TheAgitator.com
Depends on Your Definition of Transparency
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008Last week, I noted that despite assurances from Treasury officials that the bailout largess would be distributed in a transparent, accountable manner, one of the first big contracts awarded by the federal government, to the Bank of New York Mellon, had the actual amount of money to be paid to the bank redacted before the contract was made public.
The new website BailoutSleuth now reports that subsequent bailout contracts to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and the law firm Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett were also posted with significant information redacted.
No matter what happens to the economy, it looks like business and finance journalists will have plenty of job security over the next couple of years, if for no other reason than to track how the government spends all of this money. I expect debacles at least on par with the awarding of contracts in Iraq and after Hurricane Katrina.
On CNN last night they were talking about how much money was being spent on this year’s election — something like $5 billion. It also made a point of pointing out who the biggest contributors were.
When you consider the huge rise in government handouts of recent months, that $5B is a pittance compared to the hundreds of billions these contributors stand to get back in return for their support.
I’m pretty sure the government financial rescue is being seen by a lot of people as the latest way to a quick buck (or Billion). You can bet that we will be seeing a lot of stories in the news in the coming years about “what went wrong” with the $750B bailout plan. It will be like Katrina only an order of magnitude greater. And of course, it will focus on how the poor well-meaning government was taken advantage of by those evil corporations, as if the party that gets to dictate the rules can be unfairly victimized by those who merely follow them.
So Obama said in each of the final two debates that his biggest concern regarding the bailout is making sure the bailout package contained ‘Accountability’ to the American taxpayer and ‘no golden parachutes’ for these corp executives.
Game on Barack! Clearly there can be no accountability with the only meaningful information in the contracts being redacted. And no way that we can watch for and/or prevent golden parachutes if there is no information or accountability.
So come on Barry. How about some ‘change we can believe in’. Call a press conference and tell us these redactions are an outrage to the American people and demand the transparency we were promised. And promise to make good on that yourself when you win.
This looks more like the CIA/FBI version of transparency. Is this a national security issue? Whats with the black ink? Looks more like “prisoner of war” letters from home.
Follow the money. Is that even possible now? It may be years before all of the consequences of the bailout are known. But its OK. After all, its the government’s money and they can do what they want with it.
I wish they’d just jump out high windows like they did in the first depression…
Thin the heard…
I’ve worked for a government contractor. I think that blacking out the names is just some kind of weird bidding rule. You’d often see names blacked out that could easily be identified by other information. E.g. “XXXXXX XXXXX, contributor to Reason magazine and blogger at agitator.com”
Also, sometimes bid documents contain information the companies want kept secret, such as the technologies they use or their pricing structure. You’d get fewer bidders if you required companies to reveal this stuff. Commercial contracts do this too.
I’m not saying it’s right in this case, but this sort of redaction is fairly routine.
Besides, the bid documents are only the beginning. If you want to find the real dirt, you have to look at how the jobs are actually billed out and accounted for after they’re over.
Perhaps the government needs to redact things using the old-fashioned scissors method. Then the redacted documents could indeed be “transparent”.
My understanding is that Mark Cuban runs BailoutSleuth and is paying for it with his own money.
[...] In a post I covered on NTU’s blog GovernmentBytes!, Radley Balko at The Agitator points out the continuing (and disturbing) lack of transparency in bailout contracting. [...]