NYT Debate On If Banking Giants Still Too Big to Fail Ignores the Core Issue

by Stephen Lendman

Too big to fail or not ignores what's most important. Predatory bankers make serial killers look good by comparison. 

Their business model creates crises, facilitates grand theft, financial terrorism, and debt entrapment. 

They steal material wealth, systematically scam investors, and strip mine economies for self-enrichment.

They demand they get paid first, holding nations hostage, turning crises into catastrophes - facilitating the greatest ever wealth transference in history to super-rich elites already with too much, at the same time creating mass impoverishment, high unemployment, neo-serfdom, and human wreckage.

They're more dangerous than standing armies, waging war by other means, a malignancy ravaging societies and humanity. Economies become subordinate to financial oligarchs, getting things their way exclusively at the expense of the general welfare.

Controlling money, credit and debt for private enrichment is hugely destructive - assuring speculation, booms, busts, inflation, deflation, instability, crisis, recessions and depressions, homelessness, hunger, deprivation and despair.

It's democracy's greatest threat. Money power in public hands is the solution, more needed now than ever, the antidote to corrupted, dysfunctional privatized banking.

In her important book, titled "Web of Debt," Ellen Brown explained how money power in private hands entraps Americans in debt and how they can break free.

Privately run banks need maximum profits to thrive. Public ones operate by different standards. They're not beholden to Wall Street or shareholders.

Only federal, state or community creditworthiness matters. Public banks can lend interest-free or at low-affordable rates in perpetuity to create sustainable growth - inflation-free when used productively, not speculation, big bonuses or other excesses.

Up to 40% of "everything we buy goes (for) interest," Brown explained - to "bankers, financiers and bondholders." Complicit politicians let them game the system for their benefit exclusively.

If interest paid returned to public hands, a third of more of the cost goods and services bought could be saved. 

Money earned could buy 50% more than now. Living standards would rise. Ordinary people would benefit enormously. 

Poverty would decline. People would live better. They'd have more money to spend. Economic growth would follow. So would greater job creation. 

Sustained inflation-free prosperity is possible. It happened in colonial America and elsewhere under public banking.

It's a sensible, workable, sorely needed solution, an idea whose time has come.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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