Transparency In Good Governance Quotes

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, secession, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes. The cure is inclusion. Flint's story is a clear call for committing anew to our democratic faith in the common wealth. As the water crisis demonstrates, it is simply not good enough for government officials to say, 'Trust us.' For all the inefficiencies and messiness that comes with democracy, the benefits - transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and the equitable participation of all people - are worth it.

We are on the edge of economic collapse unless we wake up and forcibly take back control of our government and economy. Over the past 100 years, the game has been rigged, slowly and piecemeal at first, always in the name of serving the greater good, preventing the next bubble or providing greater transparency and security. It is as if the American people are suffering from battered spouse syndrome; the politicians, the greedy bankers, and the Fed all lie to us while they steal our wealth and our liberty. Every time we call them on it, they promise to never do it again if we’ll just give them one more chance. So we let it slide and then act shocked when they do it to us again. Maybe we should have our collective head examined.

Accountability and transparency, the two cardinal principles of good governance in a democratic setup, depend, for their observance, on how well the public audit function is discharged.

What unites conservatives and modernizers and young and old, is a hunger not for freedom but for justice; for genuine rule of law, not rule by royal whim. They want a government that is a transparent and accountable, one that provides standards services such as are available in far less wealthy societies: good education, job, affordable housing , and decent health care.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque

1. You must lead from the front. Always. 2. Speed is everything. There must be a sense of urgency. 3. Listen to the locals. They often know more than the Nobel Prize Laureates. 4. Don’t wait for federal agencies to tell you what to do ... tell them what you need. 5. Keep the public informed on the details. Do it early and often and without fanfare. Transparency inspires confidence. Confidence inspires cohesion. 6. Make quick decisions when plans fail. They will fail. As the saying goes, “No battle plan completely survives the first shot.” 7. Demand and expect excellence. There is no reason government cannot function in a competent manner. Refuse to accept failure. 8. Ignore the politics, focus on doing a good job. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. If you do a good job, that will all take care of itself. If you don’t, there is no amount of PR that will help you. 9. Read the old playbook, then throw it out and get ready to improvise. 10. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, immediately. Assume you are at the Alamo. If you end up attacking an ant hill with a sledge hammer ... that’s okay. But if you end up bringing a knife to a gun fight ... that’s a failure. If you prepare for war and peace breaks out, great! But if you prepare for peace and war breaks out, you’re in trouble!

Excuse me for being greedy, but I want freedom and good government.

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate unlike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power.

Ratan Tata was already well known in the investment community, but it was a new and interesting experience for me. Inevitably perhaps, on the road show we were always being compared and evaluated against Infosys and a lot of complimentary things were said about Infosys. Although we were competitors, to hear good things said in international forums about an Indian company made us very happy. When Ratan Tata returned from the road show he wrote a leter to Infosys’s management saying, ‘I must tell you that I felt so proud that here is an Indian company which is considered a benchmark in governance and transparency.

Hillary came onto the national scene after using her husband’s cronies to steal $100,000 from the cattle futures market after a paltry $1,000 investment. I say steal unapologetically, given that statisticians report than any of us would have had a 31 trillion to 1 chance to replicate Hillary’s investment savvy. Not satisfied by rigging a system that cattlemen and farmers must assume is transparent and honest, Mrs. Clinton — of raise-taxes-for-the-public-good fame — then shorted the government in the reporting of some of her profits and was caught doing it.

An overall picture of how a developing country with considerable amount of natural resources may get in trouble can be described by discussing the lack of absorption capacity where overspending on domestically produced goods leads to increased price level.Further, an inefficient choice of public policy cause poor economic performance through the mismanagement of budget expenditure. In this case governments undertake projects not to achieve social optimality rather to increase their fame. Hence “easy money” may easily lead to increased corrupt activities in contracting projects thereby affecting negatively the transparency level and the competitiveness of market economy

Peter’s management style was very different from that of his predecessors. He was a listener, always ready to hear out his journalists when they approached him. He ran an open and transparent newsroom and believed in the principle that government and media should not be one. There should be a line, no matter how thin, between the two. He believed the PAP was good for Singapore, but not that all its actions were correct.

For one, the World Health Organization and governments have developed a good surveillance system. The problem is that it is incomplete—too many countries still do not participate—and dependent on governments to cooperate. In 2003, the system even picked up SARS, which was originally thought to be a new influenza virus, and contained it, but SARS was infinitely easier to control than influenza would be. As it was, the world was put at risk by China, which initially lied and hid the disease. China’s candor has improved significantly, but China is still not fully transparent. And China is not the only reluctant partner.

Nothing has the same meaning any more once it has been confronted not with its unfinished form, but with its accomplished or even excessive form. We are no longer fighting the spectre of alienation, but that of ultra-reality. We are no longer fighting our shadows, but transparency. And every step in technological progress, every advance in information and communications, brings us closer to that inescapable transparency. All the signs have been reversed as a result of this precession of the end, this irruption of the final term at the very heart of things and their unfolding. The same acts, the same thoughts and the same hopes which brought us nearer to that finality we so longed for now take us away from it, since it is behind us. Similarly, everything changes meaning once the movement of History crosses this fatal demarcation line: the same events have different meanings depending on whether they take place in a history that is being made or in a history being unmade. It's the same with the curve of History as it is with the trajectory of reality. It is the upward movement which gives them force of reality. On the downward curve -- or because the movement is simply continuing as a result of its own inertia -- everything is caught in a different refraction space, as in a gravity alternator. In that new space, as in Alice's looking-glass space, words and effects are stood on their head, and every movement impedes every other. The balance which, by the force of the negative, governed our world has been upset. Events, discourses, subjects or objects exist only within the magnetic field of value, which only exists as a result of the tension between two poles: good or evil, true or false, masculine or feminine. It is these values, now depolarized, which are beginning to spin in the undifferentiated field of reality. And objects, too, are beginning to spin in the undifferentiated field of value. All there is now is a circular form of switching or substitution between disconnected and erratic values. Everything which stood in a fixed relation of opposition is losing its meaning by becoming indistinguishable from its opposite as a result of the upsurge of a reality which is absorbing all differences and conflating opposing terms by promoting them all unreservedly.

By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?

Curbing the financial sector. Since so much of the increase in inequality is associated with the excesses of the financial sector, it is a natural place to begin a reform program. Dodd-Frank is a start, but only a start. Here are six further reforms that are urgent: (a) Curb excessive risk taking and the too-big-to-fail and too-interconnected-to-fail financial institutions; they’re a lethal combination that has led to the repeated bailouts that have marked the last thirty years. Restrictions on leverage and liquidity are key, for the banks somehow believe that they can create resources out of thin air by the magic of leverage. It can’t be done. What they create is risk and volatility.2 (b) Make banks more transparent, especially in their treatment of over-the-counter derivatives, which should be much more tightly restricted and should not be underwritten by government-insured financial institutions. Taxpayers should not be backing up these risky products, no matter whether we think of them as insurance, gambling instruments, or, as Warren Buffett put it, financial weapons of mass destruction.3 (c) Make the banks and credit card companies more competitive and ensure that they act competitively. We have the technology to create an efficient electronics payment mechanism for the twenty-first century, but we have a banking system that is determined to maintain a credit and debit card system that not only exploits consumers but imposes large fees on merchants for every transaction. (d) Make it more difficult for banks to engage in predatory lending and abusive credit card practices, including by putting stricter limits on usury (excessively high interest rates). (e) Curb the bonuses that encourage excessive risk taking and shortsighted behavior. (f) Close down the offshore banking centers (and their onshore counterparts) that have been so successful both at circumventing regulations and at promoting tax evasion and avoidance. There is no good reason that so much finance goes on in the Cayman Islands; there is nothing about it or its climate that makes it so conducive to banking. It exists for one reason only: circumvention. Many

Accountable leaders operate transparently and put effort into ensuring good governance.

After 50 years of independence and several governments, and several elections, we are yet to establish good governance in Trinidad and Tobago. We are yet to fully embrace the principles of democracy, transparency, accountability, integrity. These still elude us and our people are becoming frustrated. We must break out from what I call the clutches of mal-governance. This calls for a new thinking, a paradigm shift. We cannot continue with the same old ways. People are getting tired”. This I believe, was, and still is today the view of many.

Brin had blurbed my novel Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance: the “Transparent Society,” he called it, and It Was Good. The camera would point both ways, cops and politicians just as subject to our scrutiny as we were to theirs. People are primates, Brin reminded us; our leaders are Alphas. Trying to ban government surveillance would be like poking a silverback gorilla with a stick. “But just maybe,” he allowed, “they’ll let us look back.” Dude, thought I, do you have the first fucking clue how silverbacks react to eye contact?

History is propelled by good governance paradigms that balance the ever-present tension between three human nature attributes (emotionality, amorality and egoism), and nine human dignity needs (reason, security, human rights, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation and inclusiveness).

Contrary to the assumptions of Western moral traditions, human beings are (1) not free in their actions but governed by necessity; (2) not transparent to themselves and others in their motivations, but opaque; (3) not similar to each other and therefore subject to the same moral code, but each different.

RINO, Republican in Name Only. I’m a Reagan Republican, a proponent of lower taxes, less government, free markets, free trade, defense readiness, and democratic internationalism. I also believe government should respond to our biggest problems and prepare for our biggest future challenges, be as transparent as possible and as efficient as possible.