Don’t Trash Cash
Saying no to banks tracking our every move and hiking fees with their push to outlaw our cash and turn all money electronic.
(Note: underlined words/phrases correspond to links.)
The following is a continuation of the reasoning & rationale for the Bill-Request begun at Main Street Gov, summarized here.
Voices against the extermination of cash & coin, include Martin Armstrong.
For those who’ve never heard of him, please see this trailer for the German documentary about him, entitled “The Forecaster” here:
Or here:
Via ArmstrongEconomics.com, posted by Mr. Armstrong in the early days of May 2015:
“By the end of May (2015), the subject of eliminating cash… will be up for [formal] discussion among the major countries at a conference in London.
The advocates to end our economic freedom, to move toward a new world economic order of a Totalitarian State, where we will no longer be able to buy or sell anything anonymously with paper money, will have their say [later this month]… At this meeting, there will be participation of central banks from Switzerland, Denmark, the Eurozone, and the United States…
Clearly, behind the curtain there appears to be an actual preparation for [the] economic downturn underway… The possibility of a dramatically sharpened financial crisis looming… appears to be in consideration, and is perhaps now broadly accepted as inevitable.
There is obviously a serious threat of a possible global bank run… This could spill over into a global crisis as people see banks fail in Europe, and prudent people begin to withdraw cash in North America as a precaution, setting in motion a contagion. The problems within the European banking system can obviously set off a further loss of confidence in the global financial institutions worldwide. The abolition of cash in this context is seen as a serious tool to defend the system…
Paper currency is indeed the check against negative interest rates. We only need to look to Switzerland to prove that theory. Any attempt to impose say a 5% negative interest rate (tax), would lead to an unimaginably massive flight into cash. This was recently demonstrated by the example of Swiss pension funds, which withdrew their money from the banks in a big way [for storage] in vaults [as] cash, in order to escape the financial repression…
[The officially sought after move to] negative interest rates is [also] likely to [hinder any mass exodus] from government bonds [thus protecting sovereign debt from any sustained or uncontrollable selloff]…
Bank runs [will remain a threat to the banking system for so] long as paper money exists… The only way to prevent such a global bank run would be the total prohibition of paper money…
The complete abolition of cash threatens our very freedom and rights of citizens in so many areas… [Yet] we must understand that these measures will be implemented overnight in the middle of a banking crisis…
The Economic Party:
If all money were rendered electronic, and cash as an entity of exchange were dispatched into the past, the citizenry at large, and the private individual, can be both taxed to death and tracked to death.
Moreover, with FDIC insurance covering only $250,000 in the United States, what is to say bank accounts will not be Cyprus’ed at the next banking crisis, with every dollar above that $250,000 confiscated by the banking system, in a depositor-wide bail-in.
The next banking crisis, far more devastating than the last, and so catastrophic we’ve delineated it an Extinction Level Event in its economic impact, is no doubt around the corner — Citigroup and its government servants, with Rep. James Himes of Connecticut (and Goldman Sachs) cheerleading, would not — in the thick of the holidays in December 2014, by way of the 2015 Omnibus Appropriations Bill — be sneaking many trillions of dollars worth of credit default swaps and their kin onto (quote) “covered depository institutions”, that being taxpayers, unless it and its ilk thought something horribly amok was amassing.
Bail-in’s are an easier sale than bailouts to the overwhelming majority of voters who don’t have $250,000 to their name. A bail-in by depositors so “rich” as to have more than a quarter of a million bucks in the bank, doesn’t sound so bad to the ordinary person. Except, it will be awful to small business owners who do happen to be that “rich”.
(No doubt the bought-and-paid-for politician, and his crony capitalist corruptors, will by then have their own ‘cash’ in accounts of Treasury bonds perhaps, covered much higher in insurance by a top-tier broker-dealer rescued by the bail-in.)
An America without cash & coin also makes every anti-Establishment individual and anti-Status-Quo organization vulnerable to Recommendation 31 in the “Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies” dated Dec 12 2013, that again being (quote) “Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts…” If everything you’ve got is electronic in the bank, then the easiest way to stop you — be you a new party candidate or a new party itself — is to “change the amounts held in [your] financial accounts” and zero your account out in the bat of an eyelid. The easiest way to defang a political opponent, or new political party, is (after all) to defund it.
The Economic Party doubts any policy to do away with cash will ever succeed — an underground economy operating in cash and alternatives (such as precious metals) is certain to develop and grow to size, in especially a nation like ours that has a vast Privacy and Right To Bear Arms crowd to its name.
Still, the whole idea of a society being denied a right to transact privately, and in privacy from the prying eyes of bankers and their protectors, is nevertheless an abhorrent one that must be killed dead in its tracks.
Reminder: The White House Intelligence Task Force’s Recommendation 31, to supposedly rein in the runaway train that the National Security Agency had become at breaching and invading the privacy of law abiding American citizens, again said in part: “Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts…” which means they can and will “use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts…” if the end justifies the means.
Because here’s who you’re dealing with when you’re up against the N.S.A. (hat-tip, Glenn Greenwald) …
“To Discredit a Target … Set Up a Honey-Trap, Change their Photos, Write a Blog Purporting to be One of their Victims, Email their Colleagues, Neighbors, Friends.”
(That’s from the NSA’s manual, on how to screw up someone’s life, that someone obviously NOT being a terrorist.
Because:
You do NOT “Change their Photos” when your target is a terrorist. Terrorists don’t care how cool they look on Facebook. And to our knowledge, terrorists don’t typically put pictures up, looking for dates on ChristianMingle.
Also, you do NOT “Set Up a Honey-Trap” to discredit a terrorist either — many of them have multiple wives and mistresses who, more often than not, know each other. (We seriously doubt there were many terrorists on AshleyMadison either — “Life’s short, have an affair” is more likely to be ‘Life’s short, go out with a bang’ to the jihadi type.) You “Set Up a Honey-Trap” to discredit a political opponent, a whistleblower, a journalist, a critic, to blackmail that person into compliance, or to destroy his or her marriage and family for non-compliance.
Again, without cash, we are at the mercy of banks and their protectors.
Without cash, we are slaves.
Under the covers of fabricated capital, the megabanks have become thinly capitalized or negatively capitalized, partly because they’ve NOT retained earnings to shore up depleted or destroyed capital. Instead, they’ve distributed those earnings to insiders, in inflated executive comp, rich dividends, big bonuses, all sorts of perks, and various forms of largesse — hundreds of billions of dollars, all added up, in the span of a few years.
Starved of tangible capital replenishment as a result of lavish gift-giving to insiders — and bets gone wrong that’ve been shoved under the rug — the megabanks and their managers have sought out other forms of income from depositors and customers to compensate, which we’ve seen manifest in various forms of usury like overdraft sequencing schemes, and abuses such as fees for incoming (repeat: incoming) wires — fee-collection on both sides of the electronic funds transfer, as if banks were doing the heavy lifting, when it is the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire Funds system that’s performing the wire services.
Ditto the minimum balance fees — like $5 for accounts less than $100 — when even every morsel under a hundred bucks can be lent out (or bet out) at a positive and (Fed-fueled) leveraged rate of return?
It appears the opulent gift of fractional reserve banking, gifted by the Fed, isn’t good enough for the banks.
It appears the bankers want us to bail them out when there is a crisis, and fatten them up when there isn’t one, in a non-stop cycle of Rinse & Repeat.
Like the Economic Party has said:
Ladies and gentlemen, if these aren’t the waning vital signs and last throes of a parasitic symbiosis whose end-hour has come, then what is?
To make your voice heard on this matter, Vote Here.
