Category: government transparency

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government transparency insider corruption

Setting the Jet-Setting Record Straight

The media has falsely reported that Congress bought itself three new corporate jets at a price of $200 million to jet-set across the globe, without even a shred of transparency as to who requested this earmarked spending.

It’s not true. One of those jets was requested by the military. Congress really only bought two new corporate jets at a price of only $132 million.

Yes, after enviously berating auto company CEOs last year for daring to use jets their companies had already purchased, our legislators have the unmitigated gall to one-up them by buying new jets to jet-set about in.

You might ask which politicians are responsible for this gross excess. The leaders of Congress, the Speaker and Majority and Minority Leaders, are most likely to use these aircraft. But who actually made the request is being kept from We the People.

Because this spending gets called a “program increase” rather than an “earmark,” this insertion into the Defense budget can remain secret.

Steve Ellis, with Taxpayers for Common Sense, laments that “The more you push for transparency, the more of this stuff goes underneath the carpet.” He called the Appropriations Committee “the judge, jury and executioner over what is an earmark and what isn’t and how much information we get.”

So much for transparency. The only thing transparent in Washington is the arrogance and greed of our so-called leaders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency judiciary

The Judges, the Lawyers, and the People

In legal circles, when folks think of Missouri, they think of the “Missouri Plan.” Seventy years ago, Missouri instituted a new method of selecting judges, especially the judges that sit on the state’s supreme court. The plan was copied by many other states.

It is beloved by the insiders.

A few years ago, I wrote at Townhall.com: “[T]he Missouri Bar has something of a lock on the whole process. . . . It’s supposed to be non-partisan. Bottom line is that lawyers are in control.”

A judicial commission controlled by the state bar association picks the judges that the governor must then pick from — with the bulk of the commission’s work done behind closed doors.

Missourians are shocked when informed how the process works. So are folks in other states that have adopted the Missouri Plan. It isn’t transparent and it puts key decision-making on judges in the hands of an unelected special interest.

But things may be looking up. A group called Better Courts for Missouri submitted paperwork to start a new petition. The group aims to gather enough signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2010, to open up the system, make it more transparent.

Legislative attempts to change the system have failed. Generally, politically powerful lawyers are for a plan that lets lawyers have the biggest say.

Well, now they are up against competition. The people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency

The Transparent Parthenon

Historians know how much it cost to build the Parthenon, but we still don’t know what’s been spent on this past year’s economic recovery packages and bailouts.

Yes, we still have the clay tablets upon which the accounts for building the Parthenon were tallied. What we call “transparency” today was simple common sense in ancient Athens.

Athens was a democracy, and as every small-d democrat knows, it is absolutely essential to make government records public if the people are to make important decisions.

Same goes for a democratic republic, like ours.

Now, I’m not saying that building the Parthenon made sense for Athens. I’m glad we have it now, but it was part of Periclean grandiosity, and the great statesman’s next step was to invade Sparta — and that was one war without a good ending for Athens.

By the way, there is a theory of business cycles based on how tall corporate buildings become. You know the boom is ending just when all the businesses are building huge skyscrapers.

Something similar happened in Athens. The Parthenon was finished; next, it was sacked by the Spartans.

As fascinating as it is, we can’t live in the past. But we can learn from it. If transparency was required for Pericles, it should be required for Barack Obama.

Oh, and maybe we should be extra cautious about going to war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Transparently Faster

If a promise is important, clear, specific — and keeping it would be honorable — well then, it’s bad to break it.

Alas, political candidates make and break such promises all the time. They make the promises to get votes, then break them from political expediency.

Usually, politicians don’t admit this. Usually, if they note the lapse at all, they plead some fictitious but awesome and unexpected impediment.

So, for example, candidate Obama’s promise that final legislation going to the president’s desk would be accessible online in every detail for a full five days before he signed it — well, that quickly went by the wayside. So has the idea of tracking every particular of so-called “stimulus” spending. Technical difficulties, they say.

Who knew the web-savvy Obama campaign would have so much trouble with “the Internets thing” once they got into power?

For some reason, however, a private company — unburdened by the rush to sign us all into permanent debt bondage — is doing much better when it comes to reporting the runaway spending. The Washington Times tells us that a firm called Onvia is tracking federal expenditures “down to the local level . . . in real-time speed.” Onvia has free software that people can use to follow the dollars.

Sounds like time for a little outsourcing.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The Obama administration is opposed to outsourcing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Sanders versus Bernanke

I don’t side with Bernie Sanders very often, but Vermont’s favorite socialist son occasionally brightens our capitol with something surprising.

Early in March, the senator challenged Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke with an interesting question: “Will you tell the American people to whom you lent 2.2 trillion of their dollars?”

Bernanke then said that the Fed explains its policies online. Terms and collateral requirements, and so on.

But that didn’t answer the question, so the senator pushed on. And Bernanke, not being the Master of Obfuscation that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was, replied with an honest and unmistakable “No.”

He then went on to explain why he wouldn’t: It might “stigmatize” receiving banks, don’t you see.

Sanders mocked the answer. You see, he believes that the Fed should be transparent, especially regarding the current round of crisis loans.

I’m with him on this. I believe governments can only be truly republican — run by the public — when their operations are open for all to see. But there’s another reason: A transparent Fed would be a talked-about Fed. And the more people learn about the Fed, the more likely they will be to dissolve it.

America didn’t always have a national bank. And, like Tom Jefferson and Andy Jackson, I think we can do better without one at all.

We just need a good rule of law regarding money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Nebraska

Government transparency is understandably popular. Voters want to know what their governments are doing.

So smart politicians promise us more transparency, more sunshine, more info. But, being politicians, sometimes they don’t deliver. And, when they do, they often spend a whole lot more than necessary.

That’s what is happening in Virginia. Bills to put the state budget online have passed both chambers of the legislature — unanimously.

But politicians estimate that the cost to get the job done will run over $3 million. Wow. That’s a lot. How does that compare with other states?

At the Tertium Quids blog, there’s a letter posted from Ed Martin, chief of staff to former Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. Martin points out that two years ago Blunt created the Missouri Accountability Portal by executive order.

The website is a national model with a searchable database of state expenditures. It’s garnered over 17 million hits from interested citizens. And it cost less than $200,000.

Then there’s Nebraska State Treasurer Shane Osborn. As the Washington Examiner recently reported, he put Nebraska spending online without the legislature passing a law. He just did it.

“I used my staff to compile the data,” Osborn said. “I just viewed it as my job.”

The grand cost of Osborn’s excellent transparency website? Only $38,000.

Sounds like there are millions of reasons for Virginia to learn from others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Transparent Obama

You may have heard about Barack Obama’s desire for greater transparency in government. Policy will now favor ready revelation, he has said. No more unnecessary dark secrets about governmental doings.

As a U.S. senator, Obama made a few plausible gestures in support of greater openness about the legislative process. So I have been guardedly optimistic about his commitment to transparency as our new president.

President Obama has promised to post legislation online for public viewing before he signs it. However, the very first bill he signed, which expands the right to sue over alleged pay discrimination, was not posted online.

Recovery.gov page, early February
Recovery.gov page, early February

An administration spokesman alluded to mysterious difficulties preventing this. Apparently, one is not allowed to be transparent about the obstacles to transparency. Okay, so maybe it just slipped through the cracks.

But what more urgent test can there be of the president’s commitment to transparency than the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending package Obama is touting? Why not make it easy for all Americans to scan the dirty details before it’s too late to scream at congressmen to try to stop it?

The question answers itself, but let’s visit the recovery.gov Web page.

There we are told: “Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent.”

You know, after it’s too late.

The only thing transparent here is this maneuver.

This Is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Opaque Transparency

Colorado’s state treasurer, Cary Kennedy, is on the hot seat. When running for office, she promised to make the state’s spending more transparent. She has not followed through.

In a different age, such dilatoriness might have been overlooked. Today, the very medium that makes it easy to report what is happening with taxpayers’ money, the Internet, also makes it easy to pressure delinquent officials.

There are websites. The one calling Kennedy to account is a blog called Colorado Spending Transparency. Or COST.

COST recalls that during his 2006 campaign for Colorado State Treasurer, Kennedy observed that when you buy groceries, the receipt shows what you bought. Kennedy, too, she said, would “show you where your money goes.”

Colorado does post its annual budget online. But the COST blog wants a detailed, searchable database, as fifteen other states have provided.

Representative Don Marostica, who also championed transparency in his 2006 campaign, introduced a bill to require such online itemizing. The bill never made it out of committee. Marostica had planned to re-introduce the bill until Governor Ritter stated in a recent speech that he would work with Treasurer Kennedy and others to put the state’s checkbook online.

COST says doing this will only reveal what the state paid, not necessarily what it paid for. COST wants the whole story. And will keep pressing until it gets it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Change So Far

President Barack Obama promised change . . . including in the way Congress did things. As a senator, he sponsored a transparency bill that — if Congress could only have stuck with after passing — would have publicized all proposed pork.

And there’s the rub. Congress is constitutionally in charge of change, really. You might say “change” is Congress’s job: New things for government are supposed to come from Congress in the form of legislation. Not from the president.

So how has Congress helped? Well, as I’ve reported before, the new Congress has indicated pretty clearly what kind of change it wants: A stronger stranglehold on power and a narrow purview of options to be considered.

None of this represent the kind of change Americans want . . . or Obama promised.

The most interesting procedural proposals come, these days, from the minority Republicans.

Opposing the developing Democrat bailout package (that spends more trillions we don’t have), House Minority Leader John Boehner asked that no so such bill be “brought to the floor of the House unless there have been public hearings in the appropriate committees, the entire text has been available online for the American people to review for at least one week, and it includes no special-interest earmarks.”

Veteran Washington reporter Cokie Roberts called Boehner’s proposal “delightful.”

Delightful it is, and in Obama’s spirit, too, but it’s up to Congress to deliver.

So far, no good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency term limits

Committee Chair Limits, RIP?

Advocates of limited government have lamented the decline and fall of the 1994 Republican “revolution” since, well, not long after the so-called revolution began. But before it melted into a puddle of politics-as-usual, there were some serious efforts at reform.

One procedural reform that survived was term limits on committee chairmen. The Democratic leadership, after gaining a majority in 2006, decided to keep these limits.

But now, with their majority increased, a Democrat headed to the White House, and economic collapse as a distraction, they apparently feel the time has become as ripe as a freckled banana to peel away such impediments to their rule. The scuttling of committee chair limits is now part of their new rules package.

The package also limits the ability of Republicans to force votes on bills that would be politically difficult for Democrats to vote on. Sheesh, I thought voting on stuff was the whole idea.

The minority Republicans have sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi, complaining, “This is not the kind of openness and transparency that President-elect Obama promised.”

But they shouldn’t stop there, even if the new rules are implemented over their protest. In politics, it often pays to keep fighting.

Term limits remain very popular with the many of the same voters who also like the openness and accountability the new president keeps talking about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.