From Amy Goodman's Democracy Now this morning there comes the following story:
More information is emerging from New Orleans over how the police are treating people accused of looting. A 73-year-old woman remains in jail on a $50,000 bond after police arrested her for looting sixty dollars worth of sausage. At the time of her arrest, the woman -- Merlene Maten -- was staying in a hotel with her 80-year-old husband. She said they had followed orders to stock up on food and had stored some sausage in her car. After she took the sausage from the car, she says police handcuffed her and threw her in jail. A judge then set the bail at $50,000 -- 100 times the maximum $500 fine under state law for minor thefts.
Dada ponders: Is it theft if you steal your own sausage? And, if caught stealing your own fuckin' sausage, is a $50,000 jail bond warranted? Dada wonders what the bond would have been if the sausage the woman "stole" was not her own, but someone elses? Could something else be at work here? (Mrs. Maten is elderly and Afro-American.)
2 comments:
"Dada ponders: Is it theft if you steal your own sausage?"
I'm really going to be guarding my own sausage now. It's the only one I have and I'm not about to be arrested for retrieving it. The horrendous example you cite is a perfect metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in New Orleans. How about the folks who took a shotgun to people fleeing from the flood in order to prevent them from reaching their safe haven (and possibly sending them back to face death and disease)? I thought about the boatload of fleeing Jews that was turned away from the US during the Nazi era. But get ready for more horror stories as Bush struggles to regain (or gain) some creditbility. Already there are stories of speculators lining up to buy up flooded property in order to cash in on the anticipated Bush financial largesse. Corruption, anyone?
nomindleftbehind
Really appreciate your comments nomindleftbehind. I confess, your skeptical nature amuses me greatly.
But I have to ask: Whatever made you so cynical of your leaders? Was it the coup of 2000? (At least it was bloodless!) The robbing of the Treasury by rich folks and those obscene no-bid contracts of former industry captains now 'doing us'in public service in DC? Or the fallacious war? Special interest pandering? Incompetence in the face of adversity? A leader whose drug and alcohol record has been expunged, i.e., a (former/current?) doper with his finger on the nukulear button? The dripping hypocrisy of Christian evangelicals? The bankrupt nation we've become since 2000?
Or is it something more personal? Maybe you just don't like Bush?
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. Being as it's Sunday, I've got to speed off to church; pray for God to "remove" Hugo Chavez; so we won't have to. Assassinating folks is just so antithetical to my Christianity.
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