Housing discrimination against African-Americans, also known as redlining, has long been a form of institutional racism in the post Jim Crow era. Under the Federal Housing Act, federal loans were systematically denied to African-Americans, which helped create ghettos and further segregated blacks from whites. Ferguson is just one example among many which employed the practice. The latent effects of racism are rooted … Read More
After BP agreed to pay $4.5 billion to the government, and another $9.2 billion in penalties since its catastrophic oil spill, a new ruling has put the corporation under fire again. A US District Judge has found BP grossly negligent and it’s subcontractors, Halliburton and TransOcean, negligent for their roles in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent dumping of … Read More
After more than 1,800 deaths, $108 billion in damages, and almost a decade of recovery efforts, Hurricane Katrina is now remembered as the single most devastating natural disaster in US history. There were more than 50 failures in levees, leading to 80% of New Orleans being flooded. In particular, the construction of the lower ninth ward levee was called into … Read More
Recently I traveled to one of the most nefarious prisons in the world: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite repeated government pledges to close the infamous detention facility down, 149 men remained indefinitely imprisoned there. According to a top Bush administration official, the vast majority of prisoners are innocent, and were either swept up in a dragnet or handed over in exchange … Read More
Few realize how expensive it is to keep Guantanamo Bay prison operational. The Joint Task Force (JTF) detention center, which opened in 2002, costs US taxpayers $140 million a year, breaking down to about $800,000 per detainee. The JTF was never meant to be permanent, yet twelve long years after the first round of prisoners arrived, 149 prisoners remain detained … Read More
