The U.S. State Department spokesman thinks that transparency is a joke, breaking out in laughter at his own statement that his briefing was an “exercise in transparency and democracy.” Robert Laurie, Canada Free Press, August 5, 2016, remarked that the spokesman was laughing because “…he knows his entire job falls under the heading of ‘paid liar.'”
Coincidentally, The Washington Post reported that a Post study of 125 countries on how each disclosed economic information from 1980 to 2010 showed that in both democracies and non-democracies the more transparency governments had fewer coups. (The Washington Post, August 5, 2016, by James R. Hollyer, B. Peter Rosendorff and James Raymond Vreeland)