THE SECRET WAR

THE SECRET WAR

What the "War on Cash"
Is Doing To Your Money

For over half a century, the United States Government has waged a war on cash.

You need to know why this war is underway, how its battles are being intensified and fought, and what WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction)—call them Weapons of Cash Destruction—are being used to separate you forever from your tangible money.

You and your family are already on this battlefield, targets caught in this conflict, whether you know it or not. Wake up and you have the power to win; take a few easy steps that can outsmart and defeat the forces that are trying to conquer you, confiscate your cash, and impose a new worldwide serfdom on humankind.

Government, above all, has been pushing for the fast- arriving cashless society. Government wants every financial transaction you make to be taxable, traceable, hackable, blockable, and therefore usable as a tool to enrich and empower Big Brother. And since governments want to control the transactions of money, a critical step in the process is to get the banks to be their watchdog.

Under the guise of detecting and -prosecuting money laundering crimes, the federal government has imposed rules and regulations on financial institutions that dramatically restrict the ability of the law-abiding American public to freely access the cash they have deposited in banks. The Financial Recordkeeping and Reporting of Currency and Foreign Transactions Act of 1970 (31 U.S.C. 5311 et seq.), commonly referred to as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) has required financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) any cash withdrawal or deposit of $10,000 or more. On the Currency Transaction Report (CRT) filed with the IRS, the financial institution must list the name, street address, and date of birth for all persons involved in the cash transaction.¹

A secondary crime known as “structuring” involves “the breaking down a sum of currency that exceeds the $10,000 CRT reporting level into a series of transactions at less than $10,000.”² By holding bank officers and employees criminally liable to enforce these stringent rules and regulations, the federal government has made the average person feel like a criminal just because the person prefers to transact business in cash, rather than credit cards. Not satisfied with imposing highly restrictive anti-money laundering restrictions on bank transacted cash dealings, the federal government is pushing to introduce completely digital money in the form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The goal of CBDCs is to make the U.S. dollar disappear as a paper and coin currency, replaced by dollars that exist only in cyberspace, as non-tangible electronic notations that could disappear in the blink of an eye.

Since 1992, federal regulations require banks to file ‘suspicious activity reports’ or SARs on their customers, writes Kevin Dowd, a professor of finance and economics at Durham University in the United Kingdom and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. “Banks have minimum SAR quotas that they need to submit to the government: if they don’t file enough, they can be fined and their executives and directors can be jailed for non-compliance. There is no penalty if it turns out not to be—and hence no disincentive to file false reports—and banks are not even allowed to inform suspects that they are under investigation.”³

Professor Dowd pointed out that the Justice Department has instructed banks that filing SARs is not enough. The Justice Department wants bank employees to inform the police whenever banks suspect a customer is seeking to make a “suspicious transaction.” Dowd cites this following Department of Justice warning:

(W)e encourage those institutions to consider whether to take more action: specifically, to alert law enforcement authorities about the problem, who may be able to seize the funds, initiate an investigation, or take other pro-active steps.⁴

Dowd stressed that “suspicious activity” can be “anything at all, but it definitely includes transactions that withdraw or attempt to withdraw $5,000 from your bank account.” He notes that “attempting to withdraw a few thousand dollars to, say, buy a second-hand car or meet a family emergency can get you placed under suspicion. Then it can get much worse. Once you have been flagged up as having made or attempted to make a suspicious transaction, it is then easy enough for the police to get you if they are minded to. They can turn up at your door with a K-9 unit that will inevitably find trace of illegal substances on your cash, because all cash has such traces. Then they can identify you as a suspected drug dealer, which gives them the authority to seize your cash, your car and even your house. Under existing asset forfeiture statutes, the police can seize the property allegedly involved: there is no presumption of innocence, and assets can be seized without probable cause, warrants, charge or trial, and police seizure can be very difficult to contest in court afterwards—especially if you are of modest means or when you can’t afford a good lawyer because the government has just seized most of your wealth.”⁵

Dowd continued detailing the nightmare that innocently withdrawing as little as $5,000 in cash can cause you even if your purpose for using the cash is entirely lawful:

You can be arrested too. But even if you merely become the subject of an SAR—no concrete facts or irrefutable evidence needed—that your suspected suspicious activity is terror-related you can be placed on the government’s terror watchlist, which authorizes secret government spying on you. The same applies to anyone who is suspected of being associated with someone who is suspected of terrorist-related activity.⁶

If these problems were not enough, just try depositing cash into someone else’s bank account. Some banks will not allow you to deposit cash into someone else’s account if you are not a customer of that bank. Typically, banks require you to bring to the bank with you the person who owns the bank account, especially if the amount you intend to deposit in cash to that person’s account is sizeable.⁷

ALREADY ADDICTED TO PLA$TIC MONEY

Conditioning the American public to use credit cards rather than cash for transactions traces back to the first years after World War II, back to when Harry Truman was president. The Diners Club Card issued in 1950 in New York City is generally considered to be the first credit card. Issued initially in cardboard form, the Diners Club Card grew to 10,000 users, 28 restaurants, and two hotels participating in the first year. Not a traditional credit card, the Diners Club Card had to be paid off every month.⁸ In 2024, an estimated 191 million people in the United States have at least one credit card, a significant increase from the 2020 figures.⁹ A Forbes Advisor survey from 2023, “shows that just 9 percent of Americans primarily use cash to pay for purchases. Debit cards and credit cards are the primary method used, with 54 percent of consumers using a physical or virtual debit card and 36 percent of consumers using a physical or virtual credit card.”¹⁰

In the three-month period from October to December 2023, total credit card debt surged to $1.13 trillion, marking the highest level on record, with the pain compounded by confiscatory double-digit interest rates that credit card companies charge to “revolve” the debt. With credit cards increasingly maxed out, just paying the minimum monthly amount due dooms many credit card debtors to a steadily mounting balance that rapidly becomes unpayable.¹¹

Lured by the ease of using plastic rather than having to pay in cash, the United States is already going “cashless,” with consumers buying everything from automobiles to hamburgers via bank loans or credit cards. Bank debit cards that withdraw directly from bank accounts conveniently make the use of cash an electronic event, with the added advantage of not being questioned by a bank employee as to why the depositor needs the cash withdrawn. According to a Pew Research Center study, in less than a decade, the share of Americans who go “cashless” in a typical week has increased by double digits. “Today, roughly four-in-ten Americans (41 percent) say none of their purchases in a typical week are paid for using cash, up from 29 percent in 2018 and 24 percent in 2015,” according to Michelle Faverio, a research analyst at the Pew Research Center. ¹² The average American now carries less than $50.00 in cash. A Travis Credit Union poll of over 2,000 Americans revealed that just 16 percent of respondents say they always carry cash, while 37 percent say they only “sometimes keep paper money in their wallets.”¹³ In an age when you can pay for purchases by tapping an electronic transaction terminal with your credit card or cellphone, six in ten Americans say they want to stop using paper money altogether.

When a “cashless” government turns authoritarian, it can not only monitor and tax everything you buy, but also ban purchases—ranging from foods it deems unhealthy to guns it considers dangerous. Without the approval of Big Brother, you can be denied the ability to buy what you want and need. Purchasing or repairing once-legal firearms, for example, can instantly be made impossible by preventing your credit card from being able to pay for it.

The authoritarian “cashless society” forces people to depend on credit cards, and on renting things instead of owning them. It deems cash as something only outlaws use. By digitizing money, government gains enormous power to scrutinize and control what people are permitted to buy by regulating and intimidating banks and credit card companies. With all money digitized, a government bent on universal surveillance has enormous powers to monitor every transaction that occurs in the United States in ways that circumvent and destroy our Constitutional rights.

How far can a power-hungry government go by using “cashlessness” to control its citizens? It can become more totalitarian than the dictatorships imagined by dystopian novelists George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This ominous power is already beginning to be enforced in countries around the globe.

ENTER THE DRAGON

"The cashless economy is racing ahead in China," writes journalist Donna Lu, “and its model could be the future for the rest of. the world. The system has been described as dystopian in Western media.”¹⁴

Since 2014, the People’s Republic of China has been developing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) issued by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) valued the same as the Chinese Renminbi (RMB and e-RMB), the Chinese currency used for domestic currencies within Mainland China, and a separate digital currency for the Chinese Yuan (CYN and e-CYN), the Chinese currency used for international transactions outside the mainland. ¹⁵ By 2020, China had launched an active CBDC pilot program in four of its cities and is expanding to twenty-three cities and involve 100 million people. The Chinese CBDC will come with a digital currency “wallet” that will link to a Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) to replace cash in commercial transactions. China’s CBDC will be deliverable via a cellphone app that will be designed to facilitate real- time monetary transactions at retail locations throughout the mainland.¹⁶

Communist China’s totalitarian government is replacing paper money with no “money” at all, with a “cashless society.” And advanced nations around the world, from Sweden to the United Kingdom and the United States, are rushing to do likewise. In fact, 130 countries across the world representing 98% of the global economy are in some stage of creating their own form of central bank digital currency. This global “War on Cash,” now being fought on many battlefields with a variety of weapons, will decide the future of human freedom.

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit,” said banker J.P. Morgan in 1912. Gold needs nothing else to give it value, but paper money needs backing—usually from a government that makes it “legal tender” and, by printing excessive amounts, can shrink or destroy this fiat currency’s uncertain worth.

The core idea of a CBDC is that by digitizing the dollar, every American would be allowed to create "FedAccount," described as "digital-dollar deposit accounts, provided free of charge by the Federal Reserve to every American household and business." Along with outlawing the use of cash, the Federal Reserve's ultimate "end-state" becomes a financial world in which "central bank accounts fully replace—rather than compete with—private bank deposits.” The Federal Reserve’s “entire balance sheet” would be "redesigned to operate as what it calls the 'People's Ledger." ¹⁷

Ernst Wolff, a German journalist who specializes in world finance, hedge funds, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). describes the CBDC endgame as follows:

Cash is out. Banks as we know them are out. All money is digital and transparent. Central banks generate digital money at will, as much as they want. Every citizen has one and only one bank account, which is an account with a central bank. Money is programmable, and our spending is not free-form, i.e., certain chunks of our money can be assigned for specific purposes, or we can only spend it in certain places, or we may be allowed to only buy certain types of food, etc. etc. Taxation's easy. Censorship is easy. Fining people for bad behavior is easy. The citizenry is entirely transparent and monitored, and the algorithm is a blackbox.¹⁸

Wolff’s view is that this brave, new “Digital Financial Complex” would operate much like the “Military Industrial Complex.” But instead of creating wars to generate billions of dollars as a pay-day to the arms manufacturing industries and their pals in Congress and the Pentagon, the Digital Financial Complex is envisioned to have a “progressive” agenda in which our funds could be “redistributed” to those less fortunate according to the neo-Marxist “social justice” ideological agenda. With citizens having no choice but to bank at the Federal Reserve, the central bank would eliminate all need to pay interest to depositors. Instead, “negative interest rates,” i.e. Federal Reserve charges, could be withdrawn from individual and corporate FedAccounts, thereby reducing the government’s cost of borrowing on nearly unlimited deficit spending.

But woe unto those who are overheard speaking ill of the government, try to search forbidden topics on the Internet, dare to voice opinions that challenge the truthfulness of government narratives, smoke, drink, or get traffic tickets. When Chinese journalist Liu Hu tried to book a flight, CBS reported, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of “untrustworthy people.” When ordered by a court to apologize for recent posts on social media, Liu did so—only to be told by the communist judge that his apology was “insincere.”¹⁹

“I can’t buy property,” Liu says. “My child can’t go to a private school. You feel controlled by the list all the time.”²⁰ Bad social credit could eliminate your possibility of starting a business, staying in luxury hotels, and buying or renting property. The Associated Press reported that would-be air travelers were blocked from buying tickets 17.5 million times in 2018 for “social credit offenses.” Others were barred from buying train tickets 5.5 million times, according to China’s National Public Credit Information Center, while 128 people were blocked from leaving China due to unpaid taxes.²¹ Worse, bad social credit could deny you health care from government-licensed doctors or hospitals. This political power to extend or deny you credit is literally the power of life or death because in a “cashless” society the only thing you have is credit.

Today in China, computer algorithms will track citizens online to see if they are worthy of social credit. The goal of this, according to Martin Chorzempa at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, “is algorithmic governance” that can brand you an outlaw that other citizens risk their own safety by helping.²² “With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future,” wrote Paul Mozur in the New York Times. “Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition. and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.”²³ One version of China’s system will automatically notify people via their smartphones if they are within five hundred yards of a “deadbeat” with bad credit who is to be shunned or “debt shamed.”²⁴ This, of course, also reminds citizens that a brutal Santa Claus government in Beijing is always watching and can reward or punish them.

The world’s governments are rushing to banish cash, to create their own unnatural shortage of freedom by making legal only those transactions that can be tracked. Economic privacy will vanish in a “cashless society” because every purchase is carried out via a cell phone or a computer—and is monitored by the government who will know what you buy, when you eat, and where you are at every moment of purchase ... and will judge you accordingly.

BIG TECH MERGES WITH BIG BROTHER

China has created near-total surveillance of citizens by combining government data with private corporate data by using artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, the New York Times reported its visual investigations team and reporters in Asia analyzed more than a hundred thousand government bidding documents that called for companies to bid on contracts to provide surveillance technology. The investigation found that “Chinese police analyze human behaviors to ensure facial recognition cameras capture as much activity as possible.” ²⁵ Analysts estimate that more than half the world’s one billion surveillance cameras are in China analyzing facial recognition data at commonplace locations where people go, eating, traveling, shopping, and enjoying entertainment. “Authorities are using phone trackers to link people’s digital lives to their physical movements,” the newspaper noted. “DNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are being collected indiscriminately from people with no connection to crime. The Chinese government wants to collect all these data points to build comprehensible profiles for citizens—which are accessible throughout the government.”²⁶

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) requires all news services on the Internet to be managed by CCP-sanctioned editorial staff. All blogs, websites, forums, search engines, instant messaging apps, and all other platforms that select or edit news and information are censored by editorial staff approved by national or local government internet and information offices.²⁷ The CCP internet censorship is everywhere. China forces citizens to download apps that allow the government to monitor their cell phone photos and videos. Chinese predictive software aggregates data about people without their knowledge, to flag and follow people the government considers threatening.²⁸ The Chinese Integrated Joint Operation Platform (IJOP) is one of the main systems the Chinese government uses for mass surveillance. A mobile app allows police and other officials to communicate data about people targeted as potentially threatening to the IJOP. Analysis of the IJOP app reveals those Chinese authorities “are collecting massive amounts of personal information—from the color of a person’s car to their height down to the precise centimeter—and feeding it into the IJOP central system, linking that data to the person’s national identification card number.”²⁹

But mass surveillance is not limited to China. “With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter (now “X”), Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases— whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time,” warn surveillance watchdogs John W. and Nisha Whitehead.³⁰

If you think the United States would never implement a social credit score ranking, you’re wrong. On January 31, 2023, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) proposed an ongoing program of “suitability and fitness” vetting to determine the level of “character and contact” required to work as an employee or as a contractor for a federal agency.³¹

On August 3, 2021, opinion contributor Kristin Tate reported in The Hill that “a soft social credit system” could be in place in the United States by the end of the decade. Tate noted that the U.S. credit score system would emulate China’s system, acting as “a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a ‘score’ that can restrict the ability of individuals to take actions—such as purchasing plane tickets, acquiring property or taking loans—because of behaviors.” Tate commented that the potential scope of the soft social credit system under construction is enormous. “The same companies that can track your activities and give you corporate rewards for compliant behavior could utilize their powers to block transactions, add surcharges or restrict your use of products,” she wrote. “At what point does free speech—be it against biological males playing in girls’ sports, questioning vaccine side effects, or advocating for gun rights—make someone a target in this new system? When does your debit card get canceled over old tweets, your home loan denied for homeschooling your kids, or your eBay account invalidated because a friend flagged you for posting a Gadsden flag?” Tate expressed concern that the creation of a “digital dollar” might “put an exclamation point” on a new social cred score, when governments working in conjunction with major tech companies could strip citizens not convicted of a crime with their ability to transact any business.³²

CBDC allows the government to monitor every purchase you make. Kevin Freeman, the host of Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman on Blaze TV, asks an important question. “What if you want to buy gas for your car? CBDC will know how many gallons you’ve bought this month or how many miles you’ve driven and decide whether or not you can.”³³ Freeman stresses that the federal government, which owns more than 650,000 vehicles and purchases about 50,000 vehicles annually, has already decided they want to end the purchase of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 in a move to lower carbon dioxide emissions and promote electric cars.³⁴

The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has endorsed the creation of “15-minute cities” as a central feature of its “sustainable cities” project. A 25-minute video on the WEF website features Carlo Ratti, the Director of Sensible City Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chairing a panel discussion touting 15-minute cities as the future. The website hypes the concept: “A new model for developing mixed-use, walkable communities, known as the 15-minute city, is gathering momentum in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.”³⁵ Ratti explains that a 15-minute city is one in which all the necessary services can be reached within a 15-minute walk or bicycle ride. Touting the need to reduce the use of hydrocarbon fuels, Ratti and his colleagues celebrate the idea that by confining citizens to live within the confines of a 15-minute city, the city conforms with the “sustainability” goals the United Nations defines in its Agenda 2030.³⁶ The threat to our freedoms is obvious when we combine the social credit scoring with 15-minute confines. If you live within a 15-minute city, the government can cut your access to the Internet (and hence to your digital currency) if you stray beyond the boundaries of your 15-minute prison.

The consequences are even more severe for those whose social credit scores are so low that government AI- generated thought management dictates you are cut off from the Internet and forced to live within your 15-minute city without access to your digital cash. In the dystopian future the World Economic Forum is busy creating, you will have access to your digital cash only if your thoughts and actions conform to your government controllers’ whims and [need to finish sentence]

And with a US adopted CBDC, privacy would be non- existent since the government would have a data mine displaying everything and everywhere you’ve spent your money. Their ability to surveil and control would be like nothing we’ve ever seen. The vast political divide that now envelops our country only works to compound the consequences. Imagine a government that at any instance can access an individual’s personal tracking spreadsheet that categorizes everything we buy and where we travel- and with the use of artificial intelligence can spontaneously build a profile that easily determines our interests and hobbies, political donations, and religious affiliations.

If only gold is money, and paper currency is at best only quasi-money in which you can at least make private purchases, then the credit card world that is our “cashless” future is no money at all. You cannot count on paper currency, paper investments, or paper promises of a government-guaranteed retirement, and you definitely cannot trust plastic credit, which the government can erase instantly.

Welcome to the dawning new dark age of “cashless” economics, as devised by China. Ironically, China in the 7th Century A.D. invented paper money, later forcing residents to exchange their silver and gold coins for this paper money with an expiration date, much like our paper money today whose value is constantly devalued by deliberate government-created inflation and overprinting.

Your ability to live in the dawning economy may depend entirely on the whim of those who monitor your life and politics to determine how much credit they will permit you to have. Your future freedom may depend on having the courage to take important precautions now, as you will see.

Humankind will eventually rediscover the Framers’ constitutional money. We will return to the 5,000-year tradition of precious metal that needs no government or computer to give it value. You have a far better alternative—real cash, as the Framers of America’s Constitution specified: cash that was precious metal, gold and silver. Only Mother Nature produces this kind of “cash,” and in very small quantities, so politicians cannot debase it. Our Framers wanted a future in which government remained small, and individual Americans would forever be independent and free to grow as big as they are able.

THE GOVERNMENT EXPANDS THEIR “LICENSE TO STEAL” YOUR CASH

On July 19, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new Department of Justice policy restarting an asset forfeiture program, renamed as “adoptive forfeiture,” that greatly expanded Federal-State-Local cooperation in forfeiting assets. According to a Washington Post report, in the 12 months before Attorney General Eric Holder shut down the program in 2015, state and local authorities seized $65 million worth of property from those suspected of committing a crime (even if they’re never charged or convicted of one) that they shared with federal agencies.³⁷ The “adoptive forfeiture” program turns out to be a small part of the federal government’s larger civil asset forfeiture program. According to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil-liberties law firm, in 2008, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Treasury netted $1.5 billion in combined asset forfeiture seizures, a figure that had tripled by 2014 to $4.5 billion.³⁸ In 2014, Martin Armstrong’s economics blog pointed out that according to the FBI, the total goods stolen by criminals in burglary offenses resulted in an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. Armstrong came to the inevitable conclusion: “This means police are now taking more assets than the criminals.”³⁹

Republican U.S. Congressman Tim Walberg from Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District noted one particularly egregious case. In October 2020, police officers raided Cristal Starling’s New York apartment when they suspected her then-boyfriend was dealing drugs. While Ms. Starling was not suspected or charged with any wrongdoing, police seized $8,040 of her “hard-earned cash.” Because law enforcement seized Ms. Starling’s money under a process called “civil forfeiture,” they were not under any obligation to return Ms. Sterling’s money to her. Representative Walberg pointed out that instead of returning her money, New York police transferred Ms. Sterling’s $8,040 to the Drug Administration Agency, where the money remained. Meanwhile, Walberg reported, Ms. Sterling’s boyfriend was acquitted after a jury trial.⁴⁰

In 2023, Fox News reported the Department of Justice paid more than $6 billion to private corporations to manage its asset forfeiture investigations, raising alarm from Dan Alban, the head of the Institute for Justice’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture,” that police are “treating ordinary Americans like ATMs’ and seizing their cash.”⁴¹ In an article published by the conservative Mises Institute, journalist James Bovard, a strong defender of individual freedoms, noted that between 2001 and 2014, police seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand motorists on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases.⁴²

Bovard elaborated:

Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police told me in a 1996 interview. “We have so many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law.” The Washington Post reported that police set up “rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling,” and “looked for suspected “indicators’” of criminal activity, which can include things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, or abundant energy drinks.”⁴³

The government even today can seize money out of your checking account if you have unpaid taxes, unpaid student loans, or you are behind on your child support payments. We are rushing into a future where merely possessing cash, tangible money, could soon be a crime.

MODERN MONETARY THEORY: A GOVERNMENT LICENSE TO PRINT MONEY

More subtle than outright government confiscation, printing fiat money is a ticking time bomb tax that intentionally devalues the purchasing power of your money. That tax is the inflation deliberately created by the Federal Reserve by printing money in excess of our nation’s productivity. This debases the money you earn and save.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has its roots in Keynesian economics. As noted, Keynesian economists emphasize fiscal policy as the government’s main instrument influencing economic growth. Then, in 1971, President Richard Nixon made the U.S. dollar into a fiat currency no longer tied to gold. Under the dominant influence of post-Keynesian economists in the United States after World War II and Nixon’s decision to back the dollar only by the guarantee of the U.S. government, the birth of MMT was inevitable. The core concept of MMT is that a sovereign state issuing its currency can always “create” more fiat to pay whatever obligations the sovereign state government has.

Under MMT, a sovereign government no longer needs to be worried about budget deficits. A sovereign nation like the United States, operating under fiat currency, can create the money required to pay for whatever the government considers worth funding. MMT allows the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury to support the Green New Deal’s ambitious welfare programs, including government-paid health care, guaranteed government employment, and guaranteed minimal annual incomes. Under MMT, no limits remain in fiscal policy to limit government spending. The government does not have to balance expenditures with tax revenues any longer. Even if spending exceeds tax revenues by billions or trillions of dollars, the U.S. government does not need to worry. By operating under MMT, the U.S. can simply print more money to pay any government debts, regardless of the magnitude of the debt.

According to the Treasury Department’s financial statements as of December 29, 2023, the U.S. national debt hit over $34 trillion for the first time ever. Even more rightening, the rate at which the national debt increases has accelerated at an exponential rate. Just consider this summary in January 2024, reflecting that the U.S. debt increased by ...

$1 trillion in the past 3 months;

$2 trillion in the past 6 months;

$4 trillion in the past 2 years;

$11 trillion in the past 4 years.⁴⁴

Even more astounding, in the past twenty years, the national debt has increased nearly fivefold, going from $7.4 trillion in 2004 to exceeding $34 trillion in 2024.⁴⁵ Yearly interest payments on the national debt now exceed $1 trillion, and are about to go exponential. The federal government knows this massive amount of debt accelerating at a geometric rate is not long sustainable. Sooner or later, institutional portfolio managers, pension fund advisors, even foreign governments will realize the Treasury debt issued to pay over a trillion dollars a year on skyrocketing debt makes holding U.S. Treasury bonds risky. If maturing Treasury bonds are paid off simply by the Treasury printing more money, we are well on the road to hyperinflation. The amount at which our national debt is increasing now exceeds the amount in which the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing. Thus, in the third quarter 2023, when the U.S. GDP grew at 4.9 percent (rising some $547 billion), the U.S. budget deficit increased by $622 billion. In 2023, the national debt grew by $2.581 trillion. This translates into realizing that every dollar in GDP growth cost $1.69 in new debt. and every new job created costs future generations of Americans an estimated $957,100.48.

A January 2023 survey by Primerica showed nearly three- quarters, or 72 percent, of middle-class families say their earnings are falling behind the cost of living, up from 68 percent a year earlier. Similarly, 74 percent of responding households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 said they were unable to save for their future, up from 66 percent in 2022.⁴⁶

Truthfully, the U.S. Treasury is running a dollar Ponzi scheme in which unimaginably huge amounts of fiat currency must be printed just to keep the economy from collapsing. Eventually, all Ponzi schemes die of their own weight under which the cost of stealing from future generations collapses so dramatically that the ever- increasing cost of the basics of living—food, energy, and housing—prices the middle class out of existence.

Rather than confiscate our money outright, the Federal Reserve operating under this progressive agenda of Modern Monetary Theory confiscates the value of our money. The value of $1.00 in 2000 is equal in purchasing power to about $1.79 in 2024, an increase of $0.79 over 24 years.⁴⁷ The U.S. dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.46 percent per year between 2000 and 2024, but with the rapid rise of interest rates to combat inflation in 2023, the deteriorating value of the dollar is also accelerating. With the federal government printing money with abandon under the progressive Modern Monetary Theory, you can expect that the purchasing power of your dollar holdings will continue to vanish.

As the Mises Institute points out, “real disposable income of Americans will be demolished with a combination of higher taxes and a weaker real value of their wages and deposit savings.” Even worse, the Mises Institute stresses that the federal government’s “unsustainable level of fiscal irresponsibility will also lead to more massive money printing.”⁴⁸

What does the Mises Institute recommend as a solution to this government printing press irresponsibility? “Your U.S. dollars will be worth less, real wages will continue to show poor growth, and after tax, disposable income will decline,” the Mises Institute projects. “The only way to protect yourself is to find alternative reserves of value.” The Mises Institute notes that in the crisis of uncontrollable federal deficits, holding tangible value in the form of gold “will offset the monetary destruction that is about to accelerate.⁴⁹

Most investors now painfully understand that the Fed has been punishing nearly every traditional safe haven for savers—who are now losing value by having a savings account and keeping their money in inflating dollars.

Most now recognize that Americans are being systematically herded, like sheep, into higher-risk investments full of moral hazard—especially the stock market and wildly volatile cryptocurrencies.

Perhaps everything is going through Alice’s looking glass and being reversed. We used to save, but saving is now by design a path to financial punishment. The new game appears to be to get us away from cash and into the equivalent of casino chips. Credit cards are casino chips that trick us into more spending and debt.

And we, whose ancestors knew the value of saving, are now expected via student loans and other offerings, to spend our lives not accumulating cash, but accumulating credit, which we convert into debt. Your Social Security number is now your ear tag in this herd of sheep. Welcome to the new “cashless” feudalism that Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek warned was at the end of our road to serfdom.

You still can restore your own gold standard by investing in gold, recognized as global money for thousands of years. We need to understand that the Secret War on Cash is actually a war against all of us … against our prosperity, freedom, and independence.

A PERFECT MATCH: MODERN MONETARY THEORY AND PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has self- identified as a “democrat socialist.” The Democrat Socialists of America’s website brags that “Bronx Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, best known as AOC, is DSA’s foremost socialist superstar.”⁵⁰ The DSA website continued: “Today—with over 12 million Twitter followers, her picture on the December cover of Vanity Fair, and mass cultural appeal to the teens and the not-yet political—she continues to use her unasked- for celebrity to build support for a democrat socialist agenda.”⁵¹

Previous generations of progressives were “tax and spend” socialists who sought to redistribute wealth by “tax the rich” strategies to fund their ever-expanding welfare programs. But with the advent of MMT, the battle cry shifted to “print and spend.” On Feb. 7, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (Democrat-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (Democrat- MA) introduced into the House and Senate a resolution calling for a Green New Deal, a concept that combined the New Deal initiatives of President Franklin Roosevelt designed to lift the nation from the Great Depression of the 1930s with the political left’s ideological determination to shift the nation’s energy policy from a reliance on hydro- carbon fuels to “renewable energy” provided by wind and solar power.

Little reported by the mainstream media, the Green New Deal also included a laundry list of social justice initiatives not related to climate policy.52 Reporting on the resolution introduced into Congress by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey, the Washington Post listed the following included provisions:

• Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;

• Providing all people of the United States with (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security, and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature;

• Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States;

An overview of the Green New Deal released by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s office summarized that the plan seeks a “massive transformation of our society” that could “rid the country of fossil fuels,” and “create millions of family supporting-wage (i.e., union) jobs.” Proponents touted the Green New Deal as a FDR-like broad economic agenda that would create an environmentally sound country with benefits for everyone, even for those who do not want to work.⁵³ Modern Monetary Theory became the Democrat Socialist dream.

Under MMT, a government can never go bankrupt, can print as much money as it wants, creating prosperity and social justice for all people oppressed by the capitalist economic system. Thus, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez believes government can pay for never-ending government programs to provide healthcare, college education, and a minimum guaranteed income for all—because government can print all the money needed to pay for hundreds of trillions of dollars in such social programs. Deficits, according to MMT, are a blessing, not a curse.

Yet progressives never quit finding a reason to spend money we don’t have. In December 2023, the California legislature, facing a $68 billion budget deficit, still planned on spending billions of dollars more on slavery reparations.⁵⁴ Estimates for a national slavery reparations bill top $14 trillion. Green climate change doomsayers propose climate reparations that would cost $171 trillion from the “rich” European and American economies, but not from two of the world’s heaviest users of oil and coal, namely, India and China.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, heavy losses are causing wind and solar corporations to pull out of wind- and solar-farm projects. Ørsted, a Danish company that is one of the world's largest wind-farm developers, saw its stock lose more than $10 billion, or a third of its market value, after government subsidies dried up.⁵⁶

In Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s socialism, all are equal but, as George Orwell said, some are more equal than others. Note that she advocates redistributing other people’s wealth, but she never proposes redistributing government power back to the people that government was supposed to serve. Instead, she wants all power and wealth transferred to the government, led by people like her. We know where this path leads: to an impoverished, dictatorial society with an all-powerful ruling class whose citizens serfs are moneyless and in ever-deepening debt.

Nancy Pelosi kept standby pilots and an Air Force corporate jet at her beck and call, stuffed with the most expensive caviar, wines, and other costly delicacies at taxpayer expense. Paul Pelosi, Nancy’s husband and the owner of a San Francisco investment and consulting firm, made over $1.25 million on the stock options of computer chip company Nvidia that he bought in November 2023. Under federal law, members of Congress are allowed to use inside information to place stock bets, something that would be a crime for an ordinary citizen to do. Though when pressed by Fox News, Pelosi insisted her husband never made stock purchases based on information she had given him.⁵⁷

CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL CURRENCIES: THE ULTIMATE SURVEILLANCE STATE TECHNOLOGY

If you are not concerned that some nameless, unelected government bureaucrat may disappear with all your money on a political whim (or equally questionable premise), the CBDC is just right for you.

But if you share the distrust our Founding Fathers had for over-reaching authoritative government officials, then the determination of central banks worldwide to digitize money should ring every alarm bell in your being.

Claudio Grass, a precious metals adviser in Hünenberg See, Switzerland associated with the economically conservative Mises Institute, has warned about the advent of central bank digital currency (CBDC) for years. On May 12, 2021, Grass printed on his blog an article entitled “A fork in the road: Digital Fiat vs. Decentralized Money.” He noted that central banks have been presenting their CBDC projects as “convenient and secure alternatives, efficient and solid solutions and they promise they will make life easier for businesses, banks, and ordinary citizens.”⁵⁸ He argued that while this promotional language makes CBDCs sound “fantastic,” the only problem is that none of the hype is true.

Grass warned that CBDCs are nothing more than digitized versions of each country’s existing fiat currency. “There’s nothing innovative about them [CBDC],” Grass wrote. “They are just digital representations of the same centrally controlled, freely manipulated, and extremely vulnerable and unsustainable state currencies we already have.”⁵⁹ He warned that the real goal of CBDCs was to grant unelected bureaucrats from the government central bank “more control and further centralization” to the detriment of “the forces that seek [to] protect and preserve liberty, individual self-determination, and a truly free market.”⁶⁰

In an article entitled “Digital Currency: The Fed Moves Toward Monetary Totalitarianism,” published in 2022 on the Mises Institute website, economist André Marques warns of the coming threat to our liberty. Marques explained:

The Federal Reserve is sowing the seeds for its central bank digital currency (CBDC). It may seem that the purpose of a CBDC is to facilitate transactions and enhance economic activity, but CBDCs are mainly about government control over individuals. If a CBDC were implemented, the central bank would have access to all transactions in addition to being capable of freezing accounts. It may seem dystopian— something that only totalitarian governments would do—but there have been cases of asset freezing in Canada and Brazil. Moreover, a CBDC would give the government the power to determine how much a person can spend, establish expiration dates for deposits, and even penalize people who saved money. The war on cash is also a reason why governments want to implement CBDCs. The end of cash would mean less privacy for individuals and would allow central banks to maintain a monetary policy of negative interest rates with greater ease (since individuals would be unable to withdraw money from commercial banks to avoid losses).⁶¹

In 2022, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of hundreds of truckers who paralyzed Ottawa with a convoy that ended up clogging the capital city in a protest over Covid-19 vaccine mandates.⁶² In a world where cash is outlawed and all currency is digital property of the central bank, only those complying with official government narratives and mandates are secure in having control of their money. Those punished by a government emergency proclamation could easily find their CBDC bank accounts stripped of funds.

The Cato Institute, a strong defender of individual freedoms and an advocate of free market competition, warns that a CBDC “could spell doom for what little financial privacy protections remain.”⁶³ The Cato Institute stresses that the threat to financial privacy is compounded by the threat to freedom itself. The Cato Institute warns:

Governments have long recognized that freezing someone’s financial resources is one of the most effective ways to lock them out of society. However, a CBDC could make the process easier and faster for governments by establishing a direct line between citizens and the government itself.64

THE DANGERS OF "REAL ID" DRIVER'S LICENSES

In a cashless society, establishing reliable digital identification systems have become a goal shared by the federal government and corporate America. Historically, the U.S. has no central agency in charge of creating a national identification system. A patchwork national ID system has involved identification records kept by various governmental entities, including state government vital records bureaus for birth, death, and marriage records; state government departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) for driver’s licenses; the Social Security Administration for employment and tax identification; and the State Department for passports.

In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken on the development of the REAL ID driver’s licenses. On December 5, 2022, the DHS extended the date for the enforcement of the REAL ID from May 3, 2023, to May 7, 2025.⁶⁸ The DHS’s lead in developing the REAL ID elevates the state DMVs to be in charge of applying the advanced computer-enhanced facial recognition and other technologies needed to create twenty-first-century identification systems. The federal government’s goal remains to establish a government-issued identification agency transforming identification recognition from an information-based system to a measured biometrics system.

Soon, in America, the ability to remain anonymous in one’s personal and economic life will remain impossible as long as a person remains tied to today’s technological grid. As Americans, we risk losing the privacy protections previous generations have relied upon to ensure a “Bill of Rights” protection against government intrusion. With the power of today’s cellphone, Internet, and REAL ID technologies, the government could require as a condition of opening a CBDC bank account that an individual to go beyond facial recognition technology and cellphone GPS tracking to implant a GPS chip allowing the government to track every move a person makes.

If all your money is in a digital bank account and police pull you over to the side of the highway, your “real ID” state auto license can link in government databases to your digital cash in bank accounts or your available balances in your credit cards. What is to stop rogue governments from finding excuses to debit money directly out of your digital wallet or to charge your credit cards fines, with or without your knowledge?

Combining digital identification technology with 24/7 GPS tracking, governments in a cashless society will be empowered to track all digital currency transactions to create a permanent record of who we are, where we are, with whom we communicate, and what money we spend. Adding in social credit scoring, the government can cut off access to digital currency by a few computer key strokes if the person’s beliefs are perceived by government to be threatening. In a world dominated by critical race theory, “white supremacists” are already being judged as insurrectionists simply because they are white.

BRICS
THE RISE OF BRICS NATIONS

November 15, 2019, Russia suggested that the BRICS Business Council recommend that the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), whose stated mission of banding together is to establish deeper trade relationships and cooperate on economic expansion, should create a new BRICS “cryptocurrency” that would act as a BRICS central bank digital currency.⁶⁹ The five BRICS nations represent 42 percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of the world’s GDP. With Russia and China in leading positions within the BRICS nations, the discussion of creating a BRICS central bank digital currency reflects a goal Russia and China share in forming a Eurasian alliance capable of overtaking the U.S. dollar as the new global reserve currency.⁷⁰ In its 2023 meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, the BRICS block of developing nations agreed to admit Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates.⁷¹ In this first expansion in 13 years, the BRICS nations left the door open to future enlargement as dozens more countries expressed interest in joining the rapidly emerging economic bloc.⁷² By admitting Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE, the BRICS nations gained a strong hold on global oil production with its members’ share of global oil production at over forty- three percent. By adding Iran, a new axis of Russia, China, and Iran form a new “axis of evil” opposing U.S. power in the Middle East.

In a February 2024 interview with Vladamir Putin, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asks if the US dollar is going away as the world’s reserve currency. Putin responded by saying the US dollar is the cornerstone of its power and using it as a tool in foreign policy was a grave mistake, as many countries are downsizing their dollar reserves to protect themselves from restrictions on transactions and freezing of assets. Putin proceeded to say that the vast majority of Russian foreign trade used to be conducted in US dollars while transactions in the Chinese Yuan accounted for only 3%. Now, however, in the Yuan. Putin concluded by saying that now even oil producing nations are transacting in the Yuan and that the US is killing the value of what the dollar means with its own hands. He asks the question whether anyone in the US realizes this.

Since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, the U.S. dollar has been the world’s reserve currency, the bedrock of international trade in the post- World War II economic system. The dollar’s dominance in international trade has slipped from 70 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2023.⁷³

On Saturday, January 28, 2024, the Kremlin confirmed that Russia is building a new payment system for international trade that does not incorporate the U.S. dollar. Russia’s goal is to build a new payment mechanism to settle cross- border transactions with BRICS and other developing countries bypassing the dollar.⁷⁴ After the U.S. placed economic sanctions on Russia in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov characterized the world order dominated by the dollar as “unreliable, false, and dangerous.” The U.S. currently controls SWIFT, the international system for transmitting information and making payments on international trade and is home for two of the world’s largest financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.⁷⁵

Experts predict the movement to de-dollarize international trade could be “devastating to the U.S. economy as America will find it hard to fund its deficit.” The move could also cause “prices to skyrocket” as housing, rent, and other basic necessities become unaffordable.⁷⁶ Should the BRICS nations succeed in setting up a de-dollarized payment system for international trade, demand for the U.S. dollar could decline, leading to a drop in the value of the U.S. dollar, with a potentially dramatic negative impact on the lifestyle of the average American. In addition to the BRICS nations and others moving to de-dollarize their holdings by establishing trade within their own currencies, they are also doing something else- buying gold at a significant pace. Central banks purchased a staggering $70 billion of gold in 2022 while countries such as China, Russia, and India continued the frenzied buying in 2023, the second highest year in history of central banks buying gold. It’s no surprise that China was the biggest buyer, as it pushes to diversify away from the dollar. Let us be reminded of Ayn Rand’s words, “Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper.” The world’s most powerful competitors to the US are doing exactly this- moving out of US dollars and purchasing gold at a feverish pace. Private investors should take notice and question if they should consider doing some of the same.

OUTLAWING CASH

The “cashless” banking system has become key to creating all-pervasive, all-controlling global surveillance and power over each of us.

This is why governments are so eager to impose a “cashless” society before their citizens understand the vast increase in government power, and loss of individual freedom, that come when cash goes away.

Look at the case and evidence in this study and decide for yourself whether America should “cash out” or “cash in” our future.

Recognize that for this brief moment in history, you still have the power to save at least your own family, and perhaps America, if you act decisively.

You can win the Secret War Against Cash by converting a portion of your debased government money into the real secure store of value and independence our Framers specified. They wanted us to have constitutional cash with a proven 5,000-year track record of security, liquidity, and privacy that requires no government or computer to give it value. You will not only defeat the Progressive scheme to impose serfdom, but also turn honest money into a new American Revolution for your family’s and nation’s independence and liberty.

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