By Steve Watson
In spite of a large number of protesters who are clearly aware of the fact that the greatest threat to the global financial system comes not directly from Wall Street but from the privately owned Federal Reserve cartel, the official “list of specific demands” of the Occupy Wall Street movement makes absolutely no mention of the Fed whatsoever.
By way of reminder lets take a brief look at the Fed’s contribution to the financial black hole the U.S. and the world is now faced with.
While most Americans still believe that the Fed is a government agency, in reality it is a completely privately run entity that has since 1913 had total control over the U.S. monetary system.
The Fed has never been audited and is accountable to no one, not even the Congress.
Essentially, an unaccountable private monopoly creates the money, sets the interest rates, regulates the banking system and makes secret loans to whoever they want.
The Federal Reserve has more power over the U.S. economy than any other institution and nobody can overrule any decisions that they make.
Forget Wall Street for a second, It was the Fed that created unlimited amounts of money and credit out of thin air, fundamentally destroying the possibility of any real sustainable economic growth and ultimately delivering the current financial crisis to the world.
Since that time the Fed has pursued the exact same policy of excessive spending, debt expansion and monetary inflation, thus compounding the problems that caused the crisis in the first instance.
Instead of instituting programs to pay off or liquidate debt, the Fed has twice opted to vastly increase the money supply and continue the devaluation of the U.S. dollar.
The Fed chairman and other officials act as if their unfettered power is a god given right, and they express loathing and contempt when they are simply asked to describe and explain their actions to Congress and the American people.
The Fed has refused to comply with congressional demands for transparency and withheld internal memos, in spite of freedom of information act requests.
Despite court rulings ordering disclosure, the Fed consistently refused to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank accepted as collateral and dumped on the American people.
The amount of US taxpayer money committed to bailouts by the Fed since 2007 is estimated to be well over $25 trillion. The figures by far exceed the combined cost of major historical events, accounting for inflation, dating back over 200 years.
When finally a chink of transparency was visible in the Fed’s records via a one-time limited audit earlier this year, mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it was revealed that the Fed made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their Wall Street buddies at the height of the crisis.
Not only did the “too big to fail” banksters and even major foreign banks get trillions in nearly interest-free loans, but the Fed actually paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program! Thus the very financial institutions that caused the financial crisis were paid by the Fed to manage all of these bailout loans.
The top recipients were Citigroup who received $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion.
In addition, approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign financial institutions all over Europe and Asia.
The Fed banks around the country are largely governed by a board of directors that includes officers of the very banks they’re supposed to be overseeing.
As economists and experts such as Joseph Stiglitz – former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – have noted, this represents a huge conflict of interest and completely undermines a democratic political system.
Wall Street is entirely dependent upon the Federal Reserve for the criminality it has gotten away with.
The banksters are completely aware of this fact, which is why in 2009 the heads of nine of the biggest banks in the derivatives market, including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America, secretly lobbied to keep derivatives under Federal Reserve “oversight” and away from real scrutiny.
As reported by The New York Times, they all met secretly to discuss how to use the lax regulation and institutional secrecy of the New York Fed to shield their credit-default swaps business from prying eyes and attempts at meaningful regulation.
Despite all of this, the Fed has remarkably been provided MORE authority to oversee the economy by the U.S. government.
The Fed has been involved in other unsavory activities as well, such as loaning billions to Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein and covering up the source of funding for the Watergate burglars. The Fed also shipped billions of dollars to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion, which then went “missing”.
We are barely scratching the surface here, yet it is already obvious that any meaningful protest against the economic hell we are being driven head long into MUST be directed in at least some part, if not in total, toward the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve system is solely responsible for the U.S. government becoming embroiled in constantly increasing amounts of debt.
As long as the U.S. remains beholden to the Fed, the debt will continue to rise exponentially.
As Thomas Jefferson warned:
I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Jefferson wished to see all government debt prohibited outright:
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
Instead of highlighting such home truths regarding the Fed, the #OWS list of demands calls for the arrest of Wall street criminals “who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis”.
Yet it fails to name any potential candidates for arrest, nor does it list any crimes they have committed, instead inserting the sentence “insert list of the most clear cut criminal actions here” and encouraging readers to watch the documentary film “Inside Job”.
While it does make some cogent points regarding the repeal of provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, and the trillions going to waste on overseas invasions, the OWS demands list also calls on Congress to pass the Buffet Rule on fair taxation, which as we have consistently argued, will do nothing to touch Wall Street, but everything to sink what’s left of the American middle class.
As we continue to highlight, the movement, though obviously composed of several diverse and well meaning groups of protesters, seems to be for the most part made up of impressionable liberals who are ripe for occupation themselves by leftist gatekeeper movements such as MoveOn.org.
Link:
http://theintelhub.com/2011/10/03/where-is-the-ows-demand-to-end-the-fed/
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