Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the...

[Guest bengalrick]

[i]September 5, 2005
[b]Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State[/b]
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.
[b]
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.
Article Continues Below[/b]

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. [b]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.[/b]

[b]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).[/b]

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.'"

[b]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.[/b]

[b]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?[/b]

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 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: [b]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 [url="http://www.columbiatribune.com/2005/Aug/20050831News017.asp"]here[/url] and [url="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04police.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1125839324-Gx/WKaOOvv/dZllBg1criA"]here[/url].][/b]

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.

[b]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.[/b]

[b]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.[/b]

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. [b]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.[/b] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img]

[b]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.[/b]

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. [b](isn't this the truth...)[/b]

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.
Robert Tracinski is Editor and Publisher of The Intellectual Activist.[/i]

[img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img]
[img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img]
[img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/41.gif[/img]

this article makes alot of sense... this isn't the america i know....

consider the comparisons before spouting off on this article... its the damn truth...

[Guest steggyD]

Welfare is an addiction, or a form of slavery, if you will. Use it to get into a better situation, but never become reliant upon it. If there are no jobs in New Orleans, than, I don't know, it's hard to fix everything. But something needs to be done, this is obvious.

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel[/quote]


[img]http://www.capmag.com/images2y346y/people/tracinski.jpg[/img]
[b]Robert W. Tracinski [/b]


[i]I have heard it all now.....[/i]






[img]http://www.tiscali.nl/images/3/3/FearLoathing1.jpg[/img]
[i]Maybe I need to just start doing drugs [/i]

[Guest steggyD]

Do you think living off of welfare is a good thing, BJ?

[Guest BlackJesus]

[b][quote]When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion.[/quote][/b]

[img]http://tinypic.com/dea39c.jpg[/img]
[img]http://s89194761.onlinehome.us/mypetgoat.jpg[/img]



[img]http://hughesforamerica.typepad.com/hughes_for_america/images/capt.capm10208301856.bush__capm102.jpg[/img]

[Guest steggyD]

Have you ever focued on any issue other than finding Bush's faults? Ever? Everything wrong in this country is because of the President?

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]Do you think living off of welfare is a good thing, BJ?[/quote]

[i][b]What kind of bullshit question is that... of course not, I would like it if Welfare was not a necessity but it is under our current system of corporate communism. People forget

1. You can not get Welfare unless you have Children
2. The Welfare money is "supposed" to be a subsidy to ensure that the child gets basic needs of care..... Housing and food are necessities in this equation
3. Most welfare recipients are single mothers with several children (that's what the welfare stands for - the Kids "welfare". You also have to have kids to get food stamps. Now I wish she would not have had kids, or that the man would have stayed (if in this instance he left) but now that she has those kids..... do we just not feed them? If the mother has young children who are not school age yet... who will watch those kids... most of what she makes will go right to daycare and thus they will still be just as poor. It is better for her to at least stay at home and mother those kids and then get provided the money to make sure they eat.... (if there is a father alive in this case he should also be forced to pay child support).
4. But equating the fact that these elderly and poor drown to the fact that they are in his mind parasites..... is a fucking joke. He needs to focus on the CEO parasites that walked off with 9 billion dollars of reconstruction money from Iraq. Or the parasites that ran off with billions from the several companies that had accounting fraud. Many of the ones he would have exterminated, or starved are -elderly, - mentally ill , - drug addicts (where instead of being given treatment, we incarcerate them and then let them back out, meaner than ever with new tricks of the trade), and some are victims of racism, poor educations, bad parenting, getting caught up in the wrong group, not being able to experiment as easy as whites can (IE Bush does coke for years it is called partying, a black guy does coke and gets caught he gets 10 years in prison), and yes there are some asshole criminals..... etc etc etc however there is a structurally violent system at play that creates the disease of poverty....

me and this jackoff both agree that poverty is a disease.... but what he thinks is the cure I think is the cause. [/b][/i]

[Guest steggyD]

Ok, so now we are getting somewhere. Conversation outside of posting pictures of Bush doing miscellaneous things. Wow!

[Guest steggyD]

On the drug issue, I agree completely. I believe drugs should be legalized, or at least give people treatment instead of throwing them into prison, where they learn new tricks. Belive me, white people get into prison for drugs also, at least poor white people do. I grew up with poor people, not in a suburb or anything like that. So I am pretty knowledgeable with these issues. I'm not some spoiled white brat.

Anyways, yes, kids are needed for welfare. I have seen instances, though, where the man really does stick around, but they never marry, and he does not live there on the books. Why? Because they lose the welfare. He works, whether it be legal work or not, and they still use the system to better themselves. I've seen people end up with more material goods than my family, where my father never accepted any money from the government, yet worked his ass off on a hot roof all summer long. I'm talking about white people too, so this is not a race thing. I believe that poor people share the same attributes, no matter what the skin color is.

But I also realize that some women are left with noone to help them. Men too, for that matter, I've seen women run off and leave a man with kids to take care of. They may be in need of welfare, yes.

It is hard to decide who really deserves welfare and who doesn't. That would take so much money, and many resources, as if each person is given a spy, to make sure you are not taking advantage of the situation. Then you have big brother in your house, and noone likes that. What to do?

[Guest bengalrick]

[i]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.[/i]

this is the main point in the article imo...

bj, like most programs, welfare is great on the surface, but the loopholes and the losers that abuse it, has made it to be another crutch that holds people down... steggy's example of how two people might live together but refuse to get married b/c they will lose welfare is a sound example... if they wouldn't have relied on welfare for so long, they would realize that recieving it hurts them and if they work for it theirselves, they better themselves emensly...
[i]
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[/i]

another great quote from the article...

[Guest bengalrick]

[i]
me and this jackoff both agree that poverty is a disease.... but what he thinks is the cure I think is the cause.[/i] - bj

anytime you are given anything for free, you don't appreciate it... this goes for the welfare parasites, along w/ the rich guys children... THAT is the cause... the cure is self reliance and pushing people... how does welfare help a muthafuckin' thing?? if the woman has a child but can't afford to pay for them or don't have the time to go to work and pay out child care, then they don't deserve to have the baby... they need to give them up to adoption where there is a list of people that are willing to take ANY baby, reguardless of race or what environment they were brought up in... they shouldn't be given money so they can raise this child up in an environment that will hamper their devolpment or teach them how they can live off of government money...

a child is affected more than anything, by the environment they were raised in and the quality of parents the parents were....

[Homer_Rice]

Yes, let's blame the welfare state.

This is unprofound and pretty much what one might expect from an Objectivist. Read Ayn Rand's [u]The Virtue of Selfishness.[/u]

[Homer_Rice]

Why do some people dislike the Bushes? Because they think like [url="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054719"]this.[/url]