CBDC Central Bank Digital Currency
Senator Ted Cruz introduces bill to ban CBDCs to prevent US from becoming ‘surveillance state’
From LifeSiteNews
Heritage Action for America warned that ‘anti-CBDC legislation is necessary to safeguard Americans’ financial privacy in the face of potential surveillance, control, and political intimidation.’
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act to prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that Republican sponsors of the bill believe could turn the nation into a “surveillance state” by handing over control of personal finances to federal government agencies.
While digital currency offers some attractive features, it also would grant the federal government unlimited opportunity to weaponize the technology against citizens, allowing it to both spy on the spending habits of everyday Americans and block access to the money in their personal bank accounts.
U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota described the threat of a U.S. CBDC last fall:
Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, a CBDC is a digital form of sovereign currency that is designed and issued by a government and transacts on a digital ledger that is controlled by that government. In short, a CBDC is government-controlled programmable money that, if not designed to emulate cash, could give the federal government the ability to surveil Americans’ transactions and choke out politically unpopular activity.
A government-issued CBDC is nothing more than a CCP-style surveillance tool that would be used to undermine the American way of life.
“While Americans across the country are being punished for thinking, speaking, and voting the ‘wrong’ way, the last thing we need is the government surveilling personal finances,” explained a statement from Heritage Action for America concerning the new legislation. “Anti-CBDC legislation is necessary to safeguard Americans’ financial privacy in the face of potential surveillance, control, and political intimidation.”
“CBDCs present major privacy concerns for everyday Americans, including granting the government the ability to collect intimate personal details on U.S. citizens, and potentially track and freeze funds for any reason,” the Blockchain Association noted.
Sen. Cruz, chief sponsor of the bill, said, “The Biden administration salivates at the thought of infringing on our freedom and intruding on the privacy of citizens to surveil their personal spending habits, which is why Congress must clarify that the Federal Reserve has no authority to implement a CBDC.”
“Big government has no business spying on Americans to control their personal finances and track their transactions,” said Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a co-sponsor of the bill. “It is a massive overreach.”
In early 2022, the Biden administration urged the Fed to investigate the creation of a CBDC.
“Over 100 countries are exploring or piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs),” said Biden, warning that the U.S. “must play a leading role in international engagement and global governance of digital assets consistent with democratic values and U.S. global competitiveness.”
But many Republicans see this as nothing more than a means to turn America into a totalitarian state.
Pushback against a U.S. CBDC has become an integral part of the messaging of 2024’s presidential hopefuls.
Last month, former President Donald Trump pledged to ban a CBDC if re-elected to the White House.
“As your president, I will never allow the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency,” Trump told a crowd during a campaign event in New Hampshire.
“Such a currency would give a federal government — our federal government — absolute control over your money,” Trump said. “They could take your money, and you wouldn’t even know it was gone.”
“This would be a dangerous threat to freedom, and I will stop it from coming to America,” he vowed.
Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat now running as an Independent presidential candidate, has warned that CBCDs are “a calamity for human rights and for civil rights” while similarly promising to halt progress by the Fed from creating a CBDC.
Eleven countries have already fully implemented CBDCs, including China, where digital currency is tied to a person’s “social credit score.”
The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) uses its extensive network of digital cameras —estimated to be over one billion — combined with facial-recognition capabilities to monitor the daily movements and actions of its citizens. That along with other information collecting capabilities used in conjunction with government-controlled digital currency allows the CCP to punish those who transgress desired social norms.
While Democrats in Congress have sought to pass legislation authorizing the Fed to institute a CBDC, Republicans have similarly made sought to preempt such a move.
Last fall, Emmer introduced a bill in the U.S. House with the same name as Cruz’s bill, “CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act,” to” halt the efforts of unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that dismantles Americans’ right to financial privacy.”
Co-sponsoring the bill with Cruz are Republican Sens. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Scott, Ted Budd of North Carolina, and Mike Braun of Indiana.
CBDC Central Bank Digital Currency
Ursula von der Leyen Consolidates Power. What this teaches us about the push for single global government
Suppose you want to glimpse the political future that the globalist movement seeks to impose on the Western world. In that case, you should pay attention to current developments in the European Union, particularly the European Council- the appointed body that administratively manages the EU. Most think the European Union is an alliance between independent Westphalian nation-states that have banded together to form a trade partnership sharing a common currency. This certainly was the original justification (or marketing) for this political structure. But not the current reality.
The fact is that the organizational, administrative and political structure of the EU has evolved to yield a privileged political caste, based in Brussels, Belgium, which exerts unilateral political and financial authority over the formerly autonomous member nation-states. Of course, this process has developed under the careful guidance and watchful hidden influence of the United States and NATO.
As currently structured, Western Europe under the EU is more akin to the federal structure of the United States, but with a weaker central constitution and body of law (routinely disregarded) and less autonomy for each member state. Yes, there is the election of Members of Parliament of the European Union by the citizens of each state, but those MEPs have little of no actual power. Power is concentrated entirely in the European Council’s central authority and its President, Ursula Von der Leyen- all of whom are appointed rather than elected. And, as recently covered by both Politico and Unherd, although the center-right populist movements of Europe, including France, Italy, Germany and other countries have made great gains in the recent EU parliamentary elections, their growing power was not sufficient to disrupt the reappointment of Ursula Von der Leyen as President of the EU.
Unsurprisingly, upon reappointment, Von der Leyen swiftly moved to consolidate power by controlling the appointments to the European Council, which is the structure that actually makes EU policy and has the power to override any local decisions by the formerly sovereign legislatures of member states. To the surprise of virtually no one paying attention to what has been happening in the EU.
Key references for further reading include the following:
Politico: From queen to empress: Inside Ursula von der Leyen’s power grab
After unveiling her new team, the European Commission president holds more influence than ever.
BRUSSELS — When Ursula von der Leyen unveiled her team for the next European Commission, she simultaneously silenced the doubters about who was really in charge in Brussels.
As she revealed the 26 commissioners and their roles to the public, one point was immediately clear: she would have unfettered control over European Union politics. In a matter of minutes, she introduced a big title with little responsibility for one of the most powerful countries in the European Union, she propped up her buddies, and she diluted powerful portfolios by dividing them among multiple people.
The power grab was complete.
“She will be even more in control of everything,” said one EU official who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Who thought that was even possible?”
It was the culmination of months of public and private strategy to remove the dissenting voices of her first term as European Commission president. From the first team, none of the naysayers remain. Big personalities such as France’s Thierry Breton and the Netherlands’ Frans Timmermans are now gone.
During her first term — in which she faced a global pandemic and a war on the EU’s doorstep — she developed a reputation for making unilateral decisions, overstepping her job description, cutting other EU leaders out of the decision-making, and speaking only to a handful of advisers. As a result, she gained the nickname Queen Ursula in Brussels.
The morning of von der Leyen’s announcement of her second top team, she refused to tell the European Parliament, her partners in the process of approving commissioners, who she was assigning to which job. Instead, she left a meeting with the Parliament’s top leaders and went straight into a press conference in which she revealed all the details. She was later accused of “contempt” for the Parliament.
Hours before, she convinced the French she would give their commissioner nominee an exceptionally important job if they swapped out Breton. On Tuesday, as she revealed job descriptions, they realized they’d been bamboozled into a watered-down position.
“Anyone who thought that she could have changed her style, her will to keep tight control, was at the very least naive,” said an EU diplomat.
Unherd: Von der Leyen’s authoritarian plot
National democracies will be subordinate to her Commission
The European Union is about to enter what could prove to be the most ominous phase in its troubled history. In a few weeks, Ursula von der Leyen’s new European Commission will officially take office, at which point she will have almost unfettered control over the bloc’s politics.
When von der Leyen introduced the new Commission’s lineup and organizational structure last month, even the typically Brussels-friendly mainstream media was forced to admit that what she had pulled off was nothing short of a coup. By placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalizing her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence, the Commission President has set the stage for an unprecedented supranational “power grab” that will further centralize authority in Brussels — specifically in the hands of von der Leyen herself.
She is busy transforming the Commission “from a collegial body into a presidential office”, noted Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris. But this is the culmination of a longstanding process. The Commission has been stealthily expanding its powers for a long time, evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor, resulting in a major transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level at the expense of democratic control and accountability. But this “Commissionisation” is now being taken to a whole new level.
Consider the bloc’s foreign policy, and its defence and security policy in particular. It has gone relatively unnoticed that von der Leyen has used the Ukraine crisis to push for an expansion of the Commission’s top-down executive powers, leading to a de facto supranationalization of the EU’s foreign policy (despite the fact that the Commission has no formal competence over such matters), while ensuring the bloc’s alignment with (or, rather, subordination to) the US-Nato strategy.
“The Commission is evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor.”
A signal aspect of this move has been the appointment to key defence and foreign policy roles of representatives from the Baltic States (total population: a bit more than 6 million), which have now been bumped up the political food chain because they share von der Leyen’s über-hawkish stance toward Russia. One particularly important figure is Andrius Kubilius, former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who, if confirmed, will take on the role of the EU’s first Commissioner for Defence. Kubilius, known for his close ties to US-funded NGOs and think tanks, will be responsible for the European defence industry and is expected to push for greater integration of military-industrial production. Furthermore, Kubilius served on the advisory board of the International Republican Institute and is a former member of the Atlantic Council’s EuroGrowth Initiative — two Atlanticist organizations whose primary objective is to promote US corporate and geopolitical interests around the world.
For those Western nation citizens left pondering why they should care about the political machinations of Angela Merkle’s protege Ursula Von der Leyen, they should consider the broader context. The structure of the EU is basically a test bed for ‘New World Order” political structure being incrementally advanced for the (literally) unholy alliance of the Socialist United Nations with the Corporatist World Economic Forum, both of which are allied as the proudly self-proclaimed new global government structure.
Quoting from our book “PsyWar Enforcing the New World Order”:
By globally synchronizing the public health response across the United Nations member states, new powers were granted to the UN and its organizations at the cost of national sovereignty. These universally applied regulations and multilateral agreements have given birth to an enlarged, globalized administrative state. Although this power grab has percolated for many decades, the COVID crisis acted as an accelerant to synergize international agreements that advance the UN as a world government.
The United Nations has morphed into a leviathan. Its various agreements and goals seek to centrally dictate the world’s economy, migration, “reproductive health,” monetary systems, digital IDs, environment, agriculture, wages, climate modifications, one world health, and other related globalist programs. To be clear, these are the goals of an organization seeking a globalized command economy, not an organization focused on world peace, ending wars or human rights!
This UN aims to regulate every dimension of our personal and national lives. It is working to reduce and eliminate national sovereignty across the world, and thereby to decrease our diversity, our traditions, our religions and our national identities.
The UN has partnerships and strategic agreements with member nations, as well as other globalist organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, CEPI, The World Trade Organization, The European Union and the World Economic Forum, known as the WEF.
An Example of How the United Nations Operates
The WEF and the UN signed a strategic agreement and partnership in 2019. Remember that the WEF has a commitment to “stakeholder capitalism,” by which private-partnerships work to control governments. The WEF developed a plan in 2020 to use the COVID-crisis to reorganize global governance around social issues, including climate change—this plan was called the Great Reset.
The WEF is a trade organization representing the world’s largest corporations. It repeatedly exploits disruptive technologies to enhance economic growth opportunities for its corporate members. The WEF is specifically designed to advance the economic power of its global elite members, otherwise known as the “billionaire class.”
As the WEF feeds money into the United Nations through their 2019 strategic agreement, who is managing the conflicts of interests that come with this partnership? Where is the transparency?
The UN has fourteen specialized organizations under its leadership, all involved in global governance, including the World Health Organization or WHO.
None of these organizations is related to the scope of the original UN charter, which was focused on ending wars, promoting world peace, and protecting human rights. The UN had been quietly building power for years prior to the pandemic through various agreements and treaties.
For instance, the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” is a recent example of such an agreement.
Agenda 2030 has seventeen goals and 169 targets, which vary widely in scope and topic, but almost all of these goals directly affect world governance. Here are just a few examples from the Agenda 2030 treaty. Is this what the United Nations should be concerned with, or are these issues more properly addressed by the policies of sovereign nations?
‘We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change.
Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men.
Eliminate discriminatory laws, policies and practices.
Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality.
Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people.
By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.
This is an Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance. It is accepted by all countries and is applicable to all . . .”
Agenda 2030 is essentially a totalitarian socialist manifesto. This United Nations Treaty contains many more forceful statements regarding the reduction of national rights. The UN has signed strategic agreements with the largest organizations, corporations, and world powers to fulfill its utopian vision for the world.
This is a new world order—with unelected officials in control. That means that we all will be ruled by a nondemocratic UN administrative bureaucracy. This is a form of inverse totalitarianism. A world order based on a command economy; one that is at its core both socialist and totalitarian.
Now, these goals and targets may be fine for any single nation to undertake but this is a restructuring of the United Nations beyond its charter.
Early in the pandemic, the UN—through its surrogate the WHO, declared that a global vaccine passport was needed, and provided extensive guidance to member nations to standardize vaccine passports worldwide. In response, the leaders of the G20 issued a declaration in 2022 supporting development of a global standard of vaccination for international travel and the establishment of “global digital health networks” to be built on existing digital COVID-19 vaccine passports.
In June 2023, a new initiative between the EU and the WHO for strategic cooperation on global health issues was announced. This agreement seeks to “bolster a robust multilateral system with the World Health Organization at its core, powered by a strong European Union.”
The pandemic has allowed world leaders to coalesce global administrative power under the guise of public health through the administrative bureaucracy of the UN. Public health has been weaponized to gain control of passports, travel, banking, the environment and the international economy. This is a gross violation of the individual’s right to privacy, national sovereignty and the UN charter.
It is just a matter of time before these vaccine passports will be coupled with central bank digital currencies. Then, the passports can be used to deny the unvaccinated or other political dissenters access to travel and use of their own money.
Once international passports, central bank digital currencies, command economy aspects of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the WHO amendments to the IHRs are implemented, the groundwork for a new world order will be complete. A global administrative state, whose core power resides with the UN. The US deep state views its relationship with the UN as one where it has kept some degree of organizational control. This new world order will become a spiderweb of rules, regulations, agreements, and treaties within which individuals and nations will be trapped like flies. This new global governance will be virtually unbreakable. From there, it is only a matter of time before national sovereignty becomes obsolete. This is a reality unless we fight to stop this madness.
For this reason, the power of the United Nations must be exposed and curtailed. Globalists seeking to advance their agendas are using the model of the European Union, whereby rules and regulations stymie national sovereignty, to build a worldwide system of control. All must fight this takeover at the local, national, and international level. We must use the courts, our legislatures, media, public protests, and the power vested in our national and state sovereignty to fight this. If all else fails, individual nations may need to withdraw from the UN’s New World Order in order to remain free.
“True Believers” like Corporatist EU President Ursula Von der Leyen or Socialist UN Secretary-General António Guterres always resort to heavy-handed totalitarian responses when threatened by alternative opinions or political movements. What can be observed with Von der Leyen’s response to the populist center-right political surge in Europe is precisely what will happen as the Socialist/Globalist agenda of the UN and its leader António Guterres is threatened by populist movements in the United States, Argentina, and across the world.
Let’s work together to keep our personal and national sovereignty safe for future generations. A New World Order is not needed, is not acceptable, and we the people and our sovereign governments should unequivocally reject this globalized takeover.
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Business
Bank of Canada scraps plan to create a ‘digital dollar’
Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem
From LifeSiteNews
The central bank said it will instead look at evolving the “payment” processes in Canada.
Plans by the Bank of Canada (BOC) to implement a digital “dollar,” also known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC), have been shelved.
Officials from Canada’s central bank said that a digital currency, or electronic “loonie,” will no longer be considered after years of investigating bringing one to market.
“The Bank has undertaken significant research towards understanding the implications of a retail central bank digital currency, including exploring the implications of a digital dollar on the economy and financial system, and the technological approaches to providing a digital form of public money that is secure and accessible,” the bank said, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Instead of using resources to create a digital dollar, the central bank said it will instead look at evolving the “payment” processes in Canada.
Most Canadians do not want a digital dollar, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. A public survey launched by the BOC to gauge Canadians’ taste for a digital dollar revealed that an overwhelming majority of citizens want to “leave cash alone” and not proceed with a digital iteration of the national currency.
The BOC last August admitted that the creation of a CBDC is not even necessary, as many people rely on cash to pay for things. The bank concluded that the introduction of a digital currency would only be feasible if consumers demanded its release.
The reversal comes after the BOC had already forged ahead and filed a trademark for a digital currency, LifeSiteNews previously reported.
In August, LifeSiteNews also reported that the Conservative Party is looking to gather support for a bill that would outright ban the federal government from ever creating a CBDC, and make it so that cash is kept as the preferred means of settling debts.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre promised that if he is elected prime minister he would stop any implementation of a “digital currency” or a compulsory “digital ID” system.
Prominent opponents of CBDCs have been strongly advocating that citizens use cash whenever possible and boycott businesses that do not accept cash payments as a means of slowing down the imposition of CBDCs.
Digital currencies have been touted as the future by some government officials, but, as LifeSiteNews has reported before, many experts warn that such technology would ultimately restrict freedom and be used as a “control tool” against citizens similar to China’s pervasive social credit system.
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