I LOVES her verrrrrrrrrrrrrry much

That’s an impressive list of endorsers – each one bringing years of intelligent activism to this issue. It is good to see progressives and conservatives actually working together on something of deep and real meaning to “ordinary” Americans. That’s like saying “ordinary” water. Yes, Paul and Grayson are really on to something big here and they deserve our support.I’m off to call my rep.

Thanks for staying on this Jane. It’s a critical move against the banksters.

signed.

I think so too. I hope members of the Democratic Caucus will find it persuasive and cosponsor the bill.

BTW, if you want to know if your rep is a cosponsor, you can find out here

http://action.firedoglake.com/…..osponsors/

Why are so many Republicans including teh crazy Michelle B. signed on?

so sad that the bills to audit the fed had to come from outside the democratic party – thanks to ron paul and bernie sanders for getting the ball rolling. but i’m very glad to now see some dems joining in.

I endorse the idea of auditing the Fed. It is the first step toward exercising control over what has become a quasi-member of the Executive branch and serves as an extra-Constitutional conduit to funding outside the purview of the Congress.

It should be interesting to see what happens with this bill. The trillions that the Fed has been throwing around is a blatant violation of the Constitution. OTOH neither Obama nor the Congress want to take responsibility for the magnitude of the nation’s fiscal problems by addressing them through the regular budgeting process. So while politicians may carp about opacity at the Fed, they may not want to do much about it.

Why are so many Republicans including teh crazy Michelle B. signed on?

Because it isn’t a Republican who’s spending the money.

wow jane! good news, your list needs to be updated. via thomas, there are more co-sponsors from just the last two days:

• Rep Pastor, Ed [AZ-4] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Brown-Waite, Ginny [FL-5] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Altmire, Jason [PA-4] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Latta, Robert E. [OH-5] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Reichert, David G. [WA-8] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Rogers, Mike J. [MI-8] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Berry, Marion [AR-1] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Schauer, Mark H. [MI-7] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Scalise, Steve [LA-1] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Forbes, J. Randy [VA-4] – 5/20/2009
• Rep Ross, Mike [AR-4] – 5/21/2009
• Rep Berkley, Shelley [NV-1] – 5/21/2009
• Rep Welch, Peter [VT] – 5/21/2009
• Rep Thornberry, Mac [TX-13] – 5/21/2009

179 cosponsors are now listed! (i think it must be 180 though because i don’t see Grijalva on the official list yet)

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/…..01207:@@@N

major progress! but my rep isn’t on the list yet. will call his office now.

My congressman isn’t on there yet either. I’ll give his office a call this afternoon.

In the meantime, in addition to signing myself, I posted a link to the petition on my Facebook status.

What is Break the Matrix doing on this?

Seems natural that Ron Paul activists would be all over this. We had a guest blog from Rick Williams back in April, perhaps this is a time for a fresh post on the subject of the Federal Reserve. Be aware that discussion of the Federal Reserve can bring out conspiracy theorists, some of whom make 9/11 truthers look endearing.

There’s some irony in how many more Republican sponsors than Democratic sponsors are supporting more fed transparency.

Since you brought it up…

They (the government) would have you believe that powerful people never conspire and that trying to piece together the speckled evidence of these conspiracies is only for the realm of nuttery.

— the exiled ToqueDeville

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…..rist-Label

Can we get Alan Grayson on the Daily Show to talk about this? Maybe get Ron Paul on again too.

Just brainstorming.

Some conspiracy theories may be valid. My point is that in internet discourse once you get multiple conspiracy theorists contributing it becomes distracting.

I’ll dust off my copy of Greider’s book and watch for FDL Booksalon.

Thanks to Ron Paul for banging the drum of the unchecked powers of the Federal Reserve for 30 years. Thanks to Grayson for bringing this to the attention of the Democratic side of the isle, although he kind of loses credibility by also pimping the retarded mandatory vacation bill.

Yes, I too thought more Repubs than Dems supporting her was stranger than fiction, but then we can’t ever underestimate the Feds ability to obfuscate. So, some Repubs will say, they must be audited. The Fed says, ok, Charley get the other set of books ready. What the Fed and Repubs dont want is a critical look at the Feds authority to issue bonds which create the debt service which we the taxpayers pay.

Their worst nightmare is that Ron Paul’s 30 year crusade produces positive results and the Fed loses its management of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history.

No, the Fed dosen’t want to see America financially stable. There is just no way its Masters will allow a return to debt free currency, which, as they are well familiar, produces prosperity for all and relegates the banks and other “monarchies” to impotents in their centuties old war to control governments and economies.

An excellent book on the topic of our money and our debt is, Ellen H. Brown, “Web of Debt” 2007. She presents a sober view of what we’ve been up against and how to resolve the issue of public debt.

My present representative, Maxine Waters, should certainly co-sponsor this legislation. She’s a progressive Democrat in all senses of the word. I don’t understand why she and Congresswoman Diane Watson are not already on board. They are natural, progressive Democrats from Los Angeles. Most of the Congress people from L.A. (like Henry Waxman and Adam Schiff, et. al.,) are good people who should support this legislation. (My former Congressional representative, Jane Harman, is an exception to the rule — she is a total tool to the defense industry and a major supporter of wiretapping and the War on Iraq — until, ironically, her own titties were squeezed by the intelligence Establishment.)

We, as their constituents, have to make sure that they sign on. (Harman, of course, excepted).

Right, however, they contributed, significantly, to the necessity for the Dems to create a bailout enviroment.

Because they want to posture. They will tell their constituents that they sought to constrain the Democratic influence over the Fed by exposing the kind of pressure the Administration placed on the Fed to issue “sky-is-the-limit” bailout money which they will claim belongs to the taxpayer. As long as the audit sticks to bookeeping crapolla rather than look at policy reform Repubs are happy.

But don’t let auditors recommend that the Fed curtail issuance of debt and instead issue debt free currency. That’s when the Repubs will jump ship and show their true colors; support for usury and an infinite debt service burden for America’s middle class and poor.

The libertarian right behind Ron Paul hails from the conspiracy theory swamps of the John Birch Society. This group derives its perspective from Edward Griffin, author of “The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.” (It’s an interesting book to read but people who accept its arguments, like Ron Paul, are like people who would develop theology around Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”).

If I interpret John K. Galbraith correctly (”Money”), the Federal Reserve ceased to be of any policy relevance after Benjamen Strong chaired it and helped bring about the Great Depression. Strong was succeeded by Mariner Eccles, who was probably a champion of Keynesianism before Keynes wrote the “General Theory”. (He probably consulted with Keynes during the latter’s visit to the US in 1934). I found this post from Robert Reich about Eccles:

“Marriner S. Eccles who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November, 1934 to February, 1948 gave his view of what caused the Depression in his memoirs, “Beckoning Frontiers” (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951):

“As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth — not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced — to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

“That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers’ loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

“The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

“Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.

“This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression.”

“Ce plus change, ce plus la meme chose.” Doesn’t Mariner Eccles about sum it all up?