Quite
apart from MP Judith Collins’ monstrous Anti-Money
Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act making banking at times damned
near impossible, and hugely inconvenient always, even on the simplest of transactions,
(try opening a bank account for your kid), this post references the philosophical
quagmire individuals find themselves in with a central banked system captured
completely by the Big Brother State – and not just for the tax take, (although
that moral battle was where freedom was lost).
This
week political activist Nicky Hager found out what every taxpayer knows: if you’ve
got a bank account, then the state has a convenient source for spying on every aspect
of your life. That was when Westpac handed
over all his bank transactions for a requested period directly to police,
without his knowledge, or a warrant. I’m employing no hyperbole here: give me
your bank transactions for a year, and there’s not much I couldn’t tell you
about your life in the broad strokes, or intimately.
IRD
routinely get this information from the banks - for up to four years - also without their customers
knowledge; my understanding is they often go on such fishing trips initially unwarranted (albeit that’s
a moot point, regardless, given obtaining such a warrant is a mere routine procedure for the Department. I wonder if there has been even a single case of a judge turning
them down (bet there’s not).)
Last
year I
wrote how in the most cynical of political workarounds our government
signed an Inter-governmental Agreement (IGA) with the United Police States of
America, for all the information held by New Zealand banks on every dual US
citizen (anyone with a US passport), to be sent annually first to our own IRD
(because that gets this process around our Privacy Act which IRD work above),
and then from IRD to IRS. This allows the US government to track all US
citizens no matter where they are in the world, and makes the activities of
NSA, et al, look civilised. It's notable via that IGA the godlike powers handed to our
IRD are for the first time I can think of, used for a purpose that has nothing
to do with our tax take - with such a
precedent set by the lawmakers, without a squeak of protest from the tax-take worshiping Left, well … That
post is in my top ten and worth a
read to understand how privacy has no meaning in a political context: it simply
doesn’t exist.
And
in today’s
Press this:
Thousands of
dollars belonging to a charity advocating for medicinal cannabis has been
returned after a bank stonewalled its moves to open an account.
United In
Compassion (UIC) is a non-profit group advocating for New Zealand-based
research into the therapeutic effects of cannabis-based medicines.
Kiwibank was the
third bank that UIC, which has been trying to set up an account in the lead-up
to a national symposium in April, has hit hurdles with.
On Wednesday
afternoon Kiwibank agreed to release the money immediately but won't open an
account for the group until compliance issues are sorted.
UIC co-founder
Toni-Marie Matich approached Kiwibank for help in June and close to $5000 has
been sitting in the account for the last month.
On Tuesday a
Kiwibank manager told Matich he wasn't sure whether the account would be
approved.
Initially the bank
stalled over validating all the trustees but after each one spent hours in
their local Kiwibank branch filling out forms Matich thought the green light
would be given.
Matich's daughter,
Monique, suffers from intractable epilepsy - a seizure disorder that cannot be
controlled with conventional medicine.
Although
here’s the killer paragraph – if you don’t understand how monstrous this is,
then you are beyond hope, as is the banking system:
Matich said both
she and her business partner, Damas Manderson, had been told by the same
Kiwibank manager that there were moral and ethical concerns about the account
being set up.
There’s
no other logical viewpoint to hold, anymore, than that to support the ethos which
made the West the pinnacle human civilisation once reached, the ethos that is
the beating heart of capitalism, namely, the voluntary transaction, then you
must avoid New Zealand banks. They’re not instruments of capitalism, they’re
instruments used routinely by authority in the long-lost war of the individual
to be free of the rampant state. Think of your bank account like a telephone, that's been hacked, with a bureaucrat listening to everything said. Twenty first century, meet twentieth century.
And
politicians wonder why Bitcoin has captured the imaginations of the free …
