In Chris Hedge's piece at truth-out, one of the most perceptive writers I can think of writes
Overthrow the Speculators
Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. ...
...Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. ...They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.
We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.
[my emphasis.]
The article goes on to talk about the success of the Bank of North Dakota's (BND) 90-year run (a socialist program, btw); the Local Bank initiatives in Washington and Vermont; and in Philadelphia, DC, Reading, PA, and San Francisco.
He gives the example of a California schools project for which they borrowed $22M from the Very Serious Bankers. When it's all paid it'll be $154M that Californians -- it will be the people in the end -- will give over.
This follows on examples of BDN's infrastructure loans of 0%.
There's much in the article, very densely packed, and to the point. As usual.
Hedges treats of the proposal by Bernie Sanders and Peter DeFazio for a national infrastructure bank. There's a few benefits to that which he details.
The opening to the last paragraph is valuable:
We won’t be saved by anyone in Washington. We will have to save ourselves. We will have to transform our communities, cities and states into places where the consent of the governed is no longer a joke.
I've condensed and edited heavily. His argument is more coherent, even obvious, than what I can convey and stay within copyright concerns. Please read it all. Again, the link:
http://truth-out.org/...