What if we gave the 99% a cooperative bank of their own? Surely if one looks to the numbers that have appeared in various protests across the globe, there are enough potential experts in their ranks to pull it off.

What is the problem, after all? The banks won’t lend. The solution, then: have the people make a bank. Bank of America wants to charge 5 dollars every time you purchase something with your debit card, which is — according to one consumer advocate who appeared on PBS News Hour — the equivalent of making a 500% profit? The answer is simple: turn around and make a bank.

Think of it as a fast, lean World Bank. (Or — as someone pointed out to me — The Common Good Finance Project.) If a double-dip recession is truly coming and no Works Progress Administration-sized or Lula-sized projects are likely, what could be the next biggest player on the field? If policy-makers don’t yield to the leverage represented by crowds, would they yield to a crowd with a giant bank of their own?

I just can’t seem to shake the thought: what would happen if there was a global financial institution directly and rapidly advocating for everyone’s interests? What would happen if the institution invested more in Chilean education, gave the youth of Spain jobs, helped out with university fees in the UK, lobbied to raise the minimum wage in Arkansas, Georgia, and Wyoming, lobbied against Citizens United and volunteered to put up the cash for elections with a spending-limit ceiling, and just invested in projects aiming to address income inequality in this country?

I’m not an economist, I know that it takes a while for the world to become the world, and I know, too, that some will see this as suffering from silver-bullet syndrome (and I know people will say credit unions, but there’s a certain element of advocacy lacking there), the mistaken belief that one solution can fix it all, especially when it comes to thinking that a bank could overcome every other bank’s seeming exposure.

But the idea sticks: what if we gave the people who have organized this much thus far a bank?

  9:28 am  |   October 1 2011   |  66 notes