https://www.globalresearch.ca/hello-project-icebreaker-goodbye-financial-freedom/5815537
Hello “Project Icebreaker”, Goodbye Financial Freedom. The Dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)
"Project Icebreaker" is managed and developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
There has been extensive discussion in the past couple of years within alternative media circles about the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs); a currency framework very similar to blockchain based products like bitcoin but directly controlled by central bankers.
CDBCs are a threat that some analysts including myself have been writing about for more than a decade, so it’s good to finally see the issue being addressed more in the mainstream.
The economics of enslavement
The Orwellian nature of CBDCs cannot be overstated.
In a cashless society people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Basically, everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could easily be used to stifle your freedoms.
For example, say you like to eat steak regularly, but the “green” government decides to list red meat as a health risk and a “climate change risk,” due to carbon emissions from cows. They determine by your purchase history (which they now have full access to) that you have contributed more carbon pollution than most people by eating red meat often. They declare that you must pay a retroactive carbon tax on your past purchases of red meat. Not only that, but your insurance company sends you a letter indicating that you are now a risk and they cut off your health coverage.
Other products you might consume and services you use can be tracked to create a psychological profile on you, which could then become a factor in determining your social credit score as they do often in China.
Maybe you refuse or forgot to purchase your annual mRNA booster shot, and the tracking algorithm makes a note of this. Now you are under suspicion for being “anti-vax” and your social credit score plummets, cutting you off from various public venues. Maybe you are even fired from your job.
In the worst case scenario, though, economic access is the greatest oppressive tool.
With CBDCs in place and no physical cash in existence, your savings will never truly be yours and you never be able to hold your purchasing power in your hands.
The means of exchange would be firewalled by the banks. Any (or all) government agencies would be able to freeze your ability to transact.
If one day you get angry about a particular government policy or a stupid thing a politician says, and openly call the system “corrupt” in public? The Bureau of Tolerance in Public Discourse could simply suspend your access to your digital money… Temporarily, of course. Only until you submit and change your tune – if it’s your first offense.
Repeat offenders might be required to attend a Sensitivity Training Boot Camp – at your own expense, of course! With CDBCs, any government bureaucrat could not only prevent you from making any purchases, they could also allow you to only make specific purchases, like a train ticket to Sensitivity Training Boot Camp where you’d spend eight to twelve weeks being “reeducated” in order to regain your rights to buy food.
This is every authoritarian’s dream come true.
Imagine this power even in the hands of a benevolent leader! It would be so easy to nudge citizens to live healthier, more productive lives… (In fact, in China, one of the documented uses of their combination “social credit score” and cashless transactions is denying individuals the ability to buy junk food because they’re considered to be overweight.)
In the hands of a callous, ruthless government? Much, much worse.
CBDCs give government bureaucrats the ability to starve their political opponents with algorithmic precision. It would be a new world of technocratic oppression – allowing раскулачивание or “dekulakization” of individuals or entire regions at the push of a button. At any time, for any reason.
Imagine living under the threat of possible “liquidation” every single day for the rest of your life.
This power that Stalin or Hitler or Chairman Mao could only dream of has only become possible relatively recently. Over the past few years, the combination of powerful computing, unimaginably advanced data analysis and extraction techniques and universal spying devices (also known as “smartphones”) have created the opportunity for autocrats to create the ultimate tool of control and oppression.
That “opportunity” is rapidly becoming a reality.
Project Icebreaker
It’s important to understand that central bankers are moving at breakneck speed to develop and introduce digital currencies. It’s not a matter of experimentation, they already have these systems ready to implement. In my investigations of various CBDC programs and how quickly they are progressing I came across an interesting program called Project Icebreaker managed and developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Source: BIS
For those not aware, the BIS is a globalist institution with a clandestine past known as the “central bank of central banks.” It is the policy-making hub for most of the central banks in the world. If you ever wondered how it was possible for so many national central banks to operate in tandem with each other instead of in the interests of their home countries, the BIS is the answer. In other words, organizations like the Federal Reserve are not necessarily loyal to Americans or to American officials, they are loyal to the dictates of the BIS.
The BIS is at the forefront of the CDBC movement. They’ve funded a vast array of projects to test and refine CBDC technologies for some time. Right now, the BIS estimate that at least 81 central banks around the world are in the process of introducing their very own CDBC.
Now, there are only 195 countries in the whole world, and more than 2/3 of them are pursuing this freedom-destroying, autocrat’s-dream-come-true.
Project Icebreaker in particular grabbed my interest for a number of reasons. The BIS describes the project as a foreign exchange clearing house for Retail CBDCs (retail CBDCs are digital currencies used by the regular public and businesses), enabling the currencies to be traded from country to country quickly and efficiently. This is accomplished using the “Icebreaker Hub”, a BIS controlled mechanism which facilitates data transfers for an array of transactions and connects banks to other banks.
Investigating further I realized that the Icebreaker Hub in theory functions almost exactly like the SWIFT payment system used currently by governments and international banks. More than 10,000 financial institutions in 212 different countries use the SWIFT network to transfer funds overseas for their clients; it is an incredible centralized hinge or fulcrum that gives its controllers considerable power.
As a point of reference, after the start of the war between Ukraine and Russia, the expulsion of Russia from the SWIFT network was used as a weapon in an attempt to crash the Russian economy. Russia has found ways around using SWIFT, but some damage has indeed been done to their financial structures. Consider this, however – What if all monetary transactions were centralized through CBDCs and the BIS controlled the hub in which all retail CBDCs are exchanged globally? That’s exactly what Icebreaker is.
Now imagine that you operate a business that relies on international transactions. Say you need to pay manufacturers in Vietnam to produce your products. With CBDCs in place your entire business would be completely dependent on a system like Icebreaker to move than digital money to Vietnamese banks, into your manufacturer’s account.
Say the BIS, for whatever reason, decides that all Vietnamese manufacturing illegally use child labor. Or the Ngân hàng Nhà nước Việt Nam (State Bank of Vietnam) doesn’t toe the BIS policy line, and BIS technocrats decide to “teach them a lesson.” Or maybe the BIS doesn’t approve of your products – or maybe they just don’t like you…
With Icebreaker, any BIS factotum can implement Russian-style sanctions. Your access to international commerce? Denied. Your business is now functionally dead – at the push of a button.
But Icebreaker isn’t just a reactive system – it can be a proactive system, too…
What if you had to meet certain standards in order to be allowed use of the hub, and the BIS dictates the standards?
What if the BIS decides that your company needs to meet woke ESG requirements before you can get permission for Icebreaker transactions? Insufficiently diverse board of directors? Denied. Using commodities that aren’t ethically, sustainably sourced by war refugees? Denied. Offering a product or service insufficiently aligned with globalist goals? Denied.
The BIS itself can actively manipulate social, cultural and economic decisions – using millions of businesses as their missionaries.
The entire global economy would, essentially, be held hostage.
For the average American who does most of their shopping locally, this might not seem like a big deal.
For the business world, an economic firewall could easily be used to control all international trade.
Any larger organization or business would require slavishly obeying the whims of the BIS.
It gets worse, though.
Part of the process of the “spoke and wheel” exchange method used by Icebreaker includes the exploitation of a “bridge currency” to fill gaps in exchange rates and liquidity. On the surface this seems like a clever way to speed up transactions by avoiding cross-currency shortages at banks.
That said, I want readers to think about the long-term path that this kind of “bridging” sets in motion in the realm of CBDCs.
Let’s say there is a global scale economic crisis which causes many currencies to fluctuate wildly. We’ve already seen three events that meet this definition in the last 20 years – so they really aren’t that uncommon.
Let’s say, for example, that the U.S. dollar loses its global reserve role (as it’s already lost its petrodollar exclusivity). Or, say, a debt ceiling standoff calls into question the market value of those $7.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds owned by global central banks…
This would send the $7.5 trillion/day foreign exchange market into a historic panic.
Price inflation becomes rampant and banking institutions falter under liquidity pressures.
Central bankers, who have a “solution” in search of a crisis to address, push CBDCs as the antidote. The BIS Icebreaker becomes the middleman for every single international transaction.
The populace, terrified by the economic crash, immediately embrace the digital framework. But the BIS claims they can’t find a currency they consider stable enough to act as an intermediary…
Well, “luckily” for all of us the BIS and IMF have been working on their own global CBDC. In the case of the IMF, this one-world currency would be based around the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket in use for decades to broker currency transfers between governments.
The BIS now uses this one unified, centrally controlled currency as the linchpin for world trade.
Eventually the BIS, IMF and various central banks will ask the public the inevitable question: “Why are we bothering with these national currencies when we have a perfectly good bridge currency in the form of this one-world CBDC? Why don’t we just get rid of all these superfluous separate CBDCs and have one currency for everyone?”
Thus, total global financial centralization would be achieved. And once you have a one-world currency, a completely centralized and micro-managed global economy and the most vital trade systems in the world controlled by a tiny handful of faceless unelected bureaucracies, why then have nations at all? Global government would be the next and final step.
I can see the nightmare play out when I look at projects like Icebreaker. They are seemingly innocuous, but they act as the DNA for economic tyranny that would make even the worst historic genocides pale in comparison.
What’s the solution? The last bastion of financial privacy, barter. Physical precious metals (gold as a store of value, silver for transacting and trade) would very likely become increasingly the preferred form of money for all truly free individuals for as long as the corrupt globalist regime has its tentacles in everyone’s digital wallets.
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https://brownstone.org/articles/inside-story-of-brownstone-institute/
The Inside Story of Brownstone Institute
The silence in the spring of 2020 was deafening.
Here the government at all levels was shelving every right we had taken for granted. The courts were closed. Worship services at Passover and Easter were canceled in most places by law. In many places, this persisted for the following year as well.
The media amplified every line being proclaimed by public health officials, who, as it turns out, were fronting for the national security state.
Those who could afford to were hunkered down in their homes, hiding from the “invisible enemy” outside, because the New York Times told them to, while others deemed essential were delivering groceries to the mysophobic elite classes. To find out if you were essential or not, you had to consult an order from the government.
Who was enforcing this? What were the penalties for noncompliance? Who exactly was in charge?
If there was an endgame, no one knew what it was at the time. That’s because none of the rationales made sense. Eradication? Not possible. Overwhelmed hospitals? Nurses were being furloughed because most were empty. Not enough personal protective equipment? The data indicated that 99 percent and more were not really in danger.
They did not say this at the time but the real goal was of course the vaccine, which was supposed to end the pandemic. It did not. Arguably, it prolonged it. So did every restriction. The panic alone killed many and the “mitigation measures” wrecked public health. But some very powerful people made a lot of money in the process.
Strange times and bitter memories. But the single most shocking aspect of the whole thing was the shutdown of debate. Even worse, it did not even need to be shut down because very few voices even dared to speak out. This was the most astounding feature of these 3 years.
Here we were wallowing in the midst of the most spectacular frenzy of anti-science malarky ever to appear in our lifetimes, a time when rationality itself was replaced with ideological bromides and astonishing gibberish was dished out from all the commanding heights. And yet the intellectuals either joined in the insanity or stayed silent.
Why did more people not speak out? Some were afraid of the virus. Some were afraid to contradict a powerful consensus. But vast numbers of people were not in a position that would allow them to contradict elite opinion. They were either confused or trapped into a professional setting where free thought and speech were just not tolerated.
Thus did safety and compliance become the watchwords of the day, not just safety from a disease but also from all public, private, and media authority, and compliance was not only with government diktat but new cultural norms that deemed any exercise of choice to be deadly.
You can call these people cowards but that’s too harsh. Many just didn’t want to face personal and professional disapproval. They made a careful calculation and decided to stay quiet.
This turned out to be wise. Later, many professionals, journalists, scientists, attorneys, medical doctors, and economists did speak out. They made a huge difference in rolling back the controls one by one. But look what happened to them! Many of their worst fears came true. They faced incredible professional and personal disruption.
We thought we were free, surrounded by institutions that protected free speech. We had newspapers, the Internet, universities, and think tanks – hundreds of thousands of people whose job it was to be a corrective to mass mania and government overreach.
The institutions and intellectuals failed. Worse, the silence of March 2020 mostly continues to this day.
Meanwhile, a new regime was born out of the catastrophe. It goes by many names: the biosecurity state, the digital leviathan, the security hegemon, government by the overlords of techno-primitivism.
Whatever it is, it bears little in common with anything we’ve previously experienced, though it has a lot in common with ancient depotisms. What began in disease panic mutated into a new way of life that disregards the values of the Enlightenment, particularly individual and universal human rights.
The Covid response was as much an institutional failure as it was a failure of rationality and courage. We thought we had reliable systems in place that would guarantee the ascendency of truth and reason and protect us against the tyranny of mass frenzy, government intrusion, and the forced transfer of trillions from workers to elites. Sadly, that turned out not to be true.
What does one do when civilization is sweeping toward destruction? One builds new institutions to fight back with a vision of a better world. Censorship or not, this is our moral obligation we have to the future.
Two years ago, Brownstone Institute came into being. And why? A group of passionate intellectuals concluded that new times require new institutions that can learn from the experience, respond to the ongoing crisis, and point the way toward a better alternative.
Its vision, said the mission statement, is “of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities.” It “is not just about this one crisis but past and future ones as well. This lesson concerns the desperate need for a new outlook that rejects the power of the legally privileged few to rule over the many under any pretext.”
Someday the full history will be written but not yet. We’ve made tremendous progress but there is so far to go, and the stakes grow higher by the day.
People think of Brownstone as a reliable source for frank analysis and commentary but there is a much deeper mission that is ongoing. It is best described as salvific: giving sanctuary not only to unpopular ideas but also displaced thinkers. Brownstone immediately became a source of personal and financial support for intellectuals, scientists, writers, and researchers who faced professional interference as a result of holding dissident opinions.
This aspect of our work is as important, even more so, as what you read on the website and the events, books, podcasts, and media appearances. For reasons of privacy and professional discretion, we don’t talk about this in any detail. But it is among the most crucial services we provide.
It could have been otherwise. Many new nonprofits focus first on institution building and padding up the internal bureaucracy. We did not go this direction. We are daily haunted by the failings of so many other institutions. Why create another one? Instead we chose the most earnest path: a tiny staff with maximum impact on public and private life, doing as much as we can for the mission given the limits of resources.
Now only two years since its conception, Brownstone Institute has millions of readers and thousands of backers, people who refuse to go along with whatever they are attempting to build in place of the freedoms we once knew. Our successes are many but the job is far from complete. As we approach the anniversary, we should reflect on our successes but also be realistic about the daunting challenges ahead.
We cannot assume that the crisis is over. Instead, many of the most grim policies they forced on us serve as a template for the controls they have in mind for the future. In many ways, we have lived through a coup d’etat against freedom itself. And we are still under what can only be described as quasi-martial law. Just being alert to this reality, still largely hidden from public view, is the first step.
Let us proceed boldly, with conviction and with truth, fearlessly and without favor. As ever, we remain deeply grateful for your generous support. We count on it, and only it, to make our operations possible.
Our mission is as clear now as it was then: “providing a vision for a
different way to think about freedom, security, and public life.”
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