Katrina: Rightwing, Neocon Blame-the-Victim Spin

by **Starman** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 6:04 pm

Right-Wing Spin: Katrina Exposes Welfare State Dysfunction, Crime ... THIS helps explain the psyops 'message' the neocon cheerleading squad is recieving loud-and-clear via FOX and the right-wing propaganda machine -- it helps explain the antipathy and hostility and lack of concern by the first National Guard troops to arrive in New Orleans Parish -- They arrived in 40 trucks and promptly went to sleep -- for the following several days, they played-cards and left the New Orleans beleaugured, overwhelmed Fire, Police and Emergency crews to try as best they could, with NO resupply, broken communication, FEMA roadblacks and bureaucratic incompetance and lack of coordination -- all the horrible reports of utterly incompetant responses and sabotaging volunteer rescue and relief activities. The MSM have, despite occasional and momentuous expressions of amazement, outrage and desperate appeals for ATTENTION< GODDAMIT! to address the awful lack of appropriate response, have been promoting the meme that New Orleans has descended into unrestrained lawlessness, gratuitous violence, anarchy and pillaging -- as we know, a Gross (and IMO, an indictable criminal offense inciting reactionary violence re: hypervigilantism) exaggeration and misrepresentation -- that's one of the most putrid, ugly and inexcusable actions of the media -- showing that the US desperately NEEDS a vibrant, alternative cable-media 24-7 news channel. WTF? can't we pull this off, to counter the massive disinfo and propaganda and mind-conditioning that is a major function of the MSM, providing cover for the criminal neocon-fronted corporate-robber-baron parasite cartel? I've been sickened and appalled (I'm too numb and emotionally-exhausted to think up more expressive descriptions) by the horrid misfeasance, irresponsibility, indecision, lack of coordination, bureaucratic impediments, official bullshit, excuses, and etc. this past week, with vital resources being denied, prohibited, unused, diverted, misued, and plain not used effectively. There HAS to be a high degree of deliberate intent to this mismanagement, not just an attribute of Bush Inc's top-down failure-of-leadership. One intent seems to be a further privatization of security and disaster services and social infrastructure, a greater dismantling of the Social Contract -- we're looking at an even greater civil-class breakdown into the elites, the government-connected civil-society providing support-services and living in Gated Communities-style benefit-priveleges (the upper-tier 'middle class'), the decaying remnants of lower-middle classes under economic seige, rights-dismantling and impoverishment, and the swelling ranks of displaced/disenfranchised debt-peonage serfs who are at the mercy of top-down expolitation/control. The repeated image of armed-troops occupying Downtown New Orleans is what the Feds think is 'reconstruction'? WHY aren't the National Guard and troops assisting in ongoing boat-aided rescue, triage, evacuation by trucks, fire-fighting and infrastructure-repair support services, resupply for rescue and repair services, levee-repair and pump/electric-power repair, and clean-up? GodDAMMIT -- Start collecting and burning trash and salvaging food, clothing, tools, building materials and etc. from area stores and damaged neighborhoods! Also -- the National Guard should be establishing temporary refugee shelters in Rest Areas and near social support services in a MAJOR way (actually, they should have been doing this in the 2 days after the storm struck), and beginning to prepare for a massive home-building program that refigees can be employed and trained by -- building whole new communities for those displaced, as the FIRST step towards integrating the several-million-plus people the storm displaced and left destitute. Where the HELL are those promised innovative, outside-the-box thinking/solutions the press-posing politicos were promising? Damn-them! (This topic --Brainstorming Solutions-- should probably be in its own thread. Someone want to take the initiative? I'm time stressed, got a buncha things to do I've been putting off as my attention has been transfixed by this horrid disaster all week). Damn, Damn and Damn! Starman THIS below is horrid, showing the right's extreme dysfuntional 'thinking' re: blame-the-victim-of-institutionalized economic injustice and class-based discrimination for their not 'helping' themselves. Posted from: <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/5/104830/2384">www.dailykos.com/story/20...04830/2384</a> Disgusting wingnut email I received. (none / 0 </comments/2005/9/5/104830/2384/81?mode=alone;showrate=1>) Here is some food for thought. I have no idea who the writer is, but he expresses some excellent thoughts in a succinct and straightforward manner. Of course, we all know that President Bush is the reason for Katrina, and all other catastrophes our country has incurred since it became a nation. It must be so as Cindy Sheehan, Revs. Al $harpton and Je$$e Jack$on all have implied as much, and we know what intellectuals they are. (name removed) An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State An Objectivist Review by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist September 2, 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, 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 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. "Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel" Bono by kd texan </user/uid:41414> on Mon Sep 5th, 2005 at 08:17:01 PDT </comments/2005/9/5/104830/2384/81>

Katrina: Rightwing, Neocon Blame-the-Victim Spin

Katrina: Rightwing, Neocon Blame-the-Victim Spin

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