BAILOUT?  WHAT BAILOUT?

Posted at 7:55 p.m. ET

Look, it's only the taxpayers' money.  It's not as if it's real money.  Fox News reports that some of the recipients of federal bailouts are having difficulty finding out where the cash is going.  You know, it's such a burden:

WASHINGTON — It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going?

But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they either can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,"' said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

We're declining to?  Is that what the man said?  The arrogance here is beyond belief.  Well, maybe it's not.  Maybe this is the kind of attitude that got us into trouble in the first place. 

Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.

"We manage our capital in its aggregate," said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Alabama-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.

And...

Lawmakers summoned bank executives to Capitol Hill last month and implored them to lend the money — not to hoard it or spend it on corporate bonuses, junkets or to buy other banks. But there is no process in place to make sure that's happening and there are no consequences for banks who don't comply.

Doesn't this give you confidence in your government?

"It is entirely appropriate for the American people to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent in private industry," said Elizabeth Warren, the top congressional watchdog overseeing the financial bailout.

But, at least for now, there's no way for taxpayers to find that out.

The American people may actually wake up one day and get angry.  Frankly, it would be about time.  There's a stoicism out there that's infuriating. 

Lawmakers say they want to tighten restrictions on the remaining, yet-to-be-released $350 billion block of bailout money before any more cash is handed out. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the department is trying to step up its monitoring of bank spending.

"What we've been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we're doing this," Paulson said at a recent forum in New York. "So we're building this organization as we're going."

That still doesn't tell us how the money is being spent.  A mechanism for determining that should have been in place from day one.

But Warren said she's surprised she even has to ask.

"If the appropriate restrictions were put on the money to begin with, if the appropriate transparency was in place, then we wouldn't be in a position where you're trying to call every recipient and get the basic information that should already be in public documents," she said.

And she is correct.  We may learn that a lot of the money was wasted, or that some of it went to failing executives who wanted one last fling.  This could get very bitter.  It's a story to watch, at the same time that we watch what GM and Chrysler do with their federal loan.

December 22, 2008.