secrecy

"Consistent with Congress' intent, we are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program," said Neel Kashkari, the U.S. Department of Treasury's point man for the $700 billion bailout, back on October 13, 2008. But despite Treasury's promise back then that they would release the figure the government is paying the Bank of New York Mellon (BoNYM) to manage and distribute cash from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), they still have refused to make the information public. A current copy of BoNYM's contract with the government obtained by ProPublica, a public interest journalism group, still has the compensation figures blackened out, as they were two months ago, still keeping taxpayers in the dark about how much they are paying BoNYM to administer the program.

The "Corporate Water Footprinting" conference in San Francisco December 2 and 3 had a small public component: "a presentation by Nestle on assessing water-related risks in communities, Coca-Cola's aggressive environmental water-neutrality goal, and MillerCoors' plan to use less water to make more beer," reports Amanda Witherell. "But what these giant corporations, which are seeking to control more of the world's water, really discussed the public will never know. Only four media representatives were permitted to attend -- all from obscure trade journals." Witherell's San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle "were denied media passes." While corporate executives met in secret, social justice activists held a free, public "Anti-Corporate Water Conference." Witherell asked the organizer of the Corporate Water Footprinting conference why the water activists weren't welcome at his event. "Why didn't we invite them?" he responded. "I don't know."

Skippy peanut butter jars now have an inward "dimple" on the bottom to reduce the amount they hold. (Source: CNN)Prices of your favorite grocery items are skyrocketing, but you probably don't know it. Many companies are using a sneaky way to raise prices without driving customers to less expensive brands: they are shrinking their packaging. A jar of Skippy peanut butter, for example, is the same height and circumference it has always been, but now has a hidden, inward "dimple" on the bottom that decreases the amount the jar holds by two ounces. Boxes of breakfast cereal appear to be the same height and width they've always been, but manufacturers have reduced the boxes' depth from front to back, decreasing the amount of cereal they hold. Rolls of Scott toilet tissue contain the same number of sheets as always (1,000), but the length of each sheet has been cut from 4 to 3.7 inches. A "six ounce" can of Starkist Tuna now holds just five ounces. When asked about the shrinkage, most companies point to higher costs for ingredients, manufacturing and fuel. Dan Howard, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University, says the only way consumers can fight back against this sneaky way of increasing costs is to refuse to buy from manufacturers who engage in this deceptive tactic.

Professor Andrew Appel of the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University has released a previously-suppressed report finding that electronic voting machines in New Jersey make it easy to engage in undetectable election fraud. "It takes about 7 minutes, using simple tools, to replace the computer program in the AVC Advantage with a fraudulent program that cheats," states the report, which was written by Appel and five other leading computer security experts. The researchers completed their report on September 2 but were forbidden until Friday from publishing it by a court order that has finally been reversed on appeal. The local elections board in Princeton has also denied a request by Appel and CITP fellow Grayson Barber to observe poll workers on election night, stating that the election is "too important" to permit extra people in the polling place. "In particular, they cited Andrew's status as an expert on Sequoia voting machines as a 'concern,'" Grayson noted. You can monitor this and other U.S. election integrity concerns on the Election Protection Wiki.

An analysis of tobacco industry documents published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) tells how the German cigarette industry worked to stop Lufthansa, the flagship airline of Germany, from banning smoking on its domestic flights in the early 1990s. Documents also reveal that German tobacco companies worked to keep cigarette vending machines accessible to children, stop higher taxes on cigarettes, block a ban on tobacco advertising and recruit doctors and scientists to serve as "expert witnesses" to testify against the health dangers of tobacco. One of the paper's authors, Martina Pötschke-Langer, who heads the World Health Organization's Collaboration Centre for Tobacco Control at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, said "The campaign against Lufthansa's non-smoking flights appears to be especially vicious, since pressure was applied to the government as well as to public opinion via the mass media." Lufthansa started working to ban smoking on German domestic flights in 1989, but wasn't successful until 1996.

The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has announced that it will begin reporting its payments to doctors in late 2009, using an online database. But the disclosure is limited to payments of more than $500 made for giving talks or advice to the company; payments for other services or gifts will not be included. Payments made before 2009 will also not be disclosed. Eli Lilly president and CEO John Lechleiter explained the move by stating, "We've learned that letting people see for themselves what we're doing is the best way to build trust." In mid-2007, as the U.S. Senate Finance Committee was investigating drug company grants to patient groups, Eli Lilly began disclosing its grants to U.S. nonprofit groups and educational institutions. Its new registry of payments to doctors comes as Congress considers the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The bill would require disclosure of any drug company payment to doctors of more than $25, whether the payment was for food, travel, entertainment, gifts, consulting fees or any other purpose.

In Bolivia, anti-government protests have led to dozens of deaths. President Evo Morales claimed the United States is supporting the violent groups and asked U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg to leave. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), pointing to earlier reports that the U.S. Embassy "had repeatedly asked Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright Scholar to spy on people inside Bolivia," says Morales may have a point. So CEPR is calling on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) "and other U.S. agencies to 'come clean'" about which groups they support, in Bolivia. "Despite numerous requests ... the U.S. has not turned over all the names of recipient organizations of USAID funds." In related news, USAID "is looking to hire a PR firm to tout its work in Bolivia as diplomatic relations have strained with the left-leaning South American country," reports O'Dwyer's. USAID will pay $500,000 for the first year of an up to three year contract, "to highlight its emergency supply efforts, opportunities for the poor, and other economic and social welfare programs it has funded in Bolivia."

A coalition of "consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor leaders, journalists, and others," OpenTheGovernment.org, has found that secrecy by the Bush administration continues to expand. The top twenty-five government departments in terms of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests all continued to carry serious backlogs. In 2007 there was a two percent increase in FOIA requests over 2006, as well as a decrease in the number of documents declassified. "These trends indicate that citizens will have to wait even longer to know what their government is doing," said Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org. Government secrecy is also expensive for taxpayers. "The report estimated the government spent almost $200 to maintain secrets for every dollar the government spent declassifying documents, a five percent increase over the 2006 ratio." McDermott added, "The current administration continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public. In recent years, polls have shown that a growing number of Americans believe the federal government is secretive -- terrible news for our democracy. Until we restore openness and accountability to the federal government, it will be impossible to win back the public's trust."

Tobacco manufacturers discovered over 40 years ago that radioactive polonium-210 exists in cigarettes and tobacco smoke, and spent decades working to remove it, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The companies tried to remove polonium -- a naturally-occurring, alpha particle-emitting constituent of the fertilizers and soil used to grow tobacco -- by creating special filters, washing the tobacco leaf and genetically altering tobacco plants, but ultimately failed. Instead of coming clean, the companies kept their internal research on polonium and information about their unsuccessful efforts to remove it secret. They didn't want to heighten public awareness of polonium in cigarettes. Polonium-210 is the lethal radioactive substance that was used to poison Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Pro-Tibet Protest During the OlympicsIn a scathing review of the Chinese government's handling of the Olympics, Jacquelin Magnay writes "there has been the fake singer, the fake fireworks, the fake minority kids (they were all Han, and not from the 55 different ethnic groups as portrayed), the fake press freedoms, fake internet access, fake promises. ... Beijing Olympic vice-president Wang Wei and other International Olympic Committee officials repeatedly claim the press is free to report on the Olympic Games, yet venue managers, under instruction from the organisers, will not allow reporters to ask topical non-sporting questions of Georgian or Russian athletes. Transcripts of the press conference questions about censorship are themselves heavily censored." But, regardless of the edicts from the Chinese government's propaganda unit, "global headlines ... have detailed the screech of armoured personnel carriers, human rights issues, visa restrictions, protest parks, military thuggery, deceptions and trickery."