army corps of engineers
GRITtv: The F Word: Man-Made Disaster in New Orleans
This week a federal district judge finally ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers was indeed responsible for part of the devastation in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and parts of St. Bernard Parish. The failure of the Corps to recognize the hazards wetland destruction had created was "clearly negligent on the part of the Corps," said U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. No judgment, of course, will bring back the Ninth Ward, which years after Katrina and Rita is still largely a ghost town. But this acknowledgment that the destruction didn't have to happen is important. You want national security? Stimulus? Jobs? That's it, and this is the time.
Email this pageGRITtv: Nov. 19, 2009
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was recently stripped of his federal authority to make immigration arrests after repeated complaints that he abuses power and uses racial profiling to target Latinos in his Arizona community. Salvador Reza, U.S. Air Force veteran, community organizer and renowned immigrants rights activist, joins Laura for an exclusive interview on Arpaio's ongoing abuses. Dennis Gilman brings us video footage from an Arpaio raid and from protests in Arizona, where white supremacist groups showed up to support Arpaio's policies. The National Book Awards were announced this week; Colum McCann was honored for his fiction work "Let the Great World Spin: A Novel," and T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt won the nonfiction prize.
