Thinking about New Orleans and the social breakdown there in the past few days, I recalled this quote:

"[People constantly requesting government intervention] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

- Margaret Thatcher, Conservative prime minister of Great Britain, in 1987

Accuracy In Media is angry at U.S. cable network MSNBC for running an on-screen clock counting the time since Katrina hit  (seen first at Zerby's blog).

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Some pro-labour types argue against the type of employment model the CBC is trying to impose.

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According to a report by CTV News Toronto, this is what a New Orleans police officer told a tourist from Michigan when she asked for help: "Go to hell. It's every man for himself."

Two of Canada's most prominent lefties have offerings on rabble.ca.

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"We have long heard claims of compassionate conservatism among our nation's leaders. We now want the compassion. This is the time for those with wealth and resources to step up to the plate."

- Rep. Elijah Cummings, D., Maryland, member of the Congressional Black Caucus

I would also note that U.S. Republicans also savagely mocked John Edwards' talk of "two Americas." Let's see them do that now.

And for something a bit lighter, the NYT's Stephen Holden has released his list of the best movies from this summer (yes, folks, it's almost over!).

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According to the U.S. papers the BBC surveyed, the consenus is the anarchy in New Orleans has sprung from the wholly inadequate disaster response.

One TV vignette early this week showed a man in the hurricane zone cooking a can of beans over a fire. On the garage door behind him, he spray-painted "Stay Out or Die."

As he saw things, he was in a battle zone, "and you do what you got to do to survive," he said.

A Globe and Mail article explores those sentiments:

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Just as I was waking up, I  heard a radio clip by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin saying a lot of the craziness there was due to drug addicts who hadn't had a fix since Hurricane Katrina hit.

"We're tryin' to form a perimeter, but we might not be able to hold them," he said (or words to that effect).

This is starting to sound like something out of a George Romero movie.

Update:

I found a transcript on Salon of the interview Nagin did with WWL-AM Radio in New Orleans that has the exact quote:

And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it. You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will. And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.

Excerpts from some NYT stories and a Salon column about the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and how it's disproportionately affected poor blacks.

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In 2004, despite 3.8 per cent economic growth, incomes largely stagnated in the United States while poverty rose for the fourth straight year.

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The head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said protecting New Orleans from a major hurricane event was his number-one priority.

City officials in New Orleans, however, are blasting the feds and the state for an inadequate response now that the feared has become the actual.

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A team of volunteer drug addicts in Vancouver is helping shoot up addicts who are too ill or incapacitated to shoot up themselves.

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