Today the owners of a nursing home where thirty
elderly and disabled clients drowned when they
were abandoned, were charged.
Yesterday one of the lawyers filing habeus corpus
to discover what happened to prison and jail inmates
told the Democracy Now audience that she interviewed
more than one federal prisoner who described the
drowning of all prisoners in temporary holding cells,
those large group cells most likely to hold a lot more
than "thirty". Guards abandoned a jail in New Orleans,
leaving the two federal prisoners in a gym they were
able to escape from but leaving a shocking number
of alleged jaywalkers and accused park bench sleepers
in large holding cells that are still under water.
Stay tuned to your underwater radio for a test of
the emergency broadcast system. SCI, Gonzalez
and Joseph Albaugh will be working overtime to
contain this latest Funeralgate.
Or how about the homeless woman who was arrested
for sleeping too close to the ferry, and spirited off to
Angola State Prison maximum security along with
hundreds of women(it's a men's prison!) who had
been charged with similarly minor crimes and with
non-violent crimes and many had not received
hearings or trials yet.
-Bob
norgesen wrote:
Drowning by
Numbers
"Forget
the dead you've left, they will not follow you." - Bob Dylan
New Orleans is beginning to look like Funeralgate, supersized.
FEMA has relieved volunteers of their emergency
mortuary services in Louisiana only,
and contracted out to Kenyon, a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Service
Corporation International" of Houston, Texas.
Are the alarms sounding yet? LightUpTheDarkness reminds us why they
should be:
You may remember Service
Corporation International, SCI, as it was part of the case against
confirming Alberto Gonzales due to his involvement in the Texas and
Florida scandals known as Funeralgate. As we covered back in February, Service Corporation International was
"recycling" graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and
throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new
customers at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida . Service Corporation
International, the world’s largest funeral service company, is headed
by Robert Waltrip, a longtime friend and generous financial patron of
the Bush family. Eliza May was head of the Texas Funeral Services
Commission when it began receiving complaints about unlicensed
embalmers, and sued when she was fired. Gonzales kept Bush from
testifying in this case and was also under scrutiny when a memo
surfaced that was sent to his office when he was Bush’s gubernatorial
counsel. The memo suggested possible improprieties by two funeral
commissioners with ties to SCI and Joeseph Allbaugh, Bush’s former
chief of staff in Austin, 2000 presidential campaign manager, who now
serves as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The case was suddenly settled in November 2001. The Menorah Gardens
case in Florida, involving 72 families, was settled in Oct of 2004.
So, coincident with the emergence of happy talk and silver linings - Sure, it's bad, but New Orleans rescuers find fewer dead than feared
- the duties of processing Louisiana's fresh kill is consigned to Bush
Texas mafia with a criminal record including desecration of human
remains, "recycling" graves and dumping bodies.
There is a deeply bizarre note to this, because to anyone who has paid
attention to this slow-motion atrocity the bodies will be hidden in
plain sight. (There is pointed irony, as well: in a bid at boosting
government transparancy, China has just announced that it will no longer treat
death tolls from natural disasters as state secrets.) The arrival of
SCI in New Orleans is like a shredder truck pulling up outside the
offices of a crooked firm expecting a forensic audit. The evidence -
the bodies that are still
tied to lamp posts - could be going up in the smoke of one of the
city's uncontained fires, or weighted down and dumped in the bayou.
It's not unimaginable - SCI has already done this.
Can they hide all the dead? They're going to try to hide the living.
The head of FEMA's housing effort, Brad Fair, says that 200,000 evacuees may need
"temporary" shelter for five years.
Now why, rather than offer aid which could lead, with speed, to a
permanent solution in accord with the wishes of survivors, has the
government determined to withhold the financial assistance necessary to
support self-determination, and is spending more - five years of even basic
food and shelter add up - to deny them autonomy?
That's a scary question. The challenge to a long-disengaged populace:
does it have the courage to ask, and maybe answer, scary questions?
~~~
9
September 2005
Kenyon International, “under an
agreement with the US Government and the Department of Homeland
Security” has deployed a mobile morgue to Louisiana. “The
mobile morgue includes equipment for search and recovery, victim
identification, and pathology.” Kenyon International Emergency Services
is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Houston-based Service Corporation
International.
You may remember Service Corporation
International, SCI, as it was part of the case against confirming
Alberto Gonzales due to his involvement in the Texas and Florida
scandals known as Funeralgate. As we covered back in February, Service Corporation International was
"recycling" graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and
throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new customers at
two Jewish cemeteries in Florida . Service Corporation International,
the world’s largest funeral service company, is headed by Robert
Waltrip, a longtime friend and generous financial patron of the Bush
family. Eliza May was head of the Texas Funeral Services Commission
when it began receiving complaints about unlicensed embalmers, and sued
when she was fired. Gonzales kept Bush from testifying in this case and
was also under scrutiny when a memo surfaced that was sent to his
office when he was Bush’s gubernatorial counsel. The memo suggested
possible improprieties by two funeral commissioners with ties to SCI
and Joeseph Allbaugh, Bush’s former chief of staff in Austin, 2000
presidential campaign manager, who now serves as director of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA.). The case was suddenly
settled in November 2001. The Menorah Gardens case in Florida ,
involving 72 families, was settled in Oct of 2004.
And once again, Kenyon International
is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International.
The Corporatization of Katrina goes on
and on. Knowing the past improprieties of SCI, I am not at all
comfortable with FEMA’s “request” that “no photographs of
the deceased be made by the media.” Not only is it impossible to
reflect the scope of the disaster without the pictures, it’s also
possible to minimize the numbers of victims which I would not put past
this Administration at all.
Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
OM
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