The Liberal War on Transparency: Confessions of a Freedom of Information "Criminal" - Hardcover

Horner, Christopher C.

 
9781451694888: The Liberal War on Transparency: Confessions of a Freedom of Information "Criminal"
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1451694881 ISBN 13: 9781451694888
Verlag: Threshold Editions, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Hailed by Glenn Beck as a “Watchdog,” bestselling author and legal expert Christopher Horner explains how every citizen can use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what our government is up to.  

LIBERALS ARE HIDING THE TRUTH FROM YOU. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT, AMERICA?

Hailed by Glenn Beck as a “watchdog” and by Rush Limbaugh as a “go-to guy,” bestselling author and attorney Christopher C. Horner is a leader in the fight against liberal tyranny in America—with his requests for information even declared “criminal” by the Obama administration. Revealing explosive new information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and well-placed sources, Horner exposes the tightly kept secret of liberals running our government and schools: a carefully managed war to undermine the taxpayers’ right to see what their government is up to.

During his campaign, Barack Obama promised “the most transparent administration in history.” Not only has this proven to be an empty promise, but he and his liberal allies systematically hide their activities from the public. They use private email accounts and computers, avoid creating records, stonewall information requests, and otherwise delay or deny access to information every taxpayer has a right to know. This eye-opening book exposes the White House tricks, tactics, and “tradecraft” now regularly used to keep Americans in the dark. You’ll learn:

* Scandalous examples of activist government employee tricks to hide their activities.
* How the Obama administration, which leaks sensitive information for political gain (while aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers), deliberately politicized the FOIA process to stonewall legitimate requests for public information.
* What the Democrats tried to hide about their crony deals with big business, Solyndra, various liberal initiatives, and UN schemes.
* How American colleges and universities bow to radical liberal faculties to hide public records.
* How to fight these tactics and make your own FOIA requests to get the information you need—even when the government tries to stop you.

This is more than an exposé on the latest Washington cover-up. It is a wake-up call and how-to manual for all Americans to demand transparency from our leaders and defeat the liberal attack on open and honest debate. If you believe in America, you need to fight for your freedoms. You need to take a stand against the Liberal War on Transparency.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher C. Horner is the author of the bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Power Grab, and Red Hot Lies. He is a senior fellow with the Washington, D.C. think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute and affiliated with European counterpart organizations. An attorney in Washington, D.C., Horner has represented scientists, think tanks, and members of the United States House and Senate on matters of environmental policy in the federal courts. Mr. Horner has appeared on the FOX News Channel, Court TV, MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, CNN International, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and shows hosted by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Laura Ingraham. He lives outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with his family.

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1.

When Freedom of Information Requests Are “Criminal,” Only Criminals Will Request Information

Liberals love transparency. Except when they don’t. Which is often, as transparency increasingly inconveniences them. In fact, it is more accurate to say that liberals used to love transparency. Now that transparency threatens their franchise, they’ve had enough of it.

Freedom of information was the liberals’ idea. Today, firmly in control of the institutions that they demanded be open to inspection—government and publicly funded academia—the bloom is off that rose. Openness has outlived its purpose. It needs “reform.” Transparency should still be available, but for the right kind of people. To be on the safe side, it must also acquire new meaning: Publicly funded institutions need privacy, so politically select classes subsisting on your labors should be outright exempted, protected from your scrutiny. It is private citizens and companies who need to be examined more closely, should they involve themselves in the public debate. That is, if they pick the wrong side.

Until the courts or even compliant lawmakers formally turn transparency on its head, the laws are being flaunted and subverted as political needs dictate. Release information if it helps a liberal cause, even when classified and its release places operatives or allies in danger; when exposed in scandals involving taxpayer money, shriek “harassment!” “fishing expedition!” and of course “witch hunt,” and stonewall efforts to scrutinize public records elaborating on the evidence of abuse. Welcome to the new normal of liberal open government.

This Orwellian inversion of the idea of “transparency” is toward avoiding public awareness and informed debate. Apparently those are no longer likely to be of much help to the liberal cause.

• • •

Transparency in American politics, as originally conceived by liberals, was rightly deemed vital to our system of governance. This is because of the threat that sunshine poses to those who might misuse public office or money in the darkness of secrecy. Transparency allows the taxpayer to pull back the curtain on operations of government.

Now that transparency threatens liberals’ use of government and other taxpayer-financed institutions, it is a problem to rein in; we’ve started asking questions and obtaining embarrassing answers, meaning the wrong kind of people are using transparency laws to the wrong ends. Other voices have also entered the political debate. Thanks to transparency and a more engaged public the liberal agenda is being impeded, and passage of laws they disfavor is made more likely. So the threat liberals now see is not misuse of public institutions, including publicly funded universities, a key ally in designing and expanding liberal government. Instead, the threat is exposure of how these institutions are being used, and the ability to spread the word of these abuses far and wide.

This is a cynical revolution, whereby private parties, more than a lack of public institutional accountability, must be protected against. To keep the marketplace of ideas free from competition, public debate must be kept unpolluted by undesirable content and unwanted voices. And so liberals demand that private citizens or businesses reveal all, if they dare support or otherwise engage in political activities standing in the liberals’ way. The left works to obtain private parties’ information with the same zeal and attitude with which they work to keep what belongs to the public secret. This means constructing flimsy arguments that the public is rightly private—hiding and even destroying records—and that the private is rightly public, employing deception, even theft and fabricating records in the name of a greater good. Day is night and black white, and their claim of righteousness justifies all when they are questioned about this perversion of principle.

But this also represents abandonment of a grand liberal achievement: institutionalizing the doctrine that public access to information about public service is “vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.”1 That is as articulated by a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court more than thirty years ago, although for many years before that liberals championed allowing the public to see what their government was up to. (The first freedom of information law was adopted by liberal heartthrob Sweden in 1766. Hinting at coming hypocrisies, it also tacked on illiberal speech code provisions.)

Transparency was a dream of American political progressives since they first graced the world with their presence. Progressive Hall of Famer Louis Brandeis wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”2 Suitably, he offered this wisdom in the context of “Other People’s Money,” the title of his work containing the axiom.

The man who appointed Brandeis to the Court, Woodrow Wilson, waxed on about the ideal well before his elevation to the presidency. In 1884 Wilson wrote, in his typically deathless prose, that “[l]ight is the only thing that can sweeten our political atmosphere—light thrown upon every detail of administration in the departments; light diffused through every passage of policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legislation; light that can penetrate every recess or corner in which any intrigue might hide; light that will open to view the innermost chambers of government,” and on and on for one hundred twenty words before rediscovering the dreaded punctuation mark, the period.3

All quite earnest, as liberals are known to be. And the sermon tells us that progressives would be appalled if, say, an out-of-control EPA administrator, who also ordered records being sought by the public destroyed, demanded creation of a secret, “secondary” email account despite insisting she never really used her computer anyway (when asked about having her hard drive be wiped clean, oddly, and in violation of a court order). About this secret account, an agency document I obtained in 2012 states, “Few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff, even know that these accounts exist. Therefore, responsibility for identifying, printing and submitting records for filing in accordance with EPA records schedules falls to the Administrator.” This document openly acknowledges that not even the office that created the account for the administrator knows whether she—or the current administrator, running similarly amok if not more so—has turned over emails from them that are responsive to freedom of information requests.

Surely that sort of thing would be an enormous affront to liberal principles? As you’ll read, the answer is that it depends on whom we’re speaking about, and what end or which master the secrecy or transparency is intended to serve. That is what dictates the righteousness or outrageousness of an act.

This is not a complete surprise, particularly given the admissions by liberal activists and interest groups of such situational principles. For example, they would protest the Obama administration more if only it weren’t the Obama administration.4 So, for liberals, disclosure is no longer necessarily a good idea, if it threatens the liberal enterprise (government, academia); it is, however, worthy indeed when useful to find any cudgel against private parties opposing said liberal enterprises.

The perversion of the law is now institutionalized. President Obama has installed...

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Verlag
Threshold Editions
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451694881
ISBN 13 
9781451694888
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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