Democrats debanking abuses show theyre the big threat to democracy

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.” Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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