Cashless Society: India Bans Currency Notes Sparking Chaos At BanksBy John Vibes The ban sparked a run on the banks in India this week, with customers forming massive lines at banks attempting to get cash notes out while they still could. Banks then shut down on Wednesday, and limits were imposed on ATM withdrawals. Politicians say that the new measure is aimed at fighting tax evasion, corruption, and black money, but the nations poor say that they are going to be the hardest hit. I went home for Diwali and my parents gave me money as a gift. I wish they had a simpler system for students. I desperately need cash to pay my rent and buy books and food, Vijay Karan Sharma from Chhattisgarh, a student at Delhi University, told the BBC. New notes with advanced security features will be put into circulation to replace the current notes; however, financial experts in India suggest that this could be a step towards a cashless society. Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy celebrated the ban, and said that this could help push the country towards a digital economy. Of course, this will not be a free digital economy where people will be able to choose which currency they want to trade with, but it will be a top-down controlled economy with a single monopolized currency, that can be traced and tracked at every turn. Prime Minister is working hard to reduce corruption. Black money is a scourge on any developing economy. He has been a great supporter of digital economy. So yesterday when he made the announcement, I thought it was a master stroke, Murthy said. However, the move is not entirely popular among everyone in Indias political establishment. Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal Chief Minister, called the ban a draconian decision. Meanwhile, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi pointed out that real corruption goes unnoticed, while the poor suffer the consequences of the new laws. Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter to air his frustrations: Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) November 9, 2016 Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) November 9, 2016 Mukhesh Gautam, former director of agriculture in India pointed out that: After every main crop, whether it is kharif or rabi, the growers sell their yields to the traders as the government system is crippled with red tape and is very slow. Traders come to farms or the villages and purchase their yield and give them money immediately while in the government system they have to make umpteen rounds of offices to get their payment. With this cash, farmers and rural people buy seeds, equipment and fertilizers for the next crop and also use this money for the marriage of their siblings. Since the high currency denominations have been banned, a majority of farmers are feeling cheated. Most of these farmers actually dont have bank accounts, and are going to have a very difficult time during this currency transition. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally, without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here. This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link. They should have bought gold. Cortez explaining to the natives why he was killing them and their children: Nice try on the experiment in India. How is replacing currency an experiment. The US had done it, as have most nations. Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky in the 1800s said, Money is coined liberty. Consider too, once physical cash is eliminated the banks will quickly up the fee from todays 3% to 10% or more. I have never paid a fee to get my money out of my banks, including the 4 major banks. You need to use your own bank instead of ATMS from other banks. Who said anything about an ATM? I was referring to the fees charged for electronic transfers like those charged by pay pal or square Thanks for the clarification. There are ways to avoid such fees .Paypal only charges if you make money, at 3%. Other transactions, such as buying, are free to the buyer. I advocate municipal banks..not for profit, treated as public utilties. Municipal utilities historically operate at 10% less than private. Public banks have a long history of success as In North Dakota: This bank has been successful for nearly 100 years, while private banks have destroyed economies only to be bailed out by trillions from the public, who lose trillions in equity in homes and stocks when the banks periodically fail. They have taken control of government so they can make money while destroying wealth of others. Public banks do not have these problems. Germany has 3 types of banks: private such as Deutsche Bank which helped caused the financial collapse 2007-9 and got billions in bailout money (!), cooperative banks (where clients are also owners and have an equal vote) , and public banks, which have 40% of the assets. Public banks include, state, local, and city. Germany is a stable, prosperous nation, the economic heart of Europe. Private banks are implicated in odious loans to countries like Greece, creating great suffering and instability. Public banks do not have the profit motive which creates moral hazard and reckless gamblingand so they make money without collapsing, providing a public service without the risk of private banks. So the 60 billionaires with more money than 3.5 billion, who live on $2 a day have a lot of private property. If Money is LIberty, billions (who make their 2 bucks a day in slave labor for those with the private property:) are not free. Thats what Marx said! Right on! No cash will put EVERYTHING under the governments control. No more private self employment, garage sales, online or Craigslist without being under the nose or noose of the Government. What better way to have total control= NO MORE FREEDOM. Everything under State Surveillance. Why dont we just replace a system based on profit, exploitation, and war with a system based on shared prosperity? The love of money is the root of all evilwhy not return to the 99% of our heritage when, aside from personal possessions like your toothbrush or car, all wealth is owned by all? Even Jefferson and Tom Paine wrote that what the earth has created, the oceans, the soil, the rain, the minerals, belongs to everyone, since no one built it and it could only become private property through theft. In Discourse on Equality, Rousseau wrote: Men are everywhere born free but everywhere found in chains. I think I can explain why. His explanation goes back to the first guy to say of a piece of communal property: this is mine. The Enclosure Acts in early Britain stole the Commons on which the free yeomen depended to live (Take all you NEED: food, fuel, building material, but take no more: no hoarding or selling off property that belongs to us all). That is why anarchists have argued that private property (NOT personal possessions but assets used only to make more money) is theft. The 1% who own 99% of the worlds wealth (private property) use their billions to make more billions, as billions are malnourished, starving, dying of illness in misery. This is a sick situaiton, and the solution is to take back the wealth to the people who created it (Adam Smith: The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes. This is where Marx started, from the extraction of surplus value from labor to enrich the rich and impoverish the masses. Today 1% have 99% of the wealth, and its all legal, as past wars, slavery, etc have all been forgotten or legalized. Everything Hitler did was legal: Martin Luther King. Private property is based on a history of war, exploitation, and legalized fraud (see the Bank bailouts of 2008-9); after a time, the crimes are converted into rights. Private property, from an objective view, is a codification of existing power relations. The right of private property (once more I do not mean personal possessions but the wealth of the Koch brother (100 billion) which is subsidized by the public (IMF estimates public subsidies to fossil fuel industry at 5 trillion a year) and the wealth of the Waltons (Walmart), who created nothing and do not work, is greater than 100 million working Americans and is based on paying substandard wages which require workers to get government welfare, paid by the taxpayers.). Its time to take back the Commons or risk the destruction of the earth (the British Enclosure Acts by which the aristocracy legally stole the Commons and reduced the free yeomen to starving beggars or working, along with their young children, for the Master, destroyed 90% of English forests; in the US, pasture fed cattle have destroyed 90% of fragile riparian corridors in the West). The pursuit of greater and greater profit leads to greater and greater inequality, poverty and war. It has reduced previously free people to abject poverty and death. The defense of private property, as it currently exists, is a defense of the destruction of the earth (the Koch brothers have spent hundreds of millions to create opposition to curbs on pollution, the cost of which is shifted to the public/government) and the impoverishment of most of the worlds people. I find that less than defensible. I urge all to demand,for the sake of human liberty, that the legalized theft be ended and the Commons (our water, our rich earth, our oceans) be returned to humanity, as Jefferson and Paine argued., NO one said no cash: India is replacing paper currency often used in fraud with paper currency with built in security, just like US dollars were replaced. It is not the state but the private banks (such as those who run the Federal Reserve and those who caused the Great Recession) which have destroyed the economy, with the state role being letting the banks run wild. A good analyis is Matt Taibbis Griftopia, which in detail explains how the Big Banks created the disaster, then made huge profits of it. Today household income is down 8% since 2008 while the banks that failed(and we bailed out) are making record profits. The head of the largest US Bank is being considered to run the Treasury, just as the CEO of Goldman Sachs ran the Treasury under Bush (and oversaw the worst collapse in 80 years). When banks occupy the White House, that is full-blown corporate fascism, where corporate interests and state power are totally integrated in the service of the wealthy ,whose reckless gambling losses are guaranteed by the State. We need the State to say NO and re-instate the wall of separation from casino/investment banks and commercial banking. Trump is picking a guy who has led the fight against regulation, guaranteeing another collapse, since lack of regulation creates a moral hazard where if you win the bet, you pocket the profits (last year, several hedge fund managers made over a billion each and paid a lower tax rate than taxi driver) and if you lose, the taxpayers bail you out. The only losers, the public, the banks are expert at blaming the government to shift guilt. Its a great system for wealthy banker, a nightmare for the rest of us. To have freedom, we must have an end to state tyranny (NSA, etc) and corporate tyranny, an end to corporate fascism, and a state strong enough to keep the banks honest without being run BY the banks. This requires getting Big Money (led by Wall St.) out of politics. With a Big Banker in charge of the Treasury, nothing will change and the period busts of a profit-driven system backed up the State will continue to impoverish us. Public and coop banks (like credit unions, which has 90 million client/owners in the US) solve all the moral and financial problems., Cash or being chipped is not a solution to our current imbalance, IMO. But as more of our lives show up on debit and credit cards and loyal customer cards we have no privacy. Perhaps wed do well to look at Iceland closely. They may be ahead of us in the consciousness scale.? Money is the basis for our insanity. We are all so indoctrinated into the religion of money we just cant imagine a world population without money. Think longer and harder. Certainly wont happen in our lifetime but perhaps someday us humans will grow up and give up this INDIVIDUALIST mind set. If you think about evolution and how individual cells get together with others to make a better organism, we humans are slowing our own evolution. Pamela, humans are failing. We arent part of any ecosystem, only our own monetary system. We dont understand the basics of lifeunderstand the rest of life all around us. We are so self centeredeach one of us has become the center of their little solar system. Money has become more valuable than life. Watch for knee jerk reactions They are NOT banning currency but replacing it with more secure paper notes: How many sheep, pretending to be free thinkers, will buy this bullshit? No doubt whatsoever those with the financial power want cashless this is part of the agenda for decreasing personal and national sovereignty and centralized tyranny AKA the largest form of gangsterism on the planet. The zentral banks want to track your every transaction from kradle to grave. 