Perhaps you’ve seen the stories this week about the $6.6 billion in one hundred dollar bills that the US Government managed to “lose” in Iraq back in 2003-2004. Apparently, as part of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, plane loads (C-130 Hercules to be exact) of palettes containing shrink wrapped 100 dollar bills were flown in. $22 billion in all. As the Pentagon is attempting to close the books on the operation this week, it was revealed that some $6.6 billion cannot be accounted for.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Under full military guard, physical cash is handed out, and all that has to be done is to collect a receipt. How difficult can this possibly be? That’s right, it’s not difficult at all. And the money that was lost was fully planned to be lost. This is what governments do, or more accurately, this is what human beings do when provided the opportunity. Give a group of folks the sole legal ability to print money (in this case literally) for their friends, and that is exactly what will happen. I don’t think anyone over the age of about four doesn’t understand this.
With this in mind, let’s examine one of those great pieces of American folklore: the US gold reserves. The fact of the matter is, a full independent audit of the US gold has never been performed. The closest thing to a real audit was last performed in 1953, but even that one had major problems. First, there were no independent outside parties involved, and second, only 5% of the gold was tested for purity.
For the nearly 60 years since then, the reserves have been held under tight control by a group of men closely connected to the Wall St. banks. Zero oversight by the American people or their elected representatives has been permitted. Just last week, as part of their coverage of Ron Paul’s inquiry into the gold reserves, CNBC was denied the opportunity to even film any of the gold in Fort Knox. They were told that it was a “closed facility”. One staff member even said that he was not aware of any member of congress having toured the facility since 1974.
According to a treasury document, a full audit of the gold would take 30 minutes per bar for a total of 350,000 man hours, or 400 men working for 6 months. Total cost would be $15 million. Sounds like a bargain to me. The government probably spent more than $15 million just to print and transport the $6.6 billion it lost.
Now I could go into gold swaps, cash settled leases, or even tungsten filled gold bars to make my point that 8100 tons of gold is probably not where the government claims it to be, but that isn’t really necessary. All I need to do is point to the Iraq situation above. Or any other of the millions of examples of graft that always occur in any government operation that isn’t conducted with complete transparency.
Am I wrong? No problem. This is easily settled. Let’s have our full, independent audit of the US gold reserves. Let’s see exactly how much unencumbered, assayed physical gold exists in our possession. This is easily accomplished, and really, could be a big boost for President Obama. He could finally demonstrate some of that promised transparency, and heck, he could even claim another 400 jobs created.
An independent audit would provide to outsiders the location of the gold bars, security, alarm systems, and possible methods to inactivate the systems. Gold reserves were taken from banks, with inactivation of security that was considered impenetrable. Why risk the same exposure that some banks have with cyber criminals who steal financial data of people?
The independent auditors may be hacked as well, since government and business websites have already been hacked. How would they store that information, and what guarantee would be provided that the independent auditors would not be compromised with offers of large sums of money from criminal elements, or foreign governments to provide security systems?
Simple solution:
Did you ever hear of blindfolds? HA
I’m sure the govt can convince auditors not to steal the same way the govt does.
Also: 30 minutes per bar? You mean they don’t have each bar tagged for a scanner? Time to enter 21st century!
Maybe the bars are all gone–each one was used to buy a govt-issue toilet seat?
I think those are pretty poor arguments for not doing an audit.
The one thing I would prefer is that any audit be done on a surprise basis. That way, the Wall Street thieves wouldn’t have time to replace any stolen bars by borrowing from from the IMF or the commodity exchanges.
Tom makes a valid point in suggesting that the audit could be rigged if not done on a surprise basis. Unfortunately, right now an outside audit (General Accounting Office) cannot be done. Would European banks, the other holders of large quantities of gold according to official stats, be willing to ship their gold bars to the US for a bogus audit?
In reality, though, the Trearury should have a list of all the bars it supposedly has, and that list would have to match serial numbers and hallmarks on the physical bars.
The gold is kept in the same vault as all the Socialist Security money.
Without a doubt, we’re being taken to the cleaners by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the IMF, which is probably where all the money has gone. Who else do you think is bailing out and will continue to bail out foreign entities who are broke? How else will the New World crowd ever achieve their dream/nightmare utopia?
Margaret Thatcher had it right when she said socialism works until you run out of other people’s money. “The Four Dictators,” the group that includes the heads of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading commission should all be broken up. Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Mary Schapiro and Gary Gensler should all be brought to justice if they have engaged in illegal market manipulation. Why have we continued to allow corruption to prevail when, if it continues, we as a nation will destroy ourselves.
Actually, I would be really shocked if any gold was actually found at this late date.
Some writers I’ve read speculate that the gold was long ago shipped overseas and used to fund hardened survival-insuring hiding places for “banksters,” Wall Street moguls and federally-elected and appointed officials that will be sorely needed when the American public discovers all their fraudulent lies and thievery thrust upon the middle-class American taxpayer.
I do wish that we could hold a “no confidence” vote today and “clean out the barn” in Washington, D.C., on Wall Street and within the banking cartels that sold America down the river for “filthy lucre” and ill-gotten power over our society.
Sadly, I suspect it to be entirely too late to clean up this mess without deep, long-lasting and severe physical hardship on the material and wealth resources of all God-fearing and honest American taxpayers.
At least food for thought, is it not?
They won’t conduct an audit because a full audit would blow the entire game completely out of the water. The gold’s not there.
Let’s say an assay and audit would cost $50 million. $50 million divided by 150 million U.S. income earning employees = .34 cents each!!!
WHERE DO I DONATE!!!!!!!!?????????????????
Well if the Queen of England has the right to go in and view the Bank of England gold reserves in full view and recording of TV cameras, then so too should the U.S. Presdident and TV staff take a stroll down to Ft. Knox and take a public look at the USA gold reserve.