Joe Biden is rapidly advancing plans to eliminate physical cash and establish the groundwork to ensure that Americans cannot own their own money.
The White House and the Federal Reserve, under Biden’s orders, have started developing a central bank-controlled digital currency. This programmable, trackable, easily manipulated digital dollar would render physical money obsolete. While this might sound like something from a dystopian science-fiction novel, it is all too real and could soon change life in America forever.
In March 2022, the Biden administration released a sweeping executive order that directed numerous federal agencies to crack down on digital assets, including popular cryptocurrencies. The order also ordered the Fed to study the potential development of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Although a CBDC is often termed a “digital dollar,” it would not be a digital version of the existing paper-based dollar. Rather, a CBDC would be an entirely new currency that would exist exclusively in an electronic, non-physical form.
The administration announced the completion of the CBDC reports in September 2022. Although it did not officially propose a CBDC following the release of the reports, it did announce that it had developed “policy objectives” for a U.S. CBDC system. Biden also directed the leadership of the National Economic Council, National Security Council, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Treasury Department to “meet regularly” with the Federal Reserve to further design a potential CBDC.
Since September, the administration has worked tirelessly – and quietly – to advance the creation of a CBDC. Various working groups have been coordinating efforts with non-government groups. Under the various CBDC proposals floated by the Biden administration and Federal Reserve, a U.S. CBDC would be programmable, traceable, and designed to promote various left-wing social goals. The CBDC system would also be designed to advance the green agenda by pushing the public into helping with “transitioning to a net-zero emissions economy and improving environmental justice.”
Unlike with decentralized cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, every transaction made using a CBDC could be easily traced to individual users by financial institutions, government agents, and/or the Federal Reserve. Additionally, because a CBDC would be digital and programmable, rules could be imposed that limit spending on approved activities.
Since physical cash would be obsolete, people would have no other options to make purchases. In another example, the government could monitor a person’s spending to calculate their “carbon footprint” and then issue directly deducted fines or apply spending caps.
The Biden administration’s plans to ensure that the public no longer owns money under most of the CBDC designs discussed by the Biden administration and Federal Reserve. Only large institutions such as banks, the federal government, and/or the Federal Reserve would actually have ownership of CBDCs. Everyone else would be prevented from having absolute control over their digital money.
Under the current system, when you deposit money into a checking or savings account at a bank, you immediately cease to own the money. The cash becomes the property of the bank. Although the bank is required to return the money you provided to it at your request, the cash ultimately belongs to the bank until you remove the money from your deposit account. Under the CBDCs’ proposed system, there would be no way for you to physically take CBDCs out of a depository account, store them privately, own them directly, or use them without being surveilled by a large institution.
The Biden administration has directly acknowledged that it and the Federal Reserve are now considering a future where you don’t own CBDCs. In a 2022 report about CBDCs, the Treasury Department stated,
“There are two general architectures for CBDC intermediation: (1) a single-tier (i.e., direct) CBDC with the central bank, and (2) a two-tier CBDC where intermediaries (potentially banks or nonbank financial intermediaries) would onboard and manage payments while the central bank records account balances.”
In other words, there is no scenario in which you would be able to store your digital money in a local hard drive or private storage account.
All of your money would be kept by a bank or the Federal Reserve directly, which means they would own all of your CBDC money.
Regardless of where your CBDCs are held, it’s likely the federal government would have access to data about your purchases and other information – a design choice CBDC supporters say is necessary so that officials can limit criminal activity.
The only significant privacy questions that remain in the minds of those who support CBDCs are about the extent of the data collection.
For example, Biden’s under-secretary for domestic finance, Nellie Liang, explained in a March 2022 speech about CBDCs that “one way of reconciling privacy with illicit finance concerns in a retail CBDC might be to have a tiered structure in which less data are collected for small dollar transactions or small volume accounts.”
Note that Liang says “less data” “might” be collected for small dollar accounts.
She doesn’t say no data will be collected.
If a programmable CBDC is rolled out in the near future, you won’t own money and you’ll have very little privacy, if any at all.
That’s great news for those who advocate for bigger government and want more power for large financial institutions.
But for the rest of us, it could prove to be a catastrophic loss of freedom.
(Article by Baxter Dmitry republished from ThePeoplesVoice.tv)
