CBDC's Explained - Where is Your Line in the Sand? - James Corbett Interview Part 2

Interviewer: Yep. Yep. OK. Well, speaking of control and oligarchic control, let's sag right into our next topic. And I'd like to talk about CBDCs. And I wonder if you can, you know, help the layman understand what's really going on here. I decided to go to the website of the Fed itself, the Federal Reserve, where they explained in frequently asked questions, what is a central bank digital currency? And when you read their explanation, it seems like it doesn't seem like too much is going on here. They say “a CBDC is a digital form of central bank money that is widely available to the general public. A CBDC would differ from existing digital money available to the general public because a CBDC would be a liability of the Federal Reserve, not of a commercial bank.” So it seems what we I mean, we basically we've had digital money for a long time now. Everybody's using it probably way more than we use paper. But this digital money comes from our bank. And so the correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is you have a you have a central bank, the Fed, which issues paper currency and digital to the banks. And we as the public are able to use paper currency. But as far as digital goes, it's not federal. It's just from our local bank. Is that correct?
Corbett: Yes, this is, I think, deliberately confusing. But there is a yeah, we could get into the weeds of it. But essentially, there is something called the split circuit monetary system. And the way to think about it is there are issuers and and users of money in two different circuits. One of them is the wholesale circuit, which is: the central bank, for example, in the United States is the Federal Reserve here in Japan, it would be the Bank of Japan issues a type of money within that circuit. And who are the users of that money? Well, that includes the commercial banks. They are depositors in the central bank and they have accounts at the central bank and their accounts are in this in this type of money that is circulating in that circuit. And what the commercial banks do then is they issue money into the retail circuit, which is a separate monetary circuit. And we are the users in the monetary in that monetary circuit along. I mean, there are different users here, but just for simplification's sake, we have accounts at the commercial banks. We do not have accounts at the central bank, but the commercial banks do have accounts at the central banks. So they are both issuers and users of money, different types of money. So that all that being clear as mud. What the point is, is that the only expressions of central bank liability, to use that phrase, that we in the general public have access to is the cash, which you will note when you pull out your dollar bill or your thousand yen note or whatever it is, it's a Federal Reserve note. It says Nippon Ginkgo on it, whatever it is, whatever country you're in, it's the central bank's actual expression of liability. They are the ones issuing that and printing it up. And so they are liable for those funds. The commercial bank deposits that we use, which is these days, most of what we use. And that includes, of course, the when you scan your debit card, when you're using Apple Pay, whatever it is, those are the commercial bank retail money that that is circulating around in the economy that are the deposits in our bank accounts at the commercial bank. So what they are proposing to do with CBDC is to create a completely, totally new form of money. And that should be stressed. This is not a minor detail. It is truly a new form of money. They want essentially digital cash, at least in the sense that this is a liability of the central bank. Now, here's the rub. There are many, many different ways that this can be implemented. There are many systems for doing this and many different ways that it could be done. But one of them that could happen is that: That means we have this central bank money. Well, I guess that means we have an account now at the central bank. And one way that they could do this, although I don't think they're going to, but it could happen that the central bank literally issues a wallet, an app that you download that will be your wallet for this new money. And every transaction will go through that wallet, which is essentially given to you by the central bank, monitored by the central bank. Every transaction is essentially being processed and seen by the central bank. That would be one way of implementing the CBDC. And that's kind of the ultimate nightmare. One hundred percent total control of this new form of money by a central bank in real time in the economy. As the head, the executive director of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central banks in Basel, Switzerland, said, boasted gleefully during an IMF livestream back in 2021. As it is today, we don't know what's happening in the cash world. Yes, these are expressions of central bank liability, but this hundred dollar bill is going around. We don't know who has it or where it's going. But when we have central bank digital currency, we'll know every single expression where it is at all times and who it's going through. And we can stop it from going through any particular person we don't want it to go through. So that is the ultimate nightmare.
Interviewer: Right. Now, James, couldn't they theoretically achieve the same thing by society just going to digital anyway? Because, I mean, I've seen stores and places where you can only pay in digital now and they can track that easily. So do they have to take this step?
Corbett: No, you're right in one sense, but in another sense. So what you're talking about with regards to cashless, like the store says no cash accepted or whatever. So we have to use our debit card, credit card, Apple Pay, whatever it is. But that is still commercial bank money. And at least as it exists right now, your bank, of course, knows about everything that's happening in your account. And so, yes, there is that degree of centralized control and oversight over what's happening with you. And your bank could, for example, say, you know, we don't want you as a customer anymore, you can't use our services. And we've increasingly seen that debanking trend going around. But this is sort of a step above that, an order above that, because the commercial banks, of course, are separate entities. I mean, maybe interlocking boards of directors and what have you, but at least are theoretically different corporations. And there are many of them and they compete with each other, etc. But the central bank, of course, is the one entity overall that controls the entire system and is technically, depending where you are and how it's set up, but like, for example, in the United States with the Federal Reserve, is technically independent of the government, although it is actually a creation of the Congress. So, you know, there's a lot of detail in there, but at any rate, it's not the government, but it is a centralized control point over which everything happening in the economy could be condensed. So your commercial bank doesn't know what's happening at commercial bank Y over here, let alone commercial bank C over here, commercial bank Q over there. They could talk to each other, they could share that information, but they don't have to. Whereas if it is done at the central bank level, literally every transaction, everything will be seen and will be manipulatable.
Interview: That's right. That's right. And of course, the fear not only that we lose our anonymity and our independence in our transactions, but that they could lower the boom and say, well, you know, you're not a good citizen, you haven't done this or that. I connected this, I don't know if this matches, but I have friends here in Japan. And one of my friends, the police here are notorious for making the driving test really difficult for foreigners who are over here. I kind of did this long ago before they really hammered down on this, but my friend has taken the driving test 16 times and he keeps failing and failing and failing. And I've driven with him around town and he drives better than I do. I passed one time and I was asking myself, what is going on here? Are they trying to discourage foreigners from living here? What's going on? And then I remember he has never paid his prefectural taxes. And I thought, I wonder if some way something got down because theoretically they could do that, right?
Corbett: This is exactly right. So the ultimate nightmare would be for a some sort of government connected entity to be able to essentially dictate where, when, why, and how you can spend and what money you can spend and in what amount on what purchases. And because there is really, I mean, the sky's the limit. There is no limit to the ways and the abilities that this would give a central bank to manipulate our behavior. And as one example of that, you could look back to what happened in the past few years where, for example, just as one example, Australia, France, other places had various forms of lockdown in which you were basically confined geographically to an area within a kilometer, five kilometers, whatever it is of your own house. And that's a pretty unwieldy thing to enforce in this day and age, but it's becoming much more enforceable, especially given the GPS tracking that is possible and combine that with QR codes, scanning to access different places on your phone that could be tied into a, say a vaccine passport and tied into social credit. And of course, tied into a digital currency so that your digital currency could be programmed so that if your phone detects that you are more than one kilometer from your house, you can't buy anything. Something along those lines. I mean, that's just one example of the many, many ways that this could be abused.
Interviewer: Right, right. And we shouldn't begin to think that the powers that be would not abuse their power. So James, do you make it a point to pay in cash whenever you can?
Corbett: I do, but I want to say living in Japan, that isn't actually, it doesn't seem as big a deal. At least not until the last few years. It's starting to become more common to see digital payments here in Japan, but still cash is king and no one will bat an eyelid if you try to pay basically for anything in cash. You could go to a convenience store and buy a stick of gum with a 10,000 yen note, about $100. And again, no problem. Here's your change. You could go to your bank and withdraw $50,000. Here it is. Have fun. No questions asked. You can purchase a car with cash, et cetera, et cetera. There's no problem with that. And I'm in the mindset, I guess because I left Canada 20 years ago, I'm still in the mindset of, well, that's not a big deal. But no, every time I travel anywhere, I start to notice actually that is increasingly unusual. I remember several years ago, closing out a bank account that I still had in Canada and obviously close it out. Well, just give me the cash from the account. It wasn't a lot of cash, but they still had to go through the security checks and the terrorism checks. And I had to sign over my life essentially to say, I'm not a criminal and I'm not using this for nefarious purposes just to get my own money, my own money. Going to England earlier this year, I took a little trip to go to a conference speaking in Bath. And it was truly culture shock for me to see the number of cashless only, no cash accepted, card only, electronic payments to the point where there were times in which I could not have completed a purchase in cash. There were certain things that I just could not have done without a card of some sort. And that to me, at least living in my Japan bubble, that's still shocking to me and something that I'm grateful for, but I also know that the time is limited in terms of our ability to do that.
Interviewer: That's right. The neighborhood where my family has a house in Japan, and this is true all over the country, it's suburban, but there's going to be also a lot of rice fields and this and that in the schools. There's always a stand somewhere along the road next to a rice field with farm products. You can always just go up and it's honor system, put a coin in the box and get what you want. I love it. Now, I used to teach business English here and I had this one group of very high level engineers. This company only hired from Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Keio, Waseda, that was it. These guys were sharp as a tack and all of them, all eight of them, almost always paid digitally. And some of them were down to the paying with their Apple watch. And I thought, that's just too close to the hand where they're going to put the chip in. And I thought, you guys, you're so brilliant, but you're so trusting of the system and you have no fear that things could go wrong. I mean, even if you haven't read Orwell, certainly you've seen maybe Hollywood movies with this theme in it. They're not worried at all. Very trusting.
Corbett: Yeah. Unfortunately, that speaks to what we have definitely seen in recent decades, let alone recent years. I mean, you could look back to questions about 9-11 and the fact that most certified engineers and professionals had no problem with the destruction of the towers. Oh, of course, that's what we would expect it to look like, despite the fact that that is self-evidently not the case. But also, of course, in the past few years, the number of medical professionals who have gone along with the craziness and the insanity of this gigantic medical experiment of the new injections being marketed as vaccines, et cetera, as if this is all normal and anyone questioning anything about myocarditis or what have you there, you're crazy. Again, that speaks to the fact that sometimes the most easily indoctrinable and programmable and propagandizable, to coin a term, are the professionals and the people who you would expect that they are very smart, very intelligent, capable people, except when it comes to essentially thinking outside of the box that they have been steeped into or placed into over their years of indoctrination.
Interviewer: Well, you don't move too high up the corporate ladder if you're outside the box, right? I'm originally from Seattle. I still have many family and friends in Seattle, but I've been living in Montana for a while now. That dynamic plays out. All the of my brother's friends and the people I know in Seattle, they are on board, I'll tell you. I go out to Montana and we have conversations like this all the time. Now, so I've got right here, James, we're talking about cash. I've got a 20 with Jackson on it. By the way, are you a fan of Jackson?
Corbett: Some of his things, yeah. I killed the bank. It was pretty good.
Interviewer: I killed the bank. Right!
Corbett: Trail of tears, not so good.
Interviewer: Not so much, right? Not so much. Yeah. But what I wanted to say was there's something written on every Federal Reserve note down in the left corner. Do you know what I'm going to get at down here? It says, this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. I looked up the definition of legal tender in it and I'll just whip the quote out. Legal tender. I got it right here. “Legal tender is anything recognized by law as a means to settle a public or private debt or meet a financial obligation, including tax payments, contracts, legal fines, damages, et cetera.” That means, or at least that should mean, that if you're dealing in dollars, if you're not trading asparagus for eggs and you're actually dealing in dollars in your business, you're supposed to take this. That should be the law, correct?
Corbett: Theoretically, yeah.
Interviewer: Theoretically. But years ago, when I remember Southwest Airlines was the first airlines that said no more cash payments on the airplane. You're going to get your bottle of Jack Daniels or your sandwich and you have to do it digitally. What do you think? Should we enforce this? What would you think about a community or a city or a small town that said, if you run a business here, you got to take cash?
Corbett: I want to say that that is being proposed in some municipalities in certain jurisdictions. You're right. I think every different jurisdiction essentially has its own legal loopholes and reasons why a business owner can refuse this legal tender, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, one tiny step, I think it would be a tiny step in some sense, but a giant leap in other senses, would be simply to enforce that rule. Yeah. Hey, it says legal tender. You have to take this as payment of any service or any product. And that would be one way of at least. But then again, then again, OK, so let me be my own devil's advocate. I don't want to be in a system or in a part of a system that requires some sort of law enforcement to come in and guns pointed at some business owner to say, you must take this or you must not take this or whatever it is, because the same power that we enable in that type of legislation is the same power that could then be wielded by our political enemies once they get into political office to say, that's it. We're striking down the legal tender law. Now the legal tender law is you must pay in CBDC. Oh, no. Now they've used our trick against us. What I really want to see fundamentally as a solution to this is the cultivation of the idea that, hey, we want this type of, if not central bank notes, at least some type of physical whatever it is, currency of some sort, local exchange currency, community currency, whatever, as the type of thing that we use to build up our own local economy. And I will support those businesses that will accept this. And I don't want to support those people who don't want this. I want to build up the people who are doing this because they understand this is important and are on board with me. I want to build up our community of resistance as people who are thriving rather than forcing people at a barrel of gun to do what I want them to do.
Interviewer: That's right. That's right. OK, that's shocking that you would you would propose a peaceful change in thinking over a use of force. But anyway, what else can we do, James? I love your website because there's you're always talking about solutions, always solutions. OK, so besides changing our mindset about using cash, what other things can we do to to slow down or prevent this switch over to all digital?
Corbett: All right. Well, OK, so if people are interested specifically in the monetary issue, and I think they should be. And I think at this point, people probably people are waking up to it. I did do an entire podcast, a presentation looking at the concept of survival currency and the many, many different options that are on the table for people who are interested in starting to explore different ways that they can transact with people around them in ways that are not as easily controlled. So I think that that's probably in people's interest. But also, yes, we have to start thinking about the entire infrastructure of control that's going into place right now, including such things as the the vaccine passports that are now starting to morph and manifest as digital ID of various sorts. And I think that will be the next the next layer of control that is added to this control structure that is being built up right now. And I think digital ID is really the nexus point at which so many of these different ideas and agendas come together. I think the CBDC world is certainly, what they want to foist on us. But without the digital ID in place, I'm not sure it will be complete. I think that might be the capstone they need in order to build on that particular pyramid. So I think digital ID might be something that people should really be thinking about right now and how much they want to step into that world and what they could be doing to resist that particular form of digital enslavement, because that really is the nexus point. Because unfortunately, I see the next stage, the next iteration of control being something along the lines of some cataclysmic and catalyzing event online. Can you imagine if there was some sort of major internet disruption because of North Korean hackers or whatever boogeyman you come up with? Well, okay, now we need to start cracking down on the internet in the exact same way they rolled out the Patriot Act after 9-11. We know there is an I-Patriot Act waiting in the wings ready to go in the event of the cyber 9-11. And we know this because Lawrence Lessig talked about it on stage in Half Moon Bay, California at a tech conference in 2008. He said he had talked to Richard Clark, former counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush. And he said, yes, the I-Patriot Act is there. It's waiting. It's just we need a cyber 9-11 to essentially foist it on the public. And we know that's coming. And part of that will be the digital ID to get you on the internet. And I think that is a key part of this agenda, because at the point at which people are completely de-anonymized and completely, essentially giving up their biometric details in order to get online, which increasingly is important if not essential in everyday life, is the point at which all of these agendas start to manifest. And you can have the complete digital gulag in place just as long as you get that. And I think that's something we need to be concerned about and preparing for.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, certainly it's important to use cash whenever you can. How important is it to leave our smartphone at home or go with a flip phone and avoid it completely? I remember when Japan started implementing onerous procedures at the airport to get out and you had to have an app on your phone. And my plan was just to not even have a phone. And they're like, well, we'll provide you with a phone. But finally, when I got to the airport, when I returned from the States over here, they'd sort of just given up. It was just too much. It was too complicated. And I wonder if part of the reason is because enough people said, I don't even deal with that. Do you advocate getting rid of the phone?
Corbett: Right. I think it is important for us to be drawing our lines in the sand and to at least think about the lines that we are not willing to cross. And there are many examples that I can think of. I note with some dismay to this day, I still note the dismay with which 2020 was used as the rollout for the digitization of the postal service here in Japan to the point where I was sending post parcels all around the world, sending out DVDs that people would order from me. Of course, what do you do? You just slap a label on an envelope, you pay for the postage and done. No, no, no, no, not anymore. No. Now you have to register with an account with the Japanese postal system. And then you have to print out their specially designed labels and blah, blah, blah. You have to use the app or use your printer at home. What is this digital layer they're putting on top of the act of sending a parcel to someone? Why? Why on earth about this? I was at the bank recently and was trying to do some basic transaction. I can't even remember what it was. They were trying to get me. “No, no. Can you just sign up for the app? Just download the app on your phone and then you can just do this.” I was trying to order a new card because my card was worn out. And they were saying, oh, just order it from the app. I don't have an app. Well, just download the app. And so I'm like, “no, I don't have a phone. Just give me the card.” Why is this suddenly something that I need this extra digital layer in order to do? So I think we have to start drawing those lines and start understanding that this is now a fight. And if we don't carve out that space for, no, I don't have the app, I don't have the phone, no, make this happen without that. If we do not carve out that space, it won't exist. Because of course, of course, they're just going to keep pushing and pushing to digitize everything. And this goes back to something that I point out often, which is the opening paragraph of “Propaganda” by Edward Bernays in 1928. He wrote, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.” Edward Bernays, 1928, father of PR, Propaganda.
Interviewer: 1928. And if he could have only imagined the fact that we've got these screens in front of us 24- 7, constantly, constantly spewing this propaganda.
Corbett: Right. And what does it go back to? It goes back to the organized habits and opinions of the masses. If your habit is to put your phone in your pocket wherever you go, what does that say about the way in which you are being controlled? If you cannot change your habits, then you are not in control of yourself. There is an unseen force that is the invisible government that is ruling over you.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'd like to end on that note. James, it's always wonderful to be with you. Thank you very much for the interview today.
Corbett: Thank you for taking the time.Show more

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