by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
The “Deep State” is increasingly feeling like the “Deep Banking State.” Try to get any meaningful information to unravel the corrupt and dangerous interconnections between global banking behemoths today and some government or other entity has slapped a padlock on the information.
The latest example is the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry that is delving into the collapse in March of the second largest global bank in Switzerland – Credit Suisse. The Commission has announced that it plans to lock away the details of its findings for 50 years. (UBS, the largest global bank in Switzerland, bought the crumbling remains of Credit Suisse earlier this year.)
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Reuters reported that the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is also requiring that “All persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of the commission, but also the interviewees themselves.”
The news of the 50-year lockup of the reasons for a global bank’s rapid failure is making headlines, on the basis that it’s an affront to the public’s right to know. Which, of course, it is. But the U.S. public has been suffering equally egregious lockups of information concerning the global banks based here in the U.S. for decades.
Let’s not forget what happened when the late Bloomberg reporter, Mark Pittman, filed a Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) for global bank bailout information from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis of 2008. While the Fed released general details of emergency lending programs, it did not release the names of the global banks that were doing the bulk of the borrowing, or the sums borrowed by each institution.
Pittman filed a FOIA with the Fed for the names of the banks, the amounts borrowed and the terms. Under the law, the Fed had to respond in 20 business days. The Fed stalled Pittman for six months, leading to the parent of Bloomberg News, Bloomberg LP, filing a lawsuit against the Fed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in November 2008. Bloomberg won that suit. The Fed then appealed to the Second Circuit Appellate Court seeking to continue to withhold the information.
The Fed also lost at the Second Circuit. The Fed was too embarrassed to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, because President Obama’s acting Solicitor General, Neal Katyal, planned to file a brief contrary to the Fed’s position, so a group called The Clearing House Association LLC, consisting of some of the same global banks that were being bailed out by the Fed, filed their own appeal with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in March of 2011, leaving the decision of the Second Circuit in place.
The banking reform legislation known as the Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed into law in 2010, had forced the Fed to release the transaction details of its seven emergency lending facilities in December of 2010. When the Supreme Court declined to hear the FOIA court case, the discount window transactions were released in March 2011.
Senator Bernie Sanders had attached an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act which required the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the Fed’s emergency lending programs. When that audit was released in July of 2011, it showed that the Fed had secretly sluiced more than $16 trillion in cumulative loans to the global banks from December 2007 to at least July of 2010. A statement from Senator Bernie Sanders’ office at the time included the following:
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