Personal Identification

No one is checking. 

People are careless. 

Take signatures:

With scan technology, forgery is fairly simple. 

But people don’t need scan technology. 

Banks aren’t checking signatures on checks. 

Those contracts you sign to pay things?  You can declare bankruptcy and back out. 

Marriage contract?  No fault divorce. 

Those credit cards that are supposed to be signed?  Who looks at the back, let alone checks ID cards? 

Income tax returns can now be efiled, and you esign them.  Or someone else claiming to be you does. 

 

A bank, which isn’t going to check for the validity of the signature anyway (as my bank informed me in a notice on my recent statement), requires that a check be endorsed by the payee.  A husband signs for his wife all the time.  So do her parents and teenage children.  If a transaction is ever challenged in court, who is to say what her signature is, and which is a fraud?  How different can a forgery be from the variety of family versions of her signature? 

Here is a scenario.  A large debit comes in on her monthly bank statement.  She calls the bank and says that she did not authorize that payment.  Do you have your credit card with you?  Yes.  Have you lost any checks?  I haven’t, but my husband has a checkbook, and I send my kids with checks sometimes for things like doctor’s copays.  Are you careful when you do business online?  Yeah.  I don’t give my password out or anything. 

So the bank isn’t really sure whether her identity has been stolen, or her bank account number.  Neither is she.  Does the bank just put the money back into her account and send the bill to insurance?  How would criminals get caught?  What if the woman is lying, and just wants a free hot tub or laptop or vacation?  

Maybe they call the business and look at the credit card receipt.  The signature is her name, and maybe it is a little different from standard, but no one’s signature is the same, and this woman’s tends to show more variation than most.  Maybe she’s on anti-depressants, and her signature is firmer early in the day.  Or she is tired when she shops in the middle of the night.  Maybe those electronic penpad signature machines at Walmart and grocery stores distort the signature a bit.  Or maybe she has her family sign for her all the time.  The whole thing is her word against theirs that she didn’t sign that receipt.  And is she really going to vouch for everyone who had access to her credit card, that they didn’t sign for her? 

For the sake of efficiency (if not for fraud), people are abdicating the power to create their own identification.  It is like standardizing the locks on houses to where anyone can buy a key to anyone’s house.  In the example of keys, we have private companies that create and issue unique access keys to homes.  A car company actually standardizes, and has a variety of keys and locks that they apply to their cars (my key opens one of my best friend’s cars made by the same company).  Personal identification is a growing private industry.  There are some identity protection companies, and companies that sell you a “key fob” which randomly generates passwords and sends that message to you and to your website or computer or other secured digital device in the information technology realm.  We have the iris scan and thumbprint locks that are some of the best options for security – but again, in a digital world, how hard could it be to hack the system?  In the old days people used signets or seals as identification, but those can be forged.  A signature was something recreated each time, not scientifically standardized, but theoretically an identifier solely in your possession.  As we move away from signatures, we give businesses more market to sell us identification.  Or worse, we give governments more incentive to enforce a government-issued identification.  When even your identity is controlled by the government, watch out! 

To God be all glory,

Lisa of Longbourn

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Federal Reserve and the End of Capital

The Federal Reserve is a collection of banks that loan money to the Federal Government.  Don’t be confused by the use of federal in both terms.  One is private, and the latter is public, run and (at least hypothetically) regulated by the US Constitution as ratified by the states. 

If the government wants capital, they call up the Federal Reserve, who prints out “federal reserve notes” that we call dollars.  They’re legally backed as usable on any transactions in the United States, but they have no other intrinsic value.  They are good towards commerce and payment of debts, but their value is not fixed, and the more that are printed, the less value each “note” has.  The Federal Reserve is not taking money from one place and loaning it to the government like you or I would have to do in order to loan money.  They are inventing it out of thin air. 

And here is the interesting thing.  The Federal Reserve charges interest on the money they print for the government.  A loan has been made, that could be called up.  To repay this loan, we would have to give back the dollars plus interest.  Do you see a problem here?  To repay a loan with interest, we have to give the Federal Reserve more dollars than we got from them, and they’re the only source of dollars.  Even if there were another source of dollars, those dollars would be a note on some other group, even the government, backed by nothing.  It’s all Monopoly money that people use to control each other.  Kind of strange.  This isn’t even a case of the power of the richest.  They own nothing of value, but wield all sorts of authority. 

I don’t like it.  A partial list of banks that make up the Federal Reserve (many of which are foreign) is available.  On that list is my bank, Chase Manhattan.  This leaves me conflicted.  On the one hand, I don’t want to help the criminals that propagate the Federal Reserve.  On the other hand, it is virtually impossible that my bank will go under.  When you can print your own money and are in on the biggest racket in history, you’re in pretty good shape.  This is worse than Batman, let me tell you.  The only way that my bank would be threatened is if other members of the Federal Reserve were to turn on them, and I believe that will not happen until there are no other banks.  For there to be no other banks, there would have to be no more capital. 

This is my best bet for boycotting the Federal Reserve: set myself up in a situation where I can be self-sufficient or barter whatever I need, living entirely without capital.  (Even this is impossible because the government charges property taxes payable only in the form of Federal Reserve Notes – the government is compounding their own problem.  Why?  As long as the game is still going, the government also wields power using the Monopoly money.  Just like the idea of debt in the first place, or economic stimulus packages, or bailouts, or bankrupting social security – the government does not think about long-term consequences.  Their value is not liberty and justice, but control.) 

But there is another way of eliminating capital.  We could go to a digital currency system.  Belonging to a bank (probably only one central bank) would be mandatory in a legal sense, and almost in a practical sense.  Accessing the account would require a password or a physical scan (fingerprint, iris) or a digital key (like they use in hotels, or in your remote access car key).  And anyone who has studied any kind of end times prophecies has heard of the “mark of the beast” on hands or foreheads used for buying or selling.  Can’t you imagine a world leader who decides to throw off the yoke of the banking industry and replace them? 

To God be all glory.

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