Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Engineers at the University of Alberta have made a significant breakthrough in wind energy technology, developing a small-scale generator that is cheaper and more efficient than any competing technology. The new system can generate electricity from much lower wind speeds–10 km/hr as opposed to the 18 km/hr required by current small-scale wind systems. It can be built with a few, simple electronic components that are cheap and easy to find, use and repair. Dr. Andy Knight, the lead on the project, believes that wind energy might one day become a viable source of energy for everyone to use.

The importance of developments such as this to building a Green economy can’t be understated. They touch on at least four of the ten key values–decentralization, ecological wisdom, sustainablity, and community based economics.

A vital step toward a Green economy involves getting off the grid. The nation-wide electricity grid centralizes control over energy in a few hands, and it is enormously inefficient–more than half of all the electricity that is generated in this country is needed just to get the power through the wires.

Corporate control is the reason that you see billions and billions of dollars being poured into huge, centralized projects such as breeder reacters, nuclear fusion experiments, and the ever elusive hydrogen economy. Technologies that would put energy generation directly into people’s hands get all but ignored, except by university labs and private organizations.

But in the end, I believe that the small scale, efficient power generators will win out.

Congress is considering extending Day Light Savings (click here for link).

Get this: The Federal Government is paying to have all of its’ employees attend a lecture on the Constitution (click here for link). I kid you not — just read the article!

–Nathan

Doug Duncan is attempting to distance himself from a scandal that is brewing in the Department of Permitting Services, which reports directly to Duncan (click here for link). The short version of the scandal is that developers were able to make a ton of money by violating the Clarksburg Master Plan; and they were only able to violate the Master Plan because Permitting services issued the necessary permits. It should also be noted that the Duncan Administration has refused to order the destruction of the structures in question.

–Nathan

In this Washington Post article (click here for link) it is clear that the left is going to lose big time.

–Nathan

CAFTA may come to the House floor for a vote soon, having already passed the Senate (with significant Democratic support.) One of the most dangerous provisions of CAFTA expands on the rights given corporations in the NAFTA treaty to sue foreign governments over laws that they consider restraint of trade. Spelled out in Chapter 11 of the treaty, these provisions have been used to attack a wide variety of laws.

The California-based Metalclad company successfully challenged the denial of a construction permit by a Mexican municipality for the building of a toxic waste facility despite the prresence of an ecological preserve outside the dump;

Environmental and health bans of suspected toxins have been challenged, with one case already resulting in reversal of a Canadian government ban on the gasoline additive MMT;

Canada’s implementation of two international environmental agreements has been successfully challenged, and Canada will soon be ordered to pay damages to U.S. investors in both cases;

Foreign corporations have taken two lawsuits they lost in U.S. domestic courts to be “reheard” in the NAFTA investor-to-state system, one challenging the concept of sovereign immunity regarding a contract dispute with the City of Boston and the other challenging the rules of civil procedure, the jury system and a damage award in a Mississippi state court contract case;

The American company, United Parcel Service (UPS), has filed a suit challenging the governmental provision of parcel and courier services by the Canadian postal service;

A Canadian steel fabrication company challenged a federal “Buy America” law for highway construction projects in the U.S.

Perhaps the most perverse case is that of Glamis Gold, a company based out of Reno, Nevada. Its mining projects in Honduras and Guatemala have produced extensive pollution, while the mines’ tremendous need for water has dried up rivers and ruined farmlands for the local indigenous populations. In order to take advantage of NAFTA’s chapter 11, Glamis officially incorporated in Canada, even though its presence there is little more than a post office box. Then, as a “Canadian” corporation, Glamis sued California over that state’s regulation requiring backfilling and restoration of open pit mines that would damage Native American sacred sites. The case is still pending.

CAFTA’s Chapter 10 provisions expand on those in NAFTA’s chapter 11, providing foreign investors operating within the United States property rights that extend beyond U.S. Constitutional dictates and permit foreign investors to sue the U.S. government in international tribunals to obtain compensation for policies that undermine these new rights.

It’s time to realize that the corporate economy is now an international entity that has no loyalty to the U.S. Treaties like NAFTA and CAFTA are little more than tools for internatonal capital to override national sovereignty; and the poltical class–particularly the Bush administration–are following policies that damage and diminish national sovereignty to the benefit of international capital.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the only “winner” to come out of the Iraq war has been Haliburton.

In this Associated Press article (click here for link) the counter-intuitive facts surrounding the phenomenon of the false confession are explored a little. This is not a comprehensive examination.

This is truly embarrassing. Ken Sain points out an article in the Washington Post (click here ) which discusses events in Frederick County.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Environmental Protection Agency acted properly when it rejected a nonprofit group’s petition. The group had asked EPA to impose new controls on carbon dioxide and other automobile pollutants that scientists say trap heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

Click here for rest of story.

Republican Pennselvanian Senator Rick Santorum stood by his comments of three years ogo in which he claimed that liberalim was the reason underlying the sex abuse scandal in Boston’s Catholic Diocese.
Click here for rest of story.