A report by Bloomberg reveals that the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner (at the New York Fed) secretly loaned over seven trillions dollars to arguably insolvent banks and financial institutions to keep them afloat, while concealing the scope of the lending from Congress and even member of the Treasury Department charged with allocating TARP bailouts.

Transpartisan alliances are one of the most powerful organizing tools available to activists today, and perhaps the only one that can force elected officials to become responsive to the will of the people on broadly popular issues. Which is why elite interests manipulate identity politics to castigate those willing to make them as apostates to their respective tribal values (“working with racists…dihmmi”) in order to discredit them and undermine their efforts.

We don’t really have real debates on much of anything in America anymore, so it’s worth questioning whether this will be the effect. But for what it’s worth, Bernie Sanders’ office has released the major investigation coming out of that amendment – a GAO audit of the emergency lending programs carried out by the Fed in the wake of the financial crisis. These programs – not TARP, which mostly put the Congress on the hook for the bailout politically – represented the bulk of the federal government’s support for the banking sector. And they were carried out largely in secret. This GAO audit provides a window into just what the Fed did.

Arguments supporting design of the Fed mirror arguments in favor of dictatorship.

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The Audit the Fed program was a transpartisan success for FDL and a broad coalition of activists.

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I have so many problems with the narrative that TARP and the bank bailouts in general were an unqualified success that I don’t know where to begin sometimes, but a few articles out today should provide a good place.

The Federal Reserve’s release of who received $3.3 trillion in emergency lending from a variety of different special programs during the financial crisis yielded some surprising results. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve learned so far. . . .

The idea that the Fed should be held accountable to the Congress and the public was originally treated as a crank notion pushed by extremists who did not understand modern finance. Well, the data are now public and there has been no implosion. Yet again, it turns out that the cranks were right, and those in positions of authority were either ill-informed or lying.

Let me posit that anyone who claims that TARP was a successful, cheap program to “save the financial system” is just ignorant of the facts.