Audit the FED!!! NOW!!!!!

The Federal Reserve has demonstrated conclusively and without question that it simply isn't capable of doing the job that's assigned to it. It desperately needs direction and oversight from the federal government. Currently, there's a bill to audit the Fed that, amazingly, doesn't have 100% support from both Congress and the Senate. Why this is even a question is absolutely amazing to me.

The principle that government agencies should be transparent and publically accountable is a cornerstone of democratic, responsive government, which is why those who favor plutocracy, let alone kleptocracy, find the concept so threatening. But the US financial sector and its governmental partners have for decades assiduously promoted the view that the Federal Reserve should be exempt from scrutiny, because, they claim, otherwise its "independence" would be as risk. Never mind that the dangers a nation’s economy faces can as easily come from the Fed’s co-dependency with the nation’s largest, irresponsible banks when coupled with a market ideology that encourages fraud and looting. If ever there was a sector that needed sunlight, this is it.

The case that an effective Chairman of the Federal Reserve could have poked a hole in the housing bubble back in 2004 and could have thereby prevented that bubble from crashing with the devastating effects that it did... well, good economists have been making that case since at least 2002. The sad part is that the regulators were so full of their own "wisdom" (Read: "arrogance") that nothing was done until long even long after the crisis hit and passed, leaving untold wreckage in is wake.

Update: Speaker Pelosi is now claiming that the Bush Administration knew about the coming collapse in early June, 2008, about when Obama received the Democratic nomination for President. Congress was actually briefed in September.