Danny Schechter - ColdType

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Democratic Congresswoman Marci Kaptur now of Ohio
compares The Federal Reserve to counterfeiters bankrupting
the system. Republican Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News
legal correspondent argued that Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson,
as well as several bank presidents, should be arrested.
Rage and rhetoric is escalating on the Ron Paul right and
the Dennis Kucinich left. In response, Chairman Bernanke left
Washington to speak at events and defend his role, even as
he has been seen as campaigning for reappointment to his job
and expanding his portfolio to include consumer protection.
(President Obama later said he would be reappointed.)
He has mostly defended what he has done in terms of what
he claims he prevented – a collapse of the economy into a
new depression. He insists his interventions and manipulations
were needed. “I was not going to be the Federal Reserve
Chairman who presided over the second Great Depression,”
Bernanke said. “When you’re in a situation like this, a perfect
storm, sometimes you have to do things that are a little
unorthodox, out of the box.”
Bernanke skillfully ingratiated himself with the media, politicians
and his own staffers. He was known for eating with the
workers at the Fed cafeteria and being approachable in ways
his predecessor was not. (Many of his executives spent weeks
sleeping in their offices when the crisis was most intense.) He
was, however, taken aback by all the loud criticism in Congress
by elected representative he believed did not understand
the Fed’s role as a “lender of last resort,” or as an agency that
paid money back into the Treasury under the Federal Reserve
Act. He probably did more than any official to unify activists
on the left and right in their opposition to what they saw as
the Agency’s unchecked power. He was known as “Helicopter
Ben” for all the money he printed and then dropped all over
the financial landscape.
Financier Peter Schiff, who I interviewed for my film blasted
Bernanke from the Libertarian right: