Time for a social movement to nationalize U.S. banks

The time has come for a national U.S. social movement to put an end to private banking and to nationalize the U.S. banking and credit system.

	A foreclosure sign sits on top of a sale placard outside an home on the market in the south Denver suburb of Littleton, Colo (AP photo)

To begin with, the popular basis for such a movement is appearing. Widespread resistance to the flood of housing foreclosures by the banks, including demonstrations, and physical confrontations by resistors with banks and officials, is spreading across the U.S.

In U.S. cities like Cleveland, Boston, and Philadelphia, grassroots housing groups have rallied over the past year outside local courthouses; pressured banks to renegotiate mortgages, and taken other forms of direct action. Such resistance to foreclosures has not been seen in America since the great depression of the 1930's, when massive unemployment and bank foreclosures on home mortgages similarly triggered mass resistance.

While public resistance to ever-increasing housing foreclosures is growing, the public also remains outraged over the transfer of huge sums of public money, most of it supplied by workers taxes, to banks and financial institutions whose actions in fact caused the current economic crisis.

Moreover, the U.S. public also sees that the massive transfer of money to the banks has done nothing to stem the tide of foreclosures, which are alarmingly growing in frequency. Nor has it alleviated unemployment, which is also disastrously increasing, with an additional 598,000 officially unemployed added in the past week alone..

Resistance to foreclosures; outrage at massive give-aways to the banks and finance companies; awareness that present policies do not work, and terrible suffering occasioned by unemployment and home loss; have all laid the basis for a 'Nationalize the banks' movement.

What makes such a movement necessary is the necessity to break the hold of corrupt finance capital over America. Finance capital does not rule alone; it interpenetrates with several other big business sectors. But its power is great - and remains so, or has even expanded, since Obama was elected..

Obama's whole economic team, or a large part of it, has in fact directly moved in from Wall. His new secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, for example, was head of the NY Federal reserve bank - and one of Paulson and Bernackies right-hand men during the decision to transfer of 800 billion to the banks.

Gary Gensler, the choice to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, also drafted legislation in 2000 that exempted the now notorious derivate's - including credit-default swaps - from regulation.