Bush regime hires crooked company to hide the bodies, etc

After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go
By Gordon Adams
The Baltimore Sun

Thursday 08 September 2005

The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving - and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.

When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.

When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.

When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.
Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, was senior White House budget official for national security in the Clinton administration.




Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Gulf Coast Recovery: Porch politics

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Does anyone else feel like storming the Bastille? It's
hard not to, when faced with how the Bush family has
responded to the devastation in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina.

In a serious let-them-eat-cake moment, first lady
Laura Bush said that mothers must get their kids to
school, as doing so gives children "a sense of
normalcy."

Sounds great, but, um, was she seriously asking people
who had watched their homes disappear to get their
kids in school within a week? We're guessing most
parents are putting hot meals and warm baths for the
little ones above all else.

Then her husband made the unthinkably moronic remarks
about his partying days in New Orleans and how he
looks forward once again, to chillin' at Mississippi
Sen. Trent Lott's house. "Out of the rubbles of Trent
Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's
going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward
to sitting on the porch."

Well thank goodness someone said something about the
devastation endured by the Lott family! Because of all
the images we'd seen from this disaster -- bodies
floating face down in filthy streets, children bawling
for food, people picking through trash amid violent
outbreaks throughout New Orleans -- it was the thought
of Lott's devastated porch that was keeping us awake
at night.

Now, don't get us wrong -- we're not happy the senator
has lost his home. We're just stunned (and we know we
shouldn't be) that our president is stupid enough to
say something about one wealthy man's home while
surrounded by the poor, the sick and the displaced.
His mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, seemed
equally clueless, as she toured the Houston Astrodome
where thousands of Katrina victims are being
temporarily housed.

"This is working very well for them," she said.

Which part, Barb? The part where they lost everything
they've owned? She then added, "Almost everyone I've
talked to says we're going to move to Houston." Well,
of course they do. They've been living in their own
filth, starving, fearing rape, or worse, for five days
at the Superdome in New Orleans. But why let that
image mar a perfectly good sound bite, eh?

Then again, what does one expect from an
administration that allowed a guy whose most
formidable resume entry was working for (and getting
fired by) the International Arabian Horse Association
to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Yup,
that was Michael Brown's big gig before his buddy --
Bush's 2000 campaign manager Joe Allbaugh -- got him a
job at FEMA. But it seems like Brown, who admitted he
didn't know how bad things were in New Orleans until
he saw it on the news, doesn't have anything to worry
about -- his job is secure until he's shamed into
leaving it -- if that's even possible. True, the
Department of Homeland Security has continued to rob
FEMA of its emergency response power, but still --
it's embarrassing to hear Bush say things like,
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Perhaps the
president needs to catch media reports of Brown's
bungling before he realizes that Brown's gotta go. We
don't want cake, and we don't want a "Brownie" -- we
want a government agency that will live up to its name
and respond to emergencies, pronto.



September 11, 2005 by the lndependent/UK
Cover-Up: Toxic Waters 'Will Make New Orleans Unsafe for a Decade'
by Geoffrey Lean


Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analyzed."Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

His intervention came as President Bush's approval ratings fell below 40 per cent for the first time. Yesterday, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, turned the screw by criticizing the US President's opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming. He compared New Orleans to island nations such as the Maldives, which are threatened by rising sea levels. Other US sources spelt out the extent of the danger from one of America's most polluted industrial areas, known locally as "Cancer Alley". The 66 chemical plants, refineries and petroleum storage depots churn out 600m lb of toxic waste each year. Other dangerous substances are in site storage tanks or at the port of New Orleans. No one knows how much pollution has escaped through damaged plants and leaking pipes into the "toxic gumbo" now drowning the city. Mr Kaufman says no one is trying to find out.

Few people are better qualified to judge the extent of the problem. Mr Kaufman, who has been with the EPA since it was founded 35 years ago, helped to set up its hazardous waste program. After serving as chief investigator to the EPA's ombudsman, he is now senior policy analyst in its Office of Solid Wastes and Emergency Response. He said the clean-up needed to be "the most massive public works exercise ever done", adding: "It will take 10 years to get everything up and running and safe."

Mr Kaufman claimed the Bush administration was playing down the need for a clean-up: the EPA has not been included in the core White House group tackling the crisis. "Its budget has been cut and inept political hacks have been put in key positions," Mr Kaufman said. "All the money for emergency response has gone to buy guns and cowboys - which don't do anything when a hurricane hits. We were less prepared for this than we would have been on 10 September 2001."

He said the water being pumped out of the city was not being tested for pollution and would damage Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, and endanger people using it downstream.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.





http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/09/drowning-by-numbers.html


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?