Congress Now Trying To Outlaw Reporting On Government Corruption

July 16, 2012 by The Golden Rule

Source: Alexander Higgins Blog/ RT

Lawmakers are pushing legislation through Congress that will criminalize reporting on illegal activities and corruption in the US government.

Just when you thought the United States government couldn’t sink any lower our beloved politicians in Washington have introduced legislation that will criminalize reporting on US government secrets.

What makes this new legislation shocking is that we have seen the US government repeatedly use the “State Secrets” and the “National InSecurity card to suspend the Constitution at will to commit a wide variety of heinous activities from torture and indefinite detention without trial to outright forced drugging of prisoners and even repeated assassination by the government, of people including US citizens, which is now being done on the direction of the United States’ first even assassination czar.

Keeping that in mind the fact that lawmakers are now trying to go after reporters that “publish government secrets” unequivocally amounts to an outright ban of any and all reporting on government corruption PERIOD because at the end of the day the corrupt and illegal activities conducted by government officials are done in secret in the first place.

This week, House Republicans sought legal advice on whether reporters can be prosecuted for leaking secret information public and the excuse being used is a series of leaks by officials in the Obama administration that have pissed off the republicans.

The latest of those high-profile leaks revealed the truth nature of America’s cyber warfare program and even President Obama’s secret assassination list.

Now Congress is trying to justify the outlawing of such reporting using the excuse of “comprising National Security” when the truth is the information was given to reporters in repeated interviews by government officials speaking on the condition of anonymity with the approval of the White House in the first place.

Once again our government is manufacturing yet another “crisis” that they can take advantage of to expand its evermore dictatorial powers in what has been nothing less than a full-scale ware being waged by out government against the US Constitution.

Liz Wahl joins RT web producer Andrew Blake to discuss exactly what this would that mean for freedom of the press and free speech.

“Audit the Fed” bill advances…

June 27, 2012 by The Golden Rule

Washington Times

By Stephen Dinan

The House oversight committee voted Wednesday to demand a broad audit of the Federal Reserve System by congressional investigators — a major move that lawmakers said is designed to bring accountability to the murky workings of the independent central bank.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who turned the push for an audit into a powerful presidential campaign slogan and whose criticism of the Fed’s monetary policy drew hundreds of thousands of voters into the political process.

It passed by voice vote, signaling the growing sense among lawmakers that the time has come for a full review.

“Clearly the Fed must be made too big to fail, and too big to fail requires a considerable amount of oversight,” said Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican, who is chairman of the committee.

Federal law right now specifically prohibits such a broad audit, and opponents fear undermining the independence of the Fed.

The bill would direct the Government Accountability Office to complete a broad audit that presumably would include a peek at the Fed’s decision-making and many of its lending policies.

The committee defeated an amendment sponsored by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Maryland Democrat, that would have prevented auditors from getting a look at the minutes of internal board discussions.

“This whole idea about ‘Well, we can’t touch the Fed‘ is baloney,” said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio Democrat. “We have to be able to have control over the Fed because it’s controlling every aspect of our economy.”

The Federal Reserve consists of a board of governors and 12 regional banks, which act as lenders of last resort to the country’s banking system.

Last year, a more limited audit by GAO found that the Fed repeatedly invoked emergency authority to expand its lending during the Wall Street crisis in 2008 and 2009, including major loans to prop up the housing market.

The audit also found that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which had a major role in the lending, did not have sufficient controls to prevent conflicts of interest for its employees.