And There It Is - With Some Pix

Privatization is a bad idea.

A retired judge in Virginia, filling in for the regular guy, ruled against the argument that a private firm can charge a toll for the use of public facilities in order to fund improvements and maintenance.

Cales decided that a plan to have a private developer toll users for $2.1 billion in tunnel upgrades in crowded Hampton Roads is unconstitutional. Only the state has the power to tax and that’s what tolls really are, Cales ruled.

If his ruling holds, a number of critically important highways that involve privately operated facilities, such as parts of Interstate 495 in Northern Virginia, Route 895 near Richmond and a proposed $1.3 billion toll road from Petersburg to Suffolk, could be affected. State contracts for all of them could be voided.

If so, it would be a huge defeat for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and earlier governors who have made good use of the Public-Private Transportation Act of 1995 to push ahead with highways that the tax-averse state otherwise was too short of money to build.

Actually, two things at work here.  First, when you get allergic to paying for the things you want, you're gonna end up with some pretty weird shit to deal with, like this thing swirling around here in Virginia, which is really about privatization.

We have to hold certain things "in common".  Things like Schools and Roads and Cops and Prisons (et al) need to be owned by everybody.  Turn those things over to private interests and suddenly corporate managers are the ones with the power to levy taxes.  When was the last time you were asked to vote on some corporation's policies - or its leadership?  And I'm not talkin' about the silly letters you get inviting you to some stockholders' meeting on a random Thursday someplace 8 states away from where you live.  If you really equate that with democracy, then I'll have to call you stoopid to your face, cuz seriously - you've got that one comin'.

Second - the "unaccountability of appointed judges" can be nettlesome.  This decision landed where I think it should be so I'm all like 'woohoo', but of course if it goes the other way, I'm jumping up and down screamin'.  That 3rd Branch is a tough one to figure out, and I don't have good answers for how to get us to a solid middle-ground position.  But I do think the one thing that makes it harder to find that position is money.  It's not so much the money in the politics of The Judiciary, but rather it's the money being spent in an increasingly successful bid to control the political process - the election of "business-friendly" candidates whose seats are bought and paid for, who then pass laws to make it harder for people to vote in the first place, and who then set themselves about tearing down everything that's been built for the last 230+ years by better people than they'll ever dream of being.  Keep the corporate flacks out of office, and at least some of the problems in The Judiciary start to disappear as if by magic.

I should say that I'm not generally opposed to every 'paradigm shift' just because I'm conservative and I wanna keep things nice and steady.  Some things need to change and sometimes, you have to rip shit down to make room for something better.

But when your current paradigm is democracy, and you have (mostly) one political party working mightily every day trying to shit-can that paradigm -  well yeah, I gotta problem widdat.