I would start a petition, but someone got there first. Direct debits and standing orders need to be outlawed because they allow the Government to empty our bank accounts. And then there are the televisions. I have heard that the BBC restricts their size because if they were a bit bigger the edges of the image would reveal the studio and camera crew.
These are ridiculous examples, of course. But in my view they are scarcely more ridiculous than the scare stories being put out about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which will supposedly allow the Government to control all our money and monitor what we spend it on. As Laura Dodsworth recently wrote in the Daily Sceptic:
Digital money and particularly Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer the potential for the Government, through the central bank, to see every purchase and transfer you make, in real time. And not just see, but control.
I understand Laura’s concern, and if she was right about this then I too would be warning of the dangers of CBDCs. But the truth is that CBDCs are not the threat to liberty that Laura and others think they are. In fact, CBDCs’ critics get things upside down: CBDCs will, I believe, protect us against the overreach of private companies like PayPal, not make things worse.
To see why this is the case, it helps to know that most of the money in circulation these days, 80% in fact, does not come from or ever go anywhere near the central bank. It is what economists call private money. Of the remaining 20%, 17% are reserves held by commercial banks, moving back and forth between them and the Bank of England, so not used by us, the public. That means that only 3% of the circulating money in daily use by you and me has anything to do with the central bank. Your mortgage, loans, direct debits and standing orders, deposits, credit card balances are all private money, none of it controllable by central banks. Not now and not in future, with or without CBDCs.
If we want to know what really happens when a CBDC is introduced, we don’t have to speculate because it has already happened in the Bahamas where the so-called Sand Dollar was introduced in 2019. It hasn’t been the roaring success its central banker John Rolle had hoped for. Last year he said it was “still in the very early stages” two years after launch. Take-up was “modest”, with Bahamians only using it infrequently and for low value transactions. Getting merchants to accept it as payment is one challenge, getting it to move around inside the traditional banking and payment systems is another. Only one of six retail banks and one of five credit unions is even in the pilot. As of May 2022, a mere £263,000 of Sand Dollar was in circulation. Even the Government has had to be cajoled into using it with acceptance of payments for public-facing services still in the future. John Rolle can hardly be accused of exercising enormous power over Bahamian’s money.
The difficulty of getting CBDCs into use is not all that central bankers have to worry about. The IMF no less is concerned that “the biggest and immediate risk that CBDCs pose to monetary policy is deposit disintermediation”, which is jargon for a run on the banks if they became too popular. CBDCs don’t require a bank account, you see. Not surprising then that there has not been a rush of countries following the Bahamas.
But what about Sweden’s Do Black credit card that Laura highlights, launched in 2019 by Doconomy and which limits spending based on CO2 emissions? Not a popular product with Daily Sceptic readers I dare say. I admit this caught my attention because in my previous article I had said this kind of thing would not be possible, yet here it was. When electronic payments are made the payment systems do not know what is being paid for. So how can they make a judgement based on CO2 emissions of what you have bought? What the payment system does know is the merchant and, if the payment is being handled by Mastercard or Visa, the category it assigns to the merchant. If some eco-zealots then went to the bother of assigning merchants some kind of eco-virtue score, or in the majority of cases where they hadn’t got around to scoring a merchant then scoring the general category of the merchant instead, then you could attempt to make some kind of eco-assessment based not on what you bought but where you shopped. The people who have gone to that bother are S&P Global with its Trucost system, partnering with Doconomy via its Aland Index. While all the talk from the card provider to its eco-warrior customers was about “CO2 emissions caused by their consumption”, the reality was a strange rate-my-shop system which may or may not correlate with what your actual consumption was. When it comes to virtue signalling, validity and accuracy are not important, who knew? Despite Doconomy’s claims to have saved the world, the Swedish public were less enthusiastic and the card was withdrawn in 2022.
The point is not that schemes like this are launched on a burst of virtue-signalling enthusiasm which then falls flat, but that they are more likely to happen at all in the realm of private money. Further evidence is provided by our very own Toby Young and the FSU being debanked by PayPal and the Nigel Farage NatWest/Coutts scandal. Yes, CBDCs are problematic, as the IMF notes, though not for the reasons Laura gives, and private money is arguably more so and only getting worse.
This has not escaped the central bankers, and it is why we all need public money, just not necessarily in the form of cash. If you are still not convinced, then consider the plight of more than one million people in the U.K. who are completely unbanked. That means they rely entirely on public money – cash – and desperately need for it to remain relevant. In short, they need merchants to accept it. If the only form of public money is anachronistic, expensive to handle and vastly less convenient than its private money alternatives, it is increasingly at risk of becoming irrelevant, shunned and ultimately declined. Think: paying with a cheque at the supermarket checkout. Keeping cash alive with legislation does not address the root problem. As private sector innovation streaks ahead, cash becomes more and more archaic. It will be seen as a kind of Government food stamp, only held by the poor and marginalised and only exchangeable for a miserable basket of essentials at Government approved centres. The threat of being debanked will become even scarier, handing yet more power to the PayPals, Coutts and NatWests. The option of not using a bank or having something useful to withdraw if your bank is about to fail, or simply not wanting an intermediary between you and your counterparty, is always going to be needed. Public money, in the form of well-designed CBDCs will be the answer in the future, just as cash was in the past. Public money must keep up, for all our sakes.
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Regarding the Times article about Apple above ( which I haven’t read as I have no time for paywalls ), I had no idea what a horrible and unethical company they were until I read this fine substack from A Midwestern Doctor, which covers many things as well as the current protests in China;
“The current protests we are facing are a result of this system being used excessively. Things in China have now reached the point that many Chinese citizens are willing to risk relocation to a concentration camp (which is not a pretty subject to discuss) to protest what is happening (similarly many Iranians have recently been imprisoned or worse for protesting against the government). China’s government is predictably responding to this instability with even more heavy-handed tactics and initiating a downhill spiral of unsuccessful propaganda (which will be revisited later). As stated before, I believe this cycle is ultimately being initiated by China’s economic instability.
China’s present situation should make the absolute futility of our preferred method for managing COVID-19 apparent. Even with an elaborate system that tracks every (vaccinated) citizen, imposes draconian lockdowns at will, and tests on an almost daily basis, nothing can be done to contain the spread of COVID-19 and when the system is dialed up as high as it possibly can go, the existing government will break before the spread is stopped.”
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/the-current-protests-in-china-are
“China’s present situation should make the absolute futility of our preferred method for managing COVID-19 apparent”
And that’s the problem. The doctor believes in convid when the reality is that the C1984 is basically a rebranded ‘flu which was introduced in order to get Agenda 2030 up and running. Which is why I have little time for endless talking about C1984.
With ref the recent royal racism crisis; I read what was apparently a fairly complete account of the dialogue, and Lady Hussy was in my opinion racist and/or extraordinarily dumb/demented because she appeared to repeatedly refuse to accept that the local community project representative in front of her was a British citizen, a British resident, and insisted on knowing where their “people” came from. It sounded as if Lady Hussy simply couldn’t conceive of such an obviously black person being British, a British citizen and resident, and was impatiently condescending/contemptuous in her efforts to “get at the truth” of where this person “really” came from … or was being provocative/deliberately obtuse/offensive. There was definitely something wrong. I do understand why her reactions caused offence, even distress.
The person she was speaking to was very clearly not ethnically British and had apparently changed her name from a British one to Ngozi Fulani, so it was perfectly reasonable to ask about her origins.
Not after she had already answered that question and said she was from England.
PS. I also thought that it was a mountain out of a molehill when I first read about it, but reading the account of the full exchange I understood why it was upsetting.
…. people, on both the giving and receiving ends of such reactions, used to laugh about this sort of thing, laugh it off, dismiss it as just business as usual; it was normal, etc ….
.. but it can’t be very pleasant, especially in a situation where you believe that you can’t answer back, can’t say what you think about the reaction, etc.
I agree with Fulani that Lady Hussey shouldn’t have lost her post over it though. *That* is where the lack of proportion lies.
I think the big problem is that the setting/context didn’t allow or encourage Fulani to speak up, to call Lady Hussey out about it at the time. She didn’t seem to think that she could say what she thought to Lady Hussey, the occasion and the place ( and Lady Hussey’s title too ?) silenced her.
I remember a black colleague recounting the time there was National Front march along her street when she was a young girl. ‘What are they shouting?’ she asked her father. ‘Go back home’ said her father. ‘But I am home’ she replied.
It was interesting to hear what Nigel Farage said about it all, on his out-and-about programme last night, between 19:00 & 20:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDWB3_45yPg The gist of it being that Hussy was the ‘victim’, as it were. He was probably right by saying that this wouldn’t make the press anywhere else!
2 thoughts come to mind:
1 If she really were “racist”, she wouldn’t even have spoken to her in the first place.
2 Being from Liverpool, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked if I have Irish ancestry – is this any different?
Yes, what she said was thick-eared, heavy-handed and inappropriate but to say it was “racist” is, to my mind, stretching the definition.
This post suggests the trigger for the questions might have been the mismatch between the accent (West Indian) and the name (African): https://www.unz.com/isteve/ngozi-fulani-is-actually-marlene-headley/
“Switzerland, facing an unprecedented power shortage, contemplates a partial ban on the use of electric vehicles”
It’s ironic that Switzerland imports a lot from Germany & France these days. It’s long been using hydro electric generation, and of course the difficulties outside the border encouraged it’s development, along with electric traction on the railways.
They could turn CERN off, that would save a bit of electric (1.2 terrawatts in 2012, probably a lot more now).
Today’s onshore wind farm story: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/12/onshore-wind-farm-ban-could-have-added-800m-to-household-bills/
Remember the original SARS virus? Neither do I, other than some vague memory of it causing panic then it seemed to disappear.
Why did that one vanish but this new one seems to be hanging around? What was different this time around?
https://off-guardian.org/2022/12/01/the-real-reason-behind-chinas-zero-covid-policy/
The brilliant Kit Knightly at Off-G providing a superb explanation of China’s role in the Scamdemic.
Truly insightful piece – thanks for posting…
This is the effect of suppressing and censoring information:
Before, we could assume most information was closer to false and pick out what we deemed to be closer to true for further debate. This worked well because those amplifying closer to false information were lost in the sea of all the other assumed closer to false information.
Now, we are to assume most information to be closer to true (because it’s been filtered) and pick out what we deem to be closer to false and remove it. Those amplifying closer to false information now have more status because most information that we see has to be assumed to be closer to true until it is verified and/or removed.
The more information is removed the more we must assume the information we see is closer to true, even if it isn’t.
Posted in error.
Another cause of death unknown:-
https://www.nme.com/news/tv/orange-is-the-new-black-actor-brad-william-henke-dies-aged-56-3359683
It was possible he was injected given he had worked on a NBCUniversal production: Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
https://screenrant.com/law-order-svu-warren-leight-unvaccinated-actors-response/
https://off-guardian.org/2022/12/01/the-real-reason-behind-chinas-zero-covid-policy/
CONCLUSION
To sum up, China’s “zero covid” approach forms a vital piece of the overall pandemic narrative, working in conjunction with Western governments as a deliberately stark contrast:
-It promotes the idea that vaccines work and helped prevent further lockdowns here.
-It shines a flattering light on Western governments, who appear less draconian by comparison.
-It serves as an argument for the effectiveness of lockdowns and other authoritarian measures.
Perhaps most importantly, the supposed difference works to corral and control public debate.
Traditionally leftwing critics of Western capitalism are forced to defend vaccines and lockdowns by their ideological loyalty to China.
Conversely, right-wingers have China’s “socialist” practices to point their fingers at, whilst praising Western capitalist pharmaceutical innovation for saving us from the need for tighter lockdowns.
Each side is controlled by their ideology, not realising their loyalties are being used to position them inside the permissible spectrum of opinion.
I posted a link to this excellent Kit Knightly article this morning.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/12/doug-casey/global-government-vs-the-people/
I’ll go so far as to say that Central Bank Digital Currencies and digital “health passports” are the most dangerous threats to the freedom and independence of the average human being in modern history—perhaps in world history. They will control where you can go, what you can do, and what you can own. They’re both very big deals, and they’ll be daily facts of life before 2023 is over. It’s very disturbing that we don’t hear either of them discussed anywhere. They should be taken with the utmost seriousness and stopped.