In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a war on cash. Cheques have been around in one form or another for centuries but are now hardly ever used. Credit cards and more importantly for ordinary people, debit cards, are much more convenient. Financial transactions can also be carried out on-line including by mobile phone.
In the UK, before the Covid lockdowns, debit card contactless transactions were generally limited to around £25. They were shortly raised to £100. Most of us prefer to walk about with cards in our pockets rather than large quantities of cash because they are more secure. If you lose your wallet, either by theft or carelessness, chances are your money is gone forever whereas if you lose a card, all you need is to phone your bank which involves a little inconvenience but no financial loss.
Ordinary people are not the only ones to have realised how convenient are cashless transactions, so have the big banks, and so too have people in high places who have bad intentions.
In 1995, David Icke wrote: “Today if you go into a shop to buy food and your credit card is refused by the computer, you can pay with cash. What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.”
They laughed at Icke then, but they are not laughing now, not over this particular pronouncement. The big banks and especially the central banks have embraced the switch to digital currencies. This 9 minute plus video was uploaded to YouTube three years ago, and is fairly innocuous. (The link has been archived through the Wayback Machine). More recent uploads discuss not simply digital currencies but programmable digital currencies. If you don’t understand what that phrase means, a programmable digital curreucy will be issued by your central bank – the Bank Of England in the UK, the Federal Reserve in the United States and so on.
Not only will the bank issue your currency but the programmable part means the bank (ie some faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat) will control your money. There will be no cash, and you will have no financial privacy. To wit, your every transaction will be monitored by the state, or prohibited by the state. That means if you do or say anything someone in authority does not like, your finances can be cut off with no right to appeal.
If you think that sounds unnecessarily dystopian, the phenomenon of debanking is already with us. The first high profile case in the United States was Kanye West. The first high profile case in the UK was Nigel Farage, a big mistake because he is so high profile, and unlike West cannot easily be dismissed as a crank.
These two gents were only told to clear out their accounts and take their custom elsewhere, but in Canada, the Trudeau Government froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers. Which begs the question, who is next? The implementation of a CBDC would result in a situation in which the state could isolate not only protesters but all their supporters.
How far off are we from a CBDC in Canada or elsewhere? Now that the public worldwide has been woken up to the threat, we are hopefully a long way off, but the use of cash continues to diminish.
In many places, buses no longer accept cash. Train ticket offices are disappearing. In the past few years, hundreds of bank branches have been closed in the UK alone. For most of the population, this isn’t a great inconvenience, but when rural bank branches close in America and other large countries, the inconvenience caused is a lot greater. India withdrew large denomination banknotes in 2016, ostensibly to curtail the black economy. It remains to be seen if there is any conspiratorial intent behind any of the above measures, but we can thwart both conspirators and would-be tyrants like Justin Trudeau by continuing to use cash whenever convenient, and by rejecting any legislative attempts to impose CBDCs.
Disturbing and astounding… starting a long time ago when gold disappeared at the heart and before that was it not salt?