The Sound Money Defense League strongly supports legislation to audit the shadowy Federal Reserve, an unaccountable private banking cartel that has been delegated the power to control America's money supply.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the legislation in 2014 on a 333-92 vote, with all but one Republican and 106 Democrats in favor of it. However, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, kept the bill from coming to a vote the Senate floor. In 2016, Rand Paul's (R-KY) Federal Reserve Transparency Act received great support. Ultimately, senate Democrats shot down the bill.

This session, Paul has reintroduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (S. 16) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) has introduced similar legislation in the house with H.R. 24. We are working hard to rally support for the passage of these important measures in 2018.

The Fed Enjoys Secrecy Despite Horrendous Mismanagement

A sightseeing tour through Washington D.C. may take you past an ornate building that houses the most powerful group of men and women in the Western world. It's not the White House and not the Capitol. It's the Marriner Eccles Building, where you'll find the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States.

This secretive group of bankers has absolute authority to create and control the money used by most of the world – the U.S. dollar, with no elected lawmakers or voting taxpayers controlling them.

The policies coming from the Eccles Building affect almost everything bought and sold around the world, from stocks, bonds, and commodities (oil, food, gold), down to the value of your home, your savings, and the paycheck you bring home. All public debt created by The Fed is heaped directly on your family's shoulders.

The dirty secret hiding in the weeds at Marriner Eccles is those central bankers have been stealing your money, everybody's money, day after day now for 100 years, to enrich government and themselves. They have made a clean getaway from the scene of the crime, because your government, your media, and your schools did their best to keep all this from you. To this day, most Americans do not understand the crime committed against their lives and fortunes.

The Fed Uses "Weapons of Mass Production"

In this robbery, The Fed uses weapons of mass production to create inflated prices, by printing trillions of dollars to spend or waste on social engineering, wars, and pet projects. The government gets “first use” of the money, can spend all it wants, and doesn't care about cost. “First use” means dollars you get later are worth much less. When government wants to spend more, it prints more, and the cycle is accelerated. Ongoing inflation means your money is stolen before it's even printed.

The reasoning for having a central bank is to smooth out economic highs and lows, but the modern Federal Reserve has shown anything but good economic management.

By international agreement at the end of World War II, the U.S. dollar is presently the globe's “prime currency,” because the U.S. led the Allies to victory, and because the U.S. promised to settle international accounts by redeeming dollars with gold.

By 1971, there were so many dollars in circulation that Richard Nixon defaulted on that promise to redeem dollars for gold. Overnight, the collateral for the world’s “prime currency” disappeared. All that was left backing the dollar was a confidence game – the “full faith and credit” of the United States. The evidence proves that confidence is misplaced.

Bankers have abused confidence for centuries, resulting in legalized fractional reserve banking. As they issued their banknotes – IOU's for gold and silver – bankers discovered they could pay out more receipts than they held in metals, since most customers preferred to carry paper while leaving their metal money on deposit. Banks today are legally allowed to invent money on the spot from thin air while actually owning only a fraction of the amounts they loan customers.

The Fed's original mandate when a lazy Congress handed over the nation's purse strings (during a sparsely attended Senate session on Christmas Eve of 1913) was to protect the value of the dollar and, later, to work toward full employment. The Fed has failed miserably with both.

To cover up its mistakes, the government simply lies with its official numbers. Recent Bureau of Labor figures show 92.4 million working age Americans, 16 and older, have stopped looking for jobs, while 9.5 million job seekers are still officially counted. That's over 102 million Americans out of work. Those who gave up looking are simply forgotten in the "headline" unemployment rate of 5.8% as of December, 2014.

Recent numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show 47 million Americans rely on government food handouts. But we don't see Depression Era soup lines stretching daily down the street. They are camouflaged by plastic food stamp debit cards, blending the breadlines into regular supermarket checkout lanes, further disguising government failures.

The government claims a low inflation rate of under 2%. To achieve that deceptive number, it doesn't count price hikes in food and energy, substitutes out steak for hamburger, and geometrically weights the numbers in controversial ways. Anyone shopping for groceries or paying a utility bill knows differently.

The government's Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows a $20 purchase in 1913, the year The Fed was created, would cost $477.07 today, a “2,286.4% cumulative rate of inflation.” Today's dollar is worth barely one cent when compared to the purchasing power of a 1913 dollar.

The Fed's Deliberate Policy of Inflation Robs Americans of Their Purchasing Power

The Fed never intends to repay the debt it creates, but instead intends to default on that debt, by having you, and nations we owe, pay the cost of that debt through planned inflation. Ongoing inflation at the hands of The Fed is actually a stealth default on that debt.

Serious doubts about central banks have always existed. For The Founding Fathers, the question was not whether paper money would be used, since Congress always intended paper money be backed by gold. The question was how would the nation's bankers be controlled. Long before declaring Independence, the colonies resisted King George's wishes that the Bank of England control their finances.

Thomas Jefferson expressed his fears in a letter to Virginia Senator John Eppes, leaving us his famous quote. “I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

President Andrew Jackson agreed with Jefferson. He won his second term (1832) on an anti-bank platform, then dismantled America's early foray into central banking. Prior to 1913, our nation rarely had a central bank.

Jefferson's and Jackson's worries are the same troubling concerns the Sound Money Defense League and many others have today. Standing armies are not needed to destroy America when you have The Fed already doing that from the inside out.

Few know that the U.S. Federal Reserve is not an elected government body, but an association of private bankers. The Federal Reserve Bank itself is owned by those bankers, not by taxpayers. That has not stopped The Fed from interfering in legislation and policy making.

The Fed leads the resistance to stop all public attempts to discover the truth about Americans' supposed 8,300 tons of gold, which is a public matter. The Fed has been quite successful keeping Fort Knox's secrets to itself. And The Fed has completely ignored all credible evidence and accusations that it manipulates markets to suppress the dollar price of gold in order to artificially prop up the value of the dollar. Yet The Fed enjoys the false reputation that it is independent of government.

Alan Greenspan, Fed chief for 25 years under four presidents, admitted as much. “I never said the Federal Reserve was independent,” he told a stunned audience in October of 2014. Greenspan waited eight years after leaving The Fed to make that startling admission.

The evidence is overwhelming that The Fed's loose money policies and influence have harmed America more than helped. Former Fed chief Ben Bernanke promised Congress in 2005 there was no danger from a housing bubble. The collection of academics and bankers running The Fed were just not sharp enough to recognize their loose money policy was inflating the disastrous credit bubble now known as the Housing Crisis of 2008, perhaps more accurately called the Second Great Depression. We have all felt the impact of that mistake, but The Fed seems to be repeating its reckless cycle of pumping up asset prices once again.

For years, then-Congressman Ron Paul of Texas pushed a bill to force the Fed to open its books, without success. In 2010, this effort picked up steam on the heels of the Fed's extraordinary interventions, and the bill found over 300 supporters in the House. However, the Audit the Fed bill died on the vine in the Democrat controlled Senate.

Recent events in the gold markets underline the international loss of faith in The Fed. During the Cold War, Europeans feared a Soviet invasion and stored their gold in the U.S. Over the past few years, Germany, Austria, Turkey, The Netherlands, and France have publicly stated they want their nations' gold returned to their own safekeeping.

Those nations, and others we may not yet know about, are saying plainly they distrust the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury to keep their gold safe in the U.S. That dramatic turnaround reveals America and The Fed are quickly losing the blind faith confidence which is now the only collateral the dollar, and The Fed, have left.

There is no better time than today to audit this secretive private banking cartel which controls America's money.