The welfare state and its role in NO.

[sixgun86gn]

Found this on another site.
Says exactly what I already knew.

by Robert Tracinski

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 shows 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 incompetent 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

[JP87GN]

I agree with that 100%.

[FWD turbo]

That was a great read Sixgun. I couldn't agree more. Of course Mr. Tracinski will now be labeled as a racist, with no sympathy for those "poor people who had no where to go and no way to evacuate themselves when the evacuation order was given." The thing I can't figure out though, is just WHEN did it become the federal govenment's responsibility to take care of everyone? This whole country was formed on the premise of NOT having a strong federal Government, wasn't it? Honestly, in a situation like this, in this country, the Fed should NOT have to step in to protect its citizens from each other. They should be helping rescue people, but there really should be NO NEED for the feds to protect hurricane victims from other hurricane victims. They should already be helping each other by the time the FEDS can get there. Can we all agree on that one?

Really, this is a direct result of the welfare state. It has to be. There is no other logical explanation. When you have a large group of people who cannot provide for and care for themselves on a daily basis (in a wonderful country like ours that is full of opportunity) stuck in a bad situation like this, how can you expect them to suddenly step up, be responsible, and take appropriate action? You can't. It just isn't going to happen. If they can't thrive in this country, how are they going to be able to deal with real, life-threatening adversity that demands cooperation and sacrifice for survival? Don't get me wrong, I am not without real compassion for the victims of this disaster. But the behavior of some of them just makes no sense. You didn't see this type of behavior in the 3rd world countries after the tsunami. Could it possibly be because that although those people are extremely poor, they have to fend for and provide for themselves on a daily basis to ensure their own survival because their govenment doesn't feed, clothe and shelter them? They know about hardship and understand about coming together to do what has to be done when the situation demands it. "Victims" of the welfare state have no comprehension or understanding of this philosophy at all. How can the two not be related? What other explanation could there possibly be? Now some of the behavior is justifiable, but most isn't. Really, if I haven't had clean water to drink for a cuople of days and there are bottles in the grocery store - you better believe I'm going in and taking some. I honestly don't believe that there is anything wrong with that. But why in the hell would you try to carry away a TV? There is no power, your home is destroyed, you aren't going to be able to carry it on the chopper that saves you, (assuming you don't shoot it out of the sky) So what is the point? Greed and stupidity? The real failure IS the welfare state.

(Sorry about the book. This is a subject that I feel quite strongly about. I could go on and on but I will stop there)

[Red Regal T]

Originally Posted by FWD turbo

That was a great read Sixgun. I couldn't agree more. Of course Mr. Tracinski will now be labeled as a racist, with no sympathy for those "poor people who had no where to go and no way to evacuate themselves when the evacuation order was given." The thing I can't figure out though, is just WHEN did it become the federal govenment's responsibility to take care of everyone? This whole country was formed on the premise of NOT having a strong federal Government, wasn't it? Honestly, in a situation like this, in this country, the Fed should NOT have to step in to protect its citizens from each other. They should be helping rescue people, but there really should be NO NEED for the feds to protect hurricane victims from other hurricane victims. They should already be helping each other by the time the FEDS can get there. Can we all agree on that one?

Really, this is a direct result of the welfare state. It has to be. There is no other logical explanation. When you have a large group of people who cannot provide for and care for themselves on a daily basis (in a wonderful country like ours that is full of opportunity) stuck in a bad situation like this, how can you expect them to suddenly step up, be responsible, and take appropriate action? You can't. It just isn't going to happen. If they can't thrive in this country, how are they going to be able to deal with real, life-threatening adversity that demands cooperation and sacrifice for survival? Don't get me wrong, I am not without real compassion for the victims of this disaster. But the behavior of some of them just makes no sense. You didn't see this type of behavior in the 3rd world countries after the tsunami. Could it possibly be because that although those people are extremely poor, they have to fend for and provide for themselves on a daily basis to ensure their own survival because their govenment doesn't feed, clothe and shelter them? They know about hardship and understand about coming together to do what has to be done when the situation demands it. "Victims" of the welfare state have no comprehension or understanding of this philosophy at all. How can the two not be related? What other explanation could there possibly be? Now some of the behavior is justifiable, but most isn't. Really, if I haven't had clean water to drink for a cuople of days and there are bottles in the grocery store - you better believe I'm going in and taking some. I honestly don't believe that there is anything wrong with that. But why in the hell would you try to carry away a TV? There is no power, your home is destroyed, you aren't going to be able to carry it on the chopper that saves you, (assuming you don't shoot it out of the sky) So what is the point? Greed and stupidity? The real failure IS the welfare state.

(Sorry about the book. This is a subject that I feel quite strongly about. I could go on and on but I will stop there)

PLEASE DO!

You've made many good points. I'm sure an overwhelming majority of the folks who stayed, either were in denial, hoped the storm would turn as many others had, or knew the composition of the residents of their neighborhoods. They knew if they left, there homes would probably be looted or burned by the criminal element that rule their neighborhoods. The lawless people rule through intimidation and violence. The honest police can do nothing because innocent people are afraid for their lives, if they get involved. The thugs are enabled by the political correctness that is protected and promoted by liberals. Police hands are tied from coming down on the lawbreakers, and the courts are a revolving door.

It's difficult for the country to attack this problem because of organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP obstructing every avenue to bring this destruction of America under control. As you know, they don't even want a discussion of the subject. They blame it on white racism. If you dare, some liberal will label you as a racist. If you complain about the onslaught of illegal aliens flooding into America, you're labeled a racist. When Arab males are the only terrorists, you're a racist if you want those people searched instead of a 79 year old widow. This is a frontal assault on common sense. What is going on? I'll tell ya..............liberalism.

[whitehot84]

A large number of requests are for METHODONE , Drug addicts are cut off from their sources and this is probably the largest drying out in history. No pun intended.
Where were these people when the evacuations started.? Planning their shopping sprees I suspect.
I'm afraid if I say more I'll be labeled a racist but I didn't know New Orleans was an all black city.

[turbot2496]

A pretty accurate observation from what I've seen although the politically correct media won't report it. Much more correct to call the President, administration and basically the whole country a bunch of racists.

[Red Regal T]

Originally Posted by whitehot84

A large number of requests are for METHODONE , Drug addicts are cut off from their sources and this is probably the largest drying out in history. No pun intended.
Where were these people when the evacuations started.? Planning their shopping sprees I suspect.

I just figured they wanted to be first in line for the handouts.