Only in government can someone keep their job after failing so miserably at doing their job. If Ben Bernanke were a corporate economist, accountant, or CEO, he would’ve been fired for incompetence and already taking orders at the local McDonald’s. Instead, to the dismay of real economists and free-marketeers, he is about to be rewarded and given more power than any other chairman in the Fed’s clandestine 96 year history.

I have written this time about a menace that has virtually consumed politics in America and through this shakes the entire world monitory system. Few of us are privileged to have lived before the Federal Reserve Banks were given license to enter into the business of controlling the economy. Standardized history taught in public schools does not question the policy of granting private economists the means to create and control the money for our use.

On October 3, as the spreading economic meltdown threatened to topple financial behemoths like American International Group (AIG) and Bank of America and plunged global markets into freefall, the US government responded with the largest bailout in American history. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, better known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), authorized the use of $700 billion to stabilize the nation’s failing financial systems and restore the flow of credit in the economy. That $700 billion bailout has since grown into a more than $12 trillion commitment by the US government and the Federal Reserve. About $1.1 trillion of that is taxpayer money–the TARP money and an additional $400 billion rescue of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The TARP now includes twelve separate programs, and recipients range from megabanks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase to automakers Chrysler and General Motors.

Goldman Sachs director Stephen Friedman recently defended his purchase of Goldman shares while he was serving as chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. Oh, no, there’s no conflict of interest there, right? You’ll recall Goldman Sachs, of course. That’s the former “investment bank” that was converted during late last year’s financial crisis to the status of a traditional bank holding company.

Maybe somewhere along the line we’ll get an answer to that question about potential conflict of interest, as well as to scores of other unanswered questions about a financial meltdown that happened at a critical moment in the presidential race, and that seemed to catch financial wizards completely off guard.