Well, good luck with that one Nancy. No one is getting any answers from the Federal Reserve or Ben Bernacke because they are not only stonewalling Congress, they apparently believe that they do not have to answer to anyone.
I'm trying to figure out when the Federal Reserve became a fourth branch of the Federal Government and who the hell do they answer to, if anybody.
Apparently members of Congress are starting to get really pissed off about the expanding role of the Federal Reserve System as it freely spends trillions of dollars to address the financial crisis while at the same time being immune from congressional oversight. Why are they immune? This is what I want to know. Who is really running the show here? The FED is like this closet 'CIA-Nazi Banking Secret Cartel' that believes they can get away with anything they deem necessary to use our tax dollars any way they please. Who the hell are these people?
Other Congressmen are asking the same question:
Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the highest ranking Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that his oversight panel should push the Fed for more transparency.
"The Fed is very opaque...In a nutshell, we want the Federal Reserve to have sufficient independence, but when Bernanke stands with the president as part of the president's agenda, we have to question whether we should be denied oversight," Issa told the Huffington Post.
"It's not a matter of having Bernanke in front of our committee on some quarterly basis. It's a matter of getting our questions answered and having transparency," he said. "It's not a question of their authority to commit [money], it's a question of oversight. So if we need to stop them, which would be our right, we could at least author a bill with knowledge."
But apparently this isn't the case:
As Matt Taibbi noted in his recent Rolling Stone cover story:
None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.
So it seems that although our Constitution states that it is Congress that has 'the power of the purse' this is not the case when it comes to the mysterious shadow banks involving the Federal Reserve. No one in Congress can audit them, ask for deliberations, be involved in decisions affecting our tax dollars on monetary policy matters.
So essentially what we have is a 'rogue' bunch of bankers, who are purposely keeping us in the dark and are calling all the shots that will include what happens to the future of our country refusing to answer questions to our Congress. Other Congressmen are moving towards what appears to be a power struggle with the Federal Reserve:
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), an outspoken freshman on the Financial Services Committee, wants four reforms made to the Federal Reserve. Grayson want an independent auditor, wants Freedom of Information Act requests to apply to the Fed, wants Board of Governor terms trimmed from fourteen to four years and wants all positions appointed by the government rather than banks.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, is pushing in the Senate for more Fed transparency. A similar bill in the House, authored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), has more than 50 cosponsors, including House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).
"The Constitution says we have to appropriate all dollars, which means technically the IOUs they are writing in fact aren't valid unless we later pay them if they come due," said Issa. "So this full faith and credit that they have does have to be looked at in that sense. And I'm not trying to change the status quo of these institutions. But when you look at 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 trillion dollars, all these things, you say 'Wait a second here.'"
As long as the Fed acts in concert with the administration, said Issa, it should be treated as part of it. "It is not surprising that there would be coordination between the central bank and the treasurer of the country," he said. "The question is: Is that coordination subject to oversight?"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Below is the legislation that Bernie Sanders has put forward:
The full text of Sanders' resolution:
SEC. __. SENSE OF THE SENATE TO INCREASE TRANSPARENCY AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE.
(a) Findings.--The Senate finds that--
(1) On January 28, 2009, Doug Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, provided testimony to the Senate Budget Committee, that the Federal Reserve has committed nearly $2.3 trillion - more than three times the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program - to programs it created to deal with the financial crisis - with the potential for this taxpayer assistance to grow to at least $4.5 trillion.
(2) On March 7, 2009, Bloomberg News reported that "Government loans, spending or guarantees to rescue the country's financial system total more than $11.7 trillion since the international credit crisis began in August 2007."
(3) Unlike the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the American public does not know the names of the recipients of more than $2.2 trillion in taxpayer assistance provided by the Federal Reserve since the beginning of the current U.S. financial crisis.
(4) While Congress has spent numerous hours of debate on the merits of federal investments totaling less than $1 billion, not one significant debate has been held on the floor of the Senate or the House of Representatives in Congress on whether the Federal Reserve should be exposing American taxpayers to more than $2.2 trillion in risk.
(5) On March 3, 2009, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, told the Senate Budget Committee that since the start of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has provided assistance to "hundreds and hundreds of banks," but would not name the banks, how much assistance they have received, what they are doing with this taxpayer assistance, or what the specific terms of this assistance were.
(6) The American people have a right to know who the Fed is lending over $2.2 trillion taxpayer dollars to, how much they are receiving and what the Fed is asking in return for this money.
(7) Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, there has not been a single, comprehensive independent audit of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Banks.
(8) During the worst financial crisis in our nation's history since the Great Depression - a crisis which has led to the largest taxpayer bail-out ever -- the Federal Reserve has a responsibility to the American people to explain what the Federal Reserve is doing with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate that--
(1) the Comptroller General of the United States should be provided with the resources and authority necessary to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks; and
(2) the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (in this Act referred to as the `Board') should publish on its website, with respect to all lending and financial assistance facilities it has created to address the financial crisis since March 24, 2008, the following:
(A) the identity of each business, individual, or entity to which the Board has provided such assistance;
(B) the type of financial assistance provided to that business, individual, or entity;
(C) the value or amount of that financial assistance;
(D) the date on which the financial assistance was provided;
(E) the specific terms of any repayment expected, including the repayment time period, interest charges, collateral, limitations on executive compensation or dividends, and other material terms; and
(F) the specific rationale for providing assistance in each instance; and
(G) what that business, individual, or entity is doing with this financial assistance.
I love Bernie Sanders, but I think it's time to go much further than this, because apparently the Federal Reserve has literally 'taken over our government' and nobody has the guts to just say that out loud because they have been allowed to become so powerful.
As Thomas Edison astutely observed:
"If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people."
The Federal Reserve has outlived it usefulness in our nation. It has become exceedingly clear that the bubbles that Alan Greenspan and now Ben Bernacke have continued to push are for one purpose only: to enrich those Bankers and Wall Street crooks that took us down the road to Perdition and ultimately to enrich the coffers of the 'shadow banks' that privately own the Federal Reserve.
There is another way out. President Lincoln used it.
The bankers had Lincoln’s government over a barrel, just as Wall Street has Congress in its vice-like grip today. The North needed money to fund a war, and the bankers were willing to lend it only under circumstances that amounted to extortion, involving staggering interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln saw that this would bankrupt the North and asked a trusted colleague to research the matter and find a solution. In what may be the best piece of advice ever given to a sitting President, Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois reported back that the Union had the power under the Constitution to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:
"Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes . . . and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender . . . they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution."
The Greenbacks actually were just as good as the bankers’ banknotes. Both were created on a printing press, but the banknotes had the veneer of legitimacy because they were "backed" by gold. The catch was that this backing was based on "fractional reserves," meaning the bankers held only a small fraction of the gold necessary to support all the loans represented by their banknotes. The "fractional reserve" ruse is still used today to create the impression that bankers are lending something other than mere debt created with accounting entries on their books.1
Lincoln took Col. Taylor’s advice and funded the war by printing paper notes backed by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes or "Greenbacks" represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were tradeable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln’s government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. The Greenback was not the only currency used to fund these achievements; but they could not have been accomplished without it, and they could not have been accomplished on money borrowed at the usurious rates the bankers were attempting to extort from the North.
Lincoln did not invent government-issued paper money. Rather, he restored a brilliant innovation of the American colonists. According to Benjamin Franklin, it was the colonists’ home-grown paper "scrip" that was responsible for the remarkable abundance in the colonies at a time when England was suffering from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Like with Lincoln’s Greenbacks, this prosperity posed a threat to the control of the British Crown and the emerging network of private British banks, prompting the King to ban the colonists’ paper money and require the payment of taxes in gold. According to Franklin and several other historians of the period, it was these onerous demands by the Crown, and the corresponding collapse of the colonists’ paper money supply, that actually sparked the Revolutionary War.2
The colonists won the war but ultimately lost the money power to a private banking cartel, one that issued another form of paper money called "banknotes." Today the bankers’ debt-based money has come to dominate most of the economies of the world; but there are a number of historical examples of the successful funding of economic development in other countries simply with government-issued credit. In Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, the Depression conditions suffered elsewhere were avoided by drawing on a national credit card issued by publicly-owned central banks. The governments of the island states of Guernsey and Jersey created thriving economies that carried no federal debt, just by issuing their own debt-free public currencies. China has also funded impressive internal development through a system of state-owned banks.
Here in the United States, the state of North Dakota has a wholly state-owned bank that creates credit on its books just as private banks do. This credit is used to serve the needs of the community, and the interest on loans is returned to the government. Not coincidentally, North Dakota has a $1.2 billion budget surplus at a time when 46 of 50 states are insolvent, an impressive achievement for a state of isolated farmers battling challenging weather.3 The North Dakota prototype could be copied not only in every U.S. state but at the federal level.
Why aren't we doing this? What is keeping our nation from reclaiming it's own control of it's money sources? Why are we trusting a privately owned institution such as the Federal Reserve (who we pay huge amounts of interest to) that will not even answer the questions our own Congress is asking them to provide transparency and honest answers about our nation's future?
You know, President Lincoln was a genius in my humble opinion, and I think it is way past time to take a page out of his book. There is an old saying: Everything old is new, and we need a new way out from under the clutches of the Federal Reserve who is now trying to gain control of our what will be our new regulatory rules and regulations. There is something very dangerous going on here. What is the Federal Reserve hiding from us, and who the hell do they think they work for anyway? How is this any different from having an outside 'small rogue nation' running our affairs? It isn't and that is the point. They have complete autonomy and answer to no one. How did this happen, and why is it being allowed to continue under such a critical time in our history?
As Ellen Brown wrote in her interesting article on this matter:
Today we the people are starting to understand our banking and monetary system, and we are shocked, dismayed, and furious at what we are discovering. The wizard behind the curtain turns out to be a small group of men pulling levers and dials, creating an illusory money scheme that, behind all the talk and bravado, is mere smoke and mirrors. These levers are controlled by a privately-owned, unaccountable central bank called the Federal Reserve, which has recently dispensed billions if not trillions in funds to its banker cronies, without revealing where these monies are going even under Congressional inquiry or in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As Chris Powell pointed out recently in conjunction with an FOIA request brought by Bloomberg News, which the Fed declined to comply with:
"Any government that can disburse $2 trillion secretly, without any accountability, is not a democratic government. It is government of, by, and, for the bankers."
There was a time when private central bankers were the heavyweights in control, able to run their ultra-secret agenda with impunity; but that era is coming to an end. The bankers are scrambling, trying to patch up their crumbling creations with schemes, bailouts and sleight of hand. That effort, however, must ultimately prove futile. As investment adviser Rolfe Winkler said in a recent article:
"The great Ponzi scheme that is the Western World’s economy has grown so big there’s simply no ‘fixing’ it. Flushing more debt through the system would be like giving Madoff a few billion to tide him over. Or like adding another floor to the Tower of Babel. To what end? The collapse is already here. The question is: How much do we want it to hurt? Using the public’s purse to finance ‘confidence’ in a system that is already kaput may delay the Day of Reckoning, sure, but at the cost of multiplying our losses. Perhaps fantastically."
The bankers are on the run, feverishly trying to use the collapse of the current system to steer us toward an "Amero"-style North American currency, or a one-world private banking system and privately-issued global currency that they and only they control. We the people will not accept those solutions, however, no matter how bad things get. We demand real solutions that empower us, not further enslave us.
Abraham Lincoln had such a solution. President Obama, you can finally bring his monetary solution to fruition. Manifest the vision of Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, and we the people will make sure you are placed in the pantheon of our greatest leaders and are revered for all time. America’s greatest days can still be ahead of us; but for this to happen, we need to expose and root out the deceptive banking scheme that would enslave us to a future of debt and increasing homelessness in this great country our forefathers founded. The time has come for democracy to rise superior to a private banking cartel and take back the power to create money once again. Such a transformation would represent the most epochal and empowering shift that humanity has ever seen. As you recently said:
"This country has never responded to a crisis by sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best. Throughout our history we have met every great challenge with bold action and big ideas."
Your words are a timely reminder of our long legacy of action and bold solutions in the face of adversity. Can we do this? Yes we can.
Information on Ellen Brown:
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from "the money trust." Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/...
Treasury Timothy Geithner was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Goldman, Sachs of New York is one of the organizations that own portions of the Federal Reserve.
You do the math.
As Matt Taibbi points out in his recent article connecting all the dots:
Add this together with the obscene giveaway that is the Toxic Asset program Geither has just devised (Goldman Sachs "expressed interest in participating in the plan as an investor," according to the WSJ), and you have an amazing situation. Between the Bush and Obama administrations, you have a bailout program that has now figured three ways to funnel money to Goldman, Sachs: via AIG, via TARP, and now via this trillion-dollar "Public-Private Investment Program," which basically lends huge amounts of money to investors and provides guarantees against heavy losses. It’s free money, state-subsidized profiteering at its most naked.
http://trueslant.com/...
Time to take a good hard look at what President Lincoln did during times where boldness was critical and required. The Federal Reserve has worn out it's welcome on the soil of this nation. They are indeed a 'rogue nation' that needs to be thrown out on their asses. The question is how did the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950 happen? The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." This act is not only unconstitutional it allows the Federal Reserve to run it's own 'loan shark' business on the side without having to answer to anyone. I wonder if Nancy Pelosi and Congress are actually serious about forcing the FED to answer questions? May like so much of what is going on it's just a 'another sternly worded question.'
There is a huge power struggle going on here folks, and I wonder where it's all going to end up.
Not coincidentally, North Dakota has a $1.2 billion budget surplus at a time when 46 of 50 states are insolvent.
If little old North Dakota can figure this out, don't you think it's about time we took back control of our own money, away from the Federal Reserve?
Thanks for your interest and comments.