Time To Stop The War On Cash

David Icke, who was in the news again recently for all the wrong reasons, is both a certifiable lunatic and one of the greatest prophets of the Twentieth Century. In 1995, he wrote:

“Today if you go into a shop to buy food and your credit card is refused by the computer, you can pay with cash. What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.”

At that time, many people laughed at him due to the recklessness of some of his other pronouncements. Today, people are still laughing at him, but not quite so loud.

Icke and his fellow travellers see the invisible hand of a grand conspiracy behind every world event and every infringement of our God-given freedoms. Their observations are correct, but not their diagnoses, because these attacks  come from a plethora of different sources and from many directions. About the only thing they have in common is the insistence of their advocates that everything they do is for the public good, and what could be a more public good than the detection and prevention of crime?

Since the invention of the cheque book back in the late Eighteenth Century, cash has played a smaller and smaller role in big transactions. It isn’t difficult to understand why. Carrying around large amounts of cash is a virtual invitation to be robbed or in some places to be murdered. Less dramatically, losing a large amount of cash through carelessness or in a fire perhaps, can have devastating consequences, but losing a cheque book…no sweat.

With the advent of the modern debit card including contactless payment, ordinary people are using cash less and less, but not everyone is happy with this. During the recent and ongoing lockdown, some shops were taking card payment only, while others were accepting cash only.

Cash is the preferred method of payment for criminal transactions because it is usually difficult and often impossible to trace. So if you prefer to deal only in cash, you must be a criminal, right? That appears to be the thinking of our masters. Some of the apparatchiks who police us take great delight in making their marks account for every cent. Anyone who has ever claimed a means-tested benefit or been subjected to a tax audit will understand the truth of that statement.

In the criminal court, a case must be proved beyond all reasonable doubt. In the civil court, it need be proved only on the balance of probabilities. This, together with the expense and inconvenience of mounting a civil action, has led to the police on both sides of the Atlantic driving a bus through the rule of law and seizing money from members of the public, often quite small but at times extremely large sums.

In 2015, American rap musician Snoop Dogg was stopped at an Italian airport because he was found to be transporting $422,000 in cash. That may be a staggering amount of money for the average person, but not for one of the biggest stars in his genre. Leaving aside the well-documented fondness of rap musicians for jewellery, expensive cars, and large wads of hundred dollar bills, he was on tour. When you have other musicians, technical staff and roadies to pay coupled with transport, hotel bills, restaurants, after show parties…400k doesn’t go too far.

Whatever one thinks of rap music, no one could query this guy’s work ethic. Earlier that month he had played nine concerts in other countries, and after two in Italy he was on his way back to England to play two more dates, then to France and Spain before crossing the Atlantic to continue with a heavy schedule of US concerts. So why did the Italian authorities seize his money? Because they could.

In the UK, existing money laundering regulations were augmented in 2002 with the Proceeds Of Crime Act. This led to the British police gloating over the first such case to come to court. In February 2003, Police Review reported that a man who was arrested in possession of a false passport had £15,860 in his possession that was seized, and “Now he will have to prove the money has not come from criminality or lose it for good”.

The article continues “Since December police can seize cash of over £10,000 if they believe it has come from or could be used in crime”.

Note the second clause of that sentence: could be used in crime. What does that even mean? It could be used to hire a hit-man, buy a car for use in a robbery, buy drugs? The arrogance and duplicity of these people knows no bounds. And the tyranny doesn’t stop there. This Draconian legislation was supplemented a decade and a half later by unexplained wealth orders. The first victim of these was Zamira Hajiyeva when the National Crime Agency seized her £15 million home. At present, UWOs are being used only against foreign nationals, but it won’t stop there. It never does.

The threshold for UWOs is property worth £50,000 or more. That may sound like a lot of money, but the average price of a terraced house in Dagenham, London’s poorest borough, is over £300,000.

The Lehto’s Law YouTube channel contains some unbelievable stories about gratuitous civil asset seizures in the United States, now here is a thought. The Chinese mega-city Shenzhen is virtually cashless; everyone there  – denizen and tourist alike – uses mobiles phones and bank cards. Remember what David Icke said: “What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.”

Anyone who thinks that sort of thing could happen only in China has never been on the business end of policing in the West. Phones and cards can be blocked; we have long gone passed the stage where the police can simply confiscate (read steal) your property on the most tenuous of pretexts. Indeed, they don’t even need a reason,  if they are of a mind, like this uniformed thug they can simply make something up.