Email your Senators: Tell Them to Audit the Fed! Vote for Bernie Sanders' amendment!

Audit the Fed!

Senator Bernie Sanders is rallying the troops again for his amendment to the Senate financial reform bill to audit the Federal Reserve. While the Treasury Department is posting TARP bailout recipients and amounts on their web page, the Fed is quietly spending much more, as much as $2 trillion, but is not telling us who is getting the money or why. Sanders' bill parallels the Ron Paul-Alan Grayson language from the House bill. Now if Senate leaders would only put the amendment to a vote, we might find out where the Banksters hid the big bucks.

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/632/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3187

Audit the Fed: What Did They Do With Our Money?

By Dean Baker - May 1, 2010, 9:17AM

We're entering the final innings of the debate over financial reform. There are many important issues still up in the air including whether the law will do anything to break up the big banks and prevent them from engaging in risky trading. Remarkably, the place where the Obama administration has chosen to devote its energy is protecting secrecy at the Federal Reserve Board.

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed an amendment on auditing the Fed, which would allow the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the special lending facilities that it created during the crisis. This measure would allow GAO to find out who benefited from the more than $2 trillion lent out at the peak of the financial crisis and under what terms. It would make this information available to the relevant Congressional Committees, which would then decide whether disclose it to the public. (Bloomberg News Service won a case in a federal district court that the public already has a right to this information. The case is being appealed.) The Sanders amendment is similar in its wording to the audit language that was overwhelmingly approved by the House.

For some reason this has put the Obama administration into hysterics.

They are arguing that the independence of the Fed will be compromised if it has to tell GAO what it did with our money. This is a rather bizarre notion of independence. After all, most of this money was disbursed well over a year ago. The amendment is simply about requiring the Fed to be accountable after the fact. We would be outraged over the Department of Housing and Urban Development spending even $2 million with no accountability. We are supposed to accept that the Fed can lend out 2 million times this amount with no accountability to the public?

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/01/audit_the_fed_what_did_they_do_with_our_money/#more