Category: Transparency vs. Secrecy

By Posted on Posted in Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

President Barack Obama is off to a great start. Some of these stories you may have heard about–others were quieter.

  • Began his foreign policy by calling several Middle East leaders (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Jordan’s King Abdullah–but not, unfortunately, any representative of Hamas) to talk about peace–and by appointing former Senator George Mitchell, a man who had much to do with the negotiated peace in Northern Ireland, his Middle East peace envoy
  • Also took the first steps toward drawing down forces in Iraq and closing Guantanamo
  • Overturned the secretive policies of the Bush administration in favor of much greater openness, including much better responses to Freedom Of Information Act requests:

    The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears… All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

  • Got his Blackberry back, after the National Security Administration made it supposedly unhackable
  • Discovered, along with many of his staff, that the White House computer systems are years obsolete
  • Had a substantive discussion with his economic advisors

    • Let’s keep the momentum up! There’s a whole lot of damage to undo, and even more, a whole lot ofnew progress to be made.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with ,

    For years, I’ve been calling for openness and transparency (in business and in government–in this blog, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit, in the Business Ethics Pledge, and elsewhere. Yet most businesses AND most government entities shroud themselves in secrecy, bury attempts at discourse, and give the impression of pulling the wool over the public eye.

    This makes the Obama team’s high degree of transparency and active solicitation of public input (at the change.org website, through the in-person strategy sessions it organized, etc.) even more remarkable.

    Consider this widely reported quote yesterday from an Associated Press story on Obama’s proposed tax cut by Steven R. Hurst:

    At his meeting with bipartisan leaders of Congress, Obama said he would make his stimulus proposal available on the Internet, with a Google-like search function to show each proposed project or program, by congressional district, according to three people who attended.

    Wow!

    I find this especially interesting coming not from some kind of radical but from a mainline, centrist politician, many of whose policy platforms (especially in foreign affairs) are far more conservative than mine.

    Change is about both form and substance. Obama is doing really well on the form so far; let’s hope he follows through into the substance.

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