Money and ethics in politics

Canada stands by Israel...

A couple weeks after being rejected by the General Assembly for a position on the Security Council, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has expressed his sour grapes at the rejection stating that Canada will not "pretend" to be an "honest broker." The other option then is dishonesty.

There is plenty of that in Canada's position. In his speech supporting Israel at a “gathering of international parliamentarians and experts,” he performed the old standard of conflating the Holocaust with the creation of Israel, yet he should know that the Zionist cause began well before there were any indications of that genocide. Christian Zionism could be argued to have begun even before the European variety showed its colours at the turn of Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Both Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists understood that to occupy Palestine meant the displacement by some means - some form of ethnic cleansing or genocide, of the indigenous people - the Palestinians - who resided there and had since the beginning of the Christian era.

No Child Left Behind scam: Purchase orders bypass Columbus School Board approval to funnel millions of federal dollars to questionable vendors

The Columbus City School Board has abandoned its role to monitor the district's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funds. The Board has remained silent after the district's Internal Auditor, Carolyn Smith, revealed the Board had not approved 20 million dollars in purchase orders referred to as Super P.O.'s. for the last four years. With preferential treatment in place and no incentive to provide quality-tutoring services, our students are being miserably shortchanged. (Super P.O.'s)

There is no better example of this shortchange than the district's Effectiveness Reports submitted to the Ohio Department of Education for fiscal year 2010 for Supplemental Educational Services (SES) vendors. The report shows only 4 out of 72 vendors received an effective rating. This means the other 68 SES vendors allegedly serving our students received well over $3,000,000 for FY 2010, but were considered either not effective or needing improvement in tutoring basic reading and math.

One place to cut spending: Kidnapping and torture

I know it seems like more of a noble sacrifice to cut spending on things people less fortunate than ourselves need, but can somebody explain to me why it wouldn't be at least that noble to eliminate the budget of the CIA, which serves no one?

The Washington Post and the Obama administration have been busy telling us that it's legal to kidnap people and send them to countries that torture. They may call it "renditioning" to nations that use "enhanced interrogation techniques," but a new book details what this means in English.

Bush Boasts of Waterboard Order

Former President George W. Bush continues to be beyond shame. Those favored with an advance copy of Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, say it paints a picture of a totally unapologetic Bush bragging, for example, about authorizing the CIA to waterboard 9/11 “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

According to a newspaper account of the memoir, Bush says he is asked by the CIA for permission to subject KSM to the technique that creates the sensation of imminent drowning. His response is: "Damn right."

For such a frank admission of high-level criminality, we can say, with ample justification, Shame on Bush. But that shame also sticks like Saran wrap to the rest of us – and especially to the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), which has soft-pedaled the significance of Bush’s confession, and to his make-nice successor, Barack Obama, who has refused to demand any accountability.

However, if we are still a democracy, we are all complicit.

Deadly bombs make Bangkok unsafe

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Increasingly deadly bomb attacks across Bangkok have plunged this Buddhist-majority country into confusion, despair and fear because its military and police, who received years of counter-terrorism training by the U.S., are unable to keep the capital safe.

The Thai government exposed its weakness when the prime minister and other officials -- issuing what sounded like a macabre weather report -- bleakly warned more bomb attacks would occur in October but may taper off in November.

Security officials suspect frustrated pro-democracy Red Shirt revolutionaries may now be unleashing bloody revenge assaults in Bangkok, after the military crushed the Reds' nine-week insurrection last Spring, leaving 91 people dead -- mostly civilians -- and more than 1,500 injured.

"If the conflict is not resolved, it is likely that more bombs will be used in attacks, especially IEDs (improvised explosive devices) because they are easily assembled," warned Explosive Ordnance Disposal Police Lt. Col. Khamthorn Auicharoen.

All bled out: Post-election analysis, 2010

After spending most of yesterday licking my wounds, drinking heavily, and staring morbidly at the metro section of the Dispatch, I am now ready, two days after, to put to pen and posterity my thoughts on this dark November and the American way.

The Democratic Party should disband, dissolve. Force its many malcontents and incompetents back into the GOP, where they belong. The great minds, of which there are certainly few, may find refuge from the storm in my backyard. We will drink beer there, and burn alley trash in great bonfires, and newspapers will be used only for kindling, and the puppet skulls still lingering on my fence posts, leftovers from the Day of the Dead celebrations only a few days before, will be the only reminder that our generation is as doomed as that of our mothers’ and fathers’ – and the yard will be the last known smiling place for any Democrat this year.

With my friends

After the election disaster: Back to basics

Now what?
We need to build a grassroots progressive movement -- wide, deep and strong enough to fight the right and challenge the corporate center of the Democratic Party.

The stakes are too high and crises too extreme to accept “moderate” accommodation to unending war, regressive taxation, massive unemployment, routine foreclosures and environmental destruction.

A common formula to avoid is what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the paralysis of analysis.” Profuse theory + scant practice = immobilization.

It’s not enough to denounce what’s wrong or to share visionary blueprints. Day in and out, we’ve got to organize for effective and drastic social change, in all walks of life and with a vast array of activism.

Yes, electioneering is just one kind of vital political activity. But government power is extremely important. By now, we should have learned too much to succumb to the despairing claim that elections aren’t worth the bother.

The party of organized money

Thud goes hope. Whatever the causes of “voter dissatisfaction” and voter despair that gave the party of destruction so much power back, I sit in dread the next morning not so much of the results as of the phenomenon of openly purchased elections.

“The midterms have shattered spending records for a nonpresidential contest, providing a likely blueprint for the frenzy to come when the White House is up for grabs in two years.”

So the Washington Post informed us on Tuesday. The exaggerated influence of corporate money in politics and government has always been a problem, but last January the Supreme Court threw open the floodgates, overturning all restrictions on corporate spending to influence election results. Its 5-4 ruling in the closely watched Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case advanced the spooky cause of “corporate personhood,” giving Wall Street and the military-industrial complex the same free-speech rights as actual people, which means moneyed interests have a new way to game the system.

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