It’s interesting that Ron Paul’s widely-supported Audit the Fed legislation is being reintroduced by his son Rand at a time when the war over the public narrative has never been more contentious.

As we’ve discussed before, whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and nowhere else is this more true than in the narrative about money. The only reason power exists where it exists and money operates the way it operates is because people all agree to tell each other the same stories about how those things function. They’re mental constructs that only exist within the realm of thought. If we all got together and decided to agree to a new financial system, we could turn the world’s power structures on their heads, and the only thing stopping that from happening is that those power structures have, until very recently, maintained a solid stranglehold on the public narrative.

The year 2016 saw the oligarchs lose control of the narrative for the first time ever as WikiLeaks and widespread internet access cost the next anointed neoliberal the U.S. presidency. This was not supposed to happen; it was a total deviation from the script. This is why the CIA-funded Washington Post has been acting absolutely insane and publishing outright lies about Russia hacking America’s power grid and distributing propaganda through all the main dissenting alternative media outlets; they’re trying to scare people away from outlets which describe a different way of looking at things than the narrative being promulgated by the ruling class. Shoring up control of public discourse is also why the US government has allotted a substantial chunk of the defense budget to a new “counter-propaganda” program designed to combat dissenting narratives online, and it’s why the 2013 NDAA revised the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, effectively making it legal for the government to conduct psy-ops on US citizens.

And now we’re seeing a push from the Republicans to weaken the oligarchic dominance of the narrative with regard to America’s money system. The fact that this is coming from political conservatives and isn’t about something sexy like indigenous water rights might cause progressives to sleep on this one a bit, but they shouldn’t, because it’s hugely important in the progressive agenda. Bringing transparency to the monetary systems of the most powerful economy on Earth would be a massive blow to the power structures who are choking Americans to death with the Walmart economy, and we need as many lefty eyes on this one as we can get.

There are many areas where progressives can collaborate with the libertarians, paleocons and even the nationalists on the right to great effect on some really important issues, and this is definitely one of them. Gaining transparency in America’s power structures is one of the mutual goals we share with everyone who opposes the neoliberal/neocon so-called “centrists” in the Democratic and Republican parties, and in my opinion it’s the single most important goal in the fight against corporatism. Retired Congressman Ron Paul is a libertarian hero who progressives can find a lot in common with on a number of issues, and his son Rand has been imperfectly carrying on his legacy as a Senator. These aren’t our people, but we’d be self-defeating morons not to collaborate with them against the plutocrats when our goals are the same, as they clearly are in this instance.

The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank, and it controls US monetary policy. It’s able to impact the lives of millions upon millions of Americans by adjusting the nation’s circulating money supply, causing economic booms and busts all over the country, impacting everything from inflation to interest rates and mortgage payments to whether your small business lives or dies. Despite the massive amount of power wielded by these unelected officials, the Fed operates with an appalling amount of opacity and lack of oversight. Wall Street Journal reports that in April one of the Fed’s former advisors, Andrew Levin, said that Americans would be “stunned to know” the extent to which the Federal Reserve is privately owned, adding that it “should be a fully public institution just like every other central bank” in the developed world. Levin now works with the left-leaning activist group Fed Up, which fights for changes they say would distance the Federal Reserve from Wall Street and make its activities more transparent and accountable to the public.

Levin’s former employer, former Fed chair Ben Bernanke, has different ideas. Like every Federal Reserve chairperson, including current chairwoman Janet Yellen, Bernanke adamantly and doth-protest-too-muchly opposes the Audit the Fed initiative, which is formally known as the Federal Reserve Transparency Act. A year ago the man who was Fed chair during the bank bailouts of the 2008 financial crisis wrote a piece for the Brookings Institution blog titled “ ‘Audit the Fed’ is not about auditing the Fed,” wherein Bernanke tried to argue that, since the Fed already publishes the results of already-existing financial audits, Audit the Fed is redundant and is nothing more than a Congressional attempt to gain influence over American economic policy decisions.

Oh no! That would mean the financial decisions which impact the lives of every American could be influenced by elected officials!

The funny thing about that accusation, which opponents of a Fed audit have been extensively relying upon, is that it's not even true. It is premised upon a lie. As the Ron Paul Liberty Report correctly notes, Bernanke’s argument exploits the conventional understanding of the average American’s understanding of the word “audit”, which for most people generally refers to a financial audit, which the Fed is subject to. But a financial audit doesn’t bring an ounce of transparency to any of the Fed’s secretive wheelings and dealings, its performance or its operations. A full audit along those lines has never happened in the entire history of the Federal Reserve. Not once. Their argument is further weakened by the fact that current Fed auditors are directly answerable to Fed officials, practically allowing the Fed to audit themselves.

In reality, there is no valid reason for anyone, especially a progressive, to oppose Paul’s legislation. It doesn’t take an economics professor to see that when a powerful organization is resisting a push for transparency, something fishy is going on. Let’s bust that thing open and find out what they don’t want us to see.

My suspicion is that the ruling elites simply don’t want to draw people's attention to how arbitrary and made-up the whole system is. How there are people dying of exposure in the streets of San Francisco because of the careless decisions of a few bankers in New York. How money is no longer anything more than a series of ones and zeros in a computer system, and how countless people are allowed to suffer and die because their ones and zeros don’t happen to add up in a way that satisfies the pretend rules of some Wall Street plutocrats. How a movement away from the gold standard robbed the Earth of having any say in whether things had gone far enough, and how divorcing money from Earth’s natural resources turned the whole thing into a purely mental game of a few unfathomably powerful oligarchs who are now free to manipulate the way money works at a whim.

Let’s get our eyes on this thing, my fellow starry-eyed rebels. This is exactly where they’ve been sticking the knife in us this whole time.

---

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even tossing me some money on Patreon so I can keep this gig up.