The Pro Looter Lobby
Y'all, I am proud to say that I have been "exposed" as a "founding member of the Pro Looter Lobby" by one of our local conservative websites. Happily, I appear to be in good company.
The first thing I did when I found out was email the Legal Eagle.
Then I got to thinking about what it means to be "pro-looter" and whether or not I am. I am truly pro-humanity and less so pro-property. So, if folks who are trapped in the city needed, in the initial aftermath, to ransack the city for food and clothing and dry shoes, I don't give a shit and I resent the media implication that folks should just behave themselves and wait for help or else they deserve whatever bad happens to them.
People are thirsty and hungry and wet and scared and help isn't coming, at least not as fast as it should.
Hence the reason I said yesterday that I wanted many, many more National Guardsmen down there, to rescue people, to get them food and shelter, and to secure the city.
New Orleans is, even at the best of times, a very poor, very crime-ridden city. Even if this situation were much better, say the power were just going to be out for a week, there should have been real executable plans to quickly secure the city, because any kind of disaster is not going to make the city less poor or reduce the proportion of criminals.
Oh, but the water... No, "but the water." In '93 there were plenty of towns under water for a long time and the National Guard had little problem securing them.
The city should have been secured. Maybe not in the first twenty-four hours, but shortly thereafter.
Listen, people, we are supposedly in a "war on terror" and for the past four years we've been living in a kind of shell-shocked nightmare of "They're going to hit us again. We've got to do what we've got to do to keep people safe."
Well, and pardon the bad pun, New Orleans was our dry run. Here's what happens when a city faces an unprecedented disaster (as terrorist attacks also are) and here's our government's response, even though they've had four years to prepare for some unexpected urban disaster.
Is that good enough for you?
It's not for me.
Anyway, back to the looters.
I'm not pro-television stealing or pro-not-prosecuting-these-dumbasses or any such nonsense. I'm not pro-standing-aside-and-letting-assholes-with-guns-sabotage-rescue-efforts. But I refuse to support any "kill a few of them and that'll scare the rest of them into behaving" bullshit.
It's not going to scare truly bad people. They all have guns. They'll just shoot back.
It's only going to terrorize the people who still need rescuing even worse. Who would come outside to be rescued with bullets flying?
posted by Aunt B at 9/01/2005 12:43:00 PM
10 Comments:
Anyone else see the irony of discussing law and order in a place like New Orleans?
W
Once again, I cannot agree more! I really cannot understand people that value property over human life. It makes me really sad for humanity.
Should we charge membership fees to be pro-looters or just loot random strangers to bankroll our club?
Well said. As usual.
I either am not too observant or you just added my blog to your page. Wowie! Thanks.
So, let's get this straight. WalMart will wind up with a huge insurance payout, chalking up everything in their stores as a total loss and being compensated for their goods. WalMarts across America are rushing truckloads of stuff to NOLA to give it away. But taking it out of their stores rather than letting the dozers get it or being handed a similar item off a truck is bad? Maybe the difference is all in the photo op. (Not to pick on just WalMart, although Big Blue Brother can withstand a little picking on from little old me.)
And another thing, while I'm on "this is what a free market looks like" roll. Those gas prices? Those unregulated rapidly rising pay through the nose until your brain hurts gas prices? I want everyone who has ever sung the praises of the self-regulating free market to shut the hell up. We've had artificially low gas prices for the last several decades while the rest of the world faced the music. Now it looks like our turn to get the bad news that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to build that split-level ranch thirty miles from your job and buy a truck that got seven mpg because it had a flip-down tv set for the kids and help destroy all the locally owned businesses by driving by them to shop at big old truck-dependent box stores...
You reap what you sow.
Why and how have gas prices been artificially low?
W
I think we might have to take this one outside...this is going to be a long response. (sorry for the blog-jacking, B)
Our national energy policy, such as it is, has been to favor “cheap energy” over market-based price. Several different presidential administrations of all political stripe have pressured OPEC (and most particularly, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) to keep oil prices artificially low by increasing production as price pressure mounts. To start in the 1970s (though I could start the clock earlier), President Nixon instituted price controls in 1973 that remained in place until 1981. We bought high on world markets and sold low at home; on the unpleasant occasion when President Carter attempted to tiptoe toward normalization…well, we all remember what happened then, as evidenced by this gem of a document by Richard Morgenstern (senior economist with the CBO --http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5295&sequence=0).
In the late 1970s, gas and oil consumption continued to outstrip our reserves and the answer embraced by energy policy makers was more imports, not the exploration of a less energy-intensive economic transformation. When President Reagan deregulated, he did so only in the context of massive oil sales by a radically weakened OPEC. If you remember, this precipitated a huge oil glut that sent crude oil down to $10-15 per barrel. Gasoline prices remained low, less than $1 per gallon, again as a matter of public policy and international diplomatic pressure.
Yet, India and China have begun to demand more and more oil which they themselves do not produce. Our own national energy consumpution has soared even at a time in which we are investing relatively little effort in locating or developing new resources. The cornucopia boys currently in charge have been slow to respond to this reality. The DOE has eschewed conservation programs and stifled research into alternative energy production, favoring the older strategy of leaning on Middle Eastern producers for price breaks and increased production – in fact, if you read today’s headlines about our strategy for weathering this price spike, you’ll find that we’re turning to Saudi Arabia. No surprise really, given the chummy relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud.
So, yes. Artificially low. I said what I meant. If you want cites, a quick Boolean search of terms like “artificially low” “gas” “committee” “energy” and “Congressional testimony” will get you all the grey paper you can handle, with impeccable bipartisan pedigree and real economists talking at your head. Go forth and read; as I tell my students, I can't do the research for you.
I wasn't saying you were wrong or anything Bridgett. Just curious about the details. Thanks for elaborating.
W
Bridgett, I'll tell you what I told W. and LE earlier. Any taking it outside or apologizing for blog-jacking will be met with a fist fight.
This is exactly why I blog, so that smart people can duke it out and teach me shit...
...while I slowly indoctrinate them into radical liberal heathen feminism... [insert evil laughter]
But you know what I mean. As long as things don't devolve into name-calling or personal attacks, argue away.
I think I just had my grouch on last night. Sorry if I was curt. (My home discipline -- obviously not econ! -- can be pretty argumentative.) The last thing people suffering the real pangs of what chirpy economists call "structural adjustments" is that this sudden slope of prices is really just a return to some ideal normal that they haven't really ever had to experience. I myself rankle at being told that the situation -- when calculated and adjusted and expressed in constant dollars -- isn't really as bad as we think and that relatively speaking, we're all doing ok. We're not. People are quitting jobs because they can't afford to drive 50 miles round-trip to make $8 an hour. Wages will lag significantly behind the price spike for consumer goods. There's just not that much credit reserves for most families, who have already over-extended. The poverty level is going to rise, as is inflation. This is going to be a mess, especially for rural people. I predict an outbreak of the Highway 40 blues.
What angers me is that this hard price shock and its attendant hardships didn't have to happen in this way, but that our leaders didn't have the courage to lead. American politicians aren't good at giving their voting public bad news and focus most of their efforts on 2-year and 4-year tactical responses rather than on long-term structural planning.
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