Obama's IMF sneak attack.(THE LAST WORD)(President Barack Obama on financing the International Monetary Fund)

A hundred and eight billion dollars--$108,000,000,000. Not exactly an eye-popping sum anymore, in an era of multi-trillion-dollar annual budgets and multi-trillion-dollar annual deficits. Still, even with government spending streaking into the stratosphere, $108 billion is not mere chump change, especially when it's leveraged as seed money.

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That's precisely what the $108 billion President Obama is demanding for the International Monetary Fund should be seen as: leveraged seed money aimed at growing the IMF into its new envisioned role as the World Federal Reserve. That objective was the primary agenda item at the much-ballyhooed G20 Summit in London at the beginning of April. A major part of that objective was obtaining pledges for $500 billion in new funding, supposedly targeted for helping developing countries hard bit by the economic crisis. One hundred billion of the requested $108 billion is our pledged "obligation" to meet that $500 billion target set by the compassionate high rollers at the G20 affair. The other $8 billion is an increase in our normal IMF "subscription quota."

You see, the Wall Street financial elites and their global brethren, together with their kept politicians, intend to do on a global scale with their new "supersized" IMF what the Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department are already doing to the American economy: i.e., completely looting and socializing it. The IMF as Global Fed, however, would operate with virtual impunity, facing no constitutional constraints and lacking even the feeble "oversight" now exercised (theoretically) by Congress over the Fed and Treasury.

President Obama has slipped the IMF funding into the supplemental budget request submitted to Congress in April for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The $108 billion for the IMF dwarfs the $83.4 billion in military supplemental spending for the two wars, the ostensible main purpose of the bill. The administration hopes to pass the IMF funding in the war supplemental bill to avoid the scrutiny and debate about IMF policies, its supposed "reforms," and its proposed new powers.

On May 14, the Bretton Woods Committee, a high-powered private group of former government officials and Wall Street-Goldman Sachs operatives, sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urging "prompt enactment" of President Obama's IMF funding request. The letter was signed by 14 former officials, including five former Treasury secretaries and four former secretaries of state, as well as a former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The bipartisan lineup ...