Image by TW Collins
Back in 2017 I wrote “The End of Cash”:
Understand, however, that getting rid of cash is part of this. Understand that blockchains, “coins” do not have to ultimately be a technology of freedom, but can easily be a totalitarian technology. Understand that virtually no one in a position of power is your friend on this: They want to know, they want to control, they want to be able to decide how you spend your money and your time, and they want to have an electronic dossier on you which is complete, and which will be usable to destroy you, because no one has never done or said something which cannot be made to look not just bad, but terrible and illegal, especially if you can pick, say, ten quotes or actions out of a lifetime.
In the 80s and 90s it was possible to live the cash economy, or the near cash economy (some checks, but no bank account.) Around 1990 I worked as a dispatcher for a printing company. There was an independent food stall nearby, the sort of place that was all “skilled short order cook” food. I bought most of my lunches there, and the owner ran a tab. When I was paid, by cheque, I endorsed them to him, he took 2%, and paid me cash, minus any tab I’d run up. I paid my landlord in cash, and I bought my food in cash.
At other points I was entirely casual labour: I painted, did light construction work for homeowners, various landscaping jobs, and helped people move. In most cases they paid me cash, if they paid me with a check and I didn’t want to wait the 28 days the banks often insisted on for “clearance” I’d endorse the check, lose 2% and count it not entirely unreasonable.
It’s very hard to do that now. Most people don’t pay with cash, or even checks, and everything goes thru a bank or payment processor and they are very picky about who they allow as customers. Legal activities (say selling nootropics, or porn) are often frozen out, and, indeed, banks have closed down clients accounts without even saying why. Indeed this was done to someone as prominent as Britain’s Nigel Farage, though he had enough fame and political clout to handle it. Perhaps you remember when PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all decided to stop letting people donate to Wikileaks.
Here’s a new case, in Germany, from the EU:
Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.
The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.
In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany!
Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!
Beautiful stuff, even cash is forbidden, BUT, of course, cash is hard to trace. Thing is, these days, most payments are electronic.
Back when the Trucker Protest happened in Ottawa Canada I opposed freezing their accounts, even though I thought they were a bunch of fools and opposed their agenda. Why? Because it is punishment without a trial or facing a jury. It’s devastating. And I understood that if it could be done to people I disagree with, it could be done to people I do agree with.
So Germany has made it so Huseyin will wind up homeless and possibly even starve to death simply by making him an economic non-person.
This is made much easier by the fact that there’s barely a cash economy any more
These sorts of administrative penalties are becoming more common. Palestine Action, for example, was designated a terrorist organization recently (at the same time as the terrorists who took over Syria were removed.) I’m going to come back to this, because it’s important.
But, basically, the end of the cash economy has made it MUCH easier for authoritarian governments to crush dissent, and in general, the removal of cases from courts, plea bargains, lack of jury trials, making it illegal to tell juries about jury nullification and the rise of “sanctions” and administravie orders has been extremely chilling.
Europe is trending hard authoritarian, with Britain and Germany leading the way. The US, of course, is working hard to end Habeas Corpus and other legal protections. Canada is moving in the same direction.
We need a new conception of how societies should run and until that happens we need a new conception of how to run organizations that the elite doesn’t approve of.
We’ll cover this more, soon.
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Oji
They, the leadership, all know global industrial civilization has peaked, and is headed for the dustbin. They also know this means conflict and chaos. As the negative data have piled up, and non-linear nature of the decline has become undeniable, they accelerate their preparations and mitigations.
Jan Wiklund
@Oji: There are many ways of doing this. Last time it happened, after 1929, Germany and a few other states did like Germany does now, but others turned the other way, forced the rentiers to invest in real production and restart the economy.
So there is a choice.
Anon
I was in China last week. Amazing place with a lot of good things going on. However, the amount of control the government has is amazing.
No business took cash. Only my hotel would accept my credit cards. Everyone else insisted on Alipay or some other app. But with Alipay, I couldn’t pay a Chinese person directly. For example, I couldn’t pay my cab driver directly. I was only allowed to make Alipay payments to businesses.
For travel, plane and train tickets are purchased electronically. No ticket is provided. Instead, the ticket was linked to your ID. So to board a train or plane, instead of presenting a ticket, every passenger has either their passport or Chinese ID card scanned. If you bought a ticket, your ID scan opens the gate.
I can see that happening everywhere in the near future .
Joan
I still make an effort to pay for everything I buy in person in cash. That’s groceries, coffee, books, etc. The only time I am using electronic payment is through online shopping, and the mortgage is bank transfer. Even while traveling, ATM fees are less than credit card fees.
Like & Subscribe
What good things? Massive cities crammed with 30 million people piled on top of one another but hey the hot pot rocks?
For some reason or another, videos exploring Chongqing have been running across my feed as of late. Don’t get me wrong, I find it fascinating but I also find natural disasters, as opposed to the unnatural disaster that is Chongqing, fascinating.
No matter the video, the sun never really shines in Chongqing even on the days there isn’t a cloud in the sky. The pollution is so thick, you can actually see it at night. Blade Runner comes to mind.
Maybe it’s just me, but that’s not good no matter where it is, be it in China or anywhere else.
bruce wilder
This elite lust for total domination and control is also naive in ways that make systems of control brittle. The insistence that encrypted communications should have built-in backdoors for “legitimate law enforcement” purposes means that any unscrupulous actor — not “just” unscrupulous officials — can gain access to all encrypted communications. And, the new forms of money are encrypted communications.
Backdoors designed for law enforcement cannot be guaranteed to be exclusive to “good guys” and will inevitably be targeted by others. For example, China-linked hackers have compromised systems used by U.S. broadband providers to facilitate court-authorized wiretaps, accessing information from these surveillance mechanisms.
Mark Level
Though she is no longer a member of the European Parliament, Claire Daly (who with her partner Mick Wallace was driven out by big money in the last elections) recently addressed this after a former colleague invited her to speak. Here is a link for those interested, pretty sure that she may be talking about Huseyin, though there are obviously several such cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdnG3GEKhE
I’m not sure the Parliament “erupted” as the title claims, but she was smart and effective, as usual.
Also, a bit of potential good news about the UK’s attempt to label Palestine Action a “Hate Group” and as “terrorists.” George Monbiot, very respected on the actual British Left, came out calling for a “Spartacus Defense,” he proclaimed “I am Palestine Action” & encouraged 1,000s of others to do so too. “Never Here” Kier Starmer has destroyed the British Social Safety net since taking over, constantly foaming at the mouth about a war with Russia he wants while people drink dirty water, freeze in the winter, and elders are unserved by the ruined National Health system. And the worm has turned on Palestine, something like 70% of Brits don’t support the genocide. It could work.
I learned this from a recent Electronic Intifada post. They also covered the bullshit way the “terrorist/hate” label was established, they threw a few right-wing, Nazi groups in with Palestine Action as cover. But there seems to be some skepticism that the designation will be taken up by the EU, might even be a bridge too far for them? I don’t know, they’re extremely fascistic so maybe thinking it’ll be blocked is just Hopium.
But the Zionist Narrative has lost with the public after nearly 2 years of open genocide, even in a right-wing, Imperial nostalgia society like Britain. The center cannot hold.
Feral Finster
“Back when the Trucker Protest happened in Ottawa Canada I opposed freezing their accounts, even though I thought they were a bunch of fools and opposed their agenda. Why? Because it is punishment without a trial or facing a jury. ”
This of course is entirely the point, and yes, the rush to abolish cash is entirely intended to make it possible to snuff out any protest or movement that the regime doesn’t like at the moment.
DMC
Weird. When I lived in Prague, only major businesses took plastic. Everybody else took strictly cash. Where I’m moving(rural Ecuador) it’s the same and small bills only please. I’m sure its a bit more plastic friendly in the big cities, but still, anything with local owners is going to be using a shoe box as their modern point of sale device
joey_n
@Anon,
I could be missing something, but I can only imagine that the people in China have so much trust in their government and their electrical infrastructure to confidently make cashless payments.
Say, isn’t it illegal for businesses to reject cash in China?
One thing I’ve wondered until at least three months into the COVID pandemic was how China could live with having ¥1 be the biggest (generally-circulating) coin and ¥100 the biggest note, even when considering purchasing power parity. I thought it bad enough that the US still hadn’t followed the example set by our host’s Canada in replacing the $1 and $2 bill with coins.
On YouTube there was a video of a US woman in Germany who opined that the use of €1 and €2 coins there, instead of $1 bills like in the USA, had to do with cash being king in Germany (Japan and Switzerland even have coins equivalent to €5). Correlation may not imply causation, as the old saying goes, but I’m wondering if the USA’s negligence in modernizing its monetary system is part and parcel of making cash look inconvenient and inefficient (e.g. four 25¢ coins weigh more than a $1 coin which lasts 15 times as long as the $1 bill). Besides pretending that the problem of inflation that occurred over the past 50 years doesn’t exist (at least for insular USians who haven’t set foot outside of the States at all).
But I digress. In a nutshell, I’d be happy to use cash if the monetary system we have here in the States wasn’t so stuck in the past century.
Flaser
Short note on the Canadian Truckers (AKA Freedom Convoy):
Contrary to what most of the media tells you, these people weren’t anti-vaxers.
Most actually already received their shots.
These truckers were protesting the extra red-tape that was applied to cross-border trucking, making a job that’s thankless and exhaustive just that much worse.
Funny, how these reasonable concerns weren’t mentioned anywhere in the – either liberal or conservative – media.
bruce wilder
surveillance and associated propaganda are only a few aspects of digital payment systems — another set involves the segregation into privileged clubs and a stratification of economic classes.
if you spend enough money or keep modest balances in a bank, you get a waiver of fees and all kinds of kickbacks and “redeemable points”. the system may pay you a rebate of like 2% on your spending, which is a not insignificant redistribution upward in a system that punishes the poor and illiquid with 25% credit card interest rates and a plethora of bank fees
Warvigilent
yet again with the defense of the whiny truckers ooooooh extra RED TAPE !!! how horrid. ooooh your job is thankless and exhausting !!! GUESS WHAT ALL JOBS ARE LIKE!!!! AT LEAST THEY WEREN’T WORKING IN HEALTHCARE AND HAD TO WATCH PEOPLE FuCkinG DiE WHILE RISKING THEIR OWN LIVES!!
how horrible there were extra precautions taken during a PANDEMIC THAT KILLED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. ohhhh precautions meant to protect people and the truckers themselves . just like being in a concentration camp, no difference , no siree bob!!
They had their bank accounts seized!! bullshit, the crowd funding accounts of a few of the dubious “leaders” of the convoy were frozen when it was obvious most of the money was from shady foreign sources ( as in not actually supported by canadians) and had little to do with even legitimate demands some protesters may have had that were drowned out by the convoy organizers who had outrageous demands of having the government immediately resign and the convoy leaders appoint replacements or end all anti COVID measures. The truckers got nothing but kid gloves at best.
just ask yourselves if a left wing protest could occupy the capital for a month let alone have a day of protest before the riot police come out. They blocked roads and blew semi horns all night for a Month and barely a handful were arrested or even towed. just compare how palistine activists are treated now compared to the truckers .
I dont disagree that governments are weaponizing cashless societies but lets be real, governments never needed to eliminate cash if they wanted to go after someone before. It was always possible to cut them off some other legal way or go after their family or have them blacklisted or just have them assassinated . They were not stepping up anything.
ian mentions how a lot of black lives activists turned up dead over the years in mysterious circumstances . The trucker protests were not an escalation of goverment response but the exact opposite as demonstrated when right wingers protests in the us or canada or otherwise commit crimes of politcal nature. IE the guy who rammed protesters in new york but was clearly protected by the cops and never charged. or all the right wing mass shootings that are some how never a call to escalate any kind of police response or prevention. or the right wing anti vax protests that actually did things like block hospitals and ambulances and harass/assault medical workers but faces zero response from cops. If the government ever needed a reason to violently crack down or declare civil war the right wing gives them more than enough reasons to or excuses. just look at the neo nazi groups who are militarizing all over the place ( some pretty fucking scary doomsday cult stuff too) . not a wiff of government response.
Warvigilent
edit rather declare martial law, not civil war.