“How?” …

A story appearing on May 22nd in a subsidiary newspaper of The New York Times – which we’ll refer to as BG – reported that Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke was “upbeat” in his address to law school graduates at a university – which we’ll refer to as BC.

The chairman told those law students that the “slumping US economy will be OK”. According to the BG reporter, “Bernanke said yesterday that the nation has returned to prosperity after severe economic downturns in the past, and it will do so again as it works through the worst recession since the 1930s”…

“The United States endured a decade-long Great Depression and returned to prosperity and global leadership,” Bernanke said …

“The economy will recover – it has too many fundamental strengths to be kept down for too long,” he said, “and the mood will brighten.”

The BG reporter – or more than likely – the rewrite man, in parroting what other newsman have been offering to readers, comes across as the typical American, so accurately described by Will Rogers as one who “only knows what he reads in the newspapers”.

“Bernanke, the Fed chairman since 2006,” the writer opines, “has led the nation’s central bank and guided the economy through a severe financial and economic crisis that at times threatened to spiral into a depression. In recent months, however, the economy has begun to stabilize and a number of economists believe the worst is over. Many analysts credit the aggressive and sometimes unprecedented actions the Fed has taken, slashing its key interest rate to near zero and pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system to keep credit flowing.”

The fact of the matter is that Bernanke diverted precious taxpayer dollars to non-job-producing Wall Street interests, and in so doing, he guaranteed ongoing bankruptcies, foreclosures and layoffs throughout the U.S. If he would research that “Great Depression” he likes to mention, he would discover that it was the government’s emergency shipbuilding programs that ended that economic disaster. Those programs provided employment for millions of Americans, and a shipbuilding program would do so again. But no. The U.S. citizen must take a back seat to Wall Street interests.

And here’s the payoff. The BG reporter went on to say that “Bernanke steered clear of news-making statements on monetary and economic policy, telling any business reporters covering the speech they may as well ‘go get coffee or something’”. Such arrogance!

For years and years that same university – BC – had prided itself in teaching its students to insist upon full disclosure. “Ask how? … was the advice passed on by the dean on Orientation Day. You can be sure, however, that Bernanke was briefed in this regard. So everyone had to be satisfied with “coffee or something”… because Bernanke knows he has no answer for the question, “how”?.