January 12, 2017
norberthaering.de

Why Washington is Waging a Global War on Cash

by Norbert Haering

The business interests of the U.S. companies that dominate the global IT business and payment systems are an important reason for the zeal of the U.S. government in its push to reduce cash use worldwide, but it is not the only one and might not be the most important one. Another motive is surveillance power that goes with increased use of digital payment. U.S. intelligence organizations and IT companies together can survey all international payments done through banks and can monitor most of the general stream of digital data. Financial data tends to be the most important and valuable.

Even more importantly, the status of the dollar as the world's currency of reference and the dominance of U.S. companies in international finance provide the US government with tremendous power over all participants in the formal non-cash financial system. It can make everybody conform to American law rather than to their local or international rules. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has recently run a chilling story describing how that works (German). Employees of a German factoring firm doing completely legal business with Iran were put on a US terror list, which meant that they were shut off most of the financial system and even some logistics companies would not transport their furniture any more. A major German bank was forced to fire several employees upon U.S. request, who had not done anything improper or unlawful.

There are many more such examples. Every internationally active bank can be blackmailed by the U.S. government into following their orders, since revoking their license to do business in the U.S. or in dollar basically amounts to shutting them down. Just think about Deutsche Bank, which had to negotiate with the US Treasury for months whether they would have to pay a fine of 14 billion dollars and most likely go broke, or get away with seven billion and survive. If you have the power to bankrupt the largest banks even of large countries, you have power over their governments, too. This power through dominance over the financial system and the associated data is already there. The less cash there is in use, the more extensive and secure it is, as the use of cash is a major avenue for evading this power.

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Norbert Haering is a German financial journalist, blogger and PhD economist, who received the 2007 award and the 2014 prize of the German Keynes Society for economic journalism. His best-selling book (in German) "The abolition of cash and the consequences" was published in 2016.

[Together with Castro, Dr M understood that the source of their power lies in the overvalued US dollar. Since 1972, the US freely issued green bucks no longer tied to gold. This financial swindle, the biggest in the history of mankind, brought enormous wealth to some people, and ruined a lot more. That is why Malaysia is the brain and the engine of an ambitious plan to create a stable currency, the golden Dinar.--Israel Shamir, "The Malaysian Solution," The Wisdom Fund, January 25, 2003]

[Muammar al-Qaddafi was openly advocating the creation of a new currency that would rival the dollar and the euro. In fact, he called upon African and Muslim nations to join an alliance that would make this new currency, the gold dinar, their primary form of money and foreign exchange. They would sell oil and other resources to the US and the rest of the world only for gold dinars.--John Perkins, "Libya: It's Not About Oil, It's About Currency and Loans," informationclearinghouse.info, April 26, 2011]

"BRICS Rising: 'The Western Model Is Broken'," The Wisdom Fund, July 15, 2014

[Losing your credit cards or being the victim of digital hackers can lead to a whole host of problems including denied payment, card theft, card skimming, identity theft, account takeover, fraudulent transactions and data breaches. According to the digital security company Gemalto, more than 1 billion personal records were compromised in 2014.--Guillaume Lepecq, "Cash Is Critical: Personal and national security would be imperiled by a cashless society," usnews.com, April 7, 2016]

[The Global Innovation Exchange includes such dubious member organizations as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major donor to the Modi war on cash initiative of USAID. It also includes USAID itself, several UN agencies including UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR. And it includes the US Department of Commerce and a spooky Maclean, Virginia military contractor called MITRE Corporation whose chairman is former CIA Director, James Rodney Schlesinger, a close associate of Henry Kissinger. . . .

India and the reckless (or corrupt) Modi government implementing the USAID-Better Than Cash Alliance agenda is clearly serving as a guinea pig in a mass social experiment about how to push the cash war in other countries. The Better Than Cash Alliance is described by the UNCDF, which is its Secretariat, as "a US $38 million global alliance of governments, private sector and development organizations committed to accelerating the shift from cash to electronic payments." . . .

As Norbert Haering notes, "the status of the dollar as the world's currency of reference and the dominance of US companies in international finance provide the US government with tremendous power over all participants in the formal non-cash financial system. It can make everybody conform to American law rather than to their local or international rules."--F. William Engdahl, "The Sinister Agenda Behind the Washington War On Cash," journal-neo.org, January 21, 2017]

"Big Brother is watching you: Jim Rogers prophesizes death of cash & total govt control of spending," rt.com, February 14, 2017

Rana Faroohar, "How Big Banks Became Our Masters," nytimes.com, September 27, 2017