The video is a little under an hour and mostly dwelt on hw hard/easy it would be for the Federal Reserve to convert to a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which would pave the way for a social credit score system. Knowing what to look for, i.e., the steps that would have to be taken, and the mechanisms that are already in place is good information to have.

This leads into a revealing discussion about the IRS. some of which I had previously heard about in general terms. The details Barnes provides are horrifying.

The Rebel Capitalist posits a conspiracy theory (his term) that don't sound all that bonkers to people like me who are becoming increasingly skeptical about the trustworthiness of our systems. (I think he actually said he had a couple of conspiracy theories but I apparently only took notes about one)

Finally, Barnes talks about the legality and Constitutionality of the Trump indictment that segues into a discussion of the "corrupt, incompetent elites" ruling the world and where that has led in the past.

I've inserted approximate time stamps here and there for those who may want to fast forward to a particular discussion.

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CBDC

2:35

Barnes and RC submitted FOIA requests to the Federal Reserve that will likely turn into a lawsuit. The original FOIA was for internal communications, correspondence, emails. notes, etc. on their plans to implement a CBDC. They received a response that the Fed couldn't find the documents and couldn't do a keyword or subject search so they did a new FOIA request on how the Fed organizes. indexes and archives documents. They finally produced 45 pages of gobbledy gook that they were able eventually to decipher and that shows the Fed does in fact organize, index, archive and digitize documents according to subject and keywords. They're using this information to file additional FOIA requests.

The Fed has made public statements as to legal limits on whether they could at this moment actually do a CBDC so they want to see their internal memoranda and correspondence on that.

The Fed's website says it's illegal for them to interact or do business with individuals which would make it almost impossible for them to implement CBDC because individuals would have to have an account with the Fed, i.e., be on the Fed's balance sheet.

6:38

The Fed has used this legal limitation in the past to create a barrier to banks and institutions trying to form accounts at the Federal Reserve when they don't want them; there are two pending applications to be a full reserve bank instead of a fractional reserve bank; having a Federal Reserve account is what enables these entities to do transactions with other banks. The Fed does everything in their power to prevent this because they're there to prop up the existing banking sysem and select, politically preferred, politically privileged banks, not to facilitate an effective and efficient monetary system.

The prohibition on individuals setting up accounts with the Fed is statutorily driven, the Fed is given no authority to provide direct access to the Federal Reserve system to any individual, period. Only a licensed, chartered, approved financial institution can be granted access. This is why they previously admitted they can't do a CBDC without Congress changing the law. They may use a manufactured crisis as a pretext for changing the law, a first step that people need to be alert to.

9:45

Re: Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz proposing legislation that would ban a CBDC, the concern is that as banks fail people may be lured to "move your account to the Fed" without realizing this is actually a CBDC, then find themselves with a social credit score 6 months later. - Barnes thinks what DeSantis and Cruz are doing is political posturing, especially DeSantis because of the limits on what a state government can do. Texas is talking about developing their own gold-backed currency but politically and legally it's meaningless because state governments can't do much about the monetary system. which is effectively federalized in the US.

If they were serious about CBDC they would be laser-focused on the Fed, they'd have broader legislation to take away the things that a CBDC could most problematically do like surveillance, sharing information with the state, all the things that go into the legal structure of a social credit system, ban those things. Ban that from even being aggregated by a private actor in a centralized location. They're not doing this so either they don't fully understand the issue or they're just looking for donations, polls, something to talk about to the press.

13:35

Focusing on the social credit score - in order for them to implement something like this, people would not only have to have an account with the Fed or the Treasury, but they would also point of sale software would have to be changed. People tend to think of a CBDC as though it's programmable money, as though somehow the software that's now being used can recognize not only that you bought something at Chipotle, but that what you bought was a steak burrito. Right now, your bank only knows that you bought something from a specific vendor and the amount of the transaction. New point of sale software would be required at the merchant level to give the central planners that detailed data they need. If you go to the gas station, did you spend $20 on water or on diesel fuel? Because they would impact your social credit score differently.

Does the federal government currently have the ability to require a business at a local level to use some sort of point of sale software to plug into this network, to force them to do that by threatening to withhold their business license?

Barnes points out that they have no authority with the business licensing, but that the legal means they could use is the IRS, the tax system. The IRS is still the central data gathering source. About 5 years ago they started incorporating Peter Thiel's technology company Palantir; the IRS still hasn't been given full Palantir authority, it's selective where they're applying it. They focused initially on the employment context and independent contractor context. It was clear that where they were focusing would be particularly useful to enforcement of some kind of total surveillance system, and that's effectively what a CBDC is, it combines the capacity of a control system with surveillance.

What they could do is force real time disclosures using some kind of software to enforce reporting requirements, telling merchants this simplifies and streamlines things so they don't have to worry about whether it's under or over a certain amount orwhen you have to disclose, etc. The IRS could use the threat of tax enforcement to get compliance.

What people need to look out for is the dollar assets of individuals and entities in the real economy being moved to the Fed's balance sheet; and then for some sort of federal push to encourage or force businesses to change their point of sale software to something that adds that surveillance component.

The PayPal requirment was never about tax evasion, it was always about control, this was admitted in a book called Admissions of a Tax Collector [The book is actually Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey, https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Tax-Collector-Mans-Inside/dp/0060555602/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1681455174&sr=8-1].

The author points out that we can just print money so there's no need for a tax collection system, something that IRS commissioners and the Fed have said in public statements over the years. Their argument to continue the tax system was "because of the control." He said that with a few keystrokes he could know everything about your life.

They create tax deductions so you rat yourself out, e.g., your political and charitable donations including your church (religious affiliation), deductions for your kids, etc. Where you spend your money tells people who you are and what you're about.

It's not a coincidence that Obama made the IRS the enforcement mechanism for Obamacare. The political pretext was "we're going to call it a tax so we can call the mandate legal" but that wasn't the real reason.

Medical records and the IRS

Ten years ago Barnes represented a client who ran a medical records clearinghouse. They were having their entire medical record database seized by the IRS in the name of enforcing the mandate.

The IRS was gathering and centralizing everyone's medical records. Barnes even found medical records of Korean government officials. They seized 60 million medical records (of?) 10 million Americans. In order to confirm the information was what it was Barnes had to review these medical records, a special HIPAA provision allowed him to do this.

The records he reviewed had every judge in the state of California, every major league baseball player, every movie producer and screenwriter and director. So for example, for this movie producer, not just that they were seeing a shrink but what they were seeing the shrink for; what their family was going for - sex addiction, drug treatment. Whether certain baseball players had hidden injuries.

22:22

Whether certain actors had secret heart problems that made them unbondable; which movie directors had a secret foot fetish, you name it. Barnes called it J. Edgar Hoover's wet dream of a blackmail file.

Individuals may disclose a lot of that detail themselves (to the medical provider?) but more and more they're gathering that information from third parties for 1099 purposes in the guise of needing to know how to "classify" the amounts. In the medical records context, they do this for coding purposes - to prove "reasonableness and necessity" in case either an insurance company or the government second-guesses a bill. In order to enforce the mandate, all the records were going to the IRS. They have everyone's medical records for the past 10 years.

The two suits Barnes filed stopped them from getting it to the scale they wanted to at the time. Their payback for ratting out the IRS for what they were doing was to put his client under massive criminal investigation for 5 years.

Combine those tax and financial records with the information they're gathering from Facebook and people's social media activities - Barnes can buy a database right now that gives him 50 data points on a person, what they said on Twitter, on Facebook, in a public space, what magazines they subscribe to. There's a reason they track you on the internet, that information is being sold to third parties. He's legally purchased databases from private vendors that he uses this for jury selection.

So tax, financial, these third party databases and medical records. The IRS can already get your bank records but you have to be notified. There's a case before the Supreme Court right now where they're asking for approval to gather bank records without notifying you.

If they create or have already created a social credit score system they could implement and enforce it through a CBDC. There are technical components they would need to implement that require revisions to the law.

25:45

You have to identify the pressure points, it's too overwhelming if you try and tackle the whole thing. So we need to be hyperfocused on this individual Fed accounts (balance sheets) thing and with this point of sale software.

26:08 promotional break about an upcoming conference in Orlando where a number of familiar names, including Barnes, will be presenters.

People have asked why they took out Signature Bank when they probably didn't have to, why did they let a bank as big and prominent as SVB collapse when they could have done a half dozen things to keep them afloat. You honestly need people to have doubts in the banking system to get them to beg the government to offer this alternative [CBDC], without full cognizance of what it actually is. They'll do it through some form of manufactured crisis and people need to pay attention because the ultimate control system is the CBDC.

As Kissinger said, if you control the food, you control the population; if you control the oil, you control continents; if you control the money, you control the world.

Here Barnes points out that Putin is saying, "maybe not always." He's pushing back in his own way about what the Russia-Ukraine fight is really all about. You have a country that has tried to stay out of the dollar-driven monetary system as much as possible going back 20 years. What looks like a military fight over an old ethnic geographic conflict is really a geopolitical fight over globalist control versus nationalist independence.

30:03

Conspiracy theory from RC

How do you know there's not already a CBDC. How do you know that your account is with Bank of America, say, and not already at the Fed. Going back to SVB and Signature Bank, isn't it odd that although we only have FDIC up to $250k, the Fed said every single depositor is going to be made whole. The conspiracy theory is this - maybe they had to make every depositor whole because there's no way the depositor could take a haircut, i.e., their account is already at the Fed.

Barnes says this relates to Jeff Snyder's thesis of the eurodollar system (see the bottom of this post for more on this). If you've had a system that's been operating in the shadows, where money is actually not being issued by central banks anymore but by an international cartel of banks that are effectively, almost secretly in control of our monetary system, at least from the public purview, how did they do that?

The technological revolution created the opportunity for them to shift to a ledger-driven system that could easily accomplish exactly what you're talking about. Half the time it's obvious the system doesn't even know what's on whose books. Why do you have repo problems suddenly pop up over and over again? It suggests that even these banks, these thieves, don't trust one another.

RC talked about something Bret Weinstein was saying the other day. It's his base case that Covid was actually discovered around September 2019, around the time of the Chinese military games. That's when we had the repo spike and the yield curve inverted. A lot of people say the yield curve got lucky that time because there's no way the curve could have predicted we'd have Covid and therefore a government-induced recession due to the lockdowns and whatnot. So maybe the actions of the yield curve was the result of the information about Covid going to the insiders.

Barnes recalled RC pointing out like 2 years ago that someone was betting in the market that there would be Fed rate cuts that summer, that based on where certain tell risks were popping up someone was taking some big gamble positions. At the time he just thought that was insane, inflation was gettng going and it was clear that rate cuts would be a political problem for the Fed and yet here we are now where everyone thinks there will be Fed rate cuts by this coming summer.

It's clear that some people have inside information, this goes back to 9/11, whoever just magically decided to short airline stocks two days before. it was one of the biggest airline shorts in history. Okay, maybe somebody just got incredibly lucky but usually there's somebody greedy who's part of the scam of the system or they know something. Their actions tip you off that something's coming so it's always helpful to pay attention to those cues and clues in the market.

34:33

The Trump indictment

We're now an honorary Latin American country. We always associated third world countries with places where they criminally prosecute their leading political opponent.

The US has never before indicted a former president and has never indicted the leading political opponent of the incumbent administration. Not only is New York going after Trump, Georgia is looking at doing the same, as is DC and the Biden administration directly.

The former gun dealer Victor Bout that we exchanged for the WMBA player. Putin knows his game. He (Putin?) was out there yesterday saying he thinks Trump is seriously at risk of assassination, so that's the level of talk you're getting internationally. They see these cases that have never happened in America before, that America used to mock when it happened in other countries. There's a documentary on Navalny. who's like the Lyndon LaRouche of Russia. We pretended he was this leading opponent, the documentary got an Oscar. And here we are actually indicting the incumbent's leading political opponent.

Historically it's without precedent, it's very much crossing the Rubicon, of weaponizing the entire American legal process for political purposes. Which has been happening at multiple levels but now we see it happening in a case that's legally, Constitutionally, factually very weak and politically not very appetizing to the American public.

It's factually weak because it relies upon testimony from an admitted fraudster and perjurer, disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen.

Legally, it's outside the 5-year statute of limitations, it happened more than 6 years ago. It's also legally deficient because you're politically protected under the 1st amendment from campaign laws being applied to you in such a way that they would illicitly burden your speech.

Trump can spend as much as he wants on his own campaign, it can't be limited and he can't be criminally punished for doing so, which is effectively what they're trying to do here. They're trying to say he wanted to influence the 2016 election so he spent a bunch of money reimbursing Michael Cohen for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels. That's all legal, it doesn't violate any campaign finance laws. And then the law requires intent to defraud but the only person defrauded was Trump, who was the victim of an extortion scheme.

Constitutionally, there's many problems. Selective prosecution; due process violations in terms of venue abuse, grand jury abuse. But the big one is the impeachment clause in the Constitution, which says that you can only remove a president by impeachment and conviction; only when you've done that and he's an ex-president can you indict, try and sentence him. There is no map in the Constitution for a local prosecutor to be able to weaponize their criminal justice power, otherwise an ex-president would be at the whim of any small town prosecutor anywhere in the country. If such a path were legal and Constitutional, it would have been tried with many of our presidents throughout our history. Trump's second impeachment trial in the Senate happened after he had left the presidency.

Constitutionally, none of these indictments can go forward without going through the House and Senate. They would do that except they know they don't have the votes in the Senate to convict. So they're trying to jeopardize our Constitutional framework by weaponizing the legal system in the precise way the Founders were trying to prevent.

Why are they doing this if they know the case is going to fall on its face and it's going to garner Trump lots of good PR that increases his chances to become president? Because they don't recognize the latter part. There's a lot of confession through projection with a lot of these folks so they tend to project their own crimes and fears onto others You look at the things they're trying to go after Trump for, they're things Biden or Hillary Clinton are actually guilty of. Payment for the Steele dossier that contained fake information and was laundered through the FBI and CIA was disguised as legal fees on her FEC filing. So what Trump is accused of is exactly what Clinton did.

Then there were all the allegations that Trump's family was involved in corruption overseas - that's what Hunter Biden did on a regular basis.

Then the classified documents - Biden had them back to when he was a Senator. And it appears he was using that as part of the access that he was selling through his son to enrich his whole family.

They also confess their fears. In their world, if the government came and threatened them with jail time they would do whatever the system asked them to do. So they always think either that the public will react negatively to Trump or that Trump will capitulate. But it's both his virtue and his vice that he's unmoveable.

Barnes thinks some people promised DeSantis Trump would be indicted and that would give DeSantis a path to challenge him - because they wanted to take both of them out at the same time. George Soros let the cat out of the bag two months ago; he said here's what's going to happen: DeSantis will challenge Trump, DeSantis will beat Trump and then because he challenged Trump he'll lose in the general election.

They still don't understand Trump's base, they don't understand what's happening in America. These are people who live like the old dying empires of London and Rome at different key junctures. If you want to understand world leaders, look at the empire leaders right before World War I, look at the bankers in the 1920s.

The Austro-Hungarian empire lasted six centuries, the Ottoman empire lasted more than four centuries, the Russian empire lasted three centuries. All of them collapsed in five years because the corrupt incompetence of the elites is usually what kills a society or civilization. It goes back to that saying: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. You see it over and over again.

That's what we have now, a lot of corrupt, incompetent elites running around trying to trigger WW3 in Ukraine, others trying to create WW3 with China. We'll probably start seeing a lot of "the dollar is doomed" from mainstream media because they want to blame China for that.

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The eurodollar and shadow banking

From a post I did a few days ago on It’s All Lies Part 2b: The Money Supply Metrics Have Become Obsolete:

The eurodollar market is a cashless, virtual dollar market that is the funding mechanism for the global banking system, and it governs our global monetary system. In simpler terms, the euro dollar market is an offshore, US dollar market. There are two dollar markets: onshore (US) and offshore (outside the US). Eurodollars simply refer to any US dollar that exists outside of the US. Prior to the euro currency, euro simply meant a currency held outside of the domestic economy. For instance, a euroyen are Japanese yen outside of Japan, euroyuan are Chinese yuan outside of China, etc.

...The eurodollar system is an unregulated market that the banking system completely controls... The banks make the rules and create the dollars in whichever manner they see fit. These eurodollars are created through various and often complex balance sheet constructions, which often never show up on a transaction sheet or accounting balance sheet, and because of this, it is very difficult (near impossible) to keep track of (hence the reason it is called “shadow banking”).

...The eurodollar market is estimated (depending on the study) to be $30T, $40T, or even $50T. In other words, it’s massive.

...Before the eurodollar market came about in the 1950s, the money supply was much more straightforward. There were no eurodollars, repo had a very small role compared to today, there was no “shadow banking”, no derivatives being used...

...the Fed is no longer in control of the money supply and does not know how to even define the money supply anymore, and they haven’t been able to for over 40 years.