On one front after another, the Federal Reserve is coming under siege. On Saturday, to begin, the hacker group calling itself ?Anonymous? issued a video manifesto calling for ?a relentless campaign of nonviolent, peaceful civil disobedience.?
?We aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlements [sic] and World Bank,? Anonymous says.
The group has been around for years, but made its biggest impact last fall, when WikiLeaks began releasing its stash of State Department cables. As Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard all cut off their business ties with WikiLeaks, Anonymous launched ?distributed denial of service? attacks ? basically slamming their websites with so much traffic until they were forced to shut down.
?As a first sign of good faith,? says the manifesto, ?we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.?
Monday morning, Anonymous released some emails given to them by a former employee at Bank of America. The emails are separate from the BoA documents that WikiLeaks is sitting on.
The emails haven?t been independently verified, but they appear to show that, among other things, loan numbers were routinely falsified with the intent of putting mortgage holders in default. You think the ?robo-signing? scandal was a big deal? Wait until this one gets legs.
Anonymous is nothing if not ambitious. And they have a rising tide of public anger on their side.
Then, on the same day the tsunami devoured 100 miles of Japanese coastline, New York Fed chief William Dudley ? a 21-year vet of Goldman Sachs ? stepped out of his bubble to explain Fed policy to real people in Queens.
It might not have been the first time Dudley attempted to gain the trust of the hoi polloi, but we?re pretty sure it?ll be the last. The details here were reported widely. We divined the scene from a Reuters report.
First Dudley swore up and down that inflation was no problem. ?When was the last time, sir,? came a reply from the audience, ?that you went grocery shopping?? Dudley boldly proceeded to explain the concept of ?core CPI? ? the cost-of-living measure designed for people who don?t eat or consume energy. We know firsthand how well that goes over.
Then in a brilliant stroke, he pointed to Apple?s shiny new iPad 2 to illustrate his point. ?Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,? he gamely explained. ?You have to look at the prices of all things.?
?I can?t eat an iPad,? someone yelled from the crowd. How big a leap is it from ?I can?t eat an iPad? to ?douse myself with gasoline and light my body on fire in the street,? we wondered while reading the report. Depends entirely on who?s listening, we suspect.
COR Version: Hacktivists target Federal Reserve and demand Ben Bernanke step down or there will be consequences.
Zharen
This iPad tastes like . :mad:
pkcRAISTLIN
yeah, let's punish ben for saving the world economy.
Zharen
And how exactly did they save the world economy? By using US tax dollars to bailout all the major banks? If anything, the US taxpayers should be granted that dubious honor.
As for this, I've supported Anonymous' for their past actions, but I have a feeling this might be biting off more than they can chew. I'm not sure how exactly they plan on toppling the FED, I don't think posting their private emails up is going to accomplish anything honestly. But it should be amusing to see what happens, nonetheless.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
Originally posted by Zharen
And how exactly did they save the world economy? By using US tax dollars to bailout all the major banks?
by taking quick and decisive action to prevent the implosion of the US financial system. there was no better person to be sitting at the head of the fed in '06 than an expert on the great depression.
quote:
Originally posted by Zharen
If anything, the US taxpayers should be granted that dubious honor.
not sure that whinging about things far beyond their comprehension really achieved too much, but im happy to be corrected.
Moongoose
Again, i must side with PKC here.
Im betting that the same people that are bitching about their tax dolalrs being spent to bail out the banks would be crying today if the whole lot of them was allowed to fail, taking the better part of the global economy down with them. Now i havent lived trough the great depression, but ive read a thing or two about it and it didnt seem like the most fun time, and i would rather not live trough something similar if it can be avoided. Thankfully it was.
Also, im willing to bet that a large percentage of people that bitch about the government being in debt have at least a few credit cards themselves.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Treasury Department said Friday the total amount repaid to taxpayers for government funds used to bail out U.S. companies has surpassed, for the first time, the amount of outstanding debt.
The Treasury, in its May report to Congress on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, reported TARP repayments reached $194 billion, which has exceeded by $4 billion the total amount of outstanding debt—$190 billion.
However, the outstanding debt amount does not include $106.36 billion that has been committed to institutions but has yet to be paid out by the Treasury. Factoring in that amount, the outstanding debt would be roughly $296 billion.
According to the report, $489.88 billion has been committed to specific institutions, and $383.52 billion of that has been paid out by Treasury. The department said it does not expect to use more than $550 billion of the $700 billion program.
