Editor’s Commentary: On yesterday’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I discussed the article below by Brandon Smith over at Alt-Market. It ended up taking two full segments of the show, demonstrating just how important this news is.
Most of us have been aware that Central Bank Digital Currencies will be extremely dangerous and represent the next step toward complete centralization of the world consolidated under a single tyrannical government. What most seem to be missing is that CBDCs are not the endgame; I’ve seen stories from multiple news outlets claiming that to be the case.
The reality is the “endgame” is depopulation and complete control. To get there, the powers-that-be will need ONE Central Bank Digital Currency. As we watch dozens at various degrees of readiness being rolled out across the globe, we have to understand that bringing them all under one umbrella is necessary for the globalist elite cabal to win. This is what Project Icebreaker represents.
I covered this challenge last year, but since few other than Brandon Smith and me are even talking about it, I thought now would be a good time to reinforce and reinform. With that said, here’s Brandon’s article in its entirety. The only change I made was in the headline. He had a question mark at the end. I took the question mark away because whether Project Icebreaker is successful or not, we can assume that this is the intended beginning of their evil machinations.
There has been extensive discussion in the past couple of years within alternative media circles about the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs); a currency framework very similar to blockchain based products like Bitcoin but directly controlled by central bankers. It’s a threat that some analysts including myself have been writing about for more than a decade, so it’s good to finally see the issue being addressed more in the mainstream.
The Orwellian nature of CBDCs cannot be overstated. In a cashless society most people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could be used to stifle your freedoms in the future.
For example, say you like to eat steak regularly, but the increasingly authoritarian government decides to list red meat as a health risk and a “climate change risk” due to carbon emissions from cows. They determine by your purchase history (which they have full access to) that you have contributed more carbon pollution than most people by eating red meat often. They declare that you must pay a retroactive carbon tax on your past purchases of red meat. Not only that, but your insurance company sends you a letter indicating that you are a medical risk and they cut off your health coverage.
Products you consume and services you use can be tracked to create a psychological profile on you, which could then become a factor in determining your social credit score, just as CCP authorities do in China today. Maybe you refuse to purchase an annual mRNA booster shot, and the tracking algorithm makes a note of this. Now you are under suspicion for being “anti-vax” and your social credit score plummets, cutting you off from various public venues. Maybe you are even fired from your job.
In the worst case scenario, though, economic access is the greatest oppressive tool. With CBDCs in place and no physical cash in existence, your savings will never be truly yours and you’ll never be able to hold your purchasing power in your hands. The means of exchange would be bottle-necked by the banks, and governments would have the option to freeze your ability to transact. If one day you get angry about a particular government policy and openly call the system corrupt on social media, they can simply shut off your option to transfer your digital money to others until you submit, or die.
CBDCs give establishment officials the leverage to starve their political opponents with algorithmic precision. It would be a new world of technocratic oppression.
It’s important to understand that central bankers are moving at breakneck speed to develop and introduce digital currencies. It’s not a matter of experimentation, they already have these systems ready to implement. The Federal Reserve’s instant transfer program “FedNow” is set to debut this July, which is not a CBDC but it is an intermediary step towards instituting CBDCs in the near term.
In my investigations of various CBDC programs and how quickly they are progressing I came across an interesting program called “Project Icebreaker” being run by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). For those not aware, the BIS is a globalist institution with a clandestine past known as the “central bank of central banks.” It is the policy making hub for most of the central banks in the world. If you ever wondered how it was possible for so many national central banks to operate in tandem with each other instead of acting in the interests of the countries they reside in, the BIS is the answer. In other words, organizations like the Federal Reserve are not necessarily loyal to Americans or to American officials, they are loyal to the dictates of the BIS.
The BIS is at the forefront of the movement towards the adoption of CBDCs. They have been funding a vast array of projects to test and refine CBDC technology and as of this year they estimate that at least 81 central banks around the world are in the midst of introducing digital currency systems.
Project Icebreaker in particular grabbed my attention for a number of reasons. The BIS describes the project as a foreign exchange clearing house for Retail CBDCs (retail CBDCs are digital currencies used by the regular public and businesses), enabling the currencies to be traded from country to country quickly and efficiently. This is accomplished using the “Icebreaker Hub”, a BIS controlled mechanism which facilitates data transfers for an array of transactions while connecting banks to other banks.
Investigating further I realized that the Icebreaker Hub in theory functions almost exactly like the SWIFT payment system used currently by governments and international banks. More than 10,000 financial institutions in 212 different countries use the SWIFT network to transfer funds overseas for their clients; it is an incredible centralization bottleneck that gives its shareholders considerable power.
As a point of reference, after the start of the war between Ukraine and Russia, the expulsion of Russia from the SWIFT network was used as a weapon in an attempt to crash the Russian economy. Russia has found ways around using SWIFT because of their trade relationships with major economies like China and India, but some damage has still been done to their financial structure.
Consider this, however – What if all monetary transactions were centralized through CBDCs and the BIS controlled the hub in which all retail CBDCs are exchanged globally? This is what Icebreaker is.
Now imagine that you operate a business that relies on overseas transactions; say you need to pay manufacturers in Vietnam or Taiwan to produce your products. With CBDCs in place you will most likely be completely dependent on a system similar to the Icebreaker Hub to move than digital money to Vietnamese banks and into the accounts of your manufacturers. Say officials at the BIS, for whatever reason, decide they don’t like you and they initiate Russian-style sanctions denying your access to the hub. Your business is now dead.
What if you had to meet certain standards in order to be allowed use of the hub, and the BIS dictates the standards? What if the BIS decides that your company needs to meet woke ESG related categories before you can get permission for Icebreaker transactions? Now the BIS has the ability to manipulate social and cultural trends using your business and millions of other businesses as forced messengers.
For the average consumer that does most of their transactions within their home country this might not sound like a big deal. But, for the business world, a SWIFT-like hub for retail CBDCs could be used to dominate all international trade. Running any kind of larger organization or company would mean bowing to the whims of the BIS.
It gets worse, though…
Part of the process of the “spoke and wheel” exchange method used by the Icebreaker Hub includes the exploitation of a “bridge currency” to fill gaps in exchange rates and liquidity. On the surface this seems like a clever way to speed up transactions by avoiding cross-currency shortages at banks. That said, I want readers to think about the long term path that this kind of “bridging” sets in motion in the realm of CBDCs.
Let’s say there is a global scale economic crisis event which causes many currencies to fluctuate wildly. Lets say, for example, that the US dollar loses its world reserve status and petro-status and this sends FX (foreign exchange) markets into a panic. Price inflation becomes rampant and banking institutions falter under liquidity pressures. Lets say that central bankers introduce CBDCs as a solution to the problem, and the BIS Icebreaker Hub as the intermediary for international trade. The populace is so frightened by the economic crash that they then embrace the digital framework. Now let’s say that the BIS claims they still can’t find a currency they consider stable enough to act as a means to bridge most global transactions. What happens then?
Well, “luckily” for all of us the BIS and IMF have been working on their own GLOBAL CBDC. In the case of the IMF, this one-world currency would be based around the Special Drawing Rights basket system they have been using for decades to broker currency transfers between national governments. The BIS then uses this one world currency product as the bridge for Ice Breaker going forward.
Eventually the BIS, IMF and various central banks will ask the public the inevitable question: “Why are we bothering with these national currency exchanges when we have a perfectly good bridge currency in the form of this one-world CBDC? Why don’t we just get rid of all these superfluous national CBDCs and have one currency for everyone?”
Thus, total global financial centralization would be achieved. And once you have a one-world currency, a completely centralized and micro-managed global economy and the most vital trade systems in the world controlled by a tiny handful of faceless unelected bureaucracies, why then have nations at all? Global government would be the next and final step.
I can see the nightmare play out when I look at projects like Icebreaker. They are seemingly innocuous, but they act as the DNA by which economic tyranny is given birth.
Alternative Video Sources:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
