Oddbean

The Bank Secrecy Act (1970), the third party doctrine (United States v. Miller, 1976), and The Right to Financial Privacy Act (1978) were the seeds of the full surveillance system of government we have today. These three legal maneuvers killed American liberty long before personal computers or the internet had any meaningful traction in the world. American liberty was replaced with 20th Century Federalism. A centralizing of power that began at the start of the last century with the Jekyll Island Conference (1910) that directly wrote the Federal Reserve Act (1913) and established mandates and organizations that were pivotal for the authoritarian turn in the US in the 1930s (Roosevelt) largely following the rest of the West (Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler) and making the Gold Reserve Act (1934)--that seized all American's gold--a practical undertaking (it should be noted that the elites did not lose their gold in this national asset seizure). From the 1910s to the 1930s to the 1970s to the 2000s, 20th Century Federalism kept metastasizing through permanent states of emergency (Patriot Act, FISA Courts, Total Information Awareness black ops against citizens, etc.) that to this day get renewed and funded through zero debate omnibus bills that the intelligence state has final review of through their two parties. We began the last century with a banker revolution that brought authoritarianism to America. We never had our De-Ba'athification moment as the other authoritarian states did after losing WWII. In the aftermath of the war, we simply benefited from having hoovered up all of the gold during the war such that we could use the momentum of that victory to establish a global system of debt peonage, on the one hand (BIS, IMF, World Bank), and debt reserve assets on the other (Treasury Bills, Bonds, and Notes). What could go wrong? We then built the revolving door between Wall Street, the Fed, and the Treasury to ensure the machine kept running well for the elites (unofficial "coordination" and official bailouts). We did not even use the 2008 financial collapse to right any of these wrongs. We bailed out the bankers. We did it again, along with most everyone else, in 2020. And lest we forget, all of this is viable because instead of waging peace and operating form a mandate of liberty first minimal federalism, our authoritarian political and economic leaders used 9/11 to declare an open ended War on Terror that was used to spend trillions on foreign wars, and most consequentially, to formally militarize the homeland (USNORTHCOM and DHS) and snuff out any last vestige of a citizen's right to privacy in transacting (AML/KYC everything). This story does not end well. #privacy #Bitcoin