WASHINGTON — Imagine an election in a Third World nation where a small number of millionaires and billionaires spent massive sums to push the outcome in their preferred direction. Wouldn’t many people here condescendingly tut-tut such a country’s “poorly developed” sense of democracy and the inadequacy of its political system? That, of course, is what is going on in our country...

Helen Keller’s Mushrooms Raging Moderate, by Will Durst The precise word to explain this season’s big new trend in campaign financing is obliviousness. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that everybody is allowed to give as much money as they desire to anybody they choose and absolutely nobody needs to know about it. The upshot of which has all of America knee deep in the oxymoronic spectacle of...

Two items in the trove of Iraq war documents just released by WikiLeaks have caught the attention of some on the right whose thinking is, to put it charitably, muddled:

Do you like a good crime novel – a corporate crime novel? If so The Monster: How a gang of predatory lenders and Wall Street bankers fleeced America – and spawned a global crisis by Michael W. Hudson is for you. Unfortunately it’s not a fictional novel but the history of the mortgage crisis that may yet bring down the US and world economy. This book is not directly about the foreclosure crisis but...

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services. Ellsberg compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon, reports The New York Times. (Julian Paul Assange, born 1971, is an Australian internet activist best known...

Are Gays in the military a hindrance, a help, or is the entire issue ultimately inconsequential? According to Jerome Leroy of France’s Causeur, Gay troops have proven themselves for thousands of years – and in ways today’s hetero-heavy soldiers might find tremendously uncomfortable. For Causeur, columnist Jerome Leroy writes in small part: Gay American soldiers can finally come out of the...

United States President Barack Obama’s visit to India is just a few weeks away but New Delhi and Washington DC are caught up in an ugly sparring over the US government’s withholding of information about David Coleman Headley, an American intelligence operative, who played a key role in the run-up to the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008 (better known as India’s 26/11). Add to this the fresh WikiLeaks...

If you’ve read either Ron Beasley or my ramblings you’ll know that we think that the problems that society faces are structural in nature and only going to get worse due to peak resources, demographics, deflation, etc. In light of this belief I am growing increasingly involved in ground up movements to address these issues at their foundation, which is working towards moving back to local structures...

The new document drop, copies of which were given to several select news organizations in advance, has got the Pentagon ranting again about all the terrible things that could come from a release of about 400,000 classified government documents concerning the U.S. involvement in Iraq between 2003 and mid-2010 — although the Pentagon also tells us these documents contain no surprises and no news that hasn’t...

The investigation into the disappearance of U.S. tourist David Hartley by narco-trafficking pirates in Mexico has raised the hackles of U.S. officials, who are exasperated by the lack of progress of the probe and the general lawlessness across the border. But according to this editorial from Mexico’s La Jornada, Mexicans hold the United States responsible – not only for Hartley’s presumed...

The Triangle of the Week is morphing into a debate about the human beings behind the Supreme Court’s robed figures. The overture to Anita Hill by Mrs. Clarence Thomas, piquant as it may be, leads to speculation about her career as head of Liberty Central to oppose the “tyranny” of the Obama Administration and from there to the increasingly overt politicization of the Court. On the day she left...

But that’s down 8 points in 2 months: Since the August poll, Senate Republicans blocked efforts to set the stage for a legislative repeal of the policy and a district judge ordered that the policy no longer be enforced, a ruling being appealed by the government… The decision that the policy can no longer be enforced has prompted discharged gay troops to reenlist, though their status could change...

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is back. At least until Monday: Less than 24 hours after a federal judge refused to block an injunction against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the U.S. court of appeals for the ninth circuit has done so — at least temporarily. A three-judge panel ordered a stay requested by the Justice Department “temporarily in order to provide this court with an opportunity...

Justice Clarence Thomas hardly ever speaks in Supreme Court sessions (281 words in three years by one count), but his wife has reached across almost two decades to revive his most painful public moment–the sexual harassment accusations at his confirmation hearing in 1991. In a voice mail message, Virginia Thomas asks accuser Anita Hill “to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of...

Not really so surprising, I suppose, but Dahlia Lithwick points out those corporate privacy rights are expanding even as our individual privacy rights are shrinking: The Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a case in which AT&T prevailed in its efforts to evade a Freedom of Information Act request because Exemption 7(C) of FOIA, protecting “personal privacy,” also now protects the privacy of...

Apparently bewildered by global applause at the decision to award imprisoned democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, this very defensive editorial from China’s state-controlled Global Times argues that the United States and the West ‘prohibits political diversity among countries.’ Later, in apparent defense of its own authoritarianism, it continues, ‘in some situations,...

It’s a conspiracy theory that has been brewing for years and its adherents now believe the moment of truth has come: Have America and Iran made a deal on the disposition of Iraq? Columnist Tariq Hameed of the Iraq News Agency writes that Iraqis who question this conspiracy theory have another perhaps less flattering explanation: Washington is clueless. For the Iraq News Agency, columnist Tariq Hameed...

Sasha Abramsky reports on new research demonstrating precisely how the prison-to-poverty cycle works: In devastating detail in Daedalus [the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences], the sociologists Bruce Western of Harvard and Becky Pettit of the University of Washington have shown how poverty creates prisoners and how prisons in turn fuel poverty, not just for individuals but for entire demographic...

Columnist Mario Antonio Sandoval of Guatemala’s Prensa Libre has a suggestion for how the United States could help compensate Guatemalans for the experiments U.S. doctors and scientists performed on unwilling Guatemalan subjects in the 1940s. In George W. Bush’s time in office, Guatemala President Alvaro Colom pushed hard for ‘Temporary Protected Status’ for Guatemalans in the U.S....

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s outstanding book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, roused some thoughts in me regarding the separation of Church and State, something I see as a positive good. I posted about it over on my blog. Out of respect to those who adhere to religious beliefs other than my own, I’m not posting it here. Still, I felt that Moderate Voice readers of all stripes...