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by Jeff Berwick
January 14,
2017
from
TheDollarVigilante Website
A
'must-read' article correctly connects the
stampede for cashless banking with totalitarian
police states, where ownership of data mean
ownership of people.
Source
From Scandinavia to Amsterdam to India and elsewhere, the trend of
going "cashless" is gaining traction.
We have been covering the shortcomings of what is rightly called the
'War On Cash' here at TDV for a while now and have shown just how
negative the effects can be on an unsuspecting nation's people.
Chandigarh, India, which is the capital of the northern Indian
states of Punjab and Haryana, is like one of India's labrats. Indian
officials are working hard toward making it into India's first
cashless city.
This initiative is part of the Prime Minister of India's call for
state governments to begin developing what he's calling "smart"
cities. That means cities attached to the latest Internet
technology.
However there is nothing
intelligent about his plan...
One of the major changes being made to work toward that objective
was the insistence of having all bills paid electronically at
government offices within the city.
Similarly, in Panjim, the capital of Goa, India, the local
government is attempting to incentivize the locals into paying
digitally by offering them discounts on train tickets and other
public transportation services if they pay electronically.
This is an extension of the ongoing cash battle which has been going
on in India since November when
Modi announced he was going to
replace the 500 and 1000 rupee banknotes.
However the government
has not started replacements, only ensured the removal.
What followed the eradication of India's largest denomination notes
was a constricted Indian economy, particularly among the middle and
lower classes who rely predominantly on cash transactions to conduct
daily business.
There are a myriad of problems associated with this. Many street
vendors, rickshaw drivers, and other small time merchants cannot
afford the card readers necessary to conduct the transactions
electronically.
In some cases the consequences have been starvation, suicide, and
the inability to pay for medical expenses because of lack of access
to funds or because of how difficult it is to exchange the 500 and
1000 rupee notes for lower denomination bills.
Also in Europe, in places like London, many stores and restaurants
have stopped accepting notes or coins for payment and only allow
their customers to pay with plastic.
It's becoming common for Londoners to treat people using cash as
second class citizens. In other words, it is becoming
unfashionable to pay with cash according to the status quo.
The same is true for the people of Sweden, particularly in the
cities of Stockholm and Gothenburg. Which is ironic considering that
in 1661, the Scandinavian monarchy became the first country in the
world to issue paper currency.
In Sweden this had forced people into storing their cash in bank
accounts that come with negative interest rates - yes, the banks are
charging them to save their money rather than rewarding them with
positive yielding interest.
In Amsterdam, the homeless, many of whom survive by selling
magazines, are increasingly hard pressed to find people willing to
pay in cash as well.
The problem is that even
if the homeless had cheap cell phones with
QR readers - which Amsterdam has
talked about helping the homeless community to obtain - they still
don't have the bank accounts necessary to receive the payments.
Then there is Uruguay which doesn't get much attention, but this
small South American country was among the very first to announce it
was getting rid of at least some cash transactions.
Unlike some other
counties, Uruguay's cash reduction was couched in terms of helping
the poor.
Soon the country plans to implement bank accounts for all payroll
payments. It is supposedly doing this in order to make sure even the
very poorest have bank accounts.
In fact, this is not
going to do much to help very poor people because they don't have
jobs to begin with.
But it sounds good on
paper...
All in all, the elimination of cash is being done under the guise of
helping to combat,
Of course, the reality is
that without cash, governments and banks gain the ability to run
economies like
totalitarian police states -
tracking every transaction and parasitically siphoning wealth via
income tax and other forms of taxation.
This is all part of a
United Nations backed, globalist
movement towards "smart cities" where people will own nothing and
live in small boxes and everything will be transacted digitally via
the government.
You can see what they have planned for "smart cities" here:
Basically, if you see the word "smart" in front of something, it
means "slave".
This is precisely why it is increasingly important to keep your
assets outside of these jurisdictions and out of the financial
system in general in safer alternatives such as precious metals and
crypto-currencies.
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