Clamp Down on Cash Is the Ultimate Surveillance State

By Mac Slavo

The war on cash is more than just a currency war to  clamp everyone down on the electric grid. It is also a war on your privacy, and the nail in the coffin for the free market of low level transactions.

Soon, restrictions on cash will become so severe that even spending $100 will arouse suspicion, despite the constant inflation on the value of such a denomination. One day, physical currency may become obsolete.

When that day comes, they will know everything you do.

Conducting transactions in anything but digital creds will be not only increasingly difficult, but seen as outright criminal behavior. It might even make you a terrorist.

Don Quijones argues on Wolf Street:

There are two sides in the global war against cash. On one side are many of the world’s governments, central banks, fintech firms, banks, credit card companies, telecommunication behemoths, financial institutions, large retailers, etc. According to them, the days of physical currency are numbered, so why not pull the plug already, beginning with the largest denomination bills such as the $100-note and particularly the €500-note?

On the other side are people who like to use cash – most of whom, according to the dominant official narrative, are either criminals or terrorists. After all, they must have something to hide; otherwise, why would they use a private, untraceable (not to mention archaic, dirty, dangerous and unhygienic) form of payment like cash?

Although it may seem like a foregone conclusion, cash still accounts for a majority of transactions in many European countries, and still factors in significantly in the U.S., though use of cash is in decline.

Many leaders overseas are calling out the moves to kill cash – albeit in slow motion – as nothing more than an attempt to impose a police state where every transaction, every purchase and every activity is monitored and databased.

Likewise, the use of cash is linked with terrorists and criminals, every bit as much as using pagers was linked with drug dealers in the pre-cell phone days.

Don Quijones writes:

[I]n recent weeks the unlikeliest of defenders of physical money has emerged: the national central bank of Europe’s biggest economy, the German Bundesbank.

“I have my doubts that introducing a cash limit or getting rid of bigger denominations can really prevent terrorists or criminals from engaging in illegal activities,” Carl-Ludwig Thiele, Bundesbank board member in charge of cash issues, said in a speech last week. “We also should ask ourselves: what sort of an understanding of government forms the basis of these proposals? Citizens should not be put under general suspicion.”

[…]

And in Germany and Austria, the EU’s plans to suppress cash have already provoked a backlash.

“We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch,”said Austrian Deputy Economy Minister Harald Mahreron on Oe1 radio. “We will fight everywhere against rules” including caps on cash purchases, he said.

How to Disappear Off the Grid Completely (Ad)

The NSA surveillance has never been limited to just ferreting out terrorists, its mass surveillance of every conceivable communications device has created a Big Data tracking system that can hone in on specific behaviors of anyone in the country, or can track the mass patterns of human society like a school of fish.

Standing by complicit with the elimination of cash is surrendering yourself to a society based upon nothing more than Big Brother teamed up with the Big Banks – and what good could come from all of that?

Read more:

• As Banks Seek Monopoly Over Economy, “Cash Is Being Gradually Taken Away”
• Banning Cash “Necessary to Give Central Banks More Power”
• Americans Face Impoverishing War on Cash: “More Big Banks Are Shunning Cash”
• ‘Cash Is Being Eradicated’: Digital Payments Take Over Western World

You can read more from Mac Slavo at his site SHTFplan.com