Americans are furious about the banks and the bankers. Furious at the bankers for bringing us to the brink. Furious too that the bankers continue to pay multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses to their executives. And the American people are angry that the government—which gave the banks trillions of dollars—won’t say exactly who got the money and can’t explain why all that money didn’t save homes and small businesses and create jobs.
President Obama and the Democratic Party are now pushing their financial reform bill through Congress. The bill would create consumer protections and separate the banks from their derivative-dealing casinos. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown even proposed an amendment which would have broken up the biggest banks, so that no bank would be “too big to fail” forcing tax-payers to save it. The AFL-CIO and the SEIU support this call to “break up the banks,” as has Jobs with Justice, one of the best labor organizations in the country. Brown’s motion failed, but in any case, the solution he and the unions advocated wouldn’t have begun to do the job that’s needed.
Breaking up big business has a long tradition. The U.S. has been breaking up corporations to prevent monopolies since the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890. Yet, despite such laws, the capitalist tendency of large corporations to devour smaller ones prevails, and eventually a few big corporations come to dominate the industry once again. The government broke up Standard Oil in 1911—but that didn’t stop Standard from becoming Exxon and didn’t stop that corporation under whichever name from determining much of our domestic and foreign policy. The government decided in 1974 to break up AT&T—yet by 2005 the communications monopoly had more or less reconstituted itself as the monopoly in fixed-line telephones and number two in the new electronic telephone landscape.
What failed with the corporations will also fail with the banks, which will eventually transform themselves back into powerful financial oligopolies. The answer is not to break them up, but to nationalize the banks, bring them under the control of Congress, and turn them into a National Credit Union to serve the needs of the American people. This won’t automatically solve our problems, because to make that work, we would, of course, also have to change the Congress, filling it with working people—teachers, computer programmers, construction workers, waitresses—instead of corporate lawyers and professional politicians.
Rather than letting the bankers and Congress call the tune, we might remember a song by an apple farmer named Les Rice, one time head of the Ulster County Farmers Union in New York. Rice wrote that the banks were made up marble and filled with money that farmers and workers had sweated for. In the final chorus he suggested:
Then we’d own those banks of marble,
With a guard at every door;
And we’d share those vaults of silver,
That we have sweated for.
(The complete lyrics can be found at: http://unionsong.com/u024.html )
Confiscate the bankers’ wealth and share it out among the American people? The U.S. Credit Union, owned and run by and for the American people? I like that tune.
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