Narrative Warfare: The Stripe Affair, It's About Gatekeeping In Financial Services

The situation with Freestartr getting screwed by its payment processor is a political one, but not on the part of the processor as such. A report at PJ Media reveals the following:

The notice he received from Stripe was strange, filled with rambling excuses for termination with no specifics. Stripe employee "Gus" wrote:

Unfortunately, we won't be able to overturn our decision regarding your account. Our financial partners have some fairly strict limitations on the type of businesses we can work with, and sadly your business type falls into a category which our financial partners consider to be high-risk. I'm truly sorry about that... this is a restriction imposed upon us directly from our financial partners, who use have [sic] an archaic and frankly antiquated view of non-traditional businesses.

Stripe refuses to say who the "financial partners" are. PJM also reached out to Stripe but received no response.

To which the Supreme Dark Lord, Vox Day, said:

This tends to indicate the situation is as I suspected. Stripe is looking to cash in, so they are doing whatever their investors and prospective buyers want them to do. Which, in this case, is shutting down the services that allow people to bypass both the ideological gatekeepers as well as the financial gatekeepers.

It's not an accident that they are attempting to shut down the crowdfunding sites, beginning with the alternative ones. That's primarily what this is about. Rest assured, they have their sights on Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go too.

And both Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are far more amenable to this sort of SJW pressure than Freestartr, so when that pressure comes they will fold faster than Superman on laundry day. The SJWs are not blind, whatever else their flaws are, and the leadership cadre is not stupid. They have taken notice of the ability of crowdfunding sites to allow enemies of the SJW Death Cult to circumvent control of the mainstream businesses that dominate a culture niche, primarily in the way that it allows their enemies to raise capital and make contact outside their control.

They saw a threat. They're moving to destroy that threat.

Because of existing regulation, it is very difficult to get Alt-Banking off the ground, and if successful all it does is shunt the point of conflict bank another step. Ultimately, any serious Alt-Banking fork will have to fork the independent central bank system that controls world finance because the masters of the SJWs can and will use their power over credit and currency to gatekeep threats to their dominance and control of this world-bearing pillar of Civilization.

Which means that the practical thing to do now is to start dropping lines to Federal agencies (such as the Federal Trade Commission) demanding that (a) this be investigated, and (b) while under investigation all such discriminatory action be stopped under penalty of arrest and imprisonment (if nothing, for interfering with the investigation). For you folks outside the U.S., please push for your government to do likewise.

Why?

Because establishing your own payment processor is not a sure solution. Those "financial partners" are likely the banks proper, and are in such a dominant position that they can dictate terms to their "partners" if they so wish. Even using a credit union is no guarantee of financial security; if the credit union's access to currency is cut off, its principles will be jettisoned in favor of survival, exactly as what Stripe did in this situation.

And yes, that's now on the table. Banking is a converged sector, and has been for a long time before the Red Menace as a thing. (As in "Before Andrew Jackson fought the banks.", so over 200 years ago.) If it weren't for the God-Emperor in the White House, we would have no realistic course for redress outside of a Class Action suit- and most people are too fragile to benefit from that.

For my part, as with a few others, whether or not Freestartr can pull themselves out of this mess is irrelevant. For one reason or another, things are far too time-sensitive to allow us the luxury of waiting this out and alternatives need to be exercised. I have received very good advice as to how to proceed, and I will act on it.

But I want this predatory practice to be put down, hard, and to that end I want to see the Feds move to act on this matter. Drop those lines; complain good and loud, so we can get the dread machine moving to crush this practice under its wheels.