“COVID-19 And The Push For Totalitarian Control Through Central Bank Digital Currency”
Would you be happy for the government to not only know about every single purchase you ever make, but also to have complete control over whether you are allowed to make that purchase or not? Governments all over the world are simultaneously working towards the implementation of Central Bank Digital Currencies, which will make such control possible.
Quote from Agustín Carstens, the general manager of the Bank of International Settlements:
We don’t know for example who is using a 100 dollar bill today, we don’t know who is using a 1000 peso bill today. A key difference with CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.
Wow. The Federal Reserve was bad enough already.
People have called for an end to it for years.
And now it’s just being taken to a whole new level.
If nothing has stopped them up to this point, what will stop them now? The guy standing in front of the giant tank in Tianemin Square is beginning to look like all of us.
As issuing fiat money in any form leads to inflation, and inflation to shortage, and shortage eventually to poverty and hunger, how will universal basic income issued by government in the form of digital currency benefit anybody, even the CEO of Black Rock?
When everybody gets free money, who will work? In particular who will do the boring, the dirty, toiling-with-hands - but absolutely essential - jobs that are only done by anyone to earn a living?
Apparently Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, has a personal fortune of $1.1billion. Although hIs firm controls more funds for investment than any similar company, he is not one of the richest men in the world. He has influence, sure. To some extent he has make-or-break powers over certain kinds of businesses since he can direct where investment money goes. But he does not have the power, or the clout, to transform the system. Not even with the co-operation of Bill Gates. So how could he make decisions that would reduce us all to total dependence on the state?
I’m not making predictions here about what’s going to happen, just possible ways such a plan could be implemented and explanations of what I believe the thinking is:
Shortages and inflation may be short-lived, just long enough to get people dependent on state handouts and ready to accept CBDCs and UBI. They can just stop the stimulus for a while if there’s too much inflation, as they have been doing. The economies are still functioning, in fact unemployment is reducing again in the US I was reading just yesterday.
Fink is complaining about democracy, he says markets like stability and this indeed seems to be more than a bit strange considering his own corporation seems to be doing very well out of the instability since 2008. However all the companies that BlackRock etc own shares in are not helped by the instability, they (as he says) would prefer the stability that totalitarian governance brings. I think the powers that be generally think that CBDCs will enable much more stable governance as currently the retail banks are able to effectively print their own money (a point John Titus makes), which leads to ever increasing asset prices e.g. houses. BlackRock are the beneficiaries of the current wealth grab but they know full well the system is teetering on the edge of collapse, because you can’t keep interest rates at or below zero for ever - banks need to make some income. The collapse when it comes is going to hit them and everyone else hard, they are just pillaging the system as much as they can effectively now because they can.
UBI won’t necessarily be enough to live on, so people will still have to work (the word basic is part of it remember). Think of it as a bit like a salesman’s salary - most of his earnings come from bonuses. Right now we have welfare anyway, and immigrants keep coming in largely because our own poor won’t take the most unpleasant/poorly paid work, so we already have this problem really but immigration “solves” it (while bringing many other problems of course). The lower paid jobs will still get filled one way or another.
Fink is just a figurehead, representing massive wealth interests, his personal fortune doesn’t matter in the least, and he could be replaced in the blink of an eye. His comment about democracy is just relevant I believe because it reflects the attitude of the rich elite he is part of. He is just doing what any CEO would do, pursuing his own corporation’s interests, grabbing wealth for his corporation because he can, while he can. No, he doesn’t personally have the power or clout to do much on his own but all the powerful people are acting together, along with the WEF organization to orchestrate this effective coup d’etat.
PS. By the way I’m still slightly unsure why these commentators are so convinced that UBI is going to be part of the CBDC rollout, it does make sense to me but I am still searching for more evidence that this is how the powers that be really are thinking.
PPS. Also when they are talking about an impending “collapse” or financial crisis the idea as I understand it is that CBDCs will enable them to avoid that collapse by just about abolishing the whole private banking system as it currently exists - everyone will move to having just a single bank account. If it all sounds kind of crazy that is quite possibly because it is kind of crazy - the powers that be have not factored one simple but huge problem into their calculations - people may not want to accept these CBDCs.
It could even be that UBI might come in initially as a single or perhaps annual payment of some nominal amount, say $100 a year, just enough to get people to start using their central digital account. How many poor people would want to refuse such a payout, small though it is, particularly if the govt. offered it say at the festive season when many are struggling?
Such an amount would be a drop in the ocean to governments that are currently bailing out the system to the tune of $trillions through “Quantitative Easing”, and it would have a negligible effect on inflation. Remember the idiot Gordon Brown bragging about how he saved the world by bailing out the banks, but all he really did was he kicked the can down the road, and QE has been continuing intermittently ever since, causing inflation of asset prices (not so much consumer goods, groceries etc. though because of the way QE was implemented). So the current system has a huge problem with inflation as it is, that they don’t know how to get out of. What’s more, actually I would have to agree with the Guardian writer on this, QE has been massively enriching the richest because the richest are the owners of most assets. So in fact the current system is rewarding people for not working, it just happens to be that these are people who are already rich and own assets…
I won’t comment on all of this. I cannot. I don’t know enough. But I continue to disbelieve that these plots against the hundreds of millions of literate citizens of the West will render them easy to enslave.
One point. About that “Biden” administration rumor that unemployment is down - consider this:
Unemployed in the last year of Trump’s presidency: 11 million.
Unemployed in the first year of Biden’s presidency: 23 million.
It’s certainly true that there is growing resistance, more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that we have been misled, and I really think the powers that be are out of touch with reality if they think that they can get everyone on to CBDCs completely.
Another aspect of all this has been the rise of crypto-currencies, the anonymity of some is a real problem for tax collection (though of course they complain about criminal transactions etc), it’s almost as if a parallel economy is developing that is outside government control and they are desperate to regain control.
As for the Biden administration, don’t get me wrong I’m not saying the economy is going well, and there are many reasons to suspect that there is a widening wealth gap as well (even if unemployment numbers are going down again now), exacerbated by the measures plus also by the wealth grab by the investment firms. All I’m saying is that they can stress the economy out quite a bit towards their goals without breaking it completely, then relax it a bit before the next push, and that’s really what they have been doing since the start of 2020.
The figures behind the chart do not take into account the many who are not registering as unemployed because they are not seeking work. They have been paid, as it were, by this administration, not to work.
Wealth gaps do not matter, whatever their size, in a free economy. The market, the invisible hand, works its magic, so wherever the rich are richest, the poor are least poor. Trouble is, this government is interfering in the economy, and trying to interfere much more, to make us a government-dependent nation. Its redistributive policy is a killer of prosperity. This I see you agree with. You see them doing it by fits and starts. You may be right about that, but sub specie of the bird’s eye, they are taking the country, with huge strides, down the road to serfdom.
Yes, the whole point of using Bitcoin is to avoid government interference. I cannot see how the oligarchs can make it something so different that they can control it. But I fear they might find a way.
They can make it different very simply by being the only source of the currency, and we know they have found a way to do that already because China is in the trial phase. Governments have complete control over cash today, and once they decide to they can make cash obsolete. CBDCs are coming, I am pretty sure about that whether we like it or not, the key question is will the governments be able to stop people using alternatives including crypto-currencies.
One thing they will never be able to stop us doing is just plain old fashioned bartering, people may be forced to resort to that, or payments in commodities such as gold. People could start to use independent local currencies as another alternative but that is difficult for international trade it would only work on a very local level.
It seems “conflicts of interest” are no longer a very big deal. I can’t count the number of times in the past few years I’ve heard about it, and nothing happens. Fauci being a case in point.
