Local Citizens Petition Congress to Audit the Federal Reserve

Today thousands of signatures were delivered to the offices of Tennessee Congressman John Tanner and United States Senators for Tennessee Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander by non-partisan constituents in a grass roots effort to encourage an audit of the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed), who some claim caused the financial crisis. Locally, handwritten, independent signatures were delivered to the Jackson Congressional offices numbering in the hundreds. This is not surprising since according to a recent Rasmussen Reports national phone survey, “75% of Americans favor auditing the Federal Reserve and making the results available to the public.”1

Audit the Federal Reserve Legislation, HR 1207 and S 604, are gaining widespread bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, but neither John Tanner nor Senators Corker nor Senator Alexander have yet to sign on to the legislation. Current bipartisan support includes, Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), co-chair of the Progressive Caucus; Stephanie Sandlin (D-SD), chair of the Blue Dog Coalition; Ron Paul (R-TX), the bill’s sponsor; and Pete Sessions (R-TX), chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.

According to Senator Bernie Sanders, the Federal Reserve has pumped $2.2 Trillion2 into the economy recently, no one outside the Fed knows where it has gone, and the Fed won’t say. Since 1913 the dollar has depreciated by 95%3 according to the American Institute for Economics (AIER) and statistics by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Fed has been charged by Congress with maintaining a stable currency, which they have obviously not done. According to the Constitution, Congress is to regulate a sound currency, but they gave this duty over to the Federal Reserve Bank, a for profit entity, in 1913. President Wilson, who helped ratify the Federal Reserve Act stated the following years later regarding the Act, “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
President Andrew Jackson vigilantly fought the International Banks attempt to take over the US monetary system and stopped the international bankers for nearly 100 years. However, he knew his work was not complete. He stated, But it will require steady and persevering exertions on your part to rid yourselves of the iniquities and mischiefs of the paper system and to check the spirit of monopoly and other abuses which have sprung up with it, and of which it is the main support. So many interests are united to resist all reform on this subject that you must not hope the conflict will be a short one nor success easy. My humble efforts have not been spared during my administration of the Government to restore the constitutional currency of gold and silver, and something, I trust, has been done toward the accomplishment of this most desirable object; but enough yet remains to require all your energy and perseverance. The power, however, is in your hands, and the remedy must and will be applied if you determine upon it.”
Recently Warren Buffet commented on the result of the Fed’s monetary injection in a New York Times op-ed stating, “Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: ‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.’ In fact, Inflation is a tax that is hidden from the people and while it has been slowly killing our currency for nearly a century, the current rate of monetary injection is completely unacceptable.”4