Alan Zimmerman
Dan Carlin deals with this period in his "Death Throes of the Old Republic" Hardcore History.
And the similarities to the current period struck me too. Obvious reforms that had to happen, but blocked by a power elite pushing their own narrow interest.
Jonkman Microblog is a social network, courtesy of SOBAC Microcomputer Services. It runs on GNU social, version 1.2.0-beta5, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.