Federal Reserve Free-for-All; Audit the Fed Bill Passes House

• How the globalists propose handouts from the Federal Reserve and why that’s a bad thing.

By Mark Anderson —

Monetary issues are coming to the fore like never before. Even while Swiss voters will decide fairly soon whether to institute a universal basic income—distributed to both the employed and the unemployed without means-testing—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), oddly, is chiming in on this concept of creating an economic “floor.”

The CFR and its flagship journal Foreign Affairs are the very essence of monopoly capitalism. The CFR has always championed the current “international system” that trans-nationalists treat as if it’s the Holy Grail.

But the players behind that biased system mainly consist of what the late financial author Ferdinand Lundberg called “the money bund.” That craven clique rigs the tax code and the monetary system to maintain a trans-generational death grip on “all things financial,” cloaked with claims of “merit.”

The CFR was founded in 1921, backed by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Schiffs and others with gilded surnames. Their unspoken linchpin of world control is the creation of money—its volume, its chief recipients and the terms of its creation.

Money comes into existence as debt. The Federal Reserve, in concert with the commercial banks, makes money happen on the condition that the United States Treasury prints the stuff, but the money must be handed over to the Fed, which funnels it back to the nation (in exchange for bonds) carrying interest. The print job costs the Fed just a few cents per note—regardless of the note’s denomination.

The corresponding harness placed on the enslaved masses includes the federal income tax, which services the annual interest payments on the national debt that surpasses $400 billion per year. So it’s no accident the infamous National Debt Clock hangs above the Internal Revenue Service entrance in midtown Manhattan.

Suddenly, the CFR wants the hoi polloi to receive money directly from the Federal Reserve, not as a loan, but as a grant, with no apparent strings attached.

Brown University academics Mark Blyth and Eric Lonegran trotted out their direct-payments proposal in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs. Their article, entitled “Print Less but Transfer More: Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly to the People,” contains—it seems—some valid points.

To wit, they wrote:

Today, most economists agree that like Japan in the late 1990s, the global economy is suffering from insufficient spending, a problem that stems from a larger failure of governance. Central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, have taken aggressive action, consistently lowering interest rates. . . . They have also pumped trillions of dollars’ worth of new money into the financial system. Yet such policies have only fed a damaging cycle of booms and busts . . . and now economic growth is stagnating while inequality gets worse.

But pumping trillions into “the financial system” means the money enters the upper economic loop where wagering and shadowy deals rule, and little is done for Main Street. At the local level, in the lower loop, there is a money drought.

Thus, in this two-loop system, Main Street is suffering from a tremendous lack of purchasing power versus the huge inventory of goods for sale and the total sum of the prices of those goods.

The CFR authors added:

It’s well past time, then, for U.S. policymakers—as well as their counterparts in other developed countries—to consider a version of [late economist Milton] Friedman’s “helicopter drops.” In the short term, such cash transfers could jump-start the economy. Over the long term, they could reduce dependence on the banking system for growth and reverse the trend of rising inequality.

The authors aren’t wrong in saying that the economy needs more spending strength, but what they don’t say is that unless monetary creation is shifted away from private banks, central or commercial, then more debt is incurred whenever money is created to deliver directly to citizens. At this early juncture, one wonders whether the CFR is trying to muddy the waters and prevent proper monetary reform.

Yet such monetary reform is the first step—wherein money creation would be installed in the U.S. Treasury. There, public United States notes, not private Federal Reserve notes, would be directly created by the government free of interest. Then, citizen payments in a basic-income scheme could be beneficial.

Past monetary visionaries, such as Clifford H. Douglas and Gorham B. Munson, saw the problem: If the money in circulation only comes from jobs, the costs that employers incur to pay employees end up in the final price tag, raising prices. And money from loans demands repayment with interest, thereby removing more money than was first introduced.

Faced with this paradox, Douglas, a British engineer, and Munson, an American academic activist, separately promoted “social credit,” based on the premise that an adequate sum of new money must regularly enter the economy, totally separate from the employment and loan systems.

Unlike the CFR proposal, social credit would end the private concession on money and credit creation, switch that creation to an interest-free footing and provide a regular citizen dividend to all people to supplement work income—with the volume of the sovereign money gauged to real production data. That way, you can’t have too much money chasing too-few goods (inflation)—nor too little money (deflation).

Audit the Fed Bill Passes the House

• 333 out of 435 congresspersons vote to check Fed’s books

By Mark Anderson

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Scores of issues are squeezing Congress this month, as all 435 House members nervously watch the calendar to make re-election plans. Rather surprisingly, Congress passed legislation to audit the Federal Reserve—the privately owned and controlled central bank that has possessed America’s monetary creation since 1913—by a vote of 333-92.

This good news began the evening of September 16 when Representative Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) revived H.R. 24, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2013.

Meadows was supported by Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Broun is known as a longtime Fed foe. He praised former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for getting the ball rolling on a meaningful Fed audit.

Meadows and the others recalled that the same bill in the previous Congress passed the House by a similarly wide margin, 327 to 98.

As Massie noted, the shadowy Fed needs to be just as accountable as all other federal agencies, but it isn’t.

Critics maintain that the insular Fed hides massive loan-and-bailout deals with European banks behind a veil of secrecy, conceals its monetary policy—and has nearly depleted the nation’s purchasing power on “Main Street” via a deflationary spiral. Yet that doesn’t fully reveal the treachery that occurs when money creation is privatized, with perpetual punishing interest loaded onto the backs of taxpayers across the generations.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) briefly countered that he feels partial audits have revealed sufficient information about the Fed’s workings to satisfy Congress. Cummings did add that H.R. 24 would make Congress privy to the private correspondence within the Fed on the touchy matter of monetary policy. He thinks that’s a bad thing, but that correspondence could reveal a great deal of useful information.

Monetary policy is molded at the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, meetings, to which members of Congress and even the president are not invited. Basic announcements of FOMC meetings and general recorded minutes of the proceedings are made public. However, much is not known about this most crucial of Fed operations.

The question that this newspaper has always raised is whether an audit will evolve into ending the Fed altogether. A deep audit is fine, but it’s not enough.

S. 209, the Senate version to more deeply audit the Fed, is also alive as the 113th Congress draws to a close late this year.

Time is of the essence. AMERICAN FREE PRESS readers should apply strong pressure on both houses of Congress to revive this movement to make the Fed Reserve history. Call Capitol Hill at 202-224-3121 or 225-3121.

AFP Roving Editor Mark Anderson is a veteran reporter who covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects. Write to Mark at [email protected].