Crisis Update: Central Banks Ready Currency Handcuffs

CBDC would control much more than individual lives

Apr 01, 2024

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The monetary system is about to overwhelm the political structure
With potential to turn assets into tokens and dictate purchases
Centralised control over inputs and outputs is the end of liberty
A small elite, not government, would dictate winners and losers
If data is the new gold; banks will mine people for profit
SWIFT system linking CBDCs is to go live in 12 to 24 months
Worst case scenario: humanity descends into stasis; classes into castes
Managed outcomes replace meritocracy, initiative and innovation
Scientific dictatorship sounds intelligent only if you are inside the cult

“A key difference with the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use… and also, we will have the technology to enforce that.”
— Agustín Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, in 2020.

(2,300 words or about 11 minutes of your company).

Apr 1, 2024

Expect more distraction as the central bank digital currencies are rolled out, because CBDC, not the wars or the next pandemic, is the once-and-for-all revolution.

This digital coin is intended to usher in a new realm, one of universal enslavement.

It will be a step change from the centuries-old class system, in which the populace was kept in line with crumbs from the rulers' table.

Some got a few more, others a lot less. The number of crumbs dictated your status in life, and kept you subservient to the system.

There was no material gain from dissent. What psychologists called oppositional behaviour was easily offset with political systems in which people were "nudged" by envy or fear.

The social structure was constructed on crumbs: exchanging your crumbs for new ones each year; "keeping up with the Joneses"; earning the dough to send children to a fine school to learn the inside track of crumb collecting, to network with the scions of the top crumb gatherers.

There is a film about Wall Street in which a mother explains to her child during lunch what daddy does. She explains that each time the bread is passed, a few crumbs fall off. Daddy gathers up those crumbs and trades them on the market, hoping to get a few more. [Anyone remember that film? Perhaps it was, indeed, Wall Street (1987)]

The coin of the realm enabled other activities that serviced the circulation of specie.

While the mint or treasury guarded the state's right to create money, and counterfeiting was punishable by death, government intelligence networks often created counterfeit coin to finance their off-the-books or “black” operations.

The playwright-spy Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was involved in one such operation in the late 1500s.

There was a cottage industry of coin clippers who shaved the edges off coin to amass gold and silver. This is why today coins have a ribbed edge.

It is about 500 years since bankers helped to create the modern state, from warfare to welfare.

Bankers were allowed to create money, in a deal that let monarchs finance wars without having to levy the cost from the barons (risking overthrow, as happened to Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, who got his head chopped off.)

Many a tale could be told but we'll leave the realm of coin because it is about to go digital. In this new kingdom the money power steps out from behind the green curtain.

Digital realm

What could be further from your daily life than a new monetary system — especially when it is sold as a convenience that allows you to leave behind that heavy purse or pocket of clanking change.

Yet it hides a shift in power so elemental that it will quite literally shake the ground beneath your feet.

It will create not new money but a new social system, one that leaves little room for merit, accumulating wealth or climbing the ladder. With people unable to rise in the world, the social structure would consist not of classes but castes.

It is no exaggeration to say the monetary system is about to replace the political structure.

There are plans, not yet fully advanced, to make this digital money more like a voucher or ration book. If it stops people accumulating capital, the social consequences are simple: feudalism.

If that sounds alarmist it comes straight from the horse’s mouth, yet most people don’t listen. It is there in United Nations Agenda 21, the bankers’ discussions of CBDCs, and in our own past four years’ experience of Covid countermeasures.

Techno feudalism

The monarch, in the introduction above, is replaced by a syndicate of privately-owned central banks who control a digital ledger that tallies all assets and liabilities.

The centralised ledger is integral to the objectives of sustainable development:

track food and minerals at all stages of production
offset people's "human footprint" with their carbon allowance
limit goods and services but also travel and activity
tax it directly in a person’s account
control inflation by adding or subracting digital crumbs

This changes the balance of power in every transaction. Professor Richard Werner has pointed out the flaw in the assumption that everyone has access to the same information, making markets efficient. CBDC magnifies the imbalance of knowledge a thousand fold.

Personal data is already the "new gold" and CBDC will give banks more of it: a record of every transaction you make but, crucially, with the ability to control, forbid or ration those transactions.

With digital innovation, the saying goes, if something is free, you are the product. Except we are not talking about free email. When a digital service has the scope to control your whole life, you’re the slave.

This changes everything, as the cliché goes: to control where you travel or live; thus choose your job; live in the same town as your fiancé; your ability to accumulate and own property — the most fundamental property right being the integrity of your own body. Ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union.

CBDC has the potential to freeze society into the rule of a powerful few, with the remaining population locked in what Aldous Huxley called a scientific dictatorship, or what technocrats today call cybernetic control.

It presages changes more devastating than the Enclosure Acts, the Highland Clearances and the Transportation of Europeans that was used to populate Australia and the Americas.

Nor is it the worst case; simply the most likely.

Here’s a handy explainer about your life in feudal England.

This beautifully filmed video from Absolute History shows serfs, however oppressed, at least enjoying the fruits of their labour once they had paid the dues extorted by their baron.

Digital servitude would be worse. Under Agenda 21 you would not choose your food, and meat would be out — “eat ze bugs.” Who knows when you’d be locked indoors under quarantine and beaten for leaving. Under the World Health Organisation Pandemic Treaty you might be jabbed in a universal approach called One Health; and under Scotland’s “Hate Speech” laws even conversations in your kitchen are not exempt from prosecution if reported. And you won’t be gathered around the hearth or warming yourself by the gas stove — because those are being phased out.

Despot’s ratchet

Even the popular podcaster Joe Rogan is alerting his listeners to the legacy of the Covid response: the threat of a digital currency, saddled with a social credit score system, likely tied to a vaccine app restricting travel — "and all they need is another pandemic to try to push that shit through."

How do we know they're connected: because vax passports, aka green passports on phones, that scanned a QR code before letting you enter a shop, were central to the Covid response. If you wanted to travel you had to be jabbed or quarantined.

These were not fully implemented but nor were they suspended. The would-be rulers have never backed off. Covid was a compliance test; an exercise in how far they could push us.

These policies and legislation are still in place.

CBDC is such a big change that most people have not wrapped their heads around it. Yet executives of the financial transaction system, SWIFT, say they'll be ready to launch CBDC in 12-24 months.

It is being tested in dozens of countries, to see how fast the banks can proceed. Convenience is the selling point for now. Planners have talked openly, however, about how it can control every activity of your life.

The head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, says “it will be a journey and we will walk the journey together with the legislator.” Yet legislators have little input for it is being devised by those who control the monetary system.

“Cash is here to stay. You will have all options; cash and digital cash.” As we shall see below, CBDC is not cash. If you look at the pilot schemes for CBDC, there will be little role for cash, if any.

Click on the puppet to hear it speak.

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