Welfare to Blame (long read, but worth the effort)

[badshotbob]

I usually don't copy/paste, especially long pastes, but the following article is part of the "bigger picture" that I have failed to communicate out here. I think this guy is dead smack on target on this one.




Sep 02, 2005
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 excus e 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 s elected, 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 theToronto 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

[kevin1]

That's pretty much what I've been thinking since this event started .

I've lived in a subsidized apartment neighborhood that was barely above the level of the project around the corner , so I've seen the mentality it breeds . People there preyed on each other at every opportunity , violence and drugs were rampant , and almost nothing was done about it . It took two long hard years to get out , but we did and never looked back . I've been by there several times , and it looks exactly the same as the day we left except for one thing , the faces . Most of the folks we knew back then are either dead or moved on to other subsidized housing . Personally , I think most forms of welfare should either be phased out entirely or severely restricted with regard to qualification and duration of assistance . Break the cycle .

[AJ52]

Well - thats the best damn copy/paste I've read in a long time and a reality check for the mud slingers who are hell bent at turning this disaster into a political and racial fiasco. Sad thing is we will never see this in print with the exception of the web or some obscur local paper - OR - by God, ever hear it spoken by any of our elected officials. The truth can be political suicide.

[PKnTX]

Makes sense to me.
My wife commented on the garbage and filth/waste that was
scattered about the Super Dome and convention center.
In my wisdom I replied "What should they do with it, they're
stuck there." Thinking back she was right. (I'll deny ever saying that)
That was a sign of how quickly the people that were there
had a hand in allowing their situation to deteriorate.
Not even taking thebasic need for waste containment
on themselves in the first couple of daystells something.
There's alot of good people suffering. There are some
that could do more to help themselves and their fellow citizens.
Is the welfare lifestyle a hindrence to society in general? How
can it not be?

PK

[badshotbob]

What was the first thing back up and running? Well, maybe limping along.... the USPS. I've heard various news sources say the mail is starting to flow to the shelters. Why? Welfare checks I would think.

[Tazman]

For the most part I agree with that article in regards to the thugs who took over NO, but if you take a look at who is presently refusing to leave NO, the vast majority of them are home owners who do not want to leave their homes, people on welfare do not own homes, they live in subsidized housing. The looting was started by the thugs, but soon there were non-thugs joing in, but they were taking food and water, not TVs and the like.

To blame the entire fiasco on welfare is taking it to far, to blame the rapes, shooting, sniping and the looting of non-food items on welfare and thugs is fair.