Is this a nice "warm-up" before investigating George Wanker Bush and his criminal cronies? Yeah...right.

America the hypocritical: "Try Democracy, Middle East. What? Nah, we don't have to practice it ourselves to tell you to. We have the biggest guns and goons!"

Marcy Kaptur has been very outspoken against governmental activities. I'm surprised Ron Paul's name isnt on the list. This so called "leak" ...all of it is STINKING ALREADY.

Is Marcy Kaptur on the list because she appears in Michael Moore's new movie, and because she has been outspoken about our corrupt banking system? Just curious........

While our government is awash in corruption; the source of the corruption is not the government and government corruption is not inevitable. The source of the corruption is big business. Hack off the tentacles of corporate America that are entwined throughout the system by means of campaign contributions/bribes and government corruption would be reduced to the levels of ordinary human mendacity/venality. It's hard to tell it from the system we have now but I believe that government can theoretically serve the people competently and with good faith. Don't buy in to the Reagenite hype that Government is necessarily and inevitably corrupt/inept.

Great post. Corruption is not inevitable. The voters have to realize that almost everything wrong with government has its roots in corruption. That includes war crimes, evironmental rape, loss of jobs and high taxes.

Our political system is now so corrupt that a damning ethics case can be made against virtually all of our Congressional Representatives and Senators. After watching the Democrats in Congress kowtow to their corporate masters right along with the Republicans over the past few years, I've come to agree with Founding Father John Adams, who warned,

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

I've come to the conclusion that our political system and federal government, originally designed to be merely a representative tool for the People to enact our Sovereignty, has totally abdicated any pretense of representing the people and has become the well-paid handmaiden of their corporate masters and chattels of the true power in the United States, Wall Street.

Every time the Congress plays with deregulating the so-called free market, it, and Capitalism in general have failed and brought American to the edge of ruin. And, our political system is so in the thrall of the Capitalists and Free Marketeers of Wall Street that they have deluded themselves and many of our representatives into believing the only thing wrong with these disastrous anarchic periods of deregulation is that we didn't go far enough and get rid of ALL regulations. They have long since lost sight of the fact that Capitalism and laissez faire free-market ideology is NOT a democratic ideology, and, at best exists in a very uneasy alliance with a democratic social and political structure, and, at worst, undermines and destroys democracy.

I think the wretched and nauseating performance of the once-great Democratic party has demonstrated that we are way past the tipping point now and that there is nobody out there on a white horse, no FDR, to come riding to the rescue.

Capitalism is a 'religion' based on an economic theory that was developed hundreds of years ago, in a small-town-based agricultural society that was taking its first primitive steps into industrialization. Adam Smith never envisioned what the economy of a 21st Century nation would be like and whether his theories would have any validity whatsoever to our economy of huge banks and financial institutions coupled with massive multi-national corporations.

Socialism, like Capitalism, can exist in Democracies or Tyrannies. But, unlike Capitalism, which is an economic system that appears to meld better with a classical Fascist political system, Socialism is a much better cohabitor with an elected, representative Democratic form of government. After the market collapse that led to the Great Depression, many in America believed (with good cause) that Capitalism had shown itself to be a failure and were turning toward other answers like Socialism and even Communism. Ironically, with all of his regulations, restructuring. and reigning in of the Capitalist market, FDR actually saved Capitalism by preventing it from self-destructing again from its own internal machinery for the next half century.

Alas for Capitalism, the lessons were forgotten, the Capitalists were set free to worship the human capacities for greed and selfisness in blind pursuit of profit, and Capitalism has again brought us to the edge of ruin. Obama's worst sin is that (for all of the Socialist epithets the wingnuts hurl at him), he is dedicated to preserving the current structure, the massive and all-powerful banks and financial institutions, the minimally regulated corporate oligarchy. Again, I believe Capitalism should be left to its own devices and prove all over that it is at heart a failed system and a delusional economic ideology.

"Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make."

-- David Korten, economist and internationalist

I don't think you need an IQ much above room temperature to recognize with of these two societies is the Conservative one and which the Liberal.



While I would like to see some form of Democratic Socialism introduced to temper the excesses and destructiveness of the free market, it is really time for forward thinkers to be looking askance at all of the centurys-old models, starting out with a clean slate (or spreadsheet) and thinking entirely new ways to structure the kinds of economies that will grow up during this century.

But, for now, I'd be happy to see us adopt many of the institutions that have made life so much more secure and so much less stressful in countries like Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway, and other Social Democracies.

Let's investigate ALL of our Congresspeople, throw them out on inevitable ethics violations, dissolve both the Republican and Democratic parties, and start fresh. What do we have to lose?

While they're at it, maybe they can put Bush and Cheney in jail for killing millions in a war that was based on false premises.

And if the ethics committee find real criminal violations...? A slap on the wrist..or turn it over to "I see nuthin'" A.G. Holder and the partisan right-leaning DOJ....?

Pentagon's work.
Expose 9/11 now ~

Isn't it easier to "list" the ones that aren't under an investigation? I look at them like the "justice" department looks at me: guilty until proven innocent.

How long have these been going on? do they ever end?

Marcy Kaptur is so clean she squeaks. I had the privilege of living in her district for 10 years - wish she was still my rep. instead of Mr. DoNothing, Fat Pat Tiberi.

the words congress and ethics should not be used in the same article...let alone sentence...3rd party from now on...

It was stolen through cyberhacking from a junior employee that happened to ahve peer to peer softwar on his laptop, yea right. If they stole this, what other stuff could have been stolen over the course of his work on this laptop that he takes home. This was leaked, and if it wasn't then Congress members aren't doing the work they should if they let something this secret be let out on a persons laptop to go home with.