I am not genetically a political person. It wasn’t until I was 31, that I cast my first Presidential vote AGAINST Nixon. Anything was better than this obvious (to me) slimeball. When Nixon took 49 states, I figured that either they don’t count the votes or I was living in Stepford.
At age 67 I voted FOR Obama. I spent a week tearing up when I saw huge crowds around the world celebrating their release from Bush.
To me the “hope” Obama offered was Transparency. We could have avoided Enron had we been privy to the names of those “advising” Cheney on our energy policy. Or why Wall Street regulators failed to notice a bubble of epic proportions. Torches and pitchforks outside the White House. Obama promised me that he’d tear the cloak of confidentiality from corruption and double dealing in our government. And …
On the sole issue of promised Transparency, Obama is Bush in blackface.
Sure. Were you aware Larry Summers had the balls to lecture Gray Davis on the causes of the energy crisis in 2000? Do you know who spoke with him? Did you know it included Kenneth Lay (you know-- the CEO of the energy company found to have manipulated California’s energy market??) Did you know it seems he suggested that market manipulation was not a cause of the crisis?Cite
Maybe you didn’t know Larry Summers was, along with Robert Rubin, an opponent of regulating the financial derivatives market. Maybe you didn’t know the derivatives market imploding is what caused AIG to go under and led to the Feds ponying up $180billion plus in bailout monies?
Perhaps you didn’t know Summers was an advocate for Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Maybe you didn’t know that President Obama campaigned on the premise that the Act is at least partially responsible for the economic meltdown.
Maybe you didn’t know that Larry Summers is Director of the White House’s National Economic Council
Obama is, in so-called national security matters, quite Bushlike. Obama’s AG is pretty much carrying the torch for Bush. I’d have also liked to have been a fly on the wall at Obama’s negotiated drug deal.
When the true policy making process is hidden from the electorate, how can Democracy exist? It doesn’t.
It’s my guess that most “inefficiency” in govt is the result of a relatively small group of people wrangling over shares of the spoils behind closed doors.
How many people believed that Obama would transform the Federal government into something that matched his ideals within the first eight months of his presidency? Wasn’t there some Fox News graphic a few months back that showed how much of a failure his administration was (or how much his campaign was full of lies) by showing a promise-to-fulfillment chart?
I agree that there needs to be relatively more openness and transparency in government. I also agree that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell needs to end. I also agree that … well, there are a lot of things to accomplish. Will he get to them all within four years? Eight? Can he get to them?
With transparency, all these things would be accomplished and much more. Hidden private interest in the public trust is treason. Or at least would be in a democracy.
Well, that really had nothing to do with Cheney’s energy panel, it taking place about a week before Bush even got into office. Besides, Summers was partly right. It’s easy to blame all of California’s energy problems on Enron, because they did contribute to it, but a lot of the fault was Gray Davis’s insistence to maintain caps on consumer rates, and more generally, because the state of California engaged in a halfassed deregulation that allowed energy companies to engage in the stuff they did and at the same time, for political reasons, wouldn’t allow the building of new power plants or pass along higher energy prices to the consumer, thereby throwing the whole supply and demand thing all out of whack.
To summarize, if Cheney had had to have his little tete a tete with the energy industry on CNN (where are you, Obama?), things would be much different today.
This is what I was thinking. DC has been corrupt for a long time and that includes a lot of Democrats. If things are actually going to change it will take time and continued attention and effort from us. We’d be foolish children to think some hero will come along and make things all better.
The question is, does Obama really have the will and desire to make the changes he talked about or is he ultimately just a lying politician just like so many others. The jury is still out on that. I think if we have any chance of making real progress we need to do some house cleaning in the Democratic party. I believe transparency would bring big problems for many long term Dems and the deal making and compromises that go on in Washington are something the average citizen will not understand.
Things like recovery.gov are a step in the right direction. Absolute transparency requires a hell of an infrastructure to be established, not something that can crop up overnight. If there isn’t a big online presence of open government by 2012, Obama would have some 'splainin to do.
And “absolute” transparency is impossible. Governments have to do certain things in secret. The previous administration took that concept to the absolute extreme, however.
I was providing a couple examples of how the current administration has not acted on its campaign pledge to change the status quo in DC. One of the President’s top economic advisers has been on the record supporting some of the policies that led to our current economic crisis. I don’t know or care about what this has to do with Bush or Cheney, although it’s safe to say that Bush’s administration was just as kind and helpful to certain Wall Street power players as well.
We could have a fun time talking about whether or not Tim Geithner is too close to Goldman Sachs, certainly him appointing a former Goldman lobbyist as his chief of staff (and especially in light of just how favorable this crisis has been to Goldman in particular) certainly does not aid the argument that the means in which the bailout has been handled has been transparent. Tim Geithner has long links with Larry Summers. Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, too-- both of whom suckled from Goldman’s teat for over 25 years apiece.
Transparency has been side-lined to just another problem among many. IMO, it THE problem. Practically all of the other problems facing us would simply be dissolved if they had to be debated in public. I have faith in the US electorate to make just decisions in foreign and domestic policy if given all the facts. Otherwise, we are left to endlessly point fingers and debate each other as uninformed morons. Present company excluded of course.
If anything, I’d say there’s too much transparency nowadays. Everything is in the public eye now, and that pushes both sides of an issue away from each other, polarizes people, and makes compromise and actual government impossible. Look at the current controversy over the health care bill. This whole thing could have been settled easily if it happened behind closed doors, with some Democratic and Republican congressmen sitting down and quietly working out some sort of deal. But instead it’s become a big deal, with all sorts of public involvement, talk of death panels and creeping socialism, and I think there’s a good chance nothing will pass now.