Republicans suck, but you gotta love this guy.
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The Senate just voted, 96-0, to audit the Federal Reserve. Soon, we will know what the Federal Reserve did with the trillions of dollars that it handed out during the financial crisis.
A few months ago, such a vote would have been unthinkable. One senior Treasury official claimed he would fight to stop an audit ‘at all costs’. Senator Chris Dodd predicted that an audit would spell economic doom, while Senator Judd Gregg attacked accountability for the Fed as “pandering populism”.
Today, both the Treasury Department and Senator Dodd support this amendment. As for Judd Gregg, he was just on the floor of the Senate discussing — of all people — 19th century populist Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.
What happened?
People Power is what happened. We built a coalition of people on the right and the left, ordinary citizens and economists, ex-regulators and politicians, all with one question for which we demanded an answer: “What happened to our money?”
No longer can Ben Bernanke get away with saying, “I don’t know.”
Now, we’re going to know who got what, and why.
Releasing this information will show that the Federal Reserve’s arguments for secrecy are — and have always been — a ruse, to cover up the handing out of hundreds of billions of dollars like party favors to the Wall Street favorites who brought the American economy to the brink of ruin.
But our work isn’t quite done. The Senate audit provision isn’t as strong as what we passed in the House. The Senate provision has only a one-time audit, whereas what we passed in the House would allow audits going forward. There will be a conference committee that will merge the provisions from the two bills.
The need for audits and oversight over Fed handouts going forward is great. The financial crisis isn’t over, and neither are the Fed’s secret bailouts. Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve announced it was going underwrite the Greek bailout by lending dollars to the central banks of Europe, England, and Japan. The loans may never be paid back, the Fed accepts the risk that the dollar will strengthen in the meantime, and the interest rate charged by the Fed is very likely at below-market rates. So such loans are in effect just a subsidy, to bail out foreigners.
The Fed has not been chastened. It is bolder and more of a rogue actor than ever. It’s clear that without full audit authority going forward, the Fed will continue to give out “foreign aid” without Congressional or even Executive permission.
And it will do so in secret.
So we will be fighting on to get a full audit from the conference committee.
But let’s not lose sight of what we have accomplished so far – real independent inquiry into the Fed, and its incestuous relationships with Wall Street banks. For the first time ever.
Our calls, emails, lobbying, blogging, and support really mattered. We made it happen.
Today, we beat the Fed.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/11/865680/-We-Beat-the-Fed
As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.
These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.
Happily, with a track record like that, “the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%,” KP writes. “The Americans could certainly risk it.”]
http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/
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