The Highwire with Del Bigtree - THE CENTRALIZATION OF CURRENCY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

As the world races into the digital age, control of the money supply is the focal point. While American citizens are in a fight to stop CBDC, other countries like El Salvador have successfully implemented Bitcoin as a national currency. It’s a battle pitting P2P against centralized banks.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

In America here, we're in this space where one of our founding fathers, Samuel Adams, called the animating contest of freedom. We're in this space now with our money system. And we're trying to avoid, as Catherine Austin-Fitz put it, this further centralization of this currency to a power grab or surveillance-type currency in a digital form. And we reported last year in September 2022 that the White House, it was kind of the starting gun here. They really signaled to the public that they're going to explore this.

now White House releases a press release, right house releases first ever comprehensive framework for responsible development of digital assets. And sure enough, right on Q, the UK, similar thing, this is from the Bank of England's website and it tells you straight up on the website there. We are looking at the case for issuing a digital pound. This type of money is known as central bank digital currency,

CBDC. It would not replace cash yet. So- Right. Yeah, we've heard that before. Don't worry about it. Exactly, exactly. That's still king. For now.

So what we have now is as these banks are kind of consolidating power, going to a top-up situation, we have a launch of what's called the Fed Now. This is the headline here. It's very interesting time. It's been going on developing the background since 2019. Fed Now is set to launch in July what the instant payment service could mean for digital dollar and stable coins. And we have a, if you go to the actual Fed Now website, and this is from the Federal Reserve, You can see this payment flow system.

This is a payment system like Catherine Osipids was talking about. And, you know, if I send this money to you, it's between myself, my banking institution, your banking institution, and you. Now, this puts the Federal Reserve Bank square in the middle of this. Now, on the website for FedNow, it doesn't say anything about CBDCs or digital dollar, but the infrastructure is clearly there to set them right in the middle and to surveil every, basically every dollar you spend, every dollar you send to somebody else. And so this is a problem. And thankfully, our politicians here in the United States are starting to take notice. So this was House Majority Whip Congressman from Minnesota, Tom Eamer. And in late February, he introduced an act. He took to Twitter to describe it here. He said, today, I introduced a CBDC anti-surveillance state act to halt efforts of unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. from stripping Americans of the right to financial privacy. He goes on. He says this. The bill does three things. Number one, prohibits. the Fed from issuing CBDC directly to anyone. Number two, bars the Fed from using CBDC to implement

monetary policy and control the economy. And number three, requires the Fed's CBDC projects to be transparent to Congress and the American people. Wonderful move by him. And, you know, as a neutral analysis of this, one of the things that that bill does not do again, hats off to him, great effort, and this is important effort to block the federal part of it. But it does allow other companies to come in like say JPMorgan Chase or Apple or any other of these tech companies come in with their designed CBDC and plug it directly in to the Department of the Federal Reserve. So this is something we have to watch out for. Now we have the governor of South Dakota, Christy Nome.

She was one of the first people to have one of these bills, these CBDC bills come across her desk and she vetoed it. This was her talking about it on Tucker Carlson recently. Take a look. I became aware of this bill. it wasn't introduced until almost halfway through our legislative session. We started reading through this bill that was over 110 pages long. It was sold as an update to the guidelines of the Universal Commercial Code,

backed by all of our financial institutions, our banks, as we started reading through it. We saw the section of the bill that changed the definition of currency. And essentially what it did was pave the way for a government-led CBDC, and it also banned any other form of cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or digital currency that existed. So for me, it very clearly was a threat to our freedom. In South Dakota, we are the session that completes its business earliest in the year. We are the first ones to really look at this bill and find out the truth of what's in it. And I did veto that bill.

I'm asking my legislators to change their minds to make the right decision and help me kill this bill once and for all. But I'm telling you, Tucker, we've got the same language coming to over 20 other states. I believe it's to pave away for the federal government to control our currency and thus control people. It should be alarming to everyone and it's being sold as a UCC guidelines update. There's no rush to do this. We need to be smart and make sure that we're doing what we can to protect people. Yay for Christy Noam.

And when I, you know what, I get such a heartfelt feeling about, you know, seeing politicians starting to discuss the issues that we've been covering for years. There's something surreal about the fact that when we were talking about centralized currencies years ago and concern about it, that was just conspiracy theory talk. And in just a very short period time, not only is on the verge of being a reality, we now have politicians speaking and public about it, vetoing bills that are coming at them, we really have transcended out. I mean, we've been proven right, but it's really happening.

And there really are politicians that are waking up to, which is good. Hopefully enough will wake up in time. And as you and I know, politics isn't the sole answer, like Catherine was saying, we have this synergistic effect from the ground up. We're using cash. We're using local banks. And the politicians can add support if they're doing this like Christy Nomez. This is wonderful.

But now, as we're seeing, as she's showing and describing, it's at the state level now. So people can activate, people can contact their representatives and really start to get active here. So what she's talking about, this is kind of an accurate. nebulous bill. It's just hidden in something. It's not really too exciting. People kind of just pass it over. Like she said, it's like 113 page bill. So let's look what she's talking about. There's a similar bill in Montana. This is bill SB 370. And this is the headline for the bill here. It says a bill for an act entitled, an act generally revising the uniform commercial code.

There it is. Updating terminology for the digital age, providing rules for transactions involving certain digital assets. Let's go over to Tennessee. Similar bill there. Senate bill 479. It says at the top of it, an act to amend Tennessee code annotated title 47 relative to the uniform commercial code. Then you go down in the bill and you see this part, 47-9-105A, control of electronic money, subsection A general rule control of electronic money. And then it goes on to describe all of this. So there's a lot of bills out there dealing with cryptocurrency, digital assets, taxation of that, and this uniform commercial code. So if you check out this map here, this is some of the money. of the states that have active bills, and it says on that little map legend there, define

distinct digital assets and categorize them within the Uniform Commercial Code for various purposes. Now, these various purposes are for regulation, mechanisms and control. Arizona just killed their bill, while North Dakota, just north there of Kristianom's state, they actually passed their bill. So a lot of activity going on right now. If people want to get active with this, really start doing some research. It sounds like we've got to be. careful too. And, you know, politicians are just regular human beings. They're not some geniuses.

You know, they ran, you know, they were a dentist. I mean, this is one of the things I try to make clear when I, you know, interact with politicians. They're just one of us that decide to get into office. So many of them don't understand language. It's not like there's this giant red flare that's saying CBC, this is what you're looking for. It reminds me about people that go into hospitals and things. You have to tell them, look, it's not going to say vaccination. If you're like, oh, it didn't say was going to vaccinate me while I was under, did it say the word biologics? It's almost like they're hiding it in different terms, right? You know, just control digital currency, things like that,

that you could just say, well, obviously, you know, we want control over those things, and that's how these things they're trying to slide them in, right? So we've really got to go out of our way now and alert our elected officials that this is coming at you, and you may be about to something and not even know it's in that bill. Exactly. And this is a huge switchover. Think about it.

Human beings have been using paper money for centuries. So this is a rapid switchover to a digital. age that a lot of people are not well read on this digital aspect of this. So this is a fast learning curve, but fortunately we have access to a lot of information and we can get this out here. Now, if you're living in a state like Florida, this is what your governor starts to sound like, along with other states that are joining him. Listen to Ron DeSantis. Okay. Given the continued increase in Chinese influence in worldwide affairs and increase in plans to adopt CBDC worldwide, our legislation also prohibits any CBDC issued by a foreign

reserve or government sanction central bank. This will ensure that any effort to adopt a worldwide digital currency will never occur in the free state of Florida. And finally, I'm calling on like-minded states like Florida to adopt similar legislation into their uniform commercial codes and to reject any changes to their uniform commercial code that would formally recognize a central bank digital currency. And I've already spoken to their uniform commercial codes. And I've already spoken to with a lieutenant governor of Texas who's ahead of the Senate in Texas. I do believe Texas is going to do something similar to what Florida does. And if we can get a groundswell of states to say no, we are not going to turn over this power to you.

I mean, look, ultimately, cash is king. I mean, if you can hold it in your hand, you have power over that. The minute it's all digitized, somebody else is going to have control over that. And it's just a question of, are they going to let you live your life? Are they going to decide to do things to circumvent what you want to do? And think about what we've already seen. In Canada, you remember when the truckers were protesting the Vax mandates, you know, they had banks. Some of the government seized, some of froze some of their banks.

You had charities that were trying to help these guys, and that was frozen. So we've already seen government really overstep its bounds as it is in the banking situation and financial sector that we have now. Can you imagine if we went to something like a central bank digital currency? You know, we just played Christy Noem, and now you've got Governor Ron DeSantis. You know, in some ways I'm concerned, is this yet another topic that's going to sort of fall down among party lines? Or, you know, are we seeing some, you know, sign up by both sides? Because it seems like we should all be concerned about this, no matter, you know, what party we're coming from. I know I wasn't planning and asking that question as I sit here.

Is this is this another dividing line in our country between our political systems or what's going on there? From what I've seen, it's mainly Republican pushback at this point. But the Democratic talking points on this have not really been out there. I'm not seeing any Democratic candidates saying we need this, we need this CBDC push for the climate, for climate change or anything like that. So I don't see any like the traditional talking points to push this thing through. I think much like the bills are kind of worded really basically. I think it's more of this thing that's just happening in the background. It's just part of nature.

It's just a normal switchover we're going to do with the currency to just get into the digital age and it's going to help us all transact better and faster and fight money laundering. But again, Santa said something key there. The biggest criminality I've seen is from governments and corporations. And this CBDC push centralizes that into those very hands. And so as we reported on, the government sees Canadian bank accounts of protesting truckers. And, you know, we knew they were right then. But now, in hindsight, we definitely know they were right to get these fax mandates off their borders.

We've seen it with GoFundMe. We've seen it with PayPal talking about finding people for what they call misinformation. So I'm sorry, but these corporations and governments already showed their hand of the limited power that they did have to get to people's money. I personally don't trust them to have centralized power. over this and we can look at other countries have already started this process so this is a headline in forbes it says central bank digital currencies are off to a rough start they're talking about nigeria um it says in nigeria's attempts basically they they attempted in nigeria in twenty twenty one to make a digital currency called the e naria so it was basically their

their currency but digital they didn't force it on people but what they did recently was they said there's kind of an intermediary step and this is important for americans to really pay attention to, the government said, hey, you know what, we're going to update our high denomination bank notes. So the biggest bank notes out there, we're just going to put a little update to those. It's still going to be paper, but we're going to just update them for you. We're going to take the old ones out of circulation. They took the old ones out of circulation, but they never really put these big ones back in fully. So that's the headline you're going to see now. This is what's happening in Nigeria. Nigeria attempts to replace its currency notes

descends into chaos. Long queues form outside cash machines and fights break out as customers demand access to money. And here we have, this is on the ground footage, basically riots. You see people rioting to get their money, lines at the banks. You see people burning things. This is, I mean, this is kind of chaos because the people know, this is cash in hand economy. These people know what's going on here and they're not getting their big bills. So they can't transact, they can't be their families. This is a big deal. And this is the most recent headline here. Nigeria seeks partners for tech revamp of its E-Nara digital currency. So it says in this article, the central Bank of Nigeria wants to develop its own software for the digital currency so that it can keep full

control of the effort, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the matter is confidential. It has discussed the plans, which are in the early stages, with New York-based technology firm, R3, one of the people said. So here we go. You're already seen an example of these central banks in these countries reaching out to these tech firms, in this case in New York, to plug and play a digital currency. And this would get around certain laws as well. So this really has to be watched out for in the United States. Now, Dell, another aspect to this whole conversation, we're trying to report on this as neutral as possible because there's so many moving parts. We have Bitcoin. Bitcoin's been around since 2008. And it's went from a groundswell

to global adoption. There's so many people that have it throughout the world. And there's countries now that are, instead of central bank digital currencies, they're taking Bitcoin and making that their currency. This is central, the Central African Republic. This was one of the people or one of the countries that became where Bitcoin became official currency. This is the BBC reporting this. Now, what's interesting about this country is it's one of the poorest countries in the world. And most of the people there don't don't have bank accounts. So they've really skipped the banking era. They went from no bank accounts directly to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin allows them, if they have a, if they have a cell phone, they become their own bank, their own bank.

I was just going to say, though, I mean, like, if you talk about a poor nation, there's an irony to it that, you know, they're, you know, living in, you know, relatively lowered conditions, but they all have a cold wallet, you know, somewhere in their, you know, little house. I looked at some numbers from world data, and it shows here, this is a Central African Republic, and it shows how many people have mobile phones. And the usage has been, obviously, growing since 2004 there. And you can see in about 2020, you're looking at almost about 35% of the people. So a little over a third of the people in the country have, technically now it could become their own bankers and have that with the Bitcoin model. Still not access to the whole country. But another country is El Salvador.

This has been really the shining gem of the Bitcoin adoption. El Salvador becomes first country to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency. They were the first. So it's kind of this person-to-person. banking economy. That's the name of the game here with Bitcoin. And what's interesting is the bills in the United States, they don't allow Bitcoin. They allow central bank digital currency, but they don't allow Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. So there's kind of a push to the curb of this situation, which would lend, you know, some credence to what Catherine was saying. But another,

another institution that doesn't like Bitcoin is the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. So as soon as these countries started adopting this, this currency as legal currency, legal tender in their countries, you see headlines like this. IMF lays out crypto action plan recommends against legal tender status. So the IMF has been famous, just a quick history here of why they're kind of in an upward about this. They have been famous for giving debts to giving loans and putting low income countries in debt. And what that usually happens after that is you're solving, you're giving. debt, more debt to a debt problem via the IMF. And it causes IMF riots. That's actually a term. There's a book written on this. It's called eliminating the IMF. And in this book, you can see they do an analysis of

whether you really, whether we should keep the IMF or just completely abolish it all together. And it says it's, it's one of the instigators of these riots of civil unrest. You've seen it in Egypt, Costa Rica, South Africa, Greece even. And these are these debt traps that have been talked about. So it just recently in 2022, the most recent country to go under this is Argentina. You see no to the IMF. This is out of Reuters, thousands protests in Argentina against debt deal. This is just a common thing that usually happens in these countries that sign on to this debt. And you can see here, these are the protests that happened in 2022. They ended up signing this debt deal. And sure enough, Argentina cannot pay back these these payments that they have to pay.

So at that point, this country goes into austerity. They go under a really strict economic plan. you see a lot of issues within the country at that point. So this is the IMF saying no to Bitcoin, but yes to central bank digital currency. So it's important to keep an eye on at that point. Yeah. Just in the whole picture of things going on.