Gotta Pick A Pocket Or Two

Ayn Rand In Hollywood

The Bush II regime was the place of propaganda urging for all things to go private. Thus, "privatize!" was their mantra, yet incompetence was their trademark in everything, except perhaps propaganda.

Dick "Chain Lover" Cheney is heavily invested in private prisons in Texas because he thinks private, for profit, prisons are the answer.

He misses many realities, in this case he is missing the reality that some things must be utilities instead of being for-profit enterprises.

The privatization movement is not working so well, because like health care and social security for profit, there is an inherent conflict of interest.

The reality of this came to the forefront during recent riots in some Texas private for-profit prisons:

Leaders of the rebellion were demanding a meeting with the Mexican Consulate, the FBI and the warden to discuss a number of grievances that they said GEO Group, the prison company that manages the 3,700-bed facility, had refused to address.

The evening of the uprising, the inmates sent a delegation of seven men—a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Nigerian, and four Mexicans—to meet with the authorities.

They explained that the uprising had erupted from widespread dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of the prison: inedible food, a dearth of legal resources, the use of solitary confinement to punish people who complained about their medical treatment, overcrowding and, above all, poor health care.

The delegates pointed to a string of deaths (according to public records, five men died in Reeves between August 2008 and March 2009, including two suicides) they attributed to the prison’s inattention to medical needs. The riot had been sparked by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, an epileptic, who had been carried out of the prison’s Special Housing Unit in a body bag that same day. “Suspect(s) are talking about the guy being out of the shoe [SHU],” the Odessa Police Department report said. “Someone should have been there with him. Special housing was not the place for [him].”

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Twenty-four hours after it began, the uprising was over. More than $1 million worth of damage had been done to the prison. Less than two months later, on Jan. 31, the prison would be under inmate control again—and this time the rioting would last for five days and end with one building destroyed and some $20 million in damage.

(Texas Observer). It is easy for bean counters or greedy stock holders to drift into wanting more for them, less for their prisoners.

How difficult is it to grasp that more profit is made by denying medicine, good food, and decent housing? How difficult is it to grasp that, like health care for profit, this is not the realm for profit motive to play a part?

It is easy for investors, like bailed out banksters, to become cruel under those circumstances, especially when those making the demands do not see or feel the results that their greed and lust is having on millions of other people.

Holy Status Quo Badman! neoOrleans!

The super heroes of Wall Street, Tim Geitner as superman, got a lot of flack from congress in hearings on Capitol Hill yesterday.

Congress and the White House have caught up with the sentiment the people had two years ago.

The people by the millions have lost homes, jobs, savings, health care, retirement plans, confidence in the government, and everything else the plunder barons took from them.

Yes, everything the plunder barons are still taking from them as home loss, job loss, savings loss, retirement plan loss, confidence in the government, and everything else continues to be lost.

The congress, the administration, and the press are continually spiralling down into the vortex of too corrupt and too late, because frankly all they care about is corrupt money from corrupt lobbyists so they have enough money to lie hard in the next campaign.

The next campaign to once again satiate their lust and egos.

Morning Joe on MSNBC is doing the show from the neoAmerican city neoOrleans.

NeoOrleans is all that is left of the old American city of New Orleans following the neoCon's roguish and revolting conservative revolution.

The neoCon revolt of rogues that had its way with the proud American New Orleans, converting it into the third world city of neoOrleans.

Meanwhile, back at slime central, Gotham "Gotcha" City,
the deluded elite freaks with their masks and suits on run their mouths as the rest of the nation prepares for a long lasting neoAmerika.

It is as if the deluded elite freaks fancy themselves as a type of Paris Hilton taking care of a chimp in a bowling alley.

How low can their appraisal of the American public get? Do they think that the American public buys into the economic policies that treat the people like primates for the Hilton Wall Streeters to play with?

It appears that the people see a neoNation with fewer homes, fewer jobs, less money, less health, more living in the street, and a storm of lies from their plundering government.

A government deluded by the toxins of power they fight to ingest.

When Accountability Is A Plague - 2

We have opined on the disasters that are spawned when accountability goes the way of the dinosaurs, because a lack of accountability destroys democracy.

There was a trickle of accountability yesterday when a federal judge ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers negligently caused much, if not most, of the damage done to American citizens who lived in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit.

The American citizens of New Orleans lost loved ones, pets, friends, jobs, and homes due to government negligence.

But that trickle of accountability is akin to the much smaller trickle of accountability for the Bush II crime situations such as lying to congress to get us into endless wars at the behest of the warmongers, to get us into torture in violation of our own criminal laws as well as treaty law, and to lead us into the financial disaster that has stripped us of our national financial sovereignty. The federal judge, in a 156 page opinion, held that:

The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly the expression “talk is cheap” applies here. In the event the gross negligence of the Corps in maintaining the MRGO would be regarded as policy, then the discretionary function exception would swallow the Federal Torts Claim Act leaving it an emasculated statute applying to automobile accidents where government employees are involved or medical malpractice where a government physician is involved. This was clearly not the intent of Congress. Safety concerns are not a talisman in deciding whether to apply the discretionary function exception, but certainly are a very significant consideration. Here, there was no balancing or weighing of countervailing considerations. The failure to maintain the MRGO properly compromised the Reach 2 Levee and created a substantial risk of catastrophic loss of human life and private property due to this malfeasance. Nothing the Corps has introduced into evidence tips the balance in its favor.

(IN RE KATRINA CANAL BREACHES CONSOLIDATED LITIGATION, page 148, PDF). There was nothing in the evidence that would tip the balance of the case to the favor of The Army Corps of Engineers.

Fine, however, I have some evidence that should expand the liability to those who consider themselves to be too elite to fail or to be bothered by the "quaint notion of accountability".

In a post here entitled "When Accountability Is A Plague", we pointed out that a new corruption is creeping into Washington D.C. federal government culture or tradition.

That new corrupt neoCon ideology boils down to a notion that no administration can prosecute any past administration for any "policy decisions", which, translated out of propaganda into plain talk means "crimes committed by those too elite to fail".

I will now show that the Bush II regime caused and ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to be grossly negligent, which led to the destruction in New Orleans, and which has now led to the federal court decision.

I was in New Orleans before Katrina. I was looking to purchase a rental property in the French Quarter. I found many bargains. But I had read many scientific papers, which got more and more urgent over the years, that said New Orleans was going to suffer hurricane damage. It was foreseeable. So I did not make a purchase.

I spent time with several people there, including street people, and told them why I was not going to purchase there, "because a hurricane was bound to hit the place according to escalating scientific warnings".

Well before Katrina a conservative Mississippi congressman, Mike Parker, was appointed by the Bush II regime to be the civil head of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Mr. Parker, unlike "you are doin' a heckuva job Brownie", eventually got the message from the warnings several concerned scientists were repeating.

Parker also eventually became vocal in opposing the Bush II regime's plans to severely decrease the Corps budget money used to repair and maintain the New Orleans Levee System:

Year after year, the Bush administration insisted on massive tax cuts for the wealthy. And year after year, the White House refused to provide the funding government experts said was needed to strengthen levees, beef up hurricane preparedness and get federal emergency response ready for an onslaught from Mother Nature.
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Parker was rewarded for his [earlier] Republican service by President Bush, who appointed him to head the Army Corps of Engineers on June 7, 2001. That was the very same day Bush signed his massive $1.3 trillion income tax cut into law — a tax cut that severely depleted the government of revenues it needed to address critical priorities. As Parker soon learned, one of the priorities that would be sacrificed was flood and hurricane protection.

Overall, Bush’s first budget introduced in February 2001 proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. To be sure, these budget cuts were one in a number of cuts to public priorities like health care, human services, infrastructure and job training.

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The cuts were so deep, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) broke ranks with her party and penned a nationally-syndicated op-ed in April 2001 saying that “lives very likely will be lost.”

Consider just a few of the specific examples: In the same budget that provided more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts, Bush proposed providing only half of what his own administration officials said was necessary to sustain the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)—a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage. This 2001 budget proposal came in the same year that, according to the Houston Chronicle, federal officials publicly ranked the potential damage to New Orleans by a major hurricane “among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.”

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When Parker headed to Capitol Hill for annual budget hearings in February 2002, he couldn’t hide the truth. Under questioning, he admitted that “there will be a negative impact” if the President’s budget cuts were allowed to go forward. The White House fired Parker within a matter of days.

(In These Times, Sept. 2005). Later Katrina hit, horrifying the nation, so Bush II flew over in Air Farce One, then later dropped by to say "Brownie you're doin' a heckuva job".

Lets face it, "gross negligence" is an understatement.

The republican Bush II regime got away with sending trillions of dollars to foreign nations, while leaving the American citizens in New Orleans to suffer unto this very day.

The bushies got away with it because the Obama Administration is cowardly when it comes to applying accountability to elite republicans or elite democrats.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

NeoConrad & The Boo Dogs

Senator Conrad, in his always feigned manner, was on Morning Joe today whining about deficits.

His position is phoney because the greatest cause of the deficits is the warmonger ideology in bed with the plundering of the treasury.

Senator Conrad always votes for war and war spending that cause crippling deficits and loss of financial sovereignty, but is dead set against health care reform that will help future budgets by arresting criminal cost increases.

War welfare is bankrupting the part of the country we call the middle class and the poor, while at the same time it is filling the banks of the robber barons and oil barons with unprecedented plunder.

Rid the government of these types of hypocrites.

Terrified Of A World My Children Inherit

On Morning Joe, MSNBC, this morning Mika and Willie interviewed a fellow who has children, who is "terrified" by the world they will live in, and who is doing a good series for that network.

Jeff Corwin is an environmentalist who has done a show 100 Heartbeats for MSNBC.

He mentioned that we are on the edge of loosing it completely, that no time in the earth's past, except when the dinosaurs became extinct along with thousands of others, have more species been going extinct.

Dredd Blog has pointed out the dismal reality of approaching catastrophe the governments of the world cannot seem to handle or even fathom.

Regain Our Financial Sovereignty

These were the shocking but true words of the Secretary of State on Meet The Press this Sunday: we must regain our financial sovereignty.

We should remember that when she left the White House as first lady after having spent two terms there with her husband, they left the nation with a budget surplus.

We were sovereign over our financial security, needing no foreign nation to float our financial boat. Now a severe hole has been put into our Ship of State, and we are sinking financially.

Our precious treasure, our security, sovereignty, and freedoms have therefore suffered.

All the phoney talk about security by the warmongers, plunder barons, and psychotic oil barons in the White House, Congress, and the Judiciary, is now seen in hindsight for what it really was: reckless & destructive propaganda by the Bush II regime.

The wars and other financial debauchery have bankrupted us to the point we are financial servants to foreign entities to an unamerican degree.

UPDATE: The cultural American myth that China needs us more than we need China is debunked with the facts.

All Ocean Experience Is Local

This is the last of the "all ___ is local" series, at least for awhile.

The subject of the oceans really can illustrate the reality that we are all in this Earth experience together, really can show the fallacy of the "all ___ is local" mantra, because what one nation does environmentally will have an effect on the other nations within the global community.

Scientific papers are constantly being released which in effect say that "it is worse than we thought last time".

One crisp example concerns the Greenland ice sheet:

Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.

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The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres [about 21 feet].

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Without [some lucky] moderating effects, post-1996 Greenland mass loss would have been double the amount of mass loss observed now.

(Science Daily, emphasis added). A 21 foot (7 meter) rise in ocean level would certainly have the effect of destroying civilization as we know it.

The great and small sea ports of current civilization would be destroyed, as a billion people who live in the areas that would go underwater migrated, relocated, or perished.

The small nation of Greenland could effect our entire civilization on earth?

Yes, however, the nation of Greenland by itself has no control over global weather, a function of all nations that are warming the global temperature of the earth by their own seemingly local endeavours.

If we add to this phenomenon the fact that the Arctic & Antarctic ice are also experiencing the same thing, factoring in that it is not reversible in any meaningful way, it is an incredibly serious matter.

The next post in this series is here.