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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56600.htm

The real B3W-NATO agenda

For those spared the ordeal of sifting through the NATO summit communique, here’s the concise low down: Russia is an "acute threat" and China is a "systemic challenge".

NATO, of course, are just a bunch of innocent kids building castles in a sandbox.

Those were the days when Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO's first secretary-general, coined the trans-Atlantic purpose: to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

The Raging Twenties remix reads like “keep the Americans in, the EU down and Russia-China contained”.

So the North Atlantic (italics mine) organization has now relocated all across Eurasia, fighting what it describes as “threats from the East”. Well, that’s a step beyond Afghanistan – the intersection of Central and South Asia – where NATO was unceremoniously humiliated by a bunch of Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs.

Russia remains the top threat – mentioned 63 times in the communiqué. Current top NATO chihuahua Jens Stoltenberg says NATO won’t simply “mirror” Russia: it will de facto outspend it and surround it with multiple battle formations, as “we now have implemented the biggest reinforcements of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War”.

The communiqué is adamant: the only way for military spending is up. Context: the total “defense” budget of the 30 NATO members will grow by 4.1% in 2021, reaching a staggering $1.049 trillion ($726 billion from the US, $323 billion from assorted allies).

After all, “threats from the East” abound. From Russia, there are all those hypersonic weapons that baffle NATO generals; those large-scale exercises near the borders of NATO members; constant airspace violations; military integration with that “dictator” in Belarus.

As for the threats from China – South China Sea, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific overall - it was up to the G7 to come up with a plan.

Enter “green”, “inclusive” Build Back Better World (B3W), billed as the Western “alternative” to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). B3W respects “our values” - which clownish British PM Boris Johnson could not help describing as building infrastructure in a more “gender neutral” or “feminine” way – and, further on down the road, will remove goods produced with forced labor (code for Xinjiang) from supply chains.

The White House has its own B3W spin: that’s a “values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership” which will be “mobilizing private-sector capital in four areas of focus – climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equality – with catalytic investments from our respective development institutions”

The initial “catalytic investments” for BW3 were estimated at $100 billion. No one knows how these funds will be coming from the “development institutions”.

Seasoned Global South observers already bet they will be essentially provided by IMF/World Bank “green” loans tied to private sector investment in selected emerging markets, with an eye on profit.

The White House is adamant that “B3W will be global in scope, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Africa and the Indo-Pacific”. Note the blatant attempt to match BRI’s reach.

All these “green” resources and new logistic chains financed by what will be a variant of Central Banks showering helicopter money would ultimately benefit G7 members, certainly not China.

And the “protector” of these new “green” geostrategic corridors will be – who else? – NATO. That’s the natural consequence of the “global reach” emphasized on the NATO 2030 agenda.

NATO as investment protector

“Alternative” infrastructure schemes already proliferate, geared to contain “Russia bullying” and “Chinese meddling” off from the EU. That’s the case of the Three Seas Initiative, where 12 EU member-states from Eastern Europe are supposed to better interconnect the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas.

This initiative is a pale copy of China’s 17+1 mechanism of integrating Eastern Europe as part of BRI – in this case forcing them to build very expensive infrastructure to receive very expensive American energy imports.

The offensive against “threats from the East” is bound to fail. Dmitry Orlov has detailed how “Russia excels at building and operating huge energy, transportation and materials production systems” and, in parallel, how “the technosphere…has quietly relocated and is now busy telecommuting between Moscow and Beijing.”

As every geek knows, China is way ahead in 5G and is the world's top market for chips. And now the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – significantly approved right before the G7 in Cornwall - will “safeguard” Chinese companies from “unilateral and discriminatory measures imposed by foreign countries” and the US “long arm jurisdiction”, thus forcing Atlanticist capital to make a choice.

It’s China as a rising global power that in fact has proposed an “alternative” to the Global South in the first place, a counterpunch to the endless IMF/World Bank debt trap of the past decades. BRI is a highly complex sustainable development trade/investment strategy with the potential to integrate vast swathes of the Global South.

That’s a direct connection to Chairman Mao’s famous theory on the division of the Three Worlds ; the emphasis then on the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of which China was a stalwart, now encompasses the whole Global South. In the end, it’s always about sovereignty against neocolonialism.

B3W is the Western, essentially American, reaction to BRI: try to scotch as many projects as possible while harassing China 24/7 in the process.

Unlike China or Germany, the US hardly manufactures products the Global South wants to buy; manufacturing accounts for only 5% of a US economy essentially propped up by the US dollar as reserve currency and the – dwindling – Pentagon’s Empire of Bases.

China churns out ten top engineers for every US “financial expert”. China has perfected what is known among bilingual tech experts as an effective system to make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) development plans - and implement them.

The notion that the Global South will be convinced to privilege B3W – a hollow PR coup at best – over BRI is ludicrous. Yet NATO will be regimented to actively protect those investments that follow “our values”. One thing is certain: there will be blood.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/cashless-economy-real-threat-privacy-civil-liberties/5747893

Relentless Digitalization: Is a Cashless Economy a Real Threat to Privacy and Civil Liberties?

The relentless digitalisation of every day life since the advent of the Internet has led to many accepting as inevitable the eventual emergence of a cashless society. For the last few years, a fierce debate has taken place in the public sphere involving politicians, economists and sociologists alike, on the ethical boundaries of such a society and the threat it poses to individual freedom, privacy and civil liberties. There are logical fears that the eradication of cash would accelerate the already alarming disparities between rich and poor and leave citizens at the mercy of the international banking system, with little to zero control over their personal data.

Sky News Australia host Cory Bernardi argues that a cashless society would mark ‘the end of privacy’. Indeed, a move towards a wholly digital society would represent a global victory for big tech, big data and big government. It is argued that “the abolition of paper and metal currency is often presented as an improvement on the current way of doing business. It is indeed, but only for banks and governments, not so much for the citizens and customers which they are supposed to serve.” The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process of a move towards a cashless global economy.

So what are we risking by removing cash completely from our economies? Would it represent the final nail in the coffin for personal privacy? Is it really worth giving up our civil liberties to pander to the minacious ambition of big tech and authoritarian governments?

Mass Surveillance and the Cashless Economy

A move towards a cashless economy has alarmed many who believe such a step would mean a drastic move towards a mass surveillance state. With every bank transaction able to be monitored by the banks and other financial intermediaries, and therefore by governments, only cryptocurrency transactions would remain private and hidden from third-party view. The idea that every purchase you make is “authorised and recorded by a privately run commercial bank, giving it a transaction-by-transaction history of your entire commercial life”, represents for many a somewhat dystopian future.

From Sweden to China, serious moves are being made to completely remove physical cash transactions from the economy. China in particular has launched a country-wide experiment to introduce a centralised ‘digital yuan’, with individuals’ funds being stored on a ‘digital wallet’, easily accessible to central government. This would in theory create the “world’s largest repository of financial transactions data, allowing the authoritarian CCP unprecedented access to ramp up surveillance of ordinary citizens.”

To opponents of cashless societies, handing over such control to either public or private organizations would represent another draconian shift towards authoritarianism. Laura Poitras highlighted in Der Spiegel how “the NSA monitors banks and credit card transactions — sometimes in apparent violation of national laws and global regulations. The European SWIFT financial transaction network is being tapped on different levels, internal documents from the US spy agency show.” Cashless economies would remove citizens ability to avoid such under-the-table practices.

The existence of these third-parties (banks or payment intermediaries like VISA or Mastercard) and the ever-growing power they wield facilitates this trend towards the expansion of surveillance states. They have unique access to every financial transaction in an economy, described by Brett Scott in the Guardian as “a big data economic macro-surveillance system.” Advocates for solid cash therefore extol the virtues of coins and notes as the most “flexible and anonymous medium for quick small transactions that don’t involve an intermediary.”

An Attack on Our Civil Liberties?

‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society”, asserted Brett Scott in a 2016 article for the New Statesman. The level of subtle control exercised over one’s daily activities would be significant. Scott underlines how “you’d have no choice but to conform to the intermediaries’ automated bureaucracy, giving them a lot of power, and a lot of data about the microtexture of your economic life.”  This phenomenon has already begun creeping into Western societies; London buses stopped accepting cash in 2014, Norway has become a ‘world leader’ in cashless transactions, with banknotes accounting for only 3-4% of transactions in the country.

Many argue that the anonymity of ‘classic’ payment processes is vital for our civil liberties and individual freedoms. Expanding the cashless economy would surely mean that non-adherents and opponents could easily be cut off from the system for refusing to comply. On a more human level, individuals must be protected from invisible power structures, third-party actors who could use their unfettered access to individuals’ data for nefarious reasons.

A 2019 report claimed that up to 8 million people in Great Britain would not be able to cope with the removal of cash from the economy. Would ostracising such a large section of society be worth it for convenience, cost, personal preference and the avoidance of tax evasion? As things stand, the arguments against continue to outweigh the arguments for.