“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.”
—Hannah Arendt
(in her 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics.”)
Category: government transparency
Requiring government transparency is as necessary in those areas where governments can grant special favors as in those where governments can inflict direct harm.
That is, it’s as important regarding government worker pensions as it is of the abuse of police power.
In Nevada, the legal requirement for the state’s Public Employee Retirement System (PERS), to disclose who gets what in pension payments was recently thwarted by PERS itself.
“By replacing names with ‘non-disclosable’ social security numbers in its actuarial record-keeping documents, PERS has attempted to circumvent the 2013 ruling of the Nevada Supreme Court requiring disclosure,” explained Joseph Becker of the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
I’m quoting from NPRI’s July 6 press release. Most such publicity isn’t all that interesting, but this one catching government agencies deliberately working against their duties sparks a certain … interest. Wouldn’t you say?
Simply by altering how it keeps records, PERS officials hoped to stifle public … “spying.” It’s reasonable to prevent government from giving out public servants’ Social Security numbers, so PERS switched to listing information under those numbers, in so doing “violating both the letter and spirit of the Nevada Public Records Act,” explains Becker.
And thus undermining democracy — republican governance — itself.
This public disclosure wouldn’t be an issue if the pension system were run privately, based on defined contribution funding. But that’s not how governments do things.
We must hold government’s proverbial feet to the fire — of public information — to make sure government employees and taxpayers are both treated fairly.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Feel like Charlie Brown? That football … yanked away again.
Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey announced he’s not recommending prosecution of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” Comey stated, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” He saw the evidence as not strong enough, “especially regarding intent.”
It doesn’t appear that Mrs. Clinton purposely divulged classified material, though her “intent” in setting up a private server for State Department work was self-centered, and purposely not transparent. She was clearly more concerned with shielding her communications from the U.S. Government and the public, than shielding classified information from the Russians, Chinese, Iranians or ISIS.
While the FBI noted that Clinton and her aides lacked any apparent intent “to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” the investigation discovered ample “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Not a sterling report card for someone seeking to be the commander-in-chief.
Donald Trump’s negative standing with voters, 70 percent disapproval in a recent survey, may save Mrs. Clinton. Still, standing in her way remains the fact that a majority of voters just don’t trust her.
That won’t change with yesterday’s news.
“Key assertions by Hillary Clinton in defense of her email practices have collapsed under FBI scrutiny,” read the lead of an Associated Press story, detailing six public statements made by her that the investigation found to be false.
Let’s split the difference: neither prosecute Hillary nor elect her president.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: Toms Norde / Valsts kanceleja on Flickr
On Sunday, at Townhall, I addressed the whining attacks on referendums and “democracy” that followed the Brexit referendum.
The most outrageous? A broadside from Jason Brennan.
“To have even a rudimentary sense of the pros and cons of Brexit,” argues this Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, “a person would need to possess tremendous social scientific knowledge. One would need to know about the economics and sociology of trade and immigration, the politics of centralized regulation, and the history of nationalist movements.”
In other words, most Brits needn’t worry their pretty little heads about deciding their future; experts have everything under control.
Brennan has a new book coming out, Against Democracy, wherein he posits that we need “a new system of government — epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable.”
Sound familiar? ’Tis the old Platonic whine in new wineskins.
This Philosopher King is necessary, you see, because citizens don’t posses the advanced degrees to judge whether Brennan is right or wrong. We can’t even find a Holiday Inn Express in the phonebook. Or a phonebook.
Nonetheless, why not consult other known knowers?
The late William F. Buckley, Jr., well-educated and well-spoken on political matters, once declared that he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory, than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
“Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else,” warned journalist Glenn Greenwald, an expert on such hooey.
“I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
Most decisions in a free society are thankfully made by individuals (not voters, bureaucrats, or academics) about their own lives.
But when legitimate decisions of governance must be made, I’ll take democracy over rule by experts.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Increasingly, folks in government balk at the commonsense requirement for transparency. They don’t like the basic idea of a republic, apparently — that we have rights; folks in government have duties. They are bound to serve us.
And allow us to oversee their work.
The latest bizarre attempt to wiggle out of transparency comes from California. A proposed bit of legislation, AB-2880, seeks to grant state employees copyright protection — for their everyday work as public servants.
“The bill claims to protect access to the documents through the California Public Records Act,” explains Steven Greenhut in The American Spectator, “but it gives the government the ability to control what people do with many of those records.” Emphasis added — to direct your attention to the enormity of the increase in government prerogatives.
Public records are called “public” not merely because they putatively serve the public, but because they are open to the public. Yet, if this measure passes, those records are essentially privatized … to the government.
That is not what we mean, usually, when we say “privatize.”
Using copyright law to protect “thin-skinned officials,” AB-2880 would insulate bureaucrats even further from citizen oversight.
The excuse for the law, to help agencies manage their “intellectual property,” is hardly a big concern, except perhaps in one way: trademark infringement. We do not want private businesses to pretend to be state parks or bureaus. But the overreach beyond this core issue goes so far into crazyland that one must question the intent behind it.
And stop it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The U. S. cleaves to some bizarre security standards. That is, about secrecy. Critics have been complaining for years about how “liberal” the federal government is in classifying information as secret. Or, put another way, how stingy the government is in providing us with information.
Not liberal at all.
This problem inhabits every nook and cranny of official Washington. But it’s most obvious in the case of 2002’s 9/11 report, from which 28 pages were removed. For reasons of state secrets. And that, as the BBC related this weekend, is the likely cause of much suspicion against Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia? Yes. The country whose sands were walked upon by Mohammad, the Prophet, is also the country that gave birth to 15 of the 18 terrorist skyjackers, as well as spreading the Wahabist spin on jihad throughout the Islamic world.
So, by withholding portions of the report from the public, the government fed the flame of conjecture. And with it, the belief in a Saud conspiracy and a Bush and Obama cover-up.
The withholding of information does not give us a univocal perspective. We don’t know what is being kept from our eyes and ears. So when I read the BBC report, which stated that the “probable publication” of the previously classified parts “will clear Saudi Arabia of any responsibility, CIA chief John Brennan has said,” I get suspicious.
Good, if true. But the timing of this Brennan opinion, on the weekend of the Orlando massacre?
Stinks of spin and deflection by the government, against us … who wonder, not without reason, about “conspiracies.”
Should we trust the newly de-classified segments?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
