Category: government transparency

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government transparency

Forward the Fed Audit

Will Ron Paul get his audit of the Federal Reserve?

The U.S. House has just approved it. Now it’s up to the Senate. That the proposal has gotten this far is a credit to Congressman Paul’s determination to give Americans a better idea of how their money is being misspent.

The central bank’s actions are often secret. During the 2008 bailouts, the Fed concealed which banks were getting how much of the trillions it doled out. We now have specific info — for example, $86 billion to a Bank of America that at the time touted its stability — mostly because Bloomberg LLC sued in court.

Fed defenders can be transparent about this government agency’s need for opacity. Isn’t it better, some burble, to let the Fed help dupe depositors at troubled banks about the condition of those banks so that depositors will be less likely to rescue their money? (I paraphrase.)

Some Fed champions declare that the Fed must not be “politicized” by any audit or other check on its abuses. Fine, fine, let’s stop the politicization right now. Privatize the money system, return to a gold standard, shutter the Fed and — oh, that’s not what they mean? They just want the Fed’s politically constituted and politically maneuvering officers to be able to fiscally frolic at will, a process that could be hindered if citizens knew in high-dpi detail what it’s up to?

Oops. Okay. Now I understand. . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Those Pesky Online Citizens

Are “the people” a problem for technology to solve?

One of the benefits of the Internet has been the increased ease with which citizens can learn about their governments. Just as important has been the increased opportunity to tell elected representatives and public officials, along with their hired guns in federal, state, and local bureaucracies, just what they think.

Technology has given democracy a second lease on life.

But that doesn’t mean that politicians aren’t fighting back. And finding service providers and consultants to help them.

According to Michael Cohen, co-founder of Peak Democracy, Inc., online public comment forums can have awful consequences for politicians. They may fall prey to the dreaded “Referendum Effect.” This malady, Cohen explains, is

the loss of decision-making autonomy that government leaders incur when a community expects decisions to be based solely on the majority opinion of public feedback. More specifically, the Referendum Effect occurs when public feedback usurps the decision-making independence of government leaders.

Note the assumption here: government leaders should be “independent” of the voters.

Another way he counsels the International City/County Management Association “to minimize the Referendum Effect is to exclude the word ‘vote’ from the user interface – as the ‘v-word’ can create an expectation that feedback with the most votes wins.”

Cohen ends with an offer: “To learn more about the Referendum Effect and ways to prevent it, contact Mike@PeakDemocracy.com.”

Cohen is more than willing to advise how to keep pesky citizens from actually having an effective voice online. If you want to keep yours, meet his e-realpolitik with e-vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Robert J. O’Neill, Jr. (roneill@icma.org) is the executive director of the International City/County Management Association, which published Cohen’s comments.

Categories
First Amendment rights government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

What a Whistle-blower Learned

It can happen to any organization. The original intent — or, at any rate, declared purpose — of the concern gets lost amidst the chaos of hard-to-manage projects and personnel, as individuals re-define their goals at variance with the official end; as corruption sets in; as functions decay into forms persisting out of mere inertia; as institutional memory and learning get short-circuited by broken feedback loops and a culture of silence, secrecy, and hush-hush prudence.We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren

No organization is exempt, but it happens most often, and easiest, in government.

Take the experience of Peter Van Buren, late of two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams, related in The American Conservative:

In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. . . .

What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis. . . .

Van Buren wrote a book on that huge divide between secret truth and public lie, and, of course, got in trouble for it. Folks higher up in government are not renowned for their love of whistle-blowers. Van Buren not unexpectedly finds himself being shown the door on his own career, or, as he puts it, his superiors are preparing to put his “head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees.”

Government may not honor whistle-blowers, but citizens should. After all, it is allegedly for our sake that government does what it does. To discover, as Mr. Van Buren discovered, that “we failed in the [Iraq] reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war,” is news we must incorporate into our storehouse of foreign policy wisdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency too much government

Big Anonymous Is Listening

A newspaper report brought a smile to my face and a strange sense of . . . relief, reassurance. A group of hackers known as Anonymous has apparently cracked into and tape-recorded a conference call held between the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard.Anonymous Twitter Account

The call was to discuss the international investigation of the Anonymous hackers.

“The #FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal [communications] for some time now. #OpInfiltration,” read a taunting tweet about the audio file.

An FBI agent, insisting on speaking anonymously, said, “It’s not really that sophisticated.” The anonymous government agent explained that the Anonymous group had somehow intercepted an email with the call’s information. The agent offered that the FBI is “always looking at ways to make our communications more secure.”

Apparently, Anonymous has quite the work ethic. Shortly following the penetration of FBI/Scotland Yard security (so to speak), down went websites for the Greek Ministry of Justice, the Boston Police Department, and the lawyers representing a U.S. Marine implicated in the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Now, I don’t generally support hacking into government computers or taking down people’s websites. I’m more laissez-faire. But, actions by Anonymous to force government transparency are helpful, may even sport a certain revolutionary justice.

Is Anonymous on my side? More so, I bet, than this scary national security state that now thinks it can assassinate or incarcerate an American citizen without charge or any legitimate judicial process on the orders of one man: the president.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency

Secret Censorship

“There are so many things about this story that are crazy,” according to a detailed and exasperated report at Techdirt.com, “it’s difficult to know where to start.”

What story? The one you’ve probably heard nothing about.

Back in late 2010, the federal government seized Dajaz1.com, a popular Internet blog devoted to hip hop. The Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shut down the website domain claiming it was infringing on music copyrights. ICE “put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals.”

The government then failed to abide by the legal requirements for filing an asset forfeiture case, conducting a secret legal effort, instead. Motions, hearings, and court decisions were filed in secret and placed under “seal,” denying the website owners and their attorney any opportunity for challenge.

Freedom of speech? Due process of law? Obliterated. And yet, earlier this month, the government admitted it had no legitimate case, no probable cause to go after this website in the first place, and, after a year of censorship, finally returned the web domain to its rightful owners.

That a website can be seized by our government, without a charge being publicly made and the crime proven in a fair and open court of law, is absolutely frightening.

What’s even scarier, though, is that legislation currently being considered by Congress — Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act — would give the federal government even more sweeping powers to regulate and control the Internet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency insider corruption

Mad About Power

“There’s no such thing as too much power.”

That’s the word from Democrat Herb Wesson, former Speaker of the California Assembly. Wesson was defending the Speaker’s awesome control over the purse strings.

In a story headlined, “The power of one: Perez controls Assembly with money,” the Sacramento Bee reports: “Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez single-handedly doles out millions in public funds each year to his 80 members: No vote, no committee, no debate.”

The article was vague on details, because the Speaker refused open records requests from the Bee and the Los Angeles Times. In August, the newspapers filed suit to see the legislative records.

Assemblyman Anthony Portantino charges that Speaker Pérez cut his staff as retribution for voting against this year’s state budget — although the state constitution makes it a crime to coerce a member’s vote. Assemblyman Tony Mendoza admitted that his office budget was slashed by $80,000 when the Speaker demoted him from the Rules Committee, but he wouldn’t discuss it with reporters.

Were a special interest group to similarly bribe legislators, Californians would be up in arms. But a politician? We’ll see how this plays out.

“It’s a very difficult house to run,” argues Mr. Wesson, “and you have to have the leverage that the speaker has.” Steve Maviglio, former spokesperson for two Assembly Speakers, echoes that sentiment, claiming that without a healthy bribery power, the legislative chamber would descend into “absolute chaos.”

Extreme. But some “chaos” must be better than the current all-too-orderly system of corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall

Saving Grandma

Republican legislators in Utah are trying to kill Grandma. Don’t dismiss this as a smear. It’s true.

Only spell it GRAMA, which is an acronym for Utah’s 20-year old Government Records Access Management Act, Utah’s open government and information access law. A furiously fast four days after legislators first introduced a bill to gut the open records law, it sailed through both legislative chambers and was quickly signed by the governor.

House Bill 477 changes the core of the GRAMA law, mandating that citizens must prove they deserve access to records, rather than the previous rule requiring government officials to show cause for why a document should not be released. The legislation also exempts text messages, emails and voicemails from being disclosed, the better to keep lobbyists and special interests out of the limelight.

Thankfully, Utah has a statewide process of initiative and referendum. Already a petition to put HB-477 to a referendum is underway. Unfortunately, the task is arduous: The sponsors need 100,000 voters to sign in only 40 days.

To add extra burden, legislators have passed Senate Bill 165, outlawing citizens from using electronic signatures for just such petitions.

Now the furious Utah electorate, joined by an angry media, is creating enough heat that politicians are seeing the light. The Governor is calling a special session to repeal HB-477. And a lawsuit may be filed any day now to strike down the unconstitutional, anti-democratic SB-165.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights government transparency national politics & policies

Secrecy Broken

The “Wikileaks” controversy proceeds to grow and mutate, like Clostridium botulinum in a Petri dish with spoiled pork, and I’ve avoided talking about it up till now.

Wikileaks is a website devoted to publishing leaked documents from governments and other scandal-prone institutions. You probably know the major players, and the various permutations of the story. You can hardly miss them. Because of that, I’m not going to go through the story in detail. Instead, I’d like to take a step back and offer a few “meta-thoughts” . . . ideas that might help produce a good conclusion.

  1. Republican forms of government require a great deal of transparency, though not on everything. There are military secrets and diplomatic info-dumps that, for our security, would best remain secret and un-dumped.
  2. Politicians, soldiers and bureaucrats tend to hate transparency. Why? They don’t like being second-guessed by “non-professionals.” So they often make government more opaque than it should be.
  3. Some of our leaders have tried to put nearly everything foreign-policy-related into the tightest security, demanding high clearances even for viewing. Much of this is self-serving, not truly security-related.
  4. A government worker who breaks security protocols to leak documents can be at once a hero and still prosecutable by law.

Now’s a good time to rethink transparency and our government’s secrecy protocols.

But, rethought or not, no one’s been surprised to learn of more amazing lapses in ethics and judgment on the part of our leaders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency too much government

The Liability Behind the Curtain

Do not look at the liability behind that curtain! Or: Do not mention that we don’t know what the liabilities are.

Some things are too painful to report.

Apparently.

The folks who audit the Social Security Administration are late on a set of reports. The reports in question account for the financial and actuarial (un)soundness of Social Security, specifically on the (un)funded liabilities of the pension system and Medicare.

Unlike corporations, which are required to report to the IRS on March 15 each year, and individuals, who must report on April 15, there’s no set date for the trustees of our federal government’s biggest program to make its report. But in recent years the reports have been published early enough to allow summary by May. The last report summary we have is for 2009.

Why so late?

Could it be that things have gotten so bad that it’s difficult to figure out — and embarrassing to sign one’s name to — the actual financial situation? After all, this year Social Security ran out of money to write checks for its promised (and quite immediate) pay-outs.

Sheila Weinberg, CEO of the Institute for Truth in Accounting, writes that she heard the reports were late because “trustees wanted to include the effect the health care bill had on these liabilities.” Ms. Weinberg not unreasonably challenges this rationale. Wouldn’t Social Security’s liabilities have been worth knowing before Congress committed to more entitlement spending?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

The Gulf in the Gulf

CNN’s Anderson Cooper wanted to know why the government wouldn’t let the media fully report on the infamous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Just before Independence Day, the Coast Guard widened the gulf between official policy and common sense — a gulf that has characterized much of the federal response to the catastrophe. A newly concocted rule prohibited camera crews and others from coming within 65 feet of response vessels or booms without obtaining special permission.

The government’s point man on all things BP-oil-spill, Admiral Thad Allen, at first defended the rule. This was the same man who, Cooper noted, had weeks earlier stressed that “the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations, except for two things, if it’s a security or a safety problem.”

The blanket 65-feet boundary arbitrarily inhibited access. And it raised Anderson Cooper’s ire:

“We’re not the enemy here,” Cooper clarified. “Those of us down here trying to accurately show what’s happening, we are not the enemy. I have not heard about any journalist who has disrupted relief efforts. . . . If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I would move.”

Anderson Cooper’s criticism of the rule, and its widespread coverage, elicited a backlash. In less than two weeks the rule was lifted for reporters.

Openness? Transparency? Governments don’t like it. Citizens do.

The lesson appears to be that we are likely to get transparency only after loudly demanding it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.