Below, you’ll find the Reasoning & Rationale to what we call a Bill-Request. Once certain milestones are met, as defined HERE, lawyers will be called upon to draft what will then become a Bill-Demand to Congress and the President.

First Published in 2015

On July 7 2014 the CEO of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, wrote what he foresaw for the future of finance, predicting that paper money, i.e. cash, would “cease to exist” and end up a relic relegated to (quote) “a museum”.

Now, ask any CEO of any bank if he/she too would like to see that, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one who wouldn’t, for the reasons outlined below. And, since bankers have academics and think tanks on payroll, and count editorial boards of marquee-name newspapers and government officials among their agents and proxies, we’ve now got ‘intellectuals’, the mainstream media, and public $ervants climbing on board the “Trash All Cash” bandwagon.

The implications to cash being trashed are many. But let’s start with one that ought to hit a nerve:

For those of you who work at bank branches, or in services that support bank branches (janitors, electricians, technicians, etc), please be aware that the elimination of cash (and cash equivalents, like checks) will spell the closure of 97,000 bank branches across America, and destine the millions of workers that work or serve them to mass layoffs.

With branch jobs and their wages & benefits eradicated, with branch rents & leases saved from expense, and branch land & building sold to the highest bidder, banks will experience windfall profits. Means many billions more in bonuses to those who made it all possible, i.e. the bankers in the executive ranks.

So here’s to quelling and countering the calls – from bankers, their puppets in academia etc, and their revolving-door stooges in government — for a “cashless society” wherein all monies of the people would be electronic and at the mercy of banks, be it even for bailouts of banks by depositors if required.

Which brings us to a second implication, this one affecting those of you lucky enough to have more than the FDIC insured limit of $250,000 to your name. Remember: every dollar in excess of $250K that you have in the banking system, is at the mercy of the bank if it’s allowed a bail-in, or is at the mercy of senior creditors of the bank if it’s allowed to go under. And whether you have those excess dollars in one bank, or multiple banks, is irrelevant because the FDIC’s insurance applies per account holder, not per account. In July 2008, some 10,000 customers of California bank IndyMac would see more than $500 million of their savings — that was uninsured above the $100,000 FDIC limit back then — go up in flames in the wake of IndyMac’s failure.

Next, imagine this possible episode in an existence without paper money: Your wedding anniversary is coming up. You want to buy your wife a watch that won’t bust the budget. So, you plunk down $1,500 for a very dainty Swiss-made Movado, paying electronic money for it. But, then, the transaction is denied — not for insufficient funds or anything like that, but by the bank working in cahoots with the government. Why? Because you owe some money to the IRS, an alleged liability that you’ve rightly and credibly disputed through your accountant. But that’s not good enough. “Until the dispute’s resolved, it’ll be food and medicine and bare-essential purchases only, buddy!”

Implication 3: If all money were electronic, your every move will be trackable. Your every tip and transaction, would be trackable. Whether those tips went to Candy, Cherry, or Trixie, or to Fabio for that matter, won’t matter — someone watching will know you were misty-eyed for whoever it was.

Basically, your every move is traceable in a transactional universe that’s 100% electronic. Your money becomes your court-ordered bank-ordered ankle-bracelet, pretty much.

Having exterminated cash and made it impossible for you to pull your money out of banks as cash, bankers and their protectors in DC and NYC officialdom next want to implement and effect “negative interest rates”. If and when this happens, depositors then pay the banks to hold their deposits, with perhaps the idea of Grandma’s 5-year CD ‘earning’ a negative interest rate being next.

Yes, the banks are that bankrupt now that they want you to pay them to take your money in as a deposit. Never mind that the banks also get to lend your deposit out to someone else — a borrower — in the form of a loan at an elevated rate of interest, to collect the difference. (In that regard, consider the following tweet in July 2017 by one of our candidates for the U.S. Congress: Fed hiked rate 0.75% in past 6 mos. Yet customers got little or no rate-raise on their deposits at banks. That’s $90 billion Wall Street did NOT pay Main Street in interest.)

There are other implications to cash being trashed, some of them downright frightening, like how money you thought you had can be made to disappear — vanish into the electronic netherworld, never to be recovered. For starters, there’s Recommendation 31 in the Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies that states:

“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts.”

(More on that later.)

International Cyber-Warfare, something that’s bound to increase as geopolitical tensions and financial fallouts intensify, presents an additional front of risk. Malicious attacks initiated by Chinese and Russian agents, intent on destabilizing the U.S. economy, can wreak havoc on the electronic records of bank balances of private American citizens. If the incursion were to penetrate the records systems of multiple banks, and enter next the databases of backups of those records, all those affected — potentially millions of people — may never recover their savings, CD’s or 401(k)s. (And, no, your monthly statement or teller receipt or ATM printout will not be enough to convince your bank to give you your money back.)

An Electromagnetic Pulse Attack would be infinitely more damaging.

Wealth Management Experts will tell you — at least the smartest ones will — that you must have a plan to protect against financial cyber-warfare. They’ll tell you to come with a number you think you’ll need to survive a very extended (if not extremely prolonged) blackout of your digital assets, and then advise you to put that number into cash, gold, real estate, vintage cars, collectible art, and other hard assets, including stock and bond certificates NOT held in “street name” by your broker-dealer.

Of course, if you don’t have the kind of money Wealth Management clients do, then — denied of cash — you’re totally screwed.

Cash-tip dependents come from various walks of life. They can be waiters, bartenders, valet drivers, and hairdressers, fruit and vegetable sellers, trinket vendors; they can also be cash-transporting armored vehicle personnel, and other armed security personnel protecting banks and supermarkets. In the absence of a cash-based economy, you too could be totally screwed.

Powerful Voices for the extermination of cash & coin:

Larry Summers, chief economic adviser to Barack Obama, Secretary of the Treasury to Bill Clinton before that, and a big earner on Wall Street in-between, in a Nov 8 2013 speech to a conference of the International Monetary Fund which (by the way) is Grand Central Station for bailouts of international banks:

“Imagine a situation where natural and equilibrium interest rates have fallen significantly below zero…” [Problem is, the Fed cannot cut the nominal rate below zero because people will choose to hoard money — as cash under the mattress, for example — instead of putting it in the bank.] “There are a couple of ways we could attack this… We could move to a cashless society where all money is electronic. This would make it impossible to hoard cash outside the bank, allowing the Fed to cut interest rates to below zero…”

Larry Summers, known for spinning back and forth through the revolving door so much that he’s probably got the door named after him, is essentially calling for banks being allowed to charge interest, instead of pay interest, to depositors. As in, “you gotta pay us, to give us your money!”And — predictably — other limousine liberals and Ivory Tower elites piled up in support of Summers’ idea of negative interest rates, under the pretext (and a sly one, at that) that interest in the negative would translate to less saving and more spending by the masses, as if most Americans had money left over to save nowadays at any rate of interest.

Need we remind these inhabitants living far beyond the orbit of Main Street that:

Asked if they could come up with just $2000 in 30 days without selling personal possessions, one-half of Americans said no.

Recent Census data would reveal almost one-half of Americans as either “poor” or “low income”.

1-in-4 US households are at zero or sub-zero net worth.

More than half the nation’s workers were living paycheck to paycheck.

“One way to get there would be to reconstruct our whole monetary system — say, eliminate paper money and pay negative interest rates on deposits,” wrote liberaldom’s lion,Paul Krugman, winner of the Sveriges Riksbanks pris för ekonomisk — the Swedish central bank funded prize for Economics.

Krugman’s idea was almost as good as the one pushed by Roger Myerson (also a winner of the Sveriges Riksbanks pris för ekonomisk in 2007 in the year before Krugman won) who would — in a dissertation entitled “A Model of Moral-Hazard Credit Cycles” — write:

“In recessions, a scarcity of trusted financial intermediaries limits investment and reduces employment. Under such conditions, taxing workers to subsidize bankers may increase employment enough to make the workers better off… In this sense, a tax on poor workers to subsidize rich bankers may actually benefit the workers, as the increase of investment and employment can raise their wages by more than the cost of the tax.” (Emphasis, ours.)

Anyway, with calls for a cashless society and negative rates, it appeared Krugman has firmly subscribed to the bankers’ worldview. A cheerleader par excellence of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy and asset purchase programs, Krugman (somehow) even got himself tapped by the City University of New York to conduct a two-semester study of inequality — yes, inequality — in return for $225,000 or $25,000 a month, an offer the Princeton professor and New York Times blogger deemed (quote) “remarkably generous.” Indeed. Especially given how instrumental — and, in fact, dead-central — the Fed’s programs had been (and continue to be) at widening the economic divergence there’s been between the have’s and have-not’s of America since the Fed went overdrive into pulling the banks out of their deathbeds with dose after dose of monetary adrenaline.

Opinion of Willem Buiter, Chief Economist for Citigroup, as reported by Bloomberg news, under the title “Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time To Eliminate Cash” …

The world’s central banks have a problem. When economic conditions worsen, they react by reducing interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. But, as has happened across the world in recent years, there comes a point where those central banks run out of room to cut — they can bring interest rates to zero, but reducing them further below that is fraught with problems, the biggest of which is cash in the economy… Why have your money on deposit at a negative rate that reduces your wealth when you can have it in cash and suffer no reduction? Cash therefore gives people an easy and effective way of avoiding negative nominal rates. The solution: abolish currency and tax any that’s in existence.

Another mercenary in the posse to outlaw cash, is Blythe Masters. Ms. Masters headed up JPMorgan’s Global Commodities Group at one time, and is alleged to have misled investigators inquiring into the bank’s trading practices in electricity markets (i.e. manipulating them for the benefit of the bank at the expense of consumers). A US energy regulator’s enforcement staff also alleged that Ms. Masters had “knowledge and approval” of the trading schemes underway and that she had “falsely denied under oath her awareness of the problems.” In 2015, we learned that Blythe Masters, then CEO of Digital Asset Holdings (read: no cash), was heading up an effort to assemble a universal cashless construct in coordination with interested parties in the U.S. Federal Reserve and at a number of U.S. Government agencies.

The idea of banks controlling every dime and dollar of your finances, and in effect owning you, took another wrong turn in 2015. With a great many systemic banks in the Eurozone zombiefied to a point of no return, on Aug 23 2015 the European Union’s leading business news source — the Financial Times — put out an editorial, to perhaps breathe a bit of life back into the undead, entitled: The case for retiring another ‘barbarous relic’ — could a world without cash make for a much-improved economy?

In the school of thought being increasingly espoused by bankers, their footsoldiers and their mouthpieces, all private individuals in the general public should surrender their privacy, relinquish it to become sort of a ‘model citizen with electronic-money tracking device attached.’ And to ensure you remain that model citizen, all your money must be in their control, and if and when necessary ‘theirs to keep.’

By voting in support of this measure, to NOT Trash Cash, you’re basically telling Morgan’s Gorman that you’d much rather see him erected in a museum instead.

You’ve just read the short description to the Reasoning & Rationale for this Bill-Request. If that’s enough for you to vote in support of it, please do. If there’s more you’d like to have to make up your mind, then you’ll find the long description HERE.