Add to Katrina's toll race-tinged rhetoric (Rush, O'Reilly and Glen Beck dividing country)

St. Petersburg Times ^ | September 14, 2005 | ERIC DEGGANS

[WillMalven]

ROFLMAO!

[PeteB570]

So true, so very true.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

...The larger implications of his words also are obvious...

Not to this 'journalist'. George Will notes there are just a few simple things you should do to statistically avoid poverty. Graduate High School, don't get pregnant, don't get married as a teenager, and don't get divorced.

These guidelines have nothing to do with race - they are choices made by individuals not programs administered by government.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

As has been pointed out by others since Katrina came ashore, many who stayed are dependent on welfare checks and no doubt worried they would not get their subsistence money.

How sad, to be tied to a pit because you believe you have no options.

I think it's time for Rush to have one of his "you can do it" shows.

[kcvl]

Eric Deggans

Eric Deggans Leaving TV Beat for Edit Board

Eric Deggans, one of the few African American television critics at a daily, leaves that beat in September to join the editorial board of his paper, Florida's St. Petersburg Times.

Deggans is also president of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists.

His departure from the television beat leaves a vacancy in that slot.

******

Deggans points to what he calls "Endangered White Women Syndrome" - the glut of news coverage of missing white women

[G.Mason]

" ... Such role models we have ... "

You mean roll over models? LOL

I do hope all readers will know that Mr.Eric Deggans is a but an apologist for the many failed Democrat Party programs.

Any, with stomach enough, may read his constant dribble in the St. Pete Slimes.

[mlc9852]

And they look around and don't see any positive role models. Most don't have fathers and that is a big problem.

[.cnI redruM]

>>>>Gangsta lifestyle. Welfare mentality. Developing nation. All code words often used as unflattering, veiled references to people of color.


Not if you've seen the white and Hispanic kids at your local public high school.

[listenhillary]

John Stossel
The value of private charity
August 24, 2005

When "Cheech," a street hustler, would stand outside my apartment building begging, I'd ask him why he was begging. He'd tell me about his gambling and family problems, and I'd repeatedly tell him, "Someone who speaks as well as you could do much more with his life," and I'd encourage him to consult New York City's Social Services agencies. I could have done more for Cheech personally, but I said to myself, "Better leave it to the specialists -- my city spends billions on social services -- they have specialists to deal with people like Cheech."

Multiply that thought by 296 million Americans, and you see how public assistance displaces private charity. And that's only the beginning of the damage.

Twice we've brought ABC's cameras to Delancey Street, a mutual aid charity in San Francisco. It's a collection of hundreds of former street people and ex-cons (18 felony convictions is the average) who live and work together and help each other out.

Delancey Street has been hugely successful. Thirteen thousand people have been through its programs. The ex-addicts now run a dozen businesses, including a restaurant and a moving company.

But Mimi Silbert, who started Delancey Street, says it almost didn't happen, because government kept getting in the way. "We have had to fight every bureaucracy that exists." Silbert doesn't employ certified teachers and drug counselors, so welfare workers tried to smother her with red tape. "If Jesus Christ walked in today and wanted to start Christianity, he wouldn't be able to do it because they say to him, 'You need two psychiatrists, you need one social worker, somebody has to sign the things . . . '"

Silbert wanted to help some of the worst-off people in America learn to be productive citizens. The government, which typically doesn't do anything more productive with those people than lock them up, release them and lock them up again, nearly stopped her with its complicated rules.

Fortunately, Silbert fought the bureaucrats and won, but many others are beaten down by the bureaucracy. Government often makes private charity so difficult, individuals stop trying.

I once thought there was too much poverty for private charity to make much of a difference. Now I realize that private charity would do much more -- if government hadn't crowded it out. In the 1920s -- the last decade before the Roosevelt administration launched its campaign to federalize nearly everything -- 30 percent of American men belonged to mutual aid societies, groups of people with similar backgrounds who banded together to help members in trouble. They were especially common among minorities.

Mutual aid societies paid for doctors, built orphanages and cooked for the poor. Neighbors knew best what neighbors needed. They were better at making judgments about who needs a handout and who needed a kick in the rear. They helped the helpless, but administered tough love to the rest. They taught self-sufficiency.

Mutual aid didn't solve every problem, so government stepped in. But government didn't solve every problem either. Instead, it caused more problems by driving private charity out. Today, there are fewer mutual-aid societies, because people say, "We already pay taxes for HUD, HHS. Let the professionals do it." Big Government tells both the poor and those who would help them, "Don't try."

Private charity develops a sense of personal responsibility for recipients, and it does something similar for donors, too. If I hadn't thought the government would take care of Cheech, I would've had to decide whether I thought he was worth my money -- money I could spend on myself and my family, or on promoting freedom, or on any number of charitable causes.

When you rely on the government to help those who need it, you don't practice benevolence yourself. You don't take responsibility for deciding whom to help. Just as public assistance discourages the poor from becoming independent by rewarding them with fixed handouts, it discourages the rest of us from being benevolent. This may be the greatest irony of the welfare state: It not only encourages the poor to stay dependent, it kills individuals' desire to help them.

[libertylover]

I guess Mr. Deggans just can't handle the truth.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I know.

Popular culture is nutty - emulating the prison coiterre line.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

That's just it.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Is he brain dead or a bought and paid for Democrat apologist?

[airborne]

I think what should be told to kids (and adults) is, if you see a hurricane coming, and are told to leave the area, LEAVE THE AREA!!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Can't argue with that!

[carlr]

The larger implications of his words also are obvious. These often poor, often black hurricane victims brought all this misery and death on themselves, because they weren't motivated enough to succeed in America.

It would appear that the truth hurts to these people.
When you subsidize something you get more of it.That is what the welfare state has done.
When you make abnormal behavior the norm you remove the stigma from that behavior.For the overall betterment of a society,citizens should feel embarrassed by underachievement yet libs have encouraged it and have made poverty and the acceptance of that state generational.Add to that the feeling of victimhood and you have a subculture that is counter to what this country was built on.

Unlike Communism which must be enforced by the point of a sword,our version of collectivism is creating a willful dependence of uneducated,unmotivated people.
Libs don`t like it when you peek under the covers.

[junta]

This chump should read the LAT's (major suprise) account of the white working class people of St.Bernard's parish and then compare it to the mayhem committed by the too numerous thugs of NOLA.

[SuziQ]

As America tackles public policy changes in the wake of Katrina, how will the stereotypes created by pundits such as Beck, O'Reilly and Limbaugh affect the debate? At a time when unity is so important, the words of those who profit by keeping us apart are the last we should heed.

Oh, please. If this columnist wants to complain about folks not being UNIFYING, he needs to talk about the Rev. Al Charlatan, Jesse Jackson and Calypso Louie, who have billed this as "George Bush hates black people" from the get-go!

[Fred Hayek]

Excellent point by John Stossel. There is another thing I noticed in my much younger days about government welfare system. The bureaucrats had no interest in really helping their "clients". The "clients" were supposed to just stay on the dole, and stay at the bottom. Any "client" who did anything on his or her own was viewed as a threat to the bureaucrat - a threat to the bureaucrat's job if enough "clients" got the same idea. (Much like any student daring to do any real learning at Newark Central High School was an Uncle Tom/Oreo Cookie/Race Traitor/even White M.F.). Yes, that mentality was glaringly obvious in Newark, NJ, in the mid to late 1970's.

[skinkinthegrass]

I guess Mr. Deggans (et al) just can't handle the truth.

the truth = the poison