The Pornocalypse, The Banks, And The Department Of Justice
There have been reports for quite some time about porn stars having their bank accounts cancelled for no good reason that their banks would admit. Now comes word — in the form of an extended speculation at Vice.com — that the driving force behind this banking crackdown on adult customers is in fact the Department of Justice:
News is slowly surfacing that shows the US Department of Justice may be strong-arming banks into banning porn stars.
It’s called Operation Choke Point, and it has nothing to do with deep-throating.
Instead, it’s a targeted effort to shut down as many as 30 separate industries by making it impossible for them to access banking services.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, American Bankers Association CEO Frank Keating wrote that the Justice Department is “telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges.”
“Operation Choke Point is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like,” Keating wrote. “Banks must then ‘choke off’ those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.”
Keating said the highly secretive operation was launched in early 2013. That’s when porn stars started to complain to the media that their bank accounts were being shut down without explanation.
And while the actors are quick to blame banks like Chase and Bank of America for discrimination, those institutions may in fact have no choice.
“If a bank doesn’t shut down a questionable account when directed to do so, Justice slaps the institution with a penalty for wrongdoing that may or may not have happened,” Keating wrote.
Reading between the lines, there seems to be (as yet) no solid evidence that the porn industry is among the 30 separate industries that’s being secretly targeted by “Operation Choke Point”. But it does offer a better explanation than corporate prurience for the banking difficulties adult performers have been routinely encountering of late.
Thanks to Violet Blue for the link.
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Sounds like the kind of infringement of personal freedom that successive U.S. governments have spent so many millions of dollars combating worldwide.
Outside the USA at least.
Free Republic has a longer list of the industries targeted that includes “Pornography” (the original WSJ article Vice.com references only listed some):
http://www.free...posts
One theory I’ve heard is that Chase Banks and others are being intentionally overzealous in implementing Chokepoint, as a way to drum up some manufactured grass-roots outrage against the government regulating banks (“See? This is what happens when the government tries to regulate us!”) I don’t know how accurate that theory is.
I have (in recent years), been finding that the bigger the bank, the bigger dicks they are. Big banks have no balls! (…and no soul either!) Smaller banks offer their clients better service. The employees of larger banks seem to derive some sort of perverse pleasure in trying to control every petty aspect of the bank/client relationship. Maybe it’s just a vocation that neurotic people who are on pathological power trips are gravitating toward these days, but frankly I suspect there is an even much darker purpose.
There are three banks (probably the three largest), in my region, that I refuse to do most kinds of business with. When the occasion arises where I must take a client’s check from one of these horrid institutions, I tell them outright that I’ll have to charge them a surcharge if I have to have that particular bank involved. Hopefully my “system” will cause some of these people to switch banks, rather than deal with the inconvenience of settling their debts with cash.
In my opinion, the only way to save us from these soulless corporations, is to endeavor to do my business with “ma & pa” companies, or at least the smallest of the available corporations. If no one does business with them, they will necessarily wither and die, and the smaller/locally-owned companies will thrive.
These larger companies are too interconnected, and tend to “price-fix” various services. This sort of thing used to be against the law, and there was a time when these laws were enforced!
As long as the common man continues to roll over and take it, this type of behavior referred to in the article above will just get worse!
Those who are apathetic about their loss of this sort of freedom, will one day regret it when it begins to really hit home!
We’re not as powerless now as the financial institutions want us to be, but without taking a stand, we certainly will be, and soon!
Whenever a big bank inconveniences me, I make it a pet project of mine to inconvenience them in some way that is sure to cost them more than it has cost me, and/or in some way that will cost them more than if they HADN’T implemented the unfair/un-American policy in question.
The more we support the mega-banks, the more control they will take over us. This is how banks that are “too big to fail” get that way… It’s our own fault for supporting them in the first place, and we’ll just have to take what we get if we don’t fight for our freedoms.
When the free market for goods or services is criminalized in some way, it only creates opportunities for organized crime to step in with its ability to regulate the market. On the other hand, I am loathe to believe without explicit evidence what a bankster claims he is being compelled to do by government bureaucrats.
That Chase’s activities cracking down on adult businesses (in the case something as innocuous as a seller of condoms) might be some sort of play against bank regulation has also gotten some coverage over at the big economics blog Naked Capitalism.
Faustus, that blogger has put a spin on things that doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts. He argues that “the bureaucrats” merely want banks to crack down on businesses that rely on fraud. But the reporting is that “pornography” is one of the targeted businesses in Operation Choke Point. There’s no essential link between pornography and fraud, and it’s my estimation that only a tiny minority of porn companies are doing genuinely fraudulent business (like pre-checked cross sales that are out of sight and off the page when a surfer is signing up for a porn site). So I think that blogger is being disingenuous. I don’t have a problem with the rapidly-developing meme that the banks are reacting badly to an enforcement regime they don’t like, but there appears to be a content-based element of that regime nonetheless. It’s not JUST aimed at fraudsters.
[…] in 2014, I wrote a little bit about Operation Choke Point, the US Department of Justice effort to intimidate banks into refusing to handle the banking […]
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