Dan Coleman's blog

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday, January 29, 2005

Aided and abetted by the Federal Communications Commission, an ever-shrinking number of corporations control an ever-larger proportion of the media. This has prompted media critic Robert Mc-Chesney to label media reform our most pressing issue, linking the corporate media to misplaced government priorities, a variety of corporate scandals and our troubled campaign finance system.

Recently, McChesney reported optimistically that "the movement to fix our badly broken media system is gathering momentum." He includes in this movement, efforts "to strengthen alternative, independent and non-commercial media." Our area is home to a number of those initiatives, most recently WCOM community radio.

In January 2000, the FCC authorized the licensing of Low Power FM radio stations (LPFM). This opened the door for community and alternative radio, previously pretty much confined to large metropolitan areas, to spring up in small towns across the country.

Today's Herald reported that a group from rural Orange County led by farmer Bob Strayhorn and state Rep. Bill Faison is pushing the BOCC to consider district representation. They point out that a large segment of Orange County voters feels that they are not represented under the current system. A petition to that effect with 1252 signatures was delivered to the commissioners.

This has been raised before but the commissioners were unwilling to act. My own thinking is that we should provide voting and representation systems that allow maximum representation of points of view while maintaining one-person/one-vote and effective government.

Cumulative voting could be another option to attain the same ends. Cumulative voting would allow a variety of constituencies to identify themselves and seek better representation. But there are problems with it.

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday, January 08, 2005

The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies a right to such basics as food, clothing and housing. But the word "water" does not appear in the document. Perhaps this is because the authors of the 1948 document could not imagine a time in which fresh drinking water would become an increasingly rare commodity, no longer freely available to all. That time is upon us.

In southern Orange County we are fortunate to have abundant fresh water provided from OWASA's reservoirs. But global trends are not encouraging and may threaten both our control over our water supply and our ability to keep it off the competitive market.

Less than one-half of 1 percent of the world's water is fresh. The rest is seawater or frozen in permanent ice masses. The UN has determined that a billion people lack access to fresh drinking water. Global water consumption is growing at twice the rate of the population.