Clear as Mud | Raucous Caucus | Tom Cushing | DanvilleSanRamon.com |

Local Blogs

Raucous Caucus

By Tom Cushing

E-mail Tom Cushing

About this blog: The Raucous Caucus shares the southpaw perspectives of this Boomer on the state of the nation, the world, and, sometimes, other stuff. I enjoy crafting it to keep current, and occasionally to rant on some issue I care about deeply...  (More)

View all posts from Tom Cushing

Clear as Mud

Uploaded: Jun 21, 2012
If there is any principle upon which most members of the electorate can agree, at least part of the time, it's that governmental funding and decisions ought, with few exceptions, to be transparent to the citizenry. Sunlight, it is said, is an excellent disinfectant, as only the most brazen will pursue misdeeds in the day time, or in the glare of public scrutiny. Indeed, part of the Change we were promised recently was greater transparency, in contrast to the murky dealings of the previous Administration.

I say part-of-the-time because those on the 'outs' tend to become staunch transparency advocates, while the 'ins' can conjure lots of reasons why their team should get the benefit of the doubt. Unsurprisingly, something about holding power infects the thinking of those that have it. The issue becomes more central periodically – like calendarwork, even – as the voters rouse from their daily lives to attend the campaigns office holders and seekers.

This year's edition of these follies has an interesting twist – while the Dems work to opacify certain elements of the Obama administration's performance, lest they hand campaign fodder to the GOP, the Republicans are scrambling to anonymize their donor lists. The transparency principle thus suffers whitewash from one side and invisibility cloaking from the other. This is one policy matter in which both sides are culpable in their own ways – We, the People are the losers when it succeeds.

Most recently, Mr. Obama has claimed Executive Privilege, one of those limited exceptions to the transparency principle, to avoid Justice Department production of certain documents related to the infamous "Fast and Furious" border gun-running debacle. It seems that somewhere in the bowels of the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (part of the Treasury Department), someone thought it would be a good idea to allow guns to flow into Mexico and then trace them, to help build cases against their drug lord users. Shoddy record-keeping added incompetence to absurdity; guns and lives were lost – possibly including the murder of a US Border Patrol agent.

Executive Privilege exists to shield some deliberations within government from public scrutiny, ostensibly to protect the candor of internal policy deliberations. Like other privileges, it is intended to be a narrowly-applied exception to disclosure. It is susceptible to misuse, especially when embarrassment will likely accompany disclosure, and most especially during Leap Years, when more folks pay attention. In view of the latter fact, disclosure delayed may be disclosure avoided, as many issues have labels with November "sell-by" dates.

On the GOP side, Mitch McConnell, the Party's top elected official, has borrowed a page from the Prop 8 handbook in an attempt to protect the identities of Republican campaign donors. He wants to protect fragile gazillionaires and multinationals from any market backlash their tender bottom lines might suffer from such disclosure.

Now, one might consider that providing those IDs would be particularly important in the wake of floodgates opened by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision – and one would be right. The line between large donations and bribery is already gray enough – add unaccountability to the mix and the line practically disappears. And note that the issue does not end with domestic individuals and companies – what if, say, the Chinese government decided it would be prudent to protect its considerable US public debt investment by ensuring policies designed to secure those holdings? Or insert your own foreign sovereign or entity as boogeyman – Israel, Syria, a criminal enterprise or a religious sect.

In the case of campaign finance, the anti-harassment policies that underlie any exceptions are so weak as to be laughable. The public's right to know who brung particular candidates to the dance (and will likely take them home) simply overrides issues of potential backlash. And after all, even if a contribution disinclines some voters from your business, there is certainly a nearly equal number who will seek your custom as a result of it. The purposes of those who will give only upon an assurance of unaccountability are particularly likely to be dubious. When pols act to encourage such secrecy, only their motives are rendered transparent.

As a general rule, determining the right thing to do is a pretty simple matter. The exceptions, rationalizations and sleight-of-hand used to justify the wrong things are unhelpful, usually bogus complications. There's often a direct relationship between degree of complication and ulterior motivation. Transparency is a pretty simple concept; the more complex it is made, the more one ought to come out into the sunshine.
Democracy.
What is it worth to you?

Comments

Posted by Dash, a resident of Alamo,
on Jun 25, 2012 at 9:14 pm

Some decisions about policies and actions must be made behind closed doors, because it would be impossible to have frank discussions in public. If the decisions turn out to be particularly egregious there needs to be some way of dragging the deliberations that led to them into the open.

But to hide the identity of huge donors in political campaigns? There is no excuse for that at all.

Yeah, so you're right again, Tom.


Posted by underdog, a resident of another community,
on Jun 26, 2012 at 12:03 pm

Yes a little bit of both sides. Someone is always angry about executive privelege or pardons extended to those who take the fall and obscure the light. The core problem here is election politics and nothing new, nothing more. Holder angered the GOP in blocking their redistricting efforts. They chose a fight on an issue that was pure politics. The hypocrisy of the NRA-fueled GOP, defenders of the 2nd Amendment, really caring about weapons crossing the border is an absurdity. The opportunity for disclosure and ending this debacle was open, the GOP chose the low road and the stiff political fight. Hence Executive privelege, hence the dark clouds, smoke, and fog of political warfare. Very simply, campaign donors/amounts should be disclosed to align with our free election process. Good show Tom.


Posted by Atticus Finch, a resident of San Ramon,
on Jul 12, 2012 at 9:25 pm

Quit blaming the GOP for Holder's gaff. Holder back flipped to get out of giving up documents crucial to the investigation of Fast and Furious. He's running scared because he screwed up; including the death of a U.S. Boarder Patrol Agent.

Instead of throwing big words into the mix, along with your fog of reality sense of b.s., keep the talk plain. Write the truth and stop blaming the GOP for everything.


Posted by Tom Cushing, a resident of Alamo,
on Jul 13, 2012 at 8:33 am

Hi Atticus: I actually thought this post was pretty fair and balanced -- I certainly intended it to be. I like openness; I don't like Obama's hiding those DOJ documents from public view, nor hiding the names of donors to campaigns -- any donors, to any campaigns.

Here's a quote: "The transparency principle thus suffers whitewash from one side and invisibility cloaking from the other. This is one policy matter in which both sides are culpable in their own ways ? We, the People are the losers ..."

So I'd like to respond to the critique, but I think the column speaks for itself in that regard. Anyway, the current week's entry is just about the venality of Big Banksters, who have been rigging interest rates for the past decade. Neither political party was harmed (or is mentioned) in the making of that post.


Follow this blogger.
Sign up to be notified of new posts by this blogger.

Email:

SUBMIT

Post a comment

Sorry, but further commenting on this topic has been closed.

Stay informed.

Get the day's top headlines from DanvilleSanRamon.com sent to your inbox in the Express newsletter.

Common Ground
By Sherry Listgarten | 2 comments | 1,335 views

Labor unions win big in Sacramento
By Tim Hunt | 5 comments | 1,046 views