Obama’s election marked a new dawn for hundreds of millions of people, who were looking to an eloquent, constitutional lawyer for “Hope” and “Change” in America. However, it quickly became apparent that Obama had little substance beyond the slogans branded by his campaign.With a little more than a year left in his presidency, his milquetoast legacy has been embodied by … Read More
Forget Stephen King. If you want scary, read U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier’s 150-page Findings of Fact released recently in the Deepwater Horizon case. Although the judge found BP liable for “gross negligence,” some U.S. media failed to mention that Barbier let BP off the hook on punitive damages. And that stuns me, given that the record seems to identify enough smoking … Read More
As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Nowhere does that ring more loudly true than in the aisles of every Walmart store. Always low prices, yes – but at what cost? There are, unfortunately, two inconvenient truths about the dollars you’ve supposedly saving from having elected the world’s largest retailer over Joe’s little store just down … 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
