Banks bare their fangs at cashless backlash

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Lead Editorial

10 April 2024
Vol. 26 No. 15

In 2019 the Australian Citizens Party (ACP), independent economist John Adams, and banking expert Martin North led a massive campaign against the Morrison government’s bill to ban cash transactions over $10,000, which exposed that the agenda was to trap people inside the banks where they couldn’t escape policies like negative interest rates and deposit “bail-ins”.

The success of that campaign, which forced the government to drop the bill, infuriated the banks, on whose behalf the banker’s “toilet paper”, the Australian Financial Review, launched a dishonest attack on the ACP, Adams and North written by pro-bank scribe Aaron Patrick headlined “Cash ban brings the conspiracy theorists out”.

Now the banks have struck again, in response to the astounding success of the grass-roots campaign against their cashless agenda, wheeling out the bankers’ toilet paper AFR to slander Jason Bryce, the spokesman for the Cash Welcome campaign which has more than 168,000 signatures on a Change.org petition for a “Cash and banking guarantee”.

Bryce helped to lead the “Cash Out Tuesday” protest on 2 April, which anecdotal reports indicate was amazingly successful, and followed an already 9.5 per cent rise in ATM withdrawals in February 2024 over February 2023, according to the RBA’s Retail Payments report.

In a disgusting display of sniper journalism, on 9 April AFR’s Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano attacked Bryce under the ludicrous headline “CBA’s cash nemesis in the pocket of big ATM”. (Emphasis added.)

Yes, you read that right. AFR invented the fiction of “big ATM” to paint independent ATM providers as a powerful vested interest in keeping cash, naming one company, Next Payments, which Di Stefano reported made $110 million from ATM fees in 2023, as backers of Cash Welcome.

What AFR didn’t report was that Next Payments’ net profit for 2023, after tax, was $8.3 million. Nor did AFR bother to mention that this giant of “big ATM” is up against the cashless agenda of the Big Four banks which collectively declared a net profit of more than $30 billion—3,370 times bigger!

Accusing Jason Bryce and Cash Welcome of working for “big ATM” is like saying David represented “big pebble” against Goliath—only a bank propagandist would have the gall!

If that wasn’t shameless enough, Di Stefano faked a quote attributed to Jason Bryce, to make him sound like he was acknowledging the accusations against him:  

“Oh yeah, we have money from big ATM, yes obviously”, they had Bryce saying, “but that’s buttressed by scared old biddies going to a branch and giving small amounts directly into my account.”

Di Stefano would claim that he was merely summarising and editorialising Bryce’s actual answers, which he’d also quoted, but AFR put this line in quote marks, which was outright fraud.

Of course, once you pick yourself up from the floor and get over the sheer gall of such a mainstream media smear, you can experience the pleasure of what this actually means—the banks are in a panic, because their best laid cashless plans are exploding in their faces.

The banks revealed they had a cashless agenda in mid2020, when they boasted after the first national COVID-19 lockdown that in just 10 weeks they had achieved cashless goals they had planned would take five years!

Central to their efforts is closing bank branches and ripping out ATMs, which has dried up the availability of cash all over Australia.

As the 2019 cash ban campaign showed, the banks’ agenda is about control, forcing people into transacting and banking online so they trap us in their systems where they can extract all of our data and fleece us through fees on every transaction.

But a grassroots campaign, which again the ACP is helping to lead and which includes the Senate inquiry into bank closures, has sparked a popular backlash the banks can’t handle.

They know our success could include their worst nightmare—a People’s Bank!

In this issue:

• NZ regulator endorses public Kiwibank as champion against Australia’s Big Four
• Senator to RBA: Take the whip hand to the banking industry!
• Five Eyes ropes NZ into Aus-style anti-China insanity
• A monumental betrayal: Four Corners vs. David McBride
• BRICS ‘tectonic geopolitical-geoeconomic shift’ underway
• Kennett outsources the state
• WCK founder calls out ‘war against humanity itself’
• Doctor at Israeli detention camp blows whistle on war crimes
• Reality slams Biden over support for Gaza killing
• You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone!
• Assange on the media and war
• Never lose faith: Empire can be defeated
• ALMANAC: The next chapter in the private hijacking of Australian banking, Part I

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