Why is Bill Gates so intent on everyone having government-controlled payment and ID information? Gates told The World Bank in June: “By investing in digital public infrastructure and technologies for payment and ID systems and updating regulations to foster innovation and protect consumers, governments can build on the progress reported in the Findex and expand access to financial services for all who need them.”
In The Wall Street Journal, Alexander William Salter explained the dangers of a digital dollar, writing:
Central bank digital currencies are a perfect example of what Yale political scientist James C. Scott calls the “seeing like a state” mentality. Governments have strong incentives to simplify society for the purpose of social control. Bringing commerce within a centrally managed payment system is a textbook example. If widely used, these currencies would give central banks unprecedented power over the financial system. Without additional safeguards, virtually all transactions would be a matter of public record. Financial privacy would be difficult to maintain. Also, since this currency would be a liability of the Fed, the Fed could place conditions on its use to nudge users in desired directions.
Imagine your digital balance shrinking slowly over time to motivate rapid consumer spending. Or the Fed blocking payments to politically disfavored businesses. This isn’t a huge stretch: The Fed has already involved itself in social and environmental policy. It is souping up initiatives for supporting economic “equity” and quietly pressuring banks to disclose their plans for mitigating climate-change risk. The temptation to manage a central bank digital currency in line with these agendas would be strong.
Governments already have the ability to target the financial accounts of those who step out of line with their agenda. Remember how the Canadian government targeted the accounts of the Freedom Convoy Protesters? The protesters were called terrorists so the Canadian government could force digital payment processors and crowdfunding platforms to perform surveillance on them. Reason reported at the time:
Late yesterday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked his country’s Emergencies Act of 1988 in an attempt to snuff out anti-vaccine mandate protests that have roiled Canadian domestic politics for weeks. Invoking the act allows Trudeau to broaden Terrorist Financing Act rules to bring crowdfunding platforms and payment processors under greater government scrutiny.
The announcement of these new policing powers is in response to the “Freedom Convoy,” a group of truckers and their supporters who have traversed Canada in recent weeks to protest in the capital city of Ottawa, demanding an end to Trudeau’s requirement that truck drivers be vaccinated in order to reenter their home country when coming from the U.S. The vaccine policy was implemented in January. Citing the Canadian Trucker Alliance, the Toronto Star reported in late January that “that as many as” 16,000 truckers “may be sidelined due to the new restriction.”
Trudeau said yesterday that the protesters’ blockades, which have been set up at U.S.-Canada border crossings as well as on the streets of Ottawa, “are harming our economy and endangering public safety.” Invoking the Emergencies Act will grant his government broad, unspecified powers to break up the protests, including calling in the military (which Trudeau has thus far hesitated to do, calling it a “last resort”). In order to invoke the Act, “there must be a belief the protesters constitute a national emergency and cannot be dealt with under existing laws,” reports The Guardian.
One consequence of Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act (successor to the War Measuers Act) is that crowd-funding platforms in Canada will come under anti-terrorist financing laws. That’s insane. Trudeau has chosen a maximalist strategy to crush these protests. It won’t go well. https://t.co/Man7vJUwls
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) February 14, 2022
There is much debate over how much the protest movement represents Canada’s trucking industry. Leaving aside who speaks for who, Trudeau’s attempt to impose traditional banking surveillance on crowdfunding platforms and payment processors is a noteworthy development in this saga. He announced Monday that cryptocurrency exchanges and crowdfunding platforms must now report large and “suspicious” transactions to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), thus allowing more government surveillance of who’s forking over money to the protesters. The government will also be using its expanded powers to allow financial institutions to freeze the corporate accounts of companies that own trucks used in the blockades, while suspending their insurance (which could potentially end up hurting victims as well as those responsible, in addition to having little deterrent effect).
If governments are content to use their power to turn payment processors into weapons against their enemies, imagine what they might do if they had total control over the payment processing itself. Central bank digital currencies would give the government complete control over the payments and savings of every citizen. That absolute power could lead to corruption, absolutely.
Action Line: So ask yourself, why does Bill Gates want everyone’s bank account and ID linked and controlled by the federal government? It’s another example of the expanding powers of the virtual Panopticon modern humans find themselves in. Privacy is unobtainable, and surveillance is unavoidable. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and you can be sure I won’t share your information with anyone. Let’s weather this storm together.
