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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski Sep 02, 2005 | |
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A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by startingover 18 Replies latest social current
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startingover
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Robdar
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.
Oh, so people on welfare are people of no values? They are parasites? Nice one.
Isn't it amusing how he just dismisses the criminals that were released and blames the crime spree on those worthless, welfare people. Yeah, that's it. It's all their fault.
So much for the oxymoronic "compassionate conservatives".
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upside/down
Robdar...is it me or does your avatar have a striking resemblance to Hillary Clinton?u/d(edited)
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Robdar
Robdar...is it me or does your avatar have a striking resemblance to Hillary Clinton?
u/d(edited)
U/d, is it me or does your avatar have a striking resemblance to Pat Robertson?
You need to reign it in and read the forum rules before you start calling me a bitch. I am reporting you to a mod.
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Angharad
Lets keep things civil please.
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EscapedLifer1
Rodbar, come on now,
Oh, so people on welfare are people of no values?; They are parasites?; Nice one.;
He's not saying every single individual on welfare is this way, but that a significant percentage are.
Isn't it amusing how he just dismisses the criminals that were released and;blames the crime spree on those worthless, welfare people. Yeah, that's it; It's all their fault
Did we read the same article? I didn't get that at all. He likened the situation to releasing "wolves" (the criminal element) on the "sheep" and the city. Where does he connect welfare recipients directly to the crimes? He doesn't. What he's pointing out is his premise that the whole welfare mindset, or lifestyle, is a root cause of the attitudes that led to some of the chaos.
Look, I'm gonna get flamed here, but I tend to agree with him somewhat. DISCLAIMER: I do NOT believe that every single person who accepts aid through one or more government welfare programs is a lazy abuser of the system. There are plenty who are in legitimate need and use the government's provided safety nets responsibly. But there is a large enough contingent of those who ARE abusing it for it to be an easily identifiable sub-group.
I am in construction, and I have worked on quite a few HUD projects, especially renovations to existing HUD housing projects. There is NO EXCUSE for the way some of these folks live and act. I've been in their apartments, I've helped them relocate from one apartment to the next so we can work in their unit. A large percentage of these folks live like animals. We can, and have, spent several million dollars to completely renovate (inside and out) these apartment complexes, only to come back within a year or two and have to do it all over again, because they have so trashed the place. And many of them are completely ungrateful for the upgrades and renovation, are rude and threatening to our workers, and just generally show a lack of any class whatsoever. Many of these folks are physically able and young enough to work, but they sit in their apartment or on the porch/balcony all day talking on their cell phones, watching their big screen TV's, and playing Grand Theft Auto on their game boxes. (I'm a Project Manager and I can't afford to fill my house with some of the stuff these folks have, and they don't work! WTF?)
I can't tell you how many times we've offered a lot of these folks jobs to work on our construction crews as laborers, offering them $8+/hour. It's work right there in their own apartment complex, they just have to walk outside to their job (plus it would save us having to ship in laborers from elsewhere). From experience, I would say less than 10% accept our offer. And of the 10% that did accept our offer, they either quit within a few days or we had to fire them because they just weren't willing to work.
I know some of you don't want to here this, but its the truth!! Some of these projects last a year or more because there are so many apartments and it takes time to progressively renovate units and then relocate tenants from their existing unit to a newly renovated one. So I get to see real close, for an extended period of time, how some of these folks live and act. They have become complacent and comfortable living off the government assistance programs, and appear to have no desire whatsoever to improve their lot in life, even when given the chance to do so "on a silver platter".
Again, NOT ALL are like this, but at least in the HUD projects I've worked on the abusers with attitude far outnumber the legitimate recipients who are actively trying to get off welfare.
Brandon, of the "been there, done that, had to start carrying a gun on HUD projects for my safety" class
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Abaddon
I think people who think political disenfranchisement, cultural alienation, and economic disparity is the fault of the disenfranchised, alienated poor have no sense of personal responsibility what-so-ever, let alone a realistic view of the situation.
Anyone who thinks people wouldn't get an education if they saw the value, vote if it would make a difference, or work for a living wage are ignoring the fact that people DO get an education when they see the value of it, DO vote if it makes a difference, and DO happily work for a living wage if they can get one.
Somehow the cultural resonances of America's Apartheid system (you'all didn't call it that but that's what it was) are the fault of the people who were the victims of it, not the fault of those who took part in the oppression of blacks and the failure of their children to sort out the problems it left behind. Obviously, there are many poor white peope, who get screwed over almost as much, but poor and black are pretty much synomynous in the USA; check the facts.
Whilst I don't think most people expressing such attitudes are racist (i.e. they would repudiate the idea races are diufferent in their inhernet rights and capabilities), I think some have racist attitudes, as the lack of logic they display basically reduces people to a set of expected characteristics and behaviours based on income, which is pretty much the same thing as race in the USA, as the statistics prove.
Yeah, there are poor white people, but they aren't representative of the white population. Black poverty IS representative of far too large a percentage of the black population.
It is really funny, as those who are unsymathetic or uncaring would, if born in the place of those they look at down their predominately white, middle and upper-class Republican noses, be just as screwed up if they had been born in the place of those they criticise. They of course are concieted enough to think they'd of overcome such a disadvantage. They're special. Window-licking special...
The hypocracy is nauseating, and stinks more than the Lousiana Superdome.
I do hope people will realise the sarcasm with which I make statements in the following section. When I say "It is obviously the black people's fault", those of the hard of understanding should realise I mean the opposite but feel deep irony is the only way to counter those who refuse to see where the blame really lies.
If you go back to 1979, prior to the period when the growth in inequality really took off in the United States, the top 5 percent on average had 11 times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. If you fast forward to the year 2000, the most recent economic peak, you find that that ratio increased to 19 times. So over the course of those two decades, the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times.
This is one of the funniest pieces of data. Working class white Americans think they are on the gravey train too. NEWS FLASH! They are not. But they vote, for the largest part as if they are, and thus screw themselves on the belief that they can actually live the American Dream. Obviously some do; the rest are statistics, and filed under 'below average income'.
Minorities tend to be concentrated on the lower end of the spectrum whether we’re talking about income or wealth. And if you’re looking at the impact of some of these other inequalities, they are more acutely felt by minorities as well. For example, minorities experience more crime than whites on average, and majority populations have better access to higher quality public education than minority populations. If you’re talking about wealth, the gap between white wealth and black wealth is very extreme because wealth is a more historical variable than income. African Americans by dint of their history in this country have had much less opportunity to accumulate wealth over time.
No! It's black people fault they are poor! They should be able to erase centuries of slavery and decades of discrimination without too much trouble. They are poor 'cause they want to be, it couldn't possibley because of a systemic failure in American culture... could it? 'Cause that would mean a lot of white Americans (even the ones with black friends) have to shoulder some of the responsibility for economic disparity, even if it is because of how they vote.
While education differentials themselves have grown, they only explain about half of the growth in overall inequality. That is, the gap between the earnings of, say, college and high school workers explains part of the increase in equality, but only about half of it. The rest of the increase has occurred within pretty narrowly defined educational groups. Even within college-educated workers, there is more inequality than there used to be, and among high school-educated workers as well.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and Joe Normal tends to vote for people whose policies benefit the rich as they get fooled into thinking they will really benefit from those policies and become rich themselves. Silly people; you're falling for the old hide-the-lady card trick.
Low-wage workers are paid much less now than they used to be. The idea is that a janitor in 1965 was paid a lot more than a janitor in 2000, despite the fact that that person was at least as productive and as well educated in 2000 as he or she was in 1965.
Obviously it is totally the fault of people in poor jobs working just as hard as they did in 1965 that they are paid less today.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03interviewsbernstein.html
Between 1995 and 1998, all families saw an increase in their net worth, except those earning less than $10,000 per year and those headed by individuals who did not have a high school diploma.
The rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and god help you if you come from an area with a poor education system as then you really will stay poor.
Families earning less than $10,000 saw a 14.2% decrease in their average net worth, from $46,600 to $40,000. In 1998, the net worth for families earning more than $100,000 was 43.2 times greater than the net worth for families earning less than $10,000 a year on average. Family net worth also increased more slowly for non-whites or Hispanics than for white non-Hispanics, and in 1998 remained only 30.4% of the value of white family net worth on average.
Oh, sorry. I was wrong, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Maybe they (as there is a large equivalancy between 'black' and 'poor') were better off without civil rights?
In 1992, the richest 1 percent of American households owned about 42 percent of the total national wealth; whereas in 1982, the richest 1 percent owned 32%.
Seems like the hyper-rich are slowly increasing how much of the USA they own. Will they leave any for the middle classes? When the poor have nothing left to take, they'll have to start picking on the middle classes to get richer...
In 1992, the concentration of wealth among the very richest in the United States is about twice that found in Britain.
Gee! Is you guys lucky or what? That Revolution really worked! No more taxation without representation! LOL The USA, land of freedom, protector of democracy, is twice as economically dispareate as a Constitional Monarchy without a Constitition.
The declining quality of public schools has reversed the gains that poor children made during the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades, the gap in the test scores of the wealthy and the poor decreased by 50%. In the 1990s, that gap began to expand once again.
Those bad poor children. They have to take the responsibility for having a bad education that will sabotage their earning potential. It is only fair they listen to their better educated richer fellow citizens and accept it's 'cause they're lazy.
Education funding in poor rural schools in Mississippi and Ohio is sometimes less than $4,000 per pupil per year; in South Bronx, less than $7,000; while, in the wealthiest neighborhoods, it can reach as much as $18,000.
Of course, this is fair, and is in no way responsible for continuing, increasing, and racially-linked economic disparity. So say idiots.
Among low-income students (the bottom 25%), only 8% attend college; this rate did not change between 1980 and 1997.
The time they are a changing? Nope. Lazy bad poor people; their fault, obviously.
Studies have found that people who were born into poor families in the mid-1990s are now much more likely to remain poor than their counterparts in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Oh, I was wrong, the times ARE a changing, they are getting worse.
The U.S. had the most unequal distribution of income and wealth, and the fastest growing gap between the rich and poor, in all of the developed countries in 1995. The American child poverty rate was four times greater than the average for the Western European countries.
Nothing wrong, nothing to see here, it's poor people's fault, screw them, and screw their kids, what does Europe know? They aren't 'free' in that distinctly American way...
In 1991, the U.S. ran twenty-first in the world in infant mortality rates, in 1994, infant mortality rates were higher in Harlem than they were in Bangladesh.
Anyone feel sick yet? You can't look after babies in Harlem better than in Bangladesh (one of the poorest countries in the world) AND THE MOTHERS GET THE BLAME? The politicians and those who vote for them can wash their hands with a clean conscience... sweet...
A Luxembourg Income Study found that income inequality in the U.S. was wider than that for any other industrialized nation in 1998.
USA, beacon of light for all those wishing to shaft the poor and economically disenfranchised...
Young blacks and young whites were equally likely to hold jobs in the 1950s, even in the segregated South. However, young blacks' hourly wages were roughly one-third less than that for white youths. By the late 1960s, this pay gap decreased to less than 10%, but the proportion of black youths who held jobs fell sharply. From the 1960s to the late 1990s, employment rates among young blacks in urban centers continued to decrease, and the pay gap between white youths and black youths peaked at more than 20% in the early 1990s.
More shame... but it's the black people's fault, obviously, all of it, hell, if they hadn't been black they wouldn't have had ancestors who were slaves.
The gap between median household income for blacks and whites remained constant between 1972 and 1994. Throughout this period, black median household income was 58% that of white median household income.
See, this is how much it is black people's fault. There could be no possibility that systemic racism kept black income static when compared to white income for 22 years. Everyone knows equality of races came into being in the '60's. Thus it MUST be the fault of BLACK people if it didn;t chnage in the decades after that. Simple logic, eh? If they WANTED to have more money, all they needed to do was stop being lazy.
African-Americans had a 176 percent greater unemployment rate than whites in the mid-1990s.
As so many white people seem to think poor people (which often means black people) are lazy welfare scroungers, it's not surprising no one will give such lazy people jobs...
A 2000 study by Senator Chuck Schumer found that banks denied mortgages to black home buyers in New York City almost twice as often as they did for whites even when they had the same income. The study further suggested that conventional banks ignored black neighborhoods, even those with above-average incomes, such that only "predatory" lenders were offering mortgages for homes in those areas.
Gee, ain't you glad you know that you have racial equality in your country?
African-Americans had a 300 percent greater poverty rate than whites in the mid-1990s.
Obviously nothing to do with years of discrimination, it's 'cause so many poor (read black) people are lazy welfare scroungers
Twenty-eight percent of blacks lived in poverty in 1996, but only 11.2% of whites did so.
Do you black people feel equal yet? It is your fault if you don't.
Compared to whites, African-Americans had a 100 percent greater infant mortality rate in the mid-1990s.
Because of lazy welfare mothers, obviously...
Because race is so closely related to wealth, wealth corresponds closely to political power, and political power influences the location of environmental hazards, African-Americans are disproportionately subjected to exposure to pollution.
About 60% of all African-Americans live in communities with abandoned toxic waste sites.
Three of the five largest commercial hazardous waste landfills, comprising 40% of the landfill capacity in the US, are located in predominantly African-American communities.
In Los Angeles, 71% of African Americans and 50% of Latinos live in the areas with the most polluted air, as opposed to 34% of white residents.
Industrial waste ghettos most white people can afford not to live in...
The proportion of black families earning more than $50,000 (in $1992), rose from 10.2% of all blacks to 16% between 1970 and 1992. However, the proportion of white families earning more than $50,000 also increased between 1970 and 1992 from 24.5% of all whites to 35.7%.
Ye gods, even the rates of growth are disproportionate... yet obviously there's no systemic racism... and it's all the black people's faults...
However, unemployment rates for young black men of all education levels in 1999 remained more than twice that for their young white male counterparts.
Because they don't want to work, naturally...
http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/ams3/rich1.html
And before someone starts the mornic "you are being anti-American" protests, please realise I am saying this because of the sympathy for the Americans who are criticised for being in such dire circumstances, and who rather than being helped by their countrymen, are blamed by their countrymen. How the hell is that anti-American?
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under74
Yeah, sorry....speaking as someone that grew up on welfare in the US--this crisis wasn't started by welfare. Nice try though. I know there are some people out there that would like to say it was---but there wouldn't have been a crisis if Bush would've stepped up to the plate.
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
NO. Look again at other sources.
You guys are looking for anything to support your tired opinion...even though the most conservitive republican papers in the US say the Bush administration failed New Orleans. Stop being so goddam blind and stuck in your ways.
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Robdar
Rodbar, come on now,
Oh, so people on welfare are people of no values?; They are parasites?; Nice one.;
He's not saying every single individual on welfare is this way, but that a significant percentage are.
Isn't it amusing how he just dismisses the criminals that were released and;blames the crime spree on those worthless, welfare people. Yeah, that's it; It's all their fault
Did we read the same article? I didn't get that at all. He likened the situation to releasing "wolves" (the criminal element) on the "sheep" and the city. Where does he connect welfare recipients directly to the crimes? He doesn't. What he's pointing out is his premise that the whole welfare mindset, or lifestyle, is a root cause of the attitudes that led to some of the chaos.
I guess we didn't read the same article. This man, the author, called the people on welfare parasites. He only mentioned in passing the criminals that were released to prey upon them. He then spent the rest of the article spewing vitriol at those people on welfare. I guess you don't want to see it though because you agree with him. Let review the article shall we:
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.
And he goes on and on...ad naseum.
Here is the two places where he menitons the prisoners:
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.
and
The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves
EscapedLifer, I am not saying that I disagree with you entirely. I just moved from my townhouse because they started accepting Section 8 residents last year. Without a doubt, the property went to hell. Crime went up, so did destruction of property. The children and teenagers ran loose all night and nobody enforced the city wide 11:00 curfew for school children. I couldn't see paying all the money I was paying only to live in an area that was quickly becoming a ghetto. I told this to the landlord/owner of my building too. He offered me less rent if I would stay. He also said that he was not accepting anymore Section 8 residents.
It is obvious that there are many problems in America. I just do not see how the above article helps. All it does is make those who have feel more superior to those that don't. It paints a picture that is distorted. And, it appears to me to be nothing more than middle class whining. It accomplishes nothing. It only complains and yet offers no solutions to the problem.
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Robdar
Oh, BTW, the majority of the Section 8 residents that moved in were foreigners, not blacks. The man who bought the townhouse I was living at from the previous landlord/owner was a foreigner too. He was a good landlord and gave me back all of my deposit. He is also about to graduate med school. As with all things, there are good and bad elements.Abaddon and Under74 made excellent points. If more people would drop this blame game that they are playing and stop kicking around those that have just lost everything that they own in this world, perhaps we would be able to get things done. As it stands, the US is in a severe financial crunch. Why? Because we are engaged in a war that is draining our money, there have been tax cuts given to the rich, and now there is devastation along our southern coast that is responsible for 40% of all imports and exports in this country. We are going bankrupt as a nation and the Republicans refuse to see it or do anything about it. God forbid that we should ever discuss corporate welfare. It is too easy and too much fun to point the finger at our poor population and blame them for all their sorrows as well as ours.
Oh, and I feel soooooo much safer now thanks to Homeland Security and the Patriot act. Yep. I sure do. Don't you?