Financial Vulnerability – Who Owns Your Money?

“Also, I’ve been told that the company’s expense accounts have been frozen. . . “ – Arrested Development

It’s hard to explain theft to a government, because they take things, literally.

The power to regulate is the power to destroy.  If you know who has that power over your life, that’s one aspect of preparedness – financial or otherwise.

Here’s an example I saw play out in real life:  In Modern Mayberry there was a retailer who had a small specialty shop.  Now, in Modern Mayberry there are limited shopping opportunities.  There’s the Walmart®.  There are seventeen antique stores selling stuff from nearby barns.  There’s a used kids clothes store – they’re very specific about just taking the clothes.  I tried to sell Pugsley during his difficult phase, and they simply wouldn’t take him.

But this shop was different.  It was a very specialized store – bicycles and parts – and nice bikes, the ones that cost more than the $75 that Walmart™ wants for a Huffy© with “some assembly required.”  It just so happened I was going through a biking phase, so I was gearing up.  One day, I got a package that I’d ordered from Amazon™ – I noticed that this small package (bicycle stuff) had come from the local retailer.

I thought to myself, “That’s weird.  Not as weird as a badger wearing underwear and lip gloss, but it’s not Saturday night yet, either.”

I did find two badgers in a U-Haul® once and called the ranger.  “Are they moving?” he asked.  “Maybe.  I guess that would explain the U-Haul®,” I replied.

I walked in there since I’d bought my bike from him and asked the owner what was up.  About the bikes, not the badgers.  I don’t think anyone can explain the badgers except people over at the military base, and they’re not talking.

The owner explained his business model to me.  It turned out that he did very little business locally.  What he had done was to build a small niche business selling specialty bike stuff on Amazon©.  Even though his merchandise was branded by non-Chinese makers, he bought it in bulk from China and sold it via Amazon®.

“I even sell some of it back to customers in China,” he laughed.

Then one day, Amazon© changed (in some fashion, I’m not aware of the details) the terms of the deal.  Within six months the shop was closed.  Within a year, he was divorced and had sold his house and had left to wander and find rights to wrong, or wrongs to write.  Or something.  I kinda got bored after he kept wanting me to snatch a pebble from his hand and stopped listening.

The six or so employees?  Also gone.  Not dead.  Just had to find new jobs, like looking for stuff in barns.  Side question – where did barn owls sleep before we invented barns?

The entire business gone – all with one, simple rule change.

Is there freedom of speech in Canada?  Sure, but if the government doesn’t agree with you, there won’t be freedom after speech.

Canada made a simple rule change, too.  They suspended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  They decided that if you disagreed with them politically, you could have your money frozen.  I’d use the word “stolen” but it’s not clear that’s the case yet.  Of course, like any breaking news in the land of the Internet, take every story you see below with a grain of salt.

I knew Trudeau had a fixation on single moms, but this is ridiculous:

And they can shut down your life nearly immediately:

The idea is clear, though.  Just like that small businessman in Modern Mayberry, one tiny rule change can make everything go away.  In this case, of course, the rule change wasn’t tiny.  It allows banks to shut down the accounts of those people who try to get all their money.

And for what crime?  Giving (in some cases) token amounts to the Truckers Who Honked.  A $50 donation, made before the emergency act, before it was “illegal” resulted in all of her cash being (at least for now) forfeit.

To be clear, if the government can do that with a stroke of a pen, is it really your money?  Thankfully, though the Canadian government is taking a stand against tyranny.  In Ukraine:

Roses are red, sorry for the hypocrisy, we’ve just updated our foreign policy.

There was a push a while back for what’s called “Universal Basic Income.”  The idea that everyone would get a check each month for breathing.  Think the government would manipulate that to manipulate you?

Nah, no danger in with this, right?

It gets worse.  It turns out that this is, by far, the biggest dream that Leftists have had since, well, forever.  Let’s hear it straight from one of them on Plebbit® (Reddit©). . . .

This is what they admit that they want to do to those who don’t follow their dictates.  They admit this in public.  The poet and well-known philosophizer Samuel Hyde perhaps said it best:

And there’s certainly no danger and nothing you’d have to prepare for with this new government change, is there?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

57 thoughts on “Financial Vulnerability – Who Owns Your Money?”

  1. Imagine how this situation will evolve over time: The non-jabbed will continue to avoid putting their heads into nooses. The normies will accept jabs and keep their currency where bad people more can easily steal it. The normies win Darwin awards as they die of poison “medicine” or poverty. The percentage of normies decreases. How low must that percentage go before the politicians the normies elected elected start losing recall elections?

    1. Elections are fixed at both ends. The parties decide who runs, then whoever counts the votes decide who wins the election.

  2. I fully understand how that bike shop owner went out of business.

    Several years ago I was the GM for a reasonably large e-commerce company. Amazon was our biggest channel(in spite of our best efforts to grow other channels) and they treat their third party sellers with total contempt.

    Dealing with them is a similar experience to being put on trial in the Soviet Union (or Canada now I suppose). You are faced with a bewildering and byzantine ruleset that is impossible to understand, and there is absolutely no recourse if they decide to come down on you for not following rule #472778 that you didn’t even know about. Even better is the fact that Seller Support is so poorly trained (and powerless) that following their advice can get your whole account suspended. Even better than that is the fact that when you do get suspended, they usually don’t tell you what you did.

    Which is what happened to us. Seller Support told us to do X in response to a question we had, and Amazon then suspended our sellers account. But we had absolutely no idea what we had done wrong(we only found out later). So then you have to craft an appeal to Amazon via email (no seller has access to Amazon via phone for account suspensions, it’s email only). But since you don’t actually know what you did…you have to engage in a humiliating sort of abasement that bears a remarkable similarity to the confessions given at Soviet show trials in the 30s.

    Basically you grovel and apologize for every single thing you can possibly think of, hoping that one of them is the right one. But we couldn’t figure it out and after three attempts, we got the dreaded email saying that our case was closed, no further review would be done, and the account team would not respond to further emails.

    So I started laying off people, had to lay off about half my workers. In the mean time, I found a former Amazon account rep who now has a lucrative business helping people get their accounts reinstated. Due to his connections in Amazon, he was able to find out the real reason we were suspended, and for a 5k payment, crafted an email for us that hit the correct groveling tone for Amazon to reinstate our account.

    6 weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales later…

    This is one of many reasons why I left that job and got a new job as a developer. I cannot afford to have my income at the mercy of a bunch of corrupt fascists like Amazon.

    1. I have heard that if a product sells well, very shortly there’s an “Amazon Brand” version of it that will show up – even for products as low as $1 million in sales.

  3. And our own Intelligentsia ADVISED and are still Advising Trudeau how to handle his “Little People Problem”. It’s the “You DO IT First” syndrome.

    They are taking notes and refining it for our OWN Truckers Buffalo Jump into the Dragons Lair next week?

    Good Call Wilder that our own banking system will shut us off and NOTHING you pay for with cash or credit will be available if the Powers that Be decide your part of the problem. Folks that used a business computer to make the donation have been FIRED.

    Think about that and get your work arounds done ASAP as the Trucker fuse is burning as we speak.

    Mr. Putin made his move partly because he sees that America will very soon be TOO BUSY dealing with internal issues to harm Russia. His country has been dealing with America’s sanctions and proxy wars against them for over a decade, I wonder what brand of Popcorn he likes when watching our own self-inflicted troubles?

    So, I fully expect Mucho Russia, Russia, Russia distractions in the mass media while our “Leadership” makes its move to quell our “Little Problems”.

    Praying for wisdom

    1. Interesting question about Putin’s favorite popcorn. I did some research. The answer is probably “CorinCorn”, their national brand the way that “Orville Redenbacher” is ours.

      https://corincorn.ru/

      https://corincorn.ru/images/photo4.jpg

      Russia produces 30 thousand tons of popcorn a year and eats 13 thousand. I guess Putin’s gonna personally have to eat a lot that will now be sanctioned from export abroad.

      Regarding Canada, I’m reading that they have now revoked the Emergency Act. Maybe Trudeau finally realized there is no quicker way to start a national bank run than telling people they can no longer trust banks to return their money deposits upon demand.

  4. “…that would explain the U-Hauls®…

    Guess we’ll have to update this old joke:

    Q: “How do you become a millionaire?”
    A: “Manufacture an item that WalMart® buys and sells nationwide.”

    Q: “How do you go bankrupt in a week?”
    A: “Manufacture an item that WalMart® no longer buys.” (And you’re stuck with $2MM in inventory & a $1MM line of credit that is being called in by the bank).

    Just substitute Amazon™ for WalMart$.

    1. Yes but they have an entire electronic surveillance system Including YOUR Cellphone to get targeting data to cripple your family.

      If its connected to the internet it’s not secure. Everything you say on that system can and will be used against you in the kangaroo Socialist Democrats court system.

      Small groups, closed mouths, bad attitudes.

      1. All of the people you are ‘asking a friend’ for are easily replaced. Our best hope is to get local and state power in flyover country, then use that to fend off federal overreach.

      2. Everybody talks about bankers and politicians, etc. as if they’re some sort of monster that lives underground. These are real people. They have lives and homes and jobs. They go to work the same time, the same way, just like most people every morning. If you prick them, do they not bleed? Come on, cut them a brake!

        1. Are you saying they are just like everyone else? Putting their usury on one leg at a time? Because having six cockroach-like legs I’d think they’d require a little hired help.

        2. @McChuck – Ha! I see what you did there. Just remember, broken brakes are most troublesome in hilling country and/or places with high speed traffic. And don’t forget that the emergency brake cable can fail unexpectedly too.

          We are rapidly approaching a time where having an enclosed & lockable garage would be a real asset, and the market for under-vehicle inspection mirrors could be a rapid growth area.

  6. Every law that was passed after the Constitution was ratified took away a chunk of our freedom. How much freedom is left at this point?

  7. People are already grumbling because the “child tax credit” that was being paid out early in 2020 isn’t happening now with the accompanying sob stories in the media about how cruel this is. We always operated under the assumption that the early tax credit was just bonus money and not something to be budgeted but most people haven’t. The whole thing was training for a UBI which will create a new cage people willingly climb into.

    FWIW, you site wasn’t working most of the day again and I had to shut off my anti-virus to get it to load this time.

  8. Guess I won’t be buying any new cars after 2025. It ought to make my old junkers value go up too! As if used car prices aren’t already crazy high.

  9. Banks are not faceless.
    Branch managers have homes and addresses.
    Were I thusly so targeted for financial un-personing, I figure after the first 10 or 20 of them turned up with their severed heads found sitting in their laps, the RCMP would probably go out and beat up a few grannies in walkers to find out who was about it.

    After the first one, the rest are free, and it suddenly becomes a lot less fun to enforce edicts for The Man.

    People will twig to this with amazing rapidity under the right sort of duress.
    Like not being able to get to their funds.

    Eventually, they start taking out all sorts of targets of opportunity, for the same reason. People, places, and things.
    Imagine a million DC snipers, with no interconnecting web, just raging butthurt and nothing left to lose.

    At some point, all governmental control over anything melts away like a dropped ice cream cone on a summer sidewalk.

    Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

    – Probably Aesop

    1. Weren’t you saying similar about your job requiring you to get vaxxed, then they required you to get vaxxed? Still not seeing anything in the news about a violent reaction to that. Perhaps we should stop thumping our chest and realize that individual action isn’t likely to happen, and even less likely to have a useful effect. I know organizing with actual people RL is annoying and not nearly as sexy as threatening to cut peoples’ heads off online, but let’s try it anyway.

      1. Mr. Aesop was sharing an amusing hypothetical that might be of historical or cultural interest in his saltily amusing style.

        As one does.

        And he’s still not got the #clotshot.

      2. What Codex said.

        There was no chest-thumping going on.
        I reported in real time that after much blustering and pontificating, and promising dire outcomes for non-compliance, my employer completely caved to everyone, and granted all requested exemptions. (Something about not wishing to close because they’d fired 25-33% of all staff probably factored into that decision, along with the continued applicability of the Constitution, to the great consternation of the local, state, and federal Vaxxhole gauleiters.)

        Hopefully, your memory improves on more important factoids than the petty particulars of my situation.

        I can assure you that had I suddenly and simultaneously been stripped of employment and my profession, statewide, with nothing further to lose, I would not have quietly settled for a job working the night shift at 7-11 selling Slurpees and Slim Jims until the end of my days, nor moving to a luxury shopping cart under an overpass. We’ll just leave it at that.

        If you choose to approach things more tenderly, you have my best wishes. Historically and globally, the prospects for that approach are piss-poor, but it’s a free country.

        But I cosider the guy who grabs the dentist firmly by the wedding tackle just before he begins drilling, and says “If I hurt, you hurt.” to be an instructive parable. There’s a reason they raise sheep and cows for meat, and not bears and tigers.

        1. Codex:
          Are you retarded? That isn’t meant as an insult but a serious question, so I’ll repeat it: Are you retarded?

          We don’t get to decide what our words mean, the FBI and whatever judge they choose gets to. If you think they’ll be deciding those words mean something innocuous, that answers my question in the affirmative.

          Aesop:
          You are nothing but chest-thumping and trying to come off as a hard-ass on the internet.

          You people haven’t bothered to do your research, so I’ll enlighten you-
          Since long before the internet the feds would take down groups they don’t like by linking sub-groups together. One person in “firebreather kill feds” sub-group does something stupid, and another person in that group is a member of “peaceful change love” sub-group. So now the feds can go after “FKF” and “PCL,” along with any other sub-groups that they can link similarly. This is why serious groups would have hard lines between the political and action wings, so behavior in one cannot come down on the other.

          You retards are probably yammering on about how that’s not fair, or that’s not what the Constitution says. So what? It’s not what you feel, it’s what the feds + their judges think they can get away with. Guess what? They can get away with a lot. Especially with how broad the definition of conspiracy can be. Perhaps you’re also thinking no one in our group would actually be dumb enough to do anything illegal, even though that is exactly what some of you are advocating (why advocate something if you don’t think anyone would do it?) Even if you are right about no one doing anything, and I’m right about all the fire-breathers being too cowardly to do anything because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be trying to talk others into doing what they themselves aren’t doing: Do you honestly think the feds are above cheating?

          The above isn’t theory. It’s not feelings or chest-beating, as many of you seem to be ruled by. It is the history of feds against dissident groups since the 50’s at least.

          Along those lines:
          I renounce any plans or conspiracies, not that any existed anyway.
          I renounce violence, which is not a change from my previous stance which has always been that random violence is pointless.

          Good bye and good luck, you won’t be seeing me here again.
          I urge everyone else to do the same, since this blog is now a honeypot, whether the owner intended it to be so or not.

          1. Zorost, with all due respect, there are two “levels” to your accusation/question.

            First, words have meanings. These are not determined by courts or the FBI.

            Second, yes, courts can decide to redefine those meanings. They may even send folks to prison based on those revised meanings.

            Third: some people would rather hang on the original meanings of the words they defend. Second, or maybe Second.B: We’ll all hang regardless of the new meanings the powers-that-be assign to those words. Once they start hanging us for changed definitions, they’ll hang us for any changed definition. In fact, the game becomes “How do we change the definition of the word they used in order to hang them?”

            Welcome to clown world. We have faith that God will sort it out.

  10. The US convoy should make frequent stops and hold frequent rallies, letting others join in as they travel along. Let Washington DC import a million national guard, build a million barricades, set a million checkpoints. Then after three weeks of road trip partying, and massive traffic hassles for the DC rats, everyone disperses in Ohio.

    DC is left with a huge security bill and nobody can be arrested because they didn’t come within 1000 miles of the place. It’s an epic troll which accomplishes everything you want in a political rally.

    Instead, they are civnat normie boomers, so expect a lot of crying because they don’t understand the only currency that matters to the marxists is power. They’ll declare victory because they can shout ‘hypocrites!’ as their trucks are seized and they are carted off to jail, a fresh batch of political prisoners who will await their trials in 5 years at which point all charges will be dropped.

    1. I had similar thoughts. No one with pull in DC is going to miss a meal because of this, but they’ll make a lot of hay out of evil White supremacist truckers starving the poor black folks of DC. AOC will claim she was 300 lbs before the violent trucker revolt, now look at how skinny she is.

      The FBI is probably raiding the BATF storerooms for weapons to plant on truckers as we speak, maybe some coke thrown in as a drug bust is all it takes for a trucker to become unemployable.

      The problem is that the normie by his very nature cannot wake up, no matter how much information is shoveled in his direction. He can be led, however. Unfortunately our enemies know this about the right wing brain type, and so have put a lot of effort at subverting potential leaders from rising up.

  11. If truckers approaching Washington DC don’t care for the reception, they could divert to Newport News, Norfolk, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. Some of them might be on their way to pick up a load at the port, of course, or make a delivery, but it might be hard to tell which ones.

  12. States in flyover country banding together to fend off federal overreach is the best route I see to getting to where we need to go. There is even some hope already in this direction. States are moving to establish workable currencies outside of the dollar*. Some have been talking about forming state militias**. My main worry is that these efforts are headed by normies who think we can go back to the 1950s, but with 2020s demographics and education systems. Which is why people like us need to get inside.

    * Utah goldbacks. TX gold repository w/ other states expressing interest in their own repositories. States passing laws to make gold legal tender. WY and others passing laws to make it easier to use crypto in everyday exchanges. etc.

    ** https://www.americanpartisan.org/2022/01/alaska-governor-states-should-look-at-the-militia-model-as-bulwark-against-nationalized-national-guard/

  13. Canada and the US both need a leader like Putin. He knows how to deal with dissent. Polonium soup anyone?

      1. Hmmm….. Just wondering what your superficial knowledge of history has to do with the price of turnips in Tunisia. The Putin comment was sarcasm, Mr. Self Proclaimed Genius. Ooops! I did it again.

        1. How clever you must think yourself!

          Sarcasm indistinguishable from stupidity doesn’t transmit well on the internet.
          Most people get that without being told, but that’s apparently news to you.
          Maybe look up the colloquial use of the [/sarc] tag.

          And I’ve made no such self-proclamations.
          Oops. You did do it again: sounded stupid instead of sarcastic.
          Maybe poker’s not your game, Ike.

          “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,…”
          You ought to choose your next sarcastic attempt carefully, lest you fulfill the proverb.

          1. Ouch! Taken to the woodshed by the fable man. Only two groups of people would fail to see that as sarcasm, those who think it’s a good idea and dumbasses. Which are you?

            Not being as erudite as you I had to look up ‘colloquial’ before I could look up ‘/sarc’. /sarc

            I’ve seen pissing matches where you resort to some variation on the “do you know how smart I am” or “my IQ is so high…..” argument. Sad.

            I’ll bet you spend a lot of time online. If I were to guess I would say that you’re an aging incel with such an off-putting personality that your only social interaction is digital. /sarc ?

    2. Actually, we do need a leader like Putin. Someone who cares about his people and does what it takes to protect them and their nation.

      Democracy: uses government force to protect degenerates from the people.
      Autocracy: uses government force to protect people from the degenerates.

      1. That part, yes. There was an Imprimis paper a while ago that summed him up: He’s a former KGB monster. But whatever drives the man he’s *their* monster.

        Intersting times.

    3. Hahahaha! Yeah, I’d make sure he ate first. Unless iocaine was on the menu. He certainly is into starting land wars in Asia.

  15. All your money are belong to the private banking cartel federal reserve.
    Remember when the One Chicago Jesus Messiah Hussein the Immaculate said that energy prices will necessarily skyrocket, that is here now because the New Man Utopia isn’t cheap, comrade.
    To each according to his EBT, workers of the world (except truckers and airline pilots) unite, yes we can…burn it all down by any means necessary.

  16. If you have a ford, check out the Forscan software. Good thread on it over at the F150 forum.

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