The line of thought you're ridiculing is straight out of Sowell's "Ethnic America", and is obvious common sense observation.
Looters loot for the loot
Of course they do! Did I or anyone else say otherwise? What Dion said was that at least some of these people probably had never touched wealth before and never would again.
The underlying socioeconomic conditions is who's fault?
Nobody's...or God's. It's part of the march of history. Peoples conquer or get conquered and that has consequences.
Larry, actually you are more to blame since you push the race baiting and sel-vicimization that keeps the lower class from emancipating themselves.
Maybe I'm not being clear. Sorry. I'm trying a new line of thought and am not very good at it.
Those left in New Orleans are the lowest 20% of society and those looting, raping, and murdering are the lowest of the lowest. And they're operating under conditions that would try any man. In any competition there are losers. Not everyone can "emancipate" himself. When you push people too hard bad things happen.
Race is a factor. That can't be denied. My usual line of thought has been that this sort of bad behavior has been demonstrated by no other group in the face of natural disaster. The Japanese in Kobe, whites at Homestead, Asians in the face of the tsunami, etc - all behaved much better. But it's been pointed out to me that disaster exacerbated ethnic hatreds and conflictrs in Sri Lanka. So maybe I was wrong. And how important, how typical is this bad behavior of "race relations"? Is it in any way typical of New Orleans blacks? Of those 100,000 stranded in New Orleans how many behaved badly and how badly?
What about leadership failures? Who failed and how? Nagin has been criticized for not loading people on available buses and just driving them out of town - even if they had no place to stay. A bold move which would have left him open to severe criticism had things not gotten so bad. A failure of vision some say. But Bush is on record as saying no one expected the levees to fail - complete crap. And he didn't drop down into the crowd the way he did after 911. So there's plenty of blame to spread around.