Tag: banks

Advocates Outraged That Feds Asked Banks To Search Customers’ ‘Religious Texts’ Purchases

Faith leaders and religious liberty advocates are up in arms over news that the federal government encouraged banks and other financial institutions to search customers’ private accounts using the search term “religious texts.”

The “religious texts” search term was among those federal officials asked financial institutions to use following the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, a congressional source with direct knowledge confirmed to The Epoch Times on Jan. 18.

Other terms that banks, credit card companies, and financial firms were asked to use in the searches included “MAGA” and “Trump,” according to the House Judiciary Committee. Federal officials at the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department sought the data from such searches as part of their investigation of the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Religious liberty advocates interviewed by The Epoch Times were unanimous in condemning the searches, which were conducted without judicially authorized search warrants.

“This is beyond alarming,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told The Epoch Times. “If we did a word search in history of the type of activities the Biden administration is engaged in, it would return words like ‘KGB,’ ’totalitarian,‘ ’repressive,’ ‘anti-democratic,’ and ‘grave threat to freedom.’”

Family Research Council is a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group that works on behalf of traditional values, including and especially defense of the family and religious freedom.

“The last place you would anticipate this kind of government intrusion into freedom of speech is America and yet it is rife with this administration and with the ‘deep state,’” Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver told The Epoch Times.

“It is a very serious concern and it should be a serious concern, no matter your political beliefs because if this is permitted, then it just depends on who is in power. This is what despotic governments do to suppress people that they don’t agree with,” he said.

Mr. Staver’s organization, Liberty Counsel, is an Orlando, Florida-based nonprofit religious liberty defense foundation.

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Is a Cyber 9/11 Coming?

Talk of a “Cyber 9/11” has been circulating for years.  With the next presidential election twelve months away now, some folks are predicting that a major cyber event will happen before then, throwing a monkey wrench into the 2024 election process.

What the heck is Cyber 9/11?

What does Cyber 9/11 mean?  Is there a real risk?  What should we be preparing for?

There are two aspects to the Cyber 9/11 concept.  The first is the disaster itself; 9/11 was a catastrophe that ended the lives of over 3000 people in one day.  There are fears that if power grids were hacked or enough damage was done to logistical centers, the ensuing chaos would cause deaths.

Quite memorably, back in 2000, a disgruntled public works employee in Australia hacked into the water treatment system and caused raw sewage to pour into public areas, flooding a Hyatt hotel.  One man acting alone caused a disgusting, expensive mess. Of course security experts are concerned with what a team of angry individuals could do.

The second aspect to a potential Cyber 9/11 is the change in the regulatory landscape that occurred after 9/11 in 2001.  I remember flying as a teenager in the 90s. So many things changed later.  The airport changes were most obvious to regular citizens, but the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 was far more consequential.  It dramatically changed the way surveillance was conducted.

Under the Fourth Amendment, private citizens are supposed to be protected from warrantless search and seizures.  The Patriot Act really weakened that. Law enforcement is now allowed to delay the notice of search warrants.  They don’t need nearly as much oversight from judges to conduct phone and internet surveillance.

These Constitution-weakening changes occurred after 9/11 in 2001.

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How Vexatious Government Demands Can Lead Your Bank To Refuse To Do Business with You

Dealing with big businesses whose services you need to conduct the basics of everyday economic life can be frustrating when those businesses make seemingly arbitrary decisions that cripple your ability to function in a modern economy. In general, the incentives of businesses are to, well, do business with customers.

It’s not surprising, then, that a recent New York Times story giving infuriating details of innocent Americans being cut off by their banks reveals that the real cause of the banks’ seemingly arbitrary behavior is government rules designed to make sure it knows everything it can about citizens’ banking business, to discourage big cash transactions, and to ensure businesses the government disapproves of have as difficult a time as possible without being explicitly banned.

As the Times puts it, when citizens suddenly find their banks exiling them, it’s because “a vast security apparatus has kicked into gear, starting with regulators in Washington and trickling down to bank security managers and branch staff eyeballing customers.”

The Times story highlights specific aggravating stories of Americans losing their banking and credit card services over such nonsense as regularly having cash deposits that are near, but below, the government’s legally mandated $10,000 limit that triggers filing special paperwork with the feds (despite those same businesses also frequently going over that limit and filing the necessary paperwork when they do); for getting direct deposit income from a cannabis company; for receiving frequent cash wires from your parents in Nigeria to help with your rent; for making frequent cash withdrawals in the multiple thousands to pay a contractor who wanted cash; for having a past criminal conviction for using counterfeit money; and for using a bank account to move money among a small private community loan pool for those less able to access the normal loan market.

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It Appears That We Have A Major Problem With The Banks

In recent weeks there have been numerous high-profile bank “glitches”, accounts are being shut down without warning at a staggering rate all over the nation, and more institutions continue to get into very serious financial trouble.  For a while, I was ignoring some of these reports because I thought they were isolated issues.  But when you step back and take a bigger picture view of things, it really does appear that we have a major problem with the banks.

According to CNN, on Friday many of our largest banks “were hit by deposit delays”…

Multiple US banks were hit by deposit delays on Friday caused by an error at a payment processing network, according to the Federal Reserve.

The Clearing House, which operates the Automated Clearing House system, which allows banks to send electronic payments to each other, experienced a processing error with a batch of bank transactions. Banks send everything from direct deposit paychecks to customer bill payments for mortgages and utility bills through the ACH system.

This caused a tremendous amount of distress, because paychecks were not showing up in the accounts of a lot of people.

And considering the fact that more than 60 percent of the country is currently living paycheck to paycheck, that is a big deal.

Incredibly, some banks are still trying to fix the problem.  The following is a message that PNC Bank posted on Twitter on Sunday…

Good morning, Amy. Due to an industry-wide delay with Federal ACH transactions, some ACH credits and debits, including some Direct Deposits, haven’t been processed. We recommend that you contact your employer or ACH originator for more information. Thank you.

There have been so many bank “glitches” this year.

So why is this happening?

Could this latest incident have been caused by a cyberattack?

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How Mastercard’s Digital ID Project Is Being Used by Governments To Track Health and Vaccination

In Mastercard’s ongoing technological pursuits, there seems to be an agenda of consolidating digital dominance. The so-called “Community Pass” project, helmed by Tara Nathan, Mastercard’s executive vice president, claims to integrate marginalized communities into the digital world. However, with only 3.5 million users so far, skeptics of digital ID plans may wonder about its real reach and intentions.

Nathan’s recent appearance on the company-sponsored podcast “What’s Next In,” touted the supposed merits of the Community Pass. Launched in 2019, this platform ostensibly provides individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-Pacific with a digital ID and wallet, allowing them access to services such as government benefits and humanitarian assistance.

Nathan waxed eloquent about the supposed benefits of digitization for developing economies. But her emphasis on using offline digital channels to supposedly empower marginalized individuals raises eyebrows. Is this another case of a multinational company trying to sell its tech solutions to unsuspecting communities under the guise of altruism?

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Biden Admin Orders Banks Not To Reject Immigrants’ Loan Applications Solely Based on Immigration Status

The Biden administration is moving to force financial institutions to forego typical loan qualifying requirements when dealing with illegal immigrants.

Concerns have been expressed that the loan qualification guidelines will lead lenders to incur losses that will be passed on to American citizens.

Overriding the concerns, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a  joint statement on Wednesday, warning financial institutions that “all credit applicants are protected from discrimination on the basis of their national origin, race and other characteristics covered by the (ECOA), regardless of their immigration status.”

The Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs issued a statement noting that “consumers have reported being rejected for credit cards as well as for auto, student, personal and equipment loans because of their immigration status, even when they have strong credit histories and ties to the United States and are otherwise qualified to receive the loans.”

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Whistleblower: The World Bank Helped Cover Up Child Sex Abuse at a Chain of For-Profit Schools It Funded

FOR SHANNON MAY and her husband Jay Kimmelman, the conference call scheduled with the World Bank on September 12, 2020, was make or break. It had been just over 10 years since the Harvard graduates had launched Bridge International Academies, a chain of for-profit schools that had exploded in Africa and South Asia. With the backing of Silicon Valley’s elite and the support of international financial institutions like the World Bank, the founders were now in negotiations to raise fresh capital that would allow them to move into several new countries. 

Rapid expansion was essential to the company’s business model. Bridge had figured out a way to slash the biggest cost drivers of a school budget — teachers’ salaries and traditional school houses — but the business was a low-margin enterprise that couldn’t slow down. The company was aiming for 10 million pupils, and it wasn’t as unreachable as it sounded: Bridge had already taught more than 1 million kids, backed by the for-profit investment arms of some of the world’s most famous philanthropists, including Bill Gates and eBay and Intercept founder Pierre Omidyar. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provided Bridge with $10 million in seed funding; its previous round of financing, the so-called Series E, which closed in 2017.

Bridge was now raising its next round, Series F.  May and Kimmelman had a lot to lose: The couple had relocated from Cambridge to Kenya, and had done well enough to helicopter to their vacation home on the coast.

Just days before the call, in early September, May and Kimmelman had gotten bad news. In 2016, there had been a dozen or more cases of serial sexual assault at a Bridge school in Kenya. Several years later, at another Bridge location, a child on school grounds had been fatally electrocuted by a dangling live wire, while another had been badly injured. May and Kimmelman were already aware of the tragedies. Indeed, the company had internally documented many more cases of sexual abuse, but they had not been reported to the World Bank and stayed out of the local press. Now, a World Bank investigation threatened to bring them to light. 

In February 2020, an internal World Bank entity that independently reviews bank projects, called the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, had sent an investigative team, led by veteran investigator Daniel Adler, to Nairobi to look into complaints filed by a local human rights organization about workers’ rights and health and safety issues at Bridge schools. The CAO team, while in Nairobi, learned of additional allegations from parents and community members, namely the serial assaults and the electrocution. Adler quickly filed a report recommending a deeper look and asked Bridge for more information.

Bridge spent several months gumming up the process, successfully negotiating a nondisclosure agreement with the World Bank that would make it difficult to publish in full any report that might be completed. The company also pressured the head of the CAO, Osvaldo Gratacós, to ease off. Gratacós was pushed out by the World Bank, but the effort ultimately backfired; before his tenure expired, he formally launched an investigation — known internally as a CAO compliance process — into the sex abuse allegations at Bridge in September 2020. May and Kimmelman were now meeting with the World Bank to discuss how to respond.

With the company actively soliciting Series F financing and close to securing a deal to expand in Rwanda, the timing couldn’t have been worse. So the group — which included William Sonneborn, the World Bank official who oversaw the investment in Bridge, and another World Bank staff member, Shannon Atkeson — hatched a plan to keep the allegations hidden. 

With Gratacós already on his way out, the next step was to “neutralize Adler,” the CAO’s lead investigator. Bridge would file a complaint with a World Bank ethics office accusing Adler of violating CAO procedures and of impersonating a Bridge employee. It was right out of the Bridge playbook: The company had previously done the same to a Canadian graduate student writing a report on its schools in Uganda, going so far as to craft a bogus “Wanted” poster and place it in local newspapers. (A subsequent complaint Bridge filed with his university was dismissed.)

Next, Bridge would publish a consultant report favorably comparing its own record on student safety to that of Kenyan public schools — something to point to if the news leaked. The main objective, though, was to keep it quiet for as long as possible. The revelations would “spook investors” and undermine Bridge’s expansion plans in Rwanda. “Time matters,” as one person on the call put it. “Need to delay until Series F.”

There was only one problem: Someone on the call was taking notes.

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Lone Democrat Who Opposed Marijuana Banking Bill In Senate Committee Explains His Vote

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was the sole Democrat to vote against a marijuana banking reform bill during a committee markup last month. In a new interview, the senator described his vote as an effort at making important equity improvements while there’s still a chance to do so.

“I’m worried that if we pass a bill with all of the fees and the revenue that comes, and not begin to address the issue of restorative justice, we’re not going to go back and get those communities,” Warnock said during an appearance on Crooked Media’s Lovett or Leave It podcast that was posted on Sunday. Black and brown people especially, he said, have been “hollowed out by half a century of the so-called war on drugs for using marijuana.”

Warnock was discussing the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act, which would protect banks that service state-legal marijuana markets from being punished by federal regulators.

“What it does is it allows businesses and banks to participate with cannabis businesses in states where it’s legal,” Warnock explained, “and so it creates a safe space for them. But the communities that have been most devastated by the so-called war on drugs, [it] doesn’t do a thing for them at all.”

“My question was, ‘Who are we really making safer?’”

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Give Small Business a Fighting Chance Against Mega Marijuana

The SAFE(R) Banking Act vote and the Biden administration’s review of the federal status of marijuana have garnered headlines and applause from many drug reform advocates and cannabis industry leaders. But without congressional action to protect small businesses, federal marijuana reform threatens to give an unfair advantage to a handful of national corporations while hobbling thousands of local farmers and neighborhood shopkeepers.

Under current law, state-licensed marijuana companies are denied the use of basic financial services. That means no checking accounts, no tax credits, no small business loans. For the cannabis industry’s emerging billion-dollar corporations, that’s not a problem. They’re able to expand and gobble up smaller companies (and their licenses) using private equity money and funding rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Small businesses can’t compete on that scale. Unless Congress acts, the Biden administration’s plan to merely reschedule marijuana is likely to supercharge the rise of national cannabis conglomerates while strangling local community-scale businesses.

This should be a bipartisan win-win. Support for small business and marijuana legalization are two rare issues where Republican and Democratic voters find common ground. A recent Gallup poll found Republican support for legalization now tops 51 percent, while 81 percent of Democrats want to end pot prohibition. Both parties compete to be seen as the one true BFF of Main Street mom-and-pops.

And yet party leaders on both sides are poised to embrace a lose-lose. In a study recently published by Ohio State University’s Drug Enforcement and Policy Center, we found that America’s $26 billion legal cannabis industry is quickly consolidating into the hands of a few well-financed national players. In 2018, the seven largest multistate cannabis companies accounted for only 3 percent of the legal industry’s annual revenue. By the end of 2022, that share had grown to nearly 18 percent.

If the trend continues, the cannabis industry might soon resemble America’s beer industry: a market dominated by a handful of global corporations with small businesses competing for an ever-shrinking slice of the pie.

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The cannabis industry’s arch nemesis reemerged this week

Cannabis investors have been waiting for movement on the SAFE Banking Act, which would free up large banking institutions to provide industry players with much-needed loans and other banking services, for years. 

Next week was supposed to be a big milestone in the political process as September 27 was seen as a strong tentative date for a Senate vote on the bill. 

The SAFE Banking Act could save the fledgling U.S. cannabis industry from being crushed by the hard ceiling of lack of banking access as it grows larger. 

In the past, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has pushed to include the SAFE Banking Act into a larger funding packages in order to get it passed, to no avail. 

And while the bill has garnered bipartisan support — especially in the House of Representatives — Senate Republicans seem hellbent on slowing up the industry’s progress. 

Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) have filed new legislation that would prevent federal agencies from rescheduling cannabis without congressional approval. 

The Deferring Executive Authority Act was introduced on Thursday by Lummis and Daines, who opposed marijuana being legalized in her own state. 

“Congress makes the laws in this country, not D.C. bureaucrats,” said Lummis. “The American people through their elected representatives in the Senate and House should have the final say on such a momentous change as the legalization of marijuana.

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