Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

This winter I thought it was just me, but I see that I’m not the only one who misses the snow…

This year, Sophia spent her birthday inside, playing video games with friends. “It’s really boring here without ice,” she said.

For the first time that anyone in Put-in-Bay could remember, the Great Lakes were ice-free in the middle of winter. Even Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five lakes and usually the first to freeze over, was clear.

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This is typical of the New York Times: Offer some — but not a lot of — credence to an issue and then claim that their coverage is “Fair and balanced.”

Leaning low into the microphone, Mr. Perkins affects a deep conspiratorial whisper as he sets the scene for the imagined encounter between the new president and the representative of the multinational corporate interests Mr. Morales had vilified during his campaign.

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Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi River lapped at the steps of the Gateway Arch during the 1993 flood, more than 14,000 acres of flood plain have been developed since then. That has reduced the region’s ability to store water during future floods and potentially put more people in harm’s way, said Adolphus Busch IV, a scion of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family who is chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance.

Similar development has occurred around Dallas, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Omaha, Neb., and Sacramento, Calif., said Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.

“The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short. You can already hear it in Washington, D.C.: New Orleans where?” Galloway said of the lack of action in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last summer.

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If the city of Cambridge has its way, a new residential golf course development overlooking the Little Blackwater River will lure 10,000 new residents — nearly doubling the city’s population — over the next two decades. For Cambridge leaders, Blackwater Resort means needed tax revenue and new life for a hard-luck area that hasn’t grown much in three decades.

But the view from across the bay, at the headquarters of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is different. Environmentalists there see an outsize development that would be built upriver from a wildlife refuge considered a national treasure, adding more sewage and polluted runoff to an already unhealthy bay.

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I am not holding my breath on this…

Since its inception, the bank has talked about reducing poverty. But for more than 15 years it has focused on market reform policies, offering loans to countries that promised to lift trade barriers, deregulate and privatize industry, and adopt austerity plans to stop deficit spending and reduce inflation. These reforms, which became known as the Washington Consensus, were supposed to unleash the economic potential of developing countries and spur growth. Growth, in turn, was to create opportunity for the destitute and lift them out of poverty.

Many Latin American countries took the loans and adopted the reforms, but they did not have the intended consequences. Latin America’s performance has been disappointing, particularly in comparison with the dynamic economic growth and poverty reduction in Asian countries. The region now has “the highest measures of inequality in the world,” with one-quarter of the population living on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.

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