Congrats, Porn Stars—Repugnicans Are ON YOUR SIDE!

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Tuesday, Repugnicans Republicans on the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations spent two hours grilling Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairman Martin Gruenberg over the FDIC's "Operation Choke Point" policy. Adult industry members will recall that that's the policy that encouraged the banks they deal with to close their accounts and deny them loans because they work in "pornography." "You are abusing your power and going after small businesses all over America," Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) accused Gruenberg, adding later, "Bottom line, you are putting people out of business. They haven't been fired, they haven't been reprimanded." Needless to say, Duffy wasn't talking about porn people. Seems that among the targeted industries on the Operation Choke Point list are gun stores, tobacco distributors and payday lenders, all businesses that Republicans support—and are supported by. (A full list of targeted industries can be found here.) The hearing lasted about two hours, and toward the end of it, an outraged Duffy charged, "You're abusing your power. You say, 'I don't like these industries, and I'm gonna use'—just like Lois Lerner—'the power that I have at the FDIC to target these industries, and I'm gonna put them out of business. And I'm not going to have a public debate, because people like the Second Amendment and they like their guns. I'm going to do it behind closed doors, under the cover of darkness,' and put these folks out of business as a bureaucrat and as an 'activist' ... I think the buck stops with you. I don't think you should chair the FDIC." Gruenberg responded by saying that some, including officials at FDIC, had mistakenly interpreted the Choke Point initiative as a green light to halt business with a variety of companies, without regard to the merits of their individual situations. However, he assured the subcommittee that the FDIC’s Inspector General was currently examining the matter. But Duffy accused the FDIC, and Gruenberg in particular, of "slow walking" the issue, and of failing to punish FDIC personnel that had pushed banks to deny services to the Choke Point-targeted industries. That list of targets apparently originated in a journal article published by the FDIC two years before the U.S. Department of Justice initiated Operation Choke Point, and sadly, although the DOJ has prosecuted three banks over the past three years that had allowed "scam artists" from stealing money from its customers' accounts, that was small potatoes compared to the estimated 31 million fraudulent transactions—$6 billion worth—that take place each year. None of those, however, involved the adult industry or even the escort services that are also a Choke Point target. Democrats on the subcommittee, for the most part, defended the FDIC's actions in implementing Choke Point. "We should not confuse the FDIC doing its job as a regulator as evidence of it doing anything more than its mission,” said Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), then added, addressing Gruenberg, "Mistakes have been made. You've done what you could to address them." The FDIC has since rescinded its target list, but Brian Wise with the conservative U.S. Consumer Coalition charged that absent the list, the targeting has only gotten more subjective. "By shutting down the bank accounts of these legally operating businesses, what they're actually doing is forcing these businesses to deal solely in cash, which is completely opposite of what they have said their intention is," Wise said. "It's a whole lot easier to launder money with cash than having to go through a financial institution." Now, that's something adult businesses knew well back in the '70s and '80s, but now that they've changed with the times, most wouldn't want to go back to the "old ways"—and if the House subcommittee has anything to say about it, they won't.