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Looting Frenzies: Thinking about the Federal Reserve while Nursing a Cheap Beer
Hey, let’s go into McGlinchey’s, the cheapest bar in Center City. When I first entered this place in 1982, I was only 18, so to make myself look somewhat legal, I wore an old man jacket, bought at a thrift store for 2 bucks. Inside, I was thrilled to discover that a draft of Rolling Rock was only 50 cents, and a hotdog 25. Now they are $1.25 and 75 cents, respectively. This low life bar, my kind, is still dirt cheap, but that’s inflation for you.
Inflation is your dollars deflating. It’s your money going down, down, down, depreciating as the Federal Reserve injects more bucks into our banking system. And since the biggest banks own the Federal Reserve, the Fed is the banking system. Each time these banks give cash to themselves to be lent to you at interest, your dollars become a bit more worthless.
Though perceived by most Americans as a governmental agency, even the Federal Reserve admits that it is “an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.” As “an independent entity,” the Fed does not suffer from Presidential control or Congressional oversight. Though its Board of Governors is appointed by the President of the United States, each of its seven members serves for 14 years [!], with only one member replaced every two years. Out of the limelight, these shady gentlemen are more enduring than all of our Presidents, Senators and Congressmen, and certainly more powerful, since they represent banks that bankroll all of our politicians, who are their abject servants. The Fed can also inflate, deflate, strangle, rape or bleed dry the global economy. With such leverage, it does not care that a 2011 Congressional audit, the first ever, managed to discover that in less than three years the Fed lent $16.1 trillion to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, as well as banks in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. This astronomical sum is greater than our national debt or even the GDP, so where in hell or Foggy Bottom did it come from? Nowhere. From thin air. With Godlike power, the Fed can just conjure up cash, and thus just about everything else, into being. Here a mansion, there a yacht, and now, with a few keyboard strokes, a brand new slave, or many, many slaves!
Subconsciously thinking, Daddy, send us money, the infantile sees each gross increase in the money supply as dollars sloshing through the system, benefiting everyone, but if quantitative easing were a magic bullet, Weimar and Zimbabwe would be success stories. If we could just monetize our way out of trouble, then why not pay all of our debts right now with newly minted cash, and bypass the painful interest payments? Why not revive this economy by sending each citizen a huge check? Not 600 piddly bucks, like Bush did, but a billion dollars for each man, woman, child and dog? It can’t be done because our creditors aren’t dummies. As Vladimir Putin said about us, “They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar.” So Russia, China, Japan, Brazil and our many other creditors are neither reassured nor amused when Allan Greenspan explained that “the U.S. can pay any debt that it has because we can always print money to do that.”
The Federal Reserve used to tell us how many dollars were in circulation, but in March of 2006, it stopped. A sane man would deduce that it wanted to hide how much inflation it was generating, but, no, this sudden opacity was merely a cost cutting measure, so explained the Fed, the profligate, money pumping Fed.
To grasp immediately how much your dollar has depreciated, look no further than the price of gold. In 1982, an ounce was less than $500. Now it has breached $1,800. Surging gold price also indicates that people are losing faith in their economic, political and social system, and that they fear the immediate future. When gold shoots up, this house is coming down. Wander into any Vietnamese or Cambodian neighborhood, you’ll see an inordinate number of jewelry stores selling gold. People who have been traumatized by war and dictatorship don’t trust in banks or even money, but only gold to help them survive any societal upheaval.
So if the dollar is sinking, why accumulate it? First off, foreign governments must have dollars to buy oil, since no country can sell petroleum for anything but the dollar. The only renegades to this rule are Iran and Venezuela. Accepting Chinese yuans for oil, they have constantly been threatened by Washington. If euros, yens, yuans or rubles were generally accepted for oil, the United States would quickly become irrelevant and no one would have to send us real products for our increasingly worthless paper.
This petro dollar arrangement is enforced by the U.S. military. As Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi have found out, America will rain bombs on your people’s heads if you try to escape from this racket. Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libya’s oil fields. He also proposed a common currency for Africa. In their trade with each other, African countries could then be free from the tyranny of the dollar, but such insolence could not go unpunished. America will hold a gun to your head to make sure you go on biting its bucks.
Buy this, buy that, screw me, or rather, make love to my mirage. (photo: Michael Holden)Making money on interest, banks generate debt for you and me, and for the government itself. This system is buoyed up from us drowning, and to keep us spending beyond our means, it must make us delirious with wants. Hence, this nonstop seduction everywhere you look. Don’t think or reflect. Lust. In 1982, there was only one television in McGlinchey’s. Now, there are four. As music blares, the unceasing come-ons flicker above our heads. Buy this, buy that, screw me, or rather, make love to my mirage.
Traditional virtues such as prudence and self control have been jettisoned, to be replaced by an insatiable appetite that breeds frustration, boredom, numbness and violence. In 2009, five blocks from here, a flash mob attacked a 56-year-old man riding home from work. They beat him unconscious and stole his credit cards. One of the perpetrators then bought over $5,000 of Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and other high-end merchandises. He had the loot delivered to his front door, so that’s how twenty-one-year-old Stephen Lyde was caught. Though poor and obviously inexperienced with a credit card, Lyde was lusting after all the finer things possessed by those at the very top, and just like many of them, he was willing to commit violence. Unlike white collar crooks, however, Lyde pounced on his victim directly. If America were to start yet another war, how many stockholders would rejoice?
Our banking system makes money out of nothing, lends us cash that it doesn’t even have, and with Washington as its protector and enforcer, ensures that what we own is worth less and less, while we must work more and more to make payment after unending payment, with compounding interest, penalties, fees and whatever else it feels like tagging on at the end. The Federal Reserve, then, is not an institution with “public purposes and private aspects,” but exactly the opposite. Like our federal government itself, it is a cartel with ruthless, private objectives hidden behind a public façade.
The Fed has private purposes and public aspects, and as long as this parasite controls our wallets and government, you can count on more wars, bankruptcies, foreclosures, increasingly severe inflation and looting frenzies of every kind.
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Show AllBen Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, on the day that the Declaration of Independence was approved by Congress, proposed the following phrase to be the seal for our country:
"Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God."
Once the people realize they have no choice, they will arise. The key is educating those who aren't aware, and acting collectively in a legally binding, democratic, deliberative and peaceful manner. No mob rule. Our Fathers would have wanted it that way; that's why they left us so many tools.
I don't have a problem with tactically supporting the sociopath from Texas on issues on which there is agreement between his band of John Galts and us. But I will not support his accession to executive power, no way, no how.
I think the greatest danger is the threat to the biosphere. Refresh my memory of Ron Paul's promotion of environmental regulation, would you?
I think the greatest danger is the threat to the biosphere. Refresh my memory of Ron Paul's promotion of environmental regulation, would you?
Now before you tell me that Ron Paul is no worse than Bachmann or Obama, which is probably true, allow me to say I won't be voting for them either. :-)
What is it about the Federal Reserve that brings out the crazies? Does anyone think we can run a modern industrial state of 300 million without a central bank? If it bothers you so much, give it another name. Change the board of directors procedures. Put it under congressional control. And I'll bet that our economy will change exactly 1 percent. That's because it'll still be run by the ruling class.
The country was run without the Fed from 1776 -1913. It was supposedly created in response to a bunch of financial panics. Since then we had one major depression, probably a second one that is going on now. Interests rates for savers are somewhere around one percent, banks are given money at close to 0% they aren't loaning it out. I could go on and on. I for one am pretty unimpressed with the Fed.
Alec,
[What is it about the Federal Reserve that brings out the "crazies"? ]
Legal tender laws which, in an infationary environment that serves ONLY the central banks, amount to grand larceny or counterfeiting; take your pick but you are still screwed.
Revoke the legal tender laws so I can DEMAND payment in whatever currency, commodity or precious metal I choose, and I'll have no problem with the fed because they will have no currency use dictatorship over me.
true that little will change by changing the players and not the game.
so lets change the game. have community banks in every state; "controlled" by their shareholders - the local people; backed by the govt; incentivized to reinvest in local community projects; that feed into a central bank that rivals the Fed.
Great article - with the exception of "the banks own the Federal Reserve" - that is not true. The Fed and all the world's "Central Banks" are run by a tiny group of rat-bastards that created the entire "fractional reserve" banking system. They are headquartered in London, Tel Aviv and Basil, Switzerland.
They are all Zionists and are actually the "Synagouge of Satan". Read Rev. 2:9 and 3:9. They are behind all the evil in the world and are the "great deceivers".
They own the banks, the media, the search engines, finance, health care, insurance, the stock market and most defense industries. They have owned the USA since 1913.
Fo rthe imbeciles here that joke about the Fed - you are the very definition of idiocy.
as disturbing as i find your post, or the verses, verse 3:9 is rather hopeful. also, found this lovely nugget:
“When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his
dainties: for they are deceitful meat.” Proverbs 23:1-3.
Well then, who ARE they and WHERE do they reside?
The oligarchy ignores Ron Paul, the man who almost beat Bachman in the Iowa Straw Poll mostly because of his insistence on auditing their Fed.
My understanding is Bachmann won that vote by issuing busloads of free tickets to a local concert under the provision that those getting them had to vote for her in the poll/
the Fed has recently been audited: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
that's the good news. the bad news is it just doesn't matter.
and as much as i respect Ron's respect for individual liberty, his kind of thinking embraces all natural rights while it simultaneously guts govt so that none of the rights can be enforced. we need a more humanistic libertarian that would not strip the basics in exchange for granting us our constitutional rights.
A handy follow-up to this article:
www.realecontv.com/videos/central-banks/what-happened-to-america.html
Great Article, Thank you for writing it. The Right wing masters don't like Ron Paul calling them out on foreign relations policies that pit countries against America and his insistence that the Fed be shut down. The media is being controlled not to mention his name on the air as you may have noticed. All stations are doing what they are told who and when to follow certain politicians. This is how the fix is being made and going down. We are watching American political manipulation in action everyday. The more we know about this manipulation of banks and politics, the more transparent it becomes.
What a creepy existence we have right now in this stage of geopolitical empire building by the U.S. and it's controlling families.
Wouldn't it be nice if Christian fundamentalist quoted scripture like Proverbs 22:7 Just as the rich rule the poor, the borrower is slave to the lender.
Of course the "Good News" has a solution. Care for the least of these per Mathew 25:40.
Maybe more relevant to this article is when the Old Testament lifted the debts of the poor and starving in Nehemiah 5. Can you imaging a world bankruptcy followed by creating money through government spending rather than debt? Seems like a Godly principle to me. Try reading Deuteronomy 15 if you don't believe me. Now that the Jews and Gentiles are one through Jesus the elimination of everyone's debts is only natural per this scripture. The right wingers would have a fit if these thoughts took hold.
Great article by the way.
Mr. Dinh is a good writer.
I believe the housing crash can be majorly resolved with a significant reduction in interest rates.
The banks are now getting money from the Fed at near zero interest rates via the discount window. This has increased the profit margin on bank loans.
The Fed establishes interest rates based on "private purposes", not "public interests" as this author has explained. The Fed fought hard to not allow interest rate decisions to be audited.
Making the Fed a truly federal agency would also eliminate a ton of interest payments the Treasury makes to banks and the Fed. With China gone as a major backer of government debt, the Fed stepped into that role by printing money (Quantitative Easing).
Presidents including Obama are refusing to print money at the Treasury to cover operating deficits as the "Debt Ceiling Law" allows. Instead they use the excuse of government defaults to threaten Congress into raising the debt ceiling to a much higher level than required to cover the deficit, specifically to allow the Fed to print money and then turn around and lend it to the U.S. Treasury.
Ron Paul has been right about the Fed and the banking sector from the beginning.
Fight the banksters, fight the endless wars, fight NAFTA / WTO.
Support his campaign anyway you can.
https://secure.ronpaul2012.com/
Donate to Ron Paul
Not to demean the incredibly good writing of Linh Dinh, or the above most educational comments, but how about: ///
Ron Paul for President of Texas
?
Does the United States really need another goddam GOP Texan in the White House (and yes I am thinking about Rick Perry, who said yesterday or thereabouts that more printing of money by the Fed would be, what was it?, "treasonous." He may have a point. ///
In any case, those here who argue that the Fed printing money that is a government transfer only to the banks is NOT inflationary I believe are wrong. Hidden inflation has been moving through our economy for several years now, due to the bail-outs, and it can only get worse. ///
There already exist retail supply-chain issues. I have my own short list of things I expected to be able to purchase on demand, but which are now hard to find. I'd bet that you have such a list also, if you think about the consciousness of the absence. ///
I'm drinking a cheap beer, too! I just hope they keep filtering the water. ///
The "official" inflation rate is mid 3 to 4 per cent annual. My credit union one-year CDs are paying around 0.9 per cent. Sioux Rose recently reported on CD at another posting that she was earning much less in Florida (My credit union is in Ohio...). What does it mean when we who were taught to be frugal and save after the Great Depression our parents experienced, have done exactly that, and now are being ripped off for buying into the lie?
Several days ago someone threw out an old iron vise, rusted as hell, along with several old saws. Last evening I started removing the rust from the vise. It will take some work. Seems around a century old, made in Ohio, a valuable find that I kept from the landfill. I know it will work. ///
It is amazing how much "stuff" is secretly stored in this country! ///
-30-
If Ron Paul were Vietnamese, you couldn't distinguish him from Linh Dinh. And Ron Paul's diagnosis of our money problem is incorrect. Radical distrust of government is the problem with our money because it is the government, the sovereign authority, that ordains our monetary system, declaring whether it will be public or private. In 1913, our government declared that our monetary system would be private, with a thin facade of public accountability. By 1971, the association of the currency with precious metals was finally cut.
It is believed by Paul & Dinh that precious metals are the guarantors of monetary stability. This is false. Government is the guarantor of monetary stability.
The problem is that the people of the US do not control their government. Therefore, they distrust it. Therefore the monetary system is owned and operated by incompetents, namely the rich and wannabe rich, who operate in their own interest.
A monetary system must be operated in the public interest or it will not work. Money is a public utility, regulated by government, not privately owned precious metals, or privately issued bills of credit.
This article is so full of misinformation I don't know where to start. In fact it has to be the worst article I've ever read at Common Dreams. The description up front of the Federal Reserve is all wrong, especially the implication the Fed is somehow independent of the other branches of government and can go its own way at will. This is untrue, as the below quote from Wikipedia explains. Its board of governors and its chairman are appointed by the president and it operates under congressional oversight. Its "private" aspects are not some insidious infiltration but simply the fact that private banks have accounts at the Fed.
The Fed does not and is not "printing money" willy nilly. This is something Texas wack job Rick Perry has accused it of doing. Perry has called for Chairman Bernanke to be arrested for treason for doing so. What the Fed does do is help manage the running of the economy through raising and lowering interest rates. The Fed also receives the taxes paid by US citizens, taxes levied for the purpose of withdrawing buying power from the economy so it doesn't overheat, which would cause inflation. The government taxes NOT to raise revenues but only and solely for the purpose just stated.
"Our banking system makes money out of nothing, lends us cash that it doesn’t even have, and with Washington as its protector and enforcer, ensures that what we own is worth less and less," This would be true if the rate of inflation has been steadily rising in recent years, but it hasn't. In the past decade from year to year it has fluctuated but the mean rate over the decade has been around 3 to 4 percent.
But how could there be inflation during a recession??? Our current problem is that available goods and services are not being bought, leading to unemplyment. This false specter of inflation, falsely attributed to the federal deficit (which currently is at a level roughly the same as it has been for years, including in boom times) is what has caused Obama and congress to insist that Social Security and Medicare be cut. The reason for cutting these is as nonsensical as the idea that these programs have something to do with the deficit. They don't as they are funded by their own resources separate from the federal deficit.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907.[2][3][4] Over time, the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System have expanded and its structure has evolved.[3][5] Events such as the Great Depression were major factors leading to changes in the system.[6] Its duties today, according to official Federal Reserve documentation, are to conduct the nation's monetary policy, supervise and regulate banking institutions, maintain the stability of the financial system and provide financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions.[7]
The Federal Reserve System's structure is composed of the presidentially appointed Board of Governors (or Federal Reserve Board), the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks located in major cities throughout the nation, numerous privately owned U.S. member banks and various advisory councils.[8][9][10] The FOMC is the committee responsible for setting monetary policy and consists of all seven members of the Board of Governors and the twelve regional bank presidents, though only five bank presidents vote at any given time. The Federal Reserve System has both private and public components, and was designed to serve the interests of both the general public and private bankers. The result is a structure that is considered unique among central banks. It is also unusual in that an entity outside of the central bank, namely the United States Department of the Treasury, creates the currency used.[11]
According to the Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve is independent within government in that "its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government." However, its authority is derived from the U.S. Congress and is subject to congressional oversight. Additionally, the members of the Board of Governors, including its chairman and vice-chairman, are chosen by the President and confirmed by Congress. The government also exercises some control over the Federal Reserve by appointing and setting the salaries of the system's highest-level employees. Thus the Federal Reserve has both private and public aspects.[12][13][14][15] The U.S. Government receives all of the system's annual profits, after a statutory dividend of 6% on member banks' capital investment is paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2010, the Federal Reserve made a profit of $82 billion and transferred $79 billion to the U.S. Treasury.[16]
re: "The description up front of the Federal Reserve is all wrong, especially the implication the Fed is somehow independent of the other branches of government and can go its own way at will. This is untrue, as the below quote from Wikipedia explains. Its board of governors and its chairman are appointed by the president and it operates under congressional oversight. Its "private" aspects are not some insidious infiltration but simply the fact that private banks have accounts at the Fed."
The insidious infiltration seems to be your sophistry and dissembling on the matter. I won't claim to be an expert on the Fed, but if what I'm reading isn't completely off-base, you are the one spreading misinformation.
* * * * *
From, "Web of Debt", by Ellen Brown, pgs 162-163
"Fed apologists today argue that since the interest, or most of it, is now rebated to the gov't, no net advantage has accrued to the Fed. But that argument overlooks a far greater windfall to the banks that are the Fed's owners and real constituents. The bonds that have been acquired essentially for free become the basis of the Fed's "reserves" – the phantom money that is advanced many times over by commercial banks in the form of loans.
Virtually all money in circulation today can be traced to government debt that has been 'monetized' by the Federal Reserve and the banking system. [...]
Thus the money supply has expanded by a factor of about 10 for every dollar of federal debt monetized by the Federal Reserve, and *all of this monetary expansion consists of loans on which the banks have been paid interest*. It is *this interest*, not the interest paid to the Federal Reserve, that is the real windfall to the banks – this and the fact that the banks now have a money making machine to back them up whenever they get in trouble with their "fractional reserve" (i.e. essentially fraudulent) lending scheme. "
* * * * *
In 'The Creature from Jekyll Island, Ed Griffin writes that "modern money is a grand illusion conjured by the magicians of finance and politics". The function of the Federal Reserve, he says, "is to convert debt into money. It's just that simple". The mechanism may seem complicated at first, but "it is simple if one remembers that the process is not intended to be logical but to confuse and deceive." The process by which the Fed converts debt into money begins after the government.s bonds are offered to the public at auction. "The Fed takes all the gov't bonds which the public does not buy and writes a check to Congress in exchange for them... There is no money to back up this check. These fiat dollars are created on the spot for that purpose. By calling these bonds 'reserves' the Fed then uses them as the base for creating 9 additional dollars for every dollar created by the bonds themselves. The money created for the bonds is spent by the government, whereas the money created on top of those bonds is the source of all the bank loans made to the nation's businesses and individuals. The result of this process is the same as creating money on a printing press, but the illusion is based on an accounting trick rather than a printing trick."
The accounting trick that generates 99% of the US money supply today is the *sleight of hand* of private banks.
Furthermore,
"The Federal Reserve maintains that it is now audited every year by Price Waterhouse and the Gov't Accounting Office (GAO), an arm of Congress; but some fuctions remain off limits to the GAO, including its transactions with foreign central banks and its open market operations (the operations by which it creates money with accounting entries). Thus the Fed's most important – and most highly suspect – functions remain beyond public scrutiny.
* * * * *
So the problem is not specifically the exchange of Federal Reserve notes for US bonds, and the interest accrued from that exchange, but comes from the additional fractional reserves 'magically created' by this exchange, which are subsequently highly abused by the private banking cartels.
Additionallly, there is the aspect of accountability. Because this arrangement is highly favorable and profitable to upper eschelon investors, and because these investors are inherenly protected by congress, with whom they have a cozy, and mutually beneficial relationship, the idea of the Fed being properly monitored and regulated is essentially a joke... Sadly, one that only a tiny minority get to laugh at. (But laughing they certainly are)
Compounding the problems raised above, is the private banking cartels' access, due to the repeal of the Glass Steagall act in 1999, to unlimited investment opportunities in the global market. This was acheived, "following assurances that these banking functions would be separated by "Chinese walls" within the organizations. "
"With the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, the lines between [investment and commercial] banking have become blurred, and it is not hard to envision bank traders having ready access to some very favorable loans. [...] These banks are not just investing in short-term Treasury bills on which they collect a modest intersest, as they have traditionally done. They are buying whole businesses with borrowed money, and they are doing it not to develop the productive potential of the business but just to reap a quick profit on resale.
Not only are they using their reserves to set up cushy loans for themselves, they are using these funds for the highly suspect practice of speculating on foreign currencies (to reap profits and destablilize these currencies) and placing huge derivatives bets on the open market... essentially gambling with jaw-dropping sums of money that by all rights belongs to "We The People". And we should know its being funded by us... because when the bets fail, who is asked to come to the rescue, every time? Not the soaked with cash billionaire bank stock-holders...Their ivestments are 'too big to fail'... but instead, it's us, who else?!
"Our banking system makes money out of nothing, lends us cash that it doesn’t even have..."
Banker Warren Mosler, one of the few people who understand our monetary system, has a favorite saying: "The government neither has nor does not have dollars." Since the US creates its own currency, it has complete control over it. Cash, money is not a bunch of things or commodities that have any real existence, but simply numbers on a spreadsheet that is the federal monetary system. Together the Federal Reserve, which can be thought of as a checking account that contains all the funds of all the banks in the US, and the US Treasury, which can be thought of as a savings account containing all the funds invested in US Treasury bonds, work together to ensure the spending power of the nation is at the right level to prevent inflation or deflation. By the way, the federal government cannot, by definition, go bankrupt. When you pay your taxes, say $2,000, the checking account of your bank at the Fed is lowered by $2,000 and the appropriate account at the Fed is raised $2,000. If you pay your taxes in currency, after the bookkeeping above is completed, the greenbacks you turned in are put in a shredder. This gets across how immaterial dollars actually are.
Mosler uses the analogy of a football score board. No one expects there to be some physical manifestation of scores aside from the numbers up on the board. The scorekeeper isn't expected to "show" his scores to prove he has them. US dollars are just the same. They are scores that can be used to track economic activity.
In light of this, the above quote from the article is essentially meaningless.
"The Fed has private purposes and public aspects, and as long as this parasite controls our wallets and government, you can count on more wars, bankruptcies, foreclosures, increasingly severe inflation and looting frenzies of every kind."
In order to fight an enemy, you have to know who he/she is. The creator of these miseries is not the Fed but the US government itself. In order to fight against what it is doing, we need to take back our democracy. That is what we should be focusing on, not tilting at windmills.
Riiight... because if it's on Wikipedia then it must be true.
Damn it all, Linh, now McGlinchey’s is going to be so crowded that no one will go there anymore. (Apologies to Yogi Berra - "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded)
This essay and the discussion of it is most important. It deserves and needs to be widely distributed. It could save the the republic and democracy and liberty. How can we do it?