http://endoftheamericandream.com/they-are-testing-a-super-creepy-digital-dollar-that-they-plan-to-introduce-soon/
They Are Testing A Super Creepy “Digital Dollar” That They Plan To Introduce Soon
Are you ready for the government to monitor what you buy and sell on a daily basis? Because that is what could happen if you start using the new “digital dollar” that they are now testing. Of course using the new “digital dollar” would be voluntary at first, but what if it eventually becomes mandatory? The use of physical currency continues to decline year after year, and some governments in Europe have already taken radical measures to phase out the use of cash. Many among the elite consider digital currencies to be the key to a whole new era of strict governmental control over the way that we live our lives, and there would be so much potential for abuse.
On Tuesday, an extremely ambitious 12 week test of the “digital dollar” was publicly announced. As you can see, some of the biggest companies in the financial world are participating…Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the participants announced on Tuesday.
Citigroup Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc, Mastercard Inc and Wells Fargo & Co are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed’s innovation center, they said in a statement. The project, which is called the regulated liability network, will be conducted in a test environment and use simulated data, the New York Fed said.
When asked about his firm’s participation in the project, a Citigroup executive sounded very enthusiastic…
“Programmable US dollars may be necessary to support new business models and provide a foundation to much-needed innovations in financial settlements and infrastructure,” Tony McLaughlin, managing director for emerging payments and business development at Citigroup’s treasury and trade solutions division, said in a statement. “Projects like this, that focus on the digitization of central bank money and individual bank deposits, could be expanded to take a broader view of the opportunity.”
In January, the Fed took a first step toward weighing the use of a central bank digital currency when it released its much-anticipated discussion paper and opened a four-month public comment period to receive input.
The paper said that a CBDC could streamline cross-border payments and could further enshrine and preserve the dominance of the dollar’s international role, including as the world’s reserve currency.
Obviously the Fed did not meet with too much resistance during that stage, and so now they are moving on to fully testing the “digital dollar” that they have come up with.
The fact that they are going to spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy testing this new “digital dollar” strongly indicates that they already have plans to introduce it.
The “digital dollar” would be very similar to Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies.
But instead of a decentralized system, the government would control the currency and would have the ability to track every single transaction.
And as Michael Maharrey of Schiff Gold has noted, there would even be the potential for the government to “turn off” the ability of certain individuals to make purchases…
Imagine if there was no cash. It would be impossible to hide even the smallest transaction from government eyes. Something as simple as your morning trip to Starbucks wouldn’t be a secret from government officials. As Bloomberg put it in an article published when China launched its digital yuan pilot program, digital currency “offers China’s authorities a degree of control never possible with physical money.”
The government could even “turn off” an individual’s ability to make purchases.
Thankfully, some members of Congress are sounding the alarm. In fact, Senator James Lankford has actually introduced a bill “which would require the U.S. Treasury to keep printing and coining money if the government issues an official digital currency”…
On September 29, Republican Senator James Lankford introduced the No Digital Dollar Act, which would require the U.S. Treasury to keep printing and coining money if the government issues an official digital currency.
Lankford said in a news release: “While some Oklahomans are open to digital currencies, many still prefer hard currency or at least the option of hard currency. There are still questions, cyber concerns, and security risks for digital money. There is no reason we can’t continue to have paper and digital money in our nation and allow the American people to decide how to carry and spend their own money. As technology advances, Americans should not have to worry about every transaction in their financial life being tracked or their money being deleted.”
Unfortunately, that sort of a bill is extremely unlikely to get through Congress.
Most of our leaders seem quite eager to explore the “possibilities” of implementing such a system.
And as we have seen over the past few years, those with authoritarian tendencies are not afraid to push the envelope to frightening extremes.
In an article for MaineWire, Steve Robinson listed several hypothetical scenarios that we could potentially see if a “digital dollar” starts being used on a widespread basis…
1.) To protest governmental limits on personal freedom, liberty activists stage a peaceful protest around the nation’s capital. That nation’s leader, wanting to quell the protest and protect his power, instructs his Minister of Economic Control to reduce the protesters’ CBDC balances by 50 percent everyday until the protest ends. The protest ends shortly after the message pings on the CBDC smartphone app.
2.) Economic growth is lagging, and the economists in the federal government suspect it is because consumer spending isn’t strong enough. People are saving their money, rather than spending it. To fix this problem, the Ministry of Economic Control announces a new year-long negative interest rate for all CBDC accounts. Unspent balances of CBDC will be reduced by 10 percent every month. As a result, no one saves, every one spends, and the economists have saved the economy.
3.) You’re at the grocery store picking up some ribeye steaks because some friends are coming over for a barbecue. When you get up to the counter, there’s a problem. The cashier says the payment isn’t going through. You check the CBDC app on your smartphone. There is an alert: “You have exceeded your monthly carbon credit usage; please remove the following items from your grocery cart in order to proceed…”
4.) You want to pick up a new firearm for hunting season, so you swing by the local sporting goods store. But when you go to transfer CBDC credits for the purchase, you’re denied. The trusty CBDC app explains: “We’ve detected activity on your social media accounts that suggests you are at risk of causing harm to yourself or others. You are prohibited from purchasing a firearm for one year.”
Once we open the door to this sort of tyranny, there is no telling where it could potentially end.
So we should strongly denounce all efforts to introduce a “digital dollar” while we still have the opportunity to do so.
Unfortunately, most of the population is still deep in a state of sleep, and so the elite are moving their agenda forward very rapidly.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-blackrock-larry-fink-created-global-energy-crisis/5799286
How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis
"Adherence to UN 2030 Sustainability Agenda". Colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector.
Most people are bewildered by what is a global energy crisis, with prices for oil, gas and coal simultaneously soaring and even forcing closure of major industrial plants such as chemicals or aluminum or steel. The Biden Administration and EU have insisted that all is because of Putin and Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. This is not the case. The energy crisis is a long-planned strategy of western corporate and political circles to dismantle industrial economies in the name of a dystopian Green Agenda. That has its roots in the period years well before February 2022, when Russia launched its military action in Ukraine.
Blackrock pushes ESG
In January, 2020 on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green.” In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,
“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.” [i]
In a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients, Fink delivered the new agenda for capital investing. He declared that Blackrock will exit certain high-carbon investments such as coal, the largest source of electricity for the USA and many other countries. He added that Blackrock would screen new investment in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the UN Agenda 2030 “sustainability.”
Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal. “Over time,” Fink wrote, “companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” [ii]
From that point on the so-called ESG investing, penalizing CO2 emitting companies like ExxonMobil, has become all the fashion among hedge funds and Wall Street banks and investment funds including State Street and Vanguard. Such is the power of Blackrock. Fink was also able to get four new board members in ExxonMobil committed to end the company’s oil and gas business.
Image is by Michael Buholzer / Copyright WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM/swiss-image.ch
The January 2020 Fink letter was a declaration of war by big finance against the conventional energy industry. BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (the TCFD) and is a signatory of the UN PRI— Principles for Responsible Investing, a UN-supported network of investors pushing zero carbon investing using the highly-corrupt ESG criteria—Environmental, Social and Governance factors into investment decisions. There is no objective control over fake data for a company’s ESG. As well Blackrock signed the Vatican’s 2019 statement advocating carbon pricing regimes. BlackRock in 2020 also joined Climate Action 100, a coalition of almost 400 investment managers managing US$40 trillion.
With that fateful January 2020 CEO letter, Larry Fink set in motion a colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector. Notably, that same year BlackRock’s Fink was named to the Board of Trustees of Klaus Schwab’s dystopian World Economic Forum, the corporate and political nexus of the Zero Carbon UN Agenda 2030. In June 2019, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations signed a strategic partnership framework to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. WEF has a Strategic Intelligence platform which includes Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
In his 2021 CEO letter, Fink doubled down on the attack on oil, gas and coal. “Given how central the energy transition will be to every company’s growth prospects, we are asking companies to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net zero economy,” Fink wrote. Another BlackRock officer told a recent energy conference, “where BlackRock goes, others will follow.” [iii]
In just two years, by 2022 an estimated $1 trillion has exited investment in oil and gas exploration and development globally. Oil extraction is an expensive business and cut-off of external investment by BlackRock and other Wall Street investors spells the slow death of the industry.
Biden—A BlackRock President?
Early in his then-lackluster Presidential bid, Biden had a closed door meeting in late 2019 with Fink who reportedly told the candidate that, “I’m here to help.” After his fateful meeting with BlackRock’s Fink, candidate Biden announced, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels…” In December 2020, even before Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, he named BlackRock Global Head of Sustainable Investing, Brian Deese, to be Assistant to the President and Director of the National Economic Council. Here, Deese, who played a key role for Obama in drafting the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, has quietly shaped the Biden war on energy.
This has been catastrophic for the oil and gas industry. Fink’s man Deese was active in giving the new President Biden a list of anti-oil measures to sign by Executive Order beginning day one in January 2021. That included closing the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring 830,000 barrels per day from Canada as far as Texas refineries, and halting any new leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Biden also rejoined the Paris Climate Accord that Deese had negotiated for Obama in 2015 and Trump cancelled.
The same day, Biden set in motion a change of the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” that imposes a punitive $51 a ton of CO2 on the oil and gas industry. That one move, established under purely executive-branch authority without the consent of Congress, is dealing a devastating cost to investment in oil and gas in the US, a country only two years before that was the world’s largest oil producer.[iv]
Killing refinery capacity
Even worse, Biden’s aggressive environmental rules and BlackRock ESG investing mandates are killing the US refinery capacity. Without refineries it doesn’t matter how many barrels of oil you take from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the first two years of Biden’s Presidency the US has shut down some 1 million barrels a day of gasoline and diesel refining capacity, some due to covid demand collapse, the fastest decline in US history. The shutdowns are permanent. In 2023 an added 1.7 million bpd of capacity is set to close as a result of BlackRock and Wall Street ESG disinvesting and Biden regulations. [v]
Citing the heavy Wall Street disinvestment in oil and the Biden anti-oil policies, the CEO of Chevron in June 2022 declared that he doesn’t believe the US will ever build another new refinery.[vi]
Larry Fink, Board member of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, is joined by the EU whose President of the EU Commission, the notoriously corrupt Ursula von der Leyen left the WEF Board in 2019 to become EU Commission head. Her first major act in Brussels was to push through the EU Zero Carbon Fit for 55 agenda. That has imposed major carbon taxes and other constraints on oil, gas and coal in the EU well before the February 2022 Russian actions in Ukraine. The combined impact of the Fink fraudulent ESG agenda in the Biden administration and the EU Zero Carbon madness is creating the worst energy and inflation crisis in history.
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https://themostimportantnews.com/archives/the-end-of-the-retail-industry-as-we-know-it-today
The End Of The Retail Industry As We Know It Today
Will this be the last “somewhat normal” holiday season for U.S. retailers? Normally, the holiday season is the most profitable time of the year for our retailers, but it has become clear that holiday spending is going to be way down in 2022. Meanwhile, there are a couple of long-term trends that won’t be going away any time soon that are squeezing the life out of the industry from both sides. If those long-term trends cannot be reversed, we will soon see a lot more decaying buildings with boarded up windows where thriving retail establishments once existed. The health of the retail industry is critical to the health of the overall U.S. economy, and right now the outlook for the future of the industry is not good.
Earlier today, I came across a brand new survey that discovered that more than a third of all Americans “plan to spend less on holiday shopping in 2022”…As inflation forces consumers to spend more on gas and groceries, about 1 in 3 Americans (34%) plan to spend less on holiday shopping in 2022 than they did last year, according to a new Clever Real Estate poll of 1,000 Americans.
Retailers have taken notice, hosting holiday sales earlier than normal and ratcheting up discounts to move merchandise. Stores want to draw attention to deals now before Americans decide to cut back further on nonessential spending — especially when 58% of the country already reports feeling worried about finances.
This is yet another sign that we are heading into a very serious economic slowdown, and it is extremely troubling news for our major retailers.
In fact, Target is publicly admitting that it has been forced to “lower its expectations” as we head into the holiday season…
Target’s profit fell by around 50% in its fiscal third
quarter as it cleared through unwanted inventory and sales slowed
heading into the holidays, prompting the company to lower its
expectations for retailers’ most important time of year.
If all the industry was facing was a tough year or two, most retailers could survive that.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of long-term trends that are currently plaguing the industry that aren’t going to go away for the foreseeable future.
First of all, we are witnessing a tsunami of retail theft that just keeps getting worse year after year.
If you can believe it, Target just admitted that theft from their stores will “reduce our gross margin by more than $600 million for the full year”…
The discount retailer told reporters on a call to discuss its third quarter earnings results that inventory shrinkage — or the disappearance of merchandise — has reduced its gross profit margin by $400 million so far in 2022 compared to 2021.
“At Target, year-to-date, incremental shortage has already reduced our gross margin by more than $400 million vs. last year,” Target CFO Michael Fiddelke said on the earnings call, “and we expect it will reduce our gross margin by more than $600 million for the full year.”
We aren’t just talking about somebody stealing a few candy bars.
600 million dollars is an enormous amount of money.
And a spokesperson for Target is attributing the bulk of the losses to “organized retail crime”…
A Target spokesperson told Yahoo Finance via email after the call the shrinkage was mostly specifically attributed to “organized retail crime.”
At this point, organized retail crime has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States.
Highly sophisticated gangs of thieves are robbing our retailers blind all over the country, and things are particularly bad in states such as California where penalties for shoplifting are extremely soft…
This isn’t just a problem at big-box retailers, either. The California Retailers Association has decried the rampant theft, which is hurting Golden State businesses small and large. Theft has gotten so bad in some parts of San Francisco that it is beyond belief.
“I’m new to San Francisco,” Times journalist Thomas Fuller told a grocery store clerk shortly after moving to the city. “Is it optional to pay for things here?” It sounds like an absurd thing to ask, but Fuller explains that he was genuinely forced to wonder what was going on after he witnessed people walk into Walgreens and Safeway, grab stuff, and walk out.
Shoplifting is a crime against all of us, because more of our favorite stores are being forced to shut down with each passing day.
Unfortunately, there is not an easy solution to this crisis. The moral foundation of our society is steadily rotting away all around us, and that means that even more young people are likely to pick organized retail crime as a “career choice” in the years ahead.
Meanwhile, the stunning decline of the middle class is also a trend that is really hurting our retailers.
As I detailed in a previous article, half of all workers in the United States made less than $3,133 a month last year.
Needless to say, you can’t live a middle class lifestyle in America today on just $3,133 a month.
More people are falling out of the middle class each month, and one recent survey found that close to two-thirds of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck…
According to a LendingClub survey, the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck is nearing record levels.
As of September, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. That’s just one percentage point below the record high of 64% last spring. To put it into perspective, the number of people feeling this kind of strain a year ago was around 57%.
Once upon a time, most Americans had at least some discretionary income to spend, and life was good for our major retailers.
But now all of that has changed.
On top of everything else, a major economic slowdown is staring us in the face, and prominent companies all over the nation are now laying off workers.
Sadly, it appears that list will soon include Disney…
The company that once defined family entertainment is going from media giant to epic failure, suffering over $1.4 billion in streaming losses and a stock drop of around 39% for the year. And, it would appear that these financial declines are inevitably leading to employee layoffs.
Disney has put a freeze on hiring, it is limited employee travel and is also reviewing workers for efficiency with plans to introduce cuts as a means to make the company “more nimble.”
We live in such troubled times, and things are only going to get more difficult in 2023 and beyond.
So I would encourage you to enjoy your favorite retail stores while you still can.
Because as conditions continue to get even harsher for our retailers, many of them will soon be forced to close their doors for the last time.
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