaster to get federal funds to shore up the levy system and then did a half assed job of it. Why do I lump the responsibility on the local and state governments? Because they fiddled while storm clouds gathered, and who is more responsible to the citizens most affected than the mayor and the governor they alone elected?. Now that the inevitable has happened the grasshopper class in The Big Easy want the ants of America to rebuild their city. We should, but to accept a benefit is to sell ones freedom, in this case the freedom to piss away tens of millions of dollars on local patronage as is their normal way of doing business. The string attached to any money to rebuild New Orleans should be a super strict accounting of every last cent and any weasel caught with his/her hand in the till should be tossed into that delightful Louisiana institution, Angola prison, until they are old and grey.