Daily Archives: 15 September 2009

Is Ben Bernanke The “Machiavelian Monster” Equivalent Of Nicholas Biddle?


Mises does a great profile of Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), president of the Second Bank of the United States – the central bank that preceded the Federal Reserve, and provides some useful analogues to not just the current Chairman of the Fed, but to all Fed-friendly crony insitutions that are doing all in the power to perpetuate the hegemony of Wall Street.

Like Ben Bernanke today, Nicholas Biddle cultivated the veneer of a benign civil servant calculating serenely far above the political fray. In reality he, like Bernanke, was up to his neck in the backroom game of power.

When Biddle’s bureaucratic cradle was rocked, he quickly morphed into a Machiavellian monster. Keep that in mind as Ben Bernanke gets progressively cornered by Ron Paul and the bourgeoning anti-Fed movement. (Already the Fed is less popular than the IRS.)

When you hear about the Federal Reserve Transparency Act getting stalled in committee, think of Daniel Webster, bought and paid for with central bank money. When you read Fed apologia in the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal denouncing the “reckless populism” of the Act, think of the newspaper editors in Biddle’s pocket.

The full must read article can be found here. (From zerohedge.com)

Lawless Surveillance, Warrantless Rationales (a critique of Obama continuation of Bush policies)

Over at The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy website, Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes about the so-called Presidential Surveillance Program, the “still-shadowy set of programs that spy on Americans in America without any probable cause or warrant.” The EFF, as regular BB readers know, has fought this program for several years now — in 2006, it filed suit against AT&T for providing the NSA with direct access to its database of communications records. Snip from Cohn’s essay:

While the details are unknown, credible evidence indicates that billions of everyday communications of ordinary Americans are swept up by government computers and run through a process that includes both data-mining and review of content, to try to figure out whether any of us were involved in illegal or terrorist-related activity. That means that even the most personal and private of our electronic communications – between doctors and patients, between husbands and wives, or between children and parents – are subject to review by computer algorithms programmed by government bureaucrats or by the bureaucrats themselves. (Read more from boingboing.net)

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