Devastation in America

[Ixion]

i think thats pretty harsh Hitcher..you are tarring us all with the same brush.. i own guns ( multiple.. some Mil-Spec).. i drive pickups and Harley's..i am an avowed Pagan/ agnostic and i have been around the world more than most people have been to the movies..

your basic John Smith , Main st. USA is a hard working, open minded, compassionate, moral person.. there are a few bad eggs and besause of the entertainment industry, we are painted as shalllow, egotistical assholes..

go to Cincinatti Ohio, St. Louis Mo, Phoenix Arizona, Richmond Indiana.. meet the people..then tell me your opinion.. i always guessed you as an open minded, caring person.. please tell me you are just having a bad day..

Sacramento, California is a nice place. Nice friendly "ordinary" people. Ended up there by accident (just wanted to ride a train to somewhere), it was very pleasant after San Francisco. Ended up having a long social (repeat social) chat with the Sheriff (yeah, he did have a star, just like in the Lone Ranger. Quite a buzz, I always thought sheriffs were sort of fictional. And a honking big gun too ). He was in the coffee shop. Really nice guy.

I think USAians are better outside the big metropolises, maybe

[Paul in NZ]

Mostly every American I have ever met has been a pretty decent sort.

I worked in Dalls for a few weeks with a wide variety of folks and since we needed some muscle, hired 2 'labour units' from a contractor. These lads were from deepest, Kentucky.. They were a little different... They honestly had no idea about anything that was not located within a 100 mile radius of home. After a few weeks they just up and left in the night! Odd!

However I digress....

In NZ our experience with natural disasters is like the floods of the last few years, relatively localised due to our unique geography. A few suburbs get flooded or a town gets hit and we can get in utilities gangs and heavy machinery from the next council over and the effort is underway!

Imagine if Auckland got hit. No next town, nowhere near enough resources, no power, no nothing and everything had to get airlifted in from Wellington? We just could not do it, no bridges, no airfields, ships take a couple of days and no container handling facilities...

The more sophisticated we get the more vunerable we are to disaster when the power goes off... Exactly the same thing could have happened here because just as the Americns have reduced spending on 'non essentials', our own organisations such as Civil Defence are under strength and finding it harder and harder to attract volunteers.

Like the USA, most cities in NZ have large 'poorer' populations with reduced options and these populations are DRAMATICALLY under represented in these very organisations.

Seriously, what do you think would happen in Porrirua / Otara if something similar occured (not being racist at all, these people just don't have the options)... I know a few good people (church / community leaders etc) would step up but... The gangs would also look after their own interests and people, wouldn't you?

There is an old saying. No country is any more than 3 meals away from a revolution. I think this proves it.

Yes, you can blame Bush all you want but ask yourself if we would be any better prepared? Since the reforms of the 80's, most countries have not spent enough on proper civil infrastructure as it does not win elections!

Paul N

PS - Please remember that a lot of people died.... RIP folks. We all should have done a little better...

[Wolf]

There is an old saying. No country is any more than 3 meals away from a revolution.

Always thought it was "3 meals away from barbarism". Quoted that myself today - after seeing in the news about those people looting to get food. In an emergency a certain subset of the community goes out and loots shops of TVs, stereos etc. I can't understand such people and most places instruct their police/armed forces to shoot on sight in such cases. But in New Orleans there are people having to loot stores to find something edible - those people I can understand.

[SARGE]

Always thought it was "3 meals away from barbarism". Quoted that myself today - after seeing in the news about those people looting to get food. In an emergency a certain subset of the community goes out and loots shops of TVs, stereos etc. I can't understand such people and most places instruct their police/armed forces to shoot on sight in such cases. But in New Orleans there are people having to loot stores to find something edible - those people I can understand.

i can totally understand looting for survival, but the barbarism that is happening in N/O right now is beyond me.. that is not the USA i grew up in.. the people back then/there would lay themselves down to help a neighbor or even a stranger.. these fucktards are going stone-age on us and i for one am gutted at the sights i am seeing...

shoot to kill.. take the bad DNA out of the loop, no hesitation, no remorse

today.. i am almost ashamed of my people

[Waylander]

There was a guy on tv a few minutes ago saying all this is Bush's fault and how he doesn't care about "Black folk" becouse supposedly they african-americans were the ones being arrested and such for looting. Goes back to Wolf's statement, how many of those "Black folk" were stealing TVs and such and how many were stealing food.

If they're stealing food to feed theselfs or thier family, by all means go for it so long as you're not stealing from someone who truely needs it more. But if you're stealing TVs and stuff like that your ass goes to jail.

[Hitcher]

Imagine if Auckland got hit.

Which Party is promising that? I may well vote for them...

[Timber020]

If you check that stats on "US generosity" you will find its one of the least given nation in the western work for its GNP. And its people give the least per capita to disasters overseas.

Yanks are great people, and the US is a great country, but its not a fish in the global fishtank that gives anywhere near what it takes.

[Pixie]

Errr hitcher - doesn't that smack a litle of "You're different - therefore wrong?

Sure NZ date format isn't Month Day, and admittedly not many other countries are either (none that I can think of), but it's only different... not wrong.

What's the correct way to spell "color" (or is it "colour")... etc.

Month/day is American,therefore wrong
Color is American,therefore wrong ( colour is old French WTF,we should refer to hue)
Most American spellings are archaic english spellings ( ie aluminum) or Ben Franklin's attempt to rationalise English.The American English of today is truer to the English of the 16th century,than the English we use.I bet that's a shock to the Anti American "traditionalists".

[Pixie]

The danger of the levees bursting around New Orleans has been known for years. Funds were allocated to restore wetlands to act as a buffer for storm surges. Bush and his cronies cut funding for this in order to free funds for "Homeland Security" and the Iraq invasion. No flood protection was funded unless it was tied to land developement.
So while the city was drowning due to his criminal negligence, Bush didn't even cut his holiday short to go and see what was happening.

Why should he ?All the Republican voters had already evacuated.Democracy in action
BTW Clark offered NZ's assistance,Bush was unable to move for several hours,after falling down laughing

[SARGE]

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

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
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 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 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; see here and here.]

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.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[Lou Girardin]

There were two very similar photos published in US papers:
The first was of two blacks with bags of food taken from shops, it was described as looted goods.
The second was of two white people doing the same thing, it was described as bread they had found.
No racism?

BTW Sarge, if you think that the welfare state leads to brutish, uncivilised behaviour.
study 19th century laissez-faire capitalism.
The countries with proper welfare states are the most civilised in the world and used to include NZ.

[ManDownUnder]

There were two very similar photos published in US papers:
The first was of two blacks with bags of food taken from shops, it was described as looted goods.
The second was of two white people doing the same thing, it was described as bread they had found.
No racism?

BTW Sarge, if you think that the welfare state leads to brutish, uncivilised behaviour.
study 19th century laissez-faire capitalism.
The countries with proper welfare states are the most civilised in the world and used to include NZ.

1) dude - that's hearsay
2) It appeared in a paper... so it's hearsay with intent to sell papers.

I do take your point, and it's an interesting one, but I say let's keep 'em alive first - then worry about the ills of a civilised society

[MikeL]

Well, well... the breakdown of law and order, the collapse into chaos after a natural disaster is all due to the welfare state. Obviously. Without the public housing, without the food vouchers and the unemployment cheques these people would have died of disease or malnutrition long ago. You have only yourselves to blame, Americans, for being so generous to your underprivileged.

[Waylander]

Well, well... the breakdown of law and order, the collapse into chaos after a natural disaster is all due to the welfare state. Obviously. Without the public housing, without the food vouchers and the unemployment cheques these people would have died of disease or malnutrition long ago. You have only yourselves to blame, Americans, for being so generous to your underprivileged.

Examine your own.

[Lou Girardin]

We need a smilie for sarcasm.