Some banks are refusing to work with entire industries because they have cowered to leftist activists. This is an alarming trend. And it’s not just conservative social media sites like Parler, Brandon Straka and other conservatives hated by progressives. We’re talking industries like oil and gas companies, private prisons, and gun manufacturers. The decisions to refuse services to these industries came from progressive leftist whack jobs. The concern is if the trend continues, it could lead to banks discriminating against any industry that the progressives don’t like at any given minute.
This craziness is not in America’s best interests.
Remember the redlining accusations back in the 1970s? Though the Left will tell you it was done because of racism, in reality the redlining back then was done by mortgage bankers who drew a red line on a city map around sections of the city they served and they told their mortgage loan officers to not accept applications from the areas within the red lines. It turns out that in most cases; the areas redlined were black neighborhoods, but what the activists won’t tell you is that your race didn’t matter. If you were white and you lived inside the redlined area, you would not get a mortgage. It was because those specific areas had people who could not pass a mortgage application because of no credit, bad credit, no job, a criminal record, etc.
Today, banks are creating a new type of redlining but against legal industries that are doing absolutely nothing wrong, based on political ideologies, and they are blaming it on unclear and ambiguous risks to their bank’s reputation. In other words, banks are being extorted by progressive groups that tell them they either they stop doing business with the industries they tell them or they will do things to harm their reputation on social media and elsewhere.
Currently, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency has proposed a regulation that will make it illegal for banks to use risk evaluations that are category-based to deny financial services. They better hurry up because this is probably the last change they will get to protect the American economic and financial system from ideologically political objections. Saule Omarova, a communist who graduated from Moscow State University on a Lenin Award grant, and is Biden’s nominee for the position of Comptroller of the Currency. If she gets in, she will make it legal for banks to discriminate against perfectly legitimate industries. In fact, she will probably create the list of industries to discriminate against.
If more banks continue to commit to refuse financial services to the energy industry, our country will be heading for a real calamity. So far, 6 of the largest banks in the United States have already said they will not fund new explorations and production projects in the Arctic. The thing is, oil companies are not attempting to drill in the Arctic, so these banking policies look like a presage to what’s coming.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELBiden policies are already causing enough harm in the energy sector, but debanking fossil fuel companies could cause an energy shortage in the US. We were energy independent 11 short months ago. We are now having serious problems in the energy sector and they are self-imposed problems.
If the progressives get their way and deny oil companies access to financial services could trigger a national security crisis. They would rather American oil and gas assets be taken over by companies that use foreign banks or by foreign energy firms with ties to foreign governments. What the hell are we doing?
Banks can’t make financial services judgements based on a hodgepodge of ideologically induced morality. A system like that is a divergence from the capitalist system we have had since our nation’s founding. The problem with going down that progressive rabbit hole is that the whack jobs could pick on any industry at any time, including the news media where they will deny financial services to media outlets that progressives don’t like. They could go after minority-owned businesses too. And if the banks think that they are immune from the progressive tentacles of cancel culture, they should think again.
Capitalism is honest, and that’s why it works. Adding ideology into financial decisions makes capitalism dirty, and it will break the invisible hand, the unintended greater social benefits and public good brought about by individuals acting in their own self-interests.
Once you give power to these reprobates, they will push further and further, adding more and more industries until there’s not enough left to have a functioning country.
The banks should have grown a pair and told the progressive whack jobs to screw off. And if the banks think they won’t receive a backlash, they would be wrong. Recently, 15 state financial officers sent a letter to US banks warning them of $600 billion in assets they pledge to take elsewhere if the banks adopt woke corporate policies and no longer provide financing to the fossil fuel industry.
