More On A Public Banking Option

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mark Paul and Assistant Professor of Economics at Loyola Marymount University Thomas Herndon make the case for a public banking option, emphasizing the historical precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “A forgotten lesson of the New Deal era is that a public option for basic services can both ensure universal access and empower regulators to curtail abuses. In the case of consumer finance, a public bank would go a long way toward improving the economic security of all U.S. households.”

Apart from and a part of urgent ongoing abolition struggles -- struggles to abolish white supremacy and patriarchy, pollution and waste, police brutality, prisons, nuclear weapons, illiteracy, homelessness, food insecurity, neglected treatable diseases and malnutrition, corruption, and so much more -- the work to provide a public option for banking (in part, I hope, via an expanded postal service), a public option for healthcare (in part via Medicare buy-in and Medicaid expansion), public options for internet and phone and streaming services (in part via community co-ops and expanded commercial-free national public radio and television programs with fairness doctrines and regulations against deceptive and fraudulent advertising and misinformation practices), public alternatives for sustainable energy, transportation, and food provision (mostly through co-ops and infrastructure and organic/permaculture farms and farmer's markets built and maintained and subsidized via full guaranteed public employment at a living wage programs -- not the basic income re-feudalization scam advocated by oligarchic "thought leaders" of tech) is looking like the work of the rising generation with whatever help my own eclipsed ineffectual dwindling generation can provide them as they rise in their diversity, awareness, rage, and promise.