Jeber’s

Oh mighty ‘bama, where is thy transparency?

Politically and socially I’m moderate to liberal in my general outlook on life. I’m not so liberal as to have joined the Church of Saint Obama, though McCain was a poor alternative, I thought. Too much was being expected of Obama, and he didn’t do much to bring expectations back down to earth. He was aware of his cult status, his deification.

One of the promises made early and often by the president was transparency in government. That was perhaps the most dramatic and audacious guarantee he made us early on. After the last eight years many of us welcomed the idea of a more visible process. If we’re being asked to pay the bills, we ought to be able to know where the money’s going.

And Obama told us we would see his government working. He was going to make Washington a transparent town.

It appears he may have just broken that promise. How else are we to interpret the following but to conclude it’s business as usual, sadly.

How could this happen?

We were asked to give him a pass on two aspects of his life. To support Obama was to willingly ignore the fact that he was a lawyer and a politician. He may have sounded refreshing, but the substance of Obama is deeply influenced by his love for the law on the federal level. He is a politician and a lawyer, just like Bush was a politician and a lawyer and like Nixon was a politician and a lawyer. Just like Lincoln was a politician and a lawyer.

I can only conclude that the following is an indication of that reality.

There are number of outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for key documents, by groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, and KEI. In one of our FOIA requests, we asked for 7 specific documents, referenced by the exact title and date of the documents. These documents are the proposals for the text of the agreement.

The texts are available to the Japanese government. They are available to the 27 member states of the European Union. They are available to the governments of Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia. They are available to Morocco, and many other countries. They are available to “cleared” advisers (mostly well connected lobbyists) for the pharmaceutical, software, entertainment and publishing industries. But they are a secret from you, the public.

Today we received this letter from the White House, Office of the United States Trade Representative. Our FOIA request was denied on the grounds that the documents are “information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

Here is a link to a PDF of the denial of the FOIA request.  (Source: huffingtonpost.com)