Posted on 09/02/2005 11:54:28 AM PDT by TIADaily.com
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...[read on]
(Excerpt) Read more at tiadaily.com ...
I believe they are the ones the author refers to when he writes: "There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit[.]"
Superb article!
They're going to be anti-incumbent. This mayor's and this governor's careers are over, and those associated with them will have a hard time with the voters. But that anti-incumbent feeling could also work against the GOP in the next Presidential election.
The more general problem is that most Republicans and future Republicans move out of cities like NOLA. The people who are left cling to the Democrats. But come next election -- whatever New Orleans may be by then -- the current set of state and city clowns are gone.
Great article. Thanks.
This sums it up:
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-03-30/news_feat.html
" Before 1974 in Louisiana, people convicted of a felony couldn't vote again unless they got a pardon from the governor. But for the last 30 years, felons have lost their voting rights only while they're in prison or on probation or parole. After that, they can re-register by presenting their discharge papers at the voting registrar's office."
"the 15,000 people released from this state's prisons each year -- 1 in 3 from Orleans and Jefferson parishes alone. "
This is why their elected officials are incompetent and the streets are controlled by criminals.
bttt
Yes!
"[W]ading around in sewage and griping about it" captures the spirit of those who feel they are "victims" of capitialism - a system that is an engine of rapidly expanding economic opportunity for the individual.
The mothers I see on T.V., in New Orleans, propping their children up in front of the cameras so their little voices can angrily DEMAND aid from me? Am I supposed to feel bad if that kind of mother dies?
Here in Chicago a significant minority of the population wades in the metaphorical sewage of their own failure and damns us - and our success - for their misery.
The political fountainhead of this kind of ideological sewage, here in Chicago, is our patronage vote-buying, vote-fixing nomenklatura. They're funded by loot extracted from the productive businesses of the city with commercial real estate taxes that increase every year because our businesses have increase the value of land on which the city stands. Why do tax rates never go down!
How much of all city tax revenues - which now run several billion dollars a year - are consumed by Chicago's welfare-state nomenklatura. Ten, twenty, forty percent? Up until now, there has been no way to guage it, no way to guess at the volume of the kickbacks and ghost payrolling. But recently, in the hired truck scandal, it has been measured.
The end of contract award by kickback cut the cost of hiring trucks to haul freight from $38 million last year to $16 million this year. The freight volume for the city hasn't fallen. What happened, instead, is our state's "untouchable" federal prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald, put the truck contracting thieves behind bars.
If this is how the corrupt city of Chicago hired freight haulers, how do you think a similarly corrupt city, New Orleans, chose its emergency planning organizers? How do you think they contracted emergency response communications? How do you think they hired the firm that developed the city's evaculation plan? How do you think they hired their emergency response command? By merit? With an eye to the hurricane that, sooner or later, was going to hit the city?
Thanks again!
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
How dare you stand in the way of Progress?
Cannibalism forever!
If nothing else, this was an enema that was far overdue. BTW, why didn't some of them want to leave? Because their drug network would be disrupted. IMHO.
"wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness"
Might be true for some - but what about the disabled, the elderly, the infirm?
Good article. Blaming the destruction of a city with inadequate storm defences on the "welfare state" has a nice ring to it but smacks of oversimplification.
Exterminate the weaklings!
I've been saying the same for days here, although I took the concept a bit further.
I blame the welfare state for the utter destruction of black culture in this country. Until the "Great Society" programs of the '60's were enacted, blacks were a far "tighter" people of close-knit communities, heavily influenced by the Christian church. They withstood adversity and rampant racism by sticking together, always seeking to better their circumstances and those of their children and grandchildren.
Students in Harlem used to get some of the top standardized test scores in the country......
Enter idiotic, Socialist, bleeding-heart Liberals and their usual "Let's all feel guilty and throw HUGE amounts of money at the 'problem'!" mindset. Thank you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, you bastard.
Taking FDR's policies to the extreme, this country emptied huge amounts of treasure into innumerable welfare programs. When a people suddenly are treated as wards of the State, they eventually become just that. No need for values such as education, hard work, dedication, ambition, compassion...........just "gimme mine; gimme what I'm OWED". Who needs education or even the church when you have Uncle Sam?
Before any here accuse me of being a racist for saying so, call Bill Cosby and accuse him of the same thing; he's been saying it very publicly and very loudly for months now.
The best thing we could possibly do for blacks in America is totally dismantle our welfare programs. I mean TOTALLY eliminate them.
In fact this tragic storm did 'exterminate the weaklings' because they were ill-equipped to to defend themselves. Dependence on a corrupt, inept government for salvation has real consequences indeed.
Your little juvenile attempt at backhanded slander is what I'd expect from a snot-nosed leftist punk. If you have something substantive to discuss with me bring it on, otherwise STFU.
Here here! 100% right on the money. Well done.
I was saying the same thing. Thanks for this post! I know that I must rely on myself to save myself from anything coming down the pike. Self-reliance should be taught to everyone!!! The puritans had it right afterall.
Well done, Robert. Welcome aboard FR.
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