Category: government transparency

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government transparency

Hidden Taxpayer Treasure

If I found $54 million I didn’t know I had, I’d be ecstatic. Yet, when California taxpayers discovered $54 million stuck in secret state parks system bank accounts, they were miffed.

California parks, constrained by the state’s multi-​year budget crunch, were facing closure. Meanwhile, these funds went unreported to the Department of Finance. Ruth Coleman, who has led the parks system for the last decade, resigned. Her second-​in-​command was fired.

A spokesperson for California’s finance department admitted that, historically, the department had relied upon “accurate and correct accounting being reported to us by the relevant departments.” The San Jose Mercury News called it, “The little-​known practice of trusting — and not verifying …”

Seems there are 500 “special funds” accounting for supposedly $37 billion about which California’s Department of Finance doesn’t have any real clue.

Jonathan Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, says this is hardly “an isolated incident,” and points out that it must be piled “on top of the High Speed Rail fiasco, pay hikes for legislative employees, having to pay $34 million in penalties for overdue bills, raids on special funds to pay for Legislative malfeasance, etc.”

Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to push a tax increase. One of his arguments for the tax hike has been that parks were being closed due to the budget crunch — er, well, rather, due to state officials hiding $54 million dollars.

The Governor’s tax initiative is in trouble. Coupal notes that fiscally prudent Californians have defeated the last eight tax increases on the ballot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
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.