THE STUPIDIST RESPONSE TO KATRINA

Thanks to What Really Happened.com
I read what must be the world's stupidest (and cruelest) response to the horrific events in New Orleans. In
The Intellectual Activist, Sep 2 Robert Tracinski
says that welfare was to blame for the tragedy. He thinks that the alleged violence which greeted the alleged rescuers was the result of years of welfare dependency. First off, why believe the stories in the media? How childishly niave. Quite possibly they are gross exaggerations or even planted lies - think only of Saddam's "nookular" weapons - to let the Bushites off the hook for letting the people suffer.

Then, typical of the US authoritarian right, there is his irrationalism combined with provincialism. If "A" is the cause of "B", where "A" is significantly present, then so is "B." Across the 49th is a very well developed welfare system, far more generous than that of Dixie. But that would be too far to look - only the USA exists, I forgot. At the same time there have been natural disasters, Quebec's Great Ice Storm and the Winnipeg Flood. Neither of these were on the same scale as NO, but were significant enough to be a test of the anti-welfare thesis. In the poor, welfare-dependent areas of the cities there was cooperation, not violence, when disaster struck. QED welfare is not the cause of NO violence.

I would suggest the real reasons for the violence - if there was any - can be rooted in generations of brutal Nazi-like racism, bone-grinding poverty, poor education systems and CIA-introduced drugs. I would also suggest that welfare systems are the price you have to pay if you want to maintain a corporate capitalist system, otherwise you end up with a situation like Brazil, which I suppose for someone as cold blooded as Tracinski isn't such a bad idea.