Senators demanded Tuesday to be let in on what they called the most secretive, powerful federal agency in existence, voting overwhelmingly to audit the loans and deals the Federal Reserve made over the past three years but stopping short of demanding a full review of the Fed’s future monetary policy.

What the Sanders amendment really called for was a mere one-time disclosure of some emergency lending powers used by the Federal Reserve during the most recent fiscal crisis, not an audit.

While this disclosure is small step in the right direction, it does not go far enough in ensuring a proper check on the use of power by the Federal Reserve.

The Audit the Fed coalition will continue to advance a thorough, genuine audit of the Federal Reserve.

What Sanders is now proposing is essentially the Watt amendment the Audit the Fed Coalition opposed last year in the House.

Talking Points Memo reports that, “In order to allay some of the White House’s and the Fed’s concerns, Sanders has agreed to limit the scope of what the Government Accountability Office would be allowed to audit–but his plan will still require thorough review of all the Fed’s emergency lending, beginning December 1, 2007.”

Call Senator Sanders’ office at (202) 224-5141 and tell him how you feel about this last-minute compromise.

Click here for contact information for your senators and urge them to oppose this compromise.   Tell them it’s time to support a standalone vote on S. 604, Audit the Fed.

A vote could come even late tonight or early tomorrow.  Let your senators know where you stand right away. 

The American people deserve a full, thorough audit.

A contentious effort to expand audits of the Federal Reserve that sailed through the House despite heavy criticism appears to be picking up steam as the Senate considers broad new financial regulations.

Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) is pushing an amendment to the financial overhaul bill before the Senate that would broaden the Government Accountability Office’s power to audit the Fed and compel the central bank to disclose details about the firms that received emergency federal aid during the financial crisis.

Read the rest here.

Now is the best time to push for a full, complete audit of the Federal Reserve.  Contact your senators and urge them to support S 604.  When the vote comes up on Chris Dodd’s S. 3217, ask them to support the Audit amendment.

The Clearing House Association LLC, a group that includes Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., joined the Fed in defense of a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, seeking release of records related to four Fed lending programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled March 19 that the central bank must release the documents. A three-judge panel of the appellate court rejected the Fed’s argument that disclosure would stigmatize borrowers and discourage banks from seeking emergency help.

Read the rest here.

Coalition members are still pressing for transparency.  Pressure is being applied to key Senators to pass S 604.  Take part in these efforts here.

Now his job security is in ours.

Be sure to immediately call your senators with a simple message: “No vote on Bernanke until we get a vote on Audit the Fed.”

Click here to find contact information for your senators.

Here’s what’s going on and why you need to act immediately:

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has led the charge to place a “hold” on Bernanke’s nomination to a second term as Fed chairman until the Senate votes on Audit the Fed. This means to get a vote on Bernanke, Harry Reid has to have a vote on “cloture,” and that requires a super-majority of 60 votes.  Insiders believe that Harry Reid is threatening to ram through a cloture vote as early as next week.

Senator DeMint is joined by David Vitter, Jim Bunning, and Bernie Sanders in his efforts, but these senators cannot succeed alone.   A strong message from Audit the Fed activists like you could start a stampede in the Senate that will make Harry Reid back off of Bernanke and give us a vote on Audit the Fed.

Click here to find contact information for your senators.

Make sure you let them know that:

1.) If they are not cosponsoring Audit the Fed, you expect them to sign on in support of finding out what the Fed has done with trillions of our dollars. Tell them you will make sure their constituents know of their action or inaction on this issue.

2.) They must vote “no” on cloture until after there is a vote on Audit the Fed. No vote should be taken on Ben Bernanke’s confirmation, or the nomination of anyone else for Fed Chairman, until Audit the Fed has received a public, up or down vote. The real issue here is not the Fed chairman himself. It is the need for complete transparency.

Ben Bernanke’s term as Fed chairman expires on January 31, so Harry Reid is under pressure from President Obama to act quickly.

It’s time to turn up the pressure.

Take action today to push for a vote on Audit the Fed, S. 604!

Sincerely,

The Audit the Fed Coalition

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday voiced his opposition to legislation calling for regular audits of the Fed’s monetary policies, but 79% of Americans think auditing the Fed is a good idea.

Read the rest here.

I am speaking this morning in support of HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act. As the Committee knows, this bill would require a full audit of the Federal Reserve by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

On November 10, 2008, Bloomberg News ran the following headline: “Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose.” The story pointed out that the Fed was refusing to identify the recipients of trillions of dollars in emergency loans or the dubious assets the central bank was accepting as collateral. When the initial $700 billion congressional bailout was being debated last September, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson couldn’t emphasize their commitment to transparency strongly enough. But “two months later, as the Fed [lent] far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans [had] no idea where their money [was] going or what securities the banks [were] pledging in return.”

Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, put it simply: “Taxpayers — involuntary investors in this case — have a right to know who received loans, in what amounts, for which collateral, and why specific loans were made.”

This has been portrayed as a trivial matter being pursued by some cynical and uppity Americans who don’t know their place. But there is no good reason for Americans not to know the recipients of the Fed’s emergency lending facilities. There is no good reason for them to be kept in the dark about the Fed’s arrangements with foreign central banks. These things affect the quality of the money that our system obliges the American public to accept.

The Fed’s arguments against the bill are unlikely to persuade, and will undoubtedly strike the average American as little more than special pleading. Perhaps the most frequent of the claims is that a genuine audit would jeopardize the alleged independence of the Fed. Congress could come to influence or even dictate monetary policy.

This is a red herring. The bill is not designed to empower politicians to increase the money supply, choose interest-rate targets, or adopt any of the rest of the Fed’s central planning apparatus, all of which is better left to the free market than to the Fed or Congress. It seeks nothing more than to open the Fed’s books to public scrutiny. Congress has a moral and legal obligation to oversee institutions it brings into existence. The convoluted scenarios by which merely opening the books will lead to an inflationary catastrophe at the hands of Congress are difficult to take seriously.

At the same time, as we hear this objection repeated time and again, we might wonder just how independent the Fed really is, what with its chairman up for reappointment by the president every four years. Have these critics never heard of the political business cycle? Fed chairmen have been known to ingratiate themselves into the president’s favor close to election time by means of loose monetary policy and the false (and temporary) prosperity it brings about. Let us not insult Americans’ intelligence by pretending this phenomenon does not exist.

Moreover, try to imagine a Fed chairman doggedly seeking to maintain the value of the dollar even if it meant refusing to monetize a massive deficit to fight a war or “stimulate” a depressed economy. It is not possible.

If there is any truth to the idea of Fed independence, it lay in precisely this: the Fed may reward favored friends and constituencies with trillions of dollars in various kinds of assistance, while keeping the public completely in the dark. If that is the independence we’re talking about, no self-respecting American would hesitate for a moment to challenge it.

A related argument warns that the legislation threatens to politicize lender-of-last-resort decisions. Again, this is untrue. But even if it were true, how would that represent a departure from current practice? I hope we are not asking Americans to believe that the decisions to bail out various financial institutions over the past two years, and in particular to allow them to become depository institutions overnight that they might qualify for assistance, were made on the basis of a pure devotion to the common good and were not political at all. Most Americans, not unreasonably, seem convinced of another thesis: that Goldman Sachs, for instance, might be just a little bit more politically well connected than the rest of us.

Opponents of HR 1207 have sometimes tried to claim that the Fed is already adequately audited. If this were true, why is the Fed in panic mode over this bill? It is the broad areas these audits exclude that the American public is increasingly interested in investigating, and these are the gaps that HR 1207 seeks to fill.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the monetary system we have now is sound and beyond reproach, and certainly better than any system that preceded it. My purpose today is not to render judgment upon such views, however deeply misguided I happen to consider them, and however inaccurate their implicit view of nineteenth-century financial panics. My point is simply this: if our monetary system were really as strong, robust, and beyond criticism as its cheerleaders claim, why does it need to rely so heavily on public ignorance? How can it be a sound banking system that depends on keeping the public in the dark about the condition of its financial institutions?

Let me also make clear that supporters of this legislation are strongly opposed to a watered-down version of the bill — which, incidentally, would only increase public suspicion that someone is hiding something.

If the Federal Reserve Transparency Act passes and the audit takes place, the American people will have achieved a great victory. If the legislation fails, more and more Americans will begin to wonder what the Fed could be so anxious to keep hidden, and the pressure for transparency will simply intensify. A recent poll finds 75 percent of Americans already in favor of auditing the Fed. The writing is on the wall.

The Federal Reserve may as well get used to the idea that the audit is coming. That would be a far more sensible approach than the counterproductive and condescending one it has adopted thus far, in which the peons who populate the country are urged to quit pestering their betters with all these impertinent questions. The Fed should take to heart the words of consolation the American people are given whenever a new government surveillance program is uncovered: if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

The superstitious reverence that Americans have been taught to have for the Federal Reserve is unworthy of the dignity of a free people. The Fed enjoys a government-granted monopoly on the creation of legal-tender money. It is not an unreasonable imposition for Americans to demand to know about the activities of such an institution. It is common sense.

Dear Senator,

We, the undersigned organizations representing millions of Americans, encourage you to cosponsor S 604, “The Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009.”

This legislation would eliminate the restrictions on the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits of the Federal Reserve. It directs the Comptroller General to complete, before the end of 2010, an audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and of the Federal Reserve banks, followed by a detailed report to Congress.

Presently, current law excludes the Federal Reserve from a thorough audit or any real Congressional oversight. No government agency or quasi-government agency has such an utter lack of transparency.

Congress has more oversight and insight into the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency than the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve has created and dispersed trillions of dollars in response to our current financial crisis and Americans from across the political spectrum want to know where the money has gone and how it was spent.

By opening all Federal Reserve operations including the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Term Securities Lending Facility, and Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility, as well as agreements with foreign central banks to a GAO audit and calling for such an audit to be completed by the end of 2010, S 604 would achieve much-needed transparency of the Federal Reserve.

Again, we urge you to co-sponsor this legislation and to cast your every vote in favor of a full-scale audit of the Federal Reserve.

Sincerely,

Campaign for Liberty

Americans for Tax Reform

U.S. PIRG

American Policy Center

Council for Citizens Against Government Waste

No Fear Coalition

Consumer Action

OMB Watch

Center for Fiscal Accountability

OpenTheGovernment.org

Association For Community Networking

John Birch Society

Chicago Digital Access Alliance

Government Accountability Project

NewWayUSA

Earth Intelligence Network

Ph Beta Iota Honor Society

U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation

Republican Liberty Caucus

DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

American Service Council.

After Downing Street

Public Citizen

democrats.com

Illinois Community Technology Coalition (ilCTC)

National Taxpayers Union

A New Way Forward

National Whistleblowers Center

Citizens for Health

Freedom Works

Project On Government Oversight (POGO)

Former Congressman Bob Barr

Institute for Liberty

Transpartisan Alliance

Essential Information

The Multiracial Activist

The Harbour League

Pain Relief Network