Category Archives: Politics
Justice coming too slowly for beleaguered sinkhole residents
It’s hard to believe, but with summer upon us we’re also getting closer to the one-year anniversary of the sinkhole fiasco in Bayou Corne. That means that roughly 350 residents of this bayou community 70 miles west of New Orleans have spent months now out of their homes in a forced evacuation, fleeing the smell of methane, an ever-widening hole in the earth that could now accommodate the Louisiana Superdome, [...]
Read More »We’re now roughly five years into the surge on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas that has been trapped under shale formations, deep below the earth. The sharp rise in this fairly new type of drilling has overwhelmed states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, formerly coal states where intensive drilling for fossil fuels hadn’t taken place for generations. One important consequence is that state regulators have been totally unprepared [...]
Read More »Every so often, I worry that I’ve lost my capacity to feel anger and outrage over the oily monster that is British Petroleum — but if there’s one thing that BP is very good at, it’s fueling…rage. Here on the Gulf Coast, we’ve been fighting for three years to make sure that BP — a massive multinational corporation that makes billions of dollars in profit on the backs of the [...]
Read More »Governor Bobby Jindal is said to have lost his “mojo” this legislative sessions. His plan to repeal the state income tax failed before it got started. His education reforms are on life-support due to successful court challenges to his plans for vouchers and public charter school supports. Yet, publicly he remains committed, he says to vetoing any tax that comes before him. He opposes the cigarette tax, for example, even [...]
Read More »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 [...]
Read More »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 »One of the more important topics I cover here at this site is noise pollution, particularly in my hometown of New Orleans. Over the last few years, I’ve worked together with a website www.HearTheNOLAMusic.org, where you can find a lot of critical information about the harmful health impacts from unregulated noise. That is why communities pass noise and other quality of life ordinances: It is, quite literally, a matter of [...]
Read More »It just keeps on getting worse for ExxonMobil and its major oil pipeline spill in Mayflower, Ark. This week, officials were bracing for a major storm that threatened to send more of the spilled oil from the Canadian tar sands into nearby Lake Conway — a major, environmentally sensitive waterway: Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel says he’s concerned about the effect heavy rainfall could have on dispersing oil that spilled [...]
Read More »There’ve been multiple reports over the last couple of days about officials in Arkansas restricting access — apparently upon orders from top officials at ExxonMobil — to news helicopters and other media photographers seeking to capture the full extent of the Pegasus pipeline spill in Arkansas. Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made it clear why the oil giant didn’t want you to see what was going on, as it [...]
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