| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2009 4:28 am Post subject: |
|  | | | | Cowboy | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2009 9:26 pm Post subject: |
| Poor Cowboy.  | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 1:35 am Post subject: |
|
I didn't support Mr 35 delegates.
| | | | zionistneoconsux | | Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:00 am Post subject: |
| Don't click on ZB's link above! That page will put a virus on your computer if you don't have top notch virus software. Here is the threat from that page:
Threat Report
Total threats found: 1
Small-whitebg-red Viruses (what's this?)
Threats found: 1
Here is a complete list:
Threat Name: WM.Npad.A
File name: Chap1718.doc
Location: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/7543/documents/Chap1718.doc
Probably a virus from some gov source checking to see who is interested in such a thread so that they can search your computer. Just a "heads up" from a concerned anti-ZBer. | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 12:10 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/3616/flaherty6.html
Myth #6: The Federal Reserve has never been audited
BY: Edward Flaherty, Ph.D. Department of Economics College of Charleston, S.C.
An often repeated Federal Reserve conspiracy theory is that the Fed has never been audited. "Every year Congress introduces legislation to audit the FED," wrote Thomas Schauf, "and every year it is defeated."7 Why? Conspiracy theorists such as Schauf, Gary Kah (1991), and Pat Robertson (1994) say the reason is that the Fed is involved in an international plot to subvert U.S. sovereignty and create a one-world government. Naturally, the Fed will not permit Congress to audit its activities, lest it discover this treasonous plan and shut it down.
How much truth is there to this claim? Has the Fed ever been audited by Congress or anyone else? The Fed controls U.S. monetary policy and can act with a great deal of independence from Congress and the executive branch. Clearly, such awesome power requires some sort of regular public oversight at the very least to insure that the Fed is doing its job efficiently and effectively, and to detect any abuses of power or fraud. This essay explores the claim that the Fed has never been audited and finds that it is completely false.
A Brief History of Federal Reserve Audits
Since its inception in 1913 the Federal Reserve System has been subjected to a variety of financial and performance audits by Congress, the executive branch, and private accounting firms, although responsibility for this task has shifted from time to time. From 1913 to 1921 the Board of Governors, then known as the Federal Reserve Board which sets monetary policy and regulates the activities of the Federal Reserve Banks, was audited annually by the U.S. Treasury Department. In 1921 Congress created the Government Accounting Office (GAO) and assigned it to audit the Board until 1933. In the Banking Act of 1933, Congress voted specifically to remove the Board from the GAO's jurisdiction. From 1933 to 1952 audit teams from the twelve Federal Reserve Banks performed the annual examination of the BOG's books. From 1952 to 1978, the Board, under authorization from Congress, decided to employ nationally recognize accounting firms to conduct the audits of itself to insure independent oversight. This provided an external evaluation of the adequacy and effectiveness of the examination procedures.1
In 1978 Congress passed the Federal Banking Agency Audit Act (31 USCA 714). It placed the Federal Reserve System back under the auditing authority of the GAO. The Act significantly increased the access of the GAO to the Federal Reserve Banks, the Board, and the Federal Open Market Committee (the FOMC). Since then, the GAO has conducted over 100 financial audits and performance audits of the three Federal Reserve bodies.3
Scope of GAO Audits
Some of the more important GAO performance audits of the Fed have been in the areas of bank supervision, payment systems activities, and government securities activities. In the first area, the GAO examined how well the Fed was enforcing its regulatory powers over its member banks. In 1992 it drew attention to the Fed's sluggish compliance with regulatory reforms mandated by the Foreign Bank Supervision Act of 1991. In examining the Fed's payment system activities, the GAO made the Fed aware of how its pricing policies for such services as check-clearing affected private suppliers of check-clearing services, and also suggested ways to speed up the process of check collections. Security markets for government debt is a crucial market, and GAO performance audits of the Fed have lead to more openness in the primary dealer system, particularly concerning the disclosure of price information. The GAO is also involved in several ongoing performance audits of the Fed such as analysis of risks and benefits of interstate banking, regulation of derivatives, and the budget of the Federal Reserve system.2
Audits By Private Accounting Firms
Financial audits of the Fed are also conducted regularly. Each Reserve Bank is audited every year by independent General Auditors who report directly to the Board of Governors. These examinations involve financial statement audits and reviews on the effectiveness of financial controls. Each Reserve Bank also has its own internal audit mechanisms. The Board contracts each year with an outside accounting firm to evaluate the audit program's effectiveness. Price Waterhouse conducted an audit of the Board's 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 financial statements and filed this report in the Board's 1996 Annual Report (nearly identical ones appear in other Annual Reports):
We have audited the accompanying balance sheets of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Board) as of December 31, 1995 and 1994, and the related statements of revenues and expenses for the years then ended. These financial statements are the responsibility of the Board's management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on these financial statements based on our audits.
We conducted our audits in accordance with generally accepted accounting standards and Government Accounting Standards issued by the Comptroller General of the United States. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audits to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement. An audit includes examining, on a test basis, evidence supporting the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. An audit also includes assessing the accounting principles used and significant estmates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall financial statement presentation. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.
In our opinion the financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Board as of December 31, 1995 and 1994, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the years then ended in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles.
As discussed in Notes 1 and 3 to the financial statements, the Board implemented Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 112, Employers' Accounting for Postemployment Benefits, effective January 1, 1994. In accordance with Government Accounting Standards, we have also issued a report dated March 25, 1996 on our consideration of the Board's internal control structure and a report dated March 25, 1996 on its compliance with laws and regulations.4
The Board has also contracted with Coopers & Lybrand to conduct annual financial audits of the Board and the individual Federal Reserve Banks.
Exemptions to the Scope of GAO Audits
The Government Accounting Office does not have complete access to all aspects of the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Banking Agency Audit Act stipulates the following areas are to be excluded from GAO inspections:
(1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;
(2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, open market operations;
(3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or
(4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to items.
In 1993 Wayne D. Angell, then a member of the Board of Governors, submitted testimony before a House subcommittee on the reasons for the restrictions on GAO access. He commented, By excluding these areas, the Act attempts to balance the need for public accountability of the Federal Reserve through GAO audits against the need to insulate the central bank's monetary policy functions from short-term political pressures and to ensure that foreign central banks and governmental entities can transact business in the U.S. financial markets through the Federal Reserve on a confidential basis.2
In reference to a bill that would lift the constraints placed on the GAO's audit authority over the Federal Reserve, Angell stated,
The benefits, if any, of broadening the GAO's authority into the areas of monetary policy and transactions with foreign official entities would be small. With regard to purely financial audits, the Federal Reserve Act already requires that the Board conduct an annual financial examination of each Reserve Bank...The process of conducting financial audits is reviewed by a public accounting firm to confirm that the methods and techniques being employed are effective and that the program follows generally accepted auditing standards...Further, a private accounting firm audits the Board's balance sheet...Finally, and more broadly, the Congress has, in effect, mandated its own review of monetary policy by requiring semiannual reports to Congress on monetary policy under the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978...In addition, there is a vast and continuously updated body of literature and expert evaluation of U.S. monetary policy. In this environment, the contribution that a GAO audit would make to the active public discussion of the conduct of monetary policy is not likely to outweigh the disadvantages of expanding GAO audit authority in this area.2
For more on GAO restrictions, you can search the Government Printing Office website for GAO report T-GGD-94-44, entitled "Federal Reserve System Audits: Restrictions on GAO's Access."
The Budget of the Federal Reserve and Other Oversight
The budget of the Federal Reserve system is determined by each Bank and the Board of Governors. Stephen L. Neal, the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy in 1991, stated that "Congress plays no direct role in setting or authorizing the Fed's budget. Control of its own budget is an essential component of the independence the Fed must enjoy."1 Additional oversight of the Federal Reserve System derives from the ability of Congress to expand or to contract the Fed's powers. On numerous occasions Congress has seen fit to change the Fed's structure, alter its mission, and grant it new or different powers. In 1935 Congress changed the composition of the Board of Governors to give it more independence, and it allowed the Board to determine the discount rate for all Federal Reserve Banks rather than allow each Bank to set its own rate. In1978 Congress mandated the Fed's new goal to be full employment and price stability. In 1980 Congress granted the Fed new regulatory powers over non-member banks.
Many other government reports on the audits of the Federal Reserve system are available on-line through the Government Printing Office website. Three interesting GAO reports on Federal Reserve finances and performance are:
Federal Reserve Banks: Innaccurate Reporting of Currency at the Los Angeles Branch, (9/30/96, GAO report AMID-96-146).
Federal Reserve Banks: Internal Control, Accounting, and Auditing Issues, (2/9/96, GAO report AMID-96-5).
Federal Reserve System: Current and Future Challenges Require Systemwide Attention, (6/17/96, GGD-96-128).
Conclusion
It is obvious that the Federal Reserve System is and has always been audited. It is difficult to imagine how Kah, Schauf, and other conspiracy theorists could not have come across this evidence in the course of their research. Perhaps they are merely poor researchers. Or maybe they are reluctant to acknowledge facts which contradict their basic thesis. Either way, their credibility among skeptical readers takes a sharp hit by making such obvious factual errors.
For more on how the Federal Reserve system is audited, see the New York Federal Reserve's FedPoints.
References
1. "The Budget of the Federal Reserve System," Hearing before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy...[House], July 18, 1991, U.S. Government Printing Office, Serial no. 102-59.
2. H.R. 28: "Federal Reserve Accountability Act of 1993," Hearing before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy...[House], October 27, 1993, U.S. Government Printing Office, Serial no. 103-86.
3. Public Law 95-320, "Federal Banking Agency Audit Act," July 21, 1978.
4. Annual Report, 1996, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
5. Kah, Gary (1991), En Route to Global Occupation. Layfayette, La.: Huntington House.
6. Robertson, Pat (1994). The Turning Tide. Dallas: Word Publishing.
7. Schauf, Thomas (1992). The Federal Reserve. Streamwood, IL: FED-UP, Inc.
8. United States Code Annotated, U.S. Government Printing Office. p> | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:29 am Post subject: |
| Ron Paul and Peter Schiff validated yet again with the following:
The American Empire Is Bankrupt
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090614_the_american_empire_is_bankrupt/
Posted on Jun 14, 2009
By Chris Hedges
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
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