New Ruling Class Tactic: Economic Warfare

New Ruling Class Tactic: Economic Warfare. By Jeffrey Tucker.

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 Company 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 non-compliers, and do so without any court order. …

Yes, all these actions are clearly political, totalitarian, and relying fundamentally on the control of money and finance to shore up regime power and crush political opposition.

For weeks now, I’ve worried that Trudeau would pursue a Tiananmen Square solution. This was the strategy deployed in China in 1989 to forestall the type of regime meltdown that had characterized events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire. For a while, it appeared that regimes could be toppled if enough people gathered in the streets. China showed otherwise: bullets, tanks, and arrests of key leaders are often enough to shore up control. These days, a Tiananmen-style solution takes a different form.

With financial intermediaries forced to do the state’s bidding, rebellions can be put down with texts, emails, and a few clicks on an interface. Your assets are frozen, then stolen, and you are left without a job or any financial means at all. Jails aren’t even necessary. …

 

 

Many of the world’s wisest minds have observed that the main means by which powerful states seize and retain control is through the realm of money. Guns help. Prestige helps. But in the end, it’s the control of money that keeps the people in servitude.

They’re getting bolder. Throwing media objectivity to the wind, then cancelling political speech they don’t like, then using Antifa to bash people they don’t like, then pretending the Jan 6 US riot was an “insurrection” (which may yet be used to disallow some Republicans from running in the 2022 midterm elections, because they are “traitors”), and now using the financial system to wreck the lives of political opponents.

There’s a strong anti-democratic trend in the West, all coming from the left.

Just as media bias, cancelling, and Antifa spread quickly to every western country, so too will throwing political opponents into jail or off ballots (“insurrection”, “terrorism”) or cancelling their money. You know they want to. The example has been set.

Why would anyone who disagrees with the ruling bureaucratic class keep their money in a Canadian — or any western bank — after this?