599: The Control Grid: How To Protect Your Money And Your Freedom With Catherine Austin Fitts

And so Catherine, let me ask you, is all programmable money bad, or is some of it good and we just need these guardrails?

No.

So, so I can put smart contracts on programmable money, which could be unbelievably useful.

You know, there are, there are thousands of things you can do.

And I can come up with many, many cases where they're all perfectly wonderful, right? But they're designed to implement transactions where the two parties have conditions and have negotiated things and are not being coerced in any way and are not being subject to compromise of their, of their fundamental rights.

What we're talking about is the application of programmable money and the use of distributed ledger in a way that compromises people's real const- fundamental constitutional rights or boxes and squeezes them.

So what we're looking for is programmable money which makes you more efficient and freer and not can be used centrally to coerce.

So we're worried about, you know, central co-coercion, and part of the reason we're worried about it is because the central bankers have said this is what they wanna do.

Yeah.

Tell me exactly what they have...

I mean, what is their goal? Like, why do they wanna control us so badly? What's, what's in it for them?

So I-- You know, then I have to go into conjecture.

Let me first tell you, we did a scenario plan that, uh, and we have it all up on our website, where we...

You know, I'm a great believer when the future's uncertain, you do scenarios, and then you, you know, sort of figure out how to adapt in, in whatever, whatever scenario comes true.

But one of the-- what the scenarios were-- Uh, the question was, what is the intention of the people running the system? Is their goal to centralize and kill financial transaction freedom, or are they o-- they just wanna automate, and they're open to decentralized and free? So we had four different scenarios from decentralized and free was fine to total central control.

And in the audience in the briefing we did this, sixty-eight percent said the goal was total control.

But thirty-two percent said, no, you know, they would never be that horrible or evil and do that.

And but what was interesting is almost everyone agreed we need guardrails.

Whether that's intention, their intention or not, we need to make sure the guardrails are there so that if somebody should come along that has a different intent, you know, they can't do it.

So I think that it's, it's very important to understand you don't have to accept the premise that the goal is total centralization to accept the, embrace the, the desire to have guardrails so that that can't come true.

So the reason, if you listen to what they've said, you know, we have the Bank of International Settlements, who for many years has been running a system to prototype programmable money around the world in different partnerships and efforts.

And we've seen, for example, at the G20 meeting in twenty twenty-four in India, essentially everybody embraced this vision of digital IDs and central bank digital currencies.

If you do it publicly, it's central bank digital currencies.

If you do it private, it's stable coins or other crypto on a distributed ledger.

There are many different ways of doing it.