I thought the point was pretty obvious, both in the OP and in life - wealthy people are just another Special Interest.
There’s lots of Special Interests in this country - groups of people that have their own goals and agendas. These groups often get organized and try to convince the government to pass laws that benefit the members of their group. And in many cases, what is given to the members of a group comes at a cost to the people who aren’t members of that group.
The wealthy have been able to convince many people of something that simply isn’t true - that if the government does something to benefit wealthy people somehow this will also benefit non-wealthy people. I think in most cases it’s wishful thinking; people want to believe they might become wealthy so they act in expectation of that - supporting laws that benefit wealthy people in the hope that they may someday benefit from those laws.
Another favorite tactic is to make claims that anyone who doesn’t defend the privileges of the wealthy is practicing “class warfare”. This is ridiculous. The wealthy are looking out for their own self-interest which is no different than the middle class looking out for their self-interest and the poor looking out for their self-interest.
The OP is simply pointing out some individual examples of a general principle: that the wealthy, like everyone else, are mainly concerned with looking out for themselves. This doesn’t make them any worse than the rest of us. But it does raise the question; if the wealthy aren’t looking out for your interests, why should you be looking out for their interests?
Knowing a bunch of hard-core idealists, I just want to say two things:
Usually people in a disaster need resources, rather then people coming over and being in the local and professional helper’s way;
The kind of people flocking to a disaster “wanting to help” often do so for reasons, that while showing positive intent in heart, are mostly selfish. They feel guilty, they want to feel needed, *they *want to help, and the victims have to give them the warm fuzzies. In my experience, if idealism isn’t backed up by rational thought and a professional attitude, it does more harm then good.
For instance, there was outrage about the people who vacationed in Thailand some months after the tsunami hit. By all accounts I read in the paper, those tourists were exactly what the struggling-to-rebuild-Thai little hotels needed, and the Thai were very, very happy with those tourists.
Lastly, invoking outrage is what mrs Klein does for a living, and she’s just plain good at it. Personally I don’t like her books; they lack an appendix about what we can DO to truly make the world a better place. All I get left with after reading her books is a feeling of fucked up, non directed outrage, general negativity, a bad temper for far too long, and the annoying need to push the book on other happy souls so they read it and be just as miserable and badtempered as I am. Thus spreading the meme.
That’s quite a strawman you’ve built there. The OP wasn’t talking about a bunch of wimpy liberals who felt a vague need to “do something” to validate their existence. It was talking about a group of professional health care providers who had the training and equipment to provide emergency medical care who were a few hundred yards away from a group of people who desperately needed emergency medical care. These people were exactly what the situation needed.
And could someone explain to me what’s to prevent a President from using a private security firm like Blackwater to stage a coup? Not saying that it would happen, mind you, it’s just that a large private army sort of gives me the willies. Could it be used to enforce policies that would be denied the President were he to try and have the military do them? Could he have them invade some other country?
They won’t, and they probably understand that they didn’t buy universal disaster protection, they bought hurricane evacuation services. In Florida and the Gulf Coast, hurricanes are the most likely disaster, taking steps to protect yourself in case of hurricane is smart.
Since there is no warning for a tornado, you can’t buy tornado evacuation services. You CAN buy tornado rebuilding services, it was even mentioned in the article. Priority reconstruction service for a fee, so if your business or home is destroyed, you can call in a construction company right away, who is prepared to start work immediately, instead of needing significant time to gather people, plans and materials.
I agree with everything you say except the “probably understand” part. Some of them certainly do, no doubt, but I’d be willing to bet that many of them do not. Too many people are willing to sign something without bothering to read it for me to think that all the folks (or even a significant majority of them) fully understand the contract they signed up for.
You have little grasp of reality. A doctor wandering around a shelter is about as usless as tits on a bull. Doctors are trained to do doctor stuff. Their equipment is designed for use in a hospital. EMTs and Paramedics are trained to treat people at the scene. If it wasn’t so scary it would be funny to see doctors at accident scenes. Most are completely useless and years away from any training that could help at the scene. What they need to do is to stay at the hospital and have the professionals that are trained to do so bring them patients. Which is apparently what happened. An unconcious patient was brought to the hospital. Does she have an imbedded chip they used to check her credit rating? No the ambulance brought her to a hospital where she received care. If more patients should have been brought there then it is not the fault of the doctors, partcularly interns that should not be let loose on the public without supervision.
And the need to “do something” is not a liberal thing. Maastricht was correct and never placed any kind of political label on it. Look at the outpouring of useless energy in New York after 911.
I’ve been at the scene of medical emergencies. I’m not a doctor or an EMT but I went in and did the best I could to help. I didn’t figure somebody else would take care of the problem and let somebody die so I could get in a few hands of pinochle.
Yep no understanding of reality. So who would be at the hospital with all the fancy machines when the patients get there? Basically all a doctor can do in a shelter is say, “Damn you need to get to a hospital.” There are others who can do that. Even you could do that. But you couldn’t run an ER. They were where they were needed the most. If the writer wasn’t embellishing then it wasn’t that busy at the time. Maybe they were up to their eyeballs a few days before. Apparently they were still taking in emergency cases and not just waiting for someone rich to come in for Botox. How else did the writer get there?
Oh Viggles, you say that now, but let one person suggest the superiority of foreign labour, and suddenly it’s “Buy American” this and “Illegal Immigration” that. Honestly, it’s a wonder that you found enough people to lie upon your polo field this last snowstorm. Hot Latin blood would have had those fields thawed in a trice.
Now now, you’re missing the point. The rich are the bad guys here, and the poor people are victims of Society™. The doctors are presumably rich, therefore they must be wrong. No need to analyze further - any more talk and the angry emotional appeals will begin to wear off.
C’mon, middle class and lower class incomes have been stagnant for decades while the upper class has seen their incomes rise at unprecedented rates over the same period. Anyone who can’t figure out what’s been going on is either a dumbass or they don’t WANT to figure it out.
I’d be less worried about a physical coup than I would be about a financial and economic one - you could theoretically put a bullet in a physical leader.
Oregon sunshine, the wealthy and the government are closely intertwined, but since they are not completely the same group, I didn’t want to miss anyone in my finger-pointing.
I guess if you ever need help someday you better hope that some fool like me is in the neighbourhood. Because realists like you will walk by and say “Loach doesn’t owe me any money so I guess it makes no difference to me whether he lives or dies.”
It’s you who’ve missed the point. Nobody’s saying rich people are bad and poor people are good. (Well, technically you said it but we were all able to see through your clever use of irony.) What we’ve been saying is that people generally take care of themselves and look out for number one. But we’ve been told by wealthy people for the last few decades that if we give them enough support, they’re going to someday turn it around and give something back to us. Many of us are have or at least are starting to question when this payback will begin. You, on the other hand, still seem to be among the loyalists who are sure that pretty soon some millionaire is going to reach down and scratch you behind the ears and tell you you’re a good boy.
What thread are you reading? It’s very simple. I don’t see the point in condeming doctors for being in a hospital where they belong. They would do no good putting on capes and sweeping down to rescue the poor people. They are ill equipt for that. What they are well equipt to do is things like take care of random car crash victims like the writer of the article. Obviously that “spa” was taking in victims off the street and not just rich people since she was unconcious and unable to show them her bank account.
Let’s remember the original article. Klein interviewed her intern because that’s her job - she’s a reporter (albeit an injured reporter at the time).
She was in New Orleans after the hurricane, during curfew, when her driver collided with a police car. Oops.
Anyway she was wondering what her intern did during the hurricane: maybe he had some interesting stories to tell.
No such luck. And he was glad that he didn’t work that shift. As for why he didn’t volunteer his services at his hospital or elsewhere – well, the good Doctor lives in the suburbs.
My pediatrician from the 1970s wouldn’t have acted that way.
I’m not blaming the intern though – I suspect that he didn’t have the same sort of social connections to the ill-insured that my former Doctor did.
So, no, Klein’s Doctor wasn’t where he belonged during the hurricane: he lived in the suburbs.
It’s mostly the latter I suspect. Some have more sensitive dispositions than others.
During a major natural disaster, hundreds of people died for a lack of medical care. You have a bunch of doctors sitting around playing cards in the midst of it. You continue to say they were doing the best thing they could do. And you accuse me of having a problem with reality.
Here’s reality. They should have put down the cards and tried to do something. If they had gone out and practiced medicine in the streets they would have done something. If they had gone out and brought patients into the hospital to be treated they would have done something. If a thousand people had died while they were saving one patient’s life, they would have still have done something. But they sat and played cards.
If I’m a cop and I’m standing in front of a store and somebody runs up to me and says “Some guys are robbing the store two blocks down the street!” I don’t say “Well, if I go to stop that crime and arrest them, somebody might come along while I’m not here and rob this store while I’m gone. So I’m just going to stay here to avoid that possibility.” No, I leave the store I’m at and go to where the crime is occurring. I do something. And if when I come back I find somebody did in fact break into the store while I was gone, I’ll at least know that I was doing as much as I could even if I can’t do everything. Stopping one real crime was more important than maybe stopping a theoretical crime.
And while those doctors set in a hospital and played cards and waited for theoretical patients to show up, real patients died.