LifeCare, lifeboats, Katrina and The Carlyle Group

The latest transgression to be laid at the door of the  Carlyle Group? Hurricane Katrina murders.

Near the end of a news story Friday reporting that former LifeCare exec Donald Boucher will plead guilty to making $50,000 in illegal corporate campaign contributions, we find this:

LifeCare was acquired last summer by the Carlyle Group.

Twenty-four patients died at a LifeCare facility on the grounds of a Tenet Healthcare Corp. hospital in New Orleans that was cut off by floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina.

That's a discreet way of putting it. "The 'evacuation plan'," according to NPR on 2/16, "was to not leave any living patients behind." NPR reported that administrators "saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses."
Ah, yes. The Carlyle Group. The British Journal the Economist reports that "among its partners are former secretary of state James A. Baker III, former defense secretary Frank C. Carlucci and former White House budget chief Richard Darman" ("secretive Carlyle Group gives capitalism a bad name"), adding that the group "also retains former president Bush as a top adviser...."
As Michael Moore explains, "The Carlyle group is a multinational conglomerate that invests in heavily government-regulated industries like telecommunications, healthcare and, particularly, defense."

Yeah, "healthcare."

Since last summer, LifeCare has been part of that mix.
"LifeCare": now there's a misnomer if I ever heard one. It goes way way beyond irony. It operates 21 hospitals including Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans where the folks were murdered. The Times Picayune described Memorial as a "long-term acute-care center" -- which I take to be a hybrid beween a hosital and a nursing home.
When, in its Feb. 16 report, NPR offered proof that officials there had killed patients they couldn't evacuate in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I waited for the public outrage, the outrage that I was sure would come over what happened at LifeCare: murder, OKd by officials against helpless hurricane victims.
But the outrage didn't come. By now, much of the Katrina outrage has been simply used up, it seems.
Now that we know that LifeCare is part of the hated-by-us-lefties Carlyle Group, will the outrage revive?
Probably not. Even NPR, which reported the culpability of LifeCare administrators, called them "mercy killings."
So it's OK, the term seems to say.
 Nobody seems to see how ridiculous that term "mercy killing" is. How it excuses officials, who should have heeded warnings to evacuate. Culpability rises to the highest corporate and government levels in our nation, now that it's clear federal officials -- and Bush -- knew of the danger to New Orleans days before levees broke.
Not Dead Yet's statement gets it right: "This was not about compassion or mercy. It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save themselves."
"So far the focus has been on the failures and abandonments of the poor, old and disabled by the government at local, state and national levels," Not Dead Yet's Steve Drake tells me. "But perhaps we need to look at corporate abandonment of these same people."
Right. And let's call it what it is: murder.