One Step Closer to Social Credit

How do societies slide into totalitarianism? One step at a time. You don’t go to bed one night in an open, free country and wake up the next morning to find yourself under constant surveillance with jackbooted thugs banging on your door and all your civil liberties stripped away. You don’t wake up to find that overnight you’ve gone from a free citizen to being loaded on the cattle-cars at rifle-point.

Instead, it’s a constant drip-feed of tiny outrages. Each one calculated so it’s, “Oh, that’s not so bad”. Each, you’re told, for your own good. Still, it can’t get any worse, can it? Until, of course, it does.

If you’d been told, even ten years ago, that the richest corporations in the world will be listening to everything you say in your own home, you’d have laughed at it as a looney conspiracy theory. If you’d been told that entire cities in Australia, or the whole of New Zealand, would be placed under military curfew and virtual house arrest, you’d simply have refused to believe it.

What if you were told that your bank would sit in judgement of your moral worth? Kiwi Lee Williams found out the hard way, when he was curtly told by his bank to close his accounts — that, on top of losing his job — for the heinous crime of mocking politicians.

Australians are also about to find out.

Commonwealth Bank is pushing further into green banking and services with technology that gives customers direct insight into their carbon footprint and offsetting it, marking its fifth recent initiative in the sector.

CBA is partnering with fintech CoGo and starting a pilot on Tuesday for thousands of personal banking customers […] credit scoring and data firm Experian last month announced a tie-up with CoGo that will allow customers to track their carbon emissions through banking apps.

The Australian

How will it work, in practice?

Customers get notified when their individual purchases exceed the “acceptable” carbon average. The customer would then get guilt-inducing messages on his phone, like “8 trees were cut down”.

The Expose

Step by step.

What next? Will customers get a warning that if they don’t reduce their “carbon emissions” (or pay a nice little “carbon offset” indulgence”, they’ll be penalised by, say, increased interest rates on loans or credit cards?

Early this year, CBA started a pilot for a green loan allowing existing and new mortgage customers to borrow up to $20,000 charged at 0.99 per cent annually.

How about cutting off your power if you run the heater or air-conditioner too long?

Other green measures include a tie-up with renewable energy retailer Amber, sustainability-linked agriculture loans and a property sustainability upgrade loan for commercial buildings.

They’re not even hiding that they’re planning to creep this green social credit scoring system across everything their customers spend money on.

Mr Sullivan said CBA was integrating more third parties across home, shopping and green services into its digital ecosystem, where as many as 8 million customers engaged with the bank every day.

The Australian

Will persistent failure to “live sustainably” see their accounts closed?

If you think that’s a ludicrous conspiracy theory, go talk to Lee Williams.

Better still, listen to what the “climate experts” are saying they will do.

In the scientific journal Nature, four climate experts raised the idea of a disturbing program to better control individual consumer CO2 expenditures.

A kind of personal map on which the carbon footprint would be expressed in the form of quotas. These would decrease according to travel, heating and electricity costs and other domestic lifestyles.

Anyone who exceeds the limit in accordance with the national objectives of each country would thus be obliged to buy additional units on the personal carbon market.

The Expose

Remember, these are the same conglomerate of state bureaucrats, quangos and corporations who are bringing in “vaccine passports” (remember when they were a ludicrous conspiracy theory?) and digital identities.

You’d best start believing in a Chinese-style Social Credit system — because you’ll soon wake up to find yourself in one.