{"id":14455,"date":"2018-02-25T21:08:23","date_gmt":"2018-02-26T03:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=14455"},"modified":"2018-02-25T21:08:23","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T03:08:23","slug":"picking-away-at-the-monster-ctd-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/02\/25\/picking-away-at-the-monster-ctd-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Picking Away At The Monster, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was unaware of this facet of the credit card industry, but Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times<\/strong><\/em> proposes<\/a> to take advantage of it in the wake of the Parkland massacre<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Here\u2019s an idea.<\/p>\n

What if the finance industry \u2014 credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo \u2014 were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?<\/p>\n

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn\u2019t be hard for them to take a stand.<\/p>\n

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,\u201d a spokesman for Square told me.<\/p>\n

The big financial firms don\u2019t even have to go that far.<\/p>\n

For example, Visa, which published\u00a0a 71-page paper<\/a>\u00a0in 2016 espousing its \u201ccorporate responsibility,\u201d could easily change its terms of service to say that it won\u2019t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The big credit card companies have already cut off purchases of Bitcoins, although to some extent that feels like simply refusing to have intercourse with the enemy. It’s an interesting approach – as a retailer, I’d be aghast at the thought that one of the primary methods of payments these days would put limits on what could be bought with credit, and yet there is some sense in the issuers of credit putting limits on what may be bought – seeing that some purchases may indicate an imminent failure to pay by the borrower. It’s a legitimate interest. WaPo’s<\/strong><\/em> Avi Selk remarks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some have also suggested that banks could throttle\u00a0gun makers\u00a0from the supply side, by cutting off credit.\u00a0In the past, that proposal has been a nonstarter. In 2012, Snopes investigated a report that Bank of America was cutting off credit lines to gun manufacturers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for the bank\u00a0denied the report<\/a>, saying it had no policies against doing business with the firearms industry and pointing to a $250 million deal with a gunmaker that month.<\/p>\n

Six years later,\u00a0amid the growing outrage over the Stoneman Douglas massacre,\u00a0the bank\u2019s rhetoric sounds\u00a0a bit different.<\/p>\n

Axios\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0Saturday that\u00a0Bank of America was \u201creexamining\u201d its\u00a0relationship with AR-15 rifle manufacturers that do business with it. \u201cWe are joining other companies in our industry to examine what we can do to help end the tragedy of mass shootings,\u201d the bank said in a statement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This world we’re living in is getting more and more interesting. Companies sporting a conscience? How long can that last?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was unaware of this facet of the credit card industry, but Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times proposes to take advantage of it in the wake of the Parkland massacre: Here\u2019s an idea. What if the finance industry \u2014 credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14456,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14455\/revisions\/14456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}