Finally, some honest, hard-nosed journalism in the public interest.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4826444.stm

Kudos to Ms. Adams and BBC.

Unfortunately, though, "the beat goes on." Every time some attention-seeking idiot cries "Foul!", the press is sure to pick up the story so that the rest of us end up having to pick up the enormous bill for their narcissistic indulgences. Unfortunately, it is our irresponsible press that keeps this destructive and utterly wasteful cycle going.


Congratulations, bb. You have much too lovely a community to have to bear the brunt of such poor logistics - only 9% of the traffic actually stops! Everytime I look at these pictures I am struck by how much more of a sense of community and direct personal interaction there is in GB as compared to the US. Even in our more rural areas there is significantly less direct physical everyday social contact and interaction amongst Americans (although more frequent in some highly ethnic neighborhoods.) Having been raised in a highly ethnic community in New York, I still sorely miss the richness of a smaller more closely knit social community.

Plenty of pictures is a vast understatement, my friend. This photographer [Mark Roger Ely (markely)] has far too much time on his hands! The construction pictures were pretty uninspiring, but the shots of Baldock itself were great. Btw, I noticed some very lovely street trees. In particular, I was wondering if you could identify the ones in the following pic:
http://www.sg7.co.uk/albums/BaldockFestival2005/2005_0521Image0072.jpg

Keep the local color coming, bb.

By comparison, after having served as the founding president of the HOA in our new subdivision last year, I spent all my time battling a stupid Board of "wanna-be neo-nazi politicians" to replace those street trees that which had been destroyed during construction: fighting the Board and the City to get at least the most serious drainage (we are talking real flooding here) corrected. Meanwhile, the overall attitude of the community was apathy about anything but their own individual complaints which they expected me to fight for them while they did nothing but endlessly whine. My main objectives achieved, I resigned in disgust. The sad truth of it all is that this scenario actually reflects a great deal about the quality of life (or lack thereof) in much of America today. We are certainly not the country or the people that we were even 50 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldock says that the Knights Templar founded Baldok at the intersection of the Icknield Way (Via Iceni) and the Great North Road. The Knights Templar may have used Royston Cave, near the Icknield Way ( http://www.showcaves.com/english/gb/misc/Royston.html )

Interesting history.

More pictures of the bypass: http://bealach-na-ba.fotopic.net/c300537.html

The broad discretionary spending programs first envisioned were in the 'American System' proposed by the Whigs, particularly Henry Clay ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay ). These internal improvements (roads, canals, ports, bridges, railroads) were self-evidently needed. (I would have been a Whig in the 1820s.) Many states began backing bond issues for internal developments. But after massive defaults, it was realized that the political system did not select honest and able managers or pick only the most economically viable projects to fund. The repudiated American bonds are what poor Charles Dickens put into a nightmare in 'A Christmas Carol' ('a mere American bond'). The Whig party collapsed and Wall Street began its rise to fame, replacing publicly subsidized corporations with private corporations. A number of states amended their constitutions to forbid public funding of internal improvements. So we finally began to adopt Robert Walpole's ideas on economic development which had always been bitterly attacked by Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic party.

The story becomes complicated at this point. New York City becomes the financial capitol as we abandon public funding of corporations and adopt a private model. Boss Tweed amazes the country with vast spending programs without raising taxes. Eventually it is realized that he is using the new Wall Street firms to issue bonds. He is using the ordinary taxes to pay the interest on the bonds and spending part of the capital raised for ordinary spending, part for improvements and part for massive corruption and graft.

This sort of scheme has a built in limit reached when ALL tax receipts are spent servicing bond interest. This was something new which had hitherto been impossible in the capital-poor United States. Boss Tweed was pushed out in a spasm of political reform. Almost unnoticed was the fact that he had packed the New York judiciary with corrupt judges. This has still not been dealt with in popular survey histories of the USA. The financial heart of the country, controlling the financing of the nation's private corporations, sold justice to the highest bidder. The popular histories call this the 'Age of Robber Barons' and use it as proof that the government must maintain tight oversight of corporations. But when you examine any particular corporation history, you discover that share holders were routinely disenfranchised by the courts and all sorts of laws broken with impunity by dishonest entrepreneurs. A sort of 'Gresham's Law' operated in which dishonest corporate executives, armed with court writs, tended to drive out honest executives. Instead of being the natural result of 'raw' capitalism, many of the problems of this period were caused by a dishonest judicial system.

There was a great deal of furor about corruption in the post-Civil War period. The best book about it I have ever found is 'The Era of Good Stealings', which is only available in libraries now ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019507503X/s...-6944817?%5Fencoding=UTF8 ). It deals with public corruption and the way that Civil Service reform replaced Civil Rights reform as the issue of the day ('We are becoming a Nation of Thieves!') and points out, quite accurately, that the muckrakers (the term describing journalists writing about public corruption) greatly exaggerated the amount of public corruption. But the journalists mostly overlooked the massive amount of private corruption in corporations that seems to be the real problem from today's perspective

Part of the reform in this period consisted of developing corporation law so that any private individuals could form a corporation simply by filing some papers. Earlier, forming a Corporation required a special Act by a Legislature. It was presumed that a Corporation was formed to serve an important public purpose and might be supported by public funding. This is a very different view point from our current view, and should be kept in mind when studying the opinions of the writers of the US Constitution.

http://tinyurl.com/huf8e

Senate Approves Lobbying Limits by Wide Margin

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 30, 2006

. . . .

"There's a sign that's now up in front of the Capitol," Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, a chief Democratic author of the measure, said after the vote. "It says 'Not for Sale.' "

But Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has long pressed for tougher laws on lobbying, called the bill "very, very weak."
. . . .

Our system of government and way of life owes it success to the uncanny ability of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution to anticipate and prevent the inevitable abuse of power by the government through a brilliant system of checks and balances. The result of their almost precient insight was a Constitution that was centuries ahead of it's time.

This “Bill” is an insult and an embarrassment to the American people. This token gesture does nothing to curb corruption. Our entire system of government is predicated upon the principle that the ultimate safeguard against the abuse of power in the government shall be vested in the voting citizenry through the election of representatives. These elected officials are only as effective in representing their constituent interests as their constituents are effective in holding them accountable for their behaviors.

We have become so morally and ethically convoluted that the decision as to whether Elian Gonzales should be returned to his biological father generates a maelstrom of intense public outcry while the accepted practice of elected government officials routinely putting our environment, our health and our basic individual freedoms as citizens up for sale to the highest bidder (often foreign interests) doesn’t even generate a whimper.

Having lived under the tyranny of abusive governments, our Founding Fathers were incapable of foreseeing the collective apathy that has become our national character; or, that we would simply roll over on our backs and pee all over ourselves like some abused animal rather than continue the perpetual struggle for freedom for ourselves and our children.

What a pathetic lot we have become.

[NOTE: To anyone who thinks that this is a partisan issue, note that the key author of this travesty is a Democrat, while the key critic is a Republican. This is a crisis of government, not of particular political parties.]