I find urban studies fascinating, which is perhaps why it was a concentration back when I was in school. To me--perhaps because I have lived in big cities most of my life--finding ways to reform city government, bring transparency, better deliver services and improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas is a passion, because I think there are so many possibilities (especially with today's technology) for making people's lives better by rising up to meet these challenges.
This is why I am thrilled to be working with the City Forward initiative. What is City Forward? It is a tool that pulls public data from urban centers on different issues (user specified) and displays it in customizable graphs.
For example, users can create an 'exploration' for important environmental issues such as water usage in multiple cities, and then have it displayed in charts that will visually present the data in a way that people can understand it. These charts allow anyone to make a case or tell a story about what one city or many cities are doing to improve in an areas such as this one, and what others are neglecting.
In other words, in addition to being groundbreaking in its potential applications, its a pretty cool tool for improving government transparency and letting people access public records in a useful, understandable way.
You can go to the site and see what explorations have already been done in cities across the world, and come up with some of your own. And you can encourage your city to share data with the initiative, to fight for the kind of improvements we all need, and quite frankly, deserve.
This is just provides another way to bring some light into the often dark corners of government, while improving our everyday lives. Not a bad thing in today's world, for sure.
The federal government has begun to acquire an almost reflexive opposition to transparency. Many of the usual explanations for that may be true, but there could be a more philosophical reason as well.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
Last week, in a rare public interview, Michael Leiter, the nation's counterterrorism chief, acknowledged that the government's drone and targeted killing strategy, which appears to have become a cornerstone of the Obama administration's "war on terror," demands "a full and open debate."
Leiter was responding to a question from Newsweek's Michael Isikoff about the fact that the Obama administration has said that it can target for killing certain U.S. citizens abroad based on their alleged connections to terrorism. The U.S. citizen and Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, has been widely reported as a U.S. government target. Leiter said last week that the U.S. believes that Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in failed Christmas day bombing attempt on a plane over Detroit last year.
The idea that the U.S. would target for killing its own citizens, though, has outraged many critics, who claim that amounts to government-sponsored assassinations.
In fact, targeted killings may be legal in some circumstances, when the government can show that the killing is actually necessary in self-defense against some imminent attack, or that the target is an enemy belligerent who's fighting a war against the United States and therefore can lawfully be killed by U.S. forces. But the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) has never offered a real explanation of who it's targeting and why, and how it knows that those targets are either directly fighting the United States or about to launch an imminent attack against U.S. targets.
Even if it can't provide all the names and specific evidence in advance, the government could do far more to explain its targeting policy and the legal support for it. Although State Department officials have assured critics that the government is following the law, those assurances amount to a plea to the public to trust that the government is doing the right thing. Unfortunately, government actions over the last eight years surrounding the "war on terror" have demonstrated that "trust us" just isn't good enough.
Leiter has now publicly acknowledged the point. "[C]ertainly, the policy decisions about the ways in which we should or should not use force demand a full and open discussion," he told Isikooff. "And again, I think it's part of my appearance, here, I'm trying to answer the questions to the extent I can."
Still, Leiter didn't really answer the question. Of course, the questions are difficult, and to some extent the government may need to keep some of the facts classified for national security purposes. But it could provide a whole lot more information than it's providing now.
In the case of al-Awlaki, for example, who has already been named as a target, what information connects al-Awlaki to the failed Detroit bombing? And is this the only attempted terrorist incident he's believed to have been involved in? If so, that might qualify him as conspiring to commit mass murder, but an isolated incident wouldn't make him an actual enemy belligerent under the laws of war. Or, is the government claiming it can kill him in self-defense? If so, it would have to demonstrate some real reason to believe he's an imminent threat.
Some critics of the targeting policy suggest that Awlaki, like any other suspect, deserves due process and should be arrested, charged and tried - not simply killed. While that treatment might be a good idea if the circumstances allow for it, if Awlaki is truly an enemy belligerent fighting the United States, then the laws of war don't require that. As Leiter pointed out: "Just to be clear, the U.S. government through the Department of Defense goes out and attempts to target and kill people, a lot of people, who haven't been indicted."
Of course, those are people who are (presumably) actively participating in a war against us. The government cannot simply target people it suspects of, say, financing terrorism or providing material support for terrorist actions. It needs to acknowledge that publicly.
Asked how the U.S. responds to the fact that several recently convicted terrorists, such as Faisal Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi, have said they were motivated to attack the United States due to the U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Leiter acknowledged the challenge. "I certainly will not try to argue that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized." He added: "That doesn't mean you don't do it. That means you craft a fuller strategy to explain why you're doing that and try to minimize the likelihood that individuals are going to be radicalized."
Explaining the strategy and its justification is actually the key to minimizing the likelihood that the strategy will motivate others to become radicalized. And that's exactly the part of the U.S. targeted killing strategy that's still missing.
(Was going to write something different, but think that this piece with Matt's original post (check out the entire piece at MyDD) and Rep. Pingree's project sum up what I think about tax day today. - promoted by Adam Bink)
One of my favorite posts by Matt Stoller back at MyDD was one in 2007 on April 15th- tax day- titled Paying for America, regarding how taxes are an investment in the public infrastructure of America. He writes:
Our tax code is the DNA of our nation's moral compass. I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. The old expression 'you get what you pay for' is apt for all sorts of situations.
The Teabagger types- and often, the general public- view taxes and spending as wasteful "pork" (of course, only until Rep. Slaughter back home obtained money to improve the local farmer's market, in which case everybody thought, "oh, well, that's different..."). One of many problems is that there isn't much understanding of why the money is being spent, along with a lack of coverage around the project in other parts of a state or region.
During the No On 1 campaign, I had the pleasure of working closely with Karin Roland, the campaign's online director. She's now back working for Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), and helped put together a cool transparency project on funding requests to Pingree's office. Every organization submitting a request is required to submit information and film a short video, which is posted on YouTube, explaining why the funding is important for Maine's first district. All of the requests are posted on Pingree's website with the sponsor's information listed and the amount requested, and people can leave comments. While members of the general public may find funding requests they think are wasteful, that may not always be a bad thing, and I think overall it will broaden the public's perception of the how and why of public investment, and perhaps build greater support.
Below are two examples- one funding request to address the shortage of physicians in rural Maine through scholarship funding, and one from the University of Maine to explore the potential of tidal power for renewable energy/jobs purposes.
Hopefully these kinds of projects result in greater public support for what Matt's talking about- paying for America.
The government has an increasingly free hand in deciding what information it releases to the public, and its response has unsurprisingly been towards less disclosure.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
We are supposed to be a representative democracy where We, the People are in charge, but we allow these companies and the government agencies propping them up to continue to operate with secrecy, refusing or even to let our own elected representatives know what is being done with our money!
And then I saw this. Just watch.
Alan Grayson: "Which Foreigners Got the Fed's $500,000,000,000?" Bernanke: "I Don't Know."
In order to comply with new transparency requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, state governments across the country are scrambling to put up websites that track how they spend recovery dollars. In just the last week, the White House’s count of state transparency websites has jumped from ten to twenty-five. Of all these websites, not one lists the number of jobs to be created by private contractors. Without such data, the sites are close to meaningless.
Fortunately, Oregon is leading a push to require contractors to report the number of jobs they create, as well as the hours worked and wages received by their employees. These requirements, created under Oregon HB 2037, would ensure that Oregonians get a website that doesn’t just make an empty gesture toward transparency but one that ensures their tax money actually goes toward creating quality jobs.
The benefits of such a site are simple. If contractors are creating jobs with recovery money, they can get more. If they aren’t creating jobs, the state can take away their money and target it to contractors that are. If they are serious about using recovery dollars to turn the economy around, Oregon lawmakers should make it a top priority to adopt these new standards
If the country is serious about getting the recovery plan right, they will push their states to follow in Oregon's example. Considering the fact that states are poised to distribute over $300 billion of the $787 billion set aside under ARRA, the transparency standards we adopt at the state level will more or less amount to the transparency standards we adopt as a nation.
When it comes to earmarks, I agree with Mark Schmidt: they are a phantom problem. While they are often blamed for excess spending in D.C., the truth is that they are in no way excess spending:
As policy, I'm as indifferent to the issue of earmarks as Tom Mann. They're inconsequential. Not only do they represent less than one percent of the federal budget, eliminating them wouldn't even reduce federal spending by even that tiny amount, or any amount at all, since earmarks by definition simply tag the spending in an already established pot of money, such as the Community Development Block Grant. The only question is whether decisions about funding individual projects should be made by Congress -- through earmarks -- or by a supposedly apolitical administrative process. Except for the tremendous inequities between states with clout on the Appropriations Committees and those without, Graham's argument that politicians have a legitimate role in deciding which large projects in their states should be priorities makes sense.
Like most of the problems Broder-esque cultists cite as dragging down the federal government (too partisan! too ideological! Social Security crisis!) earmarks are not actually a major, or even really a minor, problem facing the government. They don't add any spending whatsoever, as they are instead providing specific direction to money that has already been appropriated. The issue here, if any, is not financial but instead about transparency and competitive bidding. Like the expenditure of all federal money, it is a good idea to make sure that we know which lawmaker pushed it, that there has been a chance to debate it in public, and that any company which benefits from it had to go through a competitive bidding process. Those are guarantees we need not only when it comes to earmarks, but with all federal spending.
In light of this, the earmark reforms announced today by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, which are detailed in the extended entry, are perfectly adequate. This is, at best, a one-speech issue, and simply not deserving of the attention it receives given the severity of other, actual problems we face.
Anger over the lack of transparency in the Federal Reserve's plan to purchase, subsidize, and otherwise guarantee between $1.8 trillion and $12 trillion(!) in toxic assets is rising. Today, Senators as ideologically divergent as Bernie Sanders and John Ensign complained about this in a hearing with Treasury Secretary Geithner.
Over at change.gov, the transition team has opened a new section of the website where you can submit a question of 250 characters or less, where it then is made public. People vote on the best questions, and because they are public, it will be difficult for them to duck answering a question. here is the link: http://change.gov/page/content...
So far I have wrote about Barack Obama's strong stands on public financing of elections and media reform. Today I am going to talk about his work making government more transparent and more ethical. These are area's were he has gotten the most bills passed into law so hopefully this should be a interesting post.
STATE BLOGS
