Tuesday, June 09, 2009

The Beast got served a subpoena!

From Bloomberg's Scott Lanman:

The Federal Reserve was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee for e-mails and documents related to Bank of America Corp.’s purchase of Merrill Lynch & Co. after the panel was unable to obtain them through a request last week.

Yee-haa!

Needless to say, Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd had absolutely nothing to do with this. He continues to oppose transparency and oppose good government... when it comes to The Masters of the Universe his friends at the banks. (Anyone have the link to the 2007 WaPo article that described Dodd as the Bankers' best friend?)

And in related news, the Campaign for Liberty is reporting that Ron Paul's HR 1207 - Audit the Fed now has 207 cosponsors! And as usual, Congressman Chris Murphy continues to play stupid about this bill.

Murph ran against Nancy Johnson as a reformer. But what does he do when he gets into office? He ignores the crooks and liars - Geithner and Bernanke. For the life of me, I can't understand why he remains silent on the need to have a real audit of the Fed.

Tim White

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

FOI request for email and documents. here you call it good, transparent government, but are against it when you are personally involved. FLIP - FLOP!!!

tim white said...

I never said I would withhold documents / emails from a court order. I'm just opposed to a politician unilaterally telling me to provide all documents to him and his buddy.

Your continued flip flop comments fall flat.

Tim White said...

Furthermore, I spoke with the FOI Commission yesterday.

Hall's memo was highly misleading.

Anonymous said...

Someone is spamming “flip-flop” and “Tim is against transparency” all over this blog. NOTICE HOW the spammer just throws out these clichés and does not address the substance of the issue.

Tim and other elected officials have good, principled reasons to oppose this Hall/Milone/TA proposal --

(1) on First Amendment grounds: the chilling effect it would have on citizens communicating candidly with their elected officials. (The town probably has the right to demand copies of all official correspondence from its own staff, but elected officials are accountable only to the voters);

(2) on logistical grounds: the administrative nightmare and costs of receiving, processing, and storing every bit of correspondence from hundreds of elected and appointed town board members; and

(3) on grounds of precedence: no other city, town, or state monitors contacts between citizens and their elected officials as Hall/Milone/TA are proposing. Nowhere else interprets FOI this way. Why only Cheshire?

Hall & Milone could care less about ‘transparency’. They want to score political points at great expense to the town and our constitutional right to unimpeded contact with elected officials.

Anonymous said...

Tim,
These posts are in the wrong place.

Chris Murphy is on the House Oversight Committee. It will be great to see if the Federal Reserve complies with the request. So it will be interesting to see his position if they do not comply. If he is OK with their non compliance then you have the answer to your question why Murphy does not support 1207; he is one of them.