Thursday, May 05, 2016

Time to Cut the Pretension of Democracy -- No SJC BCC Answers on Public Questions




St. Johns County's all-Republican Commissioners, Administrators and Sheriff "Spends-a-Lot" DAVID SHOAR with $140 pair of scissors at dedication of $16 million County Health and Human Services Building.



When St. Augustine Mayor Nancy Shaver or St. Augustine Beach Mayor Richard O'Brien (or prior Mayor Sherman Gary Snodgrass) have presided over meetings, and people ask questions, they get answers.

When St. Johns County Commission Chairs preside in recent years, there are no answers to public questions.

Stop pretending we have a democracy, Commissioners.  Jimmy Carter says we have a corrupt oligarchy.

I agree.

Either answer public questions and hold Budget Hearings on television, or prepare for consequences. 


Our former Vice President and Oscar® and Nobel Prize winner Albert Gore, Jr. has rightly compared Americans to a dysfunctional family in dealing with environmental issues, quoting Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, who said:
The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.... The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
[Winston Churchill before the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 regarding appeasement of Nazis, quoted in Albert Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance (1992) at 196 in context of desuetude and indecision in U.S. environmental policy.]

There has been no discussion by St. Johns County Commissioners of the proposed St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore since the infamous date of November 1, 2011, when five craven Commissioners let gun-gesturing bullies, cowards and bigots call us "Nazis and Communists," comparing me to "Hitler, Stalin and Goebbels" for wanting to protect our public lands from developers and the likes of Governor RICHARD LYNN SCOTT.

Without speaking of "decorum" or invoking their "civility" rule.

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