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Wyoming
09-04-05, 07:21 PM
(Take your time - Read it through - It makes a ton of sense)


An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski - Sep 02, 2005


It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did
not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).




So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "


The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article showed National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of- life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the ancompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.


Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Joseph P Carey
09-04-05, 08:09 PM
I can't help but to agree with this article, word for word, sentence for sentence, and paragraph for paragraph. We have already discussed this on another thread, and as I said then, I will say now. I have never seen some many people so unwilling to help themselves.

What I did not know, and what the Mayor of New Orleans has not said when he was complaining and condemning the President, was that he did not transport the prisoners from the County Jail, but instead, set them free in a lawless environment of a destitute city among their future innocent victims, free to shoot people on the streets without fear of prosecution, free to rape innocent women without fear of retribution, and free to shoot at people whose only intent was to help others.

It seems to me that there is a lot of finger pointing in NO, but I didn't see any hands getting dirty in cleaning up the problem. Everybody is waiting for the Federal Government, when they knew that Posse Comitatus must be fulfilled for the Feds to acts.


I saw the mayor on TV Today, when he was being interviewed, he was still pointing fingers at the US Government, but when asked, when he called for help from the Federal Government, he could not answer; when he was asked, why he did not send buses for the poor in the projects, he did not answer; and, when he was asked, why his police were not in the streets stopping the looting with orders to shoot to kill, he said nothing! For a man with so many words, he had very few.

Now, I just saw him on 60 minutes singing his same old song! Now, he is complaining about giving up power to the Feds!

greensideout
09-04-05, 09:56 PM
The news clips were unbelieveable! At one point my wife and I looked at each other while watching the armed troops arrive and she said what I was thinking, "This is America?"

I guess my point is this---if that can happen in New Orleans, it can happen in most any city in America.

We have more than just cities to rebuild after Katrina, we must rebuild a society or the storm will never end.

yellowwing
09-05-05, 12:11 AM
Robert Tracinski is running the same scripted horse **** that we will be seeing more of when then spin machine gets traction. "The people in poverty are to blame."

LEADERSHIP does not mean pass the buck and hide behind plausible denial.

Joseph P Carey
09-05-05, 12:47 AM
I don't know Wing! Would you have been sitting there doing nothing and waiting for Washington types to deliver on their promises? Did you see any middle class people shooting each other? Did you know that NO has the highest murder rates before the storm of a city that size, not by a little either, but by a wide margin? Did you know that the Mayor ordered the police to release all the prisoners from the County Jail, and then did nothing to get them out of town?

Do not confuse poor with criminal! There is a big difference!

Wyoming
09-05-05, 07:09 AM
Originally posted by yellowwing
Robert Tracinski is running the same scripted horse **** that we will be seeing more of when then spin machine gets traction. "The people in poverty are to blame."

LEADERSHIP does not mean pass the buck and hide behind plausible denial.

Wing, I gotta go with Joe Carey on this one.

I really don't believe it is a 'blame thing', just a view of the news as I, and others, have seen, AND, the MSM can't, or won't report.

The fallout from Jussy and Al would be incredible. Why Cindy and RFK Jr would probably set up camp on the Huey P. Long bridge.

Think it through, 911, as horrendous as it was, did the city go into the same mode as New Orleans? Lootings, shootings, rape, and general mayhem. I'm sure it did in cases, but it appears nothing like what we are witnessing in New Orleans.

end

yellowwing
09-05-05, 01:51 PM
release all the prisoners from the County Jail, and then did nothing to get them out of town?
And just exactly how would he gotten them out of town? Bump them ahead of the 30,000+ citizens?

He made the tough decision to release them and hope that a few policemen and deputies could watch them.

NYC still had infrastructure and a damaged but still functional civil service of police and fire. Lower Manhatten was the only wrecked area. What would have happened if 80% of New York had been destroyed.

Tracinski writes, "Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicles", that is crap.

Its been documented (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050903/ap_on_re_us/katrina_national_guard) that the Louisiana Governor had already started contacting other Governors to send troops.

Think about it, right or wrong we are supporting the impoverished with welfare and housing subsidies. Its a begrudging burden and economic drag on all of us.

But is it moral to draw the line there. "We'll feed you and house you, but we are not obligated to make it a priority to save your life!"

dcline
09-05-05, 04:04 PM
Don't ask what your country can do for you. But what YOU can do for your country. Some of the best word to come out of a Democrat. Welfare is a useless wast it promotes laziness
and a not my problem additude. It has done nothing but make this country weaker.

yellowwing
09-05-05, 05:14 PM
Was the decision on Miranda v Arizona judicial activism? Designed to tax the rest of us so the poor could get legal representation?

Where do we draw the line?

Is it the Conservative Utopia to live behind barbed wire armed camps to keep out the undesirables? How much would that cost?

GunnyL
09-05-05, 06:22 PM
I lived in Chicago, I've been to Robert Taylor Homes, Altgelt Gardens, Cabrini Greene, I've been to the "Projects" They were in my Recruiting Area. And unlike the Dumb A55 Democrats and Anti-War types would have you believe, we didn't aggressively recruit there!! You aren't going to find too many quality enlistments in those areas and may get yourself shot in the process. I've seen what the Welfare State has given us. Generations of people who've never held a job and never done anything to help themselves.
Yellowwing; obviously you didn't see all of the City and School buses sitting up to their windows in Water that could have been used to evacuate the poor. They estimate they could have gotten out 20,000 in just one trip. The Mayor of NO directed for people to go to the Super Dome, with no provisions for food and water or to protect the people who went there. Tracinski hit it on the nose with a lot of what he said. Liberals always want to believe that their handout programs are helping people, no matter how many lives they destroy.

GunnyL

Joseph P Carey
09-05-05, 06:55 PM
Wing,

With all due respect, Wing, look at those films you see on TV, and note that all close ups are of women, old folks, children, and the infirmed, but when they did allow a wide view, look closer. Every second person is an able bodied male carrying the signs, or walking around smoking a cigarette. It is surprising that they could not get food, but, somewhere, they found cigaretts. I saw one man complaining that all was lost, but his buddy walked up to him smnoking a cigaette and he threw half of it away as the cameras were filming, I also noted that he was wearing all new clothing, both the buddy and the man smoking were, and way in the back corner, there sat a man drinking from a pint bottle, and you could be sure by his actions that it was not water.

We all have our priorities!

When 911 occurred, people went to the streets and directed traffic to relieve police officers of the burden; lunch rooms opened with free food and coffee; help came in from construction crews that were working in the area; and construction workers were assisting FDNY and NYPD with all they could do. They showed the American spirit!

Are you going to tell me that those able bodied men in New Orleans, while waiting for government assistance, could not move the dead bodies from the area? or, even cleaned up the area? Or, could not have gone to get food for the other people waiting? They didn't even think like that!

The difference between NYC and NO was that the criminals did not take control of the streets, and that was due mainly to the residents of NYC, and Mayor that went to ground zero, and was working each and every day to improve conditions without any federal intervention.

The Governor of LA should not have wasted her time talking to other Governors, but to the Feds, she did not!

The people of NYC deserve a pat on the back, and the people of NO deserve a slap in the face!

yellowwing
09-05-05, 08:03 PM
"The difference between NYC and NO was that the criminals did not take control of the streets," - like I said, only lower Manhattan was destroyed.

80% of New Orleans was destroyed. Where would they move the dead bodies to? The Garden District did very well on the high ground. But believe me, I've made that hike when I was 'slightly incapacitated', from downtown back out to Uptown. And I didn't
have a corpse dragging me down.

Smokes? They are pretty darn great, but they alone won't keep you going for 5 days. Even looted Jack Daniels is not that miraculous.

Anyway, we finally got boots on the ground. Lets get'er done.

Joseph P Carey
09-05-05, 09:25 PM
Originally posted by yellowwing
"The difference between NYC and NO was that the criminals did not take control of the streets," - like I said, only lower Manhattan was destroyed.

80% of New Orleans was destroyed. Where would they move the dead bodies to? The Garden District did very well on the high ground. But believe me, I've made that hike when I was 'slightly incapacitated', from downtown back out to Uptown. And I didn't
have a corpse dragging me down.

Smokes? They are pretty darn great, but they alone won't keep you going for 5 days. Even looted Jack Daniels is not that miraculous.

Anyway, we finally got boots on the ground. Lets get'er done.

I don't think you are getting my point, Wing! I am talking of the dead bodies right at the SuperDome, inches away from children at play, while they are waiting for buses. Someone could have moved those bodies away from the Community of people, and no one did. They just let the body rot within inches of them. They could have moved them over to the edge of the waiting area instead of living amoung them.

Laziness and sloth is no excuse!

As far as the Alcohol, cigarettes and clothing, if they could loot that kind of booty, they could have also scored some dry food stores for the community of the poeople that were waiting for buses. They did not!

As far as NYC! There were no transportation out of the city, the people walked for miles across the bridges to NJ. There was no complaining that the Government was not there with busses for them. These Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants and what have you walked out without government assistance. Looting would have been profitable in the financial district of NYC, and there was none! The People of NYC did not surrender! They got up on their hind legs and they did something, if only just to walk out, they did something!

The People of NYC assisted the wounded, they pulled rubble away from the WTC with their bare hands, they directed traffic, and they helped the indigent from the buildings in the area. They were a city of residents and workers that helped others. There was no walking over the dead in NYC!

yellowwing
09-05-05, 10:36 PM
These Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants and what have you walked out without government assistance. Looting would have been profitable in the financial district of NYC, and there was none! The People of NYC did not surrender! They got up on their hind legs and they did something, if only just to walk out, they did something!
My Lord! Our Right and Honorable Brother Joseph P. is championing for Yankee Doctors and Lawyers? Next thing you know he'll be telling us bail bondsmen have an honorable place in out Great Society.
:banana:

Joseph P Carey
09-06-05, 12:45 AM
Originally posted by yellowwing

My Lord! Our Right and Honorable Brother Joseph P. is championing for Yankee Doctors and Lawyers? Next thing you know he'll be telling us bail bondsmen have an honorable place in out Great Society.
:banana:

My dear brother Wing has no idea how honorable the work of the bail bondsman is. For one, it enables the poor and those without property, accused of a crime (Innocent until proven guilty) the right of bail expressed in the Constitution, and it is well known that the bail bondsman assists the criminal justice system of the US in providing space in the jails for more so dangerous prisoners.

Added to that, bail is the only legal form of slavery in the USA. When a prisoner is released to bail, he is considered in the custody of the bail bondsman like he would be in the custody of the County Sheriff. He may have his freedom so long as the bail bondsman allows him to do so. Should he violate his promise to abide by the conditions of release to the bail bondsman, he may be hunted down, across state lines, and brought back to justice in chains without extradition, none is needed, because he is considered an escaping prisoner, and the bail agent may break and enter his door of his abode to effect his surrender to the proper court.

Tell me someone else with that power over a human being in the USA, and is not considered honorable to the court.

yellowwing
09-06-05, 12:59 AM
Actually it sounds like good 'bidness to me. I in-debt myself for $10,000 on behalf of a citizen, I should get the right of extraordinary measures.

But where is the Evangelical Political base crying out, "When I was naked you clothed me. When I was hungry you fed me...", or something like that.

So far the Evangelical Political base is just calling for government assassinations. And we want France to dance our tune...

Joseph P Carey
09-06-05, 02:33 AM
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by yellowwing
Actually it sounds like good 'bidness to me. I in-debt myself for $10,000 on behalf of a citizen, I should get the right of extraordinary measures.

But where is the Evangelical Political base crying out, "When I was naked you clothed me. When I was hungry you fed me...", or something like that.

So far the Evangelical Political base is just calling for government assassinations. And we want France to dance our tune...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



First of all, the French can't dance, least wise not with partners!

As far as the Evangelical bit goes, you will have to talk to someone other then me on that subject!

The Business of Bail was both adrenaline and ulcers! But, you meet the most interesting of people!

DBROWN72848
09-06-05, 03:22 AM
When are we going to stop going to the aid of countries who
insist on making deals for their assistance? It makes me angry
when we use our resources and people, and then have some
country spit on america.

Joseph P Carey
09-06-05, 10:33 AM
Originally posted by DBROWN72848
When are we going to stop going to the aid of countries who
insist on making deals for their assistance? It makes me angry
when we use our resources and people, and then have some
country spit on america.

Brother Brown,

Where do we draw the line, and who draws the line, is the answer to that question. Our government changes every two years with the election of a new Congress. What you have to ask yourself is, what will be the heart string issue that will get certain Congressmen elected in the next Congressional elections?