Municipal Government Quotes

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Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquillity; evasions will merely encourage turmoil. Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.

Urban decay is a thing. And the way to avoid urban decay is to actively plan for urban regeneration.

Municipalities that have Permaculture Economies can issue more investable bonds.

City Planners, collectively, play a huge role in societies’ ability to steward capital wisely. With most of humanity living in cities, their efficiency or lack there of has huge implications for how people interact with resources. And from an ESG perspective, the condition of civilization can be largely measured by the interactions between people and resources

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will?

Municipalities that foster thriving business ecosystems can issue more investable bonds.

The quality of a Municipal Bond is partially determined by the quality of the issuing governments economy.

Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.

Municipal bonds finance local government projects, such as schools, roads, and utilities. So there’s a public good aspect to investing in municipalities that isn’t antithetical to equity investing but it’s different.

Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.

was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology. Tehran

Cuantas más demoliciones, mayor sensación de actividad municipal.

Liechtenstein is indeed the only country in the world that allows its municipalities to secede, thus granting them self-determination by virtue of its constitution.

Municipal bonds finance local government projects, such as schools, roads, and utilities.

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.

Veba and Sanja got marrried in the summer of 1993. They signed the papers at the municipal government building—Zrinka was the maid of honor—and ran under sniper fire to a taxi, which drove them down Sniper Alley at incredible speed to the Holiday Inn, where they had a drink (Zrinka's treat) in lieu of a wedding reception. A passing French journalist was so astonished at Sarajevans still getting married that he gave them a bottle of wine. "Have a good life!" he wrote on it.

unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.

Miss Mason’s life was one long struggle against mechanism. She distrusted organisation and standardisation. For this reason, she would have no truck with government departments or municipal control. Again, she set little store by the results of public examinations.

Private sector networks in the United States, networks operated by civilian U.S. government agencies, and unclassified U.S. military and intelligence agency networks increasingly are experiencing cyber intrusions and attacks,” said a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to Congress that was published the same month Conficker appeared. “. . . Networks connected to the Internet are vulnerable even if protected with hardware and software firewalls and other security mechanisms. The government, military, businesses and economic institutions, key infrastructure elements, and the population at large of the United States are completely dependent on the Internet. Internet-connected networks operate the national electric grid and distribution systems for fuel. Municipal water treatment and waste treatment facilities are controlled through such systems. Other critical networks include the air traffic control system, the system linking the nation’s financial institutions, and the payment systems for Social Security and other government assistance on which many individuals and the overall economy depend. A successful attack on these Internet-connected networks could paralyze the United States [emphasis added].

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities.

I am obligated to the Big Boss, a man of his word, but he gives it very seldom and usually on a sure thing. But he is not a trimmer. He, in times past, owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man. I wonder who is worth more in the sight of the Lord? I am only a small duck in a very large puddle, but I am interested very deeply in local or municipal government. Who is to blame for present conditions but sniveling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday, and start over on Sunday. I think maybe the Boss is nearer Heaven than the snivelers.

Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty, sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a parliament or a municipal council represent a nation or a city. The most intelligent among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes have simply used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier against the pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty. But gradually, as the people become conscious of their real interests, and the variety of their interests is growing, the system can no longer work. Therefore democrats of all countries vainly imagine various palliatives. The Referendum is tried and found to be a failure; proportional representation is spoken of, the representation of minorities, and other parliamentary Utopias. In a word, they strive to find what is not to be found, and after each new experiment they are bound to recognize that it was a failure; so that confidence in Representative Government vanishes more and more.

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33

Frederick II may be mentioned as the ruler who inaugurated the new epoch in the sphere of practical life – that epoch in which practical political interest attains Universality [is recognized as an abstract principle], and receives an absolute sanction. Frederick II merits especial notice as having comprehended the general object of the State, and as having been the first sovereign who kept the general interest of the State steadily in view, ceasing to pay any respect to particular interests when they stood in the way of the common weal. His immortal work is a domestic code – the Prussian municipal law. How the head of a household energetically provides and governs with a view to the weal of that household and of his dependents – of this he has. given a unique specimen.

Detroit is an extreme example of the fact that public-sector employment has become in effect a supplementary welfare state, with salaries and benefits – and, above all, pensions – entirely disconnected from legitimate municipal purposes. Unionized public-sector employees with a high degree of political discipline fortified by narrow financial self-interest become an unstoppable constituency, and the government becomes its own special-interest group.

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for Municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

Even when people die in a hurricane, a car accident or a war, we tend to view it as a technical failure that could and should have been prevented. If the government had only adopted a better policy; if the municipality had done its job properly; and if the military commander had taken a wiser decision, death would have been avoided. Death has become an almost automatic reason for lawsuits and investigations. ‘How could they have died? Somebody somewhere must have screwed up.

But its exclusive character and irreconcileable hostility to the religious cults and ceremonies with which the whole social life of the city-state and the empire were inseparably connected at every turn, brought the Christians into inevitable conflict with the government and with public opinion. To the man in the street, the Christian was an anti-social atheist who would take no part in the public feasts and the games, which played such a large part in city life. To the authorities he was a passive rebel, who would neither take his share of municipal offices nor pay loyal homage to the Emperor. Hence the rise of persecution, and the driving of the Christians into an underground existence, as a proscribed sect. The Church grew under the shadow of the executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in the peril of physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured the whole outlook of early Christianity. But it was not only a fear, it was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete Christian, he was the champion and hero of the new society and its conflict with the old, and even the Christians who failed in the moment of the trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours and protectors

President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance. The advisory committee distributed thousands of copies to officials nationwide. A few months later the committee published a model zoning law. The manual did not give the creation of racially homogenous neighborhoods as the reason why zoning should become such an important priority for cities, but the advisory committee was composed of outspoken segregationists whose speeches and writings demonstrated that race was one basis of their zoning advocacy.

It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government— what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies— this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere— it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works— nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability— boring stability— at every possible level.

An individualist town councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water and - seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school, hard by the country lunatic asylum and the municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park, but to come by the municipal tramway to meet him in the municipal reading-room, by the municipal museum, art-gallery, and library, where he intends ... to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall in favor of the nationalization of canals and in increase of Government control of the railway system. "Socialism, Sir," he will say, "don't waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that's what has made our city what it is.

It is understandable that the white community should fear the outbreak of riots. They are indefensible as weapons of struggle, and Negroes must sympathize with whites who feel menaced by them. Indeed, Negroes are themselves no less menaced, and those living in the ghetto always suffer most directly from the destructive turbulence of a riot. Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquility; evasions will merely encourage turmoil. Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.

Now, I suggest four tests to judge whether the Government is progressive, and, further, whether it is continuously progressive. The first test that I would apply is what measures it adopts for the moral and material improvement of the mass of the people, and under these measures I do not include those appliances of modern Governments which the British Government has applied in this country, because they were appliances necessary for its very existence, though they have benefited the people, such as the construction of Railways, the introduction of Post and Telegraphs, and things of that kind. By measures for the moral and material improvement of the people, I mean what the Government does for education, what the Government does for sanitation, what the Government does for agricultural development, and so forth. That is my first test. The second test that I would apply is what steps the Government takes to give us a larger share in the administration of our local affairs—in municipalities and local boards. My third test is what voice the Government gives us in its Councils—in those deliberate assemblies, where policies are considered. And, lastly, we must consider how far Indians are admitted into the ranks of the public service. A

Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word maiguan—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. It followed a certain logic: in weak democracies, people paid their way into office by buying votes; in a state where there were no votes to buy, you paid the people who doled out the jobs. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive ten million dollars in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least fifty million. Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

Since the mid-1980s, the government had sensed that one key reason why the opposition-for-opposition's-sake argument was so compelling to voters was that the did not really have to live with the consequences of electing an opposition MP. MPs were representatives you went to the national parliament; they did not manage municipal affairs. They could appeal for improved services for their wards, but since the central government agencies were generally well run and rolled out standardised amenities for all neighbourhoods,MPs made little or no perceptible impact locally. Thus, opposition-held wards would continue to benefit from efficient PAP government

Starting with the assessment of 71 public organizations (about 30,000 respondents) in 2002, the ACRC conducted the Integrity Assessment on 39 central government agencies, 17 municipal autonomous agencies, 227 basic

Churchill made a point about the power of government: A National or Municipal Beef Trust, with the United States Treasury at its back, might indeed give more regular employment at higher wages to its servants, and might sell cleaner food to its customers—at a price. But if evil systems corrupt good men, it is no less true that base men will dishonor any system, and while no bond of duty more exacting than that of material recompense regulates the relations of man and man, while no motion more lofty than that of self-interest animates the exertions of every class, and no hope beyond the limits of this fleeting world lights the struggles of humanity, the most admirable systems will merely succeed in transferring, under different forms and pretexts, the burden of toil, misery, and injustice from one set of human shoulders to another.

Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident). And the Dreamers are quoting MLK and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

he defined National Socialism as “the opposite of what exists today.” And their method in state and national parliaments, as well as in municipal councils, was to disrupt democratic government, make it dysfunctional, and thus “prove” its ineffectiveness in meeting Germans’ needs. In a fundamental sense, this highly partisan political force ran against politics, with all its messy compromises, disagreements, and imperfections, and promised to replace it with order and strength.

Quoting page 74-75: The ability of the minority rights interest groups to win control of the new agencies of civil rights enforcement established in the 1960s followed a traditional pattern in the politics of regulation that students of public administration called “clientele capture.” The practice is as old as Jacksonian democracy, which set the American tradition wherein party patronage ruled the civil service and mission agencies were expected to cater to the needs of their organized constituencies: farmers, veterans, laborers, and business interests. By the 1960s, journalists referred to these arrangements as iron triangles.” They were three-way coalitions of mutual back-scratching, operating in Washington and in state and municipal governments throughout America. Three points of the triangle were organized interests which lobbied legislators to establish or expand programs beneficial to their members; legislative committees, which obliged the lobbyists by authorizing and funding programs for the mission agencies to manage; and government bureaucrats, who expanded their empire building service programs to benefit the interest groups. To complete the triangular cycle, interest groups supported the legislators. … because environmental and consumer protection regulation is cross-cutting and horizontal—covering pollution, for example, from all industrial sources, rather than single industry and vertical … it is a difficult target for capture. The new agencies of civil right regulation, however, were different in ways that made them highly vulnerable to capture. Most important, the cost-benefit structure of civil right regulation is the opposite of that found in environmental and consumer protection regulation. Benefits (jobs, promotions, admissions, contract set-asides) are narrowly concentrated among protected-class clienteles (racial and ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped). Costs, on the other hand, are widely distributed (government and corporate budgets).

wagon trains. Today, the West is still full of such places, creating an interesting political irony. Some of the most conservative, red-state bastions in America—Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho—are the most park-rich states of all, with rodeo corrals, state fairgrounds, and free or inexpensive municipal campgrounds nearly everywhere. Untold millions in tax dollars were spent to build these national assets, and millions of dollars of public funds are spent every year to maintain them. The public corrals and parks measurably improve the quality of life and the local economies. But this region is also the Tea Party belt, where the central ideological pretense of the day is that government is the enemy and that every penny of taxes collected is a political crime.

Investment Counsel and Trust Services of Banks The truly professional investment advisers—that is, the well-established investment counsel firms, who charge substantial annual fees—are quite modest in their promises and pretentions. For the most part they place their clients’ funds in standard interest- and dividend-paying securities, and they rely mainly on normal investment experience for their overall results. In the typical case it is doubtful whether more than 10% of the total fund is ever invested in securities other than those of leading companies, plus government bonds (including state and municipal issues); nor do they make a serious effort to take advantage of swings in the general market. The leading investment-counsel firms make no claim to being brilliant; they do pride themselves on being careful, conservative, and competent. Their primary aim is to conserve the principal value over the years and produce a conservatively acceptable rate of income. Any accomplishment beyond that—and they do strive to better the goal—they regard in the nature of extra service rendered. Perhaps their chief value to their clients lies in shielding them from costly mistakes. They offer as much as the defensive investor has the right to expect from any counselor serving the general public. What we have said about the well-established investment-counsel firms applies generally to the trust and advisory services of the larger banks.

Under the headline, “Bribe Culture Seeps Into South Texas,” the Houston Chronicle described how payoffs have become common, everywhere from school districts to building inspections to municipal courts. The bribe—la mordida—as a way of life is moving north. Anthony Knopp, who teaches border history at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said that as America becomes more Hispanic, “corruption will show up here, naturally.” The same thing is happening in California. Small towns south of Los Angeles, such as South Gate, Lynwood, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Vernon were once white suburbs but have become largely Hispanic. They have also become notorious for thieving, bribe-taking politicians. Mayors, city council members, and treasurers have paraded off to jail. “When new groups come to power, and become entrenched … then they tend to rule it as a fiefdom,” explained Jaime Regalado, of California State University, Los Angeles. Maywood, which was 96 percent Hispanic by 2010, was so badly run it lost insurance coverage and had to lay off all its employees. The California Joint Powers Insurance Authority (JPIA), composed of more than 120 cities and other public agencies to share insurance costs, declared the Maywood government too risky to insure. It was the first time in its 32-year history that the JPIA had ever terminated a member. It has been reported that black elected officials are 5.3 times more likely to be arrested for crimes than white elected officials. Comparative arrest figures for Hispanic officials are not available. Hispanics may be especially susceptible to corruption if they work along the US-Mexico border. There are no comprehensive data on this problem, but incidents reported in just one year —2005 are disturbing. Operation Lively Green was an FBI drug smuggling sting that led to 33 guilty pleas. Twenty-four of the guilty were Hispanic and most of the rest were black. All were police officers, port inspectors, prison guards, or soldiers. They waved drug shipments through ports, prevented seizures by the Border Patrol, and sold fake citizenship documents.

That same spring, a newcomer named Jeremiah Smith—no relation to Joseph—arrived in Nauvoo after escaping legal trouble of his own. He was accused of defrauding the federal government after claiming funds in Iowa that were meant for a relative with the same name. While charges were dismissed at his first hearing in February, he was caught attempting the same crime in April, which prompted him to flee to Nauvoo. The charges had nothing to do with the Mormon church, but Joseph took sympathy and instructed his clerk to prepare a writ of habeas corpus for Jeremiah in advance of any arrest warrant. The municipal court obliged not once but twice, allowing Jeremiah to evade arresting officers when they arrived in Nauvoo. Though Nauvoo’s use of these writs had already been exceptionally liberal, the granting of one before an actual arrest warrant had even been issued was a new tactic, and it drew additional ire. Nearby newspapers that had previously been hesitant to criticize Mormon practices angrily denounced the Jeremiah Smith ordeal as a flagrant violation of the American legal system. Thomas Sharp, always eager to attack the Mormons, announced that Smith was now effectively “above the law.

sent evidence of all this to the Wall Street Journal over a dozen times. I sent it to their executive editors, their news editors and their most well-known reporters. They all refused to report on this alleged criminal organization. A financial newspaper that will not report the theft of trillions of dollars by Wall Street firms! I sent this information to the New York Times at least a dozen times. I contacted their news editors and public editors. I sent this information to the Bond Buyer, the largest municipal bond publication I am aware of. I also called them and emailed them. They did touch superficially on this in some articles but never told the whole story.

Unaware of New York City’s budget shenanigans, taxpayers expected city officials to keep the transit fare low and expand the city’s already generous municipal services. Making matters worse, the city had fewer middle-income taxpayers to pay for rising government expenses. New York City’s loss of manufacturing jobs meant fewer employment opportunities for the low-skilled, poorly educated workers who were attracted to the city. While middle-class taxpayers moved from the city out to the suburbs, the poor people who moved in required more expensive city services. In the early 1970s, the city had more than one million residents receiving welfare benefits, nearly a tenth of the nations’ recipients. More than three-quarters of the city’s welfare recipients had not even been born in New York City. Although the state and federal government paid for three-quarters of the welfare costs, the city’s share created a huge burden on its budget.82

New York City’s fiscal health was no better than the state of its subways. Lindsay and the city comptroller, Abe Beame, were engaging in a series of fiscal gimmicks to keep the city’s operating and capital budgets afloat. They were trying to satisfy too many constituents by undertaking ambitious capital projects, minimizing fare increases, and providing some of the most generous pension benefits in the nation to municipal employees. Government agencies have two types of budgets: operating budgets and capital budgets. The operating budget pays for day-to-day expenses such as salaries, pensions, and office supplies, as well as ongoing maintenance and basic repairs, such as cleaning buses and filling potholes. The capital budget funds the construction and rehabilitation of the city’s infrastructure and facilities.

New York City’s laudable policies designed to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor were simply not sustainable. On average, residents paid 10.2 percent of their incomes to the city in 1975, more than a third higher than a decade earlier. The city’s elected officials (the mayor, comptroller, borough presidents, and city council members) provided services for its citizens and offered benefits to its municipal workers that the city could not afford.52 Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. set the tone in the 1960s. When submitting his last budget, he said, “I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.” In Lindsay’s first term as mayor, the city’s labor force grew from 250,000 to 350,000 and the city’s budget rose almost 50 percent. The public university system eliminated all tuition charges and accepted any student with a high school diploma. State officials, including Rockefeller, enabled the city’s profligate spending. At the federal level, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s new programs to eradicate poverty passed along costly mandates to local governments.53

In articulating their theory of growth machines, Logan and Molotch contrast the exchange value of land (its economic worth) with its use value (value as living space) to illustrate the conflicting interests of developer-led growth coalitions focused on exchange value and the interests of city residents on use value. In North America, according to the two authors, exchange regularly trumps use. This fact underlies the development of a growth machine. Growth machines develop in the following manner: place entrepreneurs see the potential for profit from the development and intensification of their property holdings, namely, through the increase in rent. These "rentiers" develop a close relationship with other local business interests. In particular, businesses that rely on the growth of a city to increase their profitability, such as newspapers, are likely to support the interests of developers. Developers and their allies, through constant interaction with government, through ample campaign contributions, and through their ability to organize and mobilize, can co-opt local politicians, effectively coercing their involvement in the growth coalition. They supply politicians with the funds necessary to run effective election campaigns. Politicians, in turn, along with local media and other members of the growth coalition, help to perpetuate a link between civic pride and a city's economic and physical growth. This link undermines interest in the use value of land (specifically the use and maintenance of existing areas) as the city focuses increasingly on growth. Molotch argues in a later article that this coalition of growth interests reflected the most common political coalition in American cities, while acknowledging its limited applicability elsewhere. He argues that Americans' acceptance of developers' actions " as the baseline of urban process, rather than as disruptions," is evidence that Americans take developers' "presence for granted"....Numerous authors, in adopting growth machine theory, also added anti-growth citizen coalitions to the mix. Current analyses adopting the theory now invariably include the neighborhood-association-led anti-growth coalition as the foil of the developer-led growth coalition.

The crucial issue when a subsidy is proposed is the impact on the finances of the local government, known as fiscal impact. Unless the annual flows of tax revenues more than pay for the bonds being issued, then some other part of the municipal budget will suffer. Even then it will probably suffer because people’s budgets for recreation are limited. A dollar spent at the ballpark is a dollar not spent at a restaurant, bar, or other place of leisure time activity, thus transferring the jobs and economic effects from many businesses to a single sports team.

In 1986, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsored a law banning the use of tax-free bonds to finance stadiums, exactly the financing being used by the Yankees and the Mets. So how did Steinbrenner and the Mets owners get around that law? How did they manage to benefit from triple tax-free municipal bonds that add to the burdens of federal, state, and city taxpayers? First, the Yankees and the Mets will not pay rent on their new stadiums, which the city will own. If they paid rent, the Moynihan law would prohibit the sale of tax-exempt bonds to finance the stadiums. But since the stadium bonds must be paid for, where will the money come from?

Privilege, that fundamental principle of social and institutional life since time immemorial, had been renounced. With it went the whole structure of provincial, local, and municipal government.

Those debt limitations induce states and cities to rely more heavily on special purpose districts or authorities that can issue debt outside of formal constitutional constraints. Cities need merely to create a special-purpose government, a quasi-public authority that can issue debt over and above the municipality's debt limitation. Significantly, this "non-debt" debt is often more expensive, and its issuance is less transparent. The powers and management of special-purpose entities are often opaque as well and not subject to the conventional accountability associated with general-purpose local governments. As a constitutional matter, most special-purpose governments do not have to abide by the requirement of one-person-one-vote. And thought sometimes justified on the basis that they will insulate directors from political pressure, often these entities serve as sites of political patronage.

The Supreme Court justices gave the aura of being “strict constitutionalists” whose job was not to interpret or create but merely to distinguish between the rights the federal government enforced and those controlled by the states.99 But the supposedly legally neutral interpretations had profound effects. And the court, just like Johnson, demonstrated an uncanny ability to ignore inconsistencies and to twist rules, beliefs, and values to undermine the solid progress in black people’s rights that the Radical Republicans had finally managed to put in place. The court declared that the Reconstruction amendments had illegally placed the full scope of civil rights, which had once been the domain of states, under federal authority. That usurpation of power was unconstitutional because it put state governments under Washington’s control, disrupted the distribution of power in the federal system, and radically altered the framework of American government.100 The justices consistently held to this supposedly strict reading of the Constitution when it came to African Americans’ rights. Yet, this same court threw tradition and strict reading out the window in the Santa Clara decision. California had changed its taxation laws to no longer allow corporations to deduct debt from the amount owed to the state or municipalities. The change applied only to businesses; people, under the new law, were not affected. The Southern Pacific Railroad refused to pay its new tax bill, arguing that its rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. In hearing the case, the court became innovative and creative as it transformed corporations into “people” who could not have their Fourteenth Amendment rights trampled on by local communities.101 So, while businesses were shielded, black Americans were most emphatically not. The ruling that began this long, disastrous legal retreat from a rights-based society was the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases.

What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government— what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies— this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere— it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny [....]. But the system produces stability— boring stability— at every possible level.

taken on new significance in the past several decades. Serious fiscal crises in several major American cities, shifts in attitudes regarding state and federal social programs, and an explosion in the use of tax-exempt bonds have brought a topic once thought to be the exclusive province of public finance specialists to the attention of the American public at large. Law schools, in particular, have added courses on state and local taxation and finance to their curricula, and law students increasingly view municipal bond firms and state and local government agencies as respectable potential employers. Business schools and public policy schools have continued to

Mama also once said our government fell apart. She said we used to have leaders and presidents who wanted to do great things for our country and its people. We revolted, she said, when we realized they lied. Our functional democracy disintegrated, and everything stopped working. There were no presidents, no political parties, no nothing . . . just local municipalities ensuring roads were paved and taxes were collected.

Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départements, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice. When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity.

Reformers believed moral and political relationships were learned in play. Given street-afforded license, kids would grow up bad. “If we let the gutter set its stamp upon their early days,” Jacob Riis warned in 1904, “we shall have the gutter reproduced in our politics.” The antidote to the street was the supervised playground. Settlement houses had opened rudimentary play spaces in the 1890s. In 1898 the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL), founded by Lillian Wald and Charles B. Stover and housed in the College Settlement, opened the city’s first outdoor playground in Hudsonbank Park (at West 53rd Street), whose sand gardens, running track, and equipment were supervised by Hartley House’s headworker. Playground proponents insisted the city take over and expand these programs. An 1898 University Settlement report argued: “Waterloo was won in part on the playing fields of Eton said Wellington; good government for New York may partially be won on the playgrounds of the East Side.” In 1902 the city assumed responsibility for the nine ORL playgrounds created to date. And in 1903 Seward Park became the first municipal park in the country to be equipped as a playground.

Overall, US equity investments increased four or five times on average (before taxes, investment adviser fees, and other costs), and Berkshire Hathaway advanced from $12,000 to almost $150,000, fell to $75,000 during the crisis, then rose above $200,000 per share in 2016. When the crisis of 2008 struck, equities lost half their value before rebounding. As tax receipts shriveled, the massive deficits of the US government were echoed at state and local levels. The safety of municipal bonds no longer seemed so assured. However, although they would have done better in equities, they still had enough money and, feeling safe, didn’t worry as they would have done watching the ups and downs in the value of a stock portfolio.

If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.

For all y'all talking about "we can't have lawlessness": What do you call it when cops murder without consequence? When a mayor violates the municipal code? Shouldn't the people in power be held to highest level of accountability when it comes to following the law? (7/1/2020 on Twitter)

The shape of authority on the trading floor depends heavily on how much money a particular group is making. For the past several years, the most desirable jobs by far on Wall Street have been in derivatives groups, and those groups have usually ruled the floor. In general, if you aren’t in derivatives, the closer you are to government bond trading—the hub of the bond trading floor—the better. Surrounding the trading of government bonds, known as govvies, are the middle-tier jobs, including foreign exchange, mortgage trading, and corporate bonds. Less desirable jobs may not even be on the trading floor. Equity sales is bad. Private client sales may be worse. One of the worst jobs, for example, is selling money market instruments in Philadelphia, assuming the firm still has a Philadelphia office, which many do not. The worst jobs of all are in the municipal bond department. “Munis” are bonds, usually tax-exempt, that municipalities, states, or other local governmental entities issue to pay for roads, education, sewers, and so forth. Munis can be found in the backwaters of the trading floor and the wasteland of investment banking. Before I took the training examination at First Boston and was told, “You’d better do well on the exam…or else,” I knew very well what the “or else” meant: “or else you’ll end up in munis.

Chapter 2 “THE UTTER FAILURE OF THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT OF MEMPHIS” The economic success achieved in the 1850s simply could not have been accomplished without the backbreaking labor of enslaved human beings. African American slaves picked the cotton that was shipped through the Bluff City and worked the docks that loaded the white gold onto steamboats. Slaves also constructed railroads and worked in many of the city’s manufacturing concerns. In addition, the buying and selling of slaves was also one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. For example, the slave-trading firm owned by city alderman Nathan Bedford Forrest charged between $800 and $1,000 for individual chattel, and in a good year, Forrest and his partner, Byrd Hill, sold more than 1,000 slaves. By 1860 there were 16,953 slaves residing in Shelby County, and the majority of them made their way into Memphis either through the cotton trade or being rented to businesses in the city. Because of Memphis’s dependence on cotton and slaves for its economic growth, the city was often referred to as “the Charleston of the West.” The large numbers of slaves passing through the city made government officials very nervous. As a result, the mayor and board of aldermen passed several ordinances designed to control the number of slaves and free persons of color who resided or worked in Memphis. On March 27, 1850, an omnibus bill was passed that severely restricted the movements of African Americans in Memphis: State laws against slaves, free blacks and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of colour. Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time. Collection of negroes in tippling houses [saloons and bars] not to be allowed.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

Here was both a very American personal success story and a glimpse of what post-democracy strongman rule might look like in the United States, signaled not by a uniformed march on Rome or a Reichstag fire but by a governor who became senator while simultaneously keeping the governor’s job, breaking the spine of democracy in his state with the help of a cadre of brass-knuckled bodyguards, engineering kidnappings of his enemies, and defeating or sidestepping multiple impeachments and indictments and investigations, all while soaking up adoration at a muddy rural rally with farmers or in a roaring ballroom full of tuxedoed and gowned admirers, his vast and disparate audiences too in love with his charm to much care what he actually meant. Somehow simultaneously cherubic and menacing in appearance, Huey Long was a populist, a rule breaker, a shockingly gifted orator, and a thug. He once commanded National Guard troops to mount an actual true-blue armed military assault on the municipal government of the largest city in his state. The man launched an armed invasion of New Orleans!—and got away with it. The best contemporaneous biography of Long in Louisiana was subtitled “The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship.

The United States Constitution does not mandate separation of church and state. The phrase “wall of separation” comes from a letter that Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists, and that phrase has no constitutional authority or ground. It was Jefferson’s opinion, which, when he was alive, he had a right to. What the Constitution actually mandates with regard to religion is two-fold: one, the non-establishment of a national church by an act of Congress, and two, non-interference with the free exercise of religion by Congress. Got that? No Church of the United States, comparable to the Church of Denmark, or the Church of England. When the Constitution was ratified, nine of the thirteen colonies had established state churches at the state level. There is no conflict if the national bird is different from the various state birds, or the national flower from the state flowers, and so on. But if one Christian denomination were privileged at the national level, this could and would lead to conflicts with the established churches at the state level. Prior to the War Between the States, the country was governed on true federalist principles, and all this made sense. But get this down. The Constitution prohibits establishing a national denomination and supporting it with tax money. It does not require every branch of civil government, down to the smallest municipalities, to ignore the nature and will of the triune God. Still less does it require them to pretend that Jesus Christ, by His birth in Bethlehem, did not actually come to establish a new humanity in His own person and work.

The book doesn't have to be all about U.S. Treasurys, but that's mostly what it’s about. U.S. Treasuries are the foundation of the Repo market. However, these days there are Repo transactions in just about any financial instrument: federal agencies, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, foreign government bonds, emerging markets bonds, mortgage loans, etc.

The Banking Act of 1933, also known as Glass-Steagall, regulated the stock market, separated securities dealers from banks, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Though the SEC regulated many securities markets, government securities were considered exempt. That meant that federal securities laws did not apply. The thinking at the time was to let those markets operate free of government regulation, which would allow the Treasury and municipalities to sell debt at a lower cost. Oh, and one more thing. There was a clause known as Regulation Q, which prohibited banks from paying interest on savings accounts.

to the enterprising investor. He might be interested in special opportunities of the following kinds: Tax-free New Housing Authority bonds effectively guaranteed by the United States government. Taxable but high-yielding New Community bonds, also guaranteed by the United States government. Tax-free industrial bonds issued by municipalities, but serviced by lease payments made by strong corporations.

Many reasons have been put forward by sociologists, historians, and psychologists to explain the undeviating worship of group living and group thinking in America. James Bryce credited American conformity to uniform political institutions in federal, state, and municipal government. Everywhere schools, libraries, clubs, amusements, and customs were similar. "Travel where you will," he wrote, "you feel that what you have found in one place that you will find in another." Above all, there was the rapid advance in industrial science. In America, an all-powerful technology, with its standardized techniques and methods of mass production, reached its zenith. As technology attracted larger numbers of people to urban centers, and compressed them into smaller areas, community living became a necessity. This, in turn, encouraged people to co-operate, and created relationships that invite similar activities and opinions. Gradually there emerged on the American scene, against all natural development of culture and against all individual traits inherent in every man, two striking attitudes that made American conformity broader, more unyielding, and more dangerous. The first attitude, assumed by the majority, was that the act of becoming average, of being normal, was more important than that of being distinct or superior. The second attitude, also assumed by the majority, was that the state of being well adjusted to the crowd and the community was more important than that of being a unique and original human being.

During the Bosnian War in 1992, the Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) repeatedly broadcasted the Serb forces’ capture of Prijedor on radio as a display of significant victory. For further hostile takeover, 400 men were added to the Serb forces in Cirkin Polje (town in Prijedor) to seize Prijedor’s governing bodies such as the municipality, post office, police, bank, courts etc. By April, they successfully captured these government entities. This forceful takeover by Serb politicians was declared to be an illegal coup d’état by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The coup was a cold blooded, pre-planned strategic effort to capture Prijedor and convert it into a pure Serb municipality. These strategic plans were never concealed. Milomir Stakić played an important role in the strategic capture by the Serb forces.

Bosniak civilians were forced to flee their homes due to the constant shelling and army attacks by May 1992. Most of the civilians were taken as prisoners or surrendered to the Serb forces. The residents were then gathered and moved to the prison camps operated by the Serb forces in the surrounding area. Within 3 weeks of the hostile takeover of the government entities, the Serb forces mounted large scale military offense and subsequently started rounding up civilians and moving them to the Omarska camp. The Bosnian Serb forces operated the Omarska concentration camp to torture, murder, rape, and abuse captured Bosnian civilians, intellectuals, and politicians in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina (Prijedor municipality). The camp held over 7,000 innocent Bosnian civilians as prisoners for more than five months during 1992. Several hundred people died due to constant abuse by the Serb forces including mass executions, starvation, beatings, repeated sexual abuse, and horrifying living conditions. The camp guards frequently cut the throats of the Bosniak captives. Prisoners ate spoiled food found by scavenging for it.

Once home, however, his optimism began to fade. He acknowledged the high living standard, the political liberties, the freedom of expression. But there was also chaotic municipal growth, an increasingly spoiled countryside, and an absence of public regulation, all of which left “little for the future but retrogression.” It seems to me that this country doesn’t want government.... It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism—like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks—than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.

yellow brick rectangle laid out on the Pearl Street side of the ugly, brown skyscraper known as 85 Broad Street. These bricks are modern—put here in the 1980s—and are the only recognition that this was once the site of the first municipal government in New York.

Even relatively routine misconduct by Ferguson police officers can have significant consequences for the people whose rights are violated. For example, in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.

In these uncertain days, bond funds are an especially important option for investors. Unlike stock funds, they have high predictability in at least these five ways: (1) The current yields (on longer-term issues) are an excellent—if imperfect—predictor of future returns. (2) The range of gross returns earned by bond managers clusters in an inevitably narrow range that is established by the current level of interest rates in each sector of the market. (3) The choices are wide. As the maturity date lengthens, volatility of principal increases, but volatility of income declines. (4) Whether taxable or municipal, bond fund returns are highly correlated with one another. Municipal bond funds are fine choices for investors in high tax brackets, and inflation-protected bond funds are a sound option for those who believe that much higher living costs will result from the huge federal government deficits of this era. (5) The greatest constant of all is that—given equivalent portfolio quality and maturity—lower costs mean higher returns. (Don’t forget that index bond funds—or their equivalent—carry the lowest costs of all.)

Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities

The state's got no business with morals," said Barry. "That's the real cause of most of our municipal corruption," said Rodney. "A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in ratio to its attempt to be moral. The more moral issues you import into politics—gambling, prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and the rest—the more corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government will be.

A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life.

When interest rates decline, local governments will often refinance their debt, just as an individual might refinance their home mortgage. The municipality will issue new municipal bonds at lower interest rates. At the same time, they buy Treasurys and place them in a trust to pay the outstanding bond issue. The municipality matches the cash flows of the outstanding municipal bond issue with cash flows of the Treasurys.

The comparison sheets are formatted as a grid, with important topics across the top and governments down the side. There are pull-out sections for local issues at various levels—centenal, municipality, microclimate, island, time zone, language group. Each square offers the stated position of the government, an explanation of what that was calculated to mean in practice, and, if applicable, the deviation from that stated position indicated either by previous performance or current rhetoric. Citizens can even see a personalized grid with specific outcomes of each government for them: how much they would pay in taxes, for example, or changes in the funding projected to go to their kids’ schools, or the probability that their local bar will be shut down.