I woke up Tuesday to find I was no longer welcome to do certain business with Wells Fargo, one of America’s most rapacious institutions. If ever there were a business worthy of being proverbially shattered into smithereens for its monopolistic tendencies, it is Wells Fargo.
You might be thinking, “Pete, why would you be doing business with the big banks in the first place?” That’s a valid question. I’m not that smart, and never claimed to be.
Wells Fargo has unilaterally decided that I am not allowed to save my money with them. My personal and business checking accounts remain intact, at least at the time of this writing. They told me that nuking my savings account was a “business decision.” I’d call it something different, but the cuss words are too gratuitous to pass through the editorial process.
Wells Fargo officially denies closing my account for partisan political reasons.
As reported by the least inquisitive journalists on earth over at Right Wing Watch, Wells Fargo “points to other reasons.”
What are those “other reasons,” one not currently employed by Right Wing Watch might wonder?
According to Wells Fargo, there are “a number of reasons based on individual facts and circumstances.”
Thank goodness we cleared that up! What would we do without the guardians of the powerful at Right Wing Watch, who through their intrepid investigative reporting discovered that Wells Fargo severed business ties with me for “reasons”? Walter Cronkite would be proud.
Wall Streeters refusing service to outspoken members of the political Right is nothing new. It’s been happening for years. In fact, it’s likely the next major battle on the deplatorming front. First, it was access to social media. Now it is access to financial services.
Thanks to our worthless GOP, which would sacrifice its firstborn on the altar of “free-market capitalism,” and thanks to those who carry water for it at places like TheBulwarkDispatchReview, the political Right never was quite able to get ahead of the censorship curve.
Charlie Sykes, Jonah Goldberg, and the elected officials who share their outlooks have been too busy trying to swallow the boots of America’s most powerful institutions (as long as their paperwork says they’re organized as private corporations) to recognize that no matter how hard they swallow, they’ll still choke to death eventually. I suspect they’ll still be waving their pocket Constitutions and their copies of Atlas Shrugged in our faces in some not-so-distant dystopian future, when Amazon and Bank of America decide to drag us off to the actual gulag, instead of the digital one.
But hey, let’s not worry ourselves with such trivialities. Pattern recognition might cause someone with a modicum of power to finally take action against the monopolies, endangering America’s precious GDP, or worse, the stock market. We wouldn’t want that!
The political Left is also very much aligned with the most powerful institutions in America these days. I’m hardly the first person to notice that. They don’t even bother arguing semantics when conservatives get deplatformed. They prefer to celebrate our castigation openly, knowing that Sykes and his friends will run cover for them.
I’m also not the first person to notice that Wells Fargo and companies like it are hardly the mom-and-pop shop down the street. If your favorite local restaurant goes out of business because, say, the government forces it to close during a bad flu season, that’s just the way the “free market” cookie crumbles. Too bad for mom and pop.
Not so with the big banks, though.
You might recall that very small instance in 2008 when Wall Street nearly crashed the entire world economy. (And who among us hasn’t done that? Happens to the best of us!) As it turned out, the mortgage-backed securities they were selling were packed with mortgages that had been handed out like candy to unqualified borrowers who could not pay them back. The result was nearly apocalyptic.
But Congress decided that an apocalypse would hurt their reelection prospects, and handed the banks more than half a trillion American taxpayer dollars in order to keep the racket moving. Wells Fargo received up to $36 billion of those dollars.
None of this sounds like a “free market” to me. It sounds like a market rigged in favor of powerful corporations—the same ones that now display a pattern of open hostility towards outspoken conservatives. I’m sure glad we extended them that olive branch when they needed it the most!
Fortunately, our very capable federal government and law enforcement authorities cleaned up Wall Street by sending the designers of those predatory lending schemes, and the corporate executives who enabled them, to jail for a very long time.
Just kidding. That never happened.
I’m not asking for your sympathy. Using a bank other than Wells Fargo (those nickel-and-diming bastards) will hardly be a tragedy.
I’m simply asking you to take note of what’s happening.
Slowly but surely, members of the political Right are being purged from polite society for harboring the “wrong” opinions. You can no longer simply say “I just want to be left alone.” Being left alone can’t be allowed by the psychopaths in government, business, and media who are bent on total domination.
Right now, those psychopaths are all perfectly aligned against the political Right. It is an incestuous pool of backscratchers who protect one another at all costs, and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before in America.
The systems of checks and balances—not just in government but in society at large—no longer exist, evidenced by Right Wing Watch’s brave defense of Wells Fargo against me, a regular guy whom nobody even knew banked with Wells Fargo until a few days ago.
The powerful are driving a high-speed train directly towards a crowd comprised of the political Right, and very few people aboard the train are yelling “stop.” The few who are yelling “stop” have been drowned out by apologists for, and outright supporters of, conservative subjugation.
Get your affairs in order while you still can, because it’s going to get ugly.