Mining Gold's Sillyness Or the Inflating costs of Death
I did a google search for keynes ideas
"Dig it up to bury it again" - just like we do with gold - dig it from one hole and put it back down in another - how dumb and wasteful
google.com
Choice articles from the search:
seefido.com
Dogs million year old evolutionary behavior to bury thier food and dig it back up again over and over until fully consumed - completely unneccesary wasteful behavior for the modern day beverly hills poodle.
libcom.org
I was talking to a funeral home director in Georgia recently who told me something that shocked me, and I am sure, will shock you too.
Think you know who owns your local Black community funeral home? Think again. It's probably owned by a large multinational corporation, instead of a Black family like in the past. A shadowy group of billionaire white businessmen from British Columbia called the *Loewen Group* owns 30-60% of all the Black funeral homes in America (and over 1,500 funeral homes and cemeteries in all). The Loewen Group is the #2 largest mortuary company in the world, with assets in the billions of dollars, made eating the flesh of our dead. Along with SCI Inc. and the Stewart Group, (who are nos. 1 and 3 in mortuary company profits and holdings), the Loewen Group is the harbinger of the covert seizure of all Black funeral homes in the USA. They have funeral homes in Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom, Europe, and some say, are even moving into Southern and Western Africa.
Since they have taken over our local funeral homes, the costs of burying a loved one has risen 30-50%. If a family cannot pay these costs, then the body is kept "on ice" until they obtain the money. Many critics refer to this as keeping a body "hostage". In fact, in too many cases, once the white big business takes over a funeral home, prepaid funeral arrangements are routinely ignored or unilaterally violated, and then additional money is demanded for burial.
These white business people are also perpetrating a fraud on the Black community by "rehiring" the former Black owners as "managers", leading the average person to think the business is still Black-owned. The scam works this way: using gangster tactics, these white businessmen buy out bankrupt Black businesses, but also viable businesses by virtual bribes, threats, and even setting one funeral home against another in the same community to drive the reluctant owner out of business and then taking over the entire market. This is obscene, but it is the kind of hardball tactics they favor, if any owners resist selling out to them. It doesn't always work, and in fact the Black funeral home directors have formed their own trade group to protect them, but it still has allowed them to keep the pressure on, and the pressure has caused some to sellout.
This is really buzzards feeding on the Black dead. Yet another example of white capitalist forays into the Black community to dominate Black culture and business, whether it is the beauty home business, the hip hop music industry or funeral homes. Have they no shame? Have we no sanctity, even in death? The truth is that we must fight the Loewen Group buzzards off the bodies of our ancestors and loved ones. This is the worst exploitation possible.
They are so bad that even the federal government sued the Loewen Group over its corrupt business practices, but because of all the money they had already made, they were able to hold off both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. In fact, they sued the government, and tried to make the the U.S. government re-pay hundreds of millions of dollars in a private lawsuit that they lost against a local funeral home company in Mississippi, whose director sued them for trying to drive him out of business.
This company is so corrupt that their own stockholders have successfully sued them for hundreds of millions in a number of lawsuits over the last few years, accusing them of fraud, mismanagement and racketeering. But unlike Al Capone, they don't rob you with a gun, they use an ink pen, computer, or fax machine, and bring an army of lawyers when the going gets tough.
Even though they were also sued by the families of many people bilked out of their prepaid funeral arrangements and forced to pay thousands more to bury their loved ones, they have not changed their crooked way of doing business. They also are every bit as arrogant, hiding their ownership or control of many local funeral homes now, with shell companies, and putting millions in offshore banks. It is something not even the Mafia could succeed in doing in hiding illegal profits.
(lots of personal anecdotes deleted)
THE PROFIT OF DEATH (part 3 of 4)
Capitalism exploits us from cradle to gave. It costs so much now to bury our loved ones that it almost means hocking our future to pay to bury our past. Multinational Corporations like the Loewen Group of Canada, Houston-based Service Corporation International, and New Orleans-based Stewart Enterprises, Incorporated have made it very expensive to bury our people. They have done this by driving up the costs of funeral, and taking over the ownership of the family-owned funeral company.
These companies are fighting over their share of a $10 billion funeral service business. They have already made hundreds of millions in profits, but want more, in fact, in the typical greedy fashion of capitalists, want it all! Service Corporation International is the world's largest provider of funeral, crematoria, and cemetary serevices; they own over 4,5000 in all. Their global network spans 20 countries and 5 continents. Their 1999 annual report listed over $3.32 billion in revenues. Next comes the Loewen group, with ownership of almost 1,800 funeral homes and cemetaries, 90% of which are in the United States. The Loewen Group recently went into bankruptcy [with $1.6 billion dollars in liabilities] after being sucessfully sued for $500,000 in Mississippi, and yet was still able to fend off a recent takeover bid by SCI. They are most active in buying up Black, Jewish and Catholic funeral homes. Last, but not least, is the Stewart Enterprises, which has assets of almost 900 funeral homes, and $734.08 million dollars in revenues.
These people are getting rich in the game because they shy away from nothing to make money, including fraud, according to their media critics, shareholder lawsuits, and independent funeral companies. These sharks use a variety of fraudulent methods, but one of their best scams is to refuse to honor prepaid funeral plans, and force thousands of additional dollars out of a family on the spot. Many are forced to liquidate insurance policies, take out personal loans or new mortgages, and maybe even sell cars and other personal items to bury a family member. The sharks know that families will pay more out of desperation, if they are given sales pressure in their time of grief. The sharks make more from selling these preneed burial policies, [but they also lose hundreds of millions if forced to honor the policies]. Some years ago, a group of families in Louisiana filed a class action lawsuit against the Loewen Group for refusing to honor preneed policies. Similarly, a group of families in Chattanooga sued the Chattanooga Funeral Homes and SCI for refusing to honor such prepaid burial policies. But they know that most Black families won't sue them, deferring the price of the funeral to the mortician.
They also know they can make us pay more by "piecemealing" us to death. Here's what I mean: they charge you outrageous individual prices just for a casket ($2,800-$5,000), cemertary plot ($3,500), grave digging and clothing for deceased ($300),embalming ($400-650),funeral service and hearse ($1,500), and other add-ons, until we are at $10,000-$12,000 for a funeral. It's enough to make you cry *over the bill*, not just the loss of your loved one.
You ask what is the government doing about all this? Well, not a whole lot. The reality is that there is very weak regulation of funeral home practices, even though there have been federal regulations in place since 1972. They get away with price gouging, breach of contract, and other illegal acts because it is the states which are allowed to regulate, and most of their boards are stacked with funeral home owners themselves. It's the proverbial fox guarding the hen house. Only if there is a shocking case to the funeral home industry as a whole will they do anything at all. They favor "self-policing," and of course, it may have happened, but it generally is the exception rather than the rule.
So everything is already stacked against the consumer, and in favor of the funeral home owner. Then along comes the big white capitalist companies who swallow local funeral home companies to maximize profits. They make billions upon billions of dollars, and have now gotten so powerful that they threaten to do in the funeral home business what McDonald's did in the hamburger business: objectifying the product and the customer. In other words: it's no longer processing the body of your loved one at all which is the issue, the body is merely a commodity which demands a certain return for services rendered. Money rules: legal tender to cover a tender family moment.
I know you don't want to hear all this, it's a boring, theoretical approach to something as serious as life and death, but you need to know that your death or those of your loved ones are now not only the concern of your family alone, but also "bean-counters" as well: bankers, accountants, and businessmen. So, in effect they are saying that each death is just a profit center: "so let's bury them, [and if need be], dig them up and bury them again!" (BWAHAHAH - why not - works for gold)
How did we ever get to this situation, and what can we do to change it? I frankly don't know everything, like most people it was not something that I cared to reflect on, but it was forced upon me by the recent deaths of my parents. I do know that Black funeral homes started as African-style burial societies many years ago in the segregated South, where white folks would not handle Black bodies. The community then would take over that role, later Black entrepeneurs came along to start family-owned enterprises [mortuary and insurance companies], but still with the idea of servicing the Black community, not fleecing the community as today's white mega-corporations do, who have no regard for Black people except for our money.
We need to once again take over the Black funeral home business by creating funeral home cooperatives and mutual aid burial societies. It's easier to do now than before since you can buy a casket and funeral supplies yourself, conduct your own ceremony, and not once have to pay some smarmy, blood-sucking Loewen group "death-hustlers" their outrageously high prices.
I wish I had done this with my mother's death this year, and I highly recommend that you do it when the time comes. We must take the profit out of the deaths of our loved ones.
I watched a special on India Vosilla - where they take the dead to burn at the side of the river - much cheaper solution than the american way. |
