I’ve long known that the Federal Reserve of the U.S. was nothing but a cartel of the biggest banks.

So the recent audit of the Fed should really make your head explode. Why? Here are some of the more choice findings:

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study.

My thanks and appreciation to Senator Bernie Sanders. You rock! I so wish you were one of my Senators but alas, I have two good ones in Sheldon Whithouse and Jack Reed.

Another ire inducing paragraph:

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed’s board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed’s emergency lending programs.

Have they never heard of the term “Conflict of Interest”?

But get ready because the more egregious crap is about to hit the fan:

The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

So tell me, how is this not a looting of the American public? And why hasn’t this been all over the mainstream media? I’ll explain why.

The mainstream media, their board members are probably also board members at the banks too. It is a cozy, very connected world in corporate boardrooms.

But thankfully we have the blogsphere.