According to nextGov
Senators inexplicably killed a data transparency amendment proposed for the financial overhaul bill, prompting the head of the House Financial Services Committee to vow to quickly bring the item before the full House for a separate vote.
Just what is it about transparency that people don’t like?
I can understand that transparency at a personal level is a step too far for many of us. I mean, who wants to do an involuntary Full Monty for airport security staff each time you step through the new body-scanners. Or be subject to that saucy X-Ray scanner iphone app (now withdrawn from the appstores) that claimed to use ‘augmented reality’ to show people in their underwear just by pointing your phone camera at them.
But we are not talking about that kind of transparency here. This is a serious blog.
We are talking about the kind of transparency that helps to empower the wisdom of the cloud-crowd:
crowd-sourced oversight of the financial industry and also crowd-sourced oversight of the financial regulators
We are talking about transparency that makes it easier for information consumers to understand what is going on in a business, to help them make investment decisions, to help them make governance and risk assessments,
We are talking about the kind of transparency that means we’ll never hear anyone say “I wish we had known you were investing all our 401-K funds in sub-prime mortgage-backed securities” or “I wish we had known there was no plan for what would happen if the well-head fractured”.
You know, stuff like that. Important stuff.
Transparency that cuts through the clouds of opacity that ruin people’s livelihood today or their hopes for the future.
I think it’s time for a few Senators to take a little down-time and reflect on the chorus of the old Pete Seeger song Where have all the flowers gone?
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