Lloyd-Blankfein CEO Goldman-Sachs
Ellen Brown
The
campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support.
Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local
government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned
banks.
Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The
99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to
ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But
none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted
Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt
banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.
Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:
[P]rotesters
in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their
East Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of
banks. The idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a
compromised Washington and the financial industry.
It's
called a municipal bank. Simply put, it would transfer the City of San
Francisco's bank accounts—about $2 billion now spread between such banks
as Bank of America Corp., UnionBanCal Corp. and Wells Fargo &
Co.—into a public bank. That bank would use small local banks to lend to
the community.
The public bank concept is not new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota. Weidner
notes that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned taxpayers more
than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million in 2008,
when Bank of America had a $1.2 billion net loss. The
San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by city supervisor John
Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for several years.
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