Ron Paul's Questions for Ben Bernanke

by Gary North

I have good news and bad news for Ben Bernanke.


First, the good news.



Gary North

 I AM OUT OF THE OFFICIAL LOOP

I am no longer Dr. Paul's research assistant. If I were, I would be working at least half of my time on compiling questions for Dr. Paul to ask Dr. Bernanke.

I would be actively cultivating leakers from inside all 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks (private), as well as staffers working for the Board of Governors (government). There is always some disgruntled employee ready to open locked closets. I would be encouraging every one to become the equivalent of Bradley Manning. "Purloined documents R us!"

Thirty-four years ago, I held that position. Dr. Paul was then the Congressman with the least amount of seniority in Congress. His term came to an end only eight months after it began. He was elected to fill an interim position, due to a resignation, and he lost by 268 votes out of about 180,000 in November. He came back two years later, but by then, I was off to greener pastures.

In those days, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System was Arthur Burns. He had been inflating like mad, trying to pull the economy out of Nixon's 1970–71 recession, then Ford's recession in 1975. Gold bottomed in the summer of 1976 at $105. It would never again get anywhere near that price.


Dr. Paul was already becoming Dr. No – voting no on most spending bills. He opposed the extension of funding of the International Monetary Fund. I wrote the dissenting paper on my first full day on the job – a Saturday. Back then, staffers could come into the Capitol office buildings without police checkpoints of any kind, at any hour. Those were the good old days.

Dr. Paul was not in a position to give much trouble to Dr. Burns. A year before, the head of the House Banking Committee had been Wright Patman, an anti-FED Congressman from east Texas. He had been giving the FED trouble for 25 years. It was Patman who, along with fellow Greenbacker Jerry Voorhis, got the law changed in the early 1940s to force the FED to return to the Treasury all money above expenses. That was the greatest single victory Congress ever had in dealing with the FED. But Patman had been ousted in a coup by younger Democrats in 1975. They revolted against the old seniority system in the aftermath of Watergate. The new chairman, Henry Reuss [ROYCE], was pro-FED. There was no way that there would be any confrontations allowed under Reuss.


Ben Bernanke was 23 years old.

That was then. This is now. That's the bad news for Dr. Bernanke.

"QUESTIONS! WE'VE GOT QUESTIONS!"

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell

Central Bank Secrecy and Corruption

End the Fed

by Matt Stoller

“We probably know more about tribes in the Amazon jungle than we do about the real nature of power in the United States. Neither political science, nor history, nor economics do very well on this.” ~ Tom Ferguson

Something new is happening around the contours of monetary policy. It’s becoming part of our popular political landscape. We saw this a few weeks ago, when Sarah Palin injected into the 2012 presidential race the idea of fundamentally reorganizing the Federal Reserve’s mandate. Republican Mike Pence, Senator Richard Shelby, and a host of other Republicans have jumped on this concept, and there will soon be legislation introduced to make this happen.


Beyond Republican politicians, the public is beginning to rethink our monetary order. A YouTube video on quantitative easing has over 3 million views. The video slams the Fed for missing the dotcom bubble, the subprime crisis, for being fundamentally undemocratic and unaccountable, and for being engaged in collusive dealings with Goldman Sachs. Financial blogs and CNBC discuss the Fed, and its associated characters, with deep insight and passion. And Bernanke drew 30 no votes in his confirmation hearing in 2009, the most ever for such a position, just four years after drawing almost none. The market nearly crashed on the possibility that Bernanke’s nomination would fail before the White House stepped up aggressive lobbying efforts. On the left, the last few years saw a remarkable grassroots coalition of economists and activists to bring transparency to the central bank, joining a long-sought libertarian crusade. I was a staffer for Rep. Alan Grayson, who was working with that coalition to require an independent audit of the Federal Reserve. Tomorrow, because of provisions put into Dodd-Frank by Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressmen Grayson and Ron Paul, the Federal Reserve will release details of its 2007-2010 emergency loans to the web.

The Rest is at Lew Rockwell

The beginning of the end.....

by Mike Calpino

Last week’s elections were historic, there is no question about that. Voters were fed up with our lurch into socialism and with the rise of the TEA party movement, questions of government spending, control and intrusion were finally being discussed openly and honestly. Many people became involved in politics for the first time, recognizing that politics affects everything in our daily lives and if we ever want to regain some control over our lives (i.e. our liberty) politics can no longer be ignored or left up to the "political class." All this represents a good trend.

TEA partiers and conservatives who pinned their hopes on Republicans are likely to be very disappointed, however. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the new TEA party/conservative Republicans represent a small minority of the total number of Republicans in office, at all levels of government. Because of this, it will be very difficult for them to resist the pressure the establishment has on "public servants". The "system" has been in place for a long time and the beneficiaries of that system are not about to let these upstarts disassemble it. Even if they have the character to resist the pressure to conform, the radical steps necessary to save us from catastrophe will never move beyond their sparse numbers and may be beyond the imaginations of most of them.

What am I talking about? Here are some necessary steps for starters. Ending the Federal Reserve and pegging the dollar to gold. Ending all entitlement programs, a particularly difficult pill to swallow for Republicans who have been demonized for phantom proposals to do so in the past. Remove all the tax and regulatory impediments to businesses so we can return manufacturing to the United States. Eliminate public sector unions and approximately eighty percent of government jobs. Bring the military home from the vast number of places it is around the world and slim it down to a size that will ensure a devastating defense, not a costly and ineffective offense, or even less unsuccessful nation building. Can you see even one of those things happening in the next two years, or even four years with a Republican president and congress? I certainly do not.