Current Homeland Security Structure: “Top Down”

We saw how well the current “top down” Homeland Security structure worked in New Orleans in 2005 when the city was struck by Hurricane Katrina. This was not an emergency that no one was aware of, or that no one had been warned about. Government officials had known for years that something like this was possible and they did nothing to prepare deal with it. The Army Corps of Engineers did nothing about it. Eventually, “homeland security” knew the hurricane was coming, they were warned of how bad the hurricane could be and then how bad it became. And what was their response? Essentially, it was chaos and beating up little old ladies to take their revolvers from them. You can see the video on the internet where approximately 1/2 dozen burly thugs break into a woman’s home and beat her up to steal her revolver. This is the General Government’s idea of “Homeland Security”—complete chaos and incompetence and assertion of authority. Because that assertion of despotic authority makes up for the lack of competence. If the incompetents and miscreants in charge are asserting authority you can’t be asking questions about their competence. It’s exactly the opposite of the constitutional “bottom up” structure and operation of the Militia.

Let’s assume New Orleans has a population of 2 million and let’s assume that 60% were adults, so 1.2 million adults. Under the constitutional structure they would have had 1.2 million people organized for some number of years. Those people would have had food in their cellars, they all would have been armed and trained with arms, so you wouldn’t have had any looting or any of those types of problems. They all would have been trained in other ways, too. They would have had particular contingents that were trained to deal with the levies because that was the problem in that city. They would have brought all the engineering people that they had together in the particular engineering companies to deal with the problem. And if the Army Corps of Engineers were too lazy or incompetent to deal with it, then the people of New Orleans would have dealt with it. All of these problems would have been solved years before the hurricane hit if they had 1.2 million organized.

Let’s take just 10% of the 1.2 million – 120 thousand people. That many people would have been effective in those circumstances, especially if they had been working 3-4 years ahead of time. So if there had been only 1/10 of what the Constitution required for security in New Orleans, that catastrophe, tragedy, and monumental stupidity would not have happened. Who’s responsible for that?

If you look from the top down, because we always tend to think in terms of the “top down”, first it’s Congress, who certainly didn’t provide for “organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia”[1] in New Orleans. And then it’s the Louisiana State Government, they certainly didn’t do it. And thirdly, it’s whatever local government they have—city or “parish” government as they call them there, not counties. Those local government people certainly could have put pressure on the State government, and if the State government hadn’t done it they might have done something on their own. They probably could not have called it a “militia” because it would have been a local, not a State organization, but they could have set something up with the same structure. And the bottom of the pyramid, the people, who are supposed to be doing this, “WE THE PEOPLE”—they are the ones who are ultimately responsible. So we see that it was a failure of the entire structure; and the result was the City of New Orleans was inundated, people ended up in terrible situations, and many of them remained homeless for years.

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