Argentina's lower house of Congress approved money-laundering legislation just weeks ahead of an international review of the country's anti-money laundering and terrorist financing controls. The bill, which enjoyed the backing of President Cristina Fernandez, was passed with 181 votes in favor and 7 abstentions late Wednesday night, according to the lower house's website. The bill now moves to the senate, which is expected to pass the legislation before the end of the month. The Financial Action Task Force – whose 34 member nations include the U.S. – has given Argentina until its next plenary meeting in June to demonstrate its commitment to beefing up its measures against money laundering and terrorism financing following a damning report published last year by the organization. – Dow Jones

Dominant Social Theme: It is necessary to control money and banks for the good of everyone. If fingerprinting is intrusive, we shall use retinal scans.

Free-Market Analysis: What's wrong with anti-money laundering legislation? Plenty if one is oriented toward libertarianism and free-market thinking. Drug-laws and central banks are the two main tools that the Anglo-American power elite is using to control the flow of money around the world and one can see these tools being applied in Argentina. The Financial Action Task Force (see article excerpt above) is increasingly active in demanding that countries control currency with great strictness.

Money is power, in fact, and it is why it's being evermore tightly controlled. In many countries now one has to apply for residency in order to open a bank account. And business accounts can take up to six months to open. Increasingly countries and businesses are making it more and more difficult to take dollar-denominated currency out of banks by refusing to provide US$100 bills. Instead the largest sized bill that can be provided when withdrawing larger sums is US$20.

Fingerprints are being demanded at grocery stores when one wants to use a US$100 bill rather than a credit card. None of these practices are advertised in the US of course where they would be greeted with indignation. They are applied mostly in developing countries so as to effectively impede the flow of currency and to set a precedent that can then be expanded to the West. Here's some more from the Dow Jones article:

Countries that fail to implement FATF's recommendations run the risk of being labeled as high-risk or noncooperative jurisdictions. That can make it more costly and difficult for a nation to conduct business with the financial systems of FATF compliant countries … Since the beginning of the year, Argentina's financial crimes agency, UIF, has issued no fewer than 22 new regulations aimed at improving the reporting and documentation requirements for real estate and financial transactions in response to the FATF's observations.

From this article excerpt, we can see that Argentina has taken action to tighten currency regulations even without legislation. And there is an impetus to do so since the FATF is yet another unknown organization supported by the world's most powerful countries that will not hesitate to levy sanctions on nations that do not abide by FATF demands. This sort of regulatory blackmail is increasingly common these days. It is a way of creating global governance without the formal superstructure.

Of course one could be forgiven for wondering why the FAFT is needed when central banks themselves are doing a good job of regulating money and banking practices. While central banking policies are generally ruinous via price fixing of interest rates, etc., what is far less well known is that central banks virtually set economic policy around the world. If the Anglo-American elite wants to create a formal financial policy, it can do so through the 90-plus central banks that are now under the umbrella of the Bank for International Settlements.

The various currency control methodologies now being applied are certainly discouraging from a freedom perspective. As they affect everyone, their impact on actual money laundering is minimal. In Kenya for instance, parts of Nairobi are undergoing an incredible building boom with malls and commercial towers being built one after the other. Turns out in fact that the boom is being fueled by Somali "pirate" money, which is being laundered through the rampant construction.

This is just one example of how easily funds are laundered in the modern age. Currency controls affect those who do not have the resources or the intent to wash funds in a sophisticated manner. The ever-more restrictive bank initiatives have more to do with tracking transactions than with catching drug smugglers. The idea obviously is to force people to create exact records of their transactions via credit cards or non-bank facilities such as Western Union, which also now routinely fingerprints individuals around the world.

The power elite operates in secrecy and that secrecy has been blasted open by the Internet Reformation in the 21st century. But there are still plenty of elements of global governance that are being erected around the world without any reporting or commentary. The drug war itself is a ludicrous, doomed struggle, but the elites continue to criminalize drug use because it gives authorities the justification to control currency and demand invasive record keeping.

Central banks are seen as policy-oriented monetary mechanisms but few understand the power they have gained around the world. Many central banks implement invasive economic and record-keeping practices for average citizens without the input of the state itself or state representatives. These central banks may be more influenced by the BIS (controlled by Western elites) than local lawmakers.

We have reported in the past about the various elements of world government being put into place by Anglosphere powers-that-be. NATO's mission seems globalized these days and the UN is increasingly active and militaristic, especially in developing nations. African leaders, especially, are routinely hauled before the International Criminal Court (ICC). But the advance of currency controls around the world and the increasingly restrictive rules affecting both commercial banks and savings banks are perhaps the most startlingly new-era phenomenon.

The recently announced Argentinean currency controls and the legislation now being voted on may seem to be an individual response to an individual problem, but it is not. Anglo-American Money Power has turned the often-harmless and historical ingestion of mood-altering drugs into a fear-based dominant social theme that is evidently and obviously part of a much larger plan to harmonize currency controls around the world. Combine currency controls with increasingly invasive visa and passport practices and one begins to see a clear pattern of control being implemented worldwide. The world is shrinking, but not in a good way.