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The Cashless Conspiracy: How Trump’s Economy and Musk’s Data Grab Threaten Freedom

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — The Trump administration’s economic experiment, rooted in chaos, crony capitalism, and unchecked digital surveillance, is pushing America toward a dangerous new frontier.

Published

5 months ago

October 20, 2025

Stacy M. Brown

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

The Trump administration’s economic experiment, rooted in chaos, crony capitalism, and unchecked digital surveillance, is pushing America toward a dangerous new frontier. It is a crypto-driven, cashless society that threatens to erase financial freedom for millions, particularly Black Americans and the working poor.

As the economy contracts and inflation rises, President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff regime has already sent shockwaves through every sector. According to Fortune, Trump’s reckless tariff decisions have wiped nearly seven trillion dollars in market value, decimated small business confidence, and driven consumer prices to levels not seen in decades. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii warned that Trump is ruining the economy on purpose, pointing to middle-class families now paying an average of five thousand dollars more each year for basic goods such as cars, homes, groceries, and clothing. While Americans struggle with higher prices and shrinking savings, the Trump White House has quietly advanced a sweeping new financial system that merges state power, private crypto interests, and invasive data collection. In early 2025, Trump authorized a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, incorporating the volatile cryptocurrency into official United States financial infrastructure. The Conversation reported that this hybrid model privatizes the issuance of money while keeping control of reserves under the executive branch. It undermines the Federal Reserve’s independence and centralizes power in the Oval Office. Trump described bitcoin as freedom money, but in practice, it represents state-aligned crypto dominance and an economy where wealth and access depend on government loyalty.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, once run by Elon Musk, came under scrutiny for uploading massive federal databases containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security data, to unsecured cloud servers. A whistleblower revealed that the team requested its activities not be logged and even deleted records of access, behavior that cybersecurity experts compared to criminal hacking operations. Sensitive information tied to union members, workers’ rights cases, and corporate secrets may have been exposed, with traces of suspicious activity linking back to Russian IP addresses. By the spring of 2025, Musk left DOGE and the government under a cloud of suspicion after a public spat with Trump. He has gone mostly silent since his departure, but multiple people believe he took large volumes of data with him. The full extent of what was removed or copied remains unclear, leaving major concerns about the safety of sensitive personal and governmental information.

At the same time, Trump’s allies have opened new financial avenues for the wealthy through Erebor Bank, a cryptocurrency-focused institution backed by conservative megadonors and approved with unusual speed by Trump’s Treasury Department. Its mission is to serve ultra-high-net-worth individuals and tech firms, signaling a parallel financial system that privileges the rich while ordinary citizens are pushed into algorithmic surveillance economies. These developments align with global moves toward digital ID systems such as the United Kingdom’s One Login and digital wallets, which The Telegraph described as a real nightmare that centralizes personal data and is riddled with security flaws. In the United States, REAL ID enforcement now allows the federal government to link biometric data to digital identification across states. Officials claim it enhances security, yet many Black Americans have long viewed REAL ID with suspicion. Without it, citizens cannot board domestic flights, enter federal buildings, or access certain public facilities. Critics warn that REAL ID creates another layer of exclusion and control, particularly for those who already face bureaucratic and systemic barriers.

An expanded picture of what is happening around the world makes this moment appear even more calculated than coincidental. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s digital ID program has been exposed as a security disaster that relied on unsecured workstations in foreign countries, leaving millions of British citizens vulnerable to data theft and foreign manipulation. In the United States, whistleblower Charles Borges revealed that the DOGE team copied and uploaded the Social Security Administration’s database containing hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal records to unmonitored cloud servers. He resigned after filing complaints, claiming he was harassed and isolated by the administration. Meanwhile, cybersecurity analysts detected data activity linked to Russia at the same time DOGE engineers were transferring files. When taken together, these events suggest a global pattern of governments and private actors concentrating power by controlling not only digital money but also personal identity and access to daily life. Globally, other nations have already begun shifting toward cashless societies. Sweden and Norway have reduced physical currency use to historic lows, and while the move is framed as progress, even their governments are now warning about the vulnerability of fully digital economies to war, cyberattacks, and authoritarian abuse. The convergence of Trump’s crypto policies, REAL ID enforcement, the global cashless push, and Musk’s suspected data exfiltration raises the specter of a coordinated effort to centralize control over citizens’ finances and personal freedoms. It suggests that the line between economic policy, surveillance, and political domination is disappearing.

As the physical dollar fades, major institutions warn of who will be left behind. Brookings predicted years ago that cash will soon be obsolete, with digital currencies becoming the new norm. While central banks promote benefits like efficiency and transparency, they also introduce total traceability, enabling governments or corporations to freeze, restrict, or program how citizens spend money. J.P. Morgan and Loughborough University both note that a cashless system risks excluding the poor, the elderly, and the unbanked, groups disproportionately represented by Black and minority Americans. Digital payments must be designed with inclusion and convenience at their core, said Loughborough economist Markos Zachariadis, warning that without oversight, we risk leaving vulnerable groups excluded. In the United States, those same groups are already being priced out of basic participation in the economy as Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and anti-worker policies strip away safety nets like Medicaid and food assistance.

For Black America, the stakes are especially high. The march toward a cashless economy threatens to replicate the structural inequalities of the old banking system under the guise of innovation. Access to digital money will depend on data verification, credit history, and digital ID compliance, areas where Black Americans have historically faced discrimination and surveillance. With tech billionaires like Musk controlling the digital rails, privacy and autonomy may soon become luxuries reserved for the elite. As Global Finance observed, nations like Sweden are reassessing their nearly cashless economies after realizing that wars, natural disasters, and crises reveal vulnerabilities in fully digital systems. In America, those vulnerabilities may soon look like total control, where the same administration that tanked the economy gains the power to decide how and where citizens can spend what little they have left. In the end, Trump’s version of economic freedom is not about liberty. It is about ownership of currency, of data, and of people. If this cashless, crypto-fueled dystopia becomes reality, Black America and the poor will once again be first in line to pay the price.

Stacy M. Brown

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

3 days ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

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PRESS ROOM: NBA Hall of Fame Nominee Terry Cummings Joins 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to Launch Victory & Values Initiative

NNPA NEWSWIRE — NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

admin

Cummings becomes an honorary member, joining other role model sports stars

NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings has officially become an honorary member of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County, marking a powerful new chapter for the 100 Black Men and youth development across the region.

Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th. The moment signified more than membership — it marked the launch of the organization’s transformative new platform, the Victory & Values Initiative.

The Victory & Values Initiative is a groundbreaking youth development program designed to empower elementary and middle school students through a dynamic blend of sports, mentorship, and STEM exposure. The initiative focuses on building health, discipline, character, leadership, and access to opportunity — creating pathways for long-term academic and personal success.

“This is about more than sports,” said Cummings during the ceremony. “It’s about using the platform of athletics to teach life lessons, create access, and build the next generation of leaders.”

The induction ceremony also featured notable guests including NASCAR’s newest Star Driver, Lavar Scott and NASCAR Director of Athletic Performance, Phil Horton, who joined Cummings for a powerful Victory & Values Town Hall discussion. The Town Hall was moderated by renowned Sports Emcee John Hollins and focused on leadership, resilience, discipline, and the importance of mentorship in shaping young lives.

A “Day at NASCAR” for 75+ Youth

Cummings wasted no time getting to work. On his first full day as an honorary member, he joined his new brothers of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to host a “Day at NASCAR,” escorting more than 75 youth to a once-in-a-lifetime experience at EchoPark Motor Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway).

The youth participants received behind-the-scenes access including: an exclusive tour of Pit Row, access to the Garage Area and exploration of the interactive Fan Zone.

The experience culminated with a surprise meet-and-greet and Q&A session with NASCAR Superstar Bubba Wallace, who shared insights on perseverance, preparation, and breaking barriers in professional sports.

The day served as a living example of the ‘Victory & Values’ Initiative in action — exposing youth to new industries, expanding their vision for the future, and connecting them directly with high- level mentors and role models.

Building Leaders Through Access and Mentorship

The 100 Black Men of DeKalb County – a chapter of the largest, national mentoring organization in the county – continues to expand its footprint with programs focused on academic excellence, economic empowerment, leadership development, and health & wellness.

The launch of ‘Victory & Values’ represents a strategic expansion of the organization’s impact

intentionally integrating athletics and STEM to engage youth at an early age while reinforcing core principles such as integrity, accountability, teamwork, and perseverance.

“Our mission has always been to mentor the next generation,” said Vaughn Irons, President-Elect of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County. “With Terry Cummings joining the brotherhood, along with partners in NASCAR and professional sports, we are creating unprecedented access and exposure for our youth. Victory & Values is about turning inspiration into structured opportunity.”

By connecting elementary and middle school students to professional athletes, executives, STEM professionals, and community leaders, the initiative aims to:

Increase youth exposure to careers in sports business, engineering, and performance science
Strengthen mentorship pipelines
Promote physical wellness and mental resilience
Build character-driven leadership at an early age

Open Invitation to Youth and Families

All youth are invited to participate in the Victory & Values Initiative, along with the other countless, impactful programs offered by the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County.

Parents and guardians seeking mentorship, leadership development, academic enrichment, and transformative exposure opportunities for their children are encouraged to connect with the organization.

As NBA Legend Terry Cummings’ induction demonstrates, Victory & Values is more than a program — it is a movement designed to build champions in life, not just in sports.

For more information about the Victory & Values Initiative or to enroll a student, contact: 100 Black Men of DeKalb County at Phone at 404.241.1338, info@100bmod.org or Tee Foxx at 404.791.6525,