360 Degrees Demands Answers on Bailouts

In sports, you can't judge a team without knowing their stats. And here at 360, we believe there's really no way to judge the effectiveness of what the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are doing with all our money without knowing the stats: exactly how much are we paying out, to whom, and exactly what are we getting in return?

Those stats are, to a great extent, being kept secret from you, so you really can't score what they're doing. Two months after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke pledged to make the financial rescue plan transparent, we still don't know a lot about who is being helped and what troubled assets the government is buying up. The situation with the Federal Reserve's $2 trillion worth of new loans to troubled banks is worse. Exactly who's taking the loans, and what kind of assets is the Fed getting in return? We really don't know.

Now, if you've been reading 360 for any length of time, you know we think that it's very important that we do know what's happening to our money. It was lack of transparency that got us into this mess. Until the world clearly knows who owns what and how much we're paying for it, we won't have confidence restored in our financial system.

So we have joined with other bloggers, conservative media outlets and have begun actions to force the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to share information about all these bailouts with you. If in 20 days the Treasury Department has not responded to our Freedom of Information requests, we are going to sue the Treasury for that information. The government and the Fed have no right to keep this information from you, the very people who are being forced to pay for these bailouts.

As we've said time and again, it's our money, and if we are risking our national Treasury and the future value of our currency for this bailout, the very least we deserve is knowing how much and on what our money is being spent. We are doing this on your behalf and on ours.

Walter