Following the money

For the last few years, ever since I read John W. Dean's book on the White House, Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, I have been obsessed with the culture and mechanisms of lying in politics.

It has been an interesting field of study. Though lying is nasty, awful and anti-democratic, it has become almost common place and can get quite intricate. Currently, I have been watching the HBO series the Wire, which has a lot of good scenarios in it from the lower-classes to big-wig politicos on how scheming and lying in a political atmosphere takes place.

Besides this, one of my favorite movies on the subject is All the Presidents Men, which chronicles the work of two journalists in the 70's which eventually brought down Nixon who got caught up in his own web of lies and illegal activity.

Today has an excellent round-up of intricate scams and lies that people are getting caught up in, or, in the case of the federal environment minister, successfully stonewalling:

Mulroney: Much has been made of the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, but what has not gotten a repeatedly major airing in press is how intricate and dodgy the whole thing is. Andrew Coyne is on the case though.

"We never got an explanation of what Mulroney did for the money, or why Schreiber paid him in cash, or why he continued to pay him if, as he maintains, Mulroney did nothing for it. In the same way, we are no closer to understanding what Schreiber did for the $20 million he was paid in secret Airbus commissions, or what he did with it, or why it was such a big secret that both sides denied the existence of such an arrangement for years.

No one asked him why the commissions were funnelled through such a complex array of shell companies and coded bank accounts, or why he did not declare them as income, or why, when it came time to pay Frank Moores, he used a phony invoicing system to cover his tracks."

$1.5 Billion in Harper government funds unaccounted for: Desmogblog has the transcript.

"Yesterday at a meeting of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada's Minister of the Environment waffled about heavily and refused to provide a full accounting of the government's $1.519 billion Canada Eco Trust Fund for Clean Air and Climate Change."

Raids on the BC legislature: Bill Teileman, a NDP blowhard, has been doggedly hounding the BC Liberals over the raids on the Legislature and BC Liberal offices years ago. The cases are still in trial, but basically some pawns got hung out to dry and are now having their defense air out piles of dirty laundry about how the BC Libs did some illegal and questionable transactions over the privatization of BC Rail.

Teileman's office got broken into and trashed. This also happened: "Although nothing was missing, Tieleman said the intruders had moved a copy of a book about the raid and an accompanying press kit across his office and placed them on top of fallen ceiling tiles. "Somebody was sending me a clear message about the B.C. legislature raid," he told The Tyee. "There's no question about it."