Disaster Activists Are Trying To Force Mastercard To Cut Off Payments To The Far Right - The payment giant’s shareholders will vote on a proposal to set up a “human rights committee” at the company to monitor money flowing to hate groups.

http://archive.li/77Yh1
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/mastercard-activists-cut-off-donations-far-right

Activists have successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote by shareholders on a proposal which, if passed, could see the company monitoring payments to global far-right political leaders and white supremacist groups.

The proposal aims to see Mastercard establish an internal “human rights committee” that would stop designated white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists, such as Tommy Robinson, from getting access to money sent from donors using the company’s card payment services.

It’s been conceived by US-based political activists SumOfUs, who want to escalate the battle against white supremacists and far-right groups from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Patreon, and PayPal to one of the biggest companies in world finance, in an attempt to choke off donations.



Robinson and several other leading figures in the global far right have been forced in recent months to solicit donations directly on their websites via Mastercard, Visa, and American Express after PayPal banned payments to them. Facebook also disabled the donation function on Robinson’s fan page before deleting it completely.

“Spreading hate involves spending money,” Eoin Dubsky, from SumOfUs, told BuzzFeed News. “Whether it’s paying for online advertising or organising violent rallies, white supremacist groups need financial services from companies like Mastercard.”

Over several months, SumOfUs has been locked in a battle with Mastercard executives behind the scenes in order to get the new committee proposal put to the shareholders ahead of the company’s June annual general meeting.

It would see the formation of a “human rights committee” at the board level, which would monitor financial transactions with designated hate groups.

Documents seen by BuzzFeed News reveal that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has given the green light for shareholders to get the chance to vote on the formation of the committee, despite staunch opposition from the Mastercard board and executives.

In the material to be sent to shareholders, the activists refer to a website called Blood Money, which tracks online payments to white supremacist groups from the likes of Mastercard, American Express, and Stripe. The website currently claims that Mastercard services are being used by groups like Counter-Currents Publishing, Covenant People’s Ministry, the United West, Sultan Knish, and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation.

SumOfUs has also pointed to the activity of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. The former English Defence League founder is running as an independent in May’s European election.

In November 2018, PayPal banned donations to the anti-Islam activist, with the online payment company saying that its services wouldn’t “be used to promote hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory”.

More recently, Robinson has been calling on his global network of supporters to donate to his election campaign through his website, which allows payments from Mastercard.

“Having a Mastercard logo on their website also gives these groups a veneer of legitimacy, and allows those who want to donate to do so quickly and quietly,” Dubsky told BuzzFeed News.

“Mastercard also benefits, pocketing a transaction fee for each purchase or donation.”

Mastercard declined requests for comment, pointing instead to the board’s position laid out in the information sent to shareholders ahead of the general meeting.

“Mastercard is committed to treating all people fairly and with dignity, and our interest in human rights extends to all areas in which our business is involved and where we have particular expertise,” it reads. “The Board does not believe that establishing a separate human rights committee is necessary to properly exercise its oversight of this important area.”

It’s unclear whether the proposal stands a chance of succeeding at June’s meeting. But the move to confront such a big, mainstream company like Mastercard over issues like the funding of white supremacy and the far right comes after action from smaller, online financial platforms like PayPal and Patreon in the area.

PayPal has banned payments to Robinson, US far-right group Proud Boys, and Canadian anti-Islam activist Laura Loomer. It also acted against several US anti-fascist groups because the company had no tolerance for groups that promoted “hate” and “violence”.

Last year, Patreon banned YouTuber Sargon of Akkad over a 2015 video that featured the Gamergate leader repeatedly saying the n-word in a Google Hangout with the alt-right. According to the New York Times, Sargon of Akkad, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, had 3,000 subscribers and was being paid $12,000 a month on Patreon when he was removed from the site.

In a recent YouTube video, Benjamin and Robinson talked about being de-platformed by social media companies. But Robinson also suggested that he has long-term fears beyond the big tech companies.

“I am being completely un-personed,” Robinson said. “What’s next—my mobile-phone contract?”

 

[CheezzyMach]

lol that isn't going to happen until the oppression olympics fades out of popular culture.

Hence why I await the implosion. Let Pelosi and co have to deal with the monstrosity they've nurtured since the Obama years.

 

[HeyYou]

But remember guys, America is a fascist country where the right-wing controls everything.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

This guy is a moron, but I absolutely have to agree that if someone on the right thought of this first they would have tried to pull the exact same shit.

Anyone who thinks tactics like this are only used by whichever party they designate as "the bad guys" are only fooling themselves.

It's the same shit with how people keep insisting that 'the other side' is full of brainwashed morons, and also a minority, but giant corporations are just following what they want because ???. See also, when people supporting the Occupy movement back in the day had their twitter accounts purged en masse.

Yeah, the right was just about to do this, but they just never thought of censorship.

Dumbass

 

[AnOminous]

Pretty much yeah, if the internet had existed in it's current form during the 80s,90s and early 2000s I can almost guarantee the Religious Right would have done this to silence "satanists and degenerates" and the Bush administration would have had no problem unpersoning any Leftist that was critical of the War on Terror.

The problem isn't who is doing it. The problem is that it is possible to do it at all.

To be blunt, my opinion of the phrase "too big to fail" is that it is synonymous, to me, with "too big to allow to exist at all." However, if we're going to have these financial behemoths controlling things, they have to be leashed much like the government itself is.

Frankly, the free flow of money is inherent in capitalism and, in this day and age, that is effectively coterminous with speech and other freedoms that are expressed, as often as not, actually in money. If the Citizens United decision stands for anything good at all, that is it. While I'm somewhat ambivalent about equating money and speech, as that case did and more or less enshrined into constitutional law, it's a simple fact that if you can block someone's free transfer of money, you can block their speech.

That's what many insane people who attack this site have successfully been able to do, to some degree, although the Brave browser thing has now made it a lot easier for the end user to bypass such censorship attempts.

As much of a game changer as crypto is, though, it's still a basic tenet of our republic that fiat currency is something everyone should be able to depend on and when you attack anyone's ability to spend it at their will, you are attacking money itself and the foundation of the economy.

This is quite simply a bad thing and would be a bad thing no matter who did it and no matter what their reason for doing it.

 

[pwnest injun]

They're bad guys who will hurt us (and real innocent people, like the slaves who make Nike's shoes while Nike can still process payments) for profit.

This is the obvious tack to use. Once they declare themselves moral arbiters, there's a whole lot of immoral business shit that they have to wash their hands of, or else they're endorsing it. #MasterCardEndorsesSlavery #MasterCardEndorsesMurderingHomosexuals #MasterCardEndorsesMuslimGenocide It's a massively losing move.

 

[Dracula's Spirit Animal]

The problem isn't who is doing it. The problem is that it is possible to do it at all.

To be blunt, my opinion of the phrase "too big to fail" is that it is synonymous, to me, with "too big to allow to exist at all." However, if we're going to have these financial behemoths controlling things, they have to be leashed much like the government itself is.

Frankly, the free flow of money is inherent in capitalism and, in this day and age, that is effectively coterminous with speech and other freedoms that are expressed, as often as not, actually in money. If the Citizens United decision stands for anything good at all, that is it. While I'm somewhat ambivalent about equating money and speech, as that case did and more or less enshrined into constitutional law, it's a simple fact that if you can block someone's free transfer of money, you can block their speech.

That's what many insane people who attack this site have successfully been able to do, to some degree, although the Brave browser thing has now made it a lot easier for the end user to bypass such censorship attempts.

As much of a game changer as crypto is, though, it's still a basic tenet of our republic that fiat currency is something everyone should be able to depend on and when you attack anyone's ability to spend it at their will, you are attacking money itself and the foundation of the economy.

This is quite simply a bad thing and would be a bad thing no matter who did it and no matter what their reason for doing it.

And strangely (or not) having been steeped in 50+ years of ideological lockstep with the fears the left have of the worst excesses of capitalism, it is quite sobering the last few years to see the "left" throw that fundamental danger of capitalism cum oligarchy cum tyranny into their own pot to stew, just as that legitimate concern of oligarchal overreach is coming to pass in the form of tech corporations.

What the left enthusiastically supports nowadays is exactly what they fought (or claimed to fight more often than not) for a hundred and twenty years, or even a hundred and seventy.

The absolute fundamental threat of capitalism to leftist ideology is memoryholed and celebrated bcause wypipo. And there is that threat, just as any system has threats, but the so called anti-capitalists are now the cheerleaders for the fundamental threat capitalism can manifest. Clown World.

As someone who once believed their shit and am quite educated in it, I am baffled I didn't see it earlier, and certainly would vote or support virtually any other position than theirs for the rest of my days. I'm kind of a younger, dumber David Horowitz in that regard.

 

[DogEatDogFood]

Renegade Shareholders Have A Plan To Force Mastercard To Monitor Neo-Nazis
The credit card giant has spent months trying to block the creation of a committee to oversee white nationalists using its services.

By Jessica Schulberg

For months, Mastercard has tried to suffocate the creation of an internal committee that would monitor payments to white supremacists and far-right extremists. But on Tuesday, renegade shareholders will finally force a vote on the matter during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
Like most credit card companies, Mastercard is hesitant to surrender profits by blocking violent white supremacists from using its services unless laws are being broken. Mastercard currently processes payments for several extremist groups, including the League of the South, National Policy Institute, Proud Boys, Stormfront, VDare, Identity Evropa, Occidental Dissent and Radix Journal, according to Color of Change, a racial justice organization that tracks financial service companies that do business with hate groups.

Being able to process credit card payments is important to white nationalists, who need online donations, subscriptions and merchandise sales to fund their efforts to spread hate. Without the ability to process credit card payments, white supremacists are often forced to solicit donations through Bitcoin or checks, both of which are too burdensome for many of their fans.
A recent SEC filing from Gab, the social media site popular among white nationalists, shows just how dependent extremists are on credit card companies. Last year, PayPal and Stripe stopped processing credit card payments for Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter suspect was identified as a racist who ranted on Gab about his hatred of Jews and immigrants. It took Gab more than two months to find a new payment processor. As result, Gab experienced “a 90% decline in payments for our subscription services,” the company reported to the SEC in April.
SumofUs, a corporate accountability nonprofit that spearheaded the activist shareholder campaign, has already had some success in compelling payment processors to cut ties with extremists. The group helped convince PayPal to drop far-right British political activist Tommy Robinson, Australian neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell, and the French white nationalist group Génération Identitaire. But targeting individual bad actors and payment processors can feel like a “whack-a-mole approach,” SumofUs campaign manager Eoin Dubsky said.
A more efficient approach, the activists figured, would be to directly lobby the credit card companies. But when SumofUs tried to reach out directly to major credit card companies, they had a hard time getting a response.

Last year, activists came up with a plan to force credit card companies to pay attention. SumofUs put out a call for members who held Mastercard shares and would be willing to work with the nonprofit group to file a proposal at Mastercard’s next shareholder meeting. In December, three SumofUs members who own approximately 1,800 Mastercard shares submitted a proposal to create an oversight committee to oversee the company’s “responses to domestic and international developments in human rights that affect Mastercard’s business.”
In their proposal, the activists listed several extremist groups that Mastercard currently processes payments for and pointed to the reputational risks of doing business with white supremacists. Mindful of Securities and Exchange Commission rules that allow companies to exclude shareholder proposals that interfere with ordinary business decisions typically handled by management and the board of directors, the SumofUs activists framed their proposal as a broad human rights issue.
SumofUs decided to target Mastercard before its competitors because activists had heard that it was more receptive to conversations about curbing support to white nationalists than other credit card giants. Color of Change rates Mastercard as “proactive” and its main competitors as “engaged” or “not engaged.”
But after SumofUs submitted its proposal to Mastercard, the company spent the next six months working to make it disappear. First, Mastercard tried to convince SumofUs to voluntarily retract the proposal. When that failed, Mastercard appealed to the SEC to block it from moving forward on the grounds that it would interfere with “ordinary business operations.” The SEC rejected Mastercard’s request. Having failed to keep the proposal off the agenda for the annual meeting, Mastercard’s board of directors issued a statement urging all shareholders to vote against the measure.
Mastercard declined to comment on the violent extremist groups it currently processes payments for. Asked about to explain the company’s key opposition to the SumofUs proposal, Mastercard spokesman Seth Eisen said the board’s recommendations to shareholders “speaks for itself.”
SumofUs has asked its members to contact their pension providers and mutual funds, which often hold shares in major credit card companies, and urge them to vote in favor of the proposal. Nandini Jammi of Sleeping Giants — the activist group that gained prominence after convincing hundreds of companies to pull advertisements from the far-right news site Breitbart — will also deliver a speech to shareholders ahead of the vote about the need to investigate hate groups and extremists in their financial network.
Even so, the activists know they aren’t likely to win the vote on Tuesday. Social justice-driven shareholder activism is rarely successful — most investors are more concerned about turning a profit than restricting neo-Nazis’ access to financial services.
But SumofUs’ lengthy fight for their shareholder proposal wasn’t just about getting votes — it was meant “to help kickstart much-needed conversations at Mastercard about its role helping spread far-right hatred,” Dubsky said.
By that metric, the activists have already scored a win. After years of vague statements about its commitment to tolerance, Mastercard was forced to publicly admit that it doesn’t really want to do much about white supremacists.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mast...white-supremacists_n_5d0a7a55e4b0f7b7442b1ec2 (I know HuffPost is shit but it was the only article I could find)

 

[Marissa Moira]

Good thing Costco only uses VISA.

Mastercard is going to learn a harsh lesson for letting these activist idiots in.

 

[Sīn the Moon Daddy]

Shit
The Man knows about the slim jims and lube I bought at 3 am last weekend.
Oh crap now you guys do too

 

[breadandcircuses]

I doubt the vote will go the way the activists want. Shareholders care about profit, first and foremost.

 

[AF 802]

Oh no.... I should get rid of my MasterCard now. Not like my bank only issues those for debit anyway.

This is why vote with your wallet is such a bullshit phrase. Most banks will issue one or the other, you don't have a fucking choice.

 

[pwnest injun]

Oh no.... I should get rid of my MasterCard now. Not like my bank only issues those for debit anyway.

This is why vote with your wallet is such a bullshit phrase. Most banks will issue one or the other, you don't have a fucking choice.

Then, if you care to, tell your bank that they are going to lose your business over it, and go to another bank.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Didn't the citizens United case say money is a form of expression, thus protected by the 1st amendment?

That shitty decisions should work in our favor for once.

 

[TowinKarz]

I doubt the vote will go the way the activists want. Shareholders care about profit, first and foremost.

Ultimately, the insatiable lust for profit will drive these people back to doing business with Nazis (and "Nazis") , they're just spooked now because they (erroneously) believe they are losing customers by NOT shutting down services for wrongthinkers, because the screeching SocJus people are dis- proportionately loud and annoying and it seems so easy to placate them, just ban "this" one person.

But as they're hopefully learning, it's never "Just this person" once they're gone, ANOTHER takes that spot, then another, and another, and it doesn't take long before you realize that the group of SJW picketers outside the window is now smaller than the angry group of banned customers who are now petitioning the SEC to do something about you....

 

[QI 541]

That's what many insane people who attack this site have successfully been able to do, to some degree, although the Brave browser thing has now made it a lot easier for the end user to bypass such censorship attempts.

This aged poorly

 

[Coccxys]

The likelihood is MasterCard are about to owe every adult in the UK £300 each for fucking around with merchant fees, you'd think the shareholders would be more concerned about that than trying to create a potentially legally risky wrong think division.

 

[Drunk and Pour]

Someone should bring up left wing extremists like Antifa or BLM. If you're going to defund extremists, do it on both sides.

 

[CheezzyMach]

Ultimately, the insatiable lust for profit will drive these people back to doing business with Nazis (and "Nazis") , they're just spooked now because they (erroneously) believe they are losing customers by NOT shutting down services for wrongthinkers, because the screeching SocJus people are dis- proportionately loud and annoying and it seems so easy to placate them, just ban "this" one person.

But as they're hopefully learning, it's never "Just this person" once they're gone, ANOTHER takes that spot, then another, and another, and it doesn't take long before you realize that the group of SJW picketers outside the window is now smaller than the angry group of banned customers who are now petitioning the SEC to do something about you....

Or they end up in the situation Google,Twitter,Facebook etc are facing: the DOJ and FTC wanting to bust open their assholes while a gleeful and sadistic public cheers them on.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Someone should bring up left wing extremists like Antifa or BLM. If you're going to defund extremists, do it on both sides.

They will. The Koch Brothers have already teamed up with Soros to fight extremism, and you bet they consider Antifa and BLM extremists. And it isn't like an investor like Soros or the banksters have any love for anti-capitalist groups who believe liberals get the bullet too. Once their usefulness runs out, they're as fucked as everyone else.

 

[ButterBar]

And it isn't like an investor like Soros or the banksters have any love for anti-capitalist groups who believe liberals get the bullet too.

Soros funds BLM and Antifa. He has plenty of love for their chaos.