China and Russia are preparing to attack and disrupt critical U.S. military and intelligence satellites in a future conflict with crippling space missile, maneuvering satellite, and laser attacks, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday.
Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the Air Force Space Command, said the threat to U.S. space systems has reached a new tipping point, and after years of post-Cold War stagnation foreign states are focused on curbing U.S. space systems.
“Adversaries are developing kinetic, directed-energy, and cyber tools to deny, degrade, and destroy our space capabilities,” Hyten said in a prepared statement for a hearing of the House Armed Service strategic forces subcommittee.
“They understand our reliance on space, and they understand the competitive advantage we derive from space. The need for vigilance has never been greater,” the four-star general said.
Hyten said U.S. Global Positioning System satellites remain vulnerable to attack or jamming. The satellites’ extremely accurate time-keeping feature is even more critical to U.S. guided weapons than their ability to provide navigation guidance, he said.
Disrupting the satellites time capabilities would degrade the military’s ability to conduct precision strike operations used in most weapons systems today.
Hyten said a new joint military-intelligence command center is helping to monitor space threats, such as anti-satellite missile launches, covert killer robot satellites, and ground-fired lasers that can blind or disrupt satellites. The unit is called the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, located at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.
“Russia views U.S. dependency on space as an exploitable vulnerability and they are taking deliberate actions to strengthen their counter-space capabilities,” he said.
China in December created its first dedicated space warfare and cyber warfare unit, called the Strategic Support Forces, for concentrating their “space, electronic, and network warfare capabilities,” Buck said.
“China is developing, and has demonstrated, a wide range of counter-space technologies to include direct-ascent, kinetic-kill vehicles, co-orbital technologies that can disable or destroy a satellite, terrestrially-based communications jammers, and lasers that can blind or disable satellites,” Buck said.
It can be argued that up until a few years ago there were still ways to exist off the grid and operate outside the monetary system, but the implementation of negative interest rates has now virtually assured that cash, as we know it, is on its last leg.
You can have cash or you can have negative interest rates, but you can’t have both. If negative interest rates are further reduced, what could be described as slow motion bank runs will likely ensue. The common man, seeing his hard earned savings robbed with each declining monthly bank statement, will finally awaken from complacency and begin actively withdrawing their money in physical form, thereby endangering the very foundation of fractional reserve finance.
Banks can’t exist without deposits. Keeping money in a mattress is preferable to being financially bled to death with negative rates. Central bankers are well aware of this and are already prepositioning policies and taking steps to prevent the coming exodus. Outlawing large denominational physical cash and large cash transactions will be used to financially imprison the public while the negative interest rates simultaneously pick their pocket.
Laugh all you want. Pretend this is just another conspiracy theory run amok, but these policies are already set into motion in Europe with the U.S. trailing not very far behind. Under the guise of stopping criminal activity, ending corruption, and fighting the global war on terror, the last bastion of financial freedom is now being sacrificed to prop up a debt tsunami.
The cold reality is that just paying the annual interest cost, at historically normal interest rates of 3-4%, would be next to impossible for the majority of the world’s governments. Burdened with surging unfunded entitlement obligations, these governments no longer have any wiggle room for surgical reductions in spending. It is simply much easier for governments to reduce borrowing costs to below zero, eliminating those constraining interest payments, than admit they were wrong and reverse course.
Here are just some of the steps being taken to force the world into a cashless environment:
It is illegal to buy anything in France costing more than €1000 euros with physical cash. This number is down from €3000 euros just a few years ago.
Spain has banned cash transactions above €2,500 euros.
Italy banned cash transactions above €1000 euros.
Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister, Michael Meister, wants a €5,000 cap on cash transactions.
Former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, is calling for ending the $100 bill, and wants Europe to retire the €500 euro. This would effectively remove over 50% of all physical currency currently in circulation in Europe and the U.S.
The head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, along with a growing list of former and current banking officials, is calling for ending the €500 euro.
Below is the breakdown of U.S. currency. The $100 bill represents over 78% of all physical currency in circulation. Much of these $100 dollar bills, along with large denominational euros, are used as storehouses of value in many third world countries. What happens when someone in say, Zimbabwe, goes to cash in their foreign U.S. dollars and is told that hundred dollar bills are no longer recognized?
Janet Yellen, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said she will not rule out negative interest rates here in the US. Canada is contemplating them too, if their economy continues to falter. The writing is on the wall that the trend is toward negative, rather than positive, rates across the globe. If we reach a point in the U.S. where the Fed feels it must implement negative rates, then the capital controls already in place will only expand, and the days of paying in cash will be numbered.
Europe and Japan have crossed the Rubicon into negative rates; the euro and yen are already both compromised as currencies. To surrender our cash will only endanger each and every American on a level no different than surrendering our right to free speech and self-defense. When a government is given the power to theoretically turn-off your access to cash with a flip of a switch, then we will no longer remain free, but instead become indentured servants to a failed state.
This article in no way should be construed as an endorsement to buy or sell any security.
Do you realize if you have more than 300. US dollars on you the cops can take without any warrant or reason?
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