Burns a hole in my chest!
I'm someone who believes that sympathy needs to be balanced with reason. I'm horrified and saddened about the tragedy from Hurricane Katrina. However, I'm blazingly angry about the way the media and some officials are behaving at this point. Did you hear the Mayor of New Orleans? What a flippin' moron! Most people believe that this Hurricane will be considerably more damaging in the long run as compared to Andrew. He starts cussing on a radio address and saying how "G*damned pissed" he is at the Bush administration. What the hell does he expect? Does he really believe that the federal government should stop all bus systems in the entire US to come to Louisianna? Why not stop the entire economy for them! He has the gall to explain it as his frustration about the looters saying that instead dealing with the looters, we're rescuing people. ::pauses for effect:: Uh, yeah! Somehow, I'm thinking let's save the people first and if things get stolen, things get stolen. And here's CNN posting this as the first thing on the page and right under it saying that Bush states, "Not acceptable." Well, of course he's going to say more needs to be done! What is he going to say? "Oh, no, we're happy that millions of people are without electricity, that people are wading through dead bodies, and people are standing up to their chins in water in their attics." Sorry, but I would like to remind New Orleans that they chose to live in a bowl on the side of the ocean. If you live in an area that can get hurricanes, don't you dare get pissed off at the rest of the world about it! My God, selfish little... ::sighs heatedly::
In contrast, I was so happy yesterday when I learned how America was responding. Public schools around the nation are opening their doors to children from affected areas so they can go to school. Houston opened the Astrodome to help house the people who are going to be without their homes for an indefininate period of time. Both my uncle and my cousin have been deployed. Europe has already stood up and said, "How much do you need?" This is the world that I choose to live in. It is a world with disasters and that is imperfect, but where people genuinely want to help other people. It saddens me to think how many people do not live in this world. They live in a world where politics is always more important than cooperation. I hope at some point in their life, they learn the foolishness of their decision.
In contrast, I was so happy yesterday when I learned how America was responding. Public schools around the nation are opening their doors to children from affected areas so they can go to school. Houston opened the Astrodome to help house the people who are going to be without their homes for an indefininate period of time. Both my uncle and my cousin have been deployed. Europe has already stood up and said, "How much do you need?" This is the world that I choose to live in. It is a world with disasters and that is imperfect, but where people genuinely want to help other people. It saddens me to think how many people do not live in this world. They live in a world where politics is always more important than cooperation. I hope at some point in their life, they learn the foolishness of their decision.
posted by Jesi E. at 9/02/2005 07:40:00 AM
17 Comments:
Isn't OKC in Tornado Alley?
I'll remember your views on choosing where you live when a tornado flattens the place like Wichita Falls.
There isn't a place on earth that doesn't have some possibility of a natural anomaly. Even Montana has earthquakes.
Oh, absolutely! Now, it's difficult to compare a tornado to a hurricane, but let's say there is a series of tornadoes that completely flattens the Oklahoma City area. (This is still not even remotely the same comparison. Tornadoes never make the same sort of devestation a hurricane does and Oklahoma City is not a place that is naturally prone to flooding. I mean, tornadoes may flatten a city, but a hurricane can devestate several states.) Everything I have is destroyed. I have no idea where any of my family and friends are. I can see the U.S. government moving in, but there is still devestation all around me. I am not going to stand up and start cussing out the President of the United States! That is not the rational response in such a situation.
My point is shit happens. And when it does, it doesn't benefit anyone to start blaming other people. Officials across the board are stating that the federal government is doing exactly what they need to be doing, but of course more has to be done. These officials include governors and other mayors. It's this moron from New Orleans who desides to fill the radio air with unessarily expletives and irrational expectations. Sorry, but when my life gets flattened by a tornado, I do not expect my president to snap his fingers and make it all better.
desires* and unecessary*
"No one can escape the influence of a prevailing ideology," wrote Ludwig von Mises, and Gulf Coast residents know precisely what it means to be trapped — ostensibly by a flood but actually by statist policies and ideological commitments that put the government in charge of crisis management and public infrastructure. For what we are seeing in New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast region is the most egregious example of government failure in the United States since September 11, 2001. Mother Nature can be cruel, but even at her worst, she is no match for government. It was the glorified public sector, the one we are always told is protecting us, that is responsible for this. And though our public servants and a sycophantic media will do their darn best to present this calamity as an act of nature, it was not and is not. Katrina came and went with far less damage than anyone expected. It was the failure of the public infrastructure and the response to it that brought down civilization.
The levees that failed and caused New Orleans to be flooded, bringing a humanitarian crisis not seen in our country in modern times, were owned and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. The original levees surrounding this city below sea level were erected in 1718, and have been variously expanded since.
But who knew that a direct hit by a hurricane would cause them to break? Many people, it turns out. Ivor van Heerden of Louisiana State University, reports Newsday, "who has developed flooding models for New Orleans, was among those issuing dire predictions as Katrina approached, warnings that turned out to be grimly accurate. He predicted that floodwaters would overcome the levee system, fill the low-lying areas of the city and then remain trapped there well after the storm passed — creating a giant, stagnant pool contaminated with debris, sewage and other hazardous materials."
Newsday goes on: "Van Heerden and other experts put some of the blame on the Mississippi River levees themselves, because they channel silt directly into the Gulf of Mexico that otherwise would stabilize land along the riverside and slow the sinking of the coastline."
He is hardly some lone nut. National Geographic ran a large article on the topic last year that begins with a war-of-the-worlds scenario and reads precisely like this week's news from New Orleans. It is the Army Corps of Engineers that has been responsible for the dwindling of the coastline that has required the levees to be constantly reinforced with higher walls. But one problem: no one bothered to do this since 1965. That's only the beginning of the problems created by the Corps' levee management, the history of which was documented by Mark Thornton following the last flood in 1999.
Only the public sector can preside over a situation this precarious and display utter and complete inertia. What do these people have to lose? They are not real owners. There are no profits or losses at stake. They do not have to answer to risk-obsessed insurance companies who insist on premiums matching even the most remote contingencies. So long as it seems to work, they are glad to go about their business in the soporific style famous to all public sectors everywhere.
And failure of one structure has highlighted the failures of other structures. The levees could not be repaired in a timely manner because roads and bridges built and maintained by government could not withstand the pressure from the flood. They broke down.
And again, it is critical to keep in mind that none of this was caused by Hurricane Katrina as such. It was the levee break that led to the calamity. As the New York Times points out: "it was not the water from the sky but the water that broke through the city's protective barriers that had changed everything for the worse.... When the levees gave way in some critical spots, streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane passed were several feet deep in water on Tuesday morning."
Indeed, at 4pm on Monday, August 29, all seemed calm, and reports of possible calamity seemed overwrought. Two hours later the reports began to appear about the levee. A period of some twelve hours lapsed between when the hurricane passed through and when the water came rushing into the city. There is some dispute about precisely when the levees broke. Some say that they were broken long before anyone discovered it, which is another outrage. There was no warning system. There is no question that plenty of time was available between their breakage and the flooding to enable people to make other arrangements — and perhaps for the levees to be repaired. People were relieved that the rain subsided and the effects of Katrina were far less egregious than anyone expected.
That's when the disaster struck. The municipal government itself relocated to Baton Rouge even as the city pumps failed as well. Meanwhile, the Army Corp of Engineers apparently had no viable plan even to make repairs. They couldn't bring in the massive barges and cranes needed because the bridges were down and broken, or couldn't be opened without electricity. For public relations purposes, they dumped tons of sand into one breach even as another levee was breaking. But even that PR move failed since most helicopters were being used to move people from spot to spot — another classic case of miscalculation. Many bloggers had the sense that the public sector essentially walked away.
But the police and their guns and nightsticks were out in full force, not arresting criminals but pushing around the innocent and giving mostly bad instructions. The 10,000 people who had been corralled into the Superdome were essentially under house arrest from the police who were keeping them there, preventing them even from getting fresh air. A day later the water and food were running out, people were dying, and the sanitary conditions becoming disastrous. Finally someone had the idea of shipping all these people Soviet-like to Houston to live in the Astrodome, as if they are not people with volition but cattle.
After evacuations, the looting began and created a despicable sight of criminal gangs stealing everything in sight as the police looked on (when they weren't joining in). Now, this scene offers its own lessons. Why doesn't looting and rampant criminality occur every day? The police are always there and so are the hoodlums and the criminals. What was missing that made the looting rampage possible was the bourgeoisie, that had either left by choice or had been kicked out. It is they who keep the peace. And had any stayed around to protect their property, we don't even have to speculate what the police would have done: Arrest them!
Now, in the coming weeks, as it becomes ever more obvious that the real problem was not the hurricane but the failure of the infrastructure to work properly, the political left is going to have a heyday ( here too ). They will point out that Bush cut spending for the Army Corp of Engineers, that money allocated to reinforcing the levees and fixing the pumps had been cut to pay for other things, that we are reaping what we sow from failing to support the public sector.
The ever-stupid right will come to the defense of Bush and the Iraq War that has completely absorbed this regime's attention, pointing out that Bush is actually a big and compassionate spender who cares about infrastructure, while demanding that people recognize his greatness, along with all the other pieties that have become staples of modern "conservatism."
But this is a superficial critique (and defense) that doesn't get to the root of the problem with public services. NASA spends and spends and still can't seem to make a reliable space shuttle. The public schools absorb many times more — thousands times more — in resources than private schools and still can't perform well. The federal government spends trillions over years to "protect" the country and can't fend off a handful of malcontents with an agenda. So too, Congress can allocate a trillion dollars to fix every levee, fully preventing the last catastrophe, but not the next one.
The problem here is public ownership itself. It has encouraged people to adopt a negligent attitude toward even such obvious risks. Private developers and owners, in contrast, demand to know every possible scenario as a way to protect their property. But public owners have no real stake in the outcome and lack the economic capacity to calibrate resource allocation to risk assessment. In other words, the government manages without responsibility or competence.
Can levees and pumps and disaster management really be privatized? Not only can they be; they must be if we want to avoid ever more apocalypses of this sort. William Buckley used to poke fun at libertarians and their plans for privatizing garbage collection, but this disaster shows that much more than this ought to be in private hands. It is not a trivial issue; our survival may depend on it.
It is critically important that the management of the whole of the nation's infrastructure be turned over to private management and ownership. Only in private hands can there be a possibility of a match between expenditure and performance, between risk and responsibility, between the job that needs to be done and the means to accomplish it.
The list of public sector failures hardly stops there. The outrageous insistence that no one be permitted to "gouge" only creates shortages in critically important goods and services when they are needed the most. It is at times of extreme need that prices most need to be free to change so that consumers and producers can have an idea of what is needed and what is in demand. Absent those signals, people do not know what to conserve and what to produce.
Bush was on national television declaring that the feds would have zero tolerance toward gouging, which is another way of saying zero tolerance toward markets. If New Orleans stands any chance of coming back, it will only be because private enterprise does the rebuilding, one commercial venture at a time. Bush's kind of talk guarantees a future of mire and muck, the remote possibility of prosperity and peace sacrificed on the altar of interventionism. Moreover, every American ought to be alarmed at the quickness of officials to declare martial law, invade people's rights, deny people the freedom of movement, and otherwise trample on all values that this country is supposed to hold dear. A crisis does not negate the existence of human rights. It is not a license for tyranny. It is not a signal that government can do anything it wants.
This crisis ought to underscore a point made on these pages again and again. Being a government official gives you no special insight into how to best manage a crisis. Indeed the public sector, with all its guns and mandates and arrogance, cannot and will not protect us from life's contingencies. It used to be said that infrastructure was too important to be left to the uncertainties of markets. But if it's certainty that we are after, there is a new certainty that has emerged in American life: in a crisis, the government will make matters worse and worse until it wrecks your life and all that makes it worth living."
I will not take credit for this article. This was written by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., he is president of the Mises Institute
I am fairly certain that the above "comment" is the longest in recorded history....but anyway....
Jesi, do you expect anything else from government officials other than placing the blame for their problems on higher government officials?
I think all of this if Thomas Jefferson fault...if he hadn't purchased Louisiana, we wouldn't have to worry about New Orleans...it would a French problem (which means we would end up solving it anyway)
Or we could blame Napoleon for getting himself in a situation where he had to sell the land to finance his war....
Or we could blame Columbus (et al) for "discovering" this God forsake land in the first place...
Or we could just take responsibility and do the best we can to clean up and get on with life...but why do the sensible thing...
As long as so much responsibility is placed in the hands of government, physically and psychologically, man will make poor use of what remains.
You give your solution so simply and matter of factly. I agree with you; man should be responsible for himself. Toward that end it will take a massive effort, nothing short of an ideological revolution to erase a century of man-sacrificing statist interventionism . I intend to do just that.
(Btw, the host and I have authored posts longer than that)
Your comments regarding a city built inside a bowl provided a flashback for I have actually been a similar situation, & flooding was also a problem there as well.
My nephews and I had taken a rather long trip to excape the horrible conditions that had been plagueing my nerves. We went to a place that was to be so serene as to earn the label of 'fabled'. This wonder city was completely surrounded by mountains, effectively placing it into the aforementioned 'bowl'. We were welcomed warmly and assimilated quickly, and my nervous condition responded appropriately.
Sadly, & I must say sadly because it was indeed sad, one of our local artifacts that I had brought along caused such a stir amongst the locals that several of them were willing to sell themselves & their families into perpetual servitude in order to gain access to the item. In order to keep the peace, I made several aggangements to deliver several copies of the item, but that in & of itself almost doomed this tranquil town.
We were banished but by the most bizarre turn of events ( which some philosophers call Karma but other have labeled the 'Barks/Rosa' effect), we once again found ourselves, years later, in that very valley and in a dire emergency, when the valley started flooding due to a diabolical plan put in motion centuries previous by none other than Kubla Khan, & more recently, one of my nephews, it was the imported articles, the ones that lead to our banishment, that now proved to be the very means by which we were able to save that historic town.
I would love to provide more details, but I have to run, I hear some alarms going off.
there but before the grace of God go I
well, I see that the Baron enjoys a good duck book as much as the rest of us...if he is in fact is not my father, it is a rather remakable post...
To quote BvM,"Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever"
Nothing like over simplifying an issue to suit your own philosophy. People are dying. Fuck your own thoughts, help a nigga out! Side, note: I like how the majority of those left are black. meaning, they couldn't afford to leave.
I hardly think I'm over-simplifying the issue. In fact, my argument would be that the mayor is doing that exact thing. As if the President will flick his index finger and make the situation better, and he's just not doing that because he doesn't like black people. Somehow, I think things are a little more complicated than that. One can demand more action without being a dumbass. I think with poverty, not leaving is less of a money issue and more of a ignorance issue. There are always means of getting out, no matter how poor you are, but you just are not willing or do not know how to get out.
Dumbass is referring to the mayor.
Hmm, but I think you are missing the greater point... you dance around it by stating that this is the residents sole responsibility. this neglects the fact that we're all connected. something happens over there affects what happens over here. nothing exists in isolation, not even the actions of others. Of course bush can't wave his arms and make it all better now, but he could have reacted faster, where the fuck was FEMA? We step up agencies to assist in times like these. It took him over 5 days after it began to hit for bush to do ANYTHING AT ALL. I'm not saying that it was only bush to blame, but to fail to aknowledge that fact is ignorance. many failed, yes. the mayor of new orleans should have had better evacuation plans, yes... we need to not bitch, and actually work to fix the problem - people are without homes or businesses... without which, they will never be able to help themselves. we need to get these people back on their feet so they can move forward with their lives.
Hello "Me" and anyone else who cares to listen:
Are you, by chance, saying that you do not believe the people of New Orleans are getting the help they need or will not get the help they need in the future? I BEG to differ. My own "little" rubber stamping company for which I work, is matching up to $250,000 freaking thousand dollars of profits to donate to this cause. America, my friend, is the most GENEROUS nation on the fricken planet, and privately owned companies and private citizens (not to mentions millions of our tax dollars as well) all over the country are giving....giving
and giving more to this cause and to these very needy folks. Please, I ask agonizingly, please recognize what is going RIGHT in this tragedy!
Barb aka Lovely Wife
Barb, you do raise a very good point. But it still is dancing around the issue. The private sector donating money is great, don't get me wrong, but we need our government to step. they are the only ones with the authority to instate order... where were the state and national guard? this is why we have them. to suggest that private donations will solve the problem is perposterous. we have systems in place, and if they were utilized properly then a lot could have been avoided. Seriously, like a day and a half was enough to evacuate over a million people. so much should have been done differently. However, it's past and we need to learn so as not to make the same mistakes over.
Now, note that I am responding to the negative blog posting in kind...but you are right, we do need to recognize what good has been done. It's easy to be negative.
First off, let me begin by saying that I at no point ever said it was the citizen's sole responsibility. I do not believe that and I never believed that. We deal with these sorts of situations through a number of different groups: Local government providing information to it's citizens, providing means of transporting people out of the city, and cooperating with higher levels of government among other duties. State government providing a place for people to go, providing means for the federal government to come in, and basic funds that the local government cannot cover. Federal government to providing the sort of resources that one sate cannot secure alone. And that's just government influence. Private influences, citizens have to cooperate and actively respond to the situation. Citizens outside of the affected area need to be willing to help with the knowledge that natural disasters can happen to anyone, so it's unreasonable to expect the affected citizens alone to hold the entire responsibility. And lastly, businesses, who make extraordinary profits thanks to our low regulation system of govenrment, must contribute to the security of the national economy. And finally, government from around the world need to contribute for the same reason that non-affected citizens do, in addition to stabalizing the international political system and the international economy. That's a lot of players. None of these people are responsible or at fault. They are just the people who need to respond appropriately in order to fix things. Blaming one (i.e. the federal government) for the whole situation is asinine. I'm not blaming citizens, I'm just telling them not to get pissed off at everyone else because they happen to live in an area that got hit by a hurricane. It's not my fault you live there and that you didn't pursue the means to leave. I sympathize with you. I will donate money to help your region recover. I will do everything I can to make the situation better. Don't bitch at me.
FEMA was there, or at least they were nearby. I know that the press was putting pressure on either the governor of Mississippi or Alabama to state the Federal government was screwing up, and with frustrated exasperation he replied, "They're doing a great job! FEMA was here before Katrina even got here." I'm not denying that anything went wrong, I'm just asking that the citizens of these affected areas be rational in understanding what it takes to respond to an entire city being destroyed. ::shrugs::
Where is the national guard? They're there. Remember, these are U.S. citizens. We send in troops cautiously. If we had sent them any earlier, headlines would be, "It's a military state!" ::raises an eyebrow::
My last paragraph was an attempt to communicate that this thought is an exception in my general feeling about the relief effort. I'm giddy about how I offer people Top Shelf Guacamole at El Chico 'cause we donate a dollar for every one we sell in the month of September. That's cool. That's the world I live in. It's a generous world. And I will tear down those who try to disparage (not critique, or question, or debate, but ignorantly disparage) that world.
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