Former presidential candidate and political commentator Tulsi Gabbard opposes the Biden administration’s plans to develop a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the United States.
The former congresswoman argued on Sunday that CBDCs will be used as mass financial surveillance tools that “will undermine our autonomy and freedom.”
Standing up against a cashless society
in a cheep Released over the weekend, Gabbard said the federal government has already begun implementing its CBDC project, which will “produce a cashless society where every transaction we make is tracked, monitored and controlled.”
“To protect our freedom, we must all come together to reject this effort to institute a cashless digital society,” Gabbard wrote.
A CBDC is a new form of digital money issued directly by a central bank to retail customers, rather than through commercial banks. Defenders argue that it could serve as a more secure and efficient means of payment and remittances, Provide a “secure central bank liability in the digital financial ecosystem,” according to Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard.
A BIS report in May 2022 He suggested that 90% of central banks were already exploring the possible issuance of a CBDC, and more than half of them were already developing such technology. That includes the United States after President Biden placed “the utmost urgency” on the potential investigation of the US CBDC as part of his cryptocurrency executive order in March of last year.
House and Senate Republicans alike, including tom emmer, ted cross, and others, have consistently opposed CBDCs for their potential use to eliminate cash and strip consumers of their privacy. Gabbard, a former member of the Democratic Party, echoed this sentiment Monday, declaring in a interview that CBDCs are about “government-sanctioned surveillance and control.”
“It’s about them being able to keep track of every single thing we buy,” he said, “whether it’s a piece of gum, a car, or anything in between.”
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve saying in September that a CBDC, if implemented, would protect the privacy of transactions, but would still verify the identities of its users.
FedNow VS CBDC
The former congresswoman added that the Federal Reserve’s new FedNow service, a 24/7 real-time payments service for depository institutions, is the first step toward a CBDC. However, the central bank published a statement on Friday clarifying that FedNow is not related to digital currency or intended to replace cash, and is more comparable to existing services like Fedwire and FedACH.
The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, has admitted that innovation in the payments space, particularly in the form of CBDCs, would be necessary to ensure that central banks do not become irrelevant. On the contrary, she has fired standard decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as “highly speculative assets”, lacking any future.
Gabbard has reportedly invested in cryptocurrencies in the past, buying both Ether and Litecoin at the peak of the December 2017 bull market.
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This post CBDCs Are Aimed At Tracking Purchases And Controlling Our Money: US Congressman
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