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Welfare State aka: America
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| LazFX |
I ran across this and I wanted you alls thoughts on this:
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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
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 one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department.]
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 incompetence of the city
government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
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.
Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
so, without a welfare state there wouldnt be crime, criminals, poor people or low-income housing areas?
right....
if anything, its rampant individualism & self-interest that drives people in situations like these to act less than honourably.
nowhere in that article is there a link between the US "welfare" state and the post disaster activities. its just a rant :rolleyes: |
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| Lepanto |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
so, without a welfare state there wouldnt be crime, criminals, poor people or low-income housing areas?
right....
if anything, its rampant individualism & self-interest that drives people in situations like these to act less than honourably.
nowhere in that article is there a link between the US "welfare" state and the post disaster activities. its just a rant :rolleyes: |
i agree, though an essay about America and welfare abuse would be fun to read there's nothing there. a basic rant and a hypothetical heap of bull. |
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| George Smiley |
That's it!
I'm moving to America to become the world's greatest journalist!
How hard can it be over there?! |
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| Renegade |
Haha, check out his website. He claims to be "pro-reason" and "pro-individualist" but he has this gem on the front page:
| quote: | The Barbarian Invasions
Israel retreats before terrorists in Gaza, while a culturally disarmed Europe is inundated by unassimilated Muslim fanatics. What is the solution? We suggest a Western counter-invasion of Muslim minds. |
Is there anything reasonable or individualistic about calling Muslims "barbarians" and suggesting that a "counter-invasion" involving brain-washing and forced assimilation is the best available solution to this barbarism? Yep, he could only be an objectivist:
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
if anything, its rampant individualism & self-interest that drives people in situations like these to act less than honourably. |
Precisely. It's a bit hypocritical to drill into people the ethic that they have to fend for themseleves, that they are in direct competition with each other and that only those with drive and initiative are likely to prosper and then condemn people when they actually put this ethic into action. What could better represent the ethos of individualism and free-market capitalism than the thousands of desperate people fighting amongst each other for scarce resources right now in New Orleans?
God I hate economic extremists... |
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| kush paintings |
| Biggest Douche in the Universe? |
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| donnybrasco |
Why is this guy's theory so hard to grasp for some of you? Is it because it's not "Popular" or "Politically Correct"? Is it because it bucks the notion that we've all had drilled in to our heads that all people on welfare truly are people who want a better life, but have been repressed for one reason or another, most often "because they're black"? How many of you have ever had the courage to even get near one of these incredibly un-safe and scary "Housing Projects" in any given American city?
I happen to think he's pretty damn close to being on target! Politicians do buy votes via-hand-outs...and they do divide and seperate (Jesse Jackson is a PRIME example of this kind of politician/activist) for the purpose of keeping those votes safe.
The initial looting that took place WAS all about Nike shoes and big-screen TV's. The snipers who are shooting at rescuers likely were released criminals or gang members from these god-awful Housing Projects (I think this will be proven more later, after some investigation when the mess is cleaned up). OUR tax dollars fund the housing and feeding of this scum in "The Projects"...how ironic is that? We're actually PAYING criminals to live in our cities, organize and victimize us...it's NUTS!!
But no, you can't call them "criminals", because they're "poor black folk"...repressed and victims of this absurd lie that there is rampant racism afoot in America...so everyone knows what's going on, from the Reporters to the Politicians, but no one has the courage to call it like it is, precisely because of the indoctrination you all are exhibiting right here regarding what can't be said about certain races in America, no matter how badly they behave, because they deserve a free pass time and again simply because they are black. Even Martin Luther King would have condemned this absurdity!!
Your average American doesn't hate black people...they hate anyone who's a dead-beat and a drag on the system...white or black! The black leaders and politicians have twisted this around to imply that anyone who calls a black person a thief (even if they are) is in fact, a racist! And so on it goes...no one will stop to really help the black community by telling it like it is, because you can't! So the great lie in effect is responsible for the free passes this criminal element always seems to get, and this never ending cycle of "repressed black people" goes on and on, ironically, as he so accurately stated, a creation of the very people who profess to want to stop it!
This guy has the courage to step up with some real-world, street-level truths about what's really happening out there...by the time the truth gets filtered by corparate media though, what you get is what you all think is "news"...and thus your indoctrination begins. Your "commentary" is often nothing more than simple parroting of what you've seen and read via these traditional media outlets...which in all honesty, makes "debating" about this "information" almost totally pointless. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
ahhh, donny, flying the flag once again for the intellectually damaged far right ;)
and FOR THE MOTHER OF FVCKING GOD, could you PLEASE stop stating that anyone who happens to disagree with you is nothing more than a media-educated bunch of sheep. its so fvcking old. leftist or centrist theory and thinking was around well before the global media, so just cut it the out.
again, you have failed miserably to connect the US \'welfare\' state to the looting that has occurred. youve gone off on a tangent that is completely unrelated. yes, you might be \'feeding the scum\' with your payouts, but how does this relate to looting? are you saying that paying people money makes them more likely to steal? if you remove public housing, making ppl even less able to take care of themselves, they are then less likely to take the opportunity to steal what they can when they can?
that obviously makes no sense. come back with a compelling causal relationship between \'welfare\' and post-disaster criminal activity and then maybe we\'ll listen to you. |
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| kush paintings |
Why I can't grasp what this jackass is saying is because he is basing his theories on absolutely zero studies of the welfare system. While most Americans are contemptuous of those on welfare, believing beneficieries to be theives, milking the government while site on their lazy asses, this is simply not true.
"A prevalent welfare myth is that women who received AFDC became permanently dependent on public assistance. Analyses indicate that 56 percent of AFDC support ended within 12 months, 70 percent within 24 months, and almost 85 percent within 4 years (Staff of House Committee on Ways and Means, 1996). These exit rates clearly contradict the widespread myth that AFDC recipients wanted to remain on public assistance or that welfare dependency was permanent. Unfortunately, return rates were also high, with 45 percent of ex-recipients returning to AFDC within 1 year."
Author 0, Research 1
"Children, not women, are the largest group of people receiving public assistance. Less than 5 million of the 14 million public assistance recipients are adults, and 90 percent of those adults are women (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1995)."
Author 0, Research 2
Oh and did I mention women recieve far less income as a whole than men... weird how they are shown in welfare in such staggering numbers.
"The belief that single women are promiscuous and have large families to receive increased benefits has no basis in extant research, and single-parent families are not only a phenomenon of the poor (McFate, 1995). In fact, the average family size of welfare recipients has decreased from four in 1969 to 2.8 in 1994 (Staff of House Committee on Ways and Means, 1996). In 1994, 43 percent of welfare families consisted of one child, and 30 percent consisted of two children."
Ok the Waynes' family aside, these women arent exactly raising huge families with many mouths to feed.
Author 0, Research 3
"The belief that welfare provides a disincentive to work by providing a well-paying "free ride" that enables recipients, stereotyped as "Cadillac queens," to purchase extravagant items with their benefits is another myth. In reality, recipients live considerably below the poverty threshold. Despite increased program spending, the average monthly family benefit, measured in 1995 dollars, fell from $713 in 1970 to $377 in 1995, a 47 percent drop. In 26 states, AFDC benefits alone fell 64 percent short of the 1996 poverty guidelines, and the addition of food stamps only reduced this gap to 35 percent (Staff of House Committee on Ways and Means, 1996)."
Author 0, Research 4
I could beat this ignorant 's ass all night long, but I'm not the journalist. I'm not the one who is supposed to have a shread on integrity. So, you ask why can we not see his perspective? I ask you then, if I presented it in a nice arguemnt would you believe me if I told you the world was flat? |
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| kush paintings |
| Oh and byh the way, welfare is between 1 and 2 percent of the national budget, so before you go crying about how wasteful this program is, how about you put your efforts towards a rampant problem in washington. Its called, go figure, government waste. It builds like 50 million dollar bridges to islands inhabited by 50 people in congressmen's districts. No, but seriously you really have some enlightening opinions restrained by nothing more than your own imagination. |
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| donnybrasco |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
ahhh, donny, flying the flag once again for the intellectually damaged far right ;)
and FOR THE MOTHER OF FVCKING GOD, could you PLEASE stop stating that anyone who happens to disagree with you is nothing more than a media-educated bunch of sheep. its so fvcking old. leftist or centrist theory and thinking was around well before the global media, so just cut it the out.
again, you have failed miserably to connect the US 'welfare' state to the looting that has occurred. youve gone off on a tangent that is completely unrelated. yes, you might be 'feeding the scum' with your payouts, but how does this relate to looting? are you saying that paying people money makes them more likely to steal? if you remove public housing, making ppl even less able to take care of themselves, they are then less likely to take the opportunity to steal what they can when they can?
that obviously makes no sense. come back with a compelling causal relationship between 'welfare' and post-disaster criminal activity and then maybe we'll listen to you. |
How would YOU know anything about this country's social fabric and what makes it tick??? Why don't YOU STFU until you've lived here awhile and can speak from actual experience, versus your "media education" you've recieved from your TV set? And yes, until you do otherwise, I WILL call you a minion of the media!
What the author is saying is that these welfare programs are in large part nothing more than a political pay-off to the constiuents who vote for representatives who would implement them...and they do this by shamelessly dividing the people of this country in to groups based on skin color and heritage, claiming under-lying "racism" as the need for this seperatism and closing of ranks. This leads to a sense of entitlement on the part of "African Americans" (a label blacks insist on that, ironically, smacks of this very sense of division of which I speak...once you seperate yourself out from everyone else based on color, you've in effect already lost the battle for assimilation). Blacks in this country are told over and over again that they are "repressed", that racism lurks under the skin of every white man. They are told that they deserve special treatment in school, in work and even in free hand-outs, because of this supposed racism.
When you indoctrinate a whole people to "hate the white man" and make them believe that they can do whatever they want because they are "repressed", you get looting and shooting. Where is the great melting pot? Where is the sense of a free-market economy that says you can be anything you want to be in this country if you work harder than the next guy? That you can be as wealthy as you want to be, based on that hard work. Basically; Where is the sense of true equality?! Is singling any race out to receive more favortism than another truly being "equal"? Hardly! You can't play favorites like that. It leads to entitlement on the black side, and resentment on the white...it's TOTAL BULL and it needs to stop, because it's doing NOTHING to make people feel like they are "one" in this country...and THAT is PRECISELY why you were seeing such rampant looting of non-essential goods; Entitlement! Plain and simple.
Those Housing Projects are like petri dishes for crime. That is a KNOWN FACT in this country. That's also exactly why cities like Chicago are tearing theirs down...they are tired of the self-created cancer sores in their communities. Nothing drives down the value of surrounding property like a Housing Project.
And further more, do you really think anyone is going to put out statistics that contridict these votes that the Democrats own? They get well over 90% of the black vote in this country! And the Conservatives aren't about to put out any studies that debunk this lie either...why should they? It won't change their voting block, because no matter what they say or do, they will NEVER get the black vote in this country. And debunking the great lie would only cause them to lose the few precious black votes that they have, as black leaders would be SCREAMING "RACISM!" before the first study hit the press!
In the end, it's really up to the black leaders to speak the truth. To call for true assimilation and accountability in the spirit of Martin Luther King...but that's not going to happen, because ironically enough, THEY are in fact the BIGGEST racists of all! They don't really want "assimilation". The greatest set-back that this country ever suffered from the 1960's was, imho, the loss of Dr. King. His vision, his plan for the future, was one that people were receptive too. Once he was killed, extremists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan hijaked "the cause" and turned it from a lesson of love and acceptence to one of hate and division...and today, in situations like New Orleans, or in the 1992 riots in L.A., we are all as a community (black and white) suffering because of it.
That's what this author is talking about............but you know more about this than I do, living all the way in Australia, right?
:crazy: |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by donnybrasco
How would YOU know anything about this country's social fabric and what makes it tick??? Why don't YOU STFU until you've lived here awhile and can speak from actual experience, versus your "media education" you've recieved from your TV set? And yes, until you do otherwise, I WILL call you a minion of the media!
That's what this author is talking about............but you know more about this than I do, living all the way in Australia, right?
:crazy: |
right, heres a basic list of that ive read to get my opinion of welfare systems in advanced liberal democracies. i could prob pull out more but i really cant be fvcked. im just showing you that just coz i disagree with your analysis does not mean i got my fvcking degree from CCN you arrogant . if it doesnt mean i can talk somewhat on the functions of modern welfare states, id like you to point me in the right direction.
Wintrop N (1983) ‘Liberal-Democratic Theory: The New Liberalism’ and Brugger B (nd) ‘Classical British and European Liberalism and Democracy’ in N Wintrop (ed) Liberal Democratic Theory and its Critics, Croom Helm, London.
Gutmann A (1980) Liberal Equality, Cambridge, London.
Koppelman A (1996) Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality, New Haven pp177-220.
Kluegel J and Smith E (1986) Beliefs About Inequality, Hawthorne, New York. pp-39.
Glassman R (1989) Democracy and Equality, New York.
Tawney R (1931) Equality, London. pp133-52, 236-54.
Walzer M (1983) ‘Welfare, Membership and Need’ in M Sandel Liberalism and its Critics, New York.
Shannahan D, ‘Murdoch blasts huge mistake’ in The Weekend Australian no.10422 March 28-9 1998 p4.
Fraser N and Gordon L, ‘Reclaiming Social Citizenship: Beyond the Ideology of Contract Versus Charity’ in P James (ed) Critical Politics: From The Personal to the Global, pp59-74.
McGuire J and Pichler J (1969) , Inequality: the Poor and Rich In America, Belmont California.
Djao, A (1983) Inequality and Social Policy, John Wiley & Sons Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ross P, The Canadian Fact Book on Income Distribution 1980, cited in Djao, A (1983) Inequality and Social Policy.
Hochschild J (1981) What’s Fair?, Harvard University Press.
Rothman R (1993) Inequality And Stratification: Class, Color and Gender, New Jersey. chapters 1,2,4,7,9.
Drover G and Moscovitch A (eds)(1981) Inequality essays on the political economy of social welfare, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Statistics Canada cat. nos. 13-529 and 13-207 cited in Drover G and Moscovitch A (eds) Inequality essays on the political economy of social welfare.
Kekes J (1997) Against Liberalism, Cornell University Press New York. chapters 1,4,5,10.
Rees J (1971) Equality, Pall Mall Pressw Ltd, London. pp11-123.
Field F (1981) Inequality In Britain: Freedom, Welfare and the State, Fontana Paperbacks London.
Stone, D (1997) Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, W.W Norton & Company, New York, pp.137-162. Chapter 6 ‘Symbols’.
E.Tuffley Distribution of Income and Wealth Second Edition, 1996, Port Melbourne.
Peterson, R The Dynamics of Industrial Society, (1973) The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis.
Stinchcombe, A Stratification and Organization, (1986) Press Syndicate of Cambridge University, Cambridge.
Wilensky, H & Lebeaux, C Industrial Society and Social Welfare, The Free Press, New York.
Weber, M The Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London, Routledge
also, for the record, living in any country does not, in and of itself, make you an expert on that country, ok? so you living in the states means a big dose of all in relation to you being an expert in everything US.
try and grasp the concept that those that disagree with you might well be wrong but have come to those conclusions via a path other than what the little box says :rolleyes:
and again, you have not even come remotely close to providing a relationship between the welfare state and the looting. i do agree with you that housing projects are a bad idea, but that is hardly the be all and end all of welfare state theory and policy. and i really do think youve turned this into a question of race, rather than a question of welfare recipients.
i think you will find that in any area of social unrest, many people of all races and different sources of income will resort to criminal behaviour if they think they can get away with it. there are examples throughout history of this occuring.
paraphrased, the article says "the welfare state caused the crime after katrina" and this is simply not believable.
maybe next time i disagree with you, you could refrain from telling me its coz CNN told me to? coz you dont have any evidence to support that accusation, k? |
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