Chase Shuts Down Porn Star Accounts (But at Least It’s Consensual When Porn Stars Screw People)

We’re currently living through the era of political correctness on steroids. Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, the basic notion of freedom is not and can not be based on everybody getting along with each other and agreeing all the time while we all hold hands and sing Kumbayah. Would the world be a better place if we did? That’s another question for another time.

Chase Bank, or more officially, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. which does business as “Chase” but is a subsidiary of the multinational banking corporation JPMorgan Chase, has been closing the accounts of hundreds of porn stars, a move called “de-risking.”

Consumer protection advocate Mark Nestmann explains:

It’s called “de-risking,” the decision by a bank or other financial institution to end a relationship with a customer to avoid possible embarrassment or, worse, government witch-hunts.

In the last few months, US banks have closed down tens of thousands of accounts of “politically incorrect” customers. They include gun sellers, coin dealers, fireworks suppliers, dating services, US citizens living abroad, Muslim students, money services businesses, diplomats from third-world countries, and, yes, porn stars like Teagan Presley.

So a mega bank that has likely screwed over more people than 100 porn stars would in their entire careers combined is tossing people out of their bank accounts…for what? On some kind of supposed moral principle?

Are you kidding me??

Let the irony sink in for a minute.

Beyond that, these banks have become such a pervasive part of modern life, that they are hard for the average person to really avoid in so many ways (even though we really should).

Now they are going to try and shut people down for being “politically incorrect”? Think about how far our fascist government and its crony capitalist pals can take that one and run with it.

Look at the conservative and tea party non-profits who got screwed out of tax exempt status for their political beliefs under a Democrat president. Look at how gun control advocates can’t obliterate the Second Amendment, so instead government agencies like the ATF and mega corporations acting as arms of our fascist government willfully screw gun manufacturers over as much as possible with onerous rules and blocking access to accounts with which to do business.

Some say the move is part of the Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point, which is supposedly about cracking down on fraud through banks and payment processors, and it includes Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) updated regulatory guidelines that note, “facilitating payment processing for merchant customers engaged in higher-risk activities can pose risks to financial institutions.”

So-called “higher-risk activities” include everything from firework and firearm sales, to pharmaceutical and drug paraphernalia sales, to coin dealers and, yes, pornography. In fact, the FDIC page used to have a list of these merchant customer types, but it was apparently removed in July. Here’s a copy of the list from a cached link dated May 27, 2014:

Other than Ponzi schemes (which are fraudulent investment operations that should be investigated by the DOJ anyway, right?), a lot of these things may be shady, but most aren’t illegal.

Worse, a bird’s eye view of this whole situation just looks like the door got kicked wide open to a never ending slippery slope amounting to a big fat government witch hunt.

(Surprising that “alternative media” isn’t anywhere on that list…)

Beyond that, these banks on record launder money for terrorists and murderous drug cartels.

Nearly destroying themselves with their own greed, these banks also took some obscene amount of taxpayer money under the banner of a bailout — a figure ultimately calculated at an astronomical $29 trillion. In doing so, each and every American got completely screwed over for an eternity by institutions which soon-to-be-former Attorney General Eric Holder literally said were “too big to prosecute.”

Matt Taibbi of Common Dreams summed the whole thing up pretty well:

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme…

[The bailout] was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

Pretty much.

Twenty nine TRILLION dollars.

But these banks get to turn around and kick Americans out of their accounts based on some warped sense of political correctness? It’d be a sad joke if it wasn’t really happening.