Utah HB477 and Government Transparency

The Utah legislature passed, and Gov. Herbert signed, HB477 which is an attempt to destroy government transparency.  It is a bill that excludes cell phones and emails from GRAMA laws, imposes extremely high fees for information requests, and requires proof by preponderance of the evidence of wrongdoing before granting requests for communications that are suspected of being illegal.

It is an absolute assault on good governance and the proposition that government is for the people, of the people, and by the people.  The public response is universal outcry, but the legislators and governor don't care because there is basically no threat that they will be voted out of office in Utah's one-party system.  So they can pass laws which hide what they do and say from the public and assault the very contract between the governing and the governed and know that no matter how upset people get, it won't translate to the ballot box.

Please read the excellent and surprisingly combative editorial by the Salt Lake Tribune, visit keeputahopen.com for information on the referendum process that is already under way to get the law repealed, and contact your state representatives and let them know how undemocratic this is.  Just when I start to get the bug to be more states' rights oriented something like this happens and I remember that I live in Utah.

Senate Tea Party Caucus: "We Hate Transparency and Efficiency"

The Senate used to have a process where one senator could place an anonymous secret "hold" on any nomination or bill to prevent it from coming to a vote.  It represented all that was wrong with the Senate.  It was undemocratic, anti-transparent, and cowardly.  The Senate voted to end secret holds by a 92-4 vote.  Who were the four opposed?  The Senate Tea Party Caucus, of course, with Utah's own baby-faced tea-party senator, Mike Lee, included.

Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Jim DeMint (all founding members of the TPC), and John Ensign voted against ending secret holds.  They voted against democratic procedures, against transparency in our legislative process, and for cowardliness.

You Are the Government: Wikileaks and Transparency

So Julian Assange of Wikileaks recently released about 250,000 secret documents from the State Department.  The very best thing you could possibly read about Wikileaks is Glenn Greenwald.  Here is a smattering, the tip o' the iceberg, of new information that we learned about our government's illegal and immoral activity from these documents that Greenwald  put together:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.