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Happy Sunshine Week!

The Bush administration won’t tell you this, but March 12-18 is Sunshine Week, a period of time dedicated to celebrating and advocating free access by American citizens to government information. Thomas Jefferson did not say, “An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy,” but he should have. Unless citizens can know what’s going on in their government, there is no hope that they will be able to fully advocate for well-supported positions, as is their right and responsibility. And, as George Orwell pointed out in 1984, a state which is able to shove inconvenient information down a memory hole is a state that controls its citizens rather than the other way ’round.

Visit sunshineweek.org for links to websites promoting open government, resources for journalists and free information activists on college campuses, a discussion blog and a toolkit of resources to help spread the word about this woefully under-publicized week. Let the sunshine in!

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Date: March 13, 2006

Author: freenut

Categories: liberty, media

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(511 votes, average: 2.87 out of 5)

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  jclifford

  in March 13th, 2006 @ 09:26

  Thanks, freenut, for giving us this information. At first, Sunshine Week sounds like a frivolous thing, but it’s really deadly serious.

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  Layla

  in March 13th, 2006 @ 12:45

  Before everyone starts pasting sunshiny happy faces on everything, consider for a moment the role of sunshine laws in the Orange County bankrupcy.

  Orange county filed bankrupcy on Dec. 6 1994, but the financial collapse was almost prevented by a secret, time-critical rescue mission, when 4 separate Wall Street ‘white knights’ were found to restructure the debt. It would have required the approval of a board of five elected supervisors, but the supervisors were prohibited by law from meeting freely without 24 hours public notice, EVEN IN EMERGENCIES. Supervisors had to wait alone in their offices while staffers rushed between the offices trying to brief everyone. The case study is in Richard Stillman’s “Public Adminisration Concepts and Cases,” seventh edition.

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  freenut

  in March 13th, 2006 @ 13:11

  And with good reason, Layla.

  I don’t live in Orange County (and am glad). However, if I had been living in Orange County at the time, and if there were a bunch of supervisors who waited until the last minute to identify four separate Wall Street “saviors” to restructure the debt… and if I found out the supervisors snuck this deal under the bar without public notification and less than 24 hours to review the agreement from these four mysterious Wall Street “saviors,” well, I would have hit the roof.

  Orange County didn’t go bankrupt overnight. Any citizen should be suspicious of last-minute unannounced meetings. The fault lies not in uppity citizens’ insistence on a public meeting in the last 24 hours of a very long, sordid process. The fault lies in ultra-richy-rich Orange County being unable to keep its economic house in order over the long term.

  As a matter of fact, had Orange County’s investment practices been more open, not less, it probably would not have gone and done highly speculative things like consulting a psychic for investment advice in the first place.

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  Layla

  in March 13th, 2006 @ 14:27

  Some blame Bob Citron for the bankrupcy, the situation was probably more complex. Citron did not consider himself answerable to the supervisors for investment policy, only to the voters, and no one wanted to replace a treasurer whose income from investments was 35% of the county budget. In fact, Citron had a good crystal ball. He did not go to jail.

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