And Now, It’s Economic Warfare

 

With the world reopening, and even US blue states and cities repealing mandates, how optimistic should we be? A little bit is warranted but not that much. What we are seeing right now in Ottawa reveals the hegemonic depth of the system that gave us lockdowns, then mandates: it is now capable of freezing your accounts and essentially starving you and your family. 

It’s economic warfare. 

This was a wild conspiracy theory last year. Now it is very obvious that this is where many governments want to go. We’ve seen examples just in the past week. 

The truckers in Canada deployed the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe and raised $9M, until suddenly the platform said that they would not distribute the money yet, pending the release of a clear plan on what the truckers were going to do with it. 

Many of us immediately smelled a rat. Sure enough, a few days later, GoFundMe announced that it would not give the money to the truckers but rather to other charities of its choosing. In other words, it would steal the money. That outraged many people, among them Elon Musk, and the Internet blew up in fury. At that point, GoFundMe returned all the money back to the donors. 

In the next act of this drama, the truckers went to GiveSendGo, a platform that seems more independent and that pledged to give the money to the truckers. With no promotion or even a clear link on Google on where to send money, the new method raised even more money. This was entirely thanks to uncensored networks where people were sharing information. 

But the story was far from over. The platform was hit with denial-of-service attacks from malicious actors and then hacked. The thing went down hard and had to be rebuilt. The data on donors was leaked to the government and then to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who contacted donors under the guise of “doing a story” on the funding. It was a clear attempt at intimidation. 

The Minister of Finance got into the act and essentially declared that anyone using these to provide funding to the truckers were engaging in illicit activity — essentially terrorists. Without missing a beat, the Minister of Justice for Trudeau went further to declare that anyone who has given large figures through these platforms “should be worried” about having their bank accounts frozen. 

So there we have it on record: the Canadian government has declared that it can freeze anyone’s bank account and seize the contents based on their political views or charitable actions. In the midst of all of this, Trudeau declared emergency powers that allow the government to do this to all for non-compliers, and do so without any court order. 

The next step in this astonishing drama: crypto.  (more...)

And Now, It’s Economic Warfare