Visa Europe has begun suspending payments to whistle-blowing website Wikileaks ahead of carrying out an investigation into the organisation.
It follows a similar move by rival payments processor Mastercard on Tuesday.
Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are “white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”
Wikileaks has broken no law although there are some who might try to say otherwise, but when Visa, preempts any process and prevents me from supporting “my” freedoms to send money to this or that organization that has not broken any law, they are now going very far beyond just making me angry. They are using their monopoly for political ends. This is a line that once crossed, they can never go back on.
I, like I hope many others, just canceled my PayPal account, and I will never again buy a book or whatever from Amazon , but now Visa behaves in the same way. Visa, is the most comprehensive oligopoly along with Master Card and most major banks in the world, so I guess we now move to cash…. These debit and credit cards have been made nearly indispensable in the modern system of life, but the fact that the oligopoly that manages them are now shown not to be politically neutral is the closest we have come to Fascism in the terms of state or rather global corporatism.
I think it says a lot when, after having avoided pursuing or even discussing the crimes of, coercion, corruption, assassinations, renditions, torture, illegal occupations, wars of aggression, state terrorism, and many, many others that the Wikileaks are shining a light on through their activity, the only crime the crony leaders of the world and their corporate cohorts can agree about pursuing with an immediate determined vengeance is the alleged crime of releasing evidence on those crimes of states against people and the mountains of lies that surround and support them.
The message here: DO NOT EVER CHALLENGE EMPIRE!
This should surprise no one. The US was founded by a group of wealthy slave-owners, stole the land from the people living on it, and to this day white-supremacy is a deeply ingrained element in the culture – so donating to the KKK, wearing or not wearing your hood, isn’t un-American. But opposing the government is. Exposing what the government is doing is.
I hope we wake up before we reach a point of no return.
SOB.
“Kill the messenger”, as usual. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your standpoint, killing Wikileaks is not that easy. However, were I a rational agent in the insurance business, I would not underwrite a life insurance to Mr. Assange. Stuff happens …
I understood and, to a degree, sympathised with the sentiments expressed by Malcolm Rifkind, who used the China-North Korea relationship as an example of how premature information leaks could slow down (or even entirely reverse) positive shifts in global politics. But thinking about it, this statement is only valid when power lies only with heads of state and their select cohort of advisors, footsoldiers, executives etc. This is at best a remnant of dated thinking stemming from the time when the uneducated masses were entirely at the elite’s mercy. With the modern (capacity for) universal distribution of information, the power is increasingly in the hands of the masses. And this is indeed how it should be, provided that we are conscientious and educated enough to make the right choices.
True, China may have been temporarily delayed in their attitude shift from supporting a strong North Korea to supporting a united Korea headed by the current South Korean government, but with time, and with the informated pressure of the Chinese people, the right decision will one day be made, and for the right reason! Without the transparency Wikileaks encourages, who’s to say China would support a united Korea without ulterior motives?
The people have a right to know as the choices made in political realms affect us all!
@SOB – Just to be fair The United States of America was NOT founded by a group of wealthy slave owners, and the land that was stolen was stolen long before the Union of the U.S.A. existed and continued to be stolen afterwards, so that is not exclusively down to the Founding Fathers. Yes, some of the Founding Fathers were, in fact, wealthy slave owners, but not all. In fact several came from very poor family backgrounds to work themselves into position; and some were [or descended from] the very first waves of Irish to the shores of America. In fact Irish-Americans made up the majority of the Founding Fathers, ethnically speaking. Of course the rest were, most likely, English or English-American. The way I see, is that in defending WikiLeaks we do it a disservice to use Falsehoods and Incorrect Information and clumping together of a history spread out over several hundred years. If we are to defend WikiLeaks and ask people to educate themselves, then we also have a responsibility to be ‘educated’ in our defense of it. America has enough to LEGITMATELY answer for without topping it up with Falsehoods and Inaccuracies. [please excuse typo’s, I’m writing very quickly as I’ve got to run out the door!]
A p.s. to SOB: It is also VERY important to note that the initial lands were stolen from the Native Americans NOT by the U.S. Government, but rather by The Europeans! The ‘Big 3’ – England, France and Spain – all saw the “new world” as they coined it, as something to be conquered, possessed and exploited and they did! They conquered, possessed and exploited North America for literally 100’s of years before the uprising against European Colonial Tyranny [which resulted in the War of Independence] and finally the formation of The United States of America. I just thought you might appreciate having some correct data. Of course you really can’t condense a history this vast and complicated into a paragraph, so hopefully this will inspire you to take a trip to the Library. Thanks.
gotta give these hackers credit!