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Public Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come - by Stephen Lendman
The 1913 Federal Reserve Act let powerful bankers usurp America's money system in violation of the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, giving only Congress the power to "coin Money (and) regulate the Value thereof...." Thereafter, powerful bankers victimized working Americans, using money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment by bankrolling and colluding with Congress and administrations to implement laws favoring them.
As a result, decades of deregulation, outsourcing, economic financialization, and casino capitalism followed, eroding purchasing power, producing asset bubbles, record budget and national debt levels, and depression-sized unemployment far higher than reported numbers, manipulated to look better.
After financial crisis erupted in late 2007, harder than ever Main Street hard times followed, getting worse, not better. As a result, high levels of personal and business bankruptcies resulted. Millions of homes have been lost. Record numbers of Americans are impoverished. An unprecedented wealth gap grows steadily. America's unstable economy lurches from one crisis to another, the current one miring Main Street in depression, still in its early stages.
Recovery is pure illusion. Today's contagion spread out-of-control globally. No one's sure how to contain it, so Wall Street got trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to socialize losses, privatize profits, and pump life back into a corpse through grand theft by sucking public wealth to the financial sector, other corporate favorites, and America's aristocracy already with too much.
Speculation and debt need more of it to prosper, but ultimately it's a losing game. The greater the expansion, the harder it falls, especially when credit contraction persists. Job creation is moribund. Industrial America keeps imploding. High-paying jobs are exported. Economic prospects are eroding. Workers are exploited for greater corporate profits, and no one's sure how to revive stable, sustainable long-term growth.
Privatized money control is the problem, representing democracy's greatest threat. Regaining public control can restore it. The time for launching public banking across America is now when more than ever it's needed.
Cause and Effect
Economist Michael Hudson explains that "debt leveraging" caused America's economic collapse, so piling on more exacerbates conditions, especially the way it's done:
-- by bailing out giant Wall Street banks;
-- letting them used trillions in public funds for more speculation, big bonuses, and acquisitions, not direct lending to revive growth;
-- not acting as a lender of last resort to facilitate private investment to create jobs, turn around a sick economy, and stimulate demand; and
-- letting federal debt unproductively skyrocket to stratospheric levels, affirming Adam Smith's dictum that no country ever repaid theirs, especially the kind banking cartels create in lieu of workable alternatives not taken.
Key among them is:
-- nationalizing the Fed; returning money creation power to Congress;
-- abolishing Wall Street's franchise;
