Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.
Genesis 11:4
If you live in the PNW, by now you've given some thought to getting ready for the Big One. This is the ~9.0 magnitude earthquake projected to cascade across Vancouver Island, Washington's islands and peninsulas and the Oregon Coast, collapsing highways and bridges, crumbling the foundations of skyscrapers and submerging entire communities in the ensuing tsunami.
Coastal towns like Seaside and Ocean Shores are working to relocate elementary schools to higher elevations. My cousin (a phd!) knows the hilltop near her home she plans to climb after it strikes. I have friends who have put together a preparation kit, consisting of an emergency blanket, canned food, water, a first aid kit and a flashlight. My sister, after reading Katryn Schulz's 2015 New Yorker article, “The Really Big One,” ix-nayed plans to purchase land on the Olympic Peninsula (although several years later she capitulated and bought land on the Kitsap Peninsula, which should be just as bad).
It's gone beyond the realm of speculation. “The science is robust,” Schulz writes in her Pulitzer Prize winning article. Earthquakes, historically, have devastated the region, and we're due for the next one. Soon.
In a similar vein, every cognizant person on the planet has ruminated over what's transpired across the globe these past two years. The pandemic, many concur, is really a front for tectonic shifts taking place economically. The evidence is plain that something akin to an economic mega quake is set to occur, behooving any and all to shore up a plan for surviving it.
A System Toppling
For what else do we sift through content on the internet, but to discover little gems who inform us of goings-on we'd never hear about by listening to the likes of David Muir, Mika Brzezinski, Conservative Inc. or even the perspicacious Steve Bannon?
Thanks to a link posted by a commenter in a Steve Kirsch Substack article, I recently unearthed John Titus' You Tube account, Best Evidence. Titus, as it turns out, actually reads (and comprehends!) dry economic papers that put the rest of us to sleep, and ferrets out fun facts we all really need to know (because they directly affect our lives), but that no one else is telling us.
His videos are substantive, and I recommend watching them in their entirety. However, below I'm gong to outline two unprecedented occurrences he relays that have transpired in our economy these past two years.
The Dollar Losing Reserve Currency Status
The first unprecedented occurrence is Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell stating that US debt is out of control, implying this will lead to skyrocketing inflation, and that it may well cause the US to lose reserve currency status. (Titus replays these quotes in his 3/23/22 video “US Federal Reserve is a Cancer.”)
In an April 2021 Bloomberg interview, Powell says the following in response to a question regarding skyrocketing debt impacting inflation:
So yes over time and in the longer run the US federal budget is on an unsustainable path, meaning simply that the debt is growing meaningly faster than the economy and that's, by definition, unsustainable over time.
And on March 2nd, 2022, at the House Financial Services Committee, Powell says the following in response to a question regarding the implications of China and Russia (and soon Pakistan) conducting business in their own currency:
We do benefit from being the main reserve currency for the world. And that really is because we have open capital accounts and the rule of law and we have inflation, over a long period of time, under control so that the dollar preserves its value. And so our markets are the most liquid and it's the place where people want to be.
....Over time the question is if someone would want to move away from the dollar, what will be the effect on us? ...over time though it would I suppose diminish our status as the reserve currency. It's also possible to have more than one large reserve currency; there have been times when that has been the case.
Note how plainly Powell makes these HUGE concessions. And this isn't the only place big cheeses have engaged in this sort of talk: in his book Covid-19: The Great Reset, WEF founder Klaus Schwab writes:
For quite some time some analysts and policy-makers have been considering a possible and progressive end to the dominance of the dollar...the pandemic might be the catalyst that proves them right.
The cause, he corroborates with Powell, is unsustainable levels of debt. 1
The Federal Reserve Going Direct
A second unprecedented occurrence Titus relays is that toward the end of 2019, the Federal Reserve started “going direct,” meaning it began putting money directly into the hands of consumers—i.e. you and me.
In his video “Larry and Carstens' Excellent Pandemic,” Titus explains how here in the US we have a split circuit system, where commercial banks, traditionally, issue money to consumers, and the federal reserve issues money to the commercial banks. For this reason, it's impossible for the central bank to track the money a citizen spend on daily transactions.
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This “going direct” took place at the behest of the investment management corporation Blackrock who, in its August 2019 report “Dealing with the Next Downturn” states:
An unprecedented response is needed (for dealing with the next downtown.) That response will likely involve “going direct.” Going direct means the central bank finding way to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders....this boost to the stock of money has to be permanent.
What is the implication of going direct? Titus includes a telling quote from former IMF managing director Agustin Carstens:
With cash we don't know who is using a $100 bill today, we don't know who is using a 1,000 peso bill today. A key difference with CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.
(“that expression of central bank liability” means our money, and CBDC means “central bank digital currency.”)
This “going direct,” then, has put consumers in a precarious position; our money comes directly from a central bank which has the capacity (and the desire!) to monitor and control every dollar we spend.
The Implications
It's hard to overstate the significance of what Titus has reported.
As for the dollar losing reserve status, this means something would have to replace it. Powell suggests having two reserve currencies; Schwab in The Great Reset poses the renminbi, the euro, or national digital currencies as possible replacements. (2) Each of these solutions has huge political repercussions. And this “going direct,” a fundamental step in rolling out CBDC, has already occurred; it's not talk of something looming. Titus estimates a complete shift to CBDC would take place in three or four years.
What sort of authoritarian edicts might the “total absolute control,” made possible with CDCD, encompass? Some of Klaus Schwab's perspectives may provide a glimpse. In a 2015 interview with Charlie Rose, Schwab says:
The 4th industrial revolution: it changes YOU. Genetic editing, it’s YOU who are changed...practically every issue in the world can also be solved (disease, environment) by new technologies that are developed.
In his book Covid-19: The Great Reset he says refusing to participate in a contact-tracing app means hiding behind the “individualist facade of rights.”(3)
In a grand attempt to “solve all the world's problems” (ha!), it's not at all inconceivable that we are a few years away from living in a totalitarian system in which our capacity to purchase food and pay for housing hinges on whether or not we consent to receiving technology that alters our biology.
Their Babylonian Ziggurat
This scenario we see playing out, where a group of individuals vie for total absolute control, is as old as the hills.
In the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, recorded in the Book of Genesis, a group of people similarly sought to possess complete dominion by building a ziggurat that reached to the heavens. God, however, intervened and foiled their efforts by confusing their language so they could no longer understand one another, and so the community scattered and disbursed.(4) We should anticipate a similar Divine intervention when these tyrants role out this Great Reset in its entirety.
However, Genesis never indicates how long God allowed them to persist in building this Babylonian skyscraper. Those things didn't go up in a week or two, so it's fair to assume their scheming lasted as a decade, quite possibly longer. And so how long will people like Carstens and Schwab be able to persist in building their own ziggurat, attempting to have us under their thumb? It could easily last just as long.
This opens up a plethora of questions, the most basic one being: Where would someone want to find him or herself, both spiritually and physically, when central bank digital currency rolls out? More specific questions include: What impact would CBDC have on home ownership? On the capacity to travel and to purchase food? Should we have cash on hand? If so, how much? What about keeping money in FDIC insured institutions, versus the stock market? Should we spread assets among a variety of places, or does it even matter? What might a preparation kit consist of? Should we store up food and water, and have an emergency blanket and a special hill we plan to run to when this all rolls out?
Further, it demonstrates a pressing need for Christians to move beyond the Third Mansion, to use an analogy from St. Teresa of Avila. This detachment professed and practiced by the Carmelite mystics needs to become the everyday reality of a modern Christian, as in the years ahead it's quite possible we cannot depend on the economy as the means to provide us with basic necessities such as food and housing.
There's no decisive answers to these questions, that I can determine anyway, particularly the more practical ones. I don't know the entire implications of CBDC, and whether its application would really be universal--or what a rebellion against it may look like.
An Escape Route
On a hot afternoon last week I pulled into the parking lot of a Dollar Tree in Maob, Utah, only to approach the entrance and see two notebook papers plastered to the door with “closed” scrawled across in ballpoint pen.
“There they go again. Every time,” droned a man who'd walked up beside me, his long wavy hair blowing in the dusty wind.
“Why are they closed?” I asked, supremely frustrated, as it meant I might end up having to pay as much as six dollars to purchase laundry detergent somewhere else.
“Because they want to be,” he fumed, heading back to his car.
The economic plates are shifting. Here is a franchise of a publicly traded company, into which people from all over the world invest money every day, located in a city that receives 1.5 million tourists each year, running itself like a lemonade stand. And as we've all witnessed, you cannot drive through the main street of any town in America and not see help wanted signs in every window. The rumblings are all around us.
Later on, I had sorted myself out and sat at a spacious bar drinking a sour beer, surrounded by locals and tourists alike. I asked the man beside me, a Moab resident for the past six years, about some women I'd seen earlier wearing long-sleeve, ankle-length dresses. He figured they were part of a polygamist Mormon community living south of Moab.
“I thought that'd been outlawed,” I remarked.
“It has!” he guffawed.
Believe it or not, this gives me hope. An imminent rollout of CBDC isn't necessarily a leash around our necks. It is possible to thrive outside the legal system.
But does this mean we'll all have to cram ourselves into a podunk town in Utah, with the spillover perhaps finding refuge at a safe haven in Wyoming?
We shall soon see.
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1. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret. Covid-19: The Great Reset . Forum Publishing, July 2020: page 73.
2. The Great Reset Page 73.
3. The Great Reset Page 164.
4. Genesis 11:4-9.
