Crooked politicians

“TRANSPARENCY.”

People in high places love to roll that word off of their tongue like sweet honey, as if simply by saying it makes it so.

“We are transparent.”

When the rubber meets the road, however, many times, the same people are anything but transparent.

An instance of that can be seen in this newspaper’s coverage so far of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce. Transparency, the word, is on its website, but in practice, there remains a veil over the entire operation, including a separate entity named the McAllen Chamber Service Corporation formed by only three members (Steve Ahlenius was one of them). It operated for only approximately three years. What’s that all about? Who knows. The Chamber won’t respond to public information requests sent so far, so why include another one for the Service Corp?

Even a public information request for simple McAllen Chamber board minutes, surely top-secret confidential info, has dropped into some black hole. The chamber won’t even acknowledge that it received any public information requests from The Advance.

“Hear no public information request, see no public information request, speak no public information request.”

The headline to this column — Crooked politicians — isn’t to suggest that any malfeasance has taken place at the chamber. Rather, it’s simply a nod as to how important access to public information is to the political process and the saving of taxpayer dollars.

Any organization that collects a lot in the way of public monies should be held accountable. Their records open to public access. That includes the local level, the state level, and where the largest group of crooks can be found gathered together at one time in one location — Washington D.C.

The word “transparency,” which some people love to be bandy about, needs to be a real part of the public process. Not simply some throwaway word cooked up by some chamber-sounding folk where the weather is always lovely. There’s no other way to keep people honest.

BusinessInsider.com, for example, recently did a story titled: “Conflicted Congress: Key findings from Insider’s five-month investigation into federal lawmakers’ personal finances.” The story is dated Dec. 13, 2021.

Without access to financial-disclosure reports filed by every sitting member of Congress (both chambers) and their top-ranking staffers, we wouldn’t know, for example that:

# Forty-eight members of Congress and 182 senior-level staffers violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law.

# Fifteen lawmakers actively invested in military contractor stocks while working to help shape U.S. defense policy.

# Nearly 75 lawmakers in D.C. held stocks in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers (Moderna/BioNTECH/Johnson & Johnson) in 2020, with many of them buying and selling the stocks during the early stages of the pandemic.

# The names of the so-called Green Democrat team of lawmakers who nonetheless invest in fossil-fuel companies, which is so similar to rich tycoons and celebrities who board huge Gulfstream private jets to fly off to Switzerland to discuss climate change due to the man-made emission of fossil fuels.

The project being worked on by BusinessInsider.com is titled: “Conflicted Congress.”

No doubt, if they had their way, the lawmakers would rather hide away their financial-disclosure reports because it makes them look bad. They just never thought that anyone would spend approximately five months looking into them.

It’s the same way up in Austin. The most famous, or infamous, anecdote was when Gov. Greg Abbott, who is another one who loves to spout the word “transparency” as long as it doesn’t pertain to him, refused to turn over his day calendar to the media, saying, in effect, that who he met with during the day, while on the taxpayer’s clock, wasn’t any of the public’s business.

Loved that one.

Of course, AG Paxton had Greg’s back.

The Dems are no different. In fact, that was one of the points mentioned by BusinessInsider.com. The two parties can agree on nothing, can’t work together on anything in a collaborative manner. There is, however, one thing on which they stand together: corruption and greed.

To uncover that, the media needs access to public records.

Any time, you see a public entity trying hard to keep their records private, you can’t help but ask why?