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Hightower writes in Common Dreams that the U.S. should decentralize its capital, reinvesting our public trust in community banks and credit unions that actually deserve it and serve it. (What a concept.)
Wall Street would prefer that middle-class taxpayers continue to protect its giant banks -- presumably so they can continue to exploit the middle class. Writes Hightower,
After enduring years of insatiable greed by the slick-fingered hucksters who run these gambling houses; after watching in dismay as their ineptness and avarice drained more than $19 trillion from America's household wealth since 2007 and plunged our real economy into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression; after witnessing their shameful demands for trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to save their banks and their jobs; and now after seeing them return immediately to business as usual, including paying multimillion-dollar bonuses to themselves - we have to ask: Huh!?!Wall Street's giant banks are no longer central to our economy, he argues. Their complicated financial schemes,
...just move money around, spiraling real investment capital from the grassroots up to superrich global profiteers who create nothing but more wealth for themselves. Shell games at carnival sideshows are more honest than big-bank trading houses, for the hustles of such hucksters as JPMorgan, Goldman, B of A, etc. are based on financial illusions, off-the-books accounting, illegally leveraged borrowing, ridiculous tax subsidies and hide-the-pea secrecy.
The obvious truth is that these high-flying, high-tech, high-speed emporiums of high finance serve themselves, not us - so we have no obligation or need to keep serving them. Of course we need banks - to lend to us consumers and our productive businesses, to handle our commercial transactions, to manage our savings and provide financial advice, etc. But that's not what the leviathans of Wall Street do.Couldn't have said it better ourselves.
