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December 15, 2009
The Federal Reserve, also known as the central bank, is publicized as an independent entity. That is to say, it operates without any influence from any other government agency including members of Congress or the White House. According to Wikipedia, the Federal Reserve has four duties, but basically they control the country’s money, and as such, inflation and deflation. But the problem is that the Fed is more or less a secret society. No one outside the inter loop knows what they do with the country’s money. But there are those who want to change that.
Independent Representative Ron Paul has advocated a lot of what some people call radical changes in our country’s monetary policies, including making the Fed transparent. Because those changes have been considered radical, he’s been shunned a lot and looked upon as a lunatic by many. But now with the financial crisis last year and the resulting unlawful bailout of Wall Street, there are a lot of people on Capital Hill that’s beginning to think Paul isn’t such a lunatic after all.
According to this article about 300 other legislators are now joining Paul on his call to make the Federal Reserve more transparent. This has been one of Paul’s mainstays for the past couple of decades. In November of this year he introduced HR 1207 and S 604, which calls for the General Accounting Office to have access to the Federal Reserves books to be audited. This month Paul introduced HR 4248, the Free Competition in Currency Act. All this, and more, is to take away the power of the Federal Reserve to operate as it sees fit, and to spend the country’s money in the same way.
As for his current efforts, Paul says he and America’s citizens deserve the right to know the answers to a lot of questions, such as “I’d like to know who they bail out and why. I’d like to know how much they pay for securities that they buy. Did they overpay? Why did Goldman Sachs come out well and Lehman Brothers go bankrupt?” And he’s right! Why shouldn’t the American people know?
There’s only one reasonable answer to this: they know the taxpayers of the country would rise up in a citizens revolt if all these things were made public. They know we’d have confirmation of who really runs the government — Wall Street. Once it’s revealed that a huge chunk of taxpayer money (trillions, not the $700 billion we’ve been told about) is used to keep corporate America solvent year after year, voter partisanship would probably go right out the window.
Paul does have his critics. But as he pointed out this morning on CNBC, the critics have generally not even read his bill. In fact, one of them, Republican Senator Judd Gregg, when told he should read the bill, first said he didn’t need to read the bill; he already knew what was in it. But Gregg quickly caught himself, and declared he had read the bill. Gregg might have as well forgot about that last part. He’d already let his frustrations reveal the truth. He’s never read the bill, just as many opponents of many bills, on both sides of the isle, have never done; yet they’re against the bill. As Paul pointed out to Gregg, the latter simply wants to protect his sacred cow — in this case, the Federal Reserve. (See all three videos below of Paul as a guest host on CNBC’s Squawk Box Today)
On this issue, there truly is a large amount of bipartisan support in Congress. According to an article by George F. Will, there are 180 Republicans and 137 Democrats calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve’s books. But the Federal Reserve is fighting this attempt. The main arguing point of the Fed (and a small minority of lawmakers) is they say this would politicize the reserve. Not according to Ron Paul, but maybe so; but the one thing it would do is remove that total veil of secrecy of what they are doing with our money. And that is their primary concern.
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