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Ron Paul: Yesterday on the House floor we voted on the conference report dealing with financial reforms. The bill that came back after it was in conference with the Senate. The House version of that bill had the audit provision in it; the HR 1207. It was removed in conference. So when the package came back to the floor, the Republicans had once chance to amend this bill, which is called recommit motion. And we were able to include HR 1207 in this package to see if we could get it put back in. An interesting thing happened here, because you know, we do have 320 co-sponsors of HR 1207, and it passed the committee rather easily and it was not challenged on the House floor on the first go-around run. But here we were, on the House floor with a chance to put it back in, and 114 individuals who were co-sponsors of the legislation, voted against it; they voted not to include it. But this is not totally surprising. This is the way this system works too often. People do flip flop and they do change. But it also reflects the fact that the Federal Reserve is a very powerful institution, and they were able to influence these votes. But it still is sad to see that a co-sponsor of a bill this important, that the people really care about and has a great deal of significance, all of a sudden changes. I mean supervision and monitoring and knowing what the Federal Reserve is doing is very, very important. The people want to know about this. Transparency is so important, and yet it failed on the house floor.
Now does that mean it’s over and done with? Well, pretty much so, even though there is a slight possibility another type of legislation that deals with banking regulations may come up before the end of the year, and we may get a chance to offer as a recommit motion if the leadership on the Republican side permits it. But as for now, it looks like we will not have a full audit. But believe me, a lot of benefit has come from this. The Federal Reserve will not get off completely, because more people in this country than ever before know that the Federal Reserve is very, very important, they know they were responsible for the problems that we have, and they know that they work in secrecy. The American people want to know about it. So even though they may have won this battle, they are not going to win the war. Because what they’re doing is going to be devastating to us because this piece of legislation actually gave more power to the Federal Reserve, not less. More power to the regulators, more effort to keep themselves in secret. So, therefore, I see on the long term this is very, very beneficial, so I would say for those individuals that believe in monetary reform and transparency, we will keep the heat on the Fed until we get an honest monetary system.
Question: Is there still reason to be optimistic for an audit sometime in the future?
Ron Paul: Well, I certainly think so. In spite of this setback I think there is reason to be very hopeful that we have made a major step in the right direction. Monetary reform is certainly of a great deal of interest to the younger generation and it will be that younger generation that will be dealing with the reforms. People are reading and studying about central banking, the Federal Reserve, they’re reading Austrian economics. So I would say there is every reason to be optimistic in the long run, but not right at this moment. Certainly maybe the next session of Congress after elections, maybe we can be even more hopeful.
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