Fighting inflation and the climate crisis is NOT on the Republican agenda today or anytime in the future.
Republicans want to run on inflation so they are stonewalling the hearings and votes to fill the vacancies. They know a full compliment of qualified people running the Federal Reserve will act on inflation. The Republicans don't want to end the struggle of the Middle Class in the USA so they will believe President Biden is ineffective. It isn't President Biden that is ineffective, it is the Republicans.
By Scott Horsley
President Joe Biden (click here) announced three additional nominees for the Federal Reserve Board on Friday, rounding out the central bank's governing body as it prepares to tackle the highest inflation in nearly four decades.
Biden is tapping former Fed governor Sarah Bloom Raskin to serve as Vice Chair for Supervision — a key regulatory role. In addition, Biden nominated academic economists Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson to fill the remaining vacancies on the Fed's seven-member governing board.
"This group will bring much needed expertise, judgement and leadership to the Federal Reserve while at the same time bringing a diversity of thought and perspective never seen before on the Board of Governors," the president said in a statement.
If confirmed, Cook and Jefferson would be two of only five African American Fed governors in the central bank's 108-year history, and the first since 2006....
The petroleum industry owns the Republicans and this is proof. Americans want to bring inflation under control and they want the climate crisis to stop and reverse. The American people are not happy when Republicans play dirty trick to cater to cronies while their lives spiral out of control. The Republicans won't even vote on the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This has to stop. We need the Federal Reserve to function not flounder.
March 2, 2022
By Jane Mayer
As the American economy faces market turmoil (click here) fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the highest inflation rate in forty years, and continuing damage from the covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors has become a ghost ship. There are multiple vacancies on the panel, and its chairman, Jerome Powell, is awaiting Senate confirmation to a second four-year term. Last month, instead of voting on the confirmation of President Biden’s slate of five nominees to run the world’s most powerful central bank, the Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee staged a boycott....
...The Republicans’ goal was to block a single nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s pick for vice-chair for supervision. Had they met to vote as scheduled, her nomination would likely have survived a party-line tie, which under the Senate’s current rules would have advanced it to the Senate floor for the full body’s consideration. Instead, after the twelve Republicans on the committee failed to show up, the meeting adjourned, “We just want them to show up for work,” he said of his Republican colleagues. “In the midst of an attack, the Russians attacking Ukraine… they’re saying we’re not going to confirm the chair of the Federal Reserve, the vice-chair of supervision, the vice-chair of the Fed, and the other two governors.”...
...A boycott to stop a vote is extraordinary under any circumstances, but experts said they were stunned, given the magnitude of the country’s current economic challenges. “It’s an enormous dereliction of duty,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me. Stiglitz, a progressive professor at Columbia University who has advised Democratic presidents, stressed that “the Federal Reserve is the most important economic institution in the U.S., and the U.S. is the most important economy in the world. To leave this many vacancies is just mind boggling to the rest of the world. It is just amazingly irresponsible.”...
...So what, exactly, is the problem? In Stiglitz’s view, “It’s very simple: special interests.”...
...The fossil-fuel industry would have seemingly little say over who runs the Federal Reserve, but it has donated generously to the campaigns of all twelve Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee. According to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan campaign-finance watchdog group, the industry has contributed more than eight million dollars to the collective campaigns of the dozen senators....
It is perfectly obvious the Republicans in the US Senate aren't interested in a government that works so much as one that appears to be ineffective. There is nothing wrong with the country and it's agencies, it is the Republicans that are ineffective, manipulative and hate the USA Constitution that requires participation in all government nominations.
This is corruption by the 12 Republican Senators and nothing short of it. It is quid pro quo and every one of the twelve should face an ethics investigation.
