Wall Street protesters set their sights on the Federal Reserve
By Jeff Smith
NEW YORK—The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement celebrated its first anniversary in late September with multiple major marches and rallies. They drew thousands of demonstrators at Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park but also at a series of sites scattered around the city.
One of the most major developments was OWS displaying a general understanding of the role of debt in the control—many called it “enslavement”—over individuals and the nation as a whole.
OWS went so far as to publish its Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, which educates debtors in nononsense terms on how to deal with lenders and how to get out of debt and live debt-free. The manual caused a sort of media storm when it was first handed out in the Wall Street area.
The OWS coalition has also been calling for the dissolution of the Federal Reserve. In this, OWS has been in agreement with the long-held economic teachings of a constellation of patriotic leaders including Lawrence Dennis, Jerry Voorhis, Eustace Mullins and Willis Carto over the last 60 years.
OWS remains today a coalition of groups united against financial crimes.
In a noted tactical move, a few days before the start of festivities, OWS organizers announced a new policy of scattering its demonstration sites. Organizers called the new policy an effective measure against continuing efforts by the New York City administration under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to contain and effectively place distance between the OWS coalition marchers and the general public they seek to reach.
This year, besides Zuccotti Park downtown, a second main center of activity developed in Washington Square. The new plan quickly gained the street name “whirling,” in which groups of OWS demonstrators were seen in such diverse locations as the Upper West Side, Midtown Manhattan and the posh Upper East Side, handing out literature and forcefully demanding that attention be given to the behavior of large financial institutions, especially the six most major banks which many demonstrators said was one of the two general groups which are in actuality running the country.
In so doing, the OWS movement has shown itself to be a permanent fixture in Manhattan, much to the consternation of Bloomberg and the various federal agencies that seek to shut it down.
Jeff Smith is a member of AFP’s Eastern Bureau.
Shocking Stats from Fed Audit
Historic audit of Federal Reserve reveals $16 trillion in handouts
By Pete Papaherakles
A report on the first ever audit of the Federal Reserve was released on September 1 and it is revealing some startling information. While only a partial review of the privately owned and controlled central bank, it is still considered a big win for Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
The audit was carried out by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) over the past few months. In the House, it came about as a result of an amendment introduced by Paul and Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), which was added to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill that passed in 2010. On the Senate side, Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) led the charge for a Fed audit. While the Senate watered down the original language, eventually a compromise between the House and the Senate was reached so that a limited audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending would then take place.
The landmark audit revealed that from December 2007 to June 2010 the Federal Reserve secretly gave out a staggering $16T to major U.S. banks and corporations as well as to large foreign banks in Europe. Although the Fed claims that these secret bailouts were loans, little of the money has been returned and it was all loaned out at 0% interest.
In late 2008 the big banks that caused the subprime debt crisis were given an unprecedented $800B in the government’s TARP “bailout.” But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Goldman Sachs alone received $814B from the Fed and others received far more than that.
The top eight Wall Street banks received over $10T. Citigroup led the pack with a whopping $2.5T. Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch both received about $2T each, while Bank of America got $1.35T. Bear Stearns was given $853B. JP Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers got $391 and $183B respectively.
Barclays was the biggest overseas winner with $868B, and the Royal Bank of Scotland received a hefty $541B—both from the Federal Reserve. Deutsche Bank got $354B, UBS of Switzerland was handed $287B, Credit Suisse got $262B, Bank of Scotland got $181B and France’s BNP Paribas received $175B. The remaining trillions went to many smaller banks and corporations mostly in the United States and Europe.
To put this $16T in perspective, if the Fed gave this money to the United States at 0% interest instead of their criminal banker friends, the entire national debt would be paid off.
Pete Papaherakles, a U.S. citizen since 1986, was born in Greece. If you would like to see AFP speakers at your rally, contact Pete at 202-544-5977.
Fed Critics Escalate Efforts
• Protesters continue to occupy financial institutions around the United States
By Mark Anderson
CHICAGO, Ill.—The Sun barely shines on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, since its cavernous location—neighboring the equally imposing Chicago Board of Trade and Bank of America buildings—is almost always in the shadows. This is appropriate when you consider that the U.S. dollar has, in effect, been privately imprisoned in a dark dungeon known as the Fed for nearly 100 years.
Will the American people muster both the courage and the unified focus to shine a light of relentless inquiry onto the Fed’s inner workings, spring the dollar free from its long exile and finally return to a sovereign, interest-free monetary system? Will they realize that unless the process of money creation is freed from the Fed’s clutches, stopping perpetual war and solving our other problems will always elude us?
Events covered by this writer September 22 in Chicago highlighted a growing awareness that can help in this titanic quest.
VIDEO OF THE EVENT (4:43)
“End the Fed” and “Audit the Fed” rallies took place in the Windy City and at the 11 other Federal Reserve Bank branches, among other locations, partly to call attention to S. 202—the Senate version of the audit-the-Fed bill. For over two months, since its arrival in the Senate, it has been marooned, even though the House version was passed resoundingly 327-98 on July 25.
In Detroit, activists from the group Campaign for Liberty gathered near the district offices of Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin to show the public that these two Michigan Democrats seem unwilling to support S. 202.
In Philadelphia, according to activist Mike Heise, the focus was less on S. 202 and more on general awareness of the Fed and the need to end it. Some 2,000 flyers were handed out by 80 activists, and an Army truck owned by an area resident became the speaker’s platform. Speakers included Keith Smith, who’s said to be a descendant of John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Police cooperated and escorted the truck as its occupants rallied from Philly’s Fed branch to city hall and back, sending the message on a sunny day that, as the Fed nears its centennial, the nation ought to be writing its obituary.
Chicago Fed foe Steve Wierich, a former bond trader at the Board of Trade, told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that, in his estimation, if the U.S. government ever nears or reaches the point where $1T a year is paid just as interest on the national debt, then the U.S. as we know it will grind to a halt. “The U.S. government could not afford it,” he said. Public action to tackle the Fed needs to transcend just auditing it, since the likelihood is high that any full-fledged inquiry will be answered by Fed officers with “a second set of books,” obscuring touchy things like the Fed’s currency exchanges and interactions with foreign banks, he added.
Young Adam Reierson, nine, handcuffed himself to the iron bars that protect the Chicago Fed’s windows, to symbolize the debt that the young are perpetually chained to under the Fed’s system.
“Whose idea was this?” AFP asked the boy’s father, Robin. “His,” he replied. Polite but persistent Federal Reserve police did make him uncuff himself from the building after about 20 minutes.
A few blocks away, at University Center, the American Monetary Institute (AMI) held its annual Chicago conference. This writer stopped by, as noted American monetary analysts Steve Zarlenga, the head of AMI, Michael Hudson and a number of foreign economists continued revealing the ills and evils of the private, debt-based money system and the need to act now to replace it with an interest-free, public monetary system, with gold backing seen as unnecessary.
AMI is rallying around an existing bill, H.R. 2990 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), which AMI and its backersmaintain would be the best way to make that replacement. This bill would nationalize the Fed and make it a bureau within the U.S. Treasury.
H.R. 2990 is based on AMI’s American Monetary Act, which descended from “the Chicago Plan” of the 1930s. That plan called for de-privatizing money and got some traction, but it was foiled by the bankers and their operatives, amid a general lack of public understanding. The economic model that inspired H.R. 2990 “learned from past mistakes,” AMI literature says.
Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor. Listen to Mark’s weekly radio show and email him at [email protected].
Push for Bill to Audit Fed Focuses on Senate Action
• Americans must rally behind S. 202 to achieve victory
A new AMERICAN FREE PRESS advertiser has a new message: let’s restore America. In fact, the name of their campaign is The Project To Restore America, which seeks nothing less than a way to restructure America’s governance. The advertiser, Stansberry & Associates Investment Research, began the project to “fix the underlying causes of our major national problems by establishing three new amendments to the Constitution.”
The three new amendments are a balanced budget at every level of government, sound money backed by our country’s large gold reserve and a change in the tax structure, so every American can keep 80% of their income.
The Project believes that “we have to fundamentally restructure our system. There must be more balance between rights and responsibilities. There must be some fundamental limit on spending and on taxes. And finally, we need a logical way to put a stop to the narrowing of the tax base. Everyone who votes should share in the burdens of government – otherwise the incentive will always exist to vote for more government spending, no matter how high taxes (and debts) rise.”
And the Project has made it easy to have your voice heard, and it’s all free. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection and some time. Currently, 55K Americans have signed onto the Project and that number is expected to climb to over 100K by year’s end.
The brain behind the Project is Frank Porter Stansberry, who founded Baltimore-based Stansberry & Associates Investment Research in 1999, which publishes Stansberry’s Investment Advisory, a monthly newsletter that discusses safe value investments. The newsletter is independent, which means it is not beholden to advertisers, so is free to tell the truth.
This year Stansberry launched a radio program, which is currently one of the top ten investment shows in America each week. Last year, Stansberry produced a video entitled “End of America,” which forecasts the end of America’s global economic dominance. It has gone “viral,” meaning it has spread rapidly and has been viewed by over 20M Americans, as well as being featured on many U.S. media outlets.
In order to gain a fuller understanding of the Project, AFP conducted an exclusive interview with Wendy Bidwell, the director of The Project To Restore America.
“We are trying to inform Americans about the real underlying problems of what we’re experiencing in our day-to-day lives. We’re also trying to do something about it. It’s real grass-roots activism. This is our way of holding our elected officials accountable, so that they would do what they said they would do, and what the constituents want them to do.”
The Project’s main push is the Audit the Fed bill, overwhelmingly passed in the House (H.R. 459), and languishing in the Senate, compliments of Harry Reid (D-Nev.), although polls indicate over 75% of Americans are in favor of the bill. Bidwell hopes the Project can force a vote on the bill, S. 202, by flooding Senators’ offices with petitions, through email and the good old-fashioned U.S. Post Office, referred to as “snail mail,” buy Internet-savvy types.
Bidwell is confident the Project can have an impact through a focus on S. 202.
“I think if we make our huge push around one bill, that’s already been drafted, that’s already been passed in the House, and we don’t stop putting on that pressure, then I think we’ll see a change.”
Visit the Project to have your voice heard.
Dave Gahary, a former submariner in the U.S. Navy, is the host of AFP’s “Underground Interview” series.
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