Thomas Jefferson

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” 
— Thomas Jefferson 1802

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is, in fact, a private bank and not required to answer to any other company or organization. It is an entirely private business and no more “Federal” in nature than Federal Express. Until January 27, 2009 Timothy Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Under our new President, Geithner is now the Secretary of the Treasury for the United States, so it should come as no surprise that Geithner pushed so strongly to get the trillion dollar bailout through Congress – after all, he knew he would be in charge of dispersing the money once it was through, and he was surrounded with other bankers who were actively encouraging him to get it passed. The bill was passed and now it has been exposed that he basically gave these failing banks (such as AIG) huge sums of money without even attempting to verify how it was going to be spent. The reason he is now getting heat specifically about AIG is that AIG was given over $170,000,000,000 (170 Billion Dollars) of taxpayer money to keep it from going bankrupt. AIG then proceeded to disperse 165 million dollars of the taxpayer money to it’s top executives in the form of bonuses. Call me crazy but shouldn’t bonuses be reserved for companies that aren’t requiring a handout from United States taxpayers in order to stay in business? Would it have really been that hard to have included this in the bill? Timothy Geithner is not exactly “Change We Can Believe In”. True change would have been placing a small-government politician in his position and actually allowing corrupt and failing companies to uh, I don’t know – fail. It’s really not that hard. It’s called capitalism.

Here are a couple of clips because if you’re like me it helps to have an image of pond scum when you’re dealing with it. It may not be good to watch if you’ve eaten recently.