As HR 1207 gains momentum and co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, the Federal Reserve is planning to fight the tide calling for an audit of its books by hiring a veteran lobbyist to “manage its relations with Congress,” according to Reuters.
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| Linda Robertson | |
The Fed plans to hire Linda Robertson, who previously worked for now-defunct energy company Enron, as well as the Clinton administration. She is currently head of government, community and public relations at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Robertson “spent eight years in senior positions at the Treasury Department, working for three secretaries: Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers,” a bio posted on The John Hopkins University website states.
Robert Rubin, as secretary of the Treasury, recommended that Congress pass legislation to reform or repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, while Lawrence Summers in the same capacity organized the looting of Russia, stripping one trillion dollars from Russia’s struggling economy in the name of the bankers.
“Members of Congress have chafed at the Fed’s bold use of its emergency powers and in particular its multibillion-dollar bailouts of investment bank Bear Stearns and insurer American International Group,” Reuters continues. “Critics also bristle at the Fed’s practice of maintaining the confidentiality of the companies that borrow directly from the central bank on the grounds that divulging their names would risk runs on those institutions.”
One such critic is senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In March, Sanders put it squarely to Fed boss Bernanke when he said “My question to you is, will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars?” Bernanke, of course, refused to divulge a single name and instead said the loans in question are “over-collateralized” and thus come with a heavy stigma for the unknown borrowers.
Sanders has put his weight behind a similar bill — S. 604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009. It was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on March 16, 2009.
As reported by Bloomberg, the Fed has entered into trillions of dollars in off-balance sheet transactions since last September. More specifically, the Fed extended $9 trillion in credit, which is $30,000 for every single men, women, and child in this country.
Early last month, Elizabeth Coleman, Inspector General for the Federal Reserve, told Rep. Alan Grayson of the United States House Committee on Financial Services that she does “not have jurisdiction to directly go out and audit Reserve Bank activities specifically.” See a video of Grayson questioning Coleman.
“We’re getting instructions from on high saying, ‘Don’t dwell on the past,’” Grayson was told before a hearing scheduled to investigate the Fannie and Freddie swindle.
Young Americans for Liberty profiles Congressman Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve, HR 1207.
HR 1207 would put an end to this sort of hide-and-seek nonsense. It would “amend title 31, United States Code, to reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States and the manner in which such audits are reported, and for other purposes.”
Rep. Ron Paul notes that only the Fed can inflate the currency and create new money out of thin air in secrecy without oversight or supervision. “Debasing a currency is counterfeiting,” Paul told Congress in February, 2008, “it steals value from every dollar earned or saved. “It robs the people and makes them poorer… it is the enemy of the working person. Inflation is the most vicious and regressive of all forms of taxation. It transfers wealth from the middle class to the privileged rich.”
**UPDATE**
From LRC's blog:
The central bank of the United States government--the Federal Reserve--thinks it needs a lobbyist, to work in Congress against Ron Paul. The Bloomberg story doesn't mention Ron, but instead interviews some ex-Fed hack in DC. But it is Ron Paul the Fed fears. What a great achievement of Ron's, to make what Andrew Jackson called "the Monster," the all-powerful, globe-dominating, special-interest funding. bankster-enabling, dollar-depreciating, business cycle-generating central bank worry about its image, for the first time since 1913. His presidential campaign alerted millions to the fact that we are being ripped-off by the Fed. His Audit the Fed bill (183 cosponsors!) scares the heck out of them. And wait until his End the Fed manifesto is published this summer! They'll need a whole corps of lobbyists, not that they will be able to protect what is in essence a criminal counterfeiting gang. (Thanks to Jacob Orlowitz)
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