New Media Alliance Blogs

By Thomas E. Brewton

New Orleanians born and bred in the welfare-state seem honestly believe that they are not required to do anything to help themselves.

A large number of people, most of whom apparently are residents of New Orleans, have favored me with four-letter-word denunciations of The god That Failed New Orleans.

A common allegation was that I had written that New Orleans deserved its fate. No one, however, cited specifics, for good reason: I wrote nothing to that effect.

For example:

And do they want the levees to break? I guess it depends if you are (as a New Orleans blogger commented to a brain-dead Repug at the link) “a fuckmook” who believes New Orleans deserved it (and there are, sadly, many more like this)…My thought is that they … don’t care. We’re the last major city port at the mouth of the largest river system in the United States, and they don’t give a rat’s ass. We have some of the best food, culture, history and characters to be found, and are unique unto ourselves in this world, but they pretty much summed it up with Dennis Hastert’s comment: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In other words, New Orleanians don’t need to exert themselves rebuilding the city. They’re entitled to have the taxpayers of the nation do it for them, because New Orleans has all sorts of things that cater to sensual appetites.

No emailer advanced a single argument to counter the specific points I made, which were that New Orleans, a once great commercial city, had become after 1927 mired in hedonism and dependence upon the welfare state.

New Orleans rejected the God that led settlers in New England to take personal responsibility for their actions and to found public education, industry, and the progenitor of the Constitution of the United States. Instead, New Orleans on balance after 1927 turned to worshipping the welfare state, looking to the atheistic materialism of socialism for its salvation.

That point is irrefutable if one compares the record of New Orleans after the mid-1950s with those of Houston, Dallas, Mobile, Memphis, Atlanta, and Tampa. Moreover, whenever New Orleans has made real economic progress, it’s generally been under the impetus of outsiders who came to the city.

National Bank of Commerce knocked the moribund Whitney National Bank off its first-place ranking only after a banker from Dallas came in to assume the CEO’s position.

One of the city’s premier real estate developments, One Canal Place, was conceived and built by Joe Canizaro, who came from Mississippi.

Even the famed Superdome was not financed and erected by local interests. After New Orleans’s investment banking firm Howard, Weil, Labouisse & Fredericks tried several times unsuccessfully to raise the necessary funds, Mills Lane, the CEO of Atlanta’s Citizens & Southern National Bank, assembled a consortium of banks across the south to float the necessary bonds.

Obviously not everyone in New Orleans is a slave to the welfare state. But on balance its residents have drifted since 1927 into the entitlements mentality: abandonment of personal responsibility and individual initiative.

The socialist welfare state is a form of slavery, or more accurately, a sort of neo-feudalism in which the individual has no rights independent of the figurative “piece of ground” to which the political state has assigned him.

Hilaire Belloc anticipated this in his 1912 book, The Servile State. He noted that, while the just-beginning socialist state in Great Britain was doing nice things for workers, it was at the price of their liberty to decide whether to work, when to work, or where to work.  Recipients of unemployment benefits, for example, had to report to employment offices and take whatever jobs were offered to them, or face punishment. 

Belloc’s prescience was confirmed after World War II.  Sir William Beveridge, one of the British Labour Party authors of socialized medicine and other welfare-state services after World War II, stated the necessity quite forthrightly. 

“…the State,” he wrote, “ in this field [attempting to guarantee full employment] is not wholly master of events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals……the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment without full powers.”

In other words, central planning necessary for imposition of socialism cannot become effective without subordinating the rights of individuals to the goals of the planners.  That is simply a degree of servility.

Once acculturated to this mentality, a society cannot reverse field. It would be like expecting rotten fruit to become fresh and sweet again.  It would be like taking a zoo animal back to the wild.  Uniform experience is that zoo animals accustomed to being fed and protected within their own private territories (cages) become completely disoriented, sicken and die (if not eaten shortly by predators) out in the native habitat of their wild kind.

In the same way, New Orleanians corrupted by many generations of worshipping the god of the welfare-state instinctively look to the government to do whatever needs to be done and flounder fecklessly while waiting for outsiders to do what they ought to have the moral fiber and gumption to do for themselves.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

-By Warner Todd Huston

Here is a perfect example of the sort of wild-eyed leftism that is so infused into the very souls of every journalist that claims the mantle of the fourth estate. It’s also a perfect example of how they are in the tank for their messiah, Obama. Newsweek’s Rich Wolffe and Evan Thomas have presented a fawning review of how Barack Obama is so cool and collected under political fire, but warns their messiah that the GOP is still filled with meanies who have been “successfully scaring voters since 1968.” Of course, not a word is spoken of all the scare tactics that the Democrat Party has used since time immemorial and Wolffe and Thomas act as if their pals at the DNC are just innocents in the wilderness unfairly assaulted by those nasty Republicans.

After celebrating Obama’s new, gentler politics, Newsweek gets down to brass tacks to warn Obama about those awful Republicans.

If the candidate seemed weary and peevish or a little slow to respond at times, he never lost his cool. But the real test is yet to come. The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border states–the Democrats’ base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but “Reagan Democrats” in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as “the other"–as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

But, let’s do a little review of the “scaring voters” that the Democrat Party has been a party to. And, heck, we don’t even have to go as far back as when the Democrats tried to cause fear that “miscegenation” would occur if Republicans were successful in ending slavery. Or the many decades of fear the Democrats spread with Jim Crow laws. No, we don’t even have to remind everyone that the largest number of members of the KKK were Democrats – heck, the Democrats even have an ex-KKK member as a Senator in West Virginia to this very day. Just about everyone knows these things even if the modern press wants us all to forget it.

But, the Democrat Party is famous for its scare tactics. For instance, let’s revisit the famous Daisy ad the Dems ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964 where the Democrats made everyone afraid that Goldwater was going to start a nuclear war if he was elected.

Or how about when Ronald Reagan proposed changes in the welfare systems during the early part of his presidency. It was claimed that he would starve school children with his plans. It was also claimed by several Democrat politicians that Republicans wanted to make our water too polluted to drink during those Reagan days. And, let us not forget when it was claimed that Reagan also wanted to start a nuclear war just as they claimed Goldwater wanted to. Remember how they called him Ronald Raygun?

We have seen Democrats over and over again try to scare the voters into voting for Democrats. They have a full litany of scare tactics. As far as Democrats are concerned, Republicans want to take away a women’s “right” to abortion, take away all support systems for the needy, start wars all across the globe, take away our civil rights, keep blacks from getting ahead, deny all minorities any success, steal us all blind with unfair business tactics like Enron’s, install a religious state… well, it goes on and on.

So, for these “journalists” to act as if only the GOP is involved in “scaring voters” is an act so blind, an act so filled with partisan rancor, that it defies description. But it is certainly a common assumption by the bulk of the MSM. Remember, to most journalists Democrats are all that’s good in the world.

(photo credit: Irony Smirony)

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Society of Professional Journalists has decided that it is best to leave a suspect’s race out of crime reporting except for “extraordinary” reasons. Of course, to the SPJ, “good reporting” means race info in a story about crime isn’t “useful to people in the community” even if the race of a suspect is part of a police report apparently. Despite their claim that they aren’t toeing the PC line, their explanation is filled with just the sort of reasoning based on PC thinking – one of which is that all whites are racists.

Some of you may remember the story in September of 2007 when the Sacramento Bee announced that they were revisiting their policy of including race in their crime stories. A particularly gruesome crime occurred that brought the Bee to revisit their policy when they reported on the suspect leaving out race while Internet reporting as well as the Bee’s own comments section on their internet posting of the story reported the race of the suspect anyway.

SPJ continues, however, to come down on the side of leaving the race of a suspect out of crime reporting. I find their reasons, though, less than convincing. In fact, their concerns are so broad as to make all reporting on every issue untenable if applied farther than just race in crime reporting.

The SPJ says that whites will always assume that “an object in a black man’s hand” is “a weapon,” seeming to accept the premise that all whites are racists. They point out that racial intermarriage and breeding makes skin color and race impossible to determine. They say that Hispanics can look black and they bring up the unreliability of the human memory. All these, they say, are reasons never to mention the race of a suspect in a crime story. “Fuzziness” and that “memory is delicate, and especially so when it comes to emotional situations, as well as cross-racial descriptions” seems to be enough for the SPJ to exclude race in crime reporting.

It is absolutely a fact that the human memory can be vague and unreliable. Part of good police work is to record the testimony of more than just one witness if at all possible. Still, however, it seems a bit odd for a paper not to report the information that the police reports contain. In fact, there is only one prevailing reason to leave it out and the SPJ clearly assumes the argument.

When police and the community are blinded by ideas about what a particular race looks like, whole groups suffer from suspicion and the actual culprit can escape.

So, as far as the SPJ is concerned PC “social” concerns are more important than reporting the information of a crime. Instead of actually reporting all available facts, the SPJ is saying that a news source should be more about having greater societal concerns in their work and that the “news” should be written less to report the facts and more to engage in the social “sciences.” Also, while they claim not to be bowing to PCism, it seems like every one of their reasons seem based on PC principles.

This raises a whole different concern: what is the news for? Is the news for presenting the facts of current events, or is the news an avenue for social engineering?

Obviously, the SPJ imagines for “professional journalists” a far greater role than just reporting the news. In fact, the SPJ imagines that they should be the arbiters of what people should be allowed to be exposed to. This seems to me to be a far different role than what any normal person would assume a reporter’s role would be. And, can we assume that the average journalist is trained enough in the social sciences to be able to fulfill this expanded role the SPJ imagines for all journalists? Do journalists have the same training as sociologists? I think not.

They certainly think an awful lot of themselves, don’t they?

The SPJ writer of this piece, by the way, seems to visit the subject of race often. Apparently it’s a big concern of hers as the search option at SPJ shows many of her articles are based on racial and gender concerns.

So, what do you think? Should a journalist be responsible for writing about the facts or should they be concerned with deciding what is best for society?

-By Warner Todd Huston

A few days ago it was reported that Barack Obama was ever so proud to have visited all “57 states” on his campaign swing. But, I noticed that he still avoids wearing that U.S. flag lapel pin, just the same. Well, I have finally found out why Barack Obama won’t wear that darned ol’ U.S. flag pin. Until now he couldn’t find one with all “57 States” on it. Well, the folks over at Suitably Flip blog have solved the problem for the junior Senator from Illinois.

Just in for the 2008 campaign season is the new 57 state U.S. flag pin for all the infromationally challenged Senators on your shopping list. Barack can proudly wear his 57 state flag pin at all the great celebrations to come. Like the birthday for the state of Guam, or the celebration for the state of Harlem… you know, all those great parties he’ll get invited to as the nominee for one of the two or three democratic Parties out there.

Now I only have one question for the Senator. Is this the flag of the “Damn United States” or the regular one that the rest of us live in?

Now, the Suitably Flip bloggers gave us a list of the other 7 states, but I think they missed the boat with their choices. After all, they missed one state that the Obama’s definitely visit quite often. The state of DENIAL!

And now for a hat tip you won’t believe. This funny bit came to my attention through Andrew Malcolm’s entry at the Los Angeles Times’ Top of the Ticket blog. Yeah, I find it hard to believe they had enough of a sense of humor to throw a dig at their messiah, too.

-By Warner Todd Huston

In today’s report on the disastrous cyclone that swept through the small Asian country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) it looks like ABC News is trying to start a new meme: The cyclone “was Asia’s answer to Hurricane Katrina.” How long do you think it will be before the idea takes hold and all manner of comparisons will be made between Katrina and the cyclone in Myanmar? If this idea takes hold it won’t be long before the media’s Bush Derangement Syndrome starts claiming that the military junta that is preventing relief supplies from reaching the Myanmarian people are just like Bush and FEMA’s failures in New Orleans.

It was Asia’s answer to Hurricane Katrina. Packing winds upwards of 120 mph, Cyclone Nargis became one of Asia’s deadliest storms by hitting land at one of the lowest points in Myanmar and setting off a storm surge that reached 25 miles inland.

“When we saw the (storm) track, I said, ‘Uh oh, this is not going to be good,” said Mark Lander, a meteorology professor at the University of Guam. “It would create a big storm surge. It was like Katrina going into New Orleans.”

But, in truth, cyclone Nargis was much, much stronger and more deadly than Katrina and any comparisons is superficial at best. Winds during Nargis, for instance, got up to 135 mph upon landfall and may have killed up to 100,000 people – already ranked as the 8th deadliest cyclone in recorded history. (Katrina’s winds were measured at 125 mph at landfall and killed about 1,836 people)

Naturally, it’s all because of global warming, too.

Some environmentalists suggested global warming may have played a role. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that warming oceans could contribute to increasingly severe cyclones with stronger winds and heavier rains.

Yes, “some environmentalists” think its all because of global warming. And “some” people think the Earth is flat, and “some” people claim to have had sex with Bigfoot, too.

Keep on the watch for this “Asia’s Katrina” narrative. It may begin to get wider notice among the MSM. Next thing you’ll know, the military junta in Myanmar will be called the “Bush administration” of Asia!

(Photo credit: Huffingtonpost.com)