The fight over a presidential library
Editorial Observer: The George W. Bush Library: Scholarly Mecca or $500 Million Oxymoron?. Dorothy Samuels, New York Times, 1/28/07. Here's an interesting little tidbit in today's NYT about Southern Methodist University (SMU) -- where Laura Bush sits on the Board of Trustees -- and their plan to host the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Policy Institute (similar to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University). There is growing concern within the SMU community that hosting Bush's library is not in keeping with the university’s scholarly mission, governmental integrity and the rule of law. On 1/12/07, 68 theologians, professors and other past and present faculty members, citing complaints about President Bush's poor marks on civil liberties, the environment, gay rights and the war in Iraq, sent the university president a letter questioning whether visions of the library were "consistent with the school's religious and academic values." ("A Discordant Chorus Questions Visions for a Bush Library at Southern Methodist." Ralph Blumenthal, NYT 1/14/07 Subscription required to access the archives). Samuels, the NYT editorial observer, is calling on the SMU trustees (hopefully Laura will recuse herself!) to withhold the final OK unless two basic conditions are met:
- SMU should insist that Mr. Bush rescind Executive Order 13233, his 2001 directive that limits access to the records of former US Presidents.
- The trustees should insist on disclosure of contributions to the library complex.
National Intelligence Estimate on the United States
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been in the news recently with members of Congress complaining publicly about the Bush administration's 6 month delay in submitting an NIE (see Deb's recent post and Silverstein in Harper's). Now Chalmers Johnson (author and emeritus professor in political science at UC San Diego and contributor to the American Empire Project) has written a provocative article for Harpers Magazine (01/17/07) giving an NIE for the US (Reprinted on the Information Clearinghouse site). In it, he gives an historical wrap-up of the US military-industrial complex and tells of the danger to both the US and the entire world when military Keynesianism is combined with the Unitary Presidency.
The imperial project is expensive. The flow of the nation’s wealth – from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers – has created a form of “military Keynesianism,†in which the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.and:
To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense†budget of the United States – that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense – does not include: the Department of Energy’s spend¬ing on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security’s outlays for the actual “defense†of the United States ($41 billion), or the Depart¬ment of Veterans Affairs’ responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dol¬lars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily re¬lated development or the Treasury Depart¬ment’s payments of pensions to military re¬tirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.[Thanks Information Clearinghouse!] Continue reading
A long term perspective on local info
Bill Bell is the editor of the Whittier Daily News. According to a recent column, he has been a journalist for 50 years. This long experience has given him a long perspective on access to government information, especially from law enforcement agencies. What has this experience taught him?
Today, part of the big picture in the news business is how official agencies of the government make it harder and harder to come by information that is suppose to be available to the public. That might seem like a fairly narrow concern, yet it is a symptom of a chronic societal cancer that is helping to destroy our species.Much of his column is about how open and informal local information gathering used to be. In Mr. Bell's view, it depended on police being intelligent enough to know what information could be divulged w/o spoiling their case and reporters sophisticated enough not to burn their sources for a single juicy story. But over all, he implies the level of information sharing, at least at the local level was high. How does he see the situation now?
What's it like today? The Freedom of Information Act has spelled out that a huge amount of government information and records are available to the public. But government agencies seem to make it exceedingly difficult to get to the records they consider most sensitive, despite the FOIA. And, as for local cops and deputies being forthcoming with information that should be available immediately, that's a bygone era. We get it when they feel like providing it.How true and how sad. But I'm glad to see we still have people like Mr. Bell pointing out the importance of transparency at all levels of government. Continue reading
Thanks Info-to-Go! / InfoTubies
My workplace subscribes to the Info-to-Go electronic "new web sites" newsletter. I was very happy to see that the January 2007 issue issue carried mention of our videos page. Subscribers can see what I'm talking about. Nonsubscribers will have to trust me on this one. Thanks Info-to-Go! If you or your library has produced a video promoting or celebrating government publications, information or e-government available at your library, please send us the link so we can add it to our video page. If you really like one of the videos featured on the page, please consider nominating it for Information Today's first InfoTubies award. Continue reading
Rockefeller: I Don’t Trust What They’re Doing
Jeff Bliss reported for Bloomberg on Friday, January 26, 2007, that Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee may subpoena Bush administration documents related to domestic surveillance. I don't trust what they're doing, Rockefeller said in an interview on taped for Political Capital, a weekly 30 minute Bloomberg television program on politics, economics and public policy hosted by Al Hunt. The full story, Rockefeller Says He May Subpoena Documents on Spying is available online. Read the related story Review of prewar Iraq intelligence: Senate Requests, White House does not reply posted by James Jacobs. Continue reading