Category Archives: Investigations
If there is any state in the country that is in serious need of good watchdog journalism, it would be my home state of Louisiana. Sure, our Sportsmen’s Paradise has been celebrated for its colorful pols dating all the way back to Huey Long and the barely fictional “All the King’s Men,” but the reality is that too often “colorful” has been a euphemism for “corrupt.” And that is no [...]
Read More »This would not be the week that you’d want to begin work in the ExxonMobil PR department. Indeed, this seems to be the time when the oil giant — in fact, the world’s most profitable company, let us never forget — and its proverbial chickens are finally coming home to roost. Just in time for Earth Day, ExxonMobil’s environment-be-damned efforts to feed America’s addiction to oil are spoiling the earth, [...]
Read More »Sometimes it feels like conversations about the Gulf of Mexico — nearly three years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe unleashed roughly 5 million barrels of fresh crude — take place in parallel universes. Inside a courtroom here in New Orleans, BP and its high-priced lawyers continue to push for lower estimate of how much oil was spilled, while their unending barrage of uptempo TV ads seeks to convince Americans that [...]
Read More »There’s a huge twist in the complicated legal fight surrounding BP and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. Federal prosecutors are now investigating one of the lawyers on the powerful Plaintiff’s Steering Committee (PSC) amid charges of fraud related to his large list of clients Gulf Coast residents and small business owners who were affected by the BP spill. That list of plaintiffs is what got this Texas attorney, Mikal Watts, on the PSC, where he stands [...]
Read More »After exactly 200 days out of their homes, the beleaguered residents of Bayou Corne finally got a hearing in Baton Rouge this week. They were also told of growing uncertainty about when the crisis in Assumption Parish — where the massive sinkhole created by a collapsing salt cavern continues to grow — will ever be resolved. Many of them want out. Can you blame them at this point? On the 200th [...]
Read More »Too many corporations think they have too much to gain by not telling the truth. That’s been a common theme from Day One of this blog — whether the culprit has been oil giants like BP, lying about the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the natural gas companies who don’t want you to know what they’re doing with fracking wastes, or dishonesty by some of the planet’s [...]
Read More »In Louisiana, we are blessed to have a one-woman environmental protection agency by the name of Bonny Schumaker. A retired NASA physicist and pilot, Schumaker has found a way to merge her love of all creatures and her passion for flying to create an amazing operation called On Wings Of Care. She flies animal rescue missions but since 2010 has also devoted a lot of her energy toward helping her fellow [...]
Read More »The environmental issues that I most typically blog about here are really part of a larger problem in our society. It’s something we see time and time again — government failing to protect the little guy, and instead kowtowing to powerful and wealthy interests. Certainly you see that in a matter like the BP oil spill, where the government was too lax in regulating off-shore drilling before the Deepwater Horizon [...]
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Stop the bass-ackwards plan for New Orleans tourism
There’s an old saying that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Well, here in New Orleans, the tourism industry is a double-edged sword. Ever since the first oil-and-gas crash of the 1980s and especially since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, the Crescent City has depended on the kindness — and the tourism dollars — of strangers from all over the world to pay its [...]
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