Tag: Gulf Coast

With our planetary situation worsening – from massive flooding in India to Bangladesh, fire-nados raging out of control from Siberia to California and record high temperatures in Scandinavia and the Arctic, etc. – you and your organization are encouraged to join the worldwide RISE FOR CLIMATE JOBS & JUSTICE on Saturday, 8 September. In our region, the march will convene at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, at 10 a.m. This major people’s mobilization precedes the so-called “Global Climate Summit.”

One of the most important conferences hosted in Oakland over this past year for the Black community has been the Black Urban Growers Conference. With several hundred people attending, there seems to be a lot of interest surrounding one of the most fundamental things that human beings do: grow food to eat. I talked with Kevin Cartwright, who worked with the organizing committee to make this conference happen about his thoughts on the gathering.

Eight years after Katrina, nearly a 100,000 people never got back to New Orleans, the city remains incredibly poor, jobs and income vary dramatically by race, rents are up, public transportation is down, traditional public housing is gone, life expectancy differs dramatically by race and place, and most public education has been converted into charter schools.

On April 20, 2010, a reckless attitude towards the safety of the Gulf Coast by BP caused a well to blow out 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. “People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf. The reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP.

Veteran comedian and activist Dick Gregory was arrested Sept. 3 for blocking the entrance way in a protest against British Petroleum for its handling of a $20 billion victims’ compensation fund, yet his protests continue.

In an historic verdict with national implications, five New Orleans police officers were convicted on Friday of civil rights violations for killing unarmed African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and could face life in prison when sentenced later this year.

Opening arguments begin today in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It is a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

A special investigation, “’My Name is 6508799’: State of the Gulf, One Year After the Oil Drilling Disaster,” recently released by the NAACP, indicates that thousands of Gulf Coast residents are still suffering mild to severe mental health problems stemming from BP oil drilling disaster last year.

A legal dispute in the rural Louisiana town of Waterproof has attracted the attention of national civil rights organizations and activists. Waterproof Mayor Bobby Higginbotham has been held without bail since May of 2010.

One year after an earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the promised relief and reconstruction aid has not reached those most in need. Less than 2% of the $267 million spent so far has gone to Haitian firms, the rest to "masters of disaster," big U.S. firms that hire Haitians to do the back-breaking work for $5 a day.

On the fifth anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Gulf Coast residents are still trying to rebuild their lives after years of broken promises and government neglect. The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act to provide hundreds of thousands of jobs languishes in Congress. Affordable housing eludes both survivors and those displaced by the storm.

Two big Texas oil companies are spending piles of money to kill California’s fast-growing clean energy economy and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that economy has already created. Big Oil is claiming to want to protect us and save jobs in our communities.

A group of advisors who will report to the director of the U.N. Habitat agency held a town hall meeting in New Orleans on Sunday, July 26, to hear from resident experts and other community members about housing rights violations along the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina.