ah, secrecy...
mendacity that matters,
TODAY:
The late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman asked the U.S. Treasury in January 2009 to identify $301 billion of securities owned by Citigroup Inc. that the government had agreed to guarantee. He made the request on the grounds that taxpayers ought to know how their money was being used.
More than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails -- none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!”
None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees. Even so, the U.S. government considers the collection of e-mails a partial response to an official request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The Justice Department in July cited an increase in such responses as evidence that “more information is being released” under the law.
The saga of Pittman’s request shows that the promise of transparency has its limits when it comes to the government’s intervention in the financial industry, which at its peak reached $12.8 trillion in commitments. From the 2008 Bear Stearns Cos. rescue to the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing in 2010, the Obama administration has delayed disclosures and defended its right to secrecy in court.
"Treasury Shields Citigroup as Deletions Undercut Disclosure:"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...oup-with-deletions-make-foia-meaningless.html
"an unprecedented crisis for open govt"
"when it comes to the bank bailout the obama admin made a decision to err on the side of secrecy"
"openness concerning the causes of the crisis and the govt’s response would help the economy recover"
“investors who don’t have information are investors who refuse to place funds in markets, if we want investment and economic growth to resume we want to be forthright about what happened, the longer we keep investors in the dark the longer that low economic growth will persist”
"the public has a particular interest in transparency regarding the government’s unprecedented intervention in capital markets because of its sheer size"
treasury will consider the ridiculously redacted and nonresponsive emails a "partial response"
the geithner gang can't even shoot straight
bloomberg separately sued treasury thru foia, seeking the "names of banks that took emergency loans from the central bank"
bloomberg beat treasury in the district court AND ON APPEAL
(the white house must REALLY want to keep all this stuff SECRET)
the fed has STILL not disclosed to bloomberg and must decide by tomorrow whether or not to take the secret accounts upstairs to the supreme court
secrecy...
did you read the above links about the dodd-geithner grandfathering of the aig bonuses, about the fed's instructions to aig to keep SECRETS from the sec, about the SECRET deal with phrma?
it is what it is
disappointed?