Recovery.gov Not Very Transparent

Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."

Comments

Re:Better than nothing

[lennier]

Actually - and for context, I'm not an American, and not at all a supporter of Bush, and economically I'm a lot further to the left than Obama - my biggest disappointment so far with the Obama administration is just how many unreconstructed, unrepentant banking types and Bush appointees he's keeping/bringing into his administration.

There's 'experience' and there's 'corruption', and there's 'naivety' and there's 'corruption. It's hard to tell them apart. The charitable interpretation is that Obama is just being very, very conservative and far too trusting in who he appoints.

I fear he may go down in history not as Roosevelt, but as Hoover. Of course, FDR was fairly conservative when he tried to fix the economy too, and Obama at least is *trying* to put some money into infrastructure (ie, real things) even as he's flushing huge sums down the bankster drain.

And yes, when the guy he hires as CIO has to step down because of corruption in his home team, we should notice and complain. Bush's administration was filled with corruption scandals. I see no reason why Obama should get a free pass when the same thing happens on his watch. I don't care about party labels - I care about politics that 1) doesn't commit war crimes, and 2) isn't domestically corrupt. Doing less of 1) doesn't entitle you to more (or even the same amount) of 2).

Re:Better than nothing

[fm6]

The problem with thinking in stereotypes is that it makes you stupid.