The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon

“The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon” is an observation of Political Economics. Wall Street Admits: ‘We Got Rich Off the Backs of Workers’ thus creating the Bear Market. The Bear Market is America's default war. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

Obama Administration Denies Appeal for Information on Recovery.gov Contract with Smartronix

Eye on the Stimulus

We’re tracking the stimulus from bill to building, and we're organizing citizens nationwide to watchdog local stimulus projects. Our team includes lead reporter Michael Grabell, Jennifer LaFleur, Amanda Michel, Eric Umansky and Christopher Flavelle.

Obama Administration Denies Appeal for Information on Recovery.gov Contract with Smartronix

by Christopher Flavelle, ProPublica - October 7, 2009 12:30 pm EDT

The Smartronix contract. Nearly half of the pages in the technical proposal (outlined in red in the graphic above) are blacked out. (Dan Nguyen/ProPublica)

The Obama administration has refused [1], once and for all, to reveal the full details of its contract with Smartronix for a new version of Recovery.gov [2], the government’s stimulus information clearinghouse, as well as a sophisticated “data warehouse [3],” which typically allows users to store and analyze large amounts of data.

In July, the administration agreed to pay Smartronix [4], a Maryland-based company, up to $18 million [5] to create what it called Recovery.gov 2.0. The seemingly rich contract got wide [6] attention [7].

However, when ProPublica filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of the contract, the General Services Administration responded, a month later, by releasing a heavily redacted version [8]. (Take a look [9].) Nearly half the pages in the contract’s technical proposal, which is the main body of the document, were redacted completely, and of the remaining pages, many had half or more of their content blacked out.

We appealed the GSA’s decision, noting the administration’s commitment [10] to transparency in general, and its promises of transparency in the stimulus in particular [11]. We also wondered whether the arguments used to defend the redactions — especially the prohibition against the release of proprietary information — appropriately covered the sweeping redactions.

On Monday, nearly eight weeks after we sent our appeal, the GSA responded [1], denying our appeal, citing the same arguments against the release of “proprietary or trade secret information.”

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