Tracking, Explaining and Understanding the Cleverly Organized Crimes of Banksters

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tracking-Explaining-and-U-by-Richard-Clark-110606-841.html

What follows here is an abridgement, interpretation, and simplification of a RollingStone article by Matt Taibbi.

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

The official budget is on the public record, and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies, and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed "socialist' menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. On top of that, at least according to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Most Americans know about this official budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, that is maintained in complete secrecy -- or at least it was until just recently. After the financial crash of 2008, this once-secret budget grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions of dollars to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, this largely secret giveaway eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size -- it became a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat, apparently on the whim of unelected Fed officials, using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

More at the link --