Archive for July 9th, 2007
George Orwell’s fiction is becoming reality in the Big Apple. It won’t stop there unless the people, en masse, say ENOUGH!!!
By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.
The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.
If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.
“This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation,” New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in an interview last week. “We want to make it less vulnerable.”
But critics question the plan’s efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city.
Source: New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown - New York Times
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The Erie County Industrial Development Agency on Monday approved a $115 million pollution control abatement bond issue involving NRG Energy Inc.’s plan for the Huntley Plant. The new plant, scheduled to open in 2013, will create more than 1,000 construction jobs and 100 more permanent full-time jobs.
To sum up, we, the taxpayers, are paying $1.15 million per permanent job being created.
The bond issue represents part of an economic enhancement model to make the project viable.
Translation: The government will gladly confiscate your money and spend it to prop up a business that would normally fail. The moral of the story is that a good business model is not needed, just the right government connections.
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Business First has a poll for people to rate the job Eliot Spitzer is doing as Governor of New York. He is not doing very well. Fair & Poor have attracted 56% of the votes, Good has 25%, Excellent has 12% and IDK has 7%. Here’s a sampling of the comments left after the poll:
- What’s changed? Not on day 1 or day 181. Same ole, same ole.
- He started off well, but quickly turned into a typical politician. Too bad, he had a lot of promise. He’s going to fail the people like every other New York state politico. The downward spiral in NYS continues.
- Eliot who?
- cut some more jobs, he stinks
- He is doing the best he can and we should all be grateful. Remember, nothing positive comes from being negative. (grateful for what? must be some good crack!)
- Eliot has shown conclusively that he favors big government and high taxes. He has done nothing but expand the size of New York State’s bureaucracy since taking office.
[tags]Eliot Spitzer, Governor, New York, rating, Business First[/tags]
