| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"LP" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2005 02:04:03 AM |
| Object: |
Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 shows a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes
people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the
Superdome?
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 one night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She
studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public
housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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.
[Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story,
but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous
reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans
Police Department; see here and here.]
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
incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city
government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly
complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them
and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a
description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of
the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing
projects.
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
Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual
Activist magazine.
Additional comments on Katrina by Robert Tracinski in TIA Daily:
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
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| User: "turk" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 05:11:36 AM |
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"LP" <whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com...
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News
Channel,
"While watching the coverage on Fox News Channel"...'nuff said. Credibility
gone by now if not long before. Next...
turk
--
"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely,
the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great
and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire
at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H. L.
Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920.
.
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| User: "Blue Hornet" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 08:10:13 PM |
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turk wrote:
"LP" <whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com...
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News
Channel,
"While watching the coverage on Fox News Channel"...'nuff said. Credibility
gone by now if not long before. Next...
You and Mark can make all the ad hominem attacks you want to against
the piece, but I note that neither of you has disputed the facts or
argued them in a different way.
I'm not particularly put out by all of the so-called "looting", or
"finding supplies" (depending on who was doing the photo captioning and
the color of the people in the photos) of the survivors. After all,
people have to have clean water to drink and, eventually, food. So if
stores were broken into for food and water--for survival--that can be
justified. But I have been mystified since the beginning of this
thing, and continue to be puzzled, by the frequent reports of shooting
at a) police and fire fighters trying to perform rescues, b)
contractors attempting to fix broken levees and c) rescue
helicopters--at any time.
As for looting stores of general merchandise, there's no excuse for
that at any time. I'd like to see statistics on how often that is done
by people "with jobs", that is "the working poor and middle class". As
the writer said, this tragedy seems to have brought people's real
natures to the fore. Most, of course, were trying to do the right
thing by saving themselves and their families, helping neighbors and
performing heroic rescues. But too many of the ones who were left seem
not to have shared those values.
A good article, I thought.
.
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 07:23:33 AM |
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In <9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com>, LP
<whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote:
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level.
Oh great. Randroids.
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long
after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have
been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing.
Many who could have been were not. That's to the
government's shame."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2D511CBB
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| User: "duke" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 07:46:33 AM |
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On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 07:23:33 -0500, "Mark K. Bilbo" <alt-atheism@org.webmaster>
wrote:
In <9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com>, LP
<whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote:
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level.
Oh great. Randroids.
So, mark, here it is about 14 days after Katrina hit and Governor Kathleen
Blanco STILL hasn't addressed the people of Louisiana. Where is your disgust?
Where is your disgust that the gov took 3-4 days AFTER the passage of Katrina to
sign the papers moving the Federal troops in.
Where is your disgust that mayor C. Ray parked the busses instead of taking his
people out of New Orleans?
Come on, mark. Be a man. Speak up for your elected officials and shame them
for their incompetence.
duke
*****
"The Mass is the most perfect form of Prayer."
Pope Paul VI
*****
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| User: "quibbler" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 11:20:30 AM |
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In article <9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com>,
whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com says...
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first,
I see, so this is a "scholarly" analysis produced by idle chit chat
amongst propagandistic idiots who happen to be married to each other.
Those people attempting to blame the so-called "welfare state" for the
disaster are both stupid and uninformed liars. By their argument,
xianity, which also claims to help the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the
starving, etc, would have produced a "welfare state" fifty times worse
than that starting in the Great Society days. Idiots like Pat Buchannan
are declaring the New Deal a failure based upon the fact that people are
still poor in Lousiana without realizing that, by the same token, xianity
has been around for over 2000 years and people are still poor as well.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear that people were far more impoverished
before the New Deal and Great Society than afterward. These people in
Louisiana were literally sharecroppers, cotton pickers and sugar cane
cutters. Now at least they have educations and most of the people
swinging the machetes in the sugar cane fields are third world immigrants
on temporary visas. The constitution states that the federal government
has the responsiblity to "provide for the general welfare". Now
revisionistic idiots on the right are trying to insist that government
has no responsibility, even in a disaster, to help its citizens. Their
free market solutions to evacuation failed and their greed prevented them
from adequately funding the levee system in the first place. The failure
was not the Great Society or the New Deal, but rather the failure of
supply side economics and freeper fantasies of the free market and
unregulated gun ownership.
... 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public
housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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.
[Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story,
but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous
reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans
Police Department; see here and here.]
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
incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city
government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly
complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them
and then shooting at those who come to rescue them?this is not just a
description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of
the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing
projects.
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
Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual
Activist magazine.
Additional comments on Katrina by Robert Tracinski in TIA Daily:
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
--
Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com)
"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the
threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow'
disease, and many others, but I think a case can be
made that faith is one of the world's great evils,
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to
eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins
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| User: "Meteorite Debris" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 07:53:15 PM |
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On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 10:20:30 -0600 the ET form known as
quibbler<quibbler247@yahoo.com> sent a radio signal across the vast
expanse of deep space -._.--._.--._.--._.--._.--._.
I see, so this is a "scholarly" analysis produced by idle chit chat
amongst propagandistic idiots who happen to be married to each other.
Those people attempting to blame the so-called "welfare state" for the
disaster are both stupid and uninformed liars.
Exactly. Australia in the 70s was MORE of a welfare state than
Louisiana of the USA but Cyclone Tracy was nowhere near as big a
disaster as Hurricane Katrina.
--
Remove YOUR_SHOES before replying
apatriot #1, atheist #1417,
Chief EAC prophet
Jason Gastrich is praying for me on 8 January 2009
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pk1956/
Apatriotism Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apatriotism
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
-Mencken
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| User: "duke" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
12 Sep 2005 05:11:52 AM |
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On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 10:20:30 -0600, quibbler <quibbler247@yahoo.com> wrote:
In article <9dl7i15u0oo96imjc6odm31lenetka4erl@4ax.com>,
whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com says...
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first,
I see, so this is a "scholarly" analysis produced by idle chit chat
amongst propagandistic idiots who happen to be married to each other.
Now you're beginning to understand the truth finally, quib.
duke
*****
"The Mass is the most perfect form of Prayer."
Pope Paul VI
*****
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| User: "Jim07D5" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 02:46:57 PM |
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LP <whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> said:
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
Of course they weren't ready. Does anyone not think that the US State
can stop any terrorist attack it wants to, but cannot stop hurricanes?
--- Jim07D5
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| User: "Meteorite Debris" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
11 Sep 2005 07:50:53 PM |
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On 11 Sep 2005 02:04:03 -0500 the ET form known as
LP<whirl_pool@nospam.hotmail.com> sent a radio signal across the vast
expanse of deep space -._.--._.--._.--._.--._.--._.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans.
Ideologicical vulture swooping down to feast on the dead of New
Orleans.
--
Remove YOUR_SHOES before replying
apatriot #1, atheist #1417,
Chief EAC prophet
Jason Gastrich is praying for me on 8 January 2009
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pk1956/
Apatriotism Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apatriotism
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
-Mencken
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| User: "duke" |
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| Title: Re: Hurricane Exposes Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State |
12 Sep 2005 05:13:04 AM |
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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 10:20:53 +0930, Meteorite Debris
<epicurus1@YOUR_SHOESoptusnet.com.au> wrote:
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans.
Ideologicical vulture swooping down to feast on the dead of New
Orleans.
Yep, a true liberal. Running from the truth, aren't you, mad dog!!!
duke
*****
"The Mass is the most perfect form of Prayer."
Pope Paul VI
*****
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