02/25/16 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Hey man, how's it going, y'all?
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right.
I told you we got guests.
First up, it's our friend Jason Ditz, news editor of antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And he's got this brand new one in the American conservative magazine, ISIS and the end of cash, how the war on terror became a war on real money.
Oh, man.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us again.
Very interesting stuff here.
The kind of thing I haven't been worried about in a long time because I was worried about this a long time ago and it never happened.
So I thought, oh, okay.
Well, I guess that's not that big of a deal then, the push for a cashless society.
But now they're really pushing for it and they're using ISIS as an excuse?
Really?
Yeah.
Well, ISIS seems to be a tailor-made excuse because really it works as an excuse for anything.
You just have to say, oh, it's because ISIS and suddenly you've got a decent chunk of the population willing to have iPhones hacked to allow massive government surveillance, really anything.
So it's not surprising that eventually, with all this talk of cutting ISIS's financing that they would settle on, hey, we can still ask for the cash too.
Yeah.
Well, I got that right.
I mean, it is, I expect, I guess probably people are using that as pickup lines at the bar and everything, right?
Hey, you want to come home with me tonight, baby?
You know, ISIS, because ISIS.
Okay.
So, all right, now cashless, this, that, whatever, exactly what are we talking about here?
Larry Summers?
Who's he?
Well, he was Bill Clinton's last Secretary of the Treasury.
He's the guy that ruined everything for everyone.
And after that, he became the President of Harvard and...
And ruined Harvard for everyone, yes.
And then what did he ruin?
After Obama was elected, he became the head of some economic committees in the administration that are working on economic problems.
So he's, I mean, not necessarily a huge...
Right now, he doesn't necessarily have a huge government position, he kind of got drummed out after the bailouts because he was sort of the mastermind of a lot of the bailout plans, but he's still very influential, especially with Democrats.
Yeah, and I should know this, man, I'm sorry, but Fitzy G in the chat room points out that he was the Goldman CEO before that, so that's basically all you need to know.
He's Ted Cruz's wife's former employer, okay.
So long as everybody's, you know, playing on the same game board here and keeping all our...
Well, if he was the Secretary of Treasury, it kind of goes without saying that he worked for Goldman.
Right.
You're right.
Yeah, we should have just taken that assumption.
All right, now, so, yeah, real cashlessness.
They want to get rid of the 100 first because, I guess, well, let me put it this way.
Is this about ISIS at all, or they just decided, hey, we really want to do this for other reasons and let's bring up ISIS?
I think it's more that because, really, a lot of this has been going on for a long time.
There have been op-eds in the Financial Times and places like that calling for a cashless society, a lot of talk of the merits of getting rid of the $100 bill and the $50 bill as far as cracking down on tax evaders and making sure that there's an easily accessed paper trail for the government on every transaction that takes place.
And if two people are just exchanging money, there's not necessarily going to be a big receipt trail for where that money went.
Yeah, well, and so here's the thing, though, is they've already really transferred us to an almost cashless society already.
And when they say things like, well, $100 bills are basically only used for crime at this point.
It's not true, but it is seemingly plausible when everybody does use their debit card or their credit card for pretty much everything as it is, other than, you know, things that are $20 or less or something like that.
You know, people don't even write checks anymore.
It's all electronic.
Right.
And that's increasingly true, although I do find myself using cash if I'm at, say, a local store that I'm not familiar with and I don't necessarily trust their credit card system.
Some places still don't accept credit cards, incredibly enough.
I have a doctor that doesn't have a credit card system and they don't take personal checks.
So you have to pay cash.
That's that's cool.
I'm surprised I get away with that.
Yeah.
In this day and age.
Yeah.
Well, and the other thing is, too, where notice how flipped around everything is, where if you want to leave your house and go and buy a Slurpee and then stop by a friend's house and run another couple of errands and come home and not have that be on your permanent record in the totalitarian police state, that is basically impossible now.
You cannot do that.
And if you want to do that, then there's something kind of weird about you.
Well, what do you care if they know whether you went to Whataburger or not?
But the whole thing is because it's none of their business.
That's why.
All right.
And the burden of proof now for if you have a hundred dollar bill on you, the kind of expecting the burden of proof to be on you to prove that you're not a criminal.
And indeed, a lot of states have these cash forfeiture laws where if the police stop you and you have a lot of money on you, they can just take it.
And the only way you can get it back is to prove that it wasn't a drug trade or anything like that, which is next to impossible to do, because how do you how do you prove a negative?
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, and to think that this is all stuff we're just a generation ago or a little bit more than that.
This is all Fourth Amendment stuff.
You know, every every bit of this, at least people would assume is the kind of stuff where the cops would have to have a probable cause to convince the judge that we're going to find evidence of a crime if you let us look here, judge, in order to know these things.
But now it just goes without saying that everybody knows that every dime they ever spend is kept track of where and when they spent it and on what at all times.
We don't even think of it as, you know, surveillance.
It's so just natural to everyone now, I think.
So used to it.
Right.
And it's so recent.
I mean, like you say, the debit cards and things like that, those are a pretty recent development.
I mean, I guess they've been around.
Credit cards have been around for the better part of a century, but you really didn't see them as a mainstream thing until the last few decades.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I got a correction in the email here.
It says 50 G is wrong.
Summers never worked for Goldman.
I'm sure they love him, but he was never a partner or employee there.
Oh, well, if he sounds pretty definitive from Bill in the email there, if it's what he said work for Goldman, he will at some point, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Well, he was the treasury secretary.
So maybe that's just what he meant by worked for Goldman was just that's true in that capacity.
OK, but he's only in his early 60s, so there's still time for him to get it, get a cushy job at Goldman.
There you go.
Nice golden parachute.
I'm sure he doesn't have enough yet.
All right.
Well, listen, music's playing already.
The time goes by so fast.
I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's the news editor at antiwar dot com news dot antiwar dot com.
And there's so much important stuff there.
I hope you guys are reading that all day, every day.
Many of the top headlines there on the front page.
And we'll be right back with Jason talking more about ISIS and the end of cash in the American conservative magazine, the American conservative dot com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got the great Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar dot com.
News dot Antiwar dot com.
He's written for a dozen newspapers and things like that, too.
Here he is in the American Conservative Magazine.
Oh, I just hit the wrong button.
ISIS and the end of cash, how the war on terror became a war on real money.
And do I read you right here, Jason, that the government's claim or the media, the government's claim is that someone told the Associated Press that the Islamic State uses U.S. cash and so how the hell does banning dollars in America affect that?
Or they claim they're going to ban the $100 bill worldwide?
That seems to be the plan, yes.
And there was a single quote in an Associated Press article.
It cited a Raqqa activist who was using a pseudonym, and he said that ISIS was a 100 percent dollar-denominated economy, that they only accept payment in U.S. dollars, and they do all their business in U.S. dollars, and that's simply not true.
I mean, first of all, we shouldn't have taken their word for it in the first place on a story like that, because we've had similar stories saying, oh, ISIS is using Bitcoin almost exclusively, or, oh, when ISIS taxes the Christians, they demand payment in gold.
So there are a lot of conflicting stories, but now this week's narrative is, oh, ISIS, ever since some of their cash got destroyed, they're charging higher exchange rates on Iraqi dinars, and that story points out that ISIS pays virtually all their salaries in Iraqi dinars, so the claim that they were exclusively using U.S. dollars simply isn't true to begin with.
Well, and never mind that we're talking about, according to the scaremongers, a $2 billion a year economy there in the Islamic State.
I mean, every report out of there, I'm sure you're reading Patrick Coburn like me, they're running that place into the ground, they got the crappiest part of Iraq, you know, they're trying to pretend this Islamofascist caliphate rules all of the Islamic world or something like that, but, you know, it's a stretch to, I mean, you could call them the most powerful militia in the region, no doubt about that, maybe you could call them a state, but just barely, to try to pretend that, you know, it's just, it seems on the face of it to be a mosquito howitzer type situation here, where, how in the world, and what, does he address, I'm sorry, I should have read the Summers piece here, but does he address what's supposed to happen when $10 trillion worth of bricks of U.S. hundred dollar bills come flying out of central bank vaults all across the world, other than Armageddon, or what?
Well, he cites a study by another economist who's a significant British economist who works for the British government on some boards, and also ran a semi-major British bank, standard chartered bank, and he did a sort of a policy proposal for Harvard, calling for the elimination of the 150, and his argument was, because everybody knows that only criminals really use hundreds and fifties, that eliminating them would not be that big a deal.
Am I just wrong that there are trillions of dollars worth of U.S. hundred dollar bills in bank vaults substituting for gold bricks, basically as the reserves of virtually every other currency on earth right now?
Well, there are, and if you think about it, a lot of this is, in the Middle East, is the result of the 2003 Iraq invasion, because how did the Bush administration operate that occupation?
They were sending pallets of hundred dollar bills into Iraq.
We had stories back then of a couple of the troops that were assigned to guard it went missing and turned up in a casino somewhere in Dubai or someplace with about 50 grand worth of hundreds that they just grabbed off one of the pallets.
But they were just pouring hundred dollar bills in as fast as they could print them, and there was very little paper trail for where that money was going, because they didn't want to have to own up to how they were spending it.
That's amazing.
It really is foreign policy as a Bill Hicks joke.
It just keeps going on.
If we could get back to Lawrence Summers, another thing that's maybe not quite as big a deal as all of his other positions in government in the past, his current position is he's on the board of directors of Square, which is, I don't know how many people are familiar with Square, but they're a credit card payment system that has a little device that you can plug into your smartphone so you can take credit cards.
That company would benefit hugely if suddenly there's no such thing as cash and all transactions have to occur by credit cards.
That seems like a pretty big conflict of interest.
Yeah.
Well, no, there's no such thing.
In America, that's called the way the system works, and you're supposed to just take that for granted and use it for your own good if you can at the expense of the rest.
I mean, seriously, you and me and our friends listening are probably the only ones who would even consider that a conflict of interest and not just business as usual, and would even think of that as something.
But now, is anybody really buying this, I guess?
I did read a thing, and I don't want to completely spoil it because I'm going to have them on the show next week, but I got a thing from Nick Giambruno from Doug Casey's group saying, hey, this is the hidden agenda of the Davis Conference in Switzerland, that this is the new consensus at the very highest level, is that they are really pushing now to phase out cash.
We are going to see the end of this.
It ain't just this Crank Summers rota thing.
We're going to see this implemented here pretty soon by the unelected elitist consensus meeting at their pseudo-public Bilderberg group thing that they got going on there.
Right.
It really does seem like there's a growing consensus among bankers, and a lot of it is the result of what interest rates have been like for the last couple of decades.
Interest rates have gotten lower and lower.
A lot of countries are at zero at this point, and so long as there's physical cash in the world, you can't really go lower than zero on an interest rate.
In fact, the Sands article argues that.
Explain that.
Explain that.
Imagine your bank account pays zero interest, which it virtually does right now anyway if you have a bank account like mine.
I think I get an eighth of a percent a year.
But, imagine your bank account pays zero percent interest.
The idea behind that for the banks is, oh, well, that'll encourage spending.
There's no real benefit to having a longer time preference than keeping your money in the bank.
But, now imagine if they could pay you a negative interest rate, which effectively is charging you money to keep your money.
Suppose every month they take a percent out of your savings account for not spending that money.
That would encourage spending even more.
But, of course, if there's actual cash and banks are starting to charge you fees just to keep your money, you're not going to use banks.
You're just going to take all the cash out.
If you have a significant amount of cash, it's probably going to be worthwhile to get a safe and just store the money yourself, because then you're not paying effectively a fee for not spending it.
Yeah.
Or, if you want to save it, you're just going to buy silver coins.
Right.
Something like that.
Ultimately, if they can force the entire world, or at least the major economies, onto these completely digital currencies, they can set the interest rate to whatever negative number they want and just say that they're stimulating spending.
Yeah.
It really is amazing.
The kind of thing straight out of the worst kind of science fiction dystopia when you think about what the results will be for the average person.
This is the definition of the very worst slavery under Satan in the Bible, right?
It's that everybody's marked in order to be able to buy or sell or trade or anything.
Right.
This is the path we're going down.
As Sans points out, if you've got the G20 on board, that eliminates virtually all of the major denominations of money anyway.
So, even if most of the world didn't go along with it, most of them don't have currencies that are that big a deal to begin with.
Yeah.
The other thing is, though, too, is the fear of the totalitarian police state that you and I are both thinking of.
Now, I think this is going to occur to a lot of people, too.
Even if they don't even use cash, that they would like to have that alternative.
They would like to know that it's at least possible in the world to buy or sell something beyond just barter without it being put on their permanent record, going into their FBI file or their NSA file or whatever it is.
Comes down to it, I don't think you have to have a political ideology of any particular kind to realize that this is a threat to the way you live your life.
Right.
And eliminating cash outright has never even been proposed in a serious way by governments before.
I mean, even the most serious communist dictatorships during the Cold War always had cash, even if it didn't necessarily jibe with their entire ideology to have cash.
They always still had it because they simply couldn't operate an economy without it.
Yeah.
Well, man, it's really amazing.
I'm really glad that you're out ahead on this issue.
It's going to be a very important one going forward now that they're bringing this up again the way that they are.
So, really great work here.
I really appreciate your time on the show about it as well, Jason.
Well, thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is the heroic Jason Ditz.
He is the managing news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
You've got to read him all day every day on everything, on everything.
News.antiwar.com.
This one is in the American Conservative Magazine, ISIS and the End of Cash.
And we'll be back in a minute.
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