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September
28
2023

Lawmakers Oppose Digital Dollar. There's Just One Problem.
Joseph P. Farrell

OK, so here’s my random thought of the day…

There’s a move afoot to prohibit a central bank digital dollar from ever being issued by the Fed – without “authorization” that is – according to this article shared by E.G.(with our thanks):

US lawmakers advance legislation blocking the digital dollar

When I read this article (the first time) I thought, “Well, that’s good, someone out there realizes what Catherine Fitts and many others including yours truly have been warning about: a central bank digital currency is too easy to couple to a social engineering  system, and affords no privacy. It’s a sure, certain, and swift route to slavery and feudalism, and it’s nothing but a corporate coupon. It’s a method to prohibit wealth accumulation much less passing it along, because a wholly digital ‘currency’ could be made with an ‘expiration’ date. Use it or loose it.” And so on. Yet, reading it, I had to admit that something about the article gnawed away at me.  Something was missing. So I re-read it…

See if you can spot it, for here’s the article in full:

The United States House Financial Services Committee is moving forward with legislation aimed at preventing the issuance of a central bank digital currency.

According to an announcement from chairman Patrick McHenry, the committee will mark up two bills about a potential digital dollar on Sept. 20. Markups are sessions in which lawmakers discuss the details of a bill. It is a crucial step before legislation moves to the House floor.

One of the bills is the Digital Dollar Pilot Prevention Act, or H.R. 3712, which prohibits the Federal Reserve from initiating pilot programs to test CBDCs without approval from Congress.​​ The legislation was introduced by Representative Alex Mooney in May.

The Fed recently denied any decision on whether to issue a CBDC, claiming it “would only proceed with the issuance of a CBDC with an authorizing law.” However, the Federal Reserve of San Francisco has sought to fill technical positions for a CBDC project over the past few months, indicating that the digital dollar remains on the table.

The second legislation is an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act prohibiting Fed banks from offering certain products or services directly to an individual, along with prohibiting the use of CBDCs for monetary policy and for other purposes.

“A Federal reserve bank shall not offer a central bank digital currency, or any digital asset that is substantially similar under any other name or label, indirectly to an individual through a financial institution or other intermediary,” reads the bill.

The prospect of a digital dollar has stirred controversy in the United States. Presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Ron DeSantis have spoken out against the establishment of a CBDC in the country, citing financial privacy concerns. Supporters of CBDCs claim it would help the United States to keep the dollar’s global relevance, as well as boost cryptocurrency adoption. (Emphasis added)

I imagine that regular readers of this website can easily spot all the openings in the laws as summarized or quoted in the article: the language is so loose and leaves such big holes that they’re big enough to drive a panzerarmeethrough.  Besides that, something tells me that those countries which still value real production from real factories, real mines, real wells, and real power plants are not going to be too swayed by keeping a dollar “relevant” by making it represent none of those things and backed by… well, by what, exactly? What does the USA make besides endless wars, lots of GMO “food-like products” (to cite the contemporary labeling conventions), and dubious financial “instruments”? With the BRICS nations continuing to talk about a gold-backed currency (even though not one of them is talking about that all-important issue of convertbility), something tells me they’re not going to be too impressed with a “relevant dollar” just because it’s digital, and subject to all the problems that corporate coupons have, including expiration dates. Lesson number one: corporate coupons always have expiration dates. Lesson number two: anything with an expiration date is not a currency, because currencies are supposed to be relatively stable stores of value (hence the whole idea of bullion as a backing for currencies, but I digress).

Certainly I find myself in strong agreement with Mr. Kennedy and Mr. DeSantis: digital currencies are a privacy nightmare, and in a country with an out of control, lawless, and completely insane goobernment like the USSA, even more so.

But my concern isn’t privacy, nor the inherent danger that a digital “currency” is a ticket to perpetual slavery and the impossibility of any wealth accumulation via a corporate coupon with an expiration “use by” date, my concern is something else entirely, something that no one seems to be addressing, and probably for very good reason: what is the constitutionality of a digital currency?

I rather suspect it’s next to nil, because how does one “make” and “coin” something digital? Granted, some digital “currencies” might have the world “coin” in their names, but the word “coin” in that instance would seem to invoke the same sort of word-twisting alchemy used by the supreme court in some landmark money cases. Consider, for example, the following “explanation” of some Supreme Court cases involving Article I, Section 8, Clause 5, concerning the coinage and currency power of the Congress:

The Supreme Court has also held that the power to coin money imports authority to maintain such coinage as a medium of exchange at home, and to forbid its diversion to other uses by defacement, melting, or exportation.9 Consistent with this power, Congress may require holders of gold coin or gold certificates to surrender them in exchange for other currency not redeemable in gold. The Supreme Court denied recovery to a plaintiff who sought payment for gold coin and certificates thus surrendered in an amount measured by the higher market value of gold on the ground that the plaintiff had not proved that he would suffer any actual loss by being compelled to accept an equivalent amount of other currency.(https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/ALDE_00001066/)

So what's going on? How many silver certificates did Franklin Delano have to swap for all those gold coins and gold certificates? Gold certificates are no longer convertible into gold, but into silver certificates (which also eventually were no longer convertible?) For those recalling my books The Financial Vipers of Venice, or Babylon's Banksters, that gold-to-silver ratio can be a bit tricky, or was the stated convertibility already a moot point, if the ambiguity implied by the above paragraph is any indicator ... In any case, I can see at least some clever attorneys arguing that a "digital central bank currency" would constitute a modern technological method of "diversion to other uses by defacement, melting, or exportation," as even, perhaps, a bit of "electronic annihilation," and therefore perforce, criminally unconstitutional.

However, a little before that, we read this in the "explanation":

Inasmuch as every contract for the payment of money, simply, is necessarily subject to the constitutional power of the government over the currency, whatever that power may be, and the obligation of the parties is, therefore, assumed with reference to that power,7 the Supreme Court sustained the power of Congress to make Treasury notes legal tender in satisfaction of antecedent debts.

If you're sensing a whole lot of confusion and contradiction between this statement and the one cited above, join the club.

Do you, dear reader, sense the same "double legal standard" in these excerpts that I sense? Do we have in these epitomes of Supreme Court decisions the same two-tiered system of law regarding money itself, nakedly preserved for all to see because of stare decisis?

My point is this: before we start talking about central bank digital currency, especially in this country with such a dubiously scrambled legal track record,  we'd better have a very clear idea of what constituted "money" for the founding fathers, and question number one in this "back to basics" program has to be "if the Supreme court sustained the power of Congress to make 'Treasury notes' legal tender in satisfaction of antecedent debts" then (1) why did we even need monetized debt as money or a Federal Reserve (or even a First Bank of the United States?) with its worthless monetized debt federal reserve "notes" to begin with? and (2) what is the relationship of bullion to such a concept of money as a Treasury note?"

...just some random thoughts...

... and why do I keep hearing Andrew Jackson over and over in my mind, "You (The Second Bank of the United States) are a brood of vipers, and I will root you out"... and "Martin(Van Buren)... they are trying to kill me..."

...See you on the flip side...

Born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science". Following a paradigm of researching the relationship between alternative history and science, Farrell has followed with a stunning series of books, each conceived to stand alone, but each also conceived in a pre-arranged sequence:

gizadeathstar.com