Archive for 9/11
Five Questions About the BP Compensation Fund
Under withering pressure from the White House and an enraged public, BP has agreed to establish a compensation fund for those affected by the oil spill. (We need a new name for this disaster. “Oil spill” doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of what happened.) For now, BP has committed to a cool $20 billion for [...]
9/11, Katrina, and the BP Oil Spill: The Inconsistency of Compensation
The by-now predictable, tedious, and irresponsible Republican bulwark against raising or eliminating the criminally low liability cap that would leave claimant against BP out in the cold really has me frosted. And it’s gotten me thinking about how we compensate people for loss in front-page cases: September 11; Katrina; and this BP oil “spill.”
Let’s talk [...]
U.S. Government: Compensate Katrina Victims
The recent news that a federal judge has ruled the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and by extension, the U.S. Government, liable for at least some of the preventable disasters associated with Hurricane Katrina should lead the government to do what it should have done long ago: Provide generous, long-tail assistance to help the residents [...]
Court Rules Army Corps Committed “MR. GO” No-No
This just in: Federal district court judge Stanwood Duval Jr. has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to Katrina victims, payable by the U.S. Government because of the negligence of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The government — the same government, by the way, that awarded billions of dollars to the surviving family members of those [...]
Zeitoun — One Katrina Family’s Story
In the compelling Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (best known for “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) has created a piece of advocacy journalism that deserves to be read and discussed. I plowed straight through the first 200+ pages on Sunday night, stopping only when I simply couldn’t stay awake. Then I finished it last night, after [...]
“A Day That Will Live in….”
News broke today that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who presided over that great metropolis during the September 11 attacks, failed to attend the wedding of his two close friends, Howard Koeppel and Mark Hsiao, in whose home the mayor resided for six months during his very public divorce, well before the tragic [...]
Equality Forum Day 3 (Part 1): “Tomorrow Hour Zero”
The day before the tragic events of September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence intercepted a communication known to be from al-Qaeda, boasting that “tomorrow is zero hour” (literally translated above). This possibly interesting statement went untranslated, though, until September 12. According to Alex Nicholson, who apparently speaks all living and several dead languages (and also looked [...]
Tortured Legal Analysis
Last Thursday’s release of the so-called “torture memos,” written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration to justify “harsh interrogation techniques,” has brought down a hail of commentary from all points along the political spectrum. I’m reluctant to wade into this mess, mostly because it’s hard to find an angle [...]
America Betrayed
Hurricane Katrina was a bit player in the disaster that befell New Orleans; a Category 1 hurricane (there, although stronger elsewhere), it was able to swamp the city only because of an egregious, decades-long failure on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers to ensure that the levee system protecting New Orleans was sound.
This [...]