Male News Anchor: Congressman Ron Paul was in a vote, and he’s out now and we got a chance to talk to him because a lot of people have been waiting to see what he has to say.
Female News Anchor: We just asked Congressman Blackburn… there’s so many of you, it just seems like they’re all over from different states… Congressman Paul, one of the questions was, if it is not Timothy Geithner, who would it be? Reed, one of our viewers, says what about Ron Paul taking the position of treasury secretary. What do you think? You’re up to that?
Ron Paul: No, not really. Not under these circumstances, because the system is flawed. That’s why the individual can be the target and we can talk about Geithner. But you get Geithner out and you get somebody else in, he too has to accept the same rules and conditions. The Congress gives him money and he gets to spend it.
It’s the system that needs to be challenged, but I sort of like the argument that people want to challenge Geithner, because it sort of undermines his credibility, because I don’t think these programs should exists. Continue reading “Ron Paul on Fox Business”
Dimitri Vassilaros: I’m Dimitri Vassilaros, guest host. I’m a talk host on News Radio 1020 KDKA here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and an editorial page writer for The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
While no one doubts that some major steps are needed to return the economy to stability, there are many who believe the Obama administration is going about it the wrong way. Now, in this portion of the program we will speak with a major libertarian voice in the Congress, Republican Representative Dr. Ron Paul of Texas. He’s a former presidential candidate and he is an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve. He is currently a member of the Joint Economic Committee, and the House Financial Services Committee where he serves as the vice-chairman of the Oversight and Investigation Sub-Committee. Dr. Paul is a leading spokesman for limited constitution government, low taxes, free markets and a return to a sound monetary policy.
Dr. Paul, welcome to the Jim Bohannon Show, how are you sir?
Ron Paul: Good, thank you, nice to be with you.
Dimitri Vassilaros: It’s great to have you here and be talking with you again. I’ve talked to you a number of different times. You’re one of the few people inside the beltway who I respect and admire, because you have been telling it as it is for so long… long before it was ever popular. Continue reading “Ron Paul on the Jim Bohannon Show”
If you haven’t done so already, tell everyone you know to call and write their representative and ask that they support the “Federal Reserve Transparency Act H.R. 1207″.
If you called before and if your representative is not listed below, follow up and ask them to take a position either way so we know where they stand on the issue of bringing transparency to the Federal Reserve.
News Anchor: Today during the AIG hearing, Representative Ron Paul declared that free markets and capitalism weren’t working. Watch this.
Ron Paul: We had a system where the free market wasn’t working, we didn’t have capitalism. The allocation of capital came from the direction of the Federal Reserve and a lot of rules and regulations by the Congress. We had essentially no savings and capital is supposed to come from savings. We had artificially low interest rates. So, looking at all that, then this means we’d have to look differently at what our solutions should be.
News Anchor: So what should our solution be? Joining us now is Representative Ron Paul, Republican from Texas. Congressman, always great to talk to you, sir.
Ron Paul: Thank you.
News Anchor: You made a really interesting point today, Congressman. You said that we’re pointing a lot of fingers and focusing only the victimization, but we’re not looking at the cause of all of this financial mess. If you could pick one cause that has gotten us here, what would you say it is?
Ron Paul: Easy money. The Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates, deceiving the people, the investors, the savers into believing that there’s a lot of savings out there, and that we should invest more and build more houses and build more cars.
It’s the mal-investment which is every bit as dangerous from inflation of the money supply, as is the high prices that usually come. So I would say the artificially low interest rates are the real culprit. It creates a bubble and causes excessive spending. And what have we done since the crisis has hit? We’re just doing more of the same. We’re deceiving everybody in the recovery period, and that’s why I am predicting the recovery is going to be prolonged.
News Anchor: Alright. You know, you had Treasury Secretary Geithner and Ben Bernanke in front of you today, just a week after we had all this outrage with Americans just furious about these bonuses at AIG. Do you feel that the Treasury secretary and the Fed chairman explained effectively to you their reasoning of why we got to this point where we are with AIG and the bailout of the company?
Ron Paul: I don’t think so. Maybe somebody else understood it better than I did, but I thought it was a lot of double-talk going on. Besides, there is no easy answer for this. I mean we, the Congress appropriates all these huge sums of money without strings attached, and then when the public becomes knowledgeable of some easy and huge bonuses, you know, then we have to scream and howl and be outraged. I don’t think we got to the bottom at all, because the problem came from the initial bailout.
So you can’t tinker around and say, “Well, we’re going to put a 90% tax on these bonuses”, and solve the problem with an unconstitutional move. That certainly won’t solve the problem and we have to go back one step and ask, “Why in the world did we appropriate that money?”
But what do we do instead? We just appropriate more and more money and turn on the spickets with the Federal Reserve and they have no obligation to tell us what they are doing.
News Anchor: Well, then should we just be free markets then, Congressman? Should we just let AIG fail? They made the bed and they should lie in it and they should fall apart in it as well.
Ron Paul: Yes, but there’s a lot of things you can do to smooth things over. You might get rid of the income tax so people would have money to spend, you might de-regulate the market and get away from crony capitalism. Yes, and the good assets would have been bought up by now, the bankruptcy would have been declared a lot sooner, the good assets would have been bought up and we could go back to work again.
You take a company like General Motors… you bail them out and prolong the agony and the bankruptcy. There’s good parts of General Motors that would be bought up, and the sooner we buy that up and allow the market to allocate capital, the sooner we get back on our feet again.
We can’t make the assumption that only the politicians and the Federal Reserve can allocate capital. That is the crime that we have committed and we have to change that attitude if we want to solve our problems.
News Anchor: Congressman Ron Paul from Texas. It’s always great to talk with you, sir. Thank you for being on Fox Business once again.
Source: Campaign for Liberty
Date: March 21/22, 2009
Transcript:
Ron Paul: I want to give you an update on H.R. 1207, the bill to audit the Federal Reserve. We’re making great progress because a lot of you have helped encourage your member of Congress to co-sponsor the bill. We now have about 39 co-sponsors of the bill [44 as of 3/25/2009] and it’s been introduced in the Senate and we’re picking up a lot of momentum.
And to me, this is very, very important that we do this. The atmosphere in the Congress has definitely changed. It’s changed with their attitude about the Federal Reserve System, but overall there’s a tremendous push by the American people for the Congress to wake up and have more transparency.
They have heard about the stories of the Congress appropriating 700 billion dollars of TARP funds and nobody knowing where this money went, and it ends up paying huge bonuses to people who broke AIG… so the people are demanding more oversight and, fortunately, they’re putting the pressure on the Federal Reserve as well, and that’s why we’re getting so much support for this piece of legislation.
We still have a long way to go, because the special interests are very, very powerful and they don’t want this to happen and yet I think the momentum is in our direction.
In 1950 the law was changed and it exempted the Federal Reserve from any auditing procedures, and they have run wild since then. And what needs to be done is a certain portion of the code has to be repealed so that when we ask questions to the Federal Reserve, they have to answer these questions.
So, to me this is very, very encouraging and we have to keep the heat on. This has been a project of many groups around the country to get more co-sponsors, because ultimately the Congress will respond if there is enough pressure by the people.
This weekend [recorded March 21/22] I wanted to remind you that there will be a meeting for the Campaign for Liberty in Saint Louis. So, if anybody is interested in attending, it will start with a rally on Friday and there will be educational meetings all weekend. You can get all that information from the Campaign for Liberty website. One of the major projects of the Campaign for Liberty has been to get this bill passed to audit the Federal Reserve System.
This, to me, is key because we are literally moving into a crisis period, because although the financial system has fallen and it’s hard to be put back together and that’s what they’re struggling with, they’re putting all the pressure and all the weight on the dollar.
When we see these announcements that the dollar can lose 3.5% to 4% in one day, and all these announcements come as the Congress is going to spend more money and the Fed is going to print more money… Eventually, as I have been saying for so long and so often, there is going to dollar crisis, we’re getting closer to that. A dollar crisis means a political crisis, and the sooner that we find out the basic cause of this, which comes from the Federal Reserve, the better.
I have argued, of course, that we don’t need the Federal Reserve. It’s not part of our constitution and we should get rid of it, but it doesn’t happen that way. But if we get the audit and get the books open, make them answer the questions, I am convinced that the American people will be so outraged that then we will have reform of the monetary system.
We will be forced to live within our means, and we need to do this through a transition period, rather than waiting for the crisis to hit. But we’re approaching that crisis period, so hopefully we can handle this in a more deliberate fashion.
Event: House Financial Services Committee Hearing
Channel: C-SPAN
Date: 3/24/2009
Transcript:
Barney Frank: The gentleman from Texas.
Ron Paul: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. When the chairman of the committee opened up the committee today, he suggested that we look backward as well as forward and that all of our problems didn’t come from January 20th on, and I agree with that.
As a matter of fact, just looking back at the last administration isn’t quite enough and in order to understand the problems that we face and understand the cause, we have to look back possibly even several decades.
The debate today is so much and the discussion has been on technical aspects, which I think is very important, but quite frankly I think it deals a lot with the symptoms rather than the basic cause and I’d like to deal more with the cause, so I have a question for the entire panel. Continue reading “Ron Paul Questions Ben Bernanke on Free Markets vs. Crony Capitalism”
Channel: Fox News Show: Glenn Beck Program Date: 3/23/2009
Transcript:
Glenn Beck: We’re back with Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Senator Gregg said that the United States is going bankrupt, and that Obama is going to bankrupt the United States of America. Do you believe that, Congressman?
Ron Paul: Not quite, because I think it’s already bankrupt. It’s insolvent, and we couldn’t pay our bills. The official declaration hasn’t been done yet but we couldn’t pay our bills. Everything that we pretend that we owe… there’s no cash flow to pay for all the bills. Even if we sold every acre of land in this country I don’t think we could pay our bills.
So yes, the bankruptcy of America is here and I think this financial crisis should lend itself to our benefit, in that people will become outraged and maybe demand some changes here in Washington. Continue reading “Ron Paul: The United States is Bankrupt”
Channel: Fox News Show: Glenn Beck Program Date: 3/23/2009
Transcript:
Glenn Beck: Okay, there it is. Okay, I’ve been covering the government’s new way to help authorities identify domestic terrorists. A new report put together by the Missouri Information Analysis Center warns that militia members most commonly associate with third-party political groups.
There has been an update today. The Missouri Department of Public Safety has issued a letter just moments ago before we went on air saying the reports should have, “made no reference to supporters of Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin, or any other third party, political organization or any other candidate”.
They’re going to edit the report, you know, deleting these references, but I don’t think it’s going to be, “oh, how did I ever get to this point.”
We have Ron Paul on with us now, a dangerous, dangerous man. Hello, Congressman Paul, how are you?
Ron Paul: Hello there. It’s nice to be with you.
Glenn Beck: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Libertarian Party?
Glenn Beck: Congressman Ron Paul is with us now. Congressman, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Libertarian Party?
Ron Paul: Boy, that’s a tricky question. If I answer honestly, could I be in trouble? That’s the real question.
Glenn Beck: Well, I wanted to know, if you answer yes to that and if you happen to have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car, then you’re definitely a militiaman.
Ron Paul: Well, since this is on public record I have to tell you the truth… yes, I have been a member.
Glenn Beck: Do you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car.
Ron Paul: Yes, I do.
Glenn Beck: Oh, boy. You just stay on the phone, we’re tracing the call right now. You just stay on the phone.
Ron Paul: Yea, but you may be traced as well for bringing up this subject.
Glenn Beck: I know, oh I know they are tracing my calls.
Ron Paul: You better be careful too.
Glenn Beck: Listen, Congressman, you know there is this story that came out last week about Missouri, where they did this study about who is a militiaman, and there were some pretty remarkable things in there. For instance, if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car then that’s a sign. If you talk about the constitution, if you’re against the United Nations, if you have ever passed along cartoons against the FBI, ATF or IRS, then that’s another sign. I mean, this is insane.
Ron Paul: You know, they’re really taking on something and I don’t know how they can handle it. Hopefully this will awaken the American people because I think I saw a poll the other day where 25% of the American people now think the UN is not a good idea and that we should be out of it.
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