The Fed: Geithner wants to let the fox run the henhouse

A New Way Forward is a citizens' action group formed last spring that aims to transform the public's relationship to the monetary and economic policies that govern our lives by pushing for structural reform of the financial industry. They

demand an end to taxpayer bailouts without solutions for working-class America; policies that address the problem of too big to fail; reorganization so that the financial elite who managed us into this crisis are not in charge as we try to fix it, and we believe banks should be broken up — decentralized — and sold back to the private market with strong new regulatory and antitrust rules in place.

To keep your irritation with the bailout finely tuned, watch this video of the Federal Reserve's so-called internal watchdog being questioned by Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida. Like Mafia bookmakers, the nation's bookkeepers are apparently determined not to leave a paper trail, claiming to have no clue where the trillions of dollars in public money they have transferred to private hands have actually gone. $9 trillion in Fed off-balance sheet transactions this year? Don't know. Lost from the Fed's $2 trillion portfolio? Can't say. The Congress not only needs to get back the $ trillions. They should ask these hacks to return whatever they've been overpaid for not doing their jobs.

"I am shocked," Grayson tells the committee chairman, "to find out that nobody at the Federal Reserve is keeping track of anything." He's shocked. How about you?

A New Way Forward has a petition to back up efforts of reformers in Congress to block the plan by Obama's treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, to expand the Fed's control over the banking system:

Let's get at the root problems of the crisis. The seat of power, the Federal Reserve, is corrupt. With the banks, the Fed co-founded the biggest crash since the Great Depression. The banks have become political giants on the backs of working America, receiving trillions of dollars they don't deserve. Do we want the banks to continue to watch over themselves? To restore our economy for all, we demand the Fed stop operating in secret and Geithner drop his attempts at giving the Fed new powers to be the "supercop."

It's time to break up the big banks.  If an industry is too big to fail, it's too big to exist. A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.  Old Ev must be turning in his grave.