Here’s a little detail about the present government that everybody should know. The Office of the Vice President, along with all executive branch offices, is required to submit a list of its staff for publication in the government’s “Plum Book,” and is required to submit statistics on its document classification activities. Cheney has been refusing … Read more Dick Cheney’s stealth operation
The Progressive Librarians Guild has endorsed a resolution by the American Historical Association, titled Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession. The resolution addresses the Bush Administration’s violations of historic preservation practices and other principles held by historians, in the context of the war in Iraq. The violations … Read more PLG endorses AHA resolution on US gov’t and historical preservation
I’ve been tardy in blogging this… The Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service has issued a report on the EPA library closures. That link goes to a PDF of the document hosted by the Federation of American Scientists. Thanks to ALA’s Don Wood for distributing this info.
Southern Methodist University is the front runner to be the site for the Bush Presidential Library, and is favored by President Bush because of his United Methodist religious affiliation. The administration at SMU has been pushing to win the project. Faculty at SMU are starting to protest, and United Methodist leaders are also questioning the … Read more Southern Methodist University faculty uneasy about a Bush Presidential Library
As you may have noticed throughout the EPA library closure situation, the government’s big justification for closing the libraries has been that it is a digital age, meaning that physical libraries have lost their relevance. We know that that is hardly true, but aside from that, shouldn’t this argument mean that we will see EPA … Read more Reports disappearing from EPA library website
ALA Council’s Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, who has been Council’s leader on the EPA library closure issue, has sent us this article from Yubanet, which begins: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is frantically dispersing its library collections to preempt Congressional intervention, according to internal emails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Contrary to … Read more EPA libraries dumping collections to preempt congressional action
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which provides data on Federal “enforcement, staffing, and spending,” reported in March of this year that IRS data obtained through FOIA requests showed that audit rates for low income Americans were higher than the rates of tax audits for wealthy Americans, representing a significant change: Restricting the comparison to … Read more The IRS keeping audit statistics secret; covering up higher audit rates of the poor than the rich
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have announced that the EPA has begun the process of closing its libraries, in advance of Congress’s decisions on Bush’s budget recommendations. See the news release. This is very bad news.
Prior to Wednesday, the muqata’a was a large government building in Nablus, Palestine, originally built by the British in the 1920s and used until this week for civil government functions. It contained the archives of civil documents of the region, containing “hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification … Read more Israel targets Nablus administrative records for destruction
This month is the 40th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, which sets up the process by which the public can get access to unpublished government information. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has a page about the history of the FOIA since its signing by President Johnson in 1966. Also of … Read more 40th Anniversary of FOIA
Fred Stoss of the SRRT Task Force on the Environment has an editorial in the Spring 2006 issue of Electronic Green Journal on the threatened defunding of the EPA National Library Network. It’s an informative article with a useful webliography at the end.
Check out this informative, link-laded post on NARA’s reclassification of documents and a recent audit relating to it, over at LawLibrary Blog. We knew that the present administration was crazy for secrecy, and that U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein was a controversial choice because of signs of his willingness to fulfill the gov’t’s interest in greater … Read more Audit of NARA reclassification of documents
Here’s a good article about the Bush administration’s habit of picking and choosing what science by gov’t agencies gets published and what doesn’t, according to its political litmus test. The Bush administration and its supporters are the biggest users of the word FREEDOM, pounding fists on tables when they say it and saying it loud, … Read more Bush & Co. Censorship of Science It Doesn’t Like
Glenn Greenwald, in “A ‘Pulitzer Prize for Treason,’” talks about the Bush Administration’s attempts to weaken investigative reporting through “criminalizing its basic functions.” Their interest is in maintaining a high level of secrecy and controlling public perceptions – hiding the truth. Greenwald talks about how their public spin on these efforts makes cynical use of … Read more Glenn Greenwald on Bush Administration Attacks on the Free Press
Here are two letters to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations about the proposed cuts in the EPA Libraries’ budget: one dated February 24th, from ALA, ARL, AALL, and SLA, and the other, dated March 1st, from Michael Gorman as ALA President. It is good to see these letters.
An article in The Scientist from March 10th describes the situation faced by EPA’s library system. The article has a number of links at the end.
ALA’s advocacy folks have created a web page designed to make it easy to tell your Congress members of your opposition to the proposed budget cuts to EPA libraries. The page gives some useful background information and “talking points” about the situation, but leaves out the important fact that the proposed cuts are so severe … Read more Support EPA Libraries! Oppose FY 2007 Budget Cuts
AMERICAN FEDERATION of GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, AFL-CIO COUNCIL 238 (EPA) CHARLES ORZEHOSKIE, PRESIDENT P.O. Box 1127 Chicago, Illinois 60690 March 16, 2006 Ruben Moreno, Director Labor and Employee Relations USEPA Headquarters Ariel Rios Building Mail Code:3631M 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. W. Washington, DC 20460 Dear Mr. Moreno, This constitutes the American Federation of Government Employees National … Read more EPA Librarians’ Union Demands to Bargain Over Proposed Closings