Free Republic

In this administration, it's always someone else's fault. Inflation is now the No. 1 concern of voters, so the White House first blamed COVID. Then Donald Trump's tax cuts. Then Vladimir Putin. Then meatpackers and the poultry industry, Big Oil and pharmaceutical companies. Now, Democrats have identified a new inflation scapegoat: plastic. Visa, Mastercard, American Express and other credit cards hidden away in your wallet. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has had it out for credit cards for almost two decades, even though over that period, credit cards, which were once reserved for the rich, are now nearly ubiquitous in our...

CHRISTOPHER Sign's apparent suicide was linked to the "Clinton crime syndicate" by Rep Lauren Boebert after the author who wrote a Bill exposé died. Police confirmed that they believe Sign, a local TV news anchor and former University of Alabama football player, died by suicide on Saturday. Sign, 45, broke a story about Bill Clinton meeting then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016 while she was probing the private email server of the former president's wife. He later went on to pen a book about the secret meeting in 2019, Secret on the Tarmac. Boebert, a Colorado representative who has been...

A little over a week ago, when looking at the latest consumer credit data from the Federal Reserve, we were shocked to learn that in March, credit card debt soared by a record $52.4 billion, the biggest monthly increase on record and more than double the expected change. Summarizing our views on this historic surge in credit-fueled purchases, we said that “while this unprecedented rush to buy everything on credit at a time when there were no notable Hallmark holidays should not come as much of a surprise, after all we have repeatedly shown that for the middle class any...

After a quick trip in a San Francisco taxi, the passenger handed a credit card to the driver to swipe, then hopped out of the cab. Soon, a gargantuan charge — thousands of dollars — appeared on the passenger’s credit card bill for the ride. Despite months of pleading, the bank insisted the passenger owed the money and only relented after being contacted by a reporter. Wait, you’ve heard this story before, right? The Chronicle’s article about Margarita Bekker’s $9,875 bill for an 11-minute Yellow Cab ride went viral earlier this year. Three people who read that story contacted The...

U.S. consumers are spending more and ramping up credit card balances, reversing a shift during the COVID-19 crisis, when they scaled back spending and substantially paid down debt, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report showedon Tuesday. After rising by $17 billion in both the second and third quarters, credit card use appears to be returning to pre-pandemic patterns, the researchers said. However, balances were still $123 billion lower than at the end of 2019, according to the quarterly report on household debt and credit. "As pandemic relief efforts wind down, we are beginning to see the reversal of...

The company that created a credit card to track your purchases’ CO2 emissions is set to launch a “premium” version of the card that cuts off your spending as soon as you hit your “carbon max.” This is the latest of many schemes to force major changes in human behaviour to allegedly lessen global warming. Social scientist and author Steven Mosher has called the global warming movement a “giant propaganda effort” and “the biggest scientific fraud ever perpetrated on the family of man.” Doconomy has partnered with Mastercard and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to create...

Leftist activists have already been pushing Mastercard, Visa, and others to expand their ban beyond illegal activities, with the eventual goal of demonetarizing opposing political views.Last week, Mastercard, Inc., announced new rules for banks processing credit card payments to pornography websites, designed to combat child pornography and sex trafficking. Unfortunately, for a country whose corporate overlords refuse (or are unable) to distinguish between intrinsic evil and prudential policy judgments, this promising development will likely also serve as a beta test to further attack conservative groups.In December, Mastercard and Visa banned the use of their credit cards on the Pornhub website...

Businesses across the US are accepting cash only as their credit-card payments systems are down. Customers on Twitter reported outages at Ikea, Forever 21, McDonald's, and Popeyes, along with localities like a car wash and the Department of Motor Vehicles in New Jersey. Representatives from the businesses weren't immediately available for comment Friday. Chick-fil-A's payment machines weren't working earlier in the day, leading it to give out free meals. Miami International Airport put out a statement warning customers of a county-wide outage with credit-card machines inside of taxis. Some blamed payments processor, Fiserv, which is one of the biggest US...

NBC Meet the Press - Tom Brokaw grills Biden on Meet the Press re: legislation that seemed to help Hunter Biden who worked for credit card companies and Biden's efforts to stop legislation aimed at curbing predatory lending.

Presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke says a dearth of new gun control laws is no excuse for inaction by banks and credit card companies. The Democrat took to Twitter on Thursday to blast financial institutions for not acting in the absence of legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump. “Credit cards have enabled many of America’s mass shootings in the last decade — and with Washington unwilling to act, they need to cut off the sales of weapons of war today,” he began a series of tweets. “Banks and credit card companies must: 1. Refuse to take...

A new study details how Americans manage credit cards and how stressful credit debt can be. **SNIP** “The most shocking find to me was how many Americans carry credit card balances month to month,” Tommy O'Shaughnessy, an analyst at Clever Real Estate Analyst and the author of the report, told Yahoo Finance. Nearly half of the respondents (47%) carried some amount of credit card debt month to month, according to the survey, with 72% of borrowers carrying more than $1,000. “With the average 17.64% APR, that debt compounds quickly and can become unmanageable for lower income families,” O'Shaughnessy noted.

Can you imagine how scary it would be to live in a world where your livelihood depended on having the ‘correct’ politics? It’s the sort of thing you might expect of totalitarian regimes – Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussain; everywhere that has ever tried communism; increasingly, Xi’s panopticon China – but definitely not of any liberal democracy in the 21st century. That dystopian future, though, may be much closer than you think. I only properly appreciated this recently when the podcast I’ve been doing for the last few years was mysteriously dropped by my regular employer, forcing me to seek...

Stocks rose sharply in volatile trading on Wednesday as surges in retail and energy shares helped Wall Street regain the steep losses suffered in the previous session. The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded 657 points higher as of 3:05 p.m. ET, while the S&P 500 gained 3.05 percent. The Nasdaq Composite outperformed, rising 3.96 percent. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were on track for their biggest one-day gains since Aug. 26, 2015 and erased Monday's losses. The Dow also recovered all of its losses from Monday.

Shoppers delivered the strongest holiday sales increase for U.S. retailers in six years, according to early data. Total U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles, rose 5.1% between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 from a year earlier, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks both online and in-store spending with all forms of payment. The figures suggest a stock-market swoon and partial government shutdown haven’t curbed consumer confidence and spending. “Wall Street is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, while Mr. and Mrs. Main Street are happy with their jobs, enjoying their best wage increases in a decade,” said...

A New York Times examination of mass shootings since the Virginia Tech attack in 2007 reveals how credit cards have become a crucial part of the planning of these massacres. There have been 13 shootings that killed 10 or more people in the last decade, and in at least eight of them, the killers financed their attacks using credit cards. Some used credit to acquire firearms they could not otherwise have afforded. Those eight shootings killed 217 people. The investigations undertaken in their aftermath uncovered a rich trove of information about the killers’ spending. There were plenty of red flags,...

"We're going to launch our own satellite — our own damn satellite to figure out where the pollution is and how we’re going to end it," Brown told the audience at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco..."In California, with science under attack, in fact we’re under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing," Brown added. "So, we want to know, what the hell is going on all over the world, all the time?"..."If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite," Brown said back in...

Savvy credit-card users have forced J.P. Morgan Chase to pony up more in rewards payments than the bank originally projected. Buried in an otherwise positive second-quarter earnings report Friday, in which the bank announced a record $8.32 billion profit, was the admission that credit-card customers were redeeming points faster than anticipated, resulting in a $330 million charge. “This is maybe larger than we have seen over the course of the last several years,” said Marianne Lake, the chief financial officer, during a conference call with reporters. “We do pretty regularly review our rewards liability in light of evolving consumer behavior.”...

Citibank and Barclay Credit Cards can be denied based on systems issues. Barclay readily acknowledges they have an issue but it took over 20 minutes on the phone with Citibank for them to get their administration to acknowledge they have an issue. In my specific case I was trying to buy an airline ticket but it kept getting a system error. Calls to the CC company did not fix the problem, however it was nice to find out it was their issue. It seem strange that both Citi and Barclay would have the same issue at the same time. Looks...

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 and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America? Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand. PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

I've been using Samsung Pay on my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and I really like it. No real issues until just a couple of days ago when I tried to use it at a Publix store. It didn't work even though I held the phone right over the same spot of the card reader that I normally do. I tried it again and again it didn't work so I ended up pulling out my Debit card and used that. Okay, I figured that maybe there was something wrong with that particular card reader. However, this morning I went to a...