Rep. Ron Paul’s bill to subject the Fed to broad audits sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday; now it goes to the Senate, where it is certain to die. Those who believe that Democrats and Republics are fundamentally indistinguishable should ponder the bill’s fate when November rolls around. While it’s true that Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act drew bipartisan support in the House, garnering the votes of more than three dozen Democrats, Senate Democrats can be expected to take a harder line. If and when they kill the measure, it will probably be the last time for a very long while that anyone in Congress seriously challenges the Fed’s right to withhold the truth and to answer to no one but its lords and master on Wall Street.

For his part, Helicopter Ben Bernanke seems so confident that the Senate will uphold the status quo that he did not even speak out against HR 1207. Appearing before a House panel last week, he was Mr. Cool, sounding like he’d been scripted by Goebbels himself: “We are quite transparent and accountable on monetary policy,” the Fed chairman testified. “Besides our statement, besides our testimonies, we issue minutes after three weeks. We have quarterly projections, I give a press conference four times a year, there’s quite a bit of information provided to help Congress evaluate monetary policy as well as the public.”

Pure Bull

Yeah, sure: “Quite a bit of information.” All of it pure bull. Friends of the Fed have argued that airing the full details of, for one, the banking bailout would damage the financial position of the firms involved and destabilize the economy. True enough. But if you pile their lies and secrets high enough, the whole, rotten system is eventually going to collapse anyway. “An audit would expose the Fed as a massive fraud perpetrated on this country, enriching a privileged few bankers at the top of our economic food chain, and leaving the rest of us with massively devalued dollars which we are forced to use by law,” wrote Paul recently, not mincing words, at LewRockwell.com. It is both a shame and a tragedy that Ron Paul’s presidential bid, with enormous grass-roots support, was never taken seriously by the new media or the power brokers. Does anyone outside of those precincts even dispute that the Fed was created, not to stabilize the money system, but to give banks all but unlimited power to create their own money from thin air?