we re back with interior secretary, ken salazar, who as we mentioned earlier, wants to split the mms in half. part in response to the disaster in the gulf. we re also back with news today of an incremental step towards transparency in our financial system. the senate voting unanimously to pursue bernie sanders audit the fed amendment. right now we re joined by secretary of the interior, ken salazar. mr. secretary, what is the white house doing right now to try to deal with the oil spill? we re very much putting our foot on the backs of bp to make sure that they re moving forward to do what they are responsible to do. and that is to stop the leak. and to make sure that they are doing everything they can to protect the gulf. that at the end of the day, holding them accountable to restore the gulf coast. if you were to look at the
original bailout package. those senators, some of whom you see here, are definitely in the bankster party. giving away your money when the banksters ask for it. refusing to reform the system after the fact. how do you actually have the audacity to vote for a handouts with no strings attached to stinking-rich bankers who have leveraged our system to its nose, cause an economic collapse. and then you do nothing to fix the problem a few years later. you guys are funny. oh. another disappointing blow to the people s party ned, a compromise on senator bernie sanders audit the fed amendment. on thursday, the people s party, democrats and republicans a part of it, had the momentum, transparency, and accountability. it s easy to say, right? well, the fed was thrown up against the ropes, with senator sanders amendment gaining more and more traction, to reveal to the american people just how big
the fed took on a lot of assets on bleest that they were properly-valued, high grade. it s an accounting fraud. exactly. now the question is we want an audit. we want to see if blackrock is vaulg these things correctly. last week we saw red roof debt. we own it, it s ours, somehow it s being valued on the fed s balance sheet at a mark that doesn t quite look at it. has the fed become lehman brothers? to reduce it to that level of simplicity, is the fed essentially playing the same game that the investment banks have been playing, keeping stuff on the balance sheet when it knows the mark is wrong. if that s the case, then the cost to all of us as taxpayers is enormously greater than they re claim. let s talk solutions. let s say we do a fed audit and confirm the shortfall. and we know now, as a fact, not as a speculation, that we owe way more money than we have. how do you solve it?
breaking news from washington, d.c., senator chris dodd, the chairman of the senate finance committee, moments ago signing on to senator bernie sanders audit the fed amendment. that amendment, along with the kaufmann-brown amendment on too big to fail continues to gain momentum on the senate floor. senate majority leader, harry reid, said he s likely to be for kaufmann-brown to break up the banks. the question is, are senator dodd and senator reid, the majority leader and the chairman of the committee simply talking? or are they whipping votes on both the republican and democratic side of the aisle to actually give the american people the honest understanding of our financial system so that we can again reform it in a way that has real information as both governor spitzer, bill fleckenstein and josh rozner
if you were genuine and sincere in this, he would be whipping the caucus to get them in fact to vote for that. today is the day, the fact that audit the fed is probably only going to have 50 votes and therefore fail, with the majority leader saying he s in favor of it, is a mid-term strategy rather than a fundamental commitment to forcing it to pass. the white house has been backing up the fed, permitting them to live in the shadows. which is an absolute outrage. given that everyone has acknowledged the fed was the central regulator that failed over the past couple of years. although it was the new york fed more than the federal reserve. timothy geithner was there. bill, are you still with us? yes. what are they afraid they re going to find? in other words if it s the white house saying we re going to fight on the fed. or the white house or any other political fact that says we don t want to have capital posted for derivatives, we don t want transparency. what is it that they