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G20 Announces Plan To Impose Digital Currencies And IDs Worldwide

Posted by M. C. on September 14, 2023

Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that discussions were underway to build a global framework to regulate crypto assets

I feel safer now. How about you?

Our first president warned us about foreign entanglements. I often wonder wonder how much G20, G7, WHO…..non-sense is paid for by US.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/g20-announces-plan-impose-digital-currencies-and-ids-worldwide

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

Thursday, Sep 14, 2023 – 06:30 AM

Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Group of 20 leaders have agreed to a plan to eventually impose digital currencies and digital IDs on their respective populations, despite fears that governments will use them to monitor their peoples’ spending and crush dissent.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes leaders during opening session of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi, on Sept. 9, 2023. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The G20, which is currently under India’s presidency, adopted a final declaration on the subject over the weekend in New Delhi.

The meeting, which included the world’s leading economies, announced last week that they had agreed to build the necessary infrastructure to implement digital currencies and IDs.

The group said that discussions were already underway to create international regulations for cryptocurrencies, but claimed that there was “no talk of banning cryptocurrency” at the summit.

Many critics are concerned that governments and central banks will eventually regulate cryptocurrencies and then immediately replace them with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which lack similar privacy and security.

Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that discussions were underway to build a global framework to regulate crypto assets since they believe cryptocurrencies can not be regulated efficiently without total international cooperation.

“India’s [G20] presidency has put on the table key issues related to regulating or understanding that there should be a framework for handling issues related to crypto assets,” Ms. Sitharaman said before the G20 gathering.

The top items discussed at the New Delhi summit included “building Digital Public Infrastructure, Digital Economy, Cryptoassets, [Central Bank Digital Currencies].”

Gita Gopinath, the International Monetary Fund’s first deputy managing director, said in a video posted on X that the G20 “helped shape a global perspective on how policymakers should deal with crypto assets.”

She also assured Business Today that there was “no talk of banning cryptocurrencies, indicating a global consensus against such measures” in the discussions.

However, some of the suggestions call for additional policing of cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized and do not operate under central banks’ control.

Critics say that these proposals could allow government authorities to impose a social credit score system and decide how their citizens can spend their money.

European Commission Chief Reemphasizes Need for Digital IDs

At the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for an international regulatory body for artificial intelligence (AI), digital ID systems similar to coronavirus vaccine passports and advocated for global cooperation to address the challenges presented by AI.

She called for the United Nations to have a role in AI regulation and called the European Union’s COVID-19 digital certificate a perfect model for digital public infrastructures (DPI), which would include digital IDs.

“Many of you are familiar with the COVID-19 digital certificate. The EU developed it for itself. The model was so functional and so trusted that 51 countries on four continents adopted it for free,” said President von der Leyen.

“Today, the WHO uses it as a global standard to facilitate mobility in times of health threats. I want to thank Dr. Tedros again for the excellent cooperation,” she said, referring to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

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Cultural Appropriation: The Nontheft of Something No One Owns | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2023

What they overlook is the basic economic concept of rivalrousness. My use of English—a language that isn’t my mother tongue and that I have thereby thoroughly “appropriated”—does in no way prevent another person from using English, or changing English in any which way they prefer (think teenager neologisms). My applying a decades-old recipe for tonight’s dinner in no way strips someone else from the pleasure of using that same recipe.

If all you wield are government solutions, everything looks like a private-sector nail in desperate need of a hammering.

https://mises.org/wire/cultural-appropriation-nontheft-something-no-one-owns

Joakim Book

When I was at the university, I once objected to a classmate’s lazy use of “public goods.” He had used it to favor his policy position, as a shorthand synonym of what’s good for society—only a thinly veiled euphemism for what I want to happen.

“Public goods are things that are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable,” I said, almost sputtering off a nearby economics textbook. “The ones you’re talking about are neither.”

He rolled his eyes in boredom. “Yes, yes, but that’s not what people mean when they say, ‘public goods.’”

Strangely, I think he’s right. These days, the economist’s clear and rather demanding criteria of so-called public goods are largely swept aside in favor of something like “What I think would be good for the public.” And that little linguistic slip opens up a world of economic policymaking from which we still haven’t recovered.

Everything these days are public goods. In a New York Review of Books piece by Helen Epstein we learn that money printing isn’t just important for government spending but “for improvements in health care, education, transportation, the power grid, and other public goods that might foster development.”

To proponents of government services, everything that carries even a whiff of external benefits to someone, somewhere, is therefore transformed into a “public good”—which must be provided by government. We might have excused such convictions, chalking them up to ignorance, if it weren’t for economists at the pinnacle of the profession embracing those views; Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus is a case in point.

We have to dig about three hundred pages into Nordhaus’s book The Spirit of Green before we get an admission that government failures can be worse than the failures that ostensibly run amok in private markets. Otherwise they’re just technocratic solutions: rainbows and unicorns, public goods this, public goods that. Everything is an uncorrected externality—from the keyboards we write on to gas stations, hospitals, landlords, and the English language.

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Democrats Once Opposed the Post-September 11th Expansion of the Surveillance State

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2023

The Dept. of Homeland Security, once viewed as an Orwellian power grab, is now championed by Democrats to police “dangerous” political speech.

https://www.leefang.com/p/democrats-once-opposed-the-post-september?utm_campaign=email-post&r=iw8dv&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Lee Fang

In the wake of the September 11th terror attacks, President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, a new sprawling federal agency with over 170,000 employees and new intelligence powers dedicated to domestic national security.

At the inception of this agency, Democratic lawmakers challenged its authority and raised concerns that this consolidation of government power would jeopardize civil liberties.

Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., led the opposition. Feingold criticized the formation of DHS, stating it came “at the expense of unnecessarily undermining our privacy rights” and “weakening protections against unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans.”

Representative Chris Bell, D-Tex., fumed at the agency and warned against the creation of an “Orwellian surveillance state” that would be used to settle “partisan political” disputes.

Civil libertarian opposition once held sway within the party. Democrats worked closely with the ACLU and other privacy groups to question DHS powers, particularly around data mining, surveillance, and interference into domestic politics.

The fear that the newly created agency would weaponize homeland security concerns to advance partisan politics quickly materialized in the 2004 elections. Tom Ridge, after serving as the head of the agency, wrote that the Bush administration officials pressured him to raise the DHS terror threat level just before voting got underway in a bid to influence the electoral outcome.

Even as recently as 2012, House Democrats raised concerns in Congress about DHS violating American civil rights and privacy rights by inappropriately monitoring First Amendment-protected speech on social media. “I am looking forward to learning from the witnesses exactly how DHS uses social media and what DHS is doing to make sure that in its use of social media, it is not being perceived as being a Big Brother,” said Representative Jackie Speier, D-Calif., during an oversight hearing over the Department of Homeland Security’s social media surveillance efforts. 

But as the threat of Islamic terror attacks has diminished, the Department of Homeland Security has pivoted and recalibrated its reach, finding new political support for its growth.

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Why Are We in Niger?

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2023

A recent report in The Intercept suggests the Pentagon repeatedly misled Congress about the extent and the cost of the US presence in Niger. 

Congress must step up and exercise its oversight authority to end the counter-productive US military presence in Africa. Our military empire is bankrupting us and turning the rest of the world against us.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/september/11/why-are-we-in-niger/

Written by Ron Paul

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The July military coup in the west African country of Niger has once again brought attention to the fact that the US government runs a global military empire that serves Washington’s special interests, and not the national interest.

Before the coup made news headlines, most Americans – including many serving in Congress – had no idea the US government maintains more than 1,000 troops stationed on several US bases in Niger. But it’s even worse than that. A recent report in The Intercept suggests the Pentagon repeatedly misled Congress about the extent and the cost of the US presence in Niger. 

According to The Intercept, “in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of US Africa Command described Air Base 201 (in Niger) as ‘minimal’ and ‘low cost.’” In fact the US government has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the base since construction began in 2016.

So when did Congress declare war so as to legalize US military operations in Niger? They didn’t. But as Kelley Vlahos writes in Responsible Statecraft, US troops have been “training” the military in Niger since 2013 and the US government has constructed a number of military bases to “fight terrorism” in the country and region.

Does that mean that the Pentagon is operating in Niger under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) meant to track down those who attacked the US on 9/11? It’s a good question and thankfully one being asked by Sen. Rand Paul in a recent letter sent to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

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The Other 9/11

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2023

The Other 9/11

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Martin Luther King pointed out that the U.S. government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” While King’s memory has been honored with accolades, monuments, street names, and the like, I can’t help but wonder how many Americans have truly pondered his astute and discomforting observation about the U.S. government. After all, it seems to me that to be living under a government that is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is not something to be proud of or pleased with.

Today many Chileans might well be pondering King’s statement. That’s because today — 9/11 — is the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup that the U.S. government inspired and encouraged. It was a coup that left thousands of innocent people dead, including the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, two American citizens — Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi — and some 3,000 other innocent people. It also resulted in the brutal torture or rape of tens of thousands of other innocent people. That was followed by 17 years of one of the world’s most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships, not to mention the infamous secret international kidnapping, torture, and assassination ring called Operation Condor, which included the national-security establishments of the U.S., Chile, other rightwing Latin American military dictatorships. 

Of course, in the eyes of Pinochet, the Pentagon, and the CIA, the victims of all this violence were not innocent at all. In their eyes, they were nothing more than vermin, no different from the “gooks” that the Pentagon and the CIA were killing in Vietnam. Keep in mind that this was 1973, when the U.S. national-security establishment was losing its brutal war in Vietnam. 

What did that war have to do with the horrific violence inflicted by Pinochet’s goons against people in Chile? 

Everything!

You see, in the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, there was a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia — the Russia for whom a deep hatred has been inculcated into every American today, just as it was during the Cold War.

In fact, it’s rather ironic that whenever someone condemns the U.S. national-security establishment for its assassination of President Kennedy, he is smeared as a “conspiracy theorist.” Yet, what could be more ridiculous than the notion of an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia?

John Kennedy understood how ludicrous this conspiracy theory was. That’s was why he told his wife Jackie on the morning of his assassination that they were heading into “nut country” later that day. He was referring to an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News that perfectly reflected the mindset of the Pentagon and the CIA, including the accusation that JFK had “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine for the ‘Spirit of Moscow.’”

What Kennedy should have told Jackie is that it wasn’t just rightwing Dallas that was “nut country.” It was also the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that were “nut country.”

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Criminally Insane… America’s Top Diplomat Calls Depleted Uranium Munitions to Ukraine a ‘Housewarming Gift’

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2023

Busby’s scientific investigations in Iraq found atrocious levels of cancer and birth defects among communities where American and British forces heavily used uranium shells. Similar pathologies and environmental contamination have been recorded in former Yugoslavia and among NATO troops that were deployed there.

Criminally Insane… America’s Top Diplomat Calls Depleted Uranium Munitions to Ukraine a ‘Housewarming Gift’

By his own words, one can diagnose Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, as criminally insane. This week, America’s top diplomat was in Kiev for a two-day visit where he announced a new $ 1 billion aid package to the Ukrainian regime, including for the first time the American supply of depleted uranium shells.

This was Blinken’s fourth trip to Kiev since Washington’s proxy war against Russia escalated in February last year. The latest U.S. military aid package to the Neo-Nazi regime is the 46th such arms installment delivered by the Biden administration – courtesy of American taxpayers. A total of $43 billion has been disbursed over a period of 18 months.

Blinken sought to charm his Nazi hosts by calling the latest inventory a “housewarming gift”. He said it was a sign of commitment from the United States to support the Ukrainian regime for as long as it takes.

Polls show that a clear majority of U.S. citizens are opposed to the continued military aiding of Ukraine. So much for democracy!

Included in the latest aid package is the supply of depleted uranium shells. It is beyond grotesque that a high-ranking American official can find words of endearment for such munitions and the dangers being stoked with Russia.

Nauseating too was Blinken’s visit to cemeteries for Ukrainian troops killed during the conflict and his deluded nonsense that the Kiev regime was “making progress” in its counteroffensive against Russian forces. The three-month counteroffensive has been an unmitigated disaster for the NATO-backed Ukrainians. In the last three months, it is estimated that 66,000 Armed Forces of Ukraine have been killed – adding to a total military death toll on the Ukrainian side of 400,000 since Russia launched its intervention in that country on February 24, 2022. Russia’s intervention was prompted by years of NATO-sponsored aggression from the Kiev regime.

Blinken’s relishing of more arms to Ukraine while touring thousands of graves speaks of the odious, callous nature of NATO governments. The elitist Western regimes are totally unaccountable to their citizens in their pursuit of a proxy war against Russia to the “last Ukrainian”. The United States and its European accomplices are in cahoots with a corrupt Nazi-infested regime (headed by a token Jewish puppet president) in order to maintain a lucrative war racket for the Western military-industrial complex that lies at the diseased heart of Western capitalist economies.

The U.S. announcement of depleted uranium (DU) artillery missiles follows the British move to supply DU shells earlier this year. The Anglo-American rogue states, as usual, are working as a criminal double act.

Moscow condemned it as another reckless escalation in a conflict that threatens to spiral out of control into an all-out world war between nuclear powers. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has stated that Moscow considers the deployment of uranium-based munitions to be a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

The White House, Britain and Western media are claiming that DU shells are “harmless”. This is cynical and a heinous denial.

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Contra Watermelons

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2023

Or, should we force all people into machines, if we had them, that would redistribute IQ points from those who were deemed to have “too much” intelligence, to those deemed to have “too little?” This would appear to be a logical implication of “equity,” and yet our sense of justice recoils in horror from any such scenario.

https://walterblock.substack.com/p/contra-watermelons?utm_campaign=email-post&r=iw8dv&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Walter Block

[This article is a response to Paul Baer et al., “Greenhouse Development Rights: A Proposal for a Fair Global Climate Treaty,” Ethics, Place & Environment, volume 12, issue 3 (2009).]

There are not one but rather two schools of thought on the environment and its challenges. For want of better nomenclature, I shall characterize them as the watermelons and the free-market environmentalists.

The first is far more well-known than the second. Here, the solution to all problems arising from this source is more government intervention into the economy, more (green) central planning, more denigration of private-property rights, new discoveries of “market failures.”

Why call them “watermelons”? Because this fruit is green on the outside, but red on the inside. Advocates of this system are busybodies; their “philosophy” consists of do-gooding and ordering other people around: controlling property that does not belong to them, forcing others to cater to the latest political correctness emanating from who knows where. For a while, a long while, these people had hitched their intellectual wagon to the preeminent philosophy of the day, which promoted these goals: communism. But, then, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in 1991, with the dissolution of the USSR, socialism could no longer suit their purposes. A new vehicle was needed: ecology was chosen.

The second school of thought on these matters is free-market environmentalism (FME).[1] For adherents of the first view, this name is a contradiction in terms. In their view the marketplace is seen as the enemy of the planet and its flora and fauna. I was once in a debate with a professor of biology who espoused watermelonism, and when I mentioned FME, he burst out laughing. Nor was this a debater’s trick. He honestly thought it was outrageously funny.

It is the perspective of FME that all environmental problems stem from either lack of private-property rights, or from government regulation of laissez-faire capitalism, or from state control of resources. With economic freedom, all such challenges would either disappear outright, or become far more manageable.

The article by Baer is an example of watermelonism. Let us, then, mention some of its shortcomings.

Most egregious, this article speaks of “anthropogenic climate change” (emphasis added). Why is this objectionable? In the 1970s, the (then prewatermelon) green market critics were charging the capitalist system with creating global cooling. When the evidence did not appear to support this charge, they reversed field, and indicted free enterprise with global warming. But when one too many of their environmental conferences had to be cancelled due to freezing icy conditions, they changed yet once again. Now, it is climate change that is the enemy of all that is good and proper, not either cooling or warming.

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Musk Comes Under Fire for Preventing Ukraine Attack on Russia

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2023

Kyiv claims Elon Musk prevented a successful Ukrainian attack on Russia. However, the decision is consistent with SpaceX’s policy

CNN also noted that Musk laments having his technology involved in the war. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes,” Musk reportedly said to Isaacson.

We must attack anyone that doesn’t want war.

antiwar.com

by Kyle Anzalone

CNN reports that Elon Musk personally instructed SpaceX employees to disable Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on the Russian naval fleet in Crimea last year. SpaceX has spent millions of dollars of the company’s own money to help Kyiv’s military stay connected on the battlefield since the Russian invasion last year. However, the company draws a red line in participating in attacks with its technology.

CNN got the story from an advanced copy of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Musk. In Isaacson’s interpretation of the incident, Kyiv made an “emergency request” to SpaceX for Starlink to expand the reach of communications to Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. The clear implication was that Ukraine intended to launch an attack on the Russian naval fleet.

Isaacson says after Starlink denied Kyiv’s request, an explosive submarine “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.” Isaacson notes that Musk was contacted by top officials in Washington after the incident, but CNN did not report the nature of those discussions.

On Thursday, Musk gave his account of the potential Ukrainian attack. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

According to SpaceX’s terms of service, the decision not to authorize Ukraine’s emergency request is company policy and US law.

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Pentagon Misled Congress About U.S. Bases in Africa

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2023

A general failed to mention six U.S. outposts and described a quarter-billion dollar drone hub as “low-cost.”

Langley apparently failed to mention six so-called contingency locations in Africa, including a longtime drone base in Tunisia and other outposts used to wage U.S. shadow wars in Niger and Somalia.

Is there anywhere on the planet the US isn’t aiding and abetting war?

Intercept

Nick Turse

Since a cadre of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa.But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. “The Command also operates out of 12 other posture locations throughout Africa,” he said in his prepared testimony. “These locations have minimal permanent U.S. presence and have low-cost facilities and limited supplies for these dedicated Americans to perform critical missions and quickly respond to emergencies.”

Experts say that Langley misled Congress, downplaying the size and scope of the U.S. footprint in Africa. AFRICOM’s “posture” on the continent actually consists of no fewer than 18 outposts, in addition to Camp Lemonnier and Ascension Island, according to information from AFRICOM’s secret 2022 theater posture plan, which was seen by The Intercept. A U.S. official with knowledge of AFRICOM’s current footprint on the continent confirmed that the same 20 bases are still in operation. Another two locations in Somalia and Ghana were also, according to the 2022 document, “under evaluation.”

Of the 20, Langley apparently failed to mention six so-called contingency locations in Africa, including a longtime drone base in Tunisia and other outposts used to wage U.S. shadow wars in Niger and Somalia. The U.S. military has often claimed that contingency locations are little more than spartan staging areas, but according to the joint chiefs of staff, such bases are critical to sustaining operations and may even be “semi-permanent.”

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Mayor Johnson Says The Way To Grade Chicago Schools Is ‘How Much Money We Given Them’

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2023

“I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades…. My responsibility is not merely to just grade the system but to fund the system.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mayor-johnson-says-way-grade-chicago-schools-how-much-money-we-given-them

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

Monday, Sep 11, 2023 – 07:20 AM

Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,

“As a former educator and longtime employee of the Chicago teachers union, what grade would you give the current system and why?”

That question was put to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson during his appearance Thursday night at the Economic Club of Chicago.

Mayor Johnson at the Economic Club of Chicago

His answer:

“I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades…. My responsibility is not merely to just grade the system but to fund the system.

That’s how I am ultimately going to grade whether our public school system is working – based upon the investments we make to the people who rely on it.”

He offered nothing further about how to grade the schools or educational outcomes.

That answer was not an offhand comment taken out of context. It was a thoughtful answer that he explained. See for yourself. The question and answer start at the 47.3 mark in the video of his appearance.

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