Different Day, Same Shit.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq. ("FCPA"), was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. Specifically, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA prohibit the willful use of the mails or any means of instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of any offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of money or anything of value to any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given or promised, directly or indirectly, to a foreign official to influence the foreign official in his or her official capacity, induce the foreign official to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty, or to secure any improper advantage in order to assist in obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.

Source: USDOJ

Previously, yours truly detailed Sheldon Adelson's role in the Romney campaign as a sugar-daddy in the shadows, feeding Romney's Super PACs plenty of vitamin M. Today, it seems Adelson has a few problems of his own.

A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls.

Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau’s hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions.

Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008.

The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson into the ranks of the mega-rich and underwriting his role as the largest Republican donor in the 2012 campaign, providing tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other GOP causes.

Now, some of the methods Adelson used in Macau to save his company and help build a personal fortune estimated at $25 billion have come under expanding scrutiny by federal and Nevada investigators, according to people familiar with both inquiries.

Internal email and company documents, disclosed here for the first time, show that Adelson instructed a top executive to pay about $700,000 in legal fees to Leonel Alves, a Macau legislator whose firm was serving as an outside counsel to Las Vegas Sands.

The company’s general counsel and an outside law firm warned that the arrangement could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is unknown whether Adelson was aware of these warnings. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars American companies from paying foreign officials to “affect or influence any act or decision” for business gain.

If this all sounds familiar to you, all you have to do is look back to the end of the first term of the Clinton administration, when "Chinagate" hit full stride. Conservatives attempted to use the charging and eventual conviction of businessman and Democrat donor Johnny Chung on fraud charges as proof positive of the Chinese getting their recently capitalist-yet-residually-commie meathooks into the 42nd president.

When a conservative high-roller is found in bed with Chinese politicians and businessmen with possible gang ties, you won't even hear crickets, just silence.

Federal investigators are looking at whether the payments violate the statute because of Alves’ government and political roles in Macau, people familiar with the inquiry said. Investigators were also said to be separately examining whether the company made any other payments to officials. An email by Alves to a senior company official, disclosed by The Wall Street Journal, quotes him as saying “someone high ranking in Beijing” had offered to resolve two vexing issues — a lawsuit by a Taiwanese businessman and Las Vegas Sands’ request for permission to sell luxury apartments in Macau. Another email from Alves said the problems could be solved for a payment of $300 million. There is no evidence the offer was accepted. Both issues remain unresolved[...]

[...]Alves holds three public positions. He sits on the local legislature. He belongs to a 10-member council that advises Macau’s chief executive, the most powerful local administrator. And he’s a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a group that advises China’s central government.

Nevada officials are now poring over records of transactions between junkets, Las Vegas Sands and other casinos licensed by the state, people familiar with the inquiry say. Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.

Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.

Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.

Cheung isn't the only reported gangster with tangible ties to Adelson's empire. Chinese-Mexican businessman and alleged drug trafficker Zhenli Ye Gon also happened to be one of Adelson's biggest whales:

It has since risen to $350 million and a lot of his fortune found its way to Las Vegas. On the Strip, he was known as Mr. Ye, the highest of high rollers. He stayed primarily at the The Venetian (Las Vegas) where he regularly wagered $200,000 per hand in the baccarat salon. He lost big. The original estimate by DEA was $40 million in losses. They now think it was closer to $126 million — an astonishing sum. When authorities raided his home in Mexico they found $200 million in cold hard cash[...]

There's a lot of dirt under Sheldon Adelson's rug, but chances are it'll all be left under the carpet in the end.

Swatting is a practice that involves calling 911 from either a spoofed number or a blocked number and relaying information that would get the police to a home in force.

Calling a SWAT team on someone is a pretty vicious prank, especially considering the countless instances where contact with a SWAT team has meant death for many innocent individuals. Imagine this practice being used to silence bloggers, journalists and other influential people.

Now imagine this practice being used in a carefully-planned scheme to generate sympathy and big headlines in favor of conservative bloggers while allowing that same media apparatus and popular opinion to rip the "perpetrators" a new one. It's similar to the shenanigans performed by James O'Keefe against ACORN and the recently departed Andrew Breitbart and crew against Shirley Sherrod. Michelle Malkin, Chris and Dana Loesch both hoped the "Twitter Gulag" scandal would help gin up some sympathy points for them and other right-wing tweeters, to no avail. In other words, it's hard to approach this without wondering if this isn't just another scheme cooked up along those lines.

Conservative bloggers Patrick Frey and Erick Erickson were both "Swatted," supposedly as part of a feud between the two and political activist Brett Kimberlin. It's also worth noting that Kimberlin served time due to his role in the infamous "Speedway bombings." The undercurrent is that a guy who is despicable enough to wantonly injure and possibly kill innocents is surely capable of "Swatting" two guys who pissed him off. The expected response is to rally behind Frey and Erickson regardless of their political affiliations. However, it also helps how Kimberlin aligns himself to liberal causes, so conservatives also get to castigate both Kimberlin and liberals in general.

Make no mistake, "Swatting" is a legitimate problem that could get people hurt and possibly killed. And it's something you wouldn't expect conservatives to play games with. But as Matt Osborne puts it:

So we know how these types of games get played: right wing activists make the news they want to see with a sinister stunt, the right-wing blogosphere goes ballistic, spends weeks roaring about their victimization, and their yarns get days and days of mainstream coverage. Only later, when said media finally examines the facts, do we find out that we’ve been had once again.

And it seems we may have been had. Again.

In the midst of finding out more about "SWAT-Gate," I ran across this interesting tidbit of information from, of all things, a pastebin. And because of its source, the smart thing to do is to take the following with a rather large grain of salt until it's been properly verified*:

Mike Grimm is the Congressman from NY-13 and a former FBI undercover agent.

Grimm attempted to extort a Jewish congregation on the mafia stronghold of Staten Island, threatening to use his law enforcement contacts to “make it difficult for them”.

The congregation's rabbi approached former Congressman Anthony Weiner for assistance. This led to an extortion investigation for Grimm.

Grimm made contact with Brandon Darby and employed he and a small group of smear artists including Lee Stranahan and John Patrick Frey aka Patterico.

Anthony Weiner was pursued by a variety of real and synthetic female personas through 2010 and the spring of 2011. He was successfully smeared and forced to resign one year ago today.

Mike Stack was left holding the bag for the smear. He refused to drop out of sight, so he was swatted by Brandon Darby in order to silence him.

Ron Brynaert was investigating. They needed a bag holder for the swatting and Ron was the lucky winner, being set up via a phone call with Frey, purportedly for an interview, but in actuality it was purely to put him on the phone and engaged at a specific time.


Don't let the Weinergate rabbit hole distract from these simple facts. Follow the money and keep in mind a dangerous, complex hit job like this would only be entrusted to a few committed, hardcore operatives like Darby, Frey, and Stranahan.

Brandon Darby is a former FBI informant who currently spends his time as a conservative activist. Lee Stranahan is a conservative blogger who also hosts his own podcast. The following is audio from Stranahan's show when he took the call of the purported "swatter" who set the whole thing up (taken from Osborne's post):



And here is a video comparison of Darby's voice along with the voice used in the "Swatting" calls, including his appearance via phone on Stranahan's show:



The voices are remarkably similar and rather thinly disguised. There have been calls for a proper voice analysis to be made by law enforcement officials, something that Darby would be pretty reluctant to have happen if he was indeed behind all of this. In addition, there hasn't been any concrete proof that intended target Brett Kimberling was actually behind any "Swatting."

Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed at former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert for being the one behind the "Swatting" calls, as the following video attempts to prove:


Brynaert's voice doesn't quite match up to the "swatter," although it would be very easy to simply assume it did on first listen, without Darby's voice to compare with it.

As for Mike Grimm, he's found himself under the wheels of the Romneymobile™ in addition to dealing with the fallout from his attempted shakedown.

So, is "SWAT-Gate" the end result of an elaborate and ultimately successful attempt to "ratfuck" Anthony Wiener out of a job for dropping a federal investigation right into the lap of a fellow representative who attempted to extort and intimidate the Shuva Israel congregation, who then turned to Wiener for help? And in addition to cleaning up loose ends, does "SWAT-Gate" also provide a sensational story for a bunch of aspiring Breitbarters to plaster up on mainstream media for weeks on end until the results of the inevitable round of fact checking come through?

It seems far-fetched and it's very easy to take "SWAT-Gate" at face value without reading into the motivation behind it. At any rate, it's gotten the desired reaction from across the blogosphere, one of shock, dismay and an expressed desire to see the designated target go down in flames without making sure it's the right one in the first place.

* http://sibob.org/wordpress/?p=10634, http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/fbi_confirms_agency_tipped_off.html

The 2000 Presidential Election was a watershed event. Not just because it pitted one Albert Gore, Sr., Democrat nominee and Vice President to outgoing President Bill Clinton, against one George Walker Bush, Jr., Republican nominee, son of former president George Herbert Walker Bush and then-governor of Texas, but because of the effect it would have on voting, politics and future elections. It also demonstrated the sheer desperation of one party to attain and preserve power at all costs.

As a "swing state" packing 25 (now 29) electoral votes, Florida remains one of the most contested battle grounds in the presidential election. It's literally one of those states that could "go either way," puns unintended. On that election night, Bush was trailing Gore by nine electoral votes, with 37 still up in the air. 25 of those belonged to Florida, 5 to New Mexico and 7 to Oregon. Whoever tallied the most votes in Florida was guaranteed to walk away with the entire presidential election sewn up. If that outcome was neck-and-neck between the two candidates, any sort of irregularity or outright fraud could tip the scales in the other candidate's favor, allowing him to take all 25 electoral votes.

The clusterfuck that ensued on election night was years in the making. In 1998, the state of Florida passed a law to combat voter fraud. The state also signed a $4 million contract with a private firm to create a master list of names to be purged from the voter registries, with the aim of removing duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons who were legally prohibited from voting. Of course, the process itself turned out to be a complete clusterfuck -- many voters were incorrectly identified as felons. In a state that, at that point, had 31 percent of the black male population unable to vote due to criminal convictions, that was a big deal.

These purges most likely played a significant role in the then-Republican nominee's comfortable margin of approximately 100,000 votes, at least until the counts from Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties started pouring in. By the time Gore conceded to Bush, the Republican's vote margin dwindled to bare triple digits, prompting a recount by officials, Gore's retraction of his concession and a renewed effort by Florida Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Katherine Harris to make sure those manually counted votes came out in Bush's favor. Between the reported electronic ballot fraud, butterfly ballots, hanging chads and stories of outright voter disenfranchisement, it took a Supreme Court decision to declare a winner. In a 5-4 decision, the court decided to grant Bush's request to halt the recount while the tally was still in favor of the Texas governor.

The state of Florida, like many of its fellow southern states, has a long and rich history of voter disenfranchisement, and it looks like it's going to happen again.

According to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, eligible voters will be removed from the voting rolls as a result of the massive voter purge ordered by Governor Rick Scott. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress.

Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not get access to reliable citizenship data. So Scott urged election officials to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file.

That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their driver’s license information was collected.

Deja vu all over again. The GOP has found that the best way to secure important elections is to stymie the voting and registration efforts of those most likely to vote Democrat: college students, blacks, Latinos and even elderly individuals with long-standing Dem allegiances. 91-year old Bill Internicola and Maureen Russo can both attest to the efforts being made by a largely conservative political structure. Imagine a natural American citizen who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a Bronze Star for his troubles being told by his state that he's not American and therefore, can't vote.

Scott's shenanigans are well-known to the state of Florida. This is the same guy who decided to order mandatory annual drug testing for welfare recipients and state workers, at $35 a pop. He also hatched a plan to move low-income and elderly state residents into managed-care plans. Private healthcare provider Solantic stood to gain plenty from all three efforts. When the good governor's ownership of this company was revealed and his ethics questioned, he transferred ownership to his wife, Ann, described as a "a homemaker involved in various charitable organizations." In other words, not only is Ricky a creepy looking bastard, he's also an ethically bankrupt creep.

The U.S. Justice Department is stepping in by ordering a halt to all voter registration purge efforts. So far, all 67 of the state's election supervisors are complying as ordered. Too bad Ricky's being a bit hardheaded, not unlike a particular someone who was being equally hardheaded:

"The Florida Secretary of State is being recalcitrant," said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of The Advancement Project, a Washington-based voting rights advocacy group that last month asked the Justice Department to investigate. "He wants to move forward despite federal notice of illegality and supervisors of elections' refusal to purge voters. He should just quit it."

Florida is among a small number states, mostly in the South, covered by Section V of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law that reinforces voting rights guaranteed in the Constitution. In five Florida counties and other states, election officials have a history of such of egregious and creative efforts to suppress black and Latino votes that any changes in voting–related policy or procedure must first be approved by the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges, Browne Dianis said.

Florida failed to get clearance for its purge or its methods to identify the people the state suspects are non-citizens.

My mother always told me a hard head leads to a soft behind. If Ricky decides to continue with voter purges in defiance of a federal order, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder should be ready to break out the switch/paddle/belt/Hot Wheels race track/that wooden spoon your mamma keeps hung up on the kitchen wall/etc. If the state of Florida is allowed to continue without any consequence, you can expect other states to follow suit. There's no way Holder can appear to look even the least bit weak on this, lest it set bad precedent and make the Justice Department look toothless when it comes to defending voters' civil rights.

One idea I had that would really drop a steaming load of shit into the state's corn flakes is taking away the majority of the state's electoral votes. I'm not familiar with how that would happen, but yanking 20 of Florida's 29 votes would not only make the state's efforts in rigging the election for a GOP win moot, it would also send one hell of a message -- that you can't get away with this shit without suffering dire consequences. This is one area where I want to see President Obama walk on stage with his big-boy pants on.

With a milquetoast nominee on board and scores of crazy "true believers" at the helm, voter disenfranchisement is practically the only card left in the GOP's reelection deck. Well, that and scores of emoprogs who are really, really fed up with the president not being the Magic Negro™ they expected him to be. Rigging the vote is practically the only way that a guy like Mitt Romney can sail through the elections and into the presidency. Oddly enough, this isn't being talked about much on the mainstream media. Something about zombies taking over and eating faces instead of brains.

Left to their own devices, the GOP would very much like to rig democratic elections in their favor and if possible relegate the Democrats to a rump party that's about as effective at getting the vote out as those Socialists and Americans Elect guys. The natural inclination of the GOP is towards one-party rule.

He who controls the ballot box controls the election. Don't forget that. And don't count on the Supreme Court to straighten this mess out at the last minute. We've already seen how that worked out before.

A hat tip to blogger Jill Klausen, because without her Twitter post, I wouldn't have seen this timeline (from PBS's Frontline) of the slow but successful decommissioning of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, enacted to prevent rampant speculation by separating commercial and investment banking functions. In short, the act prevents banks from playing shell games with commercial bank funds to place bets on speculative investments. If the banks crap out on those investments, the eventual ramifications could spell a spectacular collapse on both sides.

It took over 20 years and $300 million in lobbying efforts for bankers to get back to the shell games. The results speak for themselves.

PBS Frontline: The Long Demise of Glass-Steagall

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

While the United States is still somewhat civilized in that metric, in comparison to places like, say, Mexico, Turkey or North Korea, we're doing our damnedest as a nation to change that, for the worst. The U.S. continues to trend southward on the list of "first-world nations you'd actually want to live in." When it comes to healthcare, education, advances in technology, per-capita income, amount of leisure time and general happiness, we're falling farther and farther behind our European and Asian contemporaries. At least we'll always be numero uno when it comes to military strength and expenditures...

When kids talk about their schools, quite a few will liken them to prisons. Not because they just don't plain like school (who does when you're a kid?), but because the schools have, for the most part, have replicated the rigid, regimented and highly controlled environment that resembles most maximum security prison environments. In many cases, you can thank zero-tolerance measures and building architects who design most new schools to be cinder-block enclaves with limited access and limited distractions. That means no windows and few entry and exit points save for the fire escapes. And they'd get rid of those, too, if they could.

I had the pleasure of going to a high school that was built in a hillside during the late 1950s, as a Cold War-era solution to surviving a nuclear attack and the resultant radiation fallout that followed. It didn't help that it was just a few miles away from a rather important military installation with a lot of stuff that made it nuke-worthy by Soviet standards. As a result, you had a hexagonal structure surrounded by other hexagonal stubs buried in a hillside, with no classroom windows. As this school was quite old by the time I attended, the HVAC and ventilation system was usually FUBAR and any decent temperature or fresh air regulation had to be done by opening the emergency doors in the classrooms that were lucky to have one. However, this school wasn't "urban" enough to warrant metal detectors and the school didn't seem to embrace the "zero-tolerance" policies with the fervor schools do today. Other schools I went to before that were built as most schools were before Brutalist architecture and the need for controlled environments came into vogue.

Not only do you have the buildings as instruments of control, you also have the adherence to class schedules, the assigned lunch seating, the requirement to travel to and from as a group at the appointed times, etc. I understand this is all necessary for young minds that have yet to handle independence with the measure of respect and good judgement that most kids have yet to develop, but I can't help but notice how the entire school environment resembles the corrective institution in a growing number of ways. It's a feeling you can't really put your finger on, but you know it's there.

The need for control and regimentation is manifested by students who act out because they're either bored or frustrated. Since the public school experience is largely regimented out of necessity (or laziness, in many cases), there's no way that a school teacher can fine-tune the curriculum to accommodate a student for whom the standard method of learning simply does not work. Lots of people require hands-on experience and end up doing better in trades and careers that feature tactile and tangible experiences. And since public schools usually lack the funds, will and foresight to identify underlying problems that could result in a miserable school experience for a kid, those problems are either ignored or doped away with copious amounts of Adderall or Ritalin. For others, they act out, and the zero-tolerance policies come into play.

Private schools are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I had the opportunity to go to quite a few when I was a young kid, specifically a small, church-run school in the middle of a "distressed urban environment." The entire experience was different from any public school I've been to at that point -- the classroom experience was less restrictive and regimented. There was less stress, even though the environment was just as competitive (or far more, in many cases) as other ordinary public schools. Fewer fights, fewer disruptions and more opportunities for a custom-tailored educational experience that actually benefits kids. But it was expensive, and single parents with other household expenditures can't swing the private school bills as well as financially established families, and those are few and far between in most urban areas.

So, where am I going with this? Well, the Tea Party made plenty of public institutions targets in their scheme to dismantle and replace them with privatized entities. Actually, it isn't so much the Tea Party orchestrating this as they are simply the dumbassed foot soldiers doing the bidding of the real power brokers funding the so-called "grassroots" organization. Public schools are one of those targets.
(More after the jump)

Under the aegis of "improving security," the folks over at the Republican National Committee and Tampa, FL. city officials are lobbying hard for a $55 million federal appropriation, part of which will be used to purchase, install and operate over 200 CCTV cameras during the 2012 Republican National Convention. Among these cameras will be two unmanned aerial vehicles. Because nothing says "we're concerned about your safety maintaining order" than a couple of drones flying overhead. You know, the ones similar to those used for scoping out terrorists targets before we "liberate" them to death with missile strikes. You can't help but think the Occupy Wall Street movement's got some cages rattled over at the RNC -- they don't want something like that to pop up come August 27. I'm sure they'll have the "free speech zones" set up, too.

The following is a brief rundown of what most of that $55 million will go towards:

• 164 cameras able to read a number 3 inches high at 300 meters in the day and identify people and vehicles at 100 meters in the dark. Many of these would be mounted on light poles.
• Two "unmanned aerial vehicles" that could hover for 20 minutes, fly in 20-knot winds and carry cameras with zoom lenses or thermal imaging capabilities.
• 20 helmet cameras with 2 1/2 hours of recording time to document crowd disturbances.
• Six trailer-mounted mobile cameras on booms that rise 20 feet or more, six more breadbox-sized cameras for covert use around high-risk activities, and four cameras that could read license tags in six lanes of traffic at speeds of 100 mph.
• 3,000 additional police officers the city expects to bring in, house, feed and pay during the convention.

I understand a need for safety measures, especially during high profile and sometimes highly charged public events, but I just can't get over how the RNC and Tampa police plan to use flying drones. Once those things were invented for military applications, it was only a matter of time before they found their way in the hands of law enforcement. And the cameras? I'm sure the city will find a good excuse to maintain them as a permanent fixture of the city streets.

Someday, law enforcement officials will find ways to attach tear gas and pepper spray canisters underneath the wings. Call it "deployable pacification."

Over the past year or so, Huntsville City Schools was busy sawing an anchor off the rickety S.S. School System. That anchor turned out to be former superintendent Dr. Ann Roy Moore, who just so happens to be on the wrong side of America's preferred color aisle, not that it seems to matter much. And the school board didn't let Moore's contract deter them from working over that anchor with a blow torch and an angle grinder -- they paid her an extra $100k to stay on as an advisor of sorts, so they wouldn't get smacked in the face with a lawyer's most favorite words: BREACH OF CONTRACT.

And after a lengthy search, the school board found a guy by the name of Dr. Casey Wardynski. At first I wasn't too interested in blogging something like this because it seemed so...small potatoes. But then I kept hearing some interesting stories about where he came from, and more importantly, what he was doing and who he brought along with him.

I still can't quite grasp why the school board and others love the guy. Maybe it was his military credentials -- after all, he is a retired Army colonel, and this city loves itself some military folk. Perhaps HCS figured they'd get a hard-nosed, no-nonsense leader who'd apply some of that military leadership magic on a school system that seems to be unable to get its collective shit together.

Wardynski's previous job was being the superintendent of Aurora Public Schools. More importantly, he's the alumnus of the Broad Foundation's Superintendents Academy, a program that, to quote Balloon Juice's E.D. Kain, "shapes new corporate reformers to go out and bring school choice and privatization to the masses." Nice, bland buzzwords. The "masses" is a nice touch, too -- gotta patronize the lesser peoples when getting your message across.

I checked up on the batting record of the "star players" that were churned out by this outfit, and it's not looking good:

• Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools and Broad alumnus.
• Marla Goodloe-Johnson, former superintendent of Seattle, WA. public schools and Broad alumnus.
• Brad Bernatek, Director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment for Seattle Public Schools and Broad alumnus.
• Beverly Hall, former superintendent of Atlanta, GA. public schools. Although not a Broad alumnus, several members of the school board were reportedly trained by the Broad Foundation sometime in 2006.
• Robert Bobb, current emergency financial manager of Detroit, MI and recent BFSA graduate. The Broad Foundation, along with the Kellogg Foundation, paid Bobb $145,000 a year on top of his $280,000 government salary. Fair bit of change there.
• Kimberly Olson, former finalist for superintendent of the Dallas, TX. independent school district and Broad alumnus.
• Arne Duncan, former superintendent of Chicago, IL. public schools, current U.S. Secretary of Education and Broad alumnus.

When you've got shit stacked this high, no amount of window opening or air freshener is gonna make the stench go away. And what of Dr. Wardynski? Well, he did leave Aurora Public Schools with a $25 million deficit.

In other words, it appears to be an outfit that trains present and future administrative staff in how to aggressively run a school system in the corporate sense, with the ultimate long-term goal of discrediting public schools as they are now in favor of charter schools largely run by corporate interests.

And now that he's settled into his new job, he's brought a few friends along:

Wardynski recruited his second-in-command, Dr. Barbara Cooper, from the school system in Aurora, Colo., just as he did with the new CFO, Frank Spinelli. Wardynski joked at last week's school board meeting that John Barry, the Aurora superintendent, is "pretty unhappy" with him.
Wardynski worked alongside both during his own nine-month stint as chief financial officer of the Aurora system.

And in Huntsville, he is paying both better than their predecessors. Cooper will make $141,600 a year as deputy superintendent - about $7,000 more than the maximum salary advertised for the job. The salary range on the posting, which ended Aug. 29, was $84,217 to $134,545.

And while the administrative staff get thousands over the maximum for their jobs, teachers, principals and faculty are being forced to abide by the absolute minimum. Keep in mind this the same school system that doubled up on bus routes and consolidated schools to save money. And also keep in mind this is in the same state where a teacher coming out of her own pockets for things like tissue and pencils is considered a perfectly normal event.

Methinks the fact that the school system is throwing extra money at hiring and keeping administrative staff around while at the same time turning teachers into minimum-wage slaves pisses a lot of folks off. Showering upper management and executives with money while drawing blood from entry-level turnips is an epidemic that's swept the entire nation. I understand you want to attract and keep your best and brightest, just not at the expense of the folks at the ground floor. You know, the people who actually run most of this shit.

Personally speaking, the jury's still out on this guy, although I'm not liking what I'm seeing this early in the game. And now for some commentary from the peanut gallery over at AL.com:

These salaries are not excessive. Good leadership comes at a cost. If you want cheap leadership, I understand that members of the previous school administration are available.

Don't you just hate it when people attempt to justify waste and cronyism when it works in their favor?

BTW, Geek Palaver, Redeye's Front Page and Merts Center Monitor has much, much more on this and other crap involving HCS.