The real N.O. problem?

rallyhound

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

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 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 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, car jackings 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
 
Occam's Razor:
Look at the facts. The simplest solution is usually correct.

Mr. Tracinski's fails to explain why "The Welfare State" didn't erupt in chaos in Mississippi or Alabama.

So, let's see if we might find a simpler explanation:
- Mississippi and Alabama Governors called up the National Guard early; Blanco waited.
- Mississippi and Alabama applied for the Federal Emergency Aid, that was made available ***in advance*** of landfall; Blanco waited.
- Mississippi and Alabama evacuated their coastal towns early; Mayor Nagin was afraid of loosing tourist dollars. By the time he did start screaming "run for your lives", about 400 NOPD officers did just that....and I don't blame them...they never received the backup they needed.

Now, certainly Mr Tracinski isn't arguing that the dregs of the Welfare State exist in any greater percentages than in New Orleans. So, we are left with a conundrum....his argument was not reliably reproduced in nearly identical circumstances. Therefore we search for a theory that fits, uniformly, thru all three states.

How 'bout this one:
Thieves, animals and barbarians walk amongst us....ALL of us. They are not, thank God, most of us or even many of us. But they are enough. If given an opportunity, they will do exactly what thieves, animals and barbarians do.

In contrast to New Orleans, the thieves, animals and barbarians in Mississippi and Alabama were given no opportunity. New Orleans, though....gem of the south; in New Orleans case, the Governor and Mayor evacuated the city, didn't back up their own Police Officers with National Guard and then sat back in bewilderment that the thieves, animals and barbarians were caught on camera doing what thieves, animals and barbarians do.

Nobody protecting the city. Nobody protecting the SuperDome.

Conclusion: "The people of New Orleans are all thieves, animals and barbarians."
Corollary: "They must also be members of the Welfare State also. Allot of them were black."
Oy!
Rich
 
Mr. Tracinski's fails to explain why "The Welfare State" didn't erupt in chaos in Mississippi or Alabama.
I'm not sure I agree with the thesis either, but one explanation could be the the total breakdown of law and order resulting from non-receding flooding in New Orleans. From your posts in other Katrina threads, I don't think you're sufficiently distinguishing the the catastrophe in New Orleans from traditional hurricane damage. But what do I know... I don't live in a hurricane-prone coastal area.

Take away mobility (wading through floodwaters doesn't count), particularly the ability of vehicles to drive on roads, and I think chaos occurs faster than you'd like to think. LE depends on mobility, and it could be that the psychology nurtured by the welfare state leads to this kind of chaos whenever LE's effectiveness breaks down. Combine that with the failure of forensics in the N.O. situation -- you can't get DNA or fibers, and police are not even set up to cordon off a crime scene, when the city is a lake -- and the law loses a lot of its preventive nature.
 
Tyme-
Devastated is devastated. In devastation, who has better mobility?
- A mechanized National Guard
or
- Ragged bands of looters on foot.

I'm just learning now that neither Nagin nor Blanco called the National Guard into New Orleans prior to the hurricane as was done in other states. Blanco didn't even sign the Constitutionally required request for Federal Assistance for Guard from other states until WEDNESDAY, when she was provided that option 5 days earlier.

There was crime in New Orleans for one reason: there were criminals allowed to operate without fear of intervention. Send all the cops home in any city in this nation and tell the people with families to protect to get out of town now.....guess what'll happen?

The real mistake in logic runs like this:
"Most street criminals are part of the Welfare Class
therefore
Most people in the Welfare Class must be street criminals".

Thank God this logic didn't exist in the 1930's.....many of our grandparents would have died for lack of a cup of soup. As Capt Charlie stated a couple of days ago, "But by the Grace of God, there go I".
Rich
 
Has less to do with the police leaving than NOLA being the one place in the south that no literate sane person would stay in during a storm if they had any other choice. You didn't get the same sort of problems in the rest of the south because people who had a stake in the future stayed and offered to shoot looters the first day in the other places. Neighborhoods remained cohesive and order remained.

Rich, your inferences concerning welfare class versus criminality are flawed as you would know had you read the references I posted earlier. The main problem with the welfare class as a whole is learned helplessness and dependency rather than criminality. Those who are helpless and dependent are easier victims of crime and less able to fend it off than those who are more assertive.
 
Redworm....
Thank you for making my point.


Meek-
I read your allegations and logic. You obviously didn't read what I wrote.
Because you saw people breaking into stores, you're certain that they must have been members of the Welfare State. I musta missed their badges, unless you feel their skin color was enough for you. Did you even glance at XavierBreath's report.

Heard on FOX tonight.....get this:
NOPD has set up a temporary jail at the Bus Station....their first arrest?
A man who drove up in a "stolen" car and tried to buy a bus ticket out of town!!!

What's next? Arresting people for living in other peoples' burned out homes during a National Disaster? Arrest the 15 year old who "stole" the bus and drove dozens out of town?

I'm no apologist for criminals and I won't have this discussion made into that. I'm no fan of Public Assistance and I've proven myself here most critical. But, when my fellow countrymen are down I WILL NOT wholesale kick them, trash them, label them or spit on the ruins of their city simply because, in their midst, are thieves, animals and barbarians.

Again, as Capt Charlie stated, "But by the Grace of God, there go I".
Rich
 
Rich: Seems to me that your first, excellent response could be more concisely expressed thusly: LA; Democrats. MS; Republicans. AL; Republicans. Doesn't that about cover it?
 
The main problem with the welfare class as a whole is learned helplessness and dependency.....

That's a very broad assumption. Learned helplessness and dependency? What does that mean? That in a civilized situation that they rely upon a welfare system? Does that actually translate over into being helpless and dependent in a non-civil situation?

I wonder if not being on welfare is good training for disaster survival? Intuitively I would immediately think that a person who lives hand to mouth on a day to day basis will be better at surviving in a disaster crisis than the soft ones who are wealthy and used to having everything done for them. Over the long term my money would be on the low income people to survive longer.

NO poses a lot of questions. For instance - did the crime rate actually go up after Katrina or was it just more visible due to the lack of contrast? Statistically speaking the crime rate during those 5 days may have actually been lower. Just a for instance- maybe we heard more about gun shots because there was no background noise - there may have been fewer gun shots overall but they could be heard better, and once they can be heard then attention gets focused on them. A theory to ponder.

Another question - did the drug addicts act up more because they could not get their drugs? Were they a small but violent minority?

So many questions, so few facts....
 
Tyme-
Devastated is devastated. In devastation, who has better mobility?
- A mechanized National Guard
or
- Ragged bands of looters on foot.
Mechanization only matters so much. If the local police or the national guard regularly trained for the possibility of maintaining law and order in a flooded city by patrolling in boats and hovercrafts (some areas are still dry), and if they had put that plan into effect when the flooding started, they probably would have prevented a lot of crime. Venice does pretty well with boats, but they're used to it. New Orleans isn't. A third of the New Orleans police deserting didn't help things either.

If there hadn't been an evacuation leaving most property unprotected, much of the crime would have been deterred by fear of retribution, even if there would have been more flood-related deaths. Not as many people evacuated from cities other than N.O., and flooding and wind damage was less severe. I think those are significant differences.
 
tyme-
Your tactical scenario just doesn't work.

You saw the pictures, right? Know how? Reporters with Satellite Trucks got in. Kinda think the National Guard might have, if left to their own devices? I certainly do.

You can fit a whole lotta MRE's, clothes, Baby Wipes and water in one Satellite Truck. Dunno how much of the sporadic looting it would have stopped. But it would have kept the otherwise law abiding at bay. For the rest, had those Camera Trucks been manned by National Guard X 100, NOLA probably woulda looked like.....
Alabama
or
Mississippi

But then, that's why the people of Alabama and Mississippi are not being addressed when we talk about the results of the "Welfare State". They fail to prove the point of which Tracinski was looking for an event or audience to make. :)
Rich
 
You obviously didn't read what I wrote. Because you saw people breaking into stores, you're certain that they must have been members of the Welfare State.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Its your board so I suppose you can define things anyway you want but I"ll say it as simply as I can. (Race has nothing to do with what I see is the problem and looting is only tangentially related as an effect and not a cause. OTOH welfare rules which prevent legally working to better oneself have everything to do with it.)

1) Welfare fosters dependency.
2) Dependency fosters learned helplessness.
and
3a) Helpless people are easier victims than people who are not helpless.
4a) Criminals preferentially prey on victims.
or
3b) Helpless people react more slowly in a crisis while they wait for help.
4b) The more helpless people being helpless together means any unit of outside help has to be divided by more victims.
so
5) People get hurt.

Redworm:
EASIER does not equal ALL.
EASIER is a relative and ALL is an absolute.
If x=% prestorm population on welfare
and y = % stranded population on welfare
and x < y even by a little bit, then I'm right that welfare is related to a greater hazard in storm survival. It remains to be seen whether I'm right, but I'd be willing to bet a dime that's what the final numbers will show.

For instance, pulling fictional figures out of a statistical hat if 10% of the prestorm population was on welfare and 11% of those stranded were on welfare that means that people on welfare were at a disadvantage in getting out of the way of the storm. I will leave it to Rich to decide what race they were, whether they were good, bad or misguided and whose fault it was they were harmed.

Butch50 these sites explain it in more detail. First relates to poverty in cities and second discusses learned helplessness.
http://staging.fanniemaefoundation.org/programs/hpd/pdf/hpd_0702_kasarda.pdf
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/pitfalls.pdf
 
Most of the video I saw on the evening news tonight looked like it was taken from boats. Most areas were not even close to drivable. And even areas that are drivable have to be connected to a precinct; being drivable doesn't do any good if there are no police cars to drive. A mere few inches of water will slow down response times.

Does the NOPD have gas for their police cars?

Do you have contacts in the New Orleans PD? Can you get any first-hand information about their situation and enforcement ability?
 
M&M-
Its your board so I suppose you can define things anyway you want
Unfairly feigned lack of power in the [ostensible] face of overwhelming authority. Make your point and defend it.

But the logic of your last post simply just does not compute.....unless your point is that the Welfare Class makes easier victims (That IS what you said). That is probably true. They make easier Criminals also. But that was not the overriding factor that determined New Orleans' fate over, for instance, LA, Des Moines, Miami, New York, Omaha, Kansas City or any other community in this nation. Poor is Poor.....they've been around since the time of Moses and, since that time, SOMEBODY has got to be on bottom otherwise WE would not be on TOP. Orators for the alternatives were people like Trotsky, Mao and Fidel....and they generally put EVERYBODY into the Welfare State.

Look, my only point is that a Free Market basically demands that some people will not "get over". Live with that and show a bit of compassion or demand a Nanny State where we're all "equal". Just don't blame all of the "seen on the nightly news" problems on that "class".

In this case, once again (thanks, Capt Charlie), "There, but for the Grace of God, go I".

Rich
 
Just a clarification or two...

Two thirds of the NOPD did not desert their posts. Two thirds of the NOPD were unaccounted for because of the non-existant comunications. Afew of them did desert but most of them were out saving people and couldn't be contacted, others were trapped in their own homes and couldn't report. I'd just hate to slight the men and women of the NOPD because of bad media spin.

Mississippi and Slidell were hardest hit by the storm, not New Orleans. Waveland, Miss. just plain isn't there anymore and the casinos along the Biloxi, Miss coast won't be back up and running until next year (if then). New Orleans was in relatively good shape until the levee at the 17th street canal broke. That's when the flooding started in N.O.

I think that Rich is right to a point. Gov. Blanco is to blame for alot of it. But Mayor Ray Nagin really did his best to save as many people as he could. His hand we're tied in alot of ways because of Blanco's lack of leadership. Nagin did two things - He called a manditory evacuation of New Orleans and he got more than 60% of the cities residents to evacuate. Neither of those things have EVER been accomplished before in New Orleans. Not even for Hurricane Betsy (1965) or Hurricane Camille (1969).

The officials for the city of New Orleans did the best that they could with the power and tools at their disposal, just as the officials for all the other parishes affected hard by Katrina.

I think the blame lies firmly with Gov. Blanco and FEMA. Gov. Blanco has had so many decisions in front of her and given the choice to act now or wait, she waited every time; And while she farted around people were dying by the dozens. FEMA may have had to wait until they got the go-ahead from Blanco, but once they got here they didn't do too much. In fact, they hurt situations in some cases. When Wal-Mart sent three 18-wheelers full of water to the N.O. area, FEMA instructed the National Guard to send them away. St. Tammany parish is well on the road to recovery, and the parish officials there say that it's without the help of FEMA. They haven't even really showed up there. St. Tammany parish contains the town of Lacombe and city of Slidell, both of which were very heavily damaged and parts still are under feet of water.

And about the "Welfare- State" subject, well, that's what the media would like to have you believe. It's true that Louisiana is a very poor state. It's also true that there are alot of people who use/abuse the welfare system there. But the disaster that happened there is not just because of poverty. Alot of the people who stayed behind did so because they had elderly family that could not bear the exidous and refused to leave them behind. Alot of people refused to leave because they wouldn't be able to take their pets. Alot of people couldn't leave because the corporations they work for wouldn't let them off of work until late Sunday night. (And anyone who doesn't believe that can ask anyone who works for companies like McDonalds, Barnes and Noble, Lowe's, etc).

So to say that the death toll in New Orleans is because of the "Welfare-State" is in a sense like saying that the a rising murder rate is because people are allowed to own guns.

And we all know that generalizations like that aren't true.
 
Can NOPD refuel its cars?
What percentage of the city is reachable via police cars?
Are communications working? (Does NOPD have working emergency generators? They require gas too.)
Can police get to their work cars?
Is anyone reporting crimes to the police? (Does 911 work?)
How many police are refusing to go into flooded areas because of disease?
How much law enforcement was the National Guard doing before the levee was repaired?
How much of the city could the NG effectively patrol?
 
Can NOPD refuel its cars?
Precisely. That's what contingency plans are made and rehearsed for. Those plans are local, not federalized. The Federales work in a **support** role only. Not only am I unaware of an alternative Command and Control Center having been set up for the NOPD, the local and State Govt evidently arranged for ZERO food or water to be dropped off at the Super Dome in anticipation of the Tens of Thousands who THEY advised to go there!

Sound like they were a bit behind the curve to you?
How much of the city could the NG effectively patrol?
Certainly the SuperDome and every square foot of the streets that you saw Satellite Trucks filming from.
Rich
 
And they knew they were behind the curve before the storm hit. JT

wwltv.com - Sunday 10-something a.m. - Talking about the Mayor's evacuation order...

"He also opened the Louisiana Superdome as a shelter of last resort that would begin accepting people around Noon. He said the Dome would have few supplies and that people were expected to bring food and other necessary items."
 
I don't think that "poorness" in and of itself foments gangsterism. I believe that's a part of the subculture of some elements of our poor society. There are more poor white people than there are poor black people. There are very few, if any, white gangs that exist as society's parasites. Could it be that the lack of embracing of American values such as fatherhood, marriage, accountability, etc., produces a culture in which folks roam, as bands of predatory animals might, scavaging from and preying on their fellow Americans?

There were a lot of poor people in Kobe, Japan, when that awful earthquake hit a few years back. There was NO looting; no roving bands of predators murdering and raping. It's a cultural thing; or, perhaps, a "lack of culture" thing.

Maybe the "welfare state" had nothing to do with the mess in NO; however, I did notice this morning a black minister's saying that many of the folks who didn't leave when ordered were "third generation welfare recipients."
 
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