Our Patriotic Debt
by Elwood Earl Sanders Jr.
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Hence, there is extreme temptation for bankers to, in effect, inform on their customers. It was not always so: Particularly onerous Treasury regulations proposed in 1999 called ‘Know Your Customer” were beaten back by Congress in a victory for Rep. Ron Paul, who is now a presidential candidate. Alas, many of the rules adopted in the Patriot Act were identity requirements made into law. There can now legally be no secret accounts or accounts under an assumed name in the United States.
The financial surveillance is only just the beginning. There’s also the passage of the Real ID Act of 2005, which sets new security and authentication procedures and forces states to register driver’s licenses and state identification cards into a national database for so-called official government purposes.
Real ID is not really an identification system at all.
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Once civil liberties in the United States are lost, they can never be reclaimed. Who will be affected? The usual suspects: political and social activists, people of faith, along with educators, artists and writers. Let’s start today with financial privacy and Real ID to reclaim the constitutional republic. The ultimate fate of a world without financial privacy was stated nearly 2,000 years ago, in the Bible, Revelation 13:16-17: “He also forced everyone … to receive a mark on the right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.” Financial privacy, civil liberties and national sovereignty must be an essential part of any constitutional republic.
