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Peter Schiff at the NYC Audit the Fed rally
At City Hall Park on Saturday – the location of the Tax Day Tea Party a week and a half earlier – hundreds of grassroots activists turned out to demand an audit of the Federal Reserve. Many of the activists preferred to abolish the Fed altogether and return to real money backed by something more than fairy dust and good wishes from Ben Bernanke, but there was general agreement that an audit was an important first step.
There has never been an audit in the 95-year history of the Federal Reserve, and its policies and actions are shrouded in secrecy. The Fed has refused a request from Bloomberg News under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion in government-backed loans from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Rep. Ron Paul has introduced H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, to compel the Federal Reserve to submit to an audit and account to the taxpayers for how it is spending trillions of our dollars. Thus, activists gathered in New York and the other cities with Federal Reserve Banks on Saturday to generate support for Paul’s bill.
The New York rally featured an impressive lineup of heavyweight Fed critics – columnist Becky Akers, economics professor Murray Sabrin, and former Congressman Jospeh DioGuardi, who has the distinction of being the only CPA ever elected to Congress. (Why am I not surprised that nobody in Congress is qualified to count the money?)
The star of the show as far as most of the crowd was concerned was clearly Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. Schiff earned notoriety for predicting the current economic meltdown and enduring the ridicule of the talking heads on CNBC.
In his remarks on Saturday, Schiff warned that the crisis will not be resolved “unless we get to the root cause, which is the Federal Reserve and the phony monetary system that we now have.”
Schiff is correct that the fiat monetary system is the root cause of the crisis, and it is something that the tea party brigades need to put on their radar. The original Boston Tea Party protested “taxation without representation.” The Federal Reserve, through its ability to print money, does exactly that.
Isaiah Matos, chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party and regional coordinator for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, helped organize the rally. Matos observed, “Regular independent audits are standard practice for any legitimate financial institution.”
Then again, legitimate financial institutions can’t create money out of thin air.
For more info: NYC Campaign for Liberty
Comments
the federal reserve is way too powerful for any kind of audit/investigation/regulation.
we are all dead... the wheels are in motion. the single most important factor in our downfall will be people's belief in religion/armageddon, which will be exploited in 2012
"taxation without representation" is an insufficient argument. It may be enough for those who want to be represented, I, on the other hand don't want to get taxed.
31 USC 714 provides for the GAO to audit the Federal Reserve. The Board and its member banks are all audited and have been for their entire existence. Those audit functions have been held by various organizations, but for the last 30 years the GAO and private accounting firms have audited the Board and its member banks.
If a complete audit has always been performed in the Fed's history then there should be no problem passing this legislation.
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