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Opinion | We need a participatory democratic government

Ben Stockwell, stockwbm@muohio.edu

A few weeks ago, Joshua Carpenter wrote two editorials on the perceived dangers Wikileaks poses to our civil liberties and to the security of the government. I responded to these letters, arguing that Wikileaks is a medium for us to learn about and to learn from our government. I argued that the leaks allowed us a clearer but still obscure picture of the people running the country and fighting our wars.

If what we have seen is any indication of the larger picture, then I demand more leaks. Indeed, I demand a truly open government.

Tuesday, in his latest editorial, he contends that an open government would lead to less privacy for its citizens. Though Carpenter ditches the talk of Wikileaks, his opinion is akin to conspiratorial ramblings of cable news anchors (some of whom have called for the execution of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning), and, like those anchors, he fails to recognize the numerous flaws in his own logic.

Let me be clear, I am one of the people in Carpenter's fairytale who have swallowed a sugarcoated pill of absolute transparency. According to him, I am someone who ignores implicit assumptions and I have a deeper goal than "simply changing corruption to honesty."

He is absolutely correct. I do have a deeper goal, but he is absolutely wrong in what those goals are.

First, I want to address a couple of the most glaring inconsistencies in Carpenter's arguments. He seems obsessed with the idea that the transparency is going to run amok. There will be agency after agency, code word for bureaucracy, formed to oversee transparency, and that will get out of hand.

What evidence does he have for such a claim? This position evokes imagery or conservative commentators when there is talk of a national health care system or some other progressive ideal.

One has to look no further than the Patriot Act, which, at the time of writing, looks like it will be extended again, to see that the government is already spying on citizens with the full support of the Congress. But this shouldn't be the case, for this is a world where, according to Carpenter's previously published opinions, governmental secrecy actually protects our rights.

His mixture of Orwellian and Randian dystopias seems to distract his view of what is going on in the world we live in.

Carpenter's analogy to the civil rights act (equal employment) fails because he tries too hard to find a flaw in a law that has provided very valuable protections for minorities in the workplace, and in the end he actually makes one up.

The act is meant to increase fairness, equality and oversight in hiring and firing. Carpenter should note that parts of this law are actually under question right now in the Supreme Court, and it could be stripped of some very important provisions regarding the rights of a worker to an unbiased review in the firing process.

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He seems to believe that in a world where governmental transparency is real, a person can only be fired because of issues with that transparency. Or, rather, a worker can't be fired if they aren't performing well because he seems to believe that every single case of a person (in government, I suppose, it was hard to tell if he was referring to the larger public) being fired can and will be construed as racist, sexist or some another chauvinist bend.

Now, here is an alternative goal that I share with many, a government that is both totally open and totally run by the people that are most affected by it.

I think Carpenter and I can agree that governmental surveillance of citizens is totally self-serving, but the government that does this (our government) is run by a ruling class whose interests are entirely separated from the interests of the rest.

Corruption in government exists, it seems, to ensure that separation remains. An open government would expose that corruption at every level, in every branch and would provide for the formation of something totally different.

This is what those of us who have, according to Carpenter, swallowed the pill of absolute transparency want. We don't just want an open government, we want an open-source government, a participatory democracy.

We want a government that we control, not one that controls us. We want a government that serves everyone and doesn't give preference to a rich few. We want a government that is free of collusion with the capital hoarding enemies of the lower 99 percent of the socio-economic strata, a collusion that Carpenter seems to acknowledge. We want a government that will protect the rights of workers no matter their color, age, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability or country of origin. We want a government where opacity is nonexistent, where transparency is the natural state.