Bridgewater, NJ joins the wasteful hall of fame

Back in September I wrote a blog post about the L.A. Unified School District joining the wasteful hall of fame by opening the most expensive public school in history (complete with $1.3 million worth of murals and public art). At the time, I didn't necessarily expect there to be any other honorees--I figured the wasteful hall of fame would be a one-and-done concept for a historically ludicrous project.

I was wrong.

A Somerset County town spent more than $17,000 defending a $5 fee it charged a resident for a compact disc of a council meeting.

Tom Coulter filed a complaint with the New Jersey Government Record Council in October 2008, saying he should pay the actual cost of the CD to get the recording.

The state council this year sided with Coulter and found he should have paid about 96 cents.

Bridgewater paid more than $14,000 in legal fees defending the case. It had to pay $3,500 to Coulter for his legal fees and give him a $4.04 refund.

Coulter says the case shows a lack of common sense.

Township Attorney Alan Grant tells The Courier News of Bridgewater the legal fees would have been substantially lower had Coulter settled, as the township had offered.

Oh boy. Of course, few stories are as simple as they might seem. In a separate blog post on the same site, it becomes clear that this type of legal fight is not uncommon, because it's not really a fight over 5 dollars--rather, it's a fight over what the public does and doesn't have the right to know.

The Open Public Records Act was passed because town officials were refusing to give residents records they were entitled to. Yet still, towns set up all sorts of arbitrary impediments to quash citizen requests for public records, like inflating their fees. And it’s not the municipal clerk who ultimately pays the price for this petty obstructionism. It’s the taxpayers.

Some towns say they raise records fees to account for the added cost of labor. But since citizens already pay the salaries of municipal clerks, why must they pay yet again so these people can do their jobs by preparing a public record?

Bridgewater ended up paying more than $14,000 to defend its case and $3,500 to Coulter for his legal fees, and giving him a $4.04 refund. “In hindsight, it is a lot of money, but we had to defend the ordinance,” said the township administrator, Jim Naples. Easy for a town official to say, since he won’t be reaching into his pockets to pay the penalty — he’ll be reaching into yours.

At a time when Wikileaks is casting a broad light on the issue of what the government should and shouldn't be hiding from its citizens, this legal fight is both disheartening and disarming.

OPRA was passed because governments were taking extreme liberties by effectively classifying non-classifiable information, and yet still local governments are fighting protracted legal battles to protect their non-existent right to keep public records classified. When governments ring up legal bills like these, the result is that taxpayers are paying money for the right to give up their rights. That's a gross perversion of the public trust, and one that Bridgewater residents should be absolutely up in arms about.

When Jim Naples says "we had to defend the ordinance", he's in essence saying that he doesn't care about OPRA or the public trust. In this type of legal fight, the public loses either way--they either lose their rights under the law, or they have to pay hefty legal bills to protect them (without a choice in the matter). That's absolutely ludicrous. So congratulations, Bridgewater, New Jersey. You are a shining beacon of governmental abuse.

[NJ.com]

(For more context on the above cartoon--and on this whole issue in particular--read this piece. New Jersey residents should be absolutely rioting in the streets by now. Instead, it seems that those who challenge these abuses of power are derided for "wasting taxpayers' money" by forcing the issues into court. That's awful.)

Caving with a link dump

I usually hate when blogs do "link dumps" (lists of links to other pages) because it's not real blogging--it's just being a content aggregator like Google Reader, and that's not the point of writing a blog. Anyone can do that. But for some reason, today I seem to be sitting on way more interesting stories than usual, and I can't write full posts on all of them.

So rather than let many of them fall by the wayside, I figured on a compromise--4 or 5 mini-posts all in one. I'll post the links, along with a short commentary teeing up what I see as the main issues or takeaways. You won't have to actually click the link and read the article in order to get the basic point, unless you choose to. I don't intend to do this often, but when there's enough good stories out there, I think it's warranted. Enjoy.

Ron Paul Claims Chairmanship of Monetary Policy Subcommittee, Prepared to Subpoena Fed
Mike Shedlock; Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish writes that Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) will almost certainly take over the role of Chairman on the Monetary Policy Subcommittee. You already know that I've been a very outspoken critic of Fed policy, and Congressman Paul has been one of the only politicians to similarly take aim at Ben Bernanke and his seemingly unchecked power.

The Fed has grown into a behemoth, and it has unquestionably become a stealth fourth branch of our federal government, despite being an "independent" organization. Its powers with respect to our currency effectively represent an acquired ability to tax and spend citizens' money (a devalued dollar is nothing if not a tax on citizens in different clothes), with little oversight. Since the Fed derives all of its power from a Congressional mandate, the Monetary Policy Subcommittee is of vital importance from an oversight perspective. It is my sincere hope that Ron Paul will be able to lend some sanity to the debate, so that we can at least begin to recognize the Fed for what it has become--that is, an all-too-powerful organization that does not answer to voters or taxpayers.

Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech
Ashlee Vance & Miguel Helft; New York Times

This is a very interesting development and probably deserves its own post, but I'm in link dump mode right now--so be it. As a response to Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal's decision to cut off avenues of funding to Wikileaks (a response to significant political pressure), an anonymous army of hackers has essentially declared cyberwar on the offending parties. Articles are everywhere about this, and the story seems to be gaining amazing traction--the Wikileaks issue appears to have sparked a powder keg, and the implications for government policy (and the way that citizens and government interact with each other) could be far-reaching.

This bears watching, as it's a very interesting method for (a certain group of) people to fight back against corporations and institutions that they feel have wronged them. Corporations and individuals alike have become dependent on technology and the internet, despite limited knowledge of the infrastructure that makes these vehicles work. The people who do know the infrastructure are in possession of more power than we might like to admit, and they could have incredible political clout if they are willing to harness it.

This incident (and the fallout from it) could be either transformative or dangerous or both for the American people, but I don't think its importance can be understated. For a populace that has increasingly felt that its voice is not being heard, this is certainly one way to get your voice heard. Very interesting.

Food Stamps by State, Not a Pretty Picture
Tim Iacono; The Mess That Greenspan Made

Tim links to this report from the Wall Street Journal, which shows food stamp usage by state. It's ugly. The national percentage of people on food stamps (sorry, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: SNAP, isn't that catchy?) continues to soar to record highs, now standing at 14% nationwide. The Journal shows that two states (and Washington D.C.) now have usage rates exceeding 20%, which is terrifying.

You can't spend your way out of a problem like this, not with labor force participation rates continuing to plummet. Eventually, there won't be enough people working to subsidize those who are not. Dollar debasement strategies only add to this problem, as I've noted before that inflation (and especially inflation in food costs that this strategy has created) hits poor people the hardest. Current policies are making the food stamp dynamic worse, not better. This is what our Fed policy has wrought.

An international report card: Shanghai's school students out-perform all others
The Economist's Daily Chart

The chart is worth looking at, so I included a quick thumbnail of it. Many of the nations who are outperforming us in terms of primary education are unsurprising (China, Singapore, South Korea), but some of them are definitely a bit of a shock (Canada, Poland). Of course, I definitely don't support relying on catch-all metrics of "academic achievement", so I take these charts with a larger than usual grain of salt. But one way or another, our education system needs help. Even by standard metrics, we're falling behind, and I've argued here before that what we really need are new metrics and a new approach entirely.

Teens Becoming Pregnant to Get on "Teen Mom"?
Rob Shuter; Popeater.com (h/t Shuckstaposition blog)

Ugh. Just...ugh. This is one of those things that just makes me want to shake my head, shrug my shoulders, and say "America is dying". There's just no positive way to spin this.

It used to be that reality TV just exposed (and glorified) bad behavior and bad people. That was bad enough. Now, because of the cult of celebrity that our society has created, reality TV is actually adding to the problem, as indicated by the revelation that teenagers are actively trying to get pregnant so that they can be on reality TV shows. Maybe this was inevitable. I don't know. But it's not good.

On Saudi Arabia

I surprised myself this morning when I realized that I'd made nearly 200 posts here (since August) without once mentioning terrorism. Maybe it's in part because I loathe the fear-mongering that has been done in the name of preventing terrorism, or the bad politics (and bad diplomacy) that has gone into fighting it, or how many personal freedoms we citizens have been all too willing to surrender since 9/11. But I digress.

More likely, the reason for my silence on the topic is that I try to shy away from topics that I know are divisive and provoke emotional responses (religion, abortion, Ground Zero mosques, etc.). I think that those are issues on which people are less likely to have rational discourse, and what I aim for above all else here is to promote rational discourse.

That said, what has always confounded me most about our response to 9/11--and the rhetoric surrounding that response--is our complete unwillingness to confront Saudi Arabia (home to 15 of 19 hijackers) in any meaningful way. That, in light of this article from The Independent, is what finally provoked this post.

Saudi Arabia is the single biggest contributor to the funding of Islamic extremism and is unwilling to cut off the money supply, according to a leaked note from Hillary Clinton.

The US Secretary of State says in a secret memorandum that donors in the kingdom still "constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide" and that "it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority".

In a separate diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks last night, the militant group which carried out the Mumbai bombings in 2008, Lashkar-e-Toiba, is reported to have secured money in Saudi Arabia via one of its charity offshoots which raises money for schools.

Why we haven't addressed this publicly--while spending so much time and money pursuing costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--is beyond me. Maybe I'm ignorant and just don't get it (yeah, probably). But this seems like seriously flawed foreign policy to me. To relate this to my post on Qatar after FIFA awarded it with the 2022 World Cup, how many governments like this are we willing to support in order to keep up our current energy policy? 

Say what you will about Wikileaks; I think that its ability to bring issues like this to light is of vital importance, regardless of the means. It has become relatively clear to me that there are more things than we imagined that our government thinks we are either too immature or too innocent to know about. In an administration that publicly prides itself on openness and transparency, the Wikileaks revelations seem to be dramatic departures from stated policy. At any rate, the Saudi Arabia article infuriated and confused me, and I thought I'd post it just to clear my head.


[The Independent]

What is the role of the mainstream media?

I've written here a bit before about responsible journalism, and what it looks like (and doesn't look like). In the wake of the Wikileaks situation (which I'm honestly still catching up on--but some of the responses to it have been downright scary), I think this issue has taken center stage. Witness this article from Gareth Porter, posted over at CounterPunch (emphasis mine).

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.

The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish "at the request of the Obama administration". That meant that its readers could not compare the highly- distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website. As a result, a key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration's ballistic missile defense policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has instead produced a spate of stories buttressing anti-Iran hysteria.

Say what you will about the wisdom, legality, morality, or potential consequences of Wikileaks. The allegations that major news outlets have been making journalistic decisions based on input and requests from Obama administration officials is incredibly damning, and must make us wonder what purpose our media is now serving. In this case, who is less responsible as a "journalist"--Wikileaks or the New York Times? It's a difficult question to answer.

In an ideal world, our newspapers and other media outlets are our watchdogs, investigating and reporting to serve the public benefit. In a nightmare scenario, however, the media is the mouthpiece of government (or corporate) policy, spewing the biased propaganda of whoever may be pulling the strings. If we can't trust our press, the democracy suffers.

The freedom of the press is a fundamental right that has allowed our nation and economy to prosper, which makes these allegations of press complicity incredibly worrisome. A properly functioning democracy depends upon a well-informed populace; without it, a "perfect" democracy is impossible. To have that well-informed populace requires that our media outlets be unbiased, presenting balanced accounts of all stories. Regardless of whether we think the Wikileaks documents should have been released, once they have, it is the mainstream media's task to present the fairest possible accounts of their contents. Anything less must be considered irresponsible journalism.

Our government and media outlets ultimately both should be serving the public benefit, but this does not always mean that they will be working together (or toward common goals). When they are, we as the public should become very suspicious of them both--only in fascist regimes do the government and the media work in concert.

In fact, I believe that the Wikileaks situation would never have happened to begin with had not our media outlets begun to betray the public trust. When the collective believes that the media is serving its investigative purpose properly, there won't be any public desire (or need) for a site such as Wikileaks in the first place. But the founders of Wikileaks recognized that public distrust of the media was growing daily, and stepped into the void with an incredibly (and perhaps excessively) unfiltered version of the news.

Wikileaks is a symptom of a disease, not a disease itself. The mainstream media must recognize it as such, and respond properly.


[CounterPunch]