Officials working on 'response' after flood of complaints
By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND
 Delegate Bob Marshall |
A state delegate in Virginia has sent a letter to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, demanding that it remove a "rainbow" flag from the flagpole that also holds Old Glory.
"Dear President [Jeffrey M.] Lacker," wrote state Delegate Bob Marshall, "Flying the homosexual flag just under the American flag outside Richmond's Federal Reserve Bank building is a serious deficiency of judgment by your organization."
Marshall said the Federal Reserve policies are supposed to "contribute to the strength and vitality of the U.S. economy," but "a flagpole in front of a federal building is not a commercial or political message board."
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"What does flying the homosexual flag, or any other similar display, have to do with your central banking mission under the Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress?"
"The Richmond Fed's endorsement of costly, anti-social, immoral behavior is rejected by 6,000 years of Western religious and moral teaching. You want the American people to trust your judgment in economic matters when your spokesperson celebrates an attack on public morals? Why?" Marshall continued.
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"Mr.Lacker, take down that flag!"
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Marshall told WND that his letter to the bank must have "set off a firecracker," because there had been hundreds of responses via email and the like already.
"This guy has no business taking an institution Congress created for financial dealings and turning it into a political billboard," he said.
Bank spokesman Jim Strader told WND that Marshall's letter had been delievered and "we are reviewing his letter and we will respond."
He refused to say what the response would be or when it would come.
But he said the "pride flag is flying at our bank as a symbol of our commitment to diversity and inclusion."
He said bank managers got a request from "an employee group" and the request to fly the flag was approved.
Strader said it coincides with Barack Obama's "proclamation" that June is the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."
"This month … marks the 30th anniversary of the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has had a profound impact on the LGBT community," Obama said. "Though we have made strides in combating this devastating disease, more work remains to be done, and I am committed to expanding access to HIV/AIDS prevention and care."
Strader refused to respond to questions about whether the statement of a social agenda was a precedent for the bank, or whether other employee or interest groups could take advantage of the forum and proclaim their campaigns, also.
"I can't comment on that," he said.
He said the bank, too, has gotten comments on the "pride flag" flying in front of the institution assigned to manage the nation's fiscal policy.
But Marshall said, "This is a celebration of a behavior that is still a class six felony in Virginia."
This dispute is not the only headache the Federal Reserve could be facing. WND recently reported on a series of grass-roots lawsuits that are being developed against the Fed.
 U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas |
And U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas long has advocated an audit of the intensely secret organization, as well as a shutdown of its operations.
The lawsuit plans come from the PatriotStorm organization at its SuetheFed.com website. The plan envisions teams of attorneys analyzing data, demanding information, verifying damages and arguing court cases.
"Our litigation plan will be loosely patterned after the tobacco litigation model executed during the 1980s and 1990s; only far more organized, coordinated and focused in order to provide shared access of all discovery materials and briefs developed to all of our network law firms and prosecutors nationwide," the website explains.
"The litigation activities will be divided among three broad areas: a) research; b) analysis and dissemination of discovery materials and briefs, and c) litigation coordination. The company will recruit several hundred to several thousand highly respected small to mid-sized litigating law firms to pursue the class action litigation for their representative plaintiffs (live persons, companies, municipalities, etc.) residing in their respective geographic areas."
Congressman Paul long has argued that the Federal Reserve simply is illegal. Some of his concerns have revolved around Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the right to coin money.
There is no mention in the Constitution of a central bank, and it wasn't until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that the Fed was created.
 Ben Bernanke |
Paul previously has said, "Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy."
And he's proposed repeatedly – and again in this Congress – the idea of auditing the Fed to determine exactly what it has been doing and then begin making corrections. With a book titled "End the Fed," he's made no secret of his ultimate goal.
That the Fed is at least partly to blame for the financial problems that have developed in the U.S. seems not to be in dispute.
It was longtime Federal Reserve chairman Ben. S. Bernanke who admitted as much.
Bernanke said it was the Fed that caused the Great Depression, the worldwide economic downturn that persisted from 1929 until about 1939. It was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. While originating in the U.S., it ended up causing drastic declines in output, severe unemployment and acute deflation in virtually every country on earth. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the Great Depression ranks second only to the Civil War as the gravest crisis in American history."
At a Nov. 8, 2002, conference to honor economist Milton Friedman's 90th birthday, Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, gave a speech at Friedman's old home base, the University of Chicago.
After citing how Friedman and a co-author documented the Fed's continual contraction of the money supply during the Depression and its aftermath – and the subsequent abandonment of the gold standard by many nations in order to stop the devastating monetary contraction – Bernanke added:
Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, Friedman and [Anna] Schwartz noted, bank panics were typically handled by banks themselves – for example, through urban consortiums of private banks called clearinghouses. If a run on one or more banks in a city began, the clearinghouse might declare a suspension of payments, meaning that, temporarily, deposits would not be convertible into cash. Larger, stronger banks would then take the lead, first, in determining that the banks under attack were in fact fundamentally solvent, and second, in lending cash to those banks that needed to meet withdrawals. Though not an entirely satisfactory solution – the suspension of payments for several weeks was a significant hardship for the public – the system of suspension of payments usually prevented local banking panics from spreading or persisting. Large, solvent banks had an incentive to participate in curing panics because they knew that an unchecked panic might ultimately threaten their own deposits.
It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous "liquidationist" thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.
In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
History records that in 1913 President Woodrow Wilson approved the Federal Reserve Act but later reflected that his actions "unwittingly ruined my country."
Wilson said that since the U.S. system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few, "we have become … one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world."
Paul recently announced, as chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, a plan to audit the Fed.
Read more: Federal Reserve bank flies the rainbow flag http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=306945#ixzz1OJaK3esb
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