NY Daily News - Errol Lewis: Ineptitude leads to death

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/343814p-293491c.html

All across America, viewers choked up Sunday - you had to - watching Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, adjacent to New Orleans, go on "Meet the Press" to tell the agonizing story of one of his top aides, the county's emergency management director. "His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you,'" Broussard recounted.

The manager's mother called every day from Tuesday through Friday, but no help came. "And she drowned on Friday night," Broussard concluded, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the Greater New Orleans area," is how Broussard put it. The riveting scene was reminiscent of the way New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin broke down and wept during a radio interview a few days earlier, begging federal and state officials to "get off your asses and let's do something."

Behind the tears, you could hear that Nagin and Broussard know full well what outsiders are only beginning to understand: They are part of a system of government that is broken at all levels, rife with cronyism and corruption and their inevitable consequence, incompetence.

and failure to the federal level.

The first few paragraphs made it look like dumping it all on Louisiana/New Orleans local governments.