Category: government transparency

Categories
government transparency

Grading the President

Barack Obama promised a new era of government transparency. He even pledged a fully transparent congressional debate on health care reform, telling us repeatedly that the negotiations would be televised on C-Span.

Now in power, he’s forgotten that tune. But of course, that’s not up to him. It’s up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Last week, she laughed at such transparency.

But Clint Hendler of the Columbia Journalism Review has graded the president for what he — not Pelosi or Reid — can deliver on transparency. Regarding state secrets, Hendler gives Obama a “D.” With Freedom of Information Act requests the administration has done better: Mark it a “B.”

I’ve talked before about problems with the recovery.gov website. But what about data.gov? By the end of the month there should be some meat on that site’s database bones, but a lot more work will remain. Call it a “D-plus.”

Hendler gives an “F” to the White House’s routine — and utterly opaque — practice of concocting off-the-record background briefings. An “A-minus,” though, goes for White House visitor records . . . despite a refusal to issue lists of visitors in the administration’s first seven months. Further, the White House reserves its right to hold back this info at any time.

The president’s grades sure aren’t that of an overachiever. Maybe he needs a tutor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency responsibility

What Would Confucius Say?

House Resolution 784, proposed to honor the twenty-five-hundred-sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Confucius, received a No vote from Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake.

Why?

Honorable Flake say ‘He who spends time passing trivial legislation may find himself out of time to read healthcare bill.’

He has a point, and it’s worth than a fortune-cookie presentation.

I am pretty sure Master K’ung-tzu, whom we call Confucius, would side with Flake. It is more important actually to do good deeds than honor the ancient wisdom of a foreign culture, or its chief exemplar.

It’s not bad to honor such an ancient one as Master Kung. But if everything else you do rubs against the Confucian grain, what does that say?

Take just one issue. Congress continues to obsess about executive salaries, and in effect has given the current administration the green light to fix salaries.

But as economist Arnold Kling has noticed, this is all a distraction. ‘The substantive issue is the extent to which [recent market] losses were caused by political actions and the extent to which they are concentrated at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. . . . Given the large role of Freddie and Fannie, it makes sense for politicians to create as large a diversion as possible. Hence, the brouhaha over bonuses at bailed-out banks.’

Very un-Confucian, such shifting of blame.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Steal This Free Document

Is it possible to steal a free good? Ask a lawyer. She’ll look it up, probably in federal court records.

Now, our federal courts use a not-very-user-friendly database system, known as PACER, for distributing public records. These records are the work product of democracy. Federal law prohibits copyrighting the information, making it public property. But the PACER system nevertheless requires lawyers and others who want to access court decisions to plunk out eight cents per page to get them.

Worse than this, the database isn’t keyword searchable.

Enter the geeks.

In a free market, a potential demand meets supply by the entrepreneurial minded. In this case, it’s just the freedom-minded, the transparency-minded. Some Harvard and Princeton affiliated computer whizzes developed a new tool or two to retrieve these documents little pieces at a time, planning to place them in a truly searchable system.

And then the courts opened the records to law libraries without charge, and one hacker wrote a PERL script and started downloading the whole database, in huge, streaming chunks.

Half a month later someone noticed. Egads, someone was stealing free information!

The FBI investigated, started following the infiltrator.

So, what do you do when someone steals public information? Exactly what the FBI determined, in the end.

Yes, sometimes “nothing” is the proper response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Cuz You Constituents Work for Me!

This summer, many congressmen held town-hall meetings about health care and other hot political topics.

Sometimes they were not entirely statesmanlike. Clips of their more embarrassing moments now reside on YouTube. For instance, you can watch Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee chat on a cellphone while a constituent is asking her a question — taking rudeness to congressional levels.

Congressman Baron Hill was determined to avoid this sort of thing. He wasn’t going to be on YouTube in any “compromising position,” not him. So he actually tried to ban any videotaping of his event. I kid you not. The evidence is on, uh, YouTube:

Constituent: “—why can’t I film this? Isn’t this my right?”

Hill: “Well, this is my town-hall meeting, and I set the rules, and I’ve had these rules—

“Let me repeat that one more time! This is my town-hall meeting for you. And you’re not going to tell me how to run my congressional office! Now, the reasons why I don’t allow filming is because usually the films that are done end up on YouTube in a compromising position.”

Oh, those pesky constituents!

Anyway, sir, too late. The technology is out there. The genie won’t go back in the bottle. Every audience you ever face will include folks who can record your words. With that in mind, you might want to, uh, watch your words from here on out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.