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Gov. Greg Abbott: No one should forfeit their liberty and be sent to jail for not wearing a mask Texas Gov. Greg Abbott reacts to a judge’s decision to jail a Dallas salon owner for opening her business
Texas Supreme Court orders Dallas salon owner released as Abbott bans jailing citizens for lockdown violations
Tyler Olson, Fox News, May 7, 2020
(https://www.foxnews.com/politics/abbott-issues-executive-order-eliminating-jail-as-punishment-for-violating-coronavirus-restrictions.)
The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the release of salon owner Shelley Luther, who was jailed for opening in violation of the state’s rules, as Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order retroactively eliminating jail time as a consequence for violating the state’s coronavirus restrictions.
Shortly after Abbott’s announcement, the Supreme Court of Texas ordered Luther’s release. She was released from jail Thursday afternoon.
“Throwing Texans in jail who have had their businesses shut down through no fault of their own is nonsensical, and I will not allow it to happen,” Abbott said in a statement. “That is why I am modifying my executive orders to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order. This order is retroactive to April 2nd, supersedes local orders and if correctly applied should free Shelley Luther.”
On Wednesday, Abbott, the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton and Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick called for Luther’s release after she was jailed by Dallas County State District Judge Eric Moyé. The officials said he had abused his discretion and emphasized that the woman was keeping her business open in order to feed her family.
“As a mother, Ms. Luther wanted to feed her children,” Paxton said in a letter to the judge asking him to free her. “As a small business owner, she wanted to help her employees feed their children. Needless to say, these are laudable goals that warrant the exercise of enforcement discretion.”
On Thursday, Paxton praised the governor for ensuring that people would not be jailed for flouting the state’s coronavirus restrictions.
“I applaud Gov. Abbott’s decision to ensure that penalties for violating public health orders are reasonable and not excessive. All Texans are trying to get through this crisis together and no one should be put in jail unnecessarily,” he said.
Abbott said it was not just that as the state was reducing its prison populations because of the coronavirus that it was also throwing entrepreneurs in jail.
“It may also ensure that other Texans like Ana Isabel Castro-Garcia and Brenda Stephanie Mata who were arrested in Laredo, should not be subject to confinement,” Abbott said of the order. “As some county judges advocate for releasing hardened criminals from jail to prevent the spread of COVID-19, it is absurd to have these business owners take their place.”
(Read more: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/abbott-issues-executive-order-eliminating-jail-as-punishment-for-violating-coronavirus-restrictions.)
Thanks to Suzi on Patreon.
Bill Gates and His ‘War Against Cash’ Are a Threat to Our Liberty, Economist Warns
Mohamed Elmaazi, Sputnik International, May 7, 2020.
(https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202005071079213583-bill-gates-and-his-war-against-cash-are-a-threat-to-our-liberty-economist-warns/)
A consortium of powerful interests that include Visa and Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund, billionaire Bill Gates and the US Treasury have been slowly lobbying for cash to be abolished worldwide and replaced with digital only currencies.
Norbert Häring holds a PhD in economics and is co-founder and co-director of the World Economics Association, the second largest association of economists worldwide. Dr Häring is a financial journalist, blogger and author of popular books on economics.
His two most recent books covered the campaign to abolish cash. The latest “Schönes neues Geld” (Brave new money) published in German in 2018 just came out in Chinese.
Dr Häring initiated a lawsuit in 2015 for the right to pay his fees to public broadcasters in cash, which has since made its way to the European Court of Justice (CJEU). The date for the oral hearing at the CJEU is set for 15 June 2020.
Sputnik: Please explain – for those who know nothing about the subject – what the campaign to abolish cash is all about and who the main players are.
Norbert Häring: Starting about 2005 the “war on cash”, as they were calling it, was just a declared business strategy of Visa and Mastercard to push back [against] the use of cash, because they see it as the main competitor for their credit cards. From about 2011 this kind of talk stopped completely.
Instead they entered into a coalition with the US-government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Citibank and formed the Better Than Cash Alliance to pursue the elimination of cash. But now, they do it under the pretended goal of helping the poor by financially including them.
There are very many academic institutes, standard-setting institutions and governments that have been enlisted in this fight against cash, either with the money of Gates and the other members of the Better Than Cash Alliance or with the diplomatic muscle of the US-government, or both.
Sputnik: Why are they doing this?
Norbert Häring: The interest of the financial sector in selling their own products instead of cash is obvious. The IT-companies want the data that [goes] with digitalisation [of cash] and the US-government wants the surveillance and sanctioning power that goes with digitalisation of payments. The other countries that co-operate also like the aspect of gaining more surveillance power over their populations. …
Sputnik: What are your concerns about the world shifting away from cash. Isn’t it more convenient if we can all hold and make use of our currency digitally?
Norbert Häring: Sure, it is convenient. Nobody is keeping anybody from using digital money. I use it too. Only some businesses, who consider the fees of the financial institutions too high, will not accept digital money. That’s one reason, why these financial intermediaries want to do away with cash. So that they can raise their prices, which is not in our interest.
More importantly: everything that we pay [for] digitally is recorded, seen and stored by various service providers and ends up in our bank account information. If there is no possibility of using cash any more, our bank account information will be a near-complete log of our life. Anybody with the power to look into it, who develops an interest in us at any time, can see where we have been and what we did for every day and hour, decades into the past.
Many people correctly think that nobody with the power to do this will ever develop enough of an interest in them. However, they have to realise that it means something for them, too, if they have to live in a society, in which every person of any importance is totally transparent for the powerful and can thus be blackmailed or destroyed by them at will. This is inconsistent with democracy and a free society.
(Read more: https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202005071079213583-bill-gates-and-his-war-against-cash-are-a-threat-to-our-liberty-economist-warns/)