From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By SEN. TOMMY TUBERVILLE

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are a threat to liberty.

Sixty-eight countries, including communist China, are exploring the possibility of issuing a CBDC. CBDCs are essentially government-sponsored cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of a national currency that allow for real-time payments.

The European Union has a digital euro CBDC pilot program, and all BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are working to stand up CBDCs. China’s CBDC pilot, the largest in the world, is being used by 260 million individuals.

While faster payments are a positive for markets and economic growth, CBDCs present major risks. They would allow governments to meticulously monitor transactions made by their citizens, and CBDCs open the door for government planners to limit the types of transactions made.

Power corrupts, and no government should have that level of control. No wonder China and other authoritarian regimes around the globe are eager to implement a CBDC.

Governments that issue CBDCs could prohibit the sale or purchase of certain goods or services and more easily freeze and seize assets. But that would never happen in the U.S, right? Don’t be so certain.

Take a look at recent events in our neighbor to the north. The government of Canada shut down bank accounts and froze assets of Canadian citizens protesting the COVID-19 vaccination in Ottawa during the winter of 2022. With a CBDC, authoritarian actions of this kind would be even easier to execute.

To make matters worse, the issuance of a CBDC by the Federal Reserve, the U.S.’s central bank, has the potential to undermine the existing banking system. The exact ramifications of what a CBDC would mean to the banking sector are unclear, but such a development could position the Fed to offer banking services directly to American businesses and citizens, undercutting the community banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions that currently serve main street effectively.

The Fed needs to stay out of the banking business – it’s having a hard enough time achieving its core mission of getting inflation under control. A CBDC would open the door for the Fed to compete with the private sector, undercutting economic growth, innovation, and financial access in the process.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has testified before Congress that America’s central bank would not issue a CBDC without express approval from Congress, but the Fed has studied CBDCs extensively.

For consumers who want the ability to make real-time payments internationally, CBDCs are not the answer. Stablecoins offer a commonsense private sector solution to this market demand.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a certain asset, such as the U.S. dollar. If Congress gets its act together and creates a regulatory framework for stablecoins, many banks, cryptocurrency firms, and other innovative private sector entities would issue dollar-pegged stablecoins. These financial instruments would allow for instantaneous cross-border payments for market participants who find that service of value.

Stablecoins are the free market response to CBDCs. They offer the benefits associated with the technology without the privacy risk, and they would likely enhance, not disrupt, the existing banking sector.

Representatives Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and French Hill (R-Ark.) have done yeoman’s work advancing quality, commonsense stablecoin legislation in the House of Representatives, and the Senate needs to move forward on this issue.

Inaction by Congress will force innovators overseas and put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. It would also help the Fed boost the case for a CBDC that will undermine liberty and open the door to government oppression.

Tommy Tuberville is a Republican from Alabama serving in the United States Senate. He is a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which plays a key role in overseeing emerging digital assets markets.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

“The treaty would put us under the thumb of the U.N. and communist China and the WHO for whatever they wanted to declare a crisis, whether it’s poverty crisis, or a gun violence crisis or a climate crisis, or a health crisis, and make us listen to the WHO. That is not constitutional.”

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists rallied outside the U.S. Capitol Thursday morning to raise awareness of and opposition to a global pandemic agreement that they say poses a grave threat to national sovereignty and basic freedoms.

On May 27, the World Health Assembly (the governing forum of the World Health Organization’s 194 member nations) is slated to meet and finalize the details of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, on the surface a plan to better handle global health crises like COVID-19 in the future. However, critics have found a number of alarming details in the drafts that have been released.

The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson explains that the plan’s February 8-15 draft “redistribute 20% of all U.S. ‘pandemic-related products’’ to other nations,” empower censorship for the sake of preventing an “infodemic” of “too much information” and “false or misleading information” from creating “mistrust in health authorities and undermin[ing] public health and social measures,” and institute a “Conference of the Parties” to alter the deal further via a two-thirds vote.

An updated draft released April 16 drops the “infodemic” language in favor of a shorter and more vague statement about “[r]ecognizing the importance of building trust and ensuring timely sharing of information to prevent misinformation, disinformation and stigmatization”; but retains the redistribution language as well as the Conference of the Parties’ amendment power–meaning that the most objectionable aspects of earlier drafts could be restored once the agreement is adopted.

On Thursday, the Sovereignty Coalition organized a press conference to make their opposition to “global governance” known. Participants included U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), U.S. Reps. Bob Good (VA-5), Chris Smith (NJ-4), Chip Roy (TX-21), and other members of Congress; Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Tea Party Patriots Action president Jenny Beth Martin, Center for Security Policy executive chairman Frank Gaffney, and Women’s Rights without Frontiers and Anti-Globalist International president Reggie Littlejohn, among other heads of conservative groups.

‘Not Now’ Campaign to Defend America’s Sovereignty Against WHO https://t.co/ThSRYgGHtP

— Sovereignty Coalition (@sovcoalition) April 18, 2024

“This is the most important issue that is getting the least amount of attention relative to its importance,” declared Good. “The treaty would put us under the thumb of the U.N. and communist China and the WHO for whatever they wanted to declare a crisis, whether it’s poverty crisis, or a gun violence crisis or a climate crisis, or a health crisis, and make us listen to the WHO. That is not constitutional.”

“Are we for standing up for Americans, or are we for ceding authority to international bodies to govern us and to shove their progressive, radical, Marxist ideas on the American people?” asked Roy.

Should the agreement be ratified, Littlejohn warned, the Conference of the Parties would have the power to “mandate vaccines, mandate masks, mandate lockdowns, and mandate quarantines,” as well as “mandate that the governments of the world surveil and censor their citizens, no doubt through digital IDs, which can be used as the basis of a Chinese-style, social credit.”

The Sovereignty Coalition also released a poll of 1,000 likely voters by McLaughlin & Associates finding that only 29% thought it was a “good idea” to delegate America’s pandemic decision making to the WHO, that nearly 75% thought health decisions should remain with their elected representatives, that nearly 64% believe any such agreement must be ratified by the Senate, and that 68% want approval delayed until the public has had the opportunity to see and debate the final text.

Long known for a similar left-wing bias to that of the United Nations, the WHO has faced additional criticism since COVID’s outbreak in 2020 for, among other offenses, opposing bans on travel from China that could have limited the reach of COVID, for legitimizing the false claims coming out of the Chinese government that initially downplayed the gravity of the situation and covered up the Communist regime’s mishandling of it, and for favoring the lockdown and mandate policies that exacerbated harm while curtailing basic freedoms and failing to improve health outcomes.

“In December [2019], the WHO refused to act on or publicize Taiwan’s warning that the new respiratory infection emerging in China could pass from human to human,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in April 2020. “In mid January [2020], despite accumulating evidence of patients contracting what we now know as COVID-19 from other people, the organization repeated the [Chinese Communist Party’s] lie that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. In January, the WHO, at Beijing’s behest, also blocked Taiwan from participating in critical meetings to coordinate responses to the coronavirus and even reportedly provided wrong information about the virus’s spread in Taiwan.”

Near the end of its tenure, the Trump administration began the process of formally withdrawing the United States from the WHO. But upon taking office, President Joe Biden notified the body that it would contribute $200 million by the end of February 2021, restoring the aid Trump had canceled and asserting a “renewed commitment” to the WHO.