Article by Derek Hunter in "Townhall":
Imagine starting a business, risking everything and
deciding to give it a go on your own. That entrepreneurial spirit is
what sets the United States apart from most of the rest of the world;
the American Spirit. Now imagine, after all that hard work and risk,
some leftist decides they don’t like you or what you’re doing and sets
out to ruin what you’ve built, to destroy you.
It
happens all the time, actually. The “cancel culture,” as it’s called,
is just one of many tools in the progressive arsenal. And while stories
like the attempted destruction of Gibson’s Bakery by radical Oberlin
College students and administrators made national news after the Gibson
family was awarded $44 million from the school, most stories don’t get
that much attention. They simply don’t help the liberal narrative, so
they’re ignored.
While protests and attempted boycotts
get brainwashed drones to activate on social media (and the “news”
stories driven by them), the left is employing other tactics to wipe out
businesses they deem unacceptable, and those tactics don’t garner any
attention at all.
One of the worst and most dangerous
was an Obama administration initiative by the Justice Department to
target firearms manufacturers called Operation Choke Point (OCP). The
DOJ didn’t go directly after manufacturers, they applied pressure on
banks doing business with them. Under the guise of being concerned with
fraud and money laundering, Obama officials let it be known that banks
doing business with legitimate companies engaging in legal commerce
would face extra regulatory attention and harassment for doing so.
The Trump administration put an end to it in 2017.
But progressive activists, with the encouragement and help of elected
Democrats, have picked up where it left off.
Activists
are pressuring banks to refuse business from the aforementioned
industries as well as oil and gas companies, companies that do business
with Israel, conservative-owned businesses, anything deemed
insufficiently “woke” by the liberal mob.
And banks are starting to cave.
There’s
a slight problem for the left, however; banks aren’t allowed to
discriminate against legal industries. This was the central theme at a
recent House Financial Services Committee hearing which sought to
determine if the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is
undermining the effectiveness of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA),
which protects low- and moderate-income communities’ ability to secure
loans.
In a letter to regulators before the hearing, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) and his Republican colleagues warned,
“We reject the notion that the New York values of a handful of banking
executives and asset managers can hold our constituents hostage and
force them to sacrifice their beliefs.”
Their GOP counterparts in the House further
drove the concern home by explicitly pointing out the renaissance of OCP
throughout the country. Unfortunately, OCC’s Comptroller’s response was
weak, to say the least. “We believe the banking industry should serve
all legal businesses in America. However, we do leave that up to the
boards and management of those financial institutions to make those
decisions,” Comptroller Joseph Otting said.
It’s
important to mention that these bad banking practices are currently
illegal under the official OCC policy which states, “The Agencies will
not tolerate lending discrimination in any form.”
But
left-wing activists aren’t about to let the law or decency stand in the
way of their agenda. They’re working hard to circumvent any regulation
or law in their way to implement OCP-like punishments to impose their
will throughout the economy, particularly in rural communities where the
“disfavored” businesses tend to thrive.
Democrat-controlled cities across the country are already
moving to block contracts with any company that is involved with
immigration enforcement, for example. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cheered the decision by Bank of America to stop doing business with private companies running prisons and illegal alien detention centers.
If they can’t win at the ballot box, the party that
loves to chant “this is what democracy looks like” will use any
anti-democratic tactic they can to impose their will.
The
OCC wields enormous power over the banking industry. It’s time for them
to use it to ensure American companies are free to engage in legal
commerce and to not be discriminated against because the fascist “woke
mob” is upset that they exist.