Libertas Continued

After the Senate passed the financial reform bill last week, the Center for Responsive Politics compared the senators' votes with their campaign funding. The results are all too familiar. Senators who opposed the legislation received 16 percent more money from the financial industry than senators who supported it. For the House version, it was even more egregious: Representatives who voted No got 70 percent more money from commercial banks than those who voted Yes. Is it a coincidence? You probably know what I think. Special interest money continues to poison our politics, creating the impression that votes in Congress are bought and sold to the highest bidder. According to the CRP, the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors -- those that would be regulated by the financial reform bill -- showered $2.3 billion onto candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees since 1989. We're going up against some deep-pocketed interests in our fight for electoral reform, b

Bruce Dixon, of the Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Move to Amend steering committee, wants to know. As a corporation, its assets are protected and its liability is limited; but if its board, officers, or major shareholders want to throw the company’s weight behind a candidate, it has the same speech rights as a person. BP won’t be indicted for murder or even negligent homicide in the deaths of the 11 oil workers on the Deepwater rig even though, as Dixon writes, “most or all of the first wave of Gulf Coast states where the oil slick will wash all have capital punishment for people.” “Centuries ago,” Dixon writes, “most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born… had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.” Corporations, and those who control them, have much in common with that old-style aristocracy. How long before we come together to toss them off their thrones?

Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her new book, Infidel, and discusses her life as a fugitive, how to fight radical Islam, and the need for what she calls legitimate intolerance. As others claim to be victims of global colonialism, Ayaan takes responsibility for her world. She argues that since the end of colonial rule, many Islamic nations have turned backward, instituting slavery and female genital mutilation. Her well spoken thought and story have been an inspiration to the west, as she claims her freedoms come not from rebelling against the past mistakes of former colonial powers, but from acceptance of the liberal reforms of modern western civil rights movements.

It's been forty years since National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University and stunned the nation. On May 4, 1970, the students on the campus in Ohio gathered to protest the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. The Ohio National Guard, in its attempts to disperse the crowd, shot and killed four people and wounded nine others. The event deeply divided the nation both politically and culturally, and many important questions remain in regards to why the Guardsmen shot into the crowd.  Remember Kent State !