Mc Mike
Mc Mike's JournalThe sweetheart contracts to 1)Innovative Emergency Management and 2)Service Corp Int'l.
1) Everyone knows that bush outsourced Homeland Security and FEMA to political hacks, where FEMA had been run by actual emergency managers before. A year before Katrina, they gave a private group called Innovative Emergency Management a half million dollar contract to write up a "catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for the city of New Orleans". Of course, after the disaster, FEMA was unable to verify that the document even existed, so bush's pig buddies just stole the money. It was pointed out that it wasn't much of a disaster relief evacuation plan if nobody could even locate the document, after the disaster occurred. IEM's sweetheart contract was actually just another example of corporate-welfare fraud by the ultra-rich nazi lame-o's that are so close to bush, and it endangered the public and led to deaths.
That's not hyperbole, it's a fact.
An interesting sub-plot is this: Greg Palast reported that IEM said in a press release (when they got the private contract a year before the flood), that they had "teamed" with renowned expert James Lee Witt, Clinton's FEMA head, to come up with a plan. But then Witt issued a statement saying that he wasn't involved with IEM at all. They just lied, made something up to make it seem like they had some kind of credentials to get a private contract for emergency management.
Interestingly, Al Frankin discussed 'lying about James Witt' in his book Lies... (on page 2) when he discussed pro-bush media bias. During the first pres. debate in 2000, bush lied and said that by far, the vast majority of his tax cuts were going to the people at the bottom, when in fact the bottom 60% got 14.7% of the money. The media said nothing. But in the same debate Gore said he visited a Texas fire disaster site with James Lee Witt. Actually he visited the site with Witt's deputy, he visited 17 other disaster sites with Witt. There were scores of stories written about how Gore lied during the debate about his involvement with Witt! It was obviously a much more important issue than bush's debate lie, or the subsequent lie of bush cronies that resulted in a 4 figure body count for US citizens.
2) And there is no final body count for the death toll. The '1800 dead' figure is artificially deflated. The private contractor that got the job of recovering bodies was SCI (Kenyon). There's a lot of good archived info on this site:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x443167
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4808758#4808770
(See post 11, by DU member Snot)
Mark C Miller's book Cruel and Unusual pointed out that the repugs hung their 'impeach Clinton' efforts on the idea that Clinton 'lied under oath'. But when l'il bush was governor, SCI was a big donor of his which engaged in a lot of illegal practices, including desecrating bodies in cutrate shoddy botched embalming procedures and death threats against Ms. Eliza May, the head of the TX Funeral Services Commission. On 7/20/99, in order to prevent a deposition in her wrongful termination suit, l'il bush submitted a sworn affidavit that said he had no conversations with TFSC, SCI, or his staff about this 'FuneralGate' controversy, he had no knowledge of any of the facts in this case, and he never asked anyone on his staff to improperly interfere in this case. The sworn affidavit was entirely false. L'il bush lied under oath. And our country's media outlets failed to report his lying under oath.
So when Katrina's body count was swelling toward 9/11-level bodycount numbers, l'il bush's admin gave a sweetheart no-bids contract to SCI to 'recover' the bodies. Its wholly owned subsidiary Kenyon spent $17 million dollars on a facility that 'handled' 900 bodies, failed to identify 10% of them, failed to inform the families of 12% of the identified dead, etc. Bodies kept turning up, months after the job was 'done'. And there was plenty of wiggle room for SCI to not identify or report dead victims of the hurricane, since so many of them were from the poorest part of our country's population, and the bush admin had made sure to scatter their refugee families all over the country in temporary housing.
Simply put, one hand washed the other here. L'il bush's team got to avoid the inevitable comparison to his 9/11 failures that a body count over 2700 would bring, got to avoid the inevitable conclusion that his handling of Katrina was another national security failure, and that massive climate-change-caused environmental catastrophes are national security issues. And he got to give big campaign donors a lot of our tax dollars. SCI got our money, performed their job incompetently as usual, and got to help out their crooked buddy with his propaganda efforts. The relationship between bush and SCI is one where they engaged in a ton of felonies together.
3) I can't write about the sweetheart contract Blackwater's mercenaries got to provide security 'military policing' in NO, because it would take years of typing to categorically cover l'il bush and the repugs' hateful crooked thieving evil Katrina 'efforts'. But Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill report excellent info on that issue in their books Shock Doctrine and Blackwater.
Excellent charts in the Choquette and Johnson paper, that kicked off Clarkson's study.
(link included in the Americablog link).
The shift of votes to benefit repugs at precincts with over 350 voters, reminded me of Michael Collins' study of l'il bush's '04 'win' coming from (allegedly, according to the NEP's strained reconciliation attempt) '4 million new white big city voters', as described in Prof. Mark C. Miller's book Loser Take All, pp 97-115.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00133.htm
excerpt:
"Miller reveals a more sophisticated election theft in 2004. I wrote the chapter, "Election 2004: The Urban Legend" (by Michael Collins, see disclosure*) based on research by Internet poster " anaxarchos " who discovered some remarkable anomalies in the final exit poll for 2004: Bush won reelection in the nation's "big cities" (500,000 > pop.).
The national exit poll is sponsored by the Media Consortium consisting of the Associated Press ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and CNN. It provides the acknowledged source of national data on who voted, where, and why. There was great controversy generated by the unintentional release of a late Election Day exit poll showing Kerry winning by 3%. The official version, released the day after the election had Bush winning by 3%.
We examined the official exit poll and discovered data that casts serious doubt on the claimed vote totals. According to the official version of the exit poll:
-- 2004 was not a red versus blue election, as reported. The rural sector in 2000 was 23% of the total vote but in 2004, it was just 16%. Bush total votes were down by two million in 2004 compared to 2000 in that segment. Bush lost significant ground in red states in 2004 and started the election in the hole.
-- Bush made spectacular gains in "big cities" (pop. 500,000 or greater) going from 26% to 39% of the total votes in that segment. According to the official exit poll, he picked up these gains largely with the help of four million white big city voters, ghosts so to speak, who rose from their graves and other hiding places to hand the election to Bush.
-- According to the official exit poll, the Bush big city magic took place amidst a 66% increase in big city voter turnout compared to a more modest 16% national turnout increase using reported vote totals.
There was no 66% increase in big city turnout. Actual big city vote totals, available election eve or shortly thereafter, show big city turnout slightly below the national average. The exit poll's 66% turnout increase and the four million white ghosts were the only way to make the poll agree with the election results, neither of which was accurate.
According to the official exits, Bush became the first president to be re-elected while both losing significant ground in his base and, at the same time, making it up in hostile territory, the nation's big cities. The same people who gave us this mess did the exit polling for the 2008 primaries and will conduct the 2008 national exit poll in November. "
It can't be conclusively stated that the 'over 350 voter precinct' flip is the same as the 'urban legend' red shift, because I don't have the big city precinct'size' numbers. But that central tabulator flip looks like a reasonable mechanism to explain the 4 million new big-city white 'ghost' bush supporters, who 'officially' gave him the victory, when he was hated in all the Dem big cities, and had done absolutely nothing in terms of 'pro-big city' policy, or big-city voter outreach.
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