One of the things I suspect about EU expansion is that Europe’s more corrupt and less secure states are joining the EU for the very reason a lot of northern Europeans oppose it: Better to be ruled by officious busybodies in Brussels than sleazy crooks at home. This has certainly been true of Italy to some degree, and probably Greece, Spain and Portugal as well. It would hardly be unprecedented for Czechs to feel the same way.

True enough. In the words of one of my favorite artists, Czech sculptor David Cerny: “Anything that can be done that will weaken domestic political power is good.”

Full interview:
http://prague.tv/pill/article.php?name=sculpted-rebellion

I’ve heard exactly this argument from Czechs across the ideological spectrum, who have completely lost hope in their elected leaders and their ability to deal with corruption. To them, the EU is a paragon of “clean hands,” which, comparatively, it may be.

Unwilling to deal with corruption as well as actual violence, as Doug pointed out in his link to the news about Tomas Nemecek.

http://www.arellanes.com/archives/000388.html#000388

Czechs often ask me what people think of the country abroad, meaning in the west. At the moment they are sharing front page space on the website of Reporters sans frontieres with Iran, Pakistan, China, Egypt, Libya, Cuba and … the US.

http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=9083

“and… the US.”

Ouch.

Nearly 400 years ago, Francis Bacon wrote that knowledge is power. Today, we see that maxim play out in many ways in the political and economic spheres in both rich and poor countries.

In government, a high level of secrecy often enables those in authority to hoard their knowledge to increase their power, hobbling people’s ability to take part in the political process in a meaningful way. Behind closed doors, corruption thrives. So too in the private sector, enabling corrupt corporate captains to keep shareholders in the dark and line their own pockets.

Czechoslovakia pays lip-service to the value of
transparency and openness in government.
If we think that our generation will see improvements in our lifetime we fail to understand how ruthless communism and unchecked capitalism can take advantage of apathy. Things will have to get really bad before the middle classes realise that exchanging one brutalism with another is not the way to create a better future.

As Kierkegaard once put it: ’Life is lived forward and understood backward.’
http://www.abctales.com/story/8506
Websites like http://www.thescoop.org/
http://www.crikey.com.au/
http://www.factcheck.org/
would be an ideal examples for exposing the weaknesses of crony capitalism Czech.

Former communists are usually the ones who have the venture capital so the fleas only changed the coat of ism; most of the political power seems to be in the similar hands and minds as whatever intelligence there was before 1989…

We should always recall that Roosevelt diagnosed a growing awareness among Americans of genuine injustice like any anarchist would!

Roosevelt believed, as few other politicians did, that the comforts of middle-class life blinded many of his fellow countrymen to the hardships endured by the majority of humankind - hardships whose effects might be lessened by political action.
And so, although Roosevelt opened his first address to Congress by pledging himself to fight the ’evil’ of anarchism, he moved immediately into a much longer section of his speech titled ’Regulation of Corporations.’ He proposed to address the great ’social problems’ and the ’antagonism’ of the day - the radicalism that threatened Americans’ safety by trimming the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Sure there is lots of rubbish on the intenet, but bloggers spread the knowledge as no other medium before ever could. We are rather lucky self publishing generation and without any doubt we know more about corruption then any other generation before us. To boot, we are exposing it in every corner of this world…

PS:
Tips and tools on how to separate wheat from chuff:
http://ablogfather.blogspot.com/