Put the assets and profits of the
banks under the people’s control to:
- Fund a massive jobs program! Jobs
for all with union wages, rights and benefits. Full rights for all workers
regardless of citizenship or legal status. - Provide free education for all—cancel
student debt! Fund free, quality education for everyone from Pre-K
through college, - End all foreclosures and evictions!
Abolish interest payments to the banks—access to affordable housing for
all.
By seizing, or expropriating, the
assets and profits of the major private banks that are owned by the richest of
the 1% and putting those funds in a democratically controlled and publicly
owned People’s Bank, we can have an economy that serves the 99%.
- The case
for seizing or expropriating the banks is straightforward. It does not
include expropriating individuals’ bank deposits. - The
bankers torpedoed the economy through their fraud, corruption and criminal
acts in pursuit of super profits for billionaires. - Millions
of workers lost their jobs because of the bankers’ greed. The unemployed
did nothing wrong. They lost everything because the 1% control and profit
from banking. - Today,
millions of families are losing their homes because the same banks are
evicting them when they can’t keep up with their interest/mortgage
payments to the banks. - Millions
of college graduates cannot pay their student loans because they cannot
find decent jobs due to the actions of the bankers, which destroyed vast
parts of the economy. - As long
as banks, finance and credit exist to make the 1% ever richer, the 99%
will get ever poorer. - By
seizing the banks and using their vast assets to meet the needs of the 99%
rather than the 1%, a truly massive jobs program could be created so that
every person could work. - By
seizing the banks, there could be an immediate end to all housing
foreclosures. The bankers wouldn’t get interest payments, but working
families could remain in their homes. - By
seizing the banks and removing the profit motive from the credit system,
student loans could be immediately canceled. Student loans total $1
trillion. That’s obscene. Education should not be a privilege and a source
of profit for the 1%. Education should be free and a guaranteed right
available to all young people. - The
control of the banks and credit by the 1% is not the consequence of divine
mandate. Why should such a critical lever of the modern economy be in the
hands of the super rich? Why should we tolerate a system that allows a
handful of bankers to amass profits and fortunes greater than those of the
worst despots and monarchs of medieval Europe? - By
creating a national People’s Bank, with open books and under the
democratic control and administration of the 99%—including representatives
from local community and neighborhood organizations; working families,
students and youth; locally elected officials; unions; small business
people; grassroots environmental organizations, and others—we can begin
the process of reorganizing the economy to meet human needs. - Banks,
like all corporations, are not people. They are paper entities, which
exist solely because laws and society permit them to exist. They have no
inherent and inalienable rights, not even the right to exist. Today, they
exist to maximize the wealth of the 1%. We say the banking function should
be used to maximize the well-being of society, the 100%. Since banks have
no rights, there is no wrong—indeed, there are life altering benefits—in
seizing the banking function and placing it under the people’s democratic
control.
