It's time for everyone to ditch their PayPal accounts

A sure sign of a coming recession is financial institutions squeezing everyone's balls

Most of you are familiar with PayPal, a payment processor founded in 1998 that allows for the instant, paperless transfer of funds between parties with PayPal accounts. It went public in 2002 and was bought by eBay later that year. eBay spun off the company in 2015, making it wholly independent again.

That’s basic history that anyone can learn on Wikipedia and doesn’t matter. What’s important as that any company that interacts with banks and handles your money will eventually enact practices just like banks, with the aim of screwing you out of as much money as they can with your nominal, poorly informed consent.

I became a PayPal user in 2003. For the better part of twenty years, I used it primarily to receive money from coaching clients, but also for other gigs and transactions between family members and friends. I stopped being a PayPal user over the weekend, and deleting my account was predictably a morass of inconvenience and lies from various PayPal representatives.

Earlier this year, I noticed that my PayPal account interface was no longer displaying running balances. In such a set-up, you can see how much money is in your account when you log in, but you can’t see how each transaction made using your account affects your balance. This was obviously a step toward introducing additional PayPal fees without having them noticed. But people did notice the change, and one who questioned the company directly got this response from a PayPal representative:

I apologize for the experience you are faced with in not being able to see the running balance. Unfortunately, this will be the new norm, and not a technical issue which can be resolved through this ticket system. The feature has been deprecated, and the only way to see the running balance is to pull a report in the report section under "activity download.”

So, basically, “Hi! Suck on this.”

Even more troubling as this kind of inexorable progression toward de facto stealing from its too-trusting customers is PayPal recently going unpretentiously political. Last month, Matt Taibbi reported that PayPal has frozen the funds of multiple independent journalists who had been critical of the U.S. Department of Defense, the false media construct known as “Russiagate,” the handling of Julian Assange, and other events the mainstream media has been propagandizing and lying about. That’s right; PayPal didn’t just suspend their accounts, in one case it kept over $9,000 and said it might return the money after a period of review.

These PayPal users’ sin? Honest reporting and being critical of government policies. Democrats and Republicans should both be gravely concerned about this, but the U.S. is too overloaded with cable-addicted and Twitter-loony ignoramuses for any kind of mass or even limited awakening to occur. Besides, what can anyone really do?

As infuriating and clearly immoral as such moves are, they’re not perplexing. Why wouldn’t such platforms make them nowadays? These “online wallet” companies are owned by billionaires, among them cocksuckers like Peter Thiel, whose ego we* shall dissect shortly. Of course their policies invariably align with that of the government they not-so-secretly control. And the federal government loves to give financial institutions carte blanche to screw people, and more importantly, emerge magnificently richer from periods in which the rest of the country suffers. It happened in 2009, and it’s about to happen again. The U.S. printed money like it, like cliches, was going out of style when the pandemic hit. Inflation was inevitable, and a recession is, too.

Luckily for the rapacious and already well-heeled, the nation is duly distracted by the elimination of Roe vs. Wade—a good thing for earnest liberals, if they would pull their heads out of their infinitely deep asses for once and ignore the squawking of “women” with dicks and five o’clock shadows and their disingenuous “allies”—and war in Ukraine, so everyone can pretend that things are ever on the verge of peaking, like daily covid deaths, and returning to “normal.” Folx, it’s going to be a long time before your occupational and everyday life is anywhere close to normal, unless you’re extremely wealthy and stumbled upon this site by accident.

I have been getting e-mails from PayPal at least twice a month for over a year announcing changes to their policies and legal agreements. Like most yutzes, I rarely read these kinds of e-mails, although maybe I would if I still kept over $40,000 in a PayPal account, as was the case until fairly recently.

On Friday, PayPal sent this.

My account was a business account; almost everyone I receive money from or send money to has a regular account. This also eliminates the “send money free to family and friends” option. Also, an earlier recent e-mail from PayPal announced that the company was increasing the fees on transfers of money to bank accounts. I hate Wells Fargo as much as anyone, but I generally keep most of my money in my checking account. So, apart from any legitimate revulsion I feel toward PayPal as an entity, as a basic business option, it wasn’t for me anymore.

After I got this e-mail, I transferred my PayPal balance to my Wells Fargo account and immediately tried deleting my account. I was told I wasn’t allowed to. I used the instant-message feature to ask about this and was told I couldn’t delete my account because I also have a PayPal credit card. So I also deleted that account, which had and normally has a zero balance, as well. I still have lots of credit accounts and an admirable FICO score, which means I can at some point acquire many more cards and run them all up to the limit immediately before my own self-inflicted death, also being careful to leave no assets to cover the debt. (This move obviously needs to become more popular, even universal.)

I was positively shocked to learn that I still couldn’t delete the account, so I called the customer service number. I’m thinking that whoever I was speaking to was looking at computer screen informing him that at one time I was exactly the kind of dumbass customer the company likes, keeping relatively large sums in a non-interest-bearing account thanks to low interest rates and apathy. Maybe that’s why he worked extra-hard to assure me he was helping me get the account zapped when all he was really doing was stonewalling me using a script.

The representative told me that I would have to wait for my deleted credit-card account to become “uncoupled” from my regular PayPal account. This is a crock, as such a matter could be handled instantly. This is clearly how PayPal seeks to keep users who want no part of PayPal but might come up with lame reasons to keep their accounts after all if given a few days to consider the issue. It’s why Facebook and other social-media companies also don’t allow you to delete accounts instantly. It’s because these companies are run by people who deserve extraordinarily painful forms of cancer, to be rolled moaning, bleeding, and oozing cancer-stink into the street when they arrive at elite private hospitals for treatment, and to be defecated on by homeless people and other lowbrow joy-seekers leaving the ER after another night of behind-the-warehouse drunkenness.

By Sunday afternoon, I had permission from PayPal to delete my remaining connection to the outfit.

I’m big on the cancer thing in these kinds of communications. I don’t actually want any kids to die, although it would be better for all of them at this point in history if they did. I do appreciate the fact of limited human lifespans and the fear exceptionally greedy people must have, thanks to their mangled constitution, when they know the end is coming and, more important, inevitable. Death—typically the slow, soul-searing, confusion-and-terror-filled kind one of the few things rich people can’t cheat, and for that reason alone, human mortality and its insuperability are glorious facts of the needless snorting-slurping-and-copulating festival called life.

But mostly, I want people to experience shame, the proper amount and allocation of which is in desperately short supply.

Peter Thiel is one of the co-founders of PayPal. He’s a brilliant man and a petty asshole. He’s politically conservative calls himself a Christian, which may be among the reasons he was especially perturbed when Gawker outed him as gay, in a really snide and indulgent way, in 2007.

It took a while, but Thiel got his revenge, eventually helping fund numerous lawsuits that put Gawker out of business. (No loss there, but that’s not the point.)

That Jesus-loving Peter Thiel—who says, naturally, that his relationship with God has evolved over the years, as seems to occur universally in the previously devout and now filthy-rich—likes having penises thrust up his asshole, or at least enjoys the taste of them in his mouth, is uninteresting to me. I know lots of everyday people, men and women, like this. As a straight male, in fact, I can’t help but want more people in the world who don’t chase women themselves and like the taste of dick, no matter how the rest of them is put together.

Being gay is as uncontroversial to me as being left-handed. In fact, although this doesn’t happen as much anymore, consider what it takes for someone to be married to a person of the opposite sex, hold a steady job, and manage his or her life while having to keep a vital part of themselves secret, often for decades. That’s not weakness, that’s heroism. And, likely because I’m over fifty, none of my gay friends want to be associated with the freewheeling, destructive madness of the Gen X transgender/queer crowd, so the liberal ones are repelled by Wokism and its inherent dishonesties.

What does interest me is Peter Thiel’s shame. Despite all the resources anyone could want, Thiel was sufficiently angry at an online gossip-rag to disappear the thing using his money. As if he apparently thought he could be a closeted billionaire for the rest of his life. This to me shows great weakness rather than strength, and reveals the ability for complete nobodies to make assholes like Thiel feel bad about things within himself he cannot change and doesn’t like. Good. And if he’s dub enough to enlist some donkey-dicked twink to penetrate him once he’s too old for such backdoor hijinks, he might just be found dead after a massive lower GI bleed and be remembered that way by millions of laughing people. He has no control over what happens in events central to his life once that life ends, and I believe that men as rich as Thiel inevitably spend a lot of time wondering if they might be able to somehow cheat death after all.

What a pathetic yet poignant struggle the self-aware human dungmonkey faces.

PayPal is not the only payment processor out there, and not the only one acting in the apparent service of butthurt malignant people the rest of us are supposed to treat with respect despite the fact that all they do is tell lie after lie.

Psaki is such a horrible person that nothing in my overused trove of misogynist slurs comes even close to describing what I would enjoy seeing happen to her. That goes for anyone who has ever accepted that job. You have to be a terrible human being to do it and enjoy the sense of being one, all while pretending to be doing a public service.

Cancer for all of them. If I manage to obtain my own case, I will happily try to spread it around to the right people because I refuse to mask up in church anymore.

Stripe, by the way, is the payment processor for Substack. It’s likely that Stripe only reversed its decision here because of the avalanche of bad publicity and because Simon Ateba is a black African.

As for what I will do in place of PayPal, I haven’t decided. I’m not all that interested in having people send me money anyway, because all that does is buy me time in the world that I’m increasingly averse to experiencing at all. I avoid being depressed to the point of paralysis by this because God was entirely fair: Even someone of limited means can quickly find a way to check out of this whole ugly show almost painlessly. And on the nonexistent other side, no one cares whether you took it in the ass or lied to increase your security at the expense of others. Everyone reverts to an even more feted version of the insensate glob of goo we all started as, and if you’re someone like Thiel or the CEO of any financial outfits, people will stop caring about your various modes of ass-plundering about two weeks after you’re dead, including the slimeballs to whom you left your wealth.