A Bloomberg attempt to pry open the Federal Reserve moved forwards this week as Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled in favor of the FOIA request for certain documents related to the Fed's emergency lending. The Project On Open Government (POGO) lays out the story behind the case and explains that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke will have to answer questions about the Fed's transparency when he faces the Senate for his renomination hearing.

While President Obama and Defense Secretary Bob Gates have laid out a moderately ambitious plan for defense acquisition reform, Mother Jones finds that lobbyist-turned-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn is standing in the way of further changes.

Public Citizen used Sunlight's Party Time data to show that no one is throwing for fundraisers than the banks bailed out by the federal government. The influence lives on.

In a mind-boggling ruling, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will allow Rep. Pete Visclosky, under investigation for potential earmarking abuses in PMA Group scandal, to use campaign funds to pay the legal fees of his staff -- including former staff. This means that Rep. Visclosky can pay the legal fees of PMA lobbyist Rich Kaelin because he is a former Visclosky staffer. As Zach Roth writes at TPM Muckraker, this also means that Rep. John Murtha could potentially pay for the legal fees of Paul Magliocchetti, the founder of the PMA Group, as Magliocchetti is a former Murtha staffer. Now you know where your campaign contributions are going.

I think that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke spoke for all Americans when he testified yesterday that the one thing that has angered him the most during our current economic crisis is the ongoing bailout of A.I.G. So far, A.I.G. has received approximately $186 billion from the U.S. government in a bailout to protect the insurance giant's huge losses. But, as Josh Marshall noted over the weekend, the bailout of A.I.G. isn’t really a bailout of A.I.G., but a bailout of the counterparties that had insurance policies to back up their mortgage-backed securities (now known as toxic assets).

Despite the knowledge that the bailout of A.I.G. is, in fact, a bailout of counterparties, A.I.G. and the Federal Reserve refuse to disclose the identities of the counterparties. In a Senate Budget Committee hearing yesterday, Sen. Ron Wyden berated Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke about the failure to release the names of the counterparties, the actual bailout recipients. Bernanke stated that “under normal conditions” the counterparties would “have a presumption of privacy”. As the New York Times' Joe Nocera put it two days ago,

“Gobs of tax money is going to bail out unnamed companies — and yet we aren’t allowed to know who they are, and are supposed to take it all on faith. You know those awful cases you read about every once in a while where a child dies in a troubled home — and then the state health department won’t divulge any information out of “privacy concerns”? This strikes me as the financial equivalent of those cases. As excuses go, it sure is convenient.”

It truly does not make sense that the taxpayers need to be left in the dark about whom we are bailing out. Representative government requires that our representatives and us little people know what we are spending our money on, particularly if that money is meant to prop up the bad decisions of private enterprise.

In conjunction with this transparency problem comes word that A.I.G. is paying two Washington spin machines, Hill & Knowlton and Burston Marsteller, to do positive PR for the belly-up company.

A.I.G. probably needs a spin army after the way they operated outside of regulations and oversight, essentially running a scam insurance business that could collapse numerous foreign banks. I'm just curious as to how a company that is nearly wholly owned by the U.S. government can pay for expensive PR firms.