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Our special report on water issues in the last print issue is now on the main site:
Imagine a world in 20 years in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic water services in the Third World; or to create laws to protect source water and force industry and industrial agriculture to stop polluting water systems; or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker, and other diversions, which will have created huge new swaths of desert.Desalination plants will ring the world's oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate-controlled nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities, which will in turn sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remaining uncontaminated parts of the world or sucked from the clouds by corporate-controlled machines, while the poor will die in increasing numbers from a lack of water.Dean Baker brings us the latest on the economy:
For example, suppose someone was considering buying a home priced right at the middle of the Washington, DC market in June of 2006. Back then this home would have cost just under $515,000. In March this home would have sold for about $400,000. This means our renter could have bought this house in March and have $115,000 more in wealth than the person who bought the home back in 2006. How’s that for accumulating wealth?And Harold Meyerson explains how Sam Zell is destroying The Los Angeles Times:
Great newspapers take decades to build. We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order. The Los Angeles Times was a hyperpartisan, parochial broadsheet until Otis Chandler became its publisher in 1960 and began the work of transforming it into the paper of both record and insight that it's been for the past half-century. The diminution of such a paper diminishes its city, which is why L.A.'s otherwise disparate civic elites have periodically tried to restore the Times to local control since the Trib bought it at the turn of this century. Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right.
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--The Editors
