Visa & Cashless Olympics Celebrate “Currency of Progress,” the Future of Payments, But Fail

If the Olympics 2012 in London are a celebration of the powers-that-be, then Visa is the plastic of the illuminati. At every Olympic and Paralympic Games for the past 25 years, Visa has implemented and managed the payment system for all game venues.  In anticipation of the £750 million in expected consumer spending at the Olympics, “Visa has partnered with merchants to ensure more than 140,000 retail locations throughout the United Kingdom accept Visa pay Wave-enabled cards and phones, including 5,000 London taxis and 3,000 point-of-sale locations at Olympic venues.”

Visa removed 27 Link cash machines across London’s Olympics sites before the onset of the games and replaced them with eight Visa-only ATMs. No power-that-be wanted to risk uppity peasants wandering around London with all that cash, making dark transactions that the power-hungry cannot see. The goal for the Olympics was for Visa, the banks and powers-that-be generally to replace all that too-easy-to-hide cash with a card-based payment system, particularly a contactless card or a mobile-based solution. That would save them a lot of freedom.

Visa—which removed 27 Link cash machines across London’s Olympics sites before the Games began and replaced them with eight Visa-only ATMs—is keen to encourage the so-called ‘cashless society.’ Cash is expensive to transport around the country, the money supply constantly has to be refreshed, it is vulnerable to counterfeiting, and presents a large cost burden to banks and others who have to circulate it. If Visa, the banks and other players can replace all that with a card-based payment system, particularly a contactless card or even mobile-based solution, then they would save a lot of expense.

In other words, the Olympics are an opportunity for Visa and those global power brokers who expect to benefit from a cashless society to continue their push for a “currency that can transcend borders.” Unfortunately for Visa, their “currency for a world standing on the fulcrum of progress” is not at all innovative given that decentralized p2p currencies are now, truly, the “currency of progress.”

Visa and the Olympics used the 2012 games to showcase the future of payments. The two teamed up to “envision a world where most consumers will rely on mobile devices, tablets and PCs to manage their daily financial lives, Visa and its partners are showcasing the future of electronic payments.”  According to the Visa website, “these new ways to pay via mobile phones and chip-enabled cards will allow for faster, more convenient and secure transactions at the Olympics venues and thousands of retail locations throughout London.”

According to Jim McCarthy, Global Head of Product at Visa Inc., “Electronic payments play a crucial role in facilitating tourism and meeting the needs of consumers on-the-go during a mega-sporting event such as the Olympic Games, making this a unique opportunity to showcase how technology is changing the way people shop, pay and get paid around the globe.”

Despite doing the footwork for the “masters of the universe,” Visa was unable to execute at the Olympics 2012 a functionable cashless society. As one writer details:

In an attempt to get into the Olympic spirit I attended the football match at Wembley Stadium in London Sunday night, but my desire to recreate the true football experience with a beer and a pie at the halftime interval during the games between Senegal and Uruguay and Great Britain and the UAE was thwarted by the failure of the Visa card payment system.

The Olympics 2012 was used as a stage to push many parts of the ongoing agenda for a totally enslaved world, across all continents and lands. Don’t make the mistake of believing the propaganda, that these cashless payment systems are all of the sudden a necessity or more convenient because they are not. There is nothing convenient about having each transaction of yours intimately detailed, and nothing convenient about actually paying the 50+% taxes the world will be on the hook for to bank-sponsored state-enterprise apparatuses.