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With Democrats poised to regain much of their Washington muscle, it’s ever more urgent to notice how they abused that power so recently.
Consider Wednesday’s blockbuster report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency outlining how nine big banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, used purely political criteria to deny services to perfectly lawful consumers — when getting “debanked” is often a financial death sentence.
And the debankers regularly relied on the hatemongering-for-profit Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority for who to ban.
This was no small abuse: The OCC investigation covered more than 100,000 consumer complaints and 50,000 internal bank documents.
A JPMorgan payment platform booted merchants with “MAGA” and “America First” in their profiles — and another for working with a group whose “crime” was that a member accurately described the Black Lives Matter movement as Marxist.
PNC refused a credit line to an outfit that, per the bank’s internal docs, “funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center” and whose owner was “a conservative political commentator.”
Yes, this largely happened under President Joe Biden and subsided once he was gone — but the push for it started long before.
In 2019, for example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly argued, “Not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly” of her and her party’s own efforts to stop banks working with “evil” industries like firearms and oil and gas.
And banks followed those political signals.
Wells Fargo declined to lend money to two firearms businesses; BofA axed private-prison businesses over “changing policymaker attitudes.”
The woke crusade against disfavored industries and speech was, of course, always going to end with average Americans getting punished for lawful behavior.
It also ended up hurting leftists as well: Capital One refused to bank a group devoted to “reproductive rights [that was] synonymous with abortion and the Dems.”
These OCC findings are an ugly echo of recent revelations from the Senate Judiciary Committee that special prosecutor Jack Smith, in his Ahab-like pursuit of President Donald Trump, illegally surveilled thousands of Americans for the crime of donating tiny amounts to the president’s campaign.
The nine banks the OCC report names promise not to abuse again; that’s far from sufficient. If the OCC doesn’t take action, the Consumer Financial Protection Board should exercise its broad enforcement powers here to permanently make debanking efforts expensive and risk-laden for anyone engaging in them.
Don’t leave the door open for Woke 2 Democrats to outdo the “craaazy” Woke 1 crew: Just imagine the financial sanctions against people who object to gender extremism, criticize Hamas, don’t want open borders or support locking up criminals.
Democrats show no shame or regret over the OCC findings, making it plain that the extremists still call the shots — and will stay in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future.
Unless and until the normies reclaim their party, every Democratic victory adds a new threat to our democracy.