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by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
March 14, 2022
from
TheRutherfordInstitute Website
"The greatest tyrannies
are always perpetrated
in the name of the
noblest causes."
Thomas Paine
The government wants your money.
It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money
any way it can get it.
The government's schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally
defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut
from,
-
wasteful pork barrel legislation
-
cronyism and graft to asset
forfeiture
-
costly stimulus packages
-
a national security
complex,
...that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to
making us any safer.
Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the
government's,
...and every
other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing
wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely
making ends meet - that is, we the taxpayers.
This is what comes of those
$1.5 trillion spending bills:
someone's got to foot the bill...!
Because the government's voracious appetite for
money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have
devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its
largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees,
and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.
No matter how much money the government pulls in,
it's never enough, so the government has come up with a new plan to
make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans' bank
accounts.
Make way for the digital dollar.
In an
Executive Order issued on March 9, 2022, President
Biden called
for the federal government to consider establishing,
a "U.S.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)."
Similar to
cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin,
CBDCs would also be a form of
digital money, but there the resemblance ends.
If adopted, CBDCs would be issued by the Federal
Reserve, the central banking system for the U.S. government.
One CBDC digital dollar would equal the value of a physical dollar.
And like the physical dollar, which ceased to be
backed by gold more than 50 years ago, the CBDC would be considered
a government-issued fiat currency that is backed by the strength and
credit of the U.S. government.
(Of course, that's not saying much
considering that much of the time,
the U.S. government operates in the red.)
Although government agencies have
six months to weigh in on the
advantages and disadvantages of a
centralized digital currency, it's as good as a done deal.
For instance,
three weeks before the Biden
Administration made headlines with its
support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and
the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a
cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation:
digital money
cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating
crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to
oversee it all.
No surprises here, of course...!
This is how the government operates:
by giving us
tools to make our lives "easier" while, in the process, making it
easier for the government to track, control and punish the
citizenry.
Indeed, this shift to a digital currency is a
global trend.
More than 100 other countries are considering
introducing their own digital currencies.
China has already
adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only
allows it to surveil and seize people's financial transactions, but
can also,
work in tandem
with its social credit score system to punish
individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward
them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior).
As China
expert Akram Keram
wrote for The Washington Post,
"With
digital yuan, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will have direct
control over and access to the financial lives of individuals,
without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities.
In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could
suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists."
Where China goes, the United States eventually
follows.
Inevitably, a digital currency will become part
of our economy and a central part of the government's surveillance
efforts.
Combine that with
ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives that are
tantamount to social media credit scores for corporations, and you
will find that we're traveling the same road as China towards
digital authoritarianism.
As journalist Jon Brookin
warns:
"Digital currency issued by a central bank can be used as
a tool for government
surveillance of citizens and control over
their financial transactions."
As such, digital currency provides the government
and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily
be,
monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked
and confiscated when convenient...!
This push for a digital currency dovetails with
the government's
war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for
some time now.
Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror,
this so-called "war on cash" has been sold to the public as,
a
means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and more
recently, COVID-19 germs...!
In recent years, just the mere possession of
significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious
activity and label you a criminal.
The
rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal
transactions given that it's harder to track, can be used to pay
illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the
"take," so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement
fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.
According to
economist
Steve Forbes,
"The real reason for this war on cash -
start with the big bills and then work your way down - is an ugly
power grab by Big Government.
People will have less privacy:
Electronic commerce makes it easier for
Big Brother to see what
we're doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn't
like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big
Macs..."
This is how a cashless society - easily
monitored, controlled, manipulated,
weaponized and locked down -
plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate
partners).
Despite what we know about the government and its
history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to
mention how easily technology can be used against us,
the shift to
a
cashless society is really not a hard sell for a society
increasingly dependent on technology for the most mundane aspects of
life.
In much the same way that Americans have opted
into government surveillance through the "convenience" of GPS devices
and cell phones, digital cash - the means of paying with one's debit
card, credit card or cell phone - is becoming the de facto commerce
of the American police state.
Not too long ago, it was estimated that
smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by
2020.
Right on schedule,
growing numbers of businesses have
adopted
no-cash policies,
including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies,
restaurants and retail stores.
In Sweden, even the homeless and
churches accept digital cash.
Making the case for a digital wallet, journalist
Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that there's no longer a need for cash.
"More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay,
Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,"
notes Roepe.
"PayPal's app is now accepted at many chain stores
including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot.
Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while
their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps."
So what's really going on here...?
Despite all of the advantages that go along with
living in a digital age - namely, "convenience" - it's hard to imagine,
how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn't
signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left
and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves, data
hackers and an all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian corpo-governmental
state...
First, when I say privacy, I'm not just referring
to the things that you don't want people to know about, those little
things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor
harmful but embarrassing or intimate.
I am also referring to the
things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about,
certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies,
nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.
Second, we're already witnessing how easy it will
be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own
gain in order to track your movements, monitor your activities and
communications, and ultimately shut you down.
For example,
civil
asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for
police agencies thanks to
ERAD
(Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by
the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not
only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card
(i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any
funds on pre-paid money cards.
In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of
Appeals
ruled that it does not violate the
Fourth Amendment for police
to scan or swipe your credit card.
Expect those numbers to skyrocket
once digital money cops show up in full force.
Third, a government-issued digital currency will
give the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete
access to the citizenry's pocketbook.
While the government might
tout the ease with which it can deposit stimulus funds into the
citizenry's accounts, such a system could also introduce what
economists refer to as "negative interest rates."
Instead of being
limited by a zero bound threshold on interest rates, the government
could impose negative rates on digital accounts in order to control
economic growth.
"If
the cash is electronic, the government can just erase 2
percent of your money every year," said David Yermack, a finance professor
at New York University.
Fourth, a digital currency will open Americans -
and their bank accounts - up to even greater financial
vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike.
Fifth, digital authoritarianism will redefine
what it means to be free in almost every aspect of our lives. Again,
we must look to China to understand what awaits us.
As Human Rights
Watch analyst Maya Wang
explains:
"Chinese authorities use technology to control the
population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways.
The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow
Beijing to surveil - and control - people's financial transactions.
China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from
intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything
from fires to natural disasters and political dissent.
The
government believes that these intrusions, together with
administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to
services,
will nudge people toward
'positive behaviors,' including greater
compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as
exercising."
Short of returning to a pre-technological,
Luddite age, there's really no way to pull this horse back now that
it's left the gate.
To our detriment, we have virtually no control
over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how
it is used.
And in terms of our bargaining power over digital
privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable
position in which we can only "hope" and trust that those in power
will treat our information with respect.
At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency
is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic
Bill of Rights that protects "we the people" from predatory
surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government
and its corporate partners.
As I make clear in
Battlefield
America - The War on the American People and in its
fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries,
the ramifications of a
government - any government - having this much unregulated,
unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its
citizens is beyond chilling...
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