In 2008, Wall Street plunged the U.S. economy into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Wall Street received a generous public bailout and quickly recovered. Main Street continues to languish. Politicians and pundits rarely inquire into the reasons for the disparity. Doing so would expose the reality that the United States is ruled as a plutocracy, not a democracy, and would focus citizen anger on the structure of the institutional system that gives Wall Street bankers their power.
The 2008 financial crash was a direct and inevitable consequence of a social engineering experiment conducted by Wall Street interests that allowed Wall Street financial institutions to consolidate their control of the creation and allocation of money beyond the reach of public accountability. The priority of the money system shifted from funding real investment for building community wealth to funding financial games designed solely to enrich Wall Street without the burden of producing anything of real value.
The proper function of money is to facilitate the sustainable and equitable utilization of resources to fulfill the needs of people, communities, and nature. This calls for a community based and democratically accountable system of money, banking, and finance that functions to create and allocate money as a well-regulated public utility.
Such a system would be remarkably similar to the one that financed the United States’ victory in World War II, produced an unprecedented period of economic stability and prosperity, made America the world’s industrial powerhouse, and created the American middle class—a system that was working well until Wall Street launched its “financial modernization” experiment.
Wall Street interests mobilized in the 1970s to advance a host of policy initiatives that led to the erosion of the middle class, an extreme concentration of wealth, a costly financial collapse, high rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, and housing foreclosure, accelerating environmental systems failure, and the hollowing out of U.S. industrial, technological, and research capacity. Wall Street profited all along the way and declared its social engineering experiment a great success.
This report presents a six-part agenda for ending Wall Street’s disastrous experiment and creating a community-based, publicly accountable money and banking system responsive to the needs and opportunities of the United States in the 21st century.
They are:
1. Break up the mega-banks and implement tax and regulatory policies that favor community financial institutions, with a preference for those organized as cooperatives or as for-profits owned by nonprofit foundations.
2. Establish state-owned partnership banks in each of the 50 states, patterned after the Bank of North Dakota. These would serve as depositories for state financial assets to use in partnership with community financial institutions to fund local farms and businesses.
3. Restructure the Federal Reserve to function under strict standards of transparency and public scrutiny, with General Accounting Office audits and Congressional oversight.
4. Direct all new money created by the Federal Reserve to a Federal Recovery and Reconstruction Bank rather than the current practice of directing it as a subsidy to Wall Street banks. The FRRB would have a mandate to fund essential green infrastructure projects as designated by Congress.
5. Rewrite international trade and investment rules to support national ownership, economic self-reliance, and economic self-determination.
6. Implement appropriate regulatory and fiscal measures to secure the integrity of financial markets and the money/banking system.
For more details, please follow link:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/pdf/liberateamericadownload.pdf
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