La traduction française est ici.
Audio:
Welcome to best evidence. My name is John Titus.
In this episode, I want to talk about Central Bank Digital Currencies – CBDC for short – in the US and plans to make CBDC an inescapable part of the monetary system and eventually an exclusive form of money in our monetary system – it may take a while, but it’s on the way.
Because CBDC is a means for control, the powers that be need to put a giant smiley face on top of it to sell it to the population being targeted for control. Luckily for the criminals running our system, that population is extraordinarily gullible. How gullible you ask? Well, let’s take a look at the smiley face itself, keeping in mind that this is what the top criminal global bankers imagine as convincing the population that CBDC is a great idea.
The pitch for CBDC is, it’s all about inclusion – that’s the buzz word, inclusion. We at the top of this digital utopia feel sorry for you cretins – I mean, people living under bridges without iphones or internet – because those people are unable to enjoy the amenities of our awesomeness. We here of the CBDC welcome wagon are here to rescue the unbanked and the underbanked – those are their terms – we are here to rescue the unbanked from their pitiful plight, okay? And there was actually a seminar on this recently at the IMF. The seminar title is « Central Bank Digital Currencies for Financial Inclusion: Risks and Rewards ». The date of that seminar was October 14, 2022. As you can see, this is just a talent show for policy wonks. They come out and they all are going to recite their scripts. The guys are going to read from their scripts. The guy we want to focus in on here is Bo Li. We’ll get to him in a minute, we’ll talk about what he has to say. In any case, it does not take much research to see that inclusion really has nothing to do with the people that it’s supposed to help and everything to do with controlling the population.
Let’s take a look at a speech from a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve expressly calling out inclusion as nothing but a contrivance. This speech is from August of 2021. You can see here it was given by Governor Christopher Waller and if we look – I want to search on this – if you look here in the lower left, I’m going to search on FDIC to go to the relevant disclosure. Here we go, okay. « According to a recent Federal Reserve Deposit Insurance Corporation survey, FDIC survey, approximately 5.4% of households were unbanked in 2019 ». 5.4% that’s it. I’m actually kind of surprised by that many people without bank accounts. But the key finding is this: « The survey found that approximately 75% of the unbanked population were ‘not at all interested’ or ‘not very interested’ in having a bank account » to begin with. And that is a huge clue as what’s behind the central bankers obsession with the so called unbanked. The vast majority of them do not want bank accounts and by definition, don’t have bank accounts and central bankers want to change that. So they’ve come up with this orwellian inclusion propaganda. And if you go on here and you look at what Waller says, he says expressly down here: « It is implausible to me that developing a CBDC is the simplest, least costly way to reach this 1% of households », meaning the 25% of 5.4%. That’s a tiny amount, he says. And so this whole inclusion campaign is simply implausible and he’s right about that.
So all this concern over the unbanked is not about people’s inability to access electronic banking. That has nothing to do with it. It’s all about people’s ability to evade electronic banking and evade the digital train tracks. And that’s [what] you saw from the FDIC’s own survey. That’s really what’s going on. They’re concerned about that 75% that doesn’t want bank accounts – the 75% of the 5.4%. So financial inclusion really isn’t « Welcome to our club, you 1% of households who don’t have bank accounts and want them ». It’s really about getting the roughly about 2 000, 2 100 homes, households per county who don’t want bank accounts and don’t have bank accounts, electronic bank accounts, in under the tent and getting rid of cash, of course, and saying, you know, « Once you’re inside this tent, now you just can’t leave ». And that’s really the aim of this inclusion campaign.
You have to remember, central bankers always speak with fork tongue, always. The Federal Reserve itself was founded and it was sold at its inception as a means to have an elastic currency. That […] the amount of money in the system could expand and contract depending on the shifting needs of the economy. What happened when the Federal Reserve was created, it was created in 1913, almost immediately the so called elastic currency is used to expand so as to finance World War one and then a few years after that, what happens? The elastic currency is contracted by the central bankers to deliberately cause a depression of 1920 and 1921 and then a few years later contracted again, after some more expansion, to cause the deliberate depression of 1929 and 1933. That is really what elastic currency means. It was really the opposite of really expansion, it was really all about contraction.
And you have the same game of opposites here. Central Bank Digital Currency is sold as inclusion. In fact, it is a device to exclude anyone who doesn’t want to play ball with this digital system, this digital entrapment, from eating by cutting off their electronic money – and we’ll see that expressly here in a minute or two. The question, if you are a central banker, is how do you start blocking those exits, how do you get the maximum number of people using CBDC rather than other forms of payment? Well, the IMF dropped some big hints on that score in that seminar I just pointed to. So let’s go over here to that seminar and here we have Bo Li again. He is the Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, so he is a top ranking proponent of CBDC. His presentation is very, very dense. You can see he’s reading from a script here and so it’s dense. And what I’ve done, I’ve chopped up his presentation into short clips that are really digestible. But let’s start with Bo’s most interesting reveal, which is his personal rock and roll CBDC fantasy. Take it away, R-Bo D-Bo.
CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program, to create smart contract, to allow targeted policy functions. For example, welfare payment. For example, consumption coupon. For example, food stamp. By programming CBDC, those money can be precisely targeted for what kind of people can own and what kind of use this money can be utilized. For example, for food. So this potential programmability can help government agencies to precisely target their support to those people who need support so that we can also improve financial inclusion.
Wow, could we get somebody over here to clean up Bo Li’s chairs? Thank you, R-Bo D-Bo for being so candid about your fetish for controlling people’s food. Did you catch that? He mentions controlling food twice in under a minute. So Bo Li just flat out told you that CBDC is about control. You voice an opinion that is not on R-Bo D-Bo circuit board and your digital food, well, shrinks. Isn’t that great? Now you might say, « Well, i’m not on welfare, I don’t use food stamps. So while you’ve explained central bankers rock and roll patrol fantasy, to be sure you haven’t explained how they’ll ensnare me ». So let’s go, I’m going to go to the next clip where R-Bo D-Bo gives us a very major clue as to how central bankers plan to shunt as many people as possible into CBDC usage. He is talking about inclusion which, as I explained earlier, is an orwellian term. And here he reveals a key feature of CBDC that central bankers plan to use as a Trojan Horse for forcing people to use CBDC. Listen to this carefully.
The second aspect that CBDC can help improve financial inclusion is because of its legal tender status, because CBDC is the obligation of Central Bank and the obligation of Central Bank is a legal tender in every country so it is widely accepted. That creates potential value for everyone to use it.
Okay, you can see why I had to chop up both presentation. There is a lot there in just thirty seconds: inclusion, legal tender, it’s an obligation of the central bank, wide acceptance, everyone can use it. But he gives away the whole point at the very end there when he says « creates potential value for everyone to use it ». All those things beforehand, legal tender, obligation to central bank and all that, those are recited in service of that end goal: everyone using CBDC, that is the ultimate goal, make no mistake about that. And all those other things are items on the central bankers punch list because they are seen as taking CBDC from zero usage to universal usage. So what I want to do is, I want to go back through that clip one more time and breakdown R-Bo D-Bo’s rapid fire data up there into smaller chunks. Court reporter, can I get this back in little Bo’s sized chunks, that would be wonderful? Awesome. Okay, here we go.
The second aspect that CBDC can help improve financial inclusion is because of its legal tender status.
Okay, legal tender status. What is legal tender and how does it promote inclusion? Let’s take the first question first. What is legal tender? The short answer is, legal tender is the only real money in our system. In the US since 1933, it has been cash, including Federal Reserve notes and coin and you can see that here from the relevant statute. Here is the relevant statute concerning legal tender in the US. It is 31 USC section 5103, you can see it there in the upper right – I’m going to zoom in so we can actually read it. Legal tender: « United States coins and currency, including Federal Reserve notes » and some previous notes, historical notes, notes of issuance, « are legal tender for all that’s public charges », etc. That’s a short list. It’s basically coins and currency, it’s Federal Reserve notes and coins. That’s it. It’s a very short list. Everything else in our system is pseudo money. It is almost real but it has a latent but huge legal catch that comes with it. So let me run through a quick list of pseudo money before I explain what that legal catch is. Credit cards, they are not real money. Checks, not real money. Money in your bank account, wire transfers, Venmos, bank dress, certified checks, Paypal, cashiers checks, money orders, even reserves on account, meaning central bank deposits on account at the FED are not legal tender. None of those things legally is money because as I said, it comes with a catch.
And the catch is this: if you owe money and you try to pay with one of those forms of pseudo money, your lender does not have to accept your payment, which keeps your debt alive. Pseudo money is not real money. It doesn’t become real money until your lender consents to it as a form of repayment. So in other words, pseudo money plus consent equals real money. Real money does not depend on lender consent. Real money means it’s coin of the realm and the realm says real money erases debt whether the credit creditor wants it to or not. Whether or not your lender wants the legal tender to erase the debt, that debt is gone. So if you owe your creditor money and you offer to pay with legal tender, that debt gets erased, it gets extinguished as a matter of law, regardless of whether your lender consents. The debt is just gone legally and so your lender’s legal right to your collateral is gone too and that’s a very important thing. Now there might be a lending contract that says the lender agrees to accept Venmo or credit card or bank money or whatever else. The lender can freely agree to accept the pseudo money but all that means is the lender consented in advance to accept the pseudo money. You still need the consent one way the other, before or after. If you are like me though, you’ve lived your entire life without seeing a lender ever reject any form of payment of a debt. They always take the payment. But I bring this up because legal tender is a hole card that is out there and you need to know about because Bo there just flashed you the ace of spade of legal tender, in direct connection with CBDC. And you need to pay attention to that because if you think that the powers that be would not resort to legal trickery with legal tender, you’re just dead wrong on the facts about that.
Allow me to introduce you to Alfred Owen Crozier, who wrote this book, « US money versus corporation currency ». This guy, Alfred Crozier, is the most ferocious critic of the Federal Reserve ever, who wrote the most scathing indictment of the FED ever one year before the FED was created – that book was written in 1912. You might have seen actually his most famous drawing, you might know Crozier from his most famous drawing, which is this. This is the original, this is the OG vampire’s quiz, the octopus taking over everything. The octopus is taking over the US treasury, the Capitol, the White House, he’s taken over The New York Stock Exchange, the bank, your local bank, the farm, the factory. And his name is National Reserve Association and that’s what it was known as before it became the FED formerly in 1913. But that drawing comes from that book, « US money versus corporation currency ». That book is fantastic. Crozier was a prominent attorney, but if you read the book carefully, you’ll also note he’s really an activist and what I mean by that is, despite the fact that he was a prominent attorney, he kind of used that position and he would write letters to very prominent bankers asking about this or that aspect of the legislation that would become the Federal Reserve Act. And then he would turn around and put the responses from these bankers, which were mostly pretty much idiotic, he put him into the book and then he self published that book. This guy was an accomplished writer. He published eight books. One of them was critically acclaimed. It was a novel called « The Magnet », written just a couple years before. Critically acclaimed book and yet he had to self publish that attack on the National Reserve Association on the FED.
Crozier was a wheeler and dealer. He actually met with president Taft in person. I suspect that was because they were both from Cincinnati. I don’t know that, little is known. I can’t find that much about Crozier but I’m just telling you what I know about him. He met with Taft and he argued against passing the Federal Reserve Act and I can’t say that that’s what stopped it, but you got to say he didn’t fail because Taft isn’t the president who signed the Federal Reserve Act, it was Woodrow Wilson. And another thing Crozier did, he wrote freely about the Rothschilds in this book, talked about how much money they have, how huge and powerful they were. Alfred Owen Crozier was a talented and very dangerous man to the powers that be, which is why you haven’t heard of him. There are a lot of books out there about money that are really good at attacking straw men that suit people’s political bents, their political leanings. Alfred Crozier went for the throat. He went for bankers, he went after bankers and he shows how bankers weaponize money and on page 326 of this book – I’m not gonna read it, it’s in chapter twenty – he shows, he relays an account of bankers using legal tender as a weapon. And I want to tell you about the story because it’s very relevant here.
The gist of the story is this: there was a bunch of western dudes, guys, miners, maybe ranchers, they discovered a mine, like a gold mine or a silver mine – probably a silver mine, I don’t know. But they discovered a mine with some commodities and they wanted to turn it into a major commercial operation and they needed money. And they borrowed that money from wall street and they used the mine as collateral for that loan. And they struggled. They struggled, but they were able to develop it to a point where it was worth a lot and they were able to pay off the loan at the last minute. The problem is, when they came to pay off the loan at the very last minute, with the sheriff standing right there, they tried to pay off with gold certificates and gold certificates back then were 100% backed by gold and they tried to pay it off with bank notes. And the Wall Street attorney is like, « What the fuck is this? You clowns owe us money and this ain’t money, this isn’t legal tender. So shag your dusty asses back to town and get me some gold coins and green backs. Go fetch those by the close of business, you rubes or your mine is going to become mine ». And it did. Wall Street took over that mine from the dudes from the West and the gold. And that’s because the gold certificates and the bank notes, like credit cards and checks and money in your bank account and wire transfers and all the rest, they’re not legal tender. Those are not money because they require the lender’s consent to retire your debt so that you can keep your collateral and that’s what happened to those guys. They lost their mine because they didn’t know what legal tender was. Legal tender does not require the lender’s consent. It erases debt by operation of law.
Legal tender is real money. Remember this. Legal tender is real money, everything else is debt money. It is nothing but a legal claim on money. It is an IOU. Most of the times – almost all the time – it’s issued by private parties. Think of it this way: if you have ten one-hundred dollar bills in your hand and you’re standing outside of the bank, that’s real money, you own that money. But if you walk inside that bank and you open an account with a thousand dollars in cash, now all you’ve got is a claim to real money. You’ve become an unsecured creditor of the bank. If that bank goes bust, you’ve got nothing. That does not happen with real money.
So how does all this background about legal tender relate to CBDC? How would CBDC status as legal tender help it gain a foothold so, as Bo there says, everyone uses it. Well, I want you to think back to inclusion. It’s not about getting a handful of people into the tent, it’s really about forcing everyone else to stay in a tent. Fundamentally, inclusion is a deception. I want you to remember there are only about one million households that are unbanked and that actually want access to electronic banking. The vast majority of unbanked choose that status freely. But inclusion is pitched generally, though, as is helping the less fortunate. It’s pitched as welfare and that covers a much bigger political beachhead orders of magnitude, bigger than the one million homes that don’t have bank accounts and don’t want bank accounts. Notice how casually though they are moved from the unbanked beachhead of about a million to the food stamps beachhead which includes forty two million people. What justifies the leap from unbanked to EBT? Is there any evidence that EBT users, food stamp users are unbanked? Of course not. EBT stands for electronic benefit transfer. The only thing CBDC adds that equation is control over forty million people, but that doesn’t matter to Bo and company. What does matter to them is being able to sweep one hundred million people total roughly on welfare, getting government checks, sweeping those one hundred million people into the CBDC tent, using feel good rubric of inclusion and some yarn about unbanked, which really only applies to a million people.
In other words, when you see Bo and company in policy seminars like the IMF here, you see these people patting themselves on the back. They’re patting themselves on the back, not for helping one million people without bank accounts, but for amassing an army of one hundred million CBDC users. Central bankers are not interested in helping a hundred million people. What they are interested in is using a hundred million people, using a third of the country to get the other two thirds in line until everyone uses CBDC. And they just told you flat out they’re going to put legal tender at the very tip of that mega spear. If you’re a business and you’ve got customers who owe you money and they offer to pay you with their inclusion CBDC or Medicaid CBDC card or EBT CBDC, who knows, they offer to pay you with CBDC, you’re going to take it or you’re not going to get paid. Because the offer to pay with legal tender, as we just saw, erases that whether you accept the form of payment or not. So your choice really boils down to, get on the CBDC inclusion train and get paid or get hosed on the whole debt.
Oh, and by the way, while you’re trying to decide whether to go the CBDC route, you are going to be absolutely bombarded with propaganda about how dirty cash is, how it spreads disease. I already saw that early on in the pandemic. I was driving around on the Indiana and Illinois toll roads and I’d see these billboards saying, « Hey, you know, don’t use that one lane for cash, use one of the six lanes for credit cards because credit cards are clean and cash is dirty ». Now that campaign has already got kicked off. They pulled it pretty quickly, but I remember it early on because I wasn’t going to fly with a mask on, forget that. In any case, the powers that be are going to pull out all the stops to make sure you go broke if you don’t use CBDC. Now, how do I know that’s the plan? The answer to that is that there is a very important tell during Bo’s spiel. He told a huge lie about the law of money and about the Federal Reserve Act in particular. And I’ll bet dollars to donuts – actually, with inflation, I’ll bet donuts to dollars – that that law is about to change. I want to go to that clip. I’m actually going to just replay the last clip about legal tender, but this I’m going let it keep running so we can hear Bo explain why he thinks CBDC is legal tender. Listen to this.
The second aspect that CBDC can help improve financial inclusion is because of its legal tender status, because CBDC is the obligation of central bank and the obligation of central bank is a legal tender in every country. So it is widely accepted.
Obligation of the central bank is legal tender in every country. No, that actually is not true. Obligations of central bank are not legal tender in every country because in the US, where good old Bo here got his law degree from Harvard – which explains why he’s indifferent what the law is – cash and coin, which are legal tender, they’re not obligations of the FED. Coins aren’t liabilities of the FED at all, they’re assets. The FED pays the US Treasury face value for coins. And if you wonder about that, I have a video on that called « What’s behind the FED’s manufactured coin shortage« . And cash, it’s true that cash Federal Reserve notes is listed as a liability of the FED’s balance sheet. But legally, cash is an obligation of the US, not of the FED. How do we know that? Because the Federal Reserve Act says so. Let me just go here. Here we are looking at the Federal Reserve Act, actually the relevant portion from the Federal Reserve Act, which is section 16. You can see up there « Note Issues », meaning Federal Reserve notes. It’s long but it’s really only the first paragraph that’s germane so I want to zoom in on that, and here you go. Here, Note Issues, Federal Reserve notes. Okay, that’s what they’re talking about and you can see here « said notes shall be obligations of the United States and shall be receivable » for all this stuff. Note how they’re obligations of the United States and they’re receivable by Federal Reserve banks, so those are two distinct entities. Bo is flat out wrong that legal tender in the US is an obligation of the central bank, it is not. It is an obligation of the US. He’s just dead wrong about that.
So when Bo tells you obligations of the central bank are legal tender in every country, he’s actually reading – I would bet you again, I bet you donuts to dollars – he’s reading from a draft amendment to the existing Federal Reserve Act, because under present law, under currently configured Federal Reserve Act, Bo’s lying, you just saw that. Federal Reserve notes are obligations of the United States, they’re not obligations of the FED. That probably tells you, I would imagine, where the FED sees the need to change the law in order to get central bank digital currencies in place. Chairman Powell is already on record saying we need to change the law, we need enabling legislation. And Bo was talking the entire time in his presentation about central bank digital currencies in the present tense. But in any case, that they’ll change the law, that is a topic in a battle for another day. For now the plan for CBDC should be clear enough for you to start thinking about what to do about it. I have some thoughts on that myself and on that topic. And so does, it would appear, at least one US senator who’s doing something about it thankfully. I’ll talk about that another time. For now, happy Thanksgiving. Thank you so much for watching. As always, I will see you next time.
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