End the Fed’s Minneapolis march has something to celebrate

End the Fed rally last April. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

Minnesota’s End the Fed group has something to celebrate Sunday as they march on the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s effort to audit the Fed passed in the House Financial Services Committee last Thursday.

Six of Minnesota’s members of Congress are among 313 co-sponsors to Paul’s bill: Republicans Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen, and Democrats Jim Oberstar, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz.

Bachmann and Paulsen serve on the House Financial Services Committee and voted in favor of the amendment Thursday, which passed 43-26. Democrat Keith Ellison is also on the committee; he voted no.

Organizer Melissa Hill said she expects “a couple hundred” people to turn out for the local End the Fed group’s fourth rally at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank in the last year.

For the first time they will gather elsewhere — at 11:30 a.m. at Loring Park on the other side of downtown — before marching (on sidewalks) to a 12:30 p.m. rally the Fed building on the Mississippi riverfront.

Hill says the Minnesota group tries to be nonpartisan and is not affiliated with the conservative Tea Party movement. “We lean a little more toward the left” than other End the Fed groups nationally, she said.

For Hill, the march comes on the heels of losing her race as a “Civil Disobedience” candidate to incumbent DFLer Diane Hofstede in Minneapolis’ city council election. And she is still the target of criminal proceedings in Pittsburgh, where she is appealing a charge of  disorderly conduct arising from the recent G20 economic summit there.

Ending the Federal Reserve (a move for which Paul also has a bill pending) would, Hill says, mean getting control of the nation’s money supply again  – “in our control instead of behind shadowy doors.”

A more politically progressive protest kicked off the string of demonstrations at the Minneapolis Fed in late September 2009, when groups (including ACORN) protested federal bailouts for Wall Street financial firms without similar aid for homeowners threatened with foreclosure on Main Street (video).

Donald McFarland, who spoke at that rally, told MnIndy those groups had no affiliation with the End the Fed protests.

A few weeks earlier, during the 2008 Republican National Convention, Ron Paul himself made an appearance at the Minneapolis Fed’s plaza at the culmination of a Green Bay-to-Minneapolis “Walk for Freedom” — which some people call the beginning of the national End the Fed movement, Hill says.