Jim Hightower

In the bipartisan bailout of Wall Street banksters, our own government not only failed to stand up for us taxpayers, it aggressively stonewalled us so we couldn't even know which giant banks were getting how much of our money.

Thank goodness, then, for the news services and federal judges who're finally compelling this cabal of bankers and regulators to tell us what they did with our public funds. In a unanimous decision, three Court of appeals judges say that the Federal Reserve (which, by the way, was the regulator that was supposed to be in charge of preventing such Wall Street collapses) must now disclose who got $2 trillion in sweetheart loans that the Fed doled out to its teetering bank buddies in 2008.

Astonishingly, top Fed officials had claimed in court that this information constitutes "trade secrets," and that disclosure of names would cause "severe and irreparable" harm to these giants. Who is the Fed fronting for? A bank consortium that includes Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, and Wells Fargo.

The Wall Street powers moan that mere mention of the fact that they had liquidity problems that needed to be plugged with two trillion taxpayer dollars would "stigmatize them." One Wall Streeter even called such revelations a "death sentance" for the giants, adding that disclosure of names would be cruelly punitive: "I don't see what public purpose is served by it," he huffed.

Hello... bankers: It's our money! We The People have a right to know who failed and who we bailed out. This just shows, once again, that we consumers cannot trust the Fed, for it will always serve banker interests – not ours. Instead of giving it more consumer authority, as some in Congress are proposing, all of its watchdog powers should go to a totally-independent consumer agency located outside the Fed.