Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech

Financial institutions—often at the behest of government officials—are freezing bank accounts, cancelling credit cards, and denying payment processing to penalize people for controversial speech and politics, according to this hard-hitting debut exposé. Reitman, cofounder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recaps recent examples, starting with PayPal’s blocking of donations to FPF’s campaign to free imprisoned military whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Other examples include the “banking blockade” of Wikileaks by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, at the instigation of Sen. Joe Lieberman, which reduced Wikileak’s revenue by 95%; PayPal’s cutoff of Consortium News for its skeptical coverage of the war in Ukraine; and PayPal and Venmo’s cessation of payment processing to online Persian poetry courses run by a Detroit-based Instagrammer on the vague possibility that they might run afoul of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Reitman explores the Kafkaesque character of debanking measures: customers usually get no notice or appeal and often are put on blacklists that trash their credit ratings. Her cogent recommendations include requiring transparency about accounts that are being closed and legislation to ban financial penalties for legal speech and political actions. Some of Reitman’s judgments are open to debate—how “chilling” is it really that Visa dropped Pornhub for fear of lawsuits from child pornography victims? Still, it’s an incisive call for action against the collusions of big money and big government. (Apr.)