https://www.globalresearch.ca/not-coming-already-here-cbdc-used-freeze-bank-accounts/5834216
“It’s Not Coming; It’s Already Here.” CBDCs Can be Used to Freeze Your Bank Accounts
When I talk about the war on cash and a cashless society, some people think I’m exaggerating the threat or they don’t take it seriously.
But I’m not exaggerating the threat. It’s here, it’s growing and it’ll only get worse. Today I’ll show you the latest example.
The proponents of the cashless society cite convenience as a major benefit. Why bother having to tote a bunch of cumbersome cash and coins around when you can just swipe a card or pay with your smartphone?
Besides, they say, cash enables criminal activity on the black market. Cash is the money of crime. And in some respects, they’re right.
Swiping a card or scanning your smartphone is certainly easier than having to get cash from a bank or ATM and lugging it around in your wallet, dealing with change, etc.
If you eliminated cash and replaced it with digital money, it would impact the black market (though they’d figure out a workaround).
Meanwhile, cash is costlier to produce than digital money and unlike with cash, you don’t need to hire a Brinks truck to move digital money around. No more bank robberies! And all those truck drivers and security guards can now learn to code!
You get the point. And that’s why the war on cash has been so successful. Digital money is simply more convenient to use than cash.
And the surest way to lull someone into complacency is to offer a “convenience” that quickly becomes habit and impossible to do without.
The Digital Cattle Pen
But here’s what they won’t tell you, as I’ve warned time after time: You’re being herded into what I call a “digital cattle pen” from which there’s no escape.
The fact is, governments always use money laundering, drug dealing and terrorism as excuses to keep tabs on honest citizens and deprive them of the ability to use money alternatives such as physical cash, gold and, these days, cryptocurrencies.
The real burden of the war on cash falls on honest citizens who are made vulnerable to wealth confiscation through negative interest rates, loss of privacy, account freezes and limits on cash withdrawals or transfers.
In reality, the so-called “cashless society” is just a Trojan horse for a system in which all financial wealth is electronic and represented digitally in the records of a small number of megabanks and asset managers.
Once that is achieved, it will be easy for state power to seize and freeze the wealth, or subject it to constant surveillance, taxation and other forms of digital confiscation like negative interest rates.
They can’t do that as long as you can go to your bank and withdraw your cash. That’s the key. Cash prevents central banks from imposing negative interest rates because if they did, people would withdraw their cash from the banking system.
If they stuff their cash in a mattress, they don’t earn anything on it; that’s true. But at least they’re not losing anything on it. Once all money is digital, you won’t have the option of withdrawing your cash and avoiding negative rates. You will be trapped in a digital pen with no way out.
In other words, it’s much easier for them to control your money if they first herd you into a digital cattle pen. That’s their true objective and all the other reasons are just a smoke screen.
Again, that’s the part they won’t tell you.
The good news is that cash is still a dominant form of payment in many countries including the U.S. The bad news is that as digital payments grow and the use of cash diminishes, a “tipping point” is reached where suddenly it makes no sense to continue using cash because of the expense and logistics involved.
Once cash usage shrinks to a certain point, economies of scale are lost and usage can go to zero almost overnight. Remember how music CDs disappeared suddenly once MP3 and streaming formats became popular?
Once the war on cash gains that kind of momentum, and we’re really not that far from it, it will be practically impossible to stop.
Biden Bucks: The Trojan Horse
My regular readers are well-versed in the technical features and dangers of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which I call Biden Bucks.
CBDCs are a form of money issued by central banks or the Treasury in digital-only form. It’s true that most payments today — credit cards, direct deposit, ATMs, online shopping, etc. — are already digital.
But there’s a difference.
All the digital payments we have today are private. They’re between you and your bank or the online store. The government does not see that information at the individual level unless they get a warrant. That’s not true for CBDCs.
With CBDCs, the government controls the ledger. They see everything you buy, your charitable contributions, your political donations, your entertainment choices, your travel and more.
When that information is combined with geospatial location (from the GPS data on your iPhone, E-ZPass toll transmitters and license plate scanners) and analyzed by artificial intelligence applications, it’s easy to develop a political profile of you.
Based on that profile, the government can decide you’re an “enemy of the people” or a “MAGA extremist” as Biden threatened in his infamous Philadelphia speech in September 2022 (the one with the military guards and blood-red lighting that visually resembled the Nuremberg rallies of the Nazi Party in the 1930s).
Once you’re on the enemies list, CBDCs can be used to freeze your bank accounts. This happened to the Freedom Convoy drivers in Canada in January 2022. It can easily happen here.
Some Americans have been relieved that CBDCs have not been fully implemented yet and members of Congress and some governors such as Ron DeSantis have stood up against them. That’s true.
“It’s Not Coming; It’s Already Here”
But the authoritarians never take no for an answer. When you close one channel, they find another. Here’s an example…
Citibank (which is entirely under the government’s thumb because of the many bailouts it has received) has announced what they call Citi Token Services (CTS).
With CTS, you convert your regular dollars into digital tokens. These tokens can be used to move money or make payments around the world. Citi calls this a “tokenized deposit.”
Notice the term “CBDC” is not used anywhere. But that’s what it is. Once you convert your dollars to digital tokens, you don’t have dollars anymore. Citi controls the ledger under the government’s thumb. They have complete information on all transactions.
This is a CBDC by another name. It’s not coming; it’s already here.
The time to protect yourself is yesterday — and if not yesterday, then today. The best way is to keep a portion of your wealth outside of the banking system.
That’s why I urge you to keep some of your liquidity in physical gold and silver.
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http://endoftheamericandream.com/our-society-is-melting-down-even-faster-than-most-people-thought-that-it-would/
Our Society Is Melting Down Even Faster Than Most People Thought That It Would
It can be difficult to believe that the wild scenes that we are witnessing on the streets of America are actually real. Earlier this week, I wrote an article entitled “What Life Is Really Like In America’s Hellish Inner Cities”. I wrote that article before the widespread looting that just erupted in Philadelphia. Just when I think that conditions in our core urban areas have reached a low point, they seem to find a way to get even worse. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of this crisis. As economic conditions continue to deteriorate, countless numbers of people will become very desperate. And when countless numbers of people become very desperate, our society will descend into a permanent state of chaos.
On Tuesday night, dozens of young people went on a rampage in the city of Philadelphia.
It is being reported that “stores in several areas of Philadelphia” were hit…
Dozens of people faced criminal charges Wednesday after a night of social media-fueled mayhem in which groups of thieves, apparently working together, smashed their way into stores in several areas of Philadelphia, stuffing plastic bags with merchandise and fleeing, authorities said.
A total of 52 arrests have been made so far, police said Wednesday.
Burglary, theft and other counts have been filed so far against at least 30 people, all but three of them adults, according to Jane Roh, spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.
Police in the city said that a large group of around 100 juveniles kept moving from store to store and looting them.
Videos shared on social media show officers attempting to grab thieves, some of whom are wearing Halloween masks, as they run riot through a Lululemon store.
One officer manages to hit one of the looters with a punch after tackling them to the ground.
Many on social media seem to be quite entertained by videos of the looting, but the truth is that this footage should break all of our hearts.
I had warned my readers that total retail theft would exceed 100 billion dollars this year, but now it is being reported that total retail theft already broke that threshold in 2022…
Last year, total losses tied to theft amounted to $112.1 billion, according to data from the 2023 National Retail Security Survey. That is up from $93.9 billion in losses in 2021 and $90.8 billion in 2020.
Retailers within metros including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland as well as Houston, New York and Seattle were hit the hardest last year.
So if last year’s number was 112 billion, what will the final number be for 2023?
130 billion?
140 billion?
150 billion?
Major retail chains all over America are shutting down stores due to rampant theft.
As I discussed yesterday, Target has decided to permanently shutter nine stores in high crime areas…
Target Corp. will shutter nine stores across four states on Oct. 21 because of theft and threats to safety, the company announced Tuesday, the latest — and loudest —example of a retailer exiting urban locations because of crime.
Target said it made the “difficult decision” to close the stores — which include locations in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay area — after the Minneapolis-based company determined that theft-preventive measures had proved ineffective. The company said it had tried adding more security, including third-party guards, and using deterrents such as locking up merchandise.
“We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” the company said.
But nine stores is just a drop in the bucket compared to what other retailers are doing.
For example, it is being reported that Rite Aid will close approximately 500 stores…
One of the largest U.S. drugstores chains Rite Aid is set to close around 500 stores nationwide as it negotiates a plan to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the firm, which is the third largest in the country, is looking to close branches and either sell or let creditors take over their remaining operations.
And CVS is in the process of closing a total of 900 stores by 2024…
Drugstore chain CVS is set to close hundreds of stores across the US as it undergoes a major reform to adjust to the needs of modern online shoppers.
The retail giant is coming to the end of a policy launched in 2021 which will see 300 stores closed each year – meaning 900 will have shuttered by 2024.
In the announcement, which has hit headlines again recently amid rampant shoplifting at the store, bosses they said that they were undergoing a new ‘retail footprint strategy.’
Drugstores used to be all over the place in our core urban areas.
But now our inner cities are littered with scores of boarded up establishments with “space available” signs on them.
This is what the future of America looks like, and it isn’t good.
Once upon a time, we could be proud of the shiny new cities that we had built from coast to coast.
Those cities were safe and they were clean.
But now our major cities have degenerated into crime-ridden hellholes that are absolutely filthy. In New York City, the millions of rats that live there are constantly making headlines…
This is the moment a group of horrified New Yorkers is forced to hop over scores of vermin scurrying across their path from bins outside a pizzeria.
Footage shows a few rats brazenly scurry across the pavement before scores of them emerge from an overflowing bin.
Taryn Brady, 29, who was with a group of friends when she filmed the rat encounter, said she was left in ‘fear and disgust’ after she and her friends had to hop over the rodents running towards them.
This is our country now.
I know that I keep saying that, but it is such an important point.
We don’t have the same nation that previous generations passed down to us.
Over the past 50 to 60 years, we have literally ruined America.
From the White House all the way down to the kids that are looting retailers in our major cities, we have become a laughingstock to the rest of the world.
And if we don’t find a way to turn things around, our story is going to have an absolutely tragic ending.
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