So much for transparency. Treasury refuses to give bank bailout information.

This again from the McClatchy news group, which is not conservative by any means:

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I don't want a check either but wouldn't be nice if they would give us the money instead of coming up with all these carppy bogged down packages?

What would you do if they would give us $30K or more? That would probably cost less than what they are proposing and you know darn well, that money would go into the economy faster than their plan.

To be clear, IP addresses can only be seen by the Administrator and I do not give IP information to anyone.

As well, when you enter your email address, it is not revealed to anyone who sends to you. The only way the sender would be able to find out is if YOU reply to them.

Again, ISP/IP information is not available to the public on this site and only I have access to that information.

WH refuses to hand over the visitor list..... after all, didn't he say he was going to be MORE transparent than other administrations? Bull!! That man told so many lies on his campaign trail....

Considering I pay for that big 'ol house he lives in, and he preached transparency, then why not hand over the visitor list. Actually, the U.S. citizens are supposed to have it given to us without asking. And for those of you who will once again find excuses for this man.... NO, he does not have a reason not to, except as usual he has been seeing people he shouldn't be around and people that no doubt would expose him for what he is...

but his reasoning was, at times, questionable. It appears as though he is going to take the money and run unlike some of his compatriots who are "attempting" to refuse stimulus money.

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it's allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.

"If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that's what they don't want us to know," said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.

The Fed stepped into a rescue role that was the original purpose of the Treasury's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The central bank loans don't have the oversight safeguards that Congress imposed upon the TARP.

Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren't rated AAA.

Congress is demanding more transparency from the Fed and Treasury on bailout, most recently during Dec. 10 hearings by the House Financial Services committee when Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had "been bamboozled."

Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP, on May 21 asked the Fed to provide data on collateral posted from April 4 to May 20. The central bank said on June 19 that it needed until July 3 to search documents and determine whether it would make them public. Bloomberg didn't receive a formal response that would let it file an appeal within the legal time limit.

On Oct. 25, Bloomberg filed another request, expanding the range of when the collateral was posted. It filed suit Nov. 7.

In response to Bloomberg's request, the Fed said the U.S. is facing "an unprecedented crisis" in which "loss in confidence in and between financial institutions can occur with lightning speed and devastating effects."

The Fed supplied copies of three e-mails in response to a request that it disclose the identities of those supplying data on collateral as well as their contracts.

While the senders and recipients of the messages were revealed, the contents were erased except for two phrases identifying a vendor as "IDC." One of the e-mails' subject lines refers to "Interactive Data -- Auction Rate Security Advisory May 1, 2008."

Brian Willinsky, a spokesman for Bedford, Massachusetts- based Interactive Data Corp., a seller of fixed-income securities information, declined to comment.

"Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure," Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Fed's Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News.

"In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information," she wrote.

New York-based Citigroup Inc., which is shrinking its global workforce of 352,000 through asset sales and job cuts, is among the nine biggest banks receiving $125 billion in capital from the TARP since it was signed into law Oct. 3. More than 170 regional lenders are seeking an additional $74 billion.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would meet congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system.

The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and public. The Bloomberg lawsuit, filed in New York, doesn't seek money damages.

"There has to be something they can tell the public because we have a right to know what they are doing," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"It would really be a shame if we have to find this out 10 years from now after some really nasty class-action suit and our financial system has completely collapsed," she said.

The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks that handed over collateral including stocks and subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site.

Borrowers include the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Citigroup and New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., the country's biggest bank by assets.

Banks oppose any release of information because that might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group, said in an interview last month.

"Americans don't want to get blindsided anymore," Mendez said in an interview. "They don't want it sugarcoated or whitewashed. They want the complete truth. The truth is we can't take all the pain right now."

The Bloomberg lawsuit said the collateral lists "are central to understanding and assessing the government's response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression."

In response, the Fed argued that the trade-secret exemption could be expanded to include potential harm to any of the central bank's customers, said Bruce Johnson, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle. That expansion is not contained in the freedom-of-information law, Johnson said.

"I understand where they are coming from bureaucratically, but that means it's all the more necessary for taxpayers to know what exactly is going on because of all the money that is being hurled at the banking system," Johnson said.

The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net;

WASHINGTON (AFP) �� The US Federal Reserve said Monday it had authorized China Construction Bank, a leading Chinese state bank, to operate in the United States.

The proposed New York City branch of CCB "would engage in wholesale deposit-taking, lending, trade finance, and other banking services," the Fed said in a statement.

The US central bank recalled that China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) is 57.0 percent owned by the Chinese state, 19.7 percent by US banking group Bank of America and 5.7 percent by Temasek Holdings, a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of Singapore. The remainder of the capital is publicly traded.

CCB is the second-largest bank in China, with total assets of approximately 1.1 trillion dollars, it noted.

The Fed said it had determined that CCB had adequate anti-money laundering safeguards and had committed to respect US laws on money laundering.

CCB's own funds exceed the minimum set by the 1998 Basel Capital Accord and "is considered equivalent to capital that would be required of a US banking organization," the US central bank said.

CCB would be the fourth mainland Chinese bank -- excluding banks in Hong Kong -- to open operations in the US, after the Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China's top bank, also has asked the Fed for authorization to open a branch in New York.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081208/pl_afp/uschinabankregulatebankingcompanyccb

Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has come out in favor of nationalizing some banks. (Photo: Reuters Pictures)

The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.

In an interview, Mr Greenspan, who for decades was regarded as the high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, said nationalisation could be the least bad option left for policymakers.

"It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do."

Mr Greenspan's comments capped a frenetic day in which policymakers across the political spectrum appeared to be moving towards accepting some form of bank nationalisation.

"We should be focusing on what works," Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told the FT. "We cannot keep pouring good money after bad." He added, "If nationalisation is what works, then we should do it."

Speaking to the FT ahead of a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, Mr Greenspan said that "in some cases, the least bad solution is for the government to take temporary control" of troubled banks either through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other mechanism.

The former Fed chairman said temporary government ownership would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them."

But he cautioned that holders of senior debt - bonds that would be paid off before other claims - might have to be protected even in the event of nationalisation.

"You would have to be very careful about imposing any loss on senior creditors of any bank taken under government control because it could impact the senior debt of all other banks," he said. "This is a credit crisis and it is essential to preserve an anchor for the financing of the system. That anchor is the senior debt."

Mr Greenspan's comments came as President Barack Obama signed into law the $787bn fiscal stimulus in Denver, Colorado. Mr Obama will announce on Wednesday a $50bn programme for home foreclosure relief in Phoenix, Arizona. Meanwhile, the White House was working last night on the latest phase of the bailout for two of the big three US carmakers.

In his speech after signing the stimulus, which he called the "most sweeping recovery package in our history", Mr Obama set out a vertiginous timetable of federal decisions in the coming weeks that included fixing the US banking system, submission next week of the 2009 budget and a bipartisan White House meeting to address longer-term fiscal discipline.

"We need to end a culture where we ignore problems until they become full-blown crises," said Mr Obama. "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles� but it does mark the beginning of the end."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that everything changed after 9/11 thing.

But not Walter.

We're a product of the '60s, he said. We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

When you mess with my money, I want to know why, he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

The more I'm on, the scarier it gets, he said. It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to others, he said.

(Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence Journal. E-mail bkerr@projo.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)

I had the privilege and honor of seeing Mother Teresa some years ago in D.C. The audience was made up of a few ordinary people and mostly political and/or media types. The woman did not mince words. She did not hesitate to tell everyone in the audience how she felt that intolerance, indifference, selfishness, materialism and consumerism, the treatment of and attitudes towards the poor, the sick, the imprisoned run rampant were things that incited people to take up arms against each other, to hate one another, etc. and that Americans might want to look a good look at themselves and give some thoughtful prayer to what part they may play in the situations they so despised. Some of the people were so moved by her that they talked to her about going to India. They wanted to work in her clinics, her hospitals, on the streets. She laughed out loud and I will never forget what she said. She said, and I quote, ** You do not have to go to another country to do God's work. Take a look around you. Man's inhumanity to man is evident everywhere. Go into your own cities and find the poor, the needy, the imprisoned, the sick, the haters with hardened hearts, whatever. They will always be with us and they are everywhere. I believe sincerely that peace is God's work, perhaps in the highest form. You think we live in peace here in this country; as Mother Teresa said, look around you. The war is but 1 faction of a very very sick society, a sick world. I was born into peace and nonviolence. I have practiced it all my life. Protests are really quite a small part of my nonviolent lifestyle. There is plenty enough hatred, violence, intolerance and indifference to keep the peacekeepers busy until the end of time, right where they live, wherever that may be. We also unfortunately have, in this country, warmongering and war profiteering and people in power who could care less about exploiting our troops and whomever they may be fighting. War is a big money maker for some folks. I do protest here but these days it is mostly letters to the editor, letters to senators, clergy, manning phones, that sort of thing. Another thing I believe is that the Creator is the changer of hearts and minds, not men, and that prayer changes things. You asked what I did besides whine on the other board, where were my legs...you asked for it, here it is.

1. I train service dogs for the disabled. I do this for all sorts of people, some of whom happen to be veterans whose welcome home from their government is, in my opinion, nothing short of betrayal. The wonderful projects, facilities that have sprung up to help these vets are all and I mean ALL privately funded, quite a few of the dogs I train have been purchased or **sponsored** meaning covering all costs and it is quite expensive, from the bleeding heart liberal pinko commies as you refer to us. They pay the fee, anywhere from $12,000 to $25,000 so that people who cannot afford it or whose government does not think them or their service important enough to provide them everything they could possibly ever need can get something they desperately need. My portion of this 2-year training program is the last leg, the month where trainer, new owner and dog are put together to learn the mechanics of what they are doing together and to learn each other. At this point the dog, its care, individualized training, all vet bills have been paid for. Normally I charge for this month of training that I do one-on-one. I have NEVER charged 1 red cent to any veteran for my services and I never will. This is one of the ways I support the troops but not the mission. You see, it can be done.

2. I have belonged to a prayer and meditation for peace group since I was a child. If I go somewhere where I can't find one, I start one or I hook up with the Mennonites or Friends, the original civil disobeyers. We PRAY for peace, for everyone, everywhere.

5. I go with a group of Indians to elementary schools throughout the Tampa Bay area in full regalia with drums, flutes and stories to share with them to try to give them a good honest look at indigenous people. This seems to be going over very well. We have more dates than we can actually handle. I am very proud to do this work.

Those are my legs and I have had them for a long time. As I recall, this is our board, the L board, so I can post whatever I like and you don't have to read my posts because you always find fault with whatever I said but I will continue to **preach to the choir** as long as I feel like it because it is the liberal board and the liberals don't mind hearing about nonviolence. As Ghandi said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And, for further perusal, here's a bit of history on Ghandi.

After one year of a none too successful law practice (in England), Gandhi decided to accept an offer from an Indian businessman in South Africa, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a legal adviser. Unbeknown to him, this was to become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and altogether Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over twenty years. The Indians who had been living in South Africa were without political rights, and were generally known by the derogatory name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness of the frightening force and fury of European racism, and how far Indians were from being considered full human beings, when he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment car, though he held a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this political awakening Gandhi was to emerge as the leader of the Indian community, and it is in South Africa that he first coined the term satyagraha to signify his theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya (celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series of experiments to forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner as to make the oppressor and the oppressed alike recognize their common bonding and humanity: as he recognized, freedom is only freedom when it is indivisible.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our money, frist by inflation and then by deflation; the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks) will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered"