Senate Adopts Sanders' 'Audit The Fed' Amendment

Sanders agreed to limit the scope of the audit to emergency lending only, exempting other Fed activities.

You do realize this renders the audit worthless. Have some friends who trade in the big firms? Ask them after a couple drinks how their relationship with the FED works. It will blow your mind, and now that the audit has been sterilized the world will never know how that relationship really works and how it undermines our sovereignty.

Would Obama have really had the stones to veto the bill if it allowed for a full-scale audit of the Fed?

Watch out Bernie, you know what happened to other political figures that tried to rein the Fed in. The Morgans, Rockefellers and Rothschilds of the world just simply can't have anyone messing with their private money making machine.

An audit which doesn't include all the money which the Fed takes in and gives out isn't really an "audit."

Finding out what happened during the bailouts, and under what terms is significant.

So, there's two trillion that went to the financial industry.

There are 10% of our workers unemployed.

There are upwards to 20% of our workers underemployed (employed below their skill levels).

There are record foreclosures.

There are record bankruptcies.

And the financial industry is making record profits.

What could possibly be better?

Definitely a step in the right direction...good job Bernie, Alan and Ron.

This will not go away, it begins the process will lead to a bigger audit public airing.

The thing is this is simply too big and the time was so rushed that so much was done. This is no ordinary crisis it compares to the Civil War and Great Depression, whole institutions will be torn down.

The House bill included an amendment from Republican Representative Ron Paul that would extend congressional audits to monetary policy, a measure vehemently opposed by the Fed on the grounds it would compromise its independence.

If the Senate bill is approved, it will have to be merged with the House bill before a package could go to Obama to be signed into law. Analysts expect the Sanders amendment will survive that process, while the Paul amendment will not.

ex animo
davidfarrar

You know, I find it interesting where all these anti-fed stuff is coming from.

They are either from libertarians, which should be GLAD if the Fed was corporate own because government is SO evil!

People who thinks the Fed could had just let inflation rise a few percentages (and how exactly are they suppose to do that? Negative interest rates?)

People that cannot do a high grade scantron quiz on the fed and get above 50

Or people that think it is better that Congress or the President should control the money supply (while believing that every freaking one of them is corporate own)

Why can't they be audited? Doesn't this resistance to scrutiny suggest they have something to hide?

Numbers don't lie nearly as much as the people who keep track of them.

I think I now have Obama figured out. I really bought that hope and change stuff. But now I see that Obama is incredibly sleazy---like a good trial lawyer, he is a gifted orator and a very smart man, but a slimeball none the less.

His technique is to position himself as a supporter of populist legislation, but behind the scenes water it down with compromises and deals. The corporations get concrete concessions; the people get promises.

This is what happened with the health care reform bait-and-switch. Without the Public Option, it was worse than useless, since it made concrete concessions to big Pharma (no price negotiation, no re-importation of drugs) in return for mere promises (insurance companies supposedly cannot to drop patients with pre-existing conditions, but they continue to do so).

His pick of Elena Kagan shows that he really has no commitment to limiting legislative power, as does his dismissal of any investigation into Bush excesses (but relentless prosecution of government whistleblowers). His has yet to close Guantanamo or take serious steps to significantly reduce our commitment in Iraq. And his declaration that now is not the time to repeal DADT is identical to a poker player declaring that if his opponent raises, he will have to fold (and of course he wanted to fold all along).

And with this "Audit the Fed," something stinks to high heaven.

This bill faced extraordinary opposition from the Wall Street, the White House, and the Fed itself. Then, just by limiting the audit to emergency spending only, it passes without any opposition at all.

I think we are being sold a bill of goods. The same bait-and-switch will happening here as in health care---"emergency spending" will be narrowly defined so that the real shenanigans are hidden and no real audit will be performed. Then Obama will crow about what landmark legislation this is, while meanwhile nothing more will be heard about the audit.

Knowing what I now realize about Obama (i.e., he's a sleazeball), I think I can predict what his future legislative record will be. This week we will get a climate bill from Senators Kerry and Lieberman which no doubt will call for more drilling, more nuclear plants, and support for the sham of clean coal in exchange for promises from polluters to limit emissions. But the bill will be written in an unenforceable way, and polluters will carry on as usual.

Also coming down the pike is the issue of net neutrality. If Obama plays is to form, he will craft a bill that enshrines in law the ability of corporations to charge what they want, driving out competition, in return for some concessions that are unenforceable but he will still trumpet.

I really have had it with Obama. Like other commenters pointed out, there is no excuse, with a Democratic majority into both houses, for Obama to be appointing corporatists like Kagan. Except that it is now become clear that it truly is his own ideology.

A key question is why did Sanders cave in, allowing the bill to be essentially neutered? After all, if this got 96-0, then surely there must have been some variation of the bill with real teeth that could get, say 70-26.

This bill lets everybody off the hook -- giving everybody an opportunity to say they voted for bringing sunshine to the Fed, knowing full well that there will be nothing like a real audit. and we most certainly will NOT bring sunshine upon the day to day corruption of this institution.

Bernie for President!

Reading back over the comments, I think tytester might have hit on the change that took this bill from a "no way in hell" to "we're all in." It's a critically important change because it prevents this bill from being a genuine audit.

If I understand correctly, the Fed is normally only chartered to buy treasury securities. But during the crisis the Fed either was permitted or simply took it upon itself to buy CDOs, which are simply bundled mortgages---many of which were stinky bad due to people being refinanced to terms they could never afford.

And it appears that the audit, which formerly covered all Fed transactions, would now not cover any CDO transactions, since it is not part of the original chartered function of the Fed.

Can this be true? Is it really just that simple? That would be like the TSA being allowed to strip search a terrorist to their heart's content, but not being allowed to look in the terrorist's baggage.

If that indeed is the change, then I'm even angrier than before, since that really means we're being played as fools.

I know things are frequently more complicated than can be simply stated. Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

But all these "Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF)" and "Section 13(3)" terms seem designed to make the eyes glaze over, while hiding the critical points from the layman's eyes.

I think I might have it exactly backwards---CDOs are in fact a traditional portion of the Fed's transactions, so therefore they would not be considered part of the "emergency" financial response and excluded from the audit.

But the CDOs are the heart and soul of what is wrong here. The mortgage companies made shitty loans, the banks bundled them into shitty CDOs, and then when they went bad the Fed bailed them out by loaning the banks good green money, accepting the shitty CDOs as collateral.

Someday the CDOs might improve and loose some of their stink. In that case the banks will repay the loans and get back their now-good investment. Otherwise, the Fed will figure out a way to get rid of them without the public getting wise---perhaps by sloughing them off on Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

Either way, the banks win and the taxpayer looses.

Why no audit of the military budget, the leading cause of our so-called deficit crisis?

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