Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.)
wins (again) the most significant victory of his congressional career. He has
taken his pet issue since the 1970s–the unwarranted power and secrecy of the
Federal Reserve –- from something pretty much no one but him cared about six
years ago, through a bestselling book and mass movement by 2009, the second time
he’s gotten the House of Representatives to vote to widen the government’s
powers to audit the Fed’s activities.
Huffington Post with details about the
vote , and on Paul’s Democratic ally equally upset with the Fed’s lack of
transparency, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio):
In a rare moment of
bipartisanship, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill by Rep. Ron Paul
(R-Texas) to audit the Federal Reserve.
The first ever GAO
(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out
in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the
Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and
Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve
audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house
bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out.
Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the
audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets.
Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100
year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this
morning.
What was revealed in
the audit was startling:
$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been
secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere
from France to Scotland.
From the period between December
2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly
bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and
governments. The
Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan
program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out
at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even
informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is
obvious – the American public would have been outraged to find out that the
Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find
jobs.
To place $16
trillion into perspective, remember that the GDP of the United States is only
$14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government
spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is
being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion.
Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into
consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether
$16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations
around the world.
In late 2008, the
TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing
banks and companies. That was a blatant lie
considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As
is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while
Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche
Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received
hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.
“This is a clear case
of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for
everyone else.”- Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
When you have
conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint(R-SC) and Ron Paul(R-TX) as
well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting
against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right
versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in
Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to
audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity
onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.
Americans should be
swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected
group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks
and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the
bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of
Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the
realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder
the world economy.
The list of
institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found
on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows:
Citigroup: $2.5
trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion
($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of
America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom):
$868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541
billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287
billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion
($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of
Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France):
$175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
And many many more including banks in Belgium of
all places
View the 266-page GAO
audit of the Federal Reserve (July 21st, 2011):
Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke participated in a live webcast of a town hall meeting
with educators on Thursday, September 30, 2010 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. EDT. During
this session, Chairman Bernanke answered teachers’ questions about the Federal
Reserve and the economy.
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