GENIUS Act creates a cryptocurrency government can use to spy on you

This past Friday, Donald Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act into law, and despite the claims being made by the economic savior of the world and his Republican Party echo chamber to the contrary, this legislation will be tied to the US dollar, thus making it easy for government to track you and every dollar you spend.

As if that’s not enough reason to oppose it, the GENIUS ACT also makes it easier for Trump to continue using the office of the presidency to rake in billions upon billions of dollars for himself (via Fortune.com):

After years of battling with regulators, the legislation represents a major victory for the crypto industry, which started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and was long viewed as an outlaw sector. Now, the stamp of approval from Congress—and the broad embrace by the Trump administration—casts new legitimacy on blockchain technology, with once-skeptical institutions like Big Tech companies and banks rushing in, especially as Bitcoin soars to record highs.

However, as Congress moves on to debate a second bill that would create regulations around cryptocurrencies and exchanges, critics warn that the passage of stablecoin legislation raises concerns about the increasing ties between Trump’s business empire and blockchain interests. “That is a huge conflict of interest that society is just really not prepared for,” said Todd Phillips, a banking and administrative law professor at Georgia State University.

The “stablecoin” part of the legislation is a key piece in the government takeover of the financial sector because stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency directly pegged to the U.S. dollar — and we all know who’s in charge of the dollar, right? (Answer: It’s the Federal Reserve Bank).

Not to worry though, according to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, another piece of legislation that just passed on the House of Representatives will make it illegal for the Federal Reserve to create their own digital currency (aka. Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC) without Congressional approval.

He’s right. The anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act will, in theory, remove the Federal Reserve’s power to control how you spend your money. But conveniently left out of his praise of this legislation is how this power will instead be transferred over to the US government under the GENIUS Act.

How exactly would government actually seize this power? We find the answer from an article I wrote a few years ago when Joe Biden pushed for the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that, in the end, would have given government via the Federal Reserve complete control over every dollar made or spent by every American. To quote Ron Paul at the time:

First and foremost, a CBDC could be used as a tool for surveillance and control of the American public. … Even more insidious is the prospect that Americans’ “digital dollars” might one day be frozen or seized for any number of pretexts. We are already past the point where political actors are comfortable labeling political speech “violence” and those who speak in their opposition “terrorists.” (Emphasis mine)

Under a Central Bank Digital Currency, Big Brother can:

• Automatically withdraw unpaid taxes from your account
• Dispense funds based on political ideology (Want to buy a gun? Look out)
• Dispense funds based on health records (Diabetic? No sugar for you!)
• Withhold funds if the nanny state doesn’t approve of your spending habits

Combined with the PATRIOT Act, a CBDC would have moved government one step closer to full control of the citizenry, which is what Biden was trying to do. And it’s what Trump is wanting to do as well with his expansion of financial surveillance via “private” digital currency.

Trump signed an executive order shortly after his inauguration that allegedly banned CBDCs, but the order also included a requirement to establish a presidential working group to create a federal regulatory framework governing digital assets (including stablecoins) and evaluate the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile. In other words, government would control digital currency instead of the Federal Reserve. The tyranny is the same, only the name is different.

This has been a known fact for years now (via Cnet.com):

Since the original 2008 white paper introducing blockchain technology, bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions have been touted as completely anonymous and private. But how anonymous are crypto transactions really?

Earlier [in 2022], $3.6 billion in bitcoin was seized from a Manhattan couple who were arrested and charged with money laundering in connection with a 2016 hack on the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. It was the largest financial seizure in the Justice Department’s history.

Law enforcement went to great lengths to trace the illicit funds, including tracking the stolen bitcoin through a complicated web of transactions spanning multiple countries. It took six years, but authorities eventually caught up. More recently, researchers have demonstrated traceability via unintentional patterns in bitcoin’s transactional data — the bigger a data set gets, the more patterns show up. And patterns can be identified and tracked.

Because cryptocurrency allows for direct peer-to-peer transactions made via the internet, the idea is that only two parties are involved in the activity. No banks, governments, or intermediaries are necessary. Although this appears to set up the perfect framework for privacy and anonymity, this bust and other examples paint a different picture of crypto transactions. (Emphasis mine)

The GENIUS Act and other future legislation regulating digital currency also brings another reality into focus: the creation of a social credit system courtesy of DOGE and Elon Musk:

[Elon Musk] bought himself a powerful perch in the White House by giving more than a quarter billion dollars to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and he has set about eliminating thousands of government jobs and entire federal agencies [while] scooping up sensitive data to give him a “god’s view” of the entire government.

The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has accessed heavily secured databases that store the private health data, financial records, work history and other sensitive personal information for millions of Americans. (Emphasis mine)

Once you connect the dots, the intention of DOGE is crystal clear.

A practical example of where we’re heading comes to us courtesy of China’s CBDC (Digital Yuan), a digital currency completely tied to the country’s vaccine passport and social credit systems. Some of the areas tracked in real time are (via New Horizons):

• Medical history
• Social media posts and internet search history
• Bank accounts and credit cards
• Residence, employment, and criminal history
• Relationships and religious activities
• Political activity

This information is fed into a central database in real time to create a “social credit score” used to reward or punish citizens. Those with a high score are allowed to participate freely in society while those with a low score are prohibited from traveling, borrowing money, keeping a job, or even getting their children into school.

China not only tracks the spending habits of its citizens, but it can also control them, which is only made possible by the expansion of government power via financial surveillance and a digital currency.

The GENIUS Act is being touted as a safe and secure digital currency destined to save the US dollar and the economy. In reality, stablecoin cryptocurrency legislation simply moves the ability to spy on how you spend your money from the Federal Reserve to Donald Trump and the US government.

I’m sure glad America voted for the lesser of two evils.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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