I spent years warning about Big Tech internet monopolies. Conservatives finally started paying attention in a big way when they actually interfered in the 2020 election. I’ve also been warning about financial industry monopolies.
In my pamphlet, Thought Control Inc, I had a chapter on financial monopolies and gun control.
“What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase JPM, and Wells Fargo were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?” Andrew Ross Sorkin had written in a New York Times column. “Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker.”
Sorkin, who had coordinated part of the boycott, was laying out a vision of financial monopolies banding together to wipe out the Bill of Rights. The vision was integral to Thought Control, Inc., as a whole.
In plainer terms, the financial services industry would form a cartel to sideline the voters, and Citigroup, Bank of America, BlackRock, and other industry titans would determine our laws and our rights.
Visa/Mastercard, the huge credit card duopoly, and other credit card companies, have just taken a big step toward making that happen.
Payment processor Visa Inc. said Saturday that it plans to start separately categorizing sales at gun shops, a major win for gun control advocates who say it will help better track suspicious surges of gun sales that could be a prelude to a mass shooting.
But the decision by Visa, the world’s largest payment processor, will likely provoke the ire of gun rights advocates and gun lobbyists, who have argued that categorizing gun sales would unfairly flag an industry when most sales do not lead to mass shootings. It joins Mastercard and American Express, which also said they plan to move forward with categorizing gun shop sales.
Visa said it would adopt the International Organization for Standardization’s new merchant code for gun sales, which was announced on Friday. Until Friday, gun store sales were considered “general merchandise.”
“Following ISO’s decision to establish a new merchant category code, Visa will proceed with next steps, while ensuring we protect all legal commerce on the Visa network in accordance with our long-standing rules,” the payment processor said in a statement.
This is being described as a way to prevent mass shootings. It’s not.
Previously the big payment processing monopolies have said that they couldn’t prevent gun sales because they had no way of separately tracking them. Now they do. The next step will be preventing sales at gun shops from being processed. That was the plan all along.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
