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New Orleans Article Worth Reading

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posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 09:38 AM
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I recieved a Email with this story......... It makes sence.

New Orleans Article Worth Reading
You may not agree, but you should read it.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

An Objectivist Review

by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist

September 2, 2005





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 inte! rsection) 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 evac! uating 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

If true, that the jail populations were not evacuated and just let out, then chaos and terror would rule the steets. Is it possible that they (gov) couldnt see this coming, or was it part of some plan to justify the implimentation of marshal law, and the police state.. Alex Jones, where are you?







[edit on 5-9-2005 by All Seeing Eye]



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 10:13 AM
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Very good and it could not have been said better. Some may see your view as racisist but I know it goes beyond race and is truley a society problem.
This is the best thing that could happen to this area if it were not for the death and distruction because it had become such a large welfare zone that just bread more and more problems.



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 10:20 AM
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Great post.

I have been thinking the same thing since the first looting started.

Alot of these people have never had any incentive to be resourcefull or self sufficient because they have been spoon fed by social programs for four generations.

Our government has created this social mess and now niether the people who are entraped by the system or the government have a clue.



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 10:25 AM
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Racisist, not in the least! It just shows how a portion of the population is used as pawns to further a "higher" agenda. Katrina, the ones left behind, intentionally! Of course they woud be at each others throats, and anyone else who gets in thier way.

Law of the jugle applies when that portion of the population is left to thier own ends, not hard to see the results. Now the media is playing the story full force to show how the guard and army are needed to restore law and order and that it will apply to all the population when thier time comes, but neglect to mention that all the jail population was let loose in the city. Action, Reaction, Solution, it makes me sick.........



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 10:39 AM
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To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washinton Times story:


I was expecting a story by some one in New Orleans.....the writer also mentioned watching Fox News for his info.....neither a NO source, IMHO.

I have heard that the original reports of gunfire were not entirely accurate, there were slanted reports of 'looting' re, those photos from Yahoo.....mentioned here

There were instances of locals pitching in to help their neighbors, the stories of Richard Austin and Monroe Haskins come first to mind....your author managed to over look those.....making it sound entirely diff from the most of the video I have seen coming directly out of NO.

Sure there were some that support what he was saying, but they truly seemed to be in the minority.

[edit on 5-9-2005 by frayed1]



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 11:59 AM
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This is hilarious, how in gods green earth can one equate a broken traffic light, or the few blocks of damage in NY during 9-11, to an entire city almost being submerged? This is not a broken traffic light or 9-11 this is the entire city where there is only local police, and national guard immediately available, and even the N.G is stretched thin due to our incursions abroad.

Corpses are literally floating around in the streets, water and food was scarce at best for days following the event, the ENTIRE city is in chaos. There is no comparison here whatsoever, and to attempt to make one for a pathetic anti welfare argument is rediculous.

I do not know how many rotting corpses the author of this has had the pleasure of smelling, but I know the couple I saw was bad enough. I can not imagine a dank hot humid city like NO with 100's if not 1000's of corpses floating around for days in the late summer heat. That can not be pretty, nor can the smell. The state of panic that this sight alone would cause is enough to send people into this type of apocalyptic mindset where it's every man for himself.

The very center that the government suggested people go to for safety turned into a hell on earth complete with rape, murder, over crowding, lack of sanitation facilities, etc, etc. What were these people to think? If I had been stuck in NO I probably would be out of the superdome, and wandering those streets myself, rather than face FEMA herding me to another state, hundreds of miles away from my friends and family.

N.O is just a perfect example of what humans are capable of when faced with chaos. Imagine the suburbs if all the grocery stores, gas stations and public facilities were closed. Imagine if littel Jimmy Timmy and Susie saw hundreds of corpses floating on by their front yard. Mom and Dad either dead or stuck in the house unable to drive anywhere. You would have the exact same situation on your hands, probably even worse as we all know there are more resources in large Urban areas anyways.

I love these arguments, they always support the "American" way of life, which is not possible without a hierarchical structure, then blame those on the bottom rung every time things go bad. Damn poor people getting caught in a hurricane that engulfed their entire state, should of known better. If that had been my community we would of behaved much better. Yeah sure.

And at the end of it all -the people who raped, murdered, and shot at the peopel who were trying to help them are truly the minority in this. There are many many more who are just trying to live without harming anybody.



posted on Sep, 5 2005 @ 12:19 PM
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New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen and it is also true that many of the remaining
citizens were poor or living with public assistance.

What this article fails to mention is how a similar event of this magnitude might affect
a State like Florida where the vast majority of the public is living off of social security
after many years of hard work.
This also ignores the working poor and the disabled who have very few choices
in where they can afford to live.

This article implies that the only people left behind are lazy parasitic deadbeats.
This may be true in some cases, but rather than condemning the poor with stereotypes,
we might want to consider our future needs.
By the year 2015 more than half of the U.S. population will be over 65 years old.
Many of us will be living off pensions or social security.

The harsh reality is that most of us will be living below poverty levels
especially with the continued increases in the cost of living and medical care.

We will be living in this welfare state, like it or not.


This is the first time that an entire major city has been damaged to this extent.
Entire towns have been wiped off the planet in other regions.

Our past experience has always been confined to a few blocks or maybe a county,
but nothing so extensive.

Our government was simply never prepared to handle a catastrophe of this magnitude.

They have fleeced the American taxpayers waving the anti-terrorist-homeland security flag
but wasted most of those resources or funneled them into the pockets of billionaire industrialists.

The poor are kept poor because the funds that could change their stars with education and social support have been squandered away.




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