The CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal Holdings and Stripe received letters Thursday from Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, who demanded they not discriminate against customers based on political or religious grounds.
The FTC threatened enforcement action if customers are denied services for those reasons.
Any act to “deplatform customers or deny them access to financial products or services” may violate the Federal Trade Commission Act and “could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action,” the agency said in a Thursday press release. The FTC didn’t cite any specific infractions by the companies.
The commission is typically made up of five members, but has just two at the moment. President Donald Trump last fired two of the Democrats who sat on the commission.
I really hope some non-US controlled credit card issuers and processors start to exist soon.
The entire US financial system seems like such a risk to participate in these days.
It’s not for credit cards, but Wero is coming soon to Europe!
Not “coming soon” - it’s here. I made my first Wero payment this weekend.
I know it is not a payment processor but I think this needs more attention to what it got. The biggest smart card manufacturer was French. If they died (the company still exists but is a shadow of what it was), you’d have to thanks the NSA for it.
The English Wikipedia is lacking but you’ll find more details here : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemplus
The USA is fighting dirty to keep its position overall and we are not responding at all.
Carte Bleue should expand beyond France.
Can I finally buy my porn games without some third party fucking over the developers?
Lol no
No they ok with that de-platforming
They want to blanket ban porn after all. That’s why the announcement only mentions being debanked for being a conservative and specifically calls out legal transactions.
Only if you register church of porn games where porn games would be worshiped.
Organizing a religion that emphasizes freedom and tries to incorporate all our likes or dislikes into it is one test of religious freedom I’ve always wanted to make.
After all if you can globally mutilate children and harass every single other group in existence for religious purposes surely we can be allowed total media freedom, subsidies for our cultural high quality food and preferred parking for our subsidized luxury cars for our starter sacred privileges in society?
The Satanic Temple is close enough.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word
You may be on to something
Every accusation is a confession, tjere are seemingly no exceptions.
Ah but its okay to disenfranchise those whose politics dont fit the federal narrative innit
didn’t they debank the ICC ? and Francesca Albenese for her political views ?
Yes, they are projecting.
So I guess blocking payments to porn sites or whatever they were doing before is supposed to stop. Right? Right?
The right is mostly aligning with that, unless you’re talking about those young alt-righters, who are following a suggestion found on a pro-lolicon forum religiously.
This is interesting.
Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, in January for $5 billion over what he alleged was the bank’s improper closure of his accounts in 2021 for political reasons. The bank is fighting the claims. The Trump Organization, led by the president’s sons, also sued Capital One last year over similar debanking allegations, and a federal judge last week dismissed that lawsuit, but gave the plaintiffs time to refile.
Following that link:
Trump sued JPMorgan and Dimon last month, seeking at least $5 billion in damages. He claims the alleged debanking came after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the end of the president’s first term.
So that’s what this is about.
Nailed it, thanks.
Trump has been debanked since the late 90s by almost all US banks, because when you bankrupt two casinos and frequently spend time with mobsters they considered loans to you “high risk” for some reason.
He’s been getting loans via Europe (mostly Deutschbank… which is also Putin’s bank of choice), and Russia, for 30 years.
That is, until he won the lottery by convincing the stupidest people alive to vote him into the highest seat of power.
So now it’s payback time against all the banks he thinks wronged him.
Not giving loans doesn’t mean debanked.
Actually, for the wealthy it does.
Trump has been very wealthy since birth. The wealthy do not have bank accounts like your average wageslave like me, where their salary gets deposited regularly and they earn interest and make withdrawls - and perhaps have an attached home loan account, etc. We earn interest in high income accounts or term deposits and then pay tax on that earning - like suckers.
The wealthy use an entirely different model that focuses on using debt as its main tool.
Their assets including real estate, share portfolios, stock options and even expensive artwork are ‘good debt’, they perhaps don’t own them fully (they may be mortgaged, loan-backed or options, etc) but they’re assets that continue to grow in value over the medium term. If they sell them or divest them for real cash it becomes income that they must pay tax on. The wealthy hate paying tax. Solution: use the assets as collateral for loans and credit lines. This is how Trump lives like a king while (previously) not having much liquid cash, and also how Elon and most ultrawealthg do it - their entire personal spending is on credit accounts - debt - and by writing as much of it off as businesses expenses (meals, travel, security, etc) it all becomes tax deductable as well.
This is the same reason a lot of business executives request most of their payment packages as stock or options - it reduces their taxable income and builds their real wealth substantially. If they want a property: mortgage against their stock & option collateral. If they need money: bank credit line with their assets as collateral.
So when banks say to a member of the 1% such as Trump “we cannot give you a loan account, your collateral/outstanding loans at other fiancial institutions/criminal associates/track record is too risky for us”, that means he cannot use that bank and must look elsewhere. He is debanked by them for his purposes.
Billionaires are not the 1%… they’re the 0.1% of the 1%…
I hate that occupy wall street picked such a stupid number to pick fights with. 1% is like a high earning doctor. Well off, but not like wealthy enough to buy votes and sway elections…
Arguing semantics is kinda pointless when the message is that wealth needs to be distributed far better.
Nobody at Occupy was protesting that just the billionaires need to be taxed much more and the ten-millionaires* should stay just as-is.
*The top 1% in the USA have roughly $12 million USD net assets as of 2025. That is far more than they need to live a very comfortable life with many luxuries.
They can use loans yes, but it’s still not what debanking means.
Btw executives get stock options because the board of directors think that gives them incentive to get the stock price up. And deferred taxes yes.
You’re being pedantic.
There are multiple types of de-banking. One explicitly applie:
“Debanking refers to the practice by financial institutions of declining or limiting financial services to businesses across whole sectors if they are assessed as having a higher money laundering and terrorism financing (ML/TF) risk.”
I wonder if Trump knows that?
Doesn’t matter, his base will guess what it means and eat it if he complains about it.
For the wealthy at that level it is effectively debanked. If anything it’s even more effective then a poor person getting normal debanked.
yeah this isn’t suspicious at all.
And certainly wouldn’t be selectively enforced anyway. This is 100% “rules for thee not for me” shit.
Like if they get debanked for “religious” or “political” reasons (esp. when they are the ones politicizing literally everything), it’s a crime.
Things that they consider political but sensible people consider “human rights”, tho? They sleep.
Totally a slow reaction to all the right wing stuff like info wars that was being debanked a number of years ago.
Wikileaks? What was that?
Process the fucking payments, payment processors.
🤦…here we go again
Somebody’s about to do something fucking horrific again.
You know who will suffer the harshest consequences though?
Crypto could replace all these companies
There are issues with speed/capacity of payments, and if the wrong crypto is used (i.e. those with proof of work, like Bitcoin, instead of proof of stake) it’s an environmental disaster.
Hardly issues at this point
So then we help the Trump kids and David Ballsacks make bank from their crypto investments. No thanks.
macroeconomists famously love deflation they think it’s really good
Oh right we hate technology around here
This seems like a good thing at first and that makes me extra wary.
Anarchist/Environmentalists get debanked: I sleep.
Epstein-club child-rapist billionaires get the slightest inconvenience: Real Shit.
That is for conservatives only though. The judges on the ICC who have been debanked for ruling against Netanyahu can pound sand.
Has this actually happened, or just playing the victim again?
The linked article has more info: https://www.bankingdive.com/news/occ-debanking-report-jpmorgan-bofa-citi-wells-fargo-pnc-td-bmo-capital-one-trump-gould/807685/
The OCC expressed concern that, between 2020 and 2025, the banks restricted access or required “escalated reviews and approvals before providing … access” to certain customers with connections to oil and gas, coal, firearms, private prisons, tobacco, payday lending, adult entertainment, digital assets or political action committees and political parties.
It’s that last part that, presumably, spurred President Donald Trump in January to accuse Bank of America – while its CEO was on stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – of debanking conservatives.
Ah yes. When i read the fascist FTC head sent the letter — a criminal who threatens antifascist media for political speech — I was certain consequences will only apply to debanking fascists.
“We called ourselves the MOD Squad, short for Merchants of Death.”
Looks like Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms have a whole new set of friends.
Thanks, but that article doesn’t mention too many specifics either. I am going to assume that if someone was denied service it’s because they are criminals, not conservatives. The line is blurry though.
There was a big deal last year after Mastercard and Visa threatened the indie game site itch.io for allowing adult games, after a single complaint from an Australian anti-porn group.
Payment processors shouldn’t be gatekeepers of what we can buy. They should just process the payments and take their cut for being a middleman.
I thought about that when I heard about this, but it looks like this will not stop Visa and MasterCard from continuing to threaten everyone who is not ‘equal’ enough
Everyone in the West cheered when Visa and MasterCard cut Russia off their processing by their own initiative. Now in the past year Europeans suddenly realized what this might mean, and are clamoring for a pan-European payment processor. While Russia already had one of their own for ages.
Realistically, it’s likely that someone with money was denied access, and used their money to hire lobbyists to make this a political problem.
Trump was debanked after Jan 6th, this is just retaliation for banks choosing not to do business with fascists and insurrectionists.
