09 Apr 2021 Debanking of Dinesh D’Souza Casts Doubt on Dimon’s Claim
In 2019, the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project asked JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon to “pledge that JPMorgan Chase & Co. is not debanking people and will not debank them because of their politics.” Dimon responded: “We have not and do not.”
But maybe they do now.
In a March 29, 2021 commentary published by The Epoch Times, conservative writer and documentarian Dinesh D’Souza revealed that Chase Bank cancelled the credit card for his company, D’Souza Media, with “[n]o reason given for the cancellation.” He wrote:
I realized right away that this might be a politically motivated decision. After all, I have had the card for years. I pay my bills every month, so chronic lateness was not an issue. (Besides, credit card companies prefer people to pay late, so that they can charge them usurious rates of interest.) Moreover, my company has a stellar credit history, having been in operation for many years.
But it’s possible there was a good reason to cancel my card that I couldn’t think of. So I called Chase, and the representative informed me that she was puzzled, too. She could find no reason listed in the internal records. All she could say was that the direction had come from senior management in the bank’s main office.
After National Center Vice President David W. Almasi confronted Dimon at the 2019 JPMorgan Chase & Co. shareholder meeting, David commented:
We gave Dimon a chance to definitively say that JPMorgan Chase has not debanked conservatives and will not wield its power against conservatives in the future, but he really only gave us half.
From the story D’Souza tells, what David said was prophetic.
During the shareholder meeting, David cited four instances of alleged debanking of conservative Chase customers that had been reported in the media at that time. One even had an audio recording of a bank employee investigating the situation who called it “mind-boggling.”
David asked Dimon:
Frankly, as someone who works in the conservative movement, I’m asking for a personal reason: Am I next?
“These companies, by becoming hyper-political, are essentially discriminating against a significant portion of Americans who don’t share their political views,” D’Souza warned in his commentary.
In 2019, David brought a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 for Dimon, saying at the time that Dimon “and the JPMorgan Chase leadership could brush up on the specter of Big Brother and making someone an ‘unperson.’”
While D’Souza suggested there might be a need for a subculture of conservative-friendly businesses to be created, FEP has stressed engagement with corporate America as the best way of breaking the left’s pressure on CEOs to debank, defund and deny services to approximately half of the American people.
FEP made D’Souza aware of what Dimon said in 2019, and Dimon can expect FEP to raise this issue again at a future shareholder meeting.
Click here to read the D’Souza commentary, and click here to read FEP’s press release from the 2019 JPMorgan Chase & Co. shareholder meeting.