Did you know that Andrew Jackson ended the Fed in 1836? 'On July 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson sent a message to the United States Senate. He returned unsigned, with his objections, a bill that extended the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, due to expire in 1836, for another fifteen years. As Jackson drily noted, the bill was presented to him on the Fourth of July, a day freighted with portent.'
Are you aware of Ron Paul’s “audit the Fed” bill, H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009? H.R. 1207 is 'A bill that would require the Fed to disclose what it did with more than $2 trillion in loans to banks and other financial institutions... originally co-sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson, one of the most conservative and one of the most progressive members of Congress. Due to public pressure, it now has more than 270 co-sponsors.'
Have you heard about the Showdown in Chicago on October 25-27, 2009, "when thousands of Americans - retirees, farmers, workers, homeowners, renters, students, clergy, and small business owners - come together on the streets of Chicago to demand a banking system that puts the American people first and a Congress that makes it happen"?
The H.R. 1207 bill and the Showdown in Chicago demonstrations are examples of the change in social mood, which is the transformation from spending to saving, that we've discussing in our posts. This social mood change is the primary driver that's taking our feelings of pessimism towards the bank bailouts, the bankers who brought on the economic contraction, the Federal Reserve, and the ever-increasing national debt to new levels, further and deeper into feelings of disgust and outrage.
Thanks to the bailout programs put in place last fall, most of the country's major banks, who are sharing their wealth but only with their top executives and high performers, are back to the same old tricks that got us in this mess. We look around at the effects of this economic contraction and it does not seem fair that when the taxpayer is paying for the bank bailouts and bankers' bonuses there are only 3,500 vouchers available for housing assistance when thousands more need them, as Detroit has come to recently find out.
Detroit's pains were exharberated by the inadequate response from Washington as shown by the high-demand for assistance by the people of Detroit. The Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program provides utility payments, rental, moving and legal assistance for low-income people who are at risk of losing housing. But it does not go far enough: within less than three minutes, 25,000 applications were filled out for only 3,500 available vouchers!
Additionally, a recent study by the Brennan Center concluded that homeowners are losing their homes because they can not navigate the landscape of lending laws and too few people are ever able to obtain qualified legal guidance.
And what about Karen King, who owes nearly $36,000, more than she's ever earned in a year, and the other thousands of people that are in the same situation.
It is clear that there are many people suffering due to the financial crisis and as failed solutions to fix the problem mount the social mood will continue to deteriorate, to the point where disgust and outrage will be manifested in ways we had not expected.
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