By Joe Wright
GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul was able to persuade Bernie Sanders and 51 additional senators to vote in favor of auditing the central bank of the United States – The Federal Reserve. The final vote was 53 for the audit versus 44 against the “Audit The Fed” bill.
Despite the Senate majority vote, it was not enough to pass the bill because Democrats filibustered the effort.
The Associated Press reports:
The Senate on Tuesday blocked legislation calling for tougher audits of the Federal Reserve, rebuffing an attempt by Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul to give lawmakers greater oversight of the central bank’s moves on interest rates.
The 53-44 vote fell short of the threshold to overcome a Democratic filibuster. But the Kentucky Republican, who is seeking the GOP’s nomination for president, was joined by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president who occupies the opposite end of the political spectrum from Paul.
The measure calls for the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency for Congress, to scrutinize the Fed’s monetary policy and offer recommendations to lawmakers on ways to address any perceived problems.
Congress, the White House and Treasury officials have traditionally been careful to steer clear of questioning the Fed’s independence to set policy, and current law blocks the GAO from reviewing the way the agency conducts monetary policy or reviewing internal deliberations.
“Nowhere else but in Washington, D.C., would you find an institution with so much unchecked power,” Paul said.
Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also supported Rand’s father Ron Paul’s multi-decade effort to audit the Federal Reserve in 2010.
Sanders was one of the only lawmakers to report the shocking findings of that first-ever audit of the Fed:
The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”
Among the investigation’s key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. “No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president,” Sanders said.
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Although a new audit of the bank would have provided more transparency and accountability, it still had no authority to fix the problem that prompted the audit in the first place.
“The Federal Reserve has the ability to create new money and spend it on whatever financial assets it wants, whenever it wants, while giving the new money to whichever banks it wants,” Paul said. “Low-income workers do not get the luxury of receiving the Fed’s newly created money first, nor do they do have the luxury of receiving the near-zero interest rates that the wealthy do.”
More and more people are becoming aware of the real problem of fractional reserve central banking. Yet it seems the solution will not come from politics. Perhaps it will come from Bitcoin?
Joe Wright writes for ActivistPost.com where this article first appeared. This article is open source and available to share or post in full with attribution.
I wonder who the 44 represent .I dobt that the idiots who have voted and continue to vote for the “44” have no clue that those individuals do not give a s..t about them…
Give us the names of the 44.
We need to go much further than an audit of the world’s central banks by an independent body; we need to revert to sovereign money creation. Check out Positive Money dot Org
the article essentially justifies what sanders wants, american worker access to cheap loans and credit rations provided for the people, so long as we stay dedicated to the state and promise not to ever ruffle the feathers of our impetuous war hawks.
Yeah, too bad Rand Paul was only mentioned in the other 50% of the article. Such bias!
C’mon, Rand’s ideology is untenable. I lean more libertarian and anarchist but that is a threat to the state. Ron was the truth. rand is the diluted form but still carries a great message.
Sanders has such popularity because he is silent on war and about expanding gov’t. He won’t win but his ideals of european style ‘socialism’ is the future for the liberal fascist party that will take center stage as soon as Trump is done vilifying conservatives completely.
44 elected representatives of the people who feel the Fed is working hard for Americans, who think the Fed has made decisions with best interests of the people in mind, who believe the Fed knows where all the money (and gold and silver and…) is, and have counted it accurately. 44 Senators that we now know bow down to their masters’ still unchecked authority over the allegedly most powerful nation on the planet.
“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s laws” — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
Glad you Posted that Quote cause it was said……and it seems to have always been true……..
Who are the 44?
You don’t have to be psychic to know some are from the most communist states: massadooshits, cali, new yawk, ‘jersey, Oregon, Washington, rhode island, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, “conn”, ILL, VA, W VA, Delaware, Maryland, etc.
ENDtheFED.
The unfederal b.s bank is criminal and allows the gold collar scum to pull the puppet strings of the office of the potus.
My suspicion is that you will find that the Federal Reserve is funneling money to the Main Stream Media to push liberal ideologies.
If the msm is so liberal why is it ignoring Bernie Sanders? He’s all over the internet but they barely mention him on television.
The media is controlled, the CIA is embedded in all mainstream newspapers magazines TV and radio networks via Operation Mockingbird, google it and learn. They want to anoint Hitlary as our next “queen” to replace the gay, communist Jihadist usurper currently occupying the white house and they want to shift the Obamination over to the satanic UN to be the next UN Secy General. Sanders is a loose cannon, they can’t control him anymore than they could control Ron Paul.Rand is a watered down version of Ron and they HATE him as much as they hated Ron. Politics makes strange bed fellows. Just as Ron and Rand are friends with Socialist Bernie Sanders, who is at least HONEST in some ways, Ron was also close friends with Congressman Peter Defazio from Oregon because even though they had (have) divergent views on Free Trade, they are in agreement that the FDA is evil and is trying to ban consumer access to high potency vitamins and minerals within the therapeutic range via CODEX. I was the first person in the world to blow the whistle on Codex via an article published in Life Extension Magazine in ’96 andI am in a documentary film about Codex with both Ron Paul and Peter DeFazio. The film is called “We Become Silent The Last Days of Health Freedom” You can watch it for free on the web. I am good friends with both Ron and Peter, we can’t let ourselves become all divided up along superfluous “party ;lines”. We must unite against the N.W.O from all sides of the political spectrum and not allow them to do their “divide and conquer” scam!!!
When a previous incarnation of an Audit The Fed was in committee Sanders did a big favor for the Banksters by watering it down to the point of being useless as you can see in a youtube video of Ron Paul discussing Sander’s actions. Sanders has been at the forefront of the candidates pushing for a wealth tax, ultimately this is an attempt to establish a global tax with Pelosi first proposing such a tax (global financial fee) in 2009 immediately following a public proposal by a Trilateral Commission member British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Pelosi discussed her proposal in a meeting with Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner, also a Trilateralist and former president of the Fed Res bank of NY. Clearly, the carbon tax is another iteration on the global tax that has sputtered with some kind of wealth tax looking like plan B. While Sanders doesn’t have Clinton’s long rap sheet or the psy op MSM coverage of someone like Trump, that doesn’t mean he will oppose the final globalist endgame or reveal any of it to Americans, maybe a limited hangout or two, that’s it.
politico.com/story/2009/12/pelosi-pushes-global-financial-fee-030200
Golly, why didn’t Mitch McConnell go simple majority to pass this??????????
Rand did not “persuade” Bernie. Bernie has been for this for a very long time. Way for media to spin it.
Another “spin” was Sanders’ “Support” for Ron Paul’s bill in 2010. He did not SUPPORT it. He torpedoed it! He killed it.HE replaced the bill with his own watered down version that allowed a one time semi-audit on only the Fed’s last bail out. Read history. Sanders sold out in 2010 just like Warren just did this week.
Bernie Sanders needs to be shot.
Your comment is unacceptable.
Probably a political move by Sanders. If they already knew they were going to win, the Dems would have let Sanders vote yes for political gain.
Well, well, well – Teddy Cruz didn’t vote. Didn’t want to displease his masters at Goldman Sachs.