The U.S. government will use the current financial crisis to promote a central bank digital currency (CBDC), warned Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., adding that such a move will only culminate in absolute financial surveillance and threaten basic personal liberties.
“CBDCs grease the slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny. While cash transactions are anonymous, a #CBDC will allow the government to surveil all our private financial affairs,” wrote Kennedy in a tweet on April 5. “The central bank will have the power to enforce dollar limits on our transactions, restricting where you can send money, where you can spend it, and when money expires.
“A CBDC tied to digital ID and social credit score will allow the government to freeze your assets or limit your spending to approved vendors if you fail to comply with arbitrary diktats [such as] vaccine mandates.”
Though Kennedy is a registered Democrat and has recently thrown his hat into the 2024 presidential race, he is known to oppose many policies of the Biden administration.
FedNow and CBDC
“The Fed just announced it will introduce its ‘FedNow’ central bank digital currency (CBDC) in July. The Fed will initially limit its CBDC to interbank transactions, but we should not be blind to the obvious danger that this is the first step in banning and seizing Bitcoin as the Treasury did with gold 90 years ago today in 1933,” said Kennedy.On March 15, the Federal Reserve announced the FedNow Service, which is projected to start operating in July. FedNow offers a nationwide “instant payment solution” for participating financial institutions and their industry partners. Those using the service can “send and receive instant payments at any time of day” with full access to funds immediately.
FedNow is not a CBDC; however, critics are calling the service a beginning step toward mainstream adoption of a CBDC by reducing the resistance through offering some of the same basic services of a digital dollar.
Foundational Threat to America’s Economic Systems
As a CBDC gives “the federal government complete visibility into every financial transaction by establishing a direct link between the government and each citizen’s financial activity,” the project is a direct attack against basic privacies as protected by the U.S. Constitution, said a recent analysis by the CATO Institute.Any buffer—currently provided by institutions like banks and payment services—between the average citizen’s financial activity and governmental intrusion would immediately cease to exist as “all financial data would be only a keystroke away.”
Such unrestrained access leads to the inevitable establishment of governmental control over such activities, and it could be “preemptive (prohibiting and limiting purchases), behavioral (spurring and curbing purchases), or punitive (freezing and seizing funds).”
Federal Reserve vice chair Lael Brainard had said that if CBDCs were widely adopted, it would disrupt the entire banking system because people would make direct central bank deposits bypassing retail institutions.
Similar to crypto, a disadvantage of using CBDCs is that they are prone to cybersecurity breaches and malicious hacking. A centralized digital dollar makes a very “attractive target for cyberattacks by giving threat actors a prominent platform on which to focus their efforts.”
Kennedy is the nephew of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy, and the son of Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who also was assassinated, when running for the presidency in 1968.
“Watch as governments, which never let a good crisis go to waste, use COVID-19 and the banking crisis to usher in a new wave of CBDCs as a safe haven from germ-laden paper currencies or as protection against bank runs,” he said.
