11/24/2020 Nick Hankoff
Gone are the days of the Federal Reserve hiding in the shadows. Now it’s a woke central bank fighting for climate and racial justice. Progressives must not fall for this but instead team up with the populist right to audit the Fed and demand transparency.
Let the healing begin! If it is going to be President Joe Biden a couple months from now, then there will be all the more incentive for antiestablishment Democrats to join forces with populist Republicans. What better issue than auditing the Federal Reserve System?
There is strong precedent for progressives and the populist right to unite around an “Audit the Fed” movement. In early 2009, Congressman Ron Paul introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which garnered 320 House cosponsors by the summer of 2010.
Since then, the antiestablishment factions of both parties have grown and at least one of the 2009 House cosponsors now holds a Senate seat. Audit the Fed has passed the House on three occasions, so it could see as much or more success this coming session.
Another development over the last eleven years is the Fed’s evolving public image. Before Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run, the central bank lurked in near-total darkness. Two thousand nine was a breakout year for its public relations campaign, and the Fed has failed to return to its prior obscurity.
Now the secretive power center larps as a super–social justice warrior, fighting for climate and racial justice, the top pet issues of the progressive left. Many grassroots progressives expressed their distaste for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but even those who held their noses to vote for them shouldn’t feel at all obliged to apologize for the Fed’s virtue signaling.