Increasing Secrecy in Government Leads To Corruption And Autocracy
One of the features of our increasingly plutocratic and autocratic government is an equally increasing amount of secrecy in the basics of the legislative and executive branches. Beyond national security issues, secrecy is now extending deep into the legislative and executive functions and allows well-connected plutocrats and business leaders to control our governmental functions without transparency.
Twice in the last year, the House announced their intention to vote on an Obamacare repeal without getting a CBO score. Health care is slightly less than 20% of the economy. Now Paul Ryan and the House are about to do it again, this time voting on the tax bill before the CBO will complete their analysis. So, this time House Republicans will be voting on a bill that probably effects 100% of all Americans with no idea what it’s real impact will be. And, in fact, it appears that the bill may actually violate the statutory PAYGO rules.
Instead, the House and the Senate seem to rely on analysis from the conservative leaning Tax Foundation which supports the theory that large foreign inflows of capital will create jobs and raise wages. As Paul Krugman points out, the adjustment period while this is occurring implies substantially increased deficits well beyond the $1.5 trillion currently estimated. Krugman estimates an additional $600 billion per year in deficit spending. In addition, the fact that GDP will increase due to foreign inflows also means that a significant portion of that GDP increase will actually go to foreigners. Gross National Income (GNI), which is what Americans will actually keep, will grow by substantially less. A classic example of this situation is Ireland where large foreign capital inflows have created a situation where GDP is substantially greater than GNI. In addition, huge foreign inflows would also imply a stronger dollar which, combined with larger deficits, probably means significant losses in manufacturing jobs here in the US. The Tax Foundation analysis takes none of these critical realities into consideration.
In the Senate, both the ACA repeal and the current tax plan were written in secret by just a handful of Republicans. Even GOP Senators who were not involved in the ACA repeal process were not allowed to know what the bill actually contained until it was released, with voting scheduled for just days later. A similar process occurred with the tax bill.
Over at the EPA, Scott Pruitt is largely dismantling the agency in secret. According to the NY Times, Pruitt “has terminated a decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions. His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on topics like climate change”. He continues to meet industry insiders in secret and to order changes to EPA analyses without any scientific basis to back those changes up.
The explosion of secrecy at the federal level under one-party rule has been bad enough. But take a look at states where the GOP has had total control for years, such as Kansas. Besides being a bellwether of disaster by passing a tax plan that looks remarkably similar to the one the Republicans in Congress are trying to pass now, the state has now become one of the most secretive in the nation. According to the Kansas City Star, “Kansas runs one of the most secretive state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service”. A spokesman for the DOT, strapped for cash because Governor Brownback had raided its budget for years in order to staunch the massive deficits his tax plan was running up, openly admitted that the agency did not have the money to repair a dangerous part of I-70 that has been the sight of multiple horrendous accidents. That spokesman was fired for his/her candor.
The state’s Department of for Children and Families has routinely shredded notes of discussions about children who died under its care. The Department has lied and obfuscated their actions on so many occasions that legislators on both sides of the aisle no longer trust it. Police body-camera footage is treated as evidence and rarely released to the public and often only after a drawn out process are the families involved even allowed to see it. The names of police officers involved in fatal shootings are withheld from the public and open cases are routinely sealed for decades. One poor family has been trying to see the evidence about their missing son since 1988 without success. Kansas’ full privatized Medicaid system apparently has enrollees with disabilities being pressured to sign blank treatment plans which provide no details on the coverage they will receive. Only later, when the plan gets filled in, do they discover that treatments have been severely cut. In the legislature itself, over 90% of the bills are written anonymously, making it impossible to discover who is actually writing the bill and what interests they might represent.
If this kind of secrecy reminds you of some other form of government, such as perhaps autocracy, you’d be very much correct. The increasing lack of transparency from not only Trump but the rest of the GOP is a very disturbing trend and indicates the increasing power of the plutocrats and the autocrats in our supposedly democratic system.
