All Roads Are Leading toward an International CBDC in a Cashless World

ECONOMICS, 1 May 2023

Bill Willers | Global Research - TRANSCEND Media Service

The Daily Sceptic

“The masses are still oblivious to the machinations of their shadowy overlords.”
– Jim Quinn

26 Apr 2023 – The idea of government “of, by and for the people” has become a sick joke.

Federal/corporate power dominates a fearful public from which it has effectively separated itself. Elected representatives consort with lobbyists flush with cash.

A collective of unelected 3-letter agencies — IRS, SEC, CDC, FDA, DHS, DEA, FCC, FBI, CIA, EPA, etc., say “Obey!”, and a conditioned public goes along.

Above it all sits a shadowy body of globalists, aka “the Cabal”, and coming down the pike is the final piece of their game plan for total control of the human family: abolishment of physical money and establishment of a programmable electronic currency dubbed CBDC for Central Bank Digital Currency. 

• Why CBDC entrapment would be absolute is clear — that one’s every buy/sell action, down to penny candy, would be recorded;
• that CBDC is controllable as to where, when, and how it may spent; that “bail ins” (reductions in one’s account) could be done anytime government might wish;
• that a time limit can force spending and make saving impossible; that should one have unwanted opinions, or refuse some governmental dictate, their CBDC account could be frozen, etc.

It would be as thorough as any high security prison. And what is most alarming is that an apparently unaware majority is being guided toward CBDC, stepwise in a process of normalization. Here is what’s going on now:

• Item: NY City’s citizens will now have food purchases tracked through credit cards.
• Item: Big box stores like CostCo now have automatic check out options, some “cash or card”, others “card only”. Card only options will doubtless become the norm. 
• Item: The attack on cash started with large bills only, the rationale, as per Harvard’s Lawrence Summers, being that criminals use them. Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff is open in that his problem with cash is that it’s “anonymous”, and that it “handcuffs” central banks. Rogoff even wrote a book, The Curse of Cash. 
• Item: This issue isn’t just national, it’s global. Here is Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, threatening citizens making payments of over 1000 Euro in physical cash, with prison. 
• Item: Google has a digital payment system called a “Google Pay Wallet” that allows users to “tap to pay anywhere Google Pay is accepted”. It’s being tested now in the airline industry as a price guarantee program for Google Flights. 
• Item: For the past year, Amazon’s “palm reading payment technology” has been used at Whole Foods stores, where a wave of the hand gets the bill paid. Now, Panera is considering this “frictionless” method. Panera’s loyalty program includes 52 million customers. As increasing numbers of companies move to “frictionless” payment, the procedure becomes ever more seen as normal and fussing with cash or cards as passé. In time, all forms of electronic exchange could be organized, bit-by-bit if necessary, into a single, integrated, global system. 

Has a level of “normalization” within society been reached in order for the Establishment to move more aggressively?

Well, let’s see: On April 10, 2023, at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) [and who the hell gave them authority?] launched an International CBDC called the “Unicoin”, a “universal monetary unit [that] strengthens the monetary sovereignty of participating central banks”. And a mere 4 weeks earlier (March 6), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), aka “the Central Bank for central banks”, concluded a multi-country study, Project Icebreaker, regarding the use of cross-currency/cross-border financial transactions using CBDCs. Both, designed to protect the stability of central banks, are moves toward a single global electronic currency. 

You might argue that physical money continues to be in great supply, so where is the danger of a global CBDC when society is awash with cash? 

Well, training a culture to use electronic money is requiring expanded time, even generations, for normalization to become established. However, cash can be made scarce — and then to dry up — relatively quickly. And within the past two years, a senior fellow at no less an economics and policy research group than the Brookings Institute published an oped in the NY Times, “Cash will soon be obsolete. Will America be ready?”

Will we? One can estimate the inclination of the majority, and of society’s general direction, at the marketplace — Target, Walmart, a super market, whatever — by observing fellow citizens. Speed and convenience are clearly guiding decisions in a society in which “progress” is understood primarily in terms of technology and efficiency. While some observers claim people are now “waking up” to the perils inherent in where we are being herded, such people seem still to be a small minority. If the many unrelenting and diverse steps toward CBCDs are to be stopped and reversed, that minority needs to swell by an order of magnitude, and soon.

*

Economist George Gammon clarifies how the Biden Administration’s move to raise mortgage rates for those with good credit is yet another move to CBDCs. At the moment, individuals cannot have accounts with the Federal Reserve, so the little guy can’t benefit from discount windows enjoyed by big banks. “Not fair” declares the little guy, who now is inclined to advocate for Fed accounts for everybody, unaware of the implications. 

What this mortgage policy demonstrates is that credit can be issued by the Fed based not on merit but on what Gammon calls “narrative”. In this instance, the narrative is about social policy, but it could be about absolutely anything a government might want. Because the Fed creates credit out of nothing, it can offer rates all the way to zero. No bank can compete, and that favors the argument for Fed accounts for all, which, as Gammon makes clear, is a highway leading straight to the entrapment of CBDC. 

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Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at willers@uwosh.edu

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