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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (249206)	9/4/2005 9:15:35 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571443

"Very interesting statistics about the TYPE of people that were left unevacuated." The article is bullshit. The violence didn't start until several days after the disaster. People were orderly before, during and after the hurricane. The problems didn't start until they started to get desperate. I don't care what their socio-economic status is, you abandon people with out food, water, shelter, leaving them to bake in 90+ degree heat and high humidity, the social fabric will start to unravel.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (249206)	9/4/2005 9:15:39 AM
From: steve harris	Respond to of 1571443

With 90% of the media voting democrat, I don't think we'll see much criticism of the 40 year failure of the welfare state... Looks like time to restart the WPA program. Have the able bodied paid to tear down and rebuild their homes... It'll never happen....

To: RetiredNow who wrote (249206)	9/4/2005 4:16:59 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571443

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. The looting, rape and murder were as a direct result of the flooding/wind/rain that led to a loss of control over the city. For some people, they became whimpering children; for others, they became looters, rapers and murderers. It was their way of imposing some kind of control. Humans have an innate need to be controlled to some degree......too much and they rebel; too little and they rebel. 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. This is such crap. The cause for the disaster in NO was one part negligence, one part incompetence, one part racism and one part hurricane. New Orleans like some American cities has a significant underclass of poor people that does not get the level of services the rest of us do. Do you honestly think that if a Beverly Hills or a Bedford Hills or a Kennilworth or a Miami Beach were below sea level, those levees would only have been built to withstand a CAT. 3 hurricane? This attitudinal thing against the poor underclass has been SOP in this country for a long time........its gotten better in recent years but it still goes on. The worst part is the Republican refusal to acknowledge that its a problem. They point to blacks who have made it and claim that if they can do it, so should the rest. There is their premature call to end Affirmative Action or at least to weaken it. Unfortunately, you don't erase 150 years of racism in one or two generations. You don't erase the fact that slaves were bred for a docile and servile nature rather than an aggressive one. You don't erase the psychological damage caused to an entire race. There are very good reasons we say the n word in public forums rather than nigger. And articles like the one you posted perpetuate the myth of the underclass created by the welfare state. The truth is the underclass was created by a bad combination of slaverly and racism. The truth is we have done too little rather than too much. The truth is that the welfare state is a misnomer and this country is one of the most niggardly of the developed nations when it comes to its poor. But those truths like so many other truths don't get much play in the halls of Congress or anywhere else for that matter.