We’ve come a long way baby, in 233 years!  The elite are still controlling our money, the corrupt, in and out of government, are still making billion (or is it trillion) dollar deals with the devil and the Congress and the President are trying to strip us of our freedom and sell America’s sovereignty to the third world, along with giving away our national wealth and resources.  Other than that, not much has changed.  In fact, we continue to repeat the same mistakes, over and over and over again, to the detriment of all Americans and to the destruction of our freedom and sovereignty.

President Andrew Jackson (1829 to 1837) knew what the central banks were doing and he closed them, paid off the national debt and returned the monetary system to gold and silver coins.  He said about the central banks:

“The paper-money system and its natural associations—monopoly and exclusive privileges—have already struck their roots too deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil.”

Jackson also said, while throwing the bankers out of the oval office:

“… You are a den of vipers and thieves.  I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, I will rout you out,” and he did.

Jackson called paper money “rag money”.  He was right then and he is still right now.

Thomas Jefferson said to John Taylor in 1816 that: “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies…”.

President James Madison (1809 to 1817) said: “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”

These men knew what they were talking about.

In the end, it only took the money changers and the power brokers 81 years to undue the actions of Andrew Jackson and get their way again, by convincing the U. S. Congress and President Wilson that we needed another central bank, euphemistically called the Federal Reserve, which isn’t federal and it doesn’t have any reserves.

Congressman Louis T. McFadden (Rep. PA – June 1932) said of the Federal Reserve:  “The Federal Reserve banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the International Bankers.” McFadden also blamed the Great Depression on the Federal Reserve.  McFadden was right then and he is still right today.

The Federal Reserve, with the help of many socialist presidents and Congresses since 1913, have turned a once prosperous and wealthy nation, into a debtor nation by corrupting the phrase in the pre-amble of the U. S. constitution where it states: ”….. and promote the general welfare“.  As a result, every dollar we spend now represents debt and does not equal a fair measure of goods and services, as it should.  You would need $21.60 in 2007 to equal what a dollar was worth in 1913, prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve.  Since 2000, the value of the dollar, thus each American’s buying power, has eroded by over 20%.

Socialist politicians in our government, for almost 100 years, for the purposes of remaining in power by exploiting the weakness in individuals who were looking for a free handout, worked in conjunction with the Federal Reserve to expand the money supply (debt) to pay for the handouts.  Not only was the public treasury pillaged for purely political reasons (that should be treason), but the American taxpayer also picked up the tab for the interest paid to the Federal Reserve and other countries for the loans and the hidden cost of inflation because of diluting the number of dollars in circulation.  This evil is still going on today, but the numbers are escalating exponentially.

The estimated liability for actual government debt and unfunded entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) for every man, woman and child in America, is estimated to be almost $350,000.  The Social Security unfunded liability is just shy of $14 Trillion.  Medicare’s unfunded liability is over $73 Trillion.  Both numbers are rising rapidly.

In light of the nation’s current financial black hole, which we are being dragged into by the sheer gravity of it, along with the failure of most government social programs, for the government to even be contemplating, much less debating the implementation of nationalized health care and cap and trade legislation, is not only fool hardy and grossly negligent, it is outright treason.

But as long as there are corrupt politicians who will exploit the weakness in humans for their votes and conspire with special interest groups, giant, international corporations and the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air to pay for unconstitutional welfare and environmental protection programs, America’s airplane is on fire and is in a crash dive to the deadly sea of national bankruptcy, while Americans are headed for perpetual indentured servitude.

No!  Americans are already indentured (slaves) to America’s rising debt and the relief can only come from patriotic Americans who will bring this madness to an abrupt halt, first peacefully and if that doesn’t work, by any other means.

We claimed freedom from tyranny once before and if necessary, we can and will do it again.  We cannot let the bastards win, or the Revolution from which America was born and all the lives that were sacrificed since then to maintain our freedom, will have been for naught.

It is high time that free Americans everywhere, repeat the words of President Andrew Jackson, to the politicians of Washington DC and to those politicians elsewhere in state and local governments, “… You are a den of vipers and thieves.  We intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, we will rout you out,” and then do it.

President Jackson also said,  “it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil”, and indeed it WILL take the efforts of millions of Americans to “eradicate this evil.”

Ron Ewart [send him email] is President of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS, an organization dedicated to re-establish, preserve, protect and defend property rights.

Statement at Hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, February 15, 2007

Transparency in monetary policy is a goal we should all support. I’ve often wondered why Congress so willingly has given up its prerogative over monetary policy. Astonishingly, Congress in essence has ceded total control over the value of our money to a secretive central bank.

Congress created the Federal Reserve, yet it had no constitutional authority to do so. We forget that those powers not explicitly granted to Congress by the Constitution are inherently denied to Congress – and thus the authority to establish a central bank never was given.

Of course Jefferson and Hamilton had that debate early on, a debate seemingly settled in 1913.

But transparency and oversight are something else, and they’re worth considering. Congress, although not by law, essentially has given up all its oversight responsibility over the Federal Reserve.

There are no true audits, and Congress knows nothing of the conversations, plans, and actions taken in concert with other central banks. We get less and less information regarding the money supply each year, especially now that M3 is no longer reported.

The role the Fed plays in the President’s secretive Working Group on Financial Markets goes unnoticed by members of Congress. The Federal Reserve shows no willingness to inform Congress voluntarily about how often the Working Group meets, what actions it takes that affect the financial markets, or why it takes those actions.

But these actions, directed by the Federal Reserve, alter the purchasing power of our money. And that purchasing power is always reduced. The dollar today is worth only four cents compared to the dollar in 1913, when the Federal Reserve started. This has profound consequences for our economy and our political stability. All paper currencies are vulnerable to collapse, and history is replete with examples of great suffering caused by such collapses, especially to a nation’s poor and middle class. This leads to political turmoil.

Even before a currency collapse occurs, the damage done by a fiat system is significant. Our monetary system insidiously transfers wealth from the poor and middle class to the privileged rich. Wages never keep up with the profits of Wall Street and the banks, thus sowing the seeds of class discontent. When economic trouble hits, free markets and free trade often are blamed, while the harmful effects of a fiat monetary system are ignored. We deceive ourselves that all is well with the economy, and ignore the fundamental flaws that are a source of growing discontent among those who have not shared in the abundance of recent years.

Few understand that our consumption and apparent wealth is dependent on a current account deficit of $800 billion per year. This deficit shows that much of our prosperity is based on borrowing rather than a true increase in production. Statistics show year after year that our productive manufacturing jobs continue to go overseas. This phenomenon is not seen as a consequence of the international fiat monetary system, where the United States government benefits as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency.

Government officials consistently claim that inflation is in check at barely 2%, but middle class Americans know that their purchasing power – especially when it comes to housing, energy, medical care, and school tuition – is shrinking much faster than 2% each year.

Even if prices were held in check, in spite of our monetary inflation, concentrating on CPI distracts from the real issue. We must address the important consequences of Fed manipulation of interest rates. When interest rates are artificially low, below market rates, insidious mal-investment and excessive indebtedness inevitably bring about the economic downturn that everyone dreads.

We look at GDP numbers to reassure ourselves that all is well, yet a growing number of Americans still do not enjoy the higher standard of living that monetary inflation brings to the privileged few. Those few have access to the newly created money first, before its value is diluted.

For example: Before the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, CEO income was about 30 times the average worker’s pay. Today, it’s closer to 500 times. It’s hard to explain this simply by market forces and increases in productivity. One Wall Street firm last year gave out bonuses totaling $16.5 billion. There’s little evidence that this represents free market capitalism.

In 2006 dollars, the minimum wage was $9.50 before the 1971 breakdown of Bretton Woods. Today that dollar is worth $5.15. Congress congratulates itself for raising the minimum wage by mandate, but in reality it has lowered the minimum wage by allowing the Fed to devalue the dollar. We must consider how the growing inequalities created by our monetary system will lead to social discord.

GDP purportedly is now growing at 3.5%, and everyone seems pleased. What we fail to understand is how much government entitlement spending contributes to the increase in the GDP. Rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes, which simply gets us back to even, is considered part of GDP growth. Wall Street profits and salaries, pumped up by the Fed’s increase in money, also contribute to GDP statistical growth. Just buying military weapons that contribute nothing to the well being of our citizens, sending money down a rat hole, contributes to GDP growth! Simple price increases caused by Fed monetary inflation contribute to nominal GDP growth. None of these factors represent any kind of real increases in economic output. So we should not carelessly cite misleading GDP figures which don’t truly reflect what is happening in the economy. Bogus GDP figures explain in part why so many people are feeling squeezed despite our supposedly booming economy.

But since our fiat dollar system is not going away anytime soon, it would benefit Congress and the American people to bring more transparency to how and why Fed monetary policy functions.

For starters, the Federal Reserve should:

• Begin publishing the M3 statistics again. Let us see the numbers that most accurately reveal how much new money the Fed is pumping into the world economy.
• Tell us exactly what the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets does and why.
• Explain how interest rates are set. Conservatives profess to support free markets, without wage and price controls. Yet the most important price of all, the price of money as determined by interest rates, is set arbitrarily in secret by the Fed rather than by markets! Why is this policy written in stone? Why is there no congressional input at least?
• Change legal tender laws to allow constitutional legal tender (commodity money) to compete domestically with the dollar.

How can a policy of steadily debasing our currency be defended morally, knowing what harm it causes to those who still believe in saving money and assuming responsibility for themselves in their retirement years? Is it any wonder we are a nation of debtors rather than savers?

We need more transparency in how the Federal Reserve carries out monetary policy, and we need it soon.

Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas. His “Audit the Fed” bill, HR1207, currently has over 290 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives.  He is the author of seven books, including “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” and his latest, “End the Fed.”

Last week I was very pleased that hearings were held on the independence of the Federal Reserve system.  My bill HR 1207, known as the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, was discussed at length, as well as the general question of whether or not the Federal Reserve should continue to operate independently.

The public is demanding transparency in government like never before.  A majority of the House has cosponsored HR 1207.  Yet, Senator Jim DeMint’s heroic efforts to attach it to another piece of legislation elicited intense opposition by the Senate leadership.

The hearings on Capitol Hill provided us with a great deal of information about the types of arguments that will be levied against meaningful transparency and how the secretive central bankers will defend the status quo that is so beneficial to them.

Claims are made that auditing the Fed would compromise its independence.  However, by independence, they really mean secrecy.  The Fed clearly cherishes its vast power to create and spend trillions of dollars, diluting the value of every other dollar in circulation, making deals with other central banks, and bailing out cronies, all to the detriment of the taxpayer, and to the enrichment of themselves.  I am happy to challenge this type of “independence”.

They claim the Fed is endowed with special intellectual abilities with which to control the market and that central bankers magically know what the market needs.  We should just trust them.  This is patently ridiculous.  The market is a complex and intricate thing.

No one knows what the market needs other than the market itself.  It sends signals, such as prices, that should be reacted to and respected, not thwarted and controlled.  Bankers are not all-knowing and cannot ignore the rules of supply and demand.  They might act as if they are, but their manipulation of the market just ends up throwing it wildly off balance, which gives us the boom and bust cycles.

They claim the Fed must remain apolitical.  No organization is apolitical that relies on the President to appoint the Chairman.  In fact, it is subject to the worst sort of politics – power to create trillions of dollars and affect the value of every dollar in the country without the accountability of direct elections or meaningful oversight!

The Fed typically enacts monetary policy that is favorable to particular administrations close to elections, to the detriment of long term considerations.  They do this partly because of the political appointee process for the Chairmanship.

The only accountability the Federal Reserve has is ultimately to Congress, which granted its charter and can revoke it at any time.  It is Congress’s constitutional duty to protect the value of the money, and they have abdicated this responsibility for far too long.

This was the issue that got me involved in politics 35 years ago.  It is very encouraging to finally see the issue getting some needed exposure and traction.  It is regrettable that it took a crisis of this magnitude to get a serious debate on this issue.

Ron Paul is a republican member of Congress from Texas.

I have been very pleased with the progress of my legislation, HR 1207, which calls for a complete audit of the Federal Reserve and removes many significant barriers towards transparency of our monetary system. This bill now has nearly 170 cosponsors, with support from both Republicans and Democrats.

Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a companion bill in the Senate S 604, which will hopefully begin to gain momentum as well. I am very encouraged to see so many of my colleagues in Congress stand with me for greater transparency in government.

Some have begun to push back against this bill, and I am very happy to address their concerns.

The main argument seems to be that Congressional oversight over the Fed is government interference in the free market. This argument shows a misunderstanding of what a free market really is. Fundamentally, you cannot defend the Federal Reserve and the free market at the same time.

The Fed negates the very foundation of a free market by artificially manipulating the price and supply of money – the lifeblood of the economy. In a free market, interest rates, like the price of any other consumer good, are decentralized and set by the market.

The only legitimate, Constitutional role of government in monetary policy is to protect the integrity of the monetary unit and defend against counterfeiters.

Instead, Congress has abdicated this responsibility to a cabal of elite, quasi-governmental banks who, instead of stabilizing the economy, have destabilized it. It took less than two decades for the Federal Reserve to bring on the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It has also inflated away the value of our currency by over 96 percent since its inception. It has invisibly stolen from the poor and given to the rich through this controlled inflation, and now openly stolen through recent bank bailouts. It has predictably exacerbated the very problems it was meant to solve.

Detractors have also argued that the Fed must remain immune from the political process, and that that more congressional oversight would distort their very important decisions. On the contrary, the Federal Reserve is already heavily entrenched in the political process, as the Fed chairman is a political appointee. High-level officials routinely make the rounds between positions at the Fed, member banks, Treasury and back again, taking care of friends and each other along the way.

As far as the foolishness of placing complex monetary policy decisions in the hands of politicians – I couldn’t agree more. No politician or central banker, no matter how brilliant, is smart enough to know more than the market itself. The failure of central economic planning has been witnessed over and over. It is frankly beyond me why we ever agreed to try it again.

To understand how unwise it is to have the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the magnitude of the privileges they have. They have been given the power to create money, by the trillions, and to give it to their friends, under any terms they wish, with little or no meaningful oversight or accountability. Thus the loudest arguments against greater transparency are likely to come from those friends, and understandably so.

However, it is the responsibility of every member of Congress to represent the interests of the people that sent them to Washington and find out what has been happening with our money. As the branch of government with the power of the purse, we really have no other reasonable choice when the economy is in the shape it is in.

Ron Paul is a republican member of Congress from Texas.

Ron Paul in a speech before Congress on April 1, 2009

Ron Paul: I rise in opposition to this resolution. You know, they say so often that there is not enough bipartisanship around here. We hear that complaint a lot of times. But you know, when I look at it, I see that there has been too much bipartisanship in creating the problem we’ve had. And it hasn’t been the last few days. This crisis that we’re in the midst of, this financial crisis, didn’t pop up here in the last sixty days. It didn’t pop up here in the last eight years, but has taken several decades for us to get to this point where we are today dealing with a budget that is just totally out of control and a monetary and economic system that is uncontrollable as well.

They said that this budget is going to be $3.6 dollars with a $1.1 dollar deficit. And the amazing thing is that a $1.1 dollar deficit is going to be $400 billion less than this year. I’ll wait and see if that really happens, because that probably won’t work out that way. Matter of fact, characteristically, the statistics that we hear and we talk about the budget are never reliable, especially when you’re in a recession. In a recession, nobody can predict the revenues. The revenues are going to be a lot lower and the expenditures are going to be a lot higher.

So, I am making a prediction that the spending will be over $4 trillion this year, and that the deficit is going to be over $2 trillion, and that the picture that we are looking at today is much worse than we are willing to admit. Matter of fact, I think the problem we face today is not so much a budgetary problem. It’s much different than that. We talk a lot about the budget. Just think of how many hours we talked about it today. But the budget and the deficit is a symptom of something much more serious, and that is what we have allowed our government to become. I think it has been the loss of respect by us here in the Congress to understand and take seriously Article 1 Section 8. If we did that, we wouldn’t be doing all these things that we are doing.

If we understood the 10th amendment, we wouldn’t be doing all this, we wouldn’t have a deficit. If we understood monetary policy we wouldn’t have a monetary system that encourages all this that gets us off the hook.

Because conservatives like to spend a lot of money, and liberals like to spend a lot of money, and they don’t have to worry. We’ll raise taxes, we borrow it and we do it and have been doing it for decades and getting away with it. But it’s coming to an end because we’ve always been dependent on the Fed to come in and monetize the debt. Now, have they backed off in anyway? No. They are expending it. Not only do they buy in the market, they’re buying it directly from the treasury. They’re only encouraging us to do even more of this.

We have endorsed, as a Congress and as a people, a welfare-warfare state, and that is not part of what America is supposed to be. It encourages the spending and the borrowing and the deficits and all the inflation. Take for instance, we were supposed to get a lot of change with the new administration.

One thing I was hoping about is that they might look at this overseas wild spending and expansion of the war going on in the Middle East…. but the military budget, the war budget is going up 9%. And as long as we have the expansion of war, the dependency of this spending overseas, we’re spending over a trillion dollars a year maintaining the world empire. At the same time, we have runaway spending here on welfare here at home. It is unsustainable.

We have a debt that will not be paid. We know that when it reaches a certain level, it cannot be paid. But it is always liquidated. Now, if an individual or a company goes into debt, it can be liquidated in the old fashion way of bankruptcy.

Countries don’t go bankrupt. What they do is they default on the debt. It doesn’t mean they won’t pay it. They pay it off in bad money. And literally, the purpose of the Federal Reserve right now is to lower the real debt. So, if you destroy 50% of the value of the dollar in the next year or two, the real debt has gone down 50%. Literally, the Federal Reserve Board is praying for and encouraging inflation to lower the real debt because it can’t be sustained.

But who does that hurt? It hurts people who save. The people who save get 1% on their earnings and we tax the little bit they get and the people who are doing the right thing are being punished the most. So, the ones who lived beyond their means get bailed out. And it’s a very bad, bad system that we have and we have to decide what the role of government ought to be.

You know, we do blame the banks, we blame the business people and everybody. But you know, I have a lot of people come to my office and say, “Cut his, cut his, cut here, but don’t cut my program”. So, we have to decide as a people what should the role of government be. And if we think the role of government is going to be and should be the policeman of the world and to run a welfare state, this budgetary problem will never be solved.

Nancy Pelosi: Gentleman is recognized for 30 seconds.

Ron Paul: I thank you for yielding, and let me just close by saying that the greatest danger I see right now is the placing of the blame for the crisis that we’re in as if we had too much freedom, too much capitalism, not enough regulation. They did this in the 1930s and they are doing it even more now.

Instead of saying that we overspent, overtaxed, overregulated, we have lost our confidence and if we don’t change that attitude and if we accept this notion and accept international regulation, believe me, we’re in big trouble. We will lose our freedoms and we will lose our sovereignty as well.

The stock market rises and then crashes. Housing prices soar and then plummet. The Federal Reserve causes these booms and busts by constantly expanding and contracting the supply of money and credit.

Credit expansion by the Federal Reserve increases the demand for producer assets and investment instruments. This causes bubbles in things like stocks and housing. When the Fed then contracts credit to avoid systemic price inflation the asset bubbles burst.

This is the history of the Federal Reserve — booms and busts, mixed with episodes of economic stagnation and high inflation like the 1970s.

Even before the Fed was created in 1913 government manipulation of money and credit caused repeated bubbles and contractions. One big source of this mischief was government imposed exchange ratios between gold, silver, and the U.S. dollar. When these hardwired exchange ratios didn’t match reality, problems ensued.

It’s important to recognize that economic perfection isn’t possible. Investors will always make mistakes. But we would expect these mistakes to be randomly distributed throughout the economy, and occur at different times. What causes a bunch of investment mistakes to cluster in particular sectors at a specific time, causing systemic problems?

Only government has the power to impose universal conditions on the economy, from the top down, causing investment mistakes to cluster, like they have in the housing market. The government can do this by passing laws and creating programs that favor one type of investment over others, causing a boom in those sectors.

But the Federal Reserve, with its monopoly control over the supply of money and credit, is an even more powerful mechanism for causing investment errors to cluster.

We need to get off the Federal Reserve roller coaster. We need to end centralized top-down control of the money supply and interest rates. We need a true free market in money and banking. We must abolish the Federal Reserve.

Congressman Ron Paul has a bill to accomplish this. It’s called the “Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act,” and a national coalition called “End the Fed” is working to bring attention to this bill.

Please use our quick and easy Educate the Powerful System to ask your elected representatives to co-sponsor the “Federal Reserve Abolition Act” when Congressman Paul re-introduces it in this Congress.