But perhaps the most promising service that post offices could provide is banking. Today, sixty-eight million Americans, more than a quarter of U.S. households, lack access to adequate banking services. Many are shut out by high fees tied to minimum balances, overdrafts, direct deposit penalties, and ATM charges. As a result, they are left to unregulated payday lenders and check cashers that level obscene annual percentage rates. The postal inspector general found that underbanked Americans spend $89 billion each year on financial fees. This closed system shackles families to poverty, further cementing the economic inequality tearing our country apart.
Why Postal Banking Could Unite the Country
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In our April/May/June 2019 issue, Congressman Bill Pascrell of New Jersey wrote an excellent history and defense of the U.S. Postal Service. In fact, it’s worth reading purely for its historical interest. It’s fascinating to learn that debates about the proper purpose and mission of the USPS go all the way back to George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton thought the mail should be profitable and help subsidize other government operations. Washington and Madison were more interested in establishing the infrastructure and didn’t much care if it operated at a loss.
We’re still having those debates in Congress. In a general sense, Democrats take the side of Washington and Madison while the Republicans subscribe to the Hamiltonian view. Whichever way you swing on the issue, there’s no doubt that people send a lot fewer letters these days. The increase of online shopping hasn’t fully made up for it. The USPS is not profitable and it’s not likely to become profitable.
But, as Pascrell argued, the service is still immensely valuable. The USPS has an unrivaled reach into every nook and cranny of the country. Therefore, its infrastructure offers unique opportunities to not only the federal government but state and local governments as well.
In many American communities, the post office was historically called the “federal building,” and it served as a one-stop shop for numerous governmental needs. (Tellingly, FDR wanted Social Security to be administered through posts to assure its accessibility.) In smaller towns and cities, for example, the post office was a focal point for immigrant registration, military recruitment, and distributing income tax forms. There is no reason that America’s post offices can’t again provide a variety of important governmental functions.
Pascrell wants to utilize the postal service to enhance people’s experience with government. For example, tax forms could be supplied, and IRS adjutants could be stationed in post offices around tax time. In addition to processing passports by appointment, the USPS could provide the service at all times. Meanwhile, state governments could turn the post offices into voting booths in the process of moving to vote-by-mail systems.
But his biggest proposal is to have the USPS set up postal banking. He now has taken the ideas he discussed in our magazine earlier this year and teamed up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce a bill to accomplish those ideas.
Today @AOC and I are urging an expansion of postal banking. #Postalbanking can help needy Americans in urban *and* rural communities while boosting our great post offices well into the future — it’s time to make it happen!
The Post Office remains one of America’s best success stories. My essay in @monthly explored how we can modernize it so it endures for generations to come — with #postalbanking playing a major part.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april…
Here’s how he explained it in our pages:
But perhaps the most promising service that post offices could provide is banking. Today, sixty-eight million Americans, more than a quarter of U.S. households, lack access to adequate banking services. Many are shut out by high fees tied to minimum balances, overdrafts, direct deposit penalties, and ATM charges. As a result, they are left to unregulated payday lenders and check cashers that level obscene annual percentage rates. The postal inspector general found that underbanked Americans spend $89 billion each year on financial fees. This closed system shackles families to poverty, further cementing the economic inequality tearing our country apart.Postal branches could offer a range of banking services—including savings accounts, deposit services, and even small lending—at a 90 percent discount compared to what predatory lenders provide, according to a report commissioned by the USPS inspector general. This would give many families an average savings of $2,000 a year while putting nearly $9 billion into the post’s coffers.Postal banking could even unite liberals and Trump supporters. Rural communities are America’s most bank starved: 90 percent of zip codes lacking a bank or credit union lie in rural areas. Bank branches are also sparse in poorer urban areas, and 46 percent of Latino and 49 percent of African American households are unbanked. The Postal Service is well positioned to help both communities. Some 59 percent of post offices lie in “bank deserts,” or places where there is no more than one branch. Where financial institutions close their doors to these communities, post offices remain open to anyone who walks inside. And this change wouldn’t even need the approval of Congress, requiring only the postmaster general’s consent. Pilot programs could then begin immediately—including in places like 194 Ward Street in my own city of Paterson.Ultimately, these reforms would expand on the post’s democratic tradition. For centuries, the agency has connected far-flung parts of the country at little cost. Letting it help citizens pay their taxes, obtain passports, vote, and bank would better connect Americans with their federal government. In doing so, these reforms could help mend our citizenry’s chronically low confidence in the federal government. They could also make the agency’s contribution to public life—already enormous—more visible to the people it serves. And that would make it more difficult for anti-government zealots to tear the agency apart.
One way to unite this country is to come up with ideas that can benefit people in both urban and rural areas. The postal service has done this from its inception. It makes sense that it could play a role in unifying the country in the future. It’s great to see that Pascrell and AOC recognize this possibility. It’s time for their rest of their colleagues to do so, as well.
The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating
this whole filthy system, in which “Wall Street rules.” But
its services in behalf of the rich and the super-rich only compound
the fundamental and insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging
the system into ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next
crisis will be that much more violent and explosive.
In 2008, this
resulted in the most sweeping and systemic financial crisis since the Great
Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, New York Fed President Tim
Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of
Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest bank bailout in human history.
"A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks
were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old
investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-
September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns,
its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue
to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s
largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America,
needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape
failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington
Mutual and IndyMac, died."
The full significance of the bailouts of the financial
system
and the subsequent provision of trillions of dollars
is clear. It
has brought about the institutionalisation of a
process,
developing over the preceding decades, where the
financial
system, with the stock market at its centre, functions
as a
mechanism for the transfer of wealth to the heights of
society.
"It was caused by reckless lending practices,
Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax
government oversight in the George W. Bush
years, and deregulation of the financial sector
in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source,
going back decades, was rising inequality. In
good times and bad, no matter which party
held power, the squeezed middle class sank
ever further into debt...
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
“Our entire
crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
“Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no
allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this
invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business
and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism"
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
CLINTON MAFIA
AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS
TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the
Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and
investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms
and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped
contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and
Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with
CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million
in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS.
Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically,
and her
husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be
true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before
even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her
infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary
will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the
Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
Only Barack Obama has serviced banksters
more than Hillary and Billary!
“Clinton also
failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his
presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires,
in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street
bankers.”
FOLLOWING
THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO
REVOLUTION
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/bill-and-hillary-clintons-global.html
Transcripts
released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street
bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising
the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson- Bowles
deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000
federal jobs; a tax on employees’
Media silent on dismissal of
DNC suit against
Julian Assange
A federal court ruling last Tuesday
dismissing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil suit against Julian
Assange “with prejudice” was a devastating indictment of the US ruling elite’s
campaign to destroy the WikiLeaks founder. It exposed as a fraud the entire
“Russiagate” conspiracy theory peddled by the Democratic Party, the corporate
media and the intelligence agencies for the past three years.
The decision, by Judge John Koeltl of
the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, rejected the
smears that Assange “colluded” with Russia. It upheld his status as a
journalist and publisher and dismissed claims that WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication
of leaked emails from the DNC was “illegal.”
Despite the significance of the ruling,
and its clear newsworthiness, it has been subjected to an almost complete
blackout by the entire media in the US and internationally.
The universal silence on the court
decision—extending from the New York Times (which buried a
six-paragraph report on the ruling on page 25) and the Washington Post,
to “alternative” outlets such as the Intercept, the television
evening news programs and the publications of the pseudo-left—can be described
only as a coordinated political conspiracy.
Its aim is to suppress any discussion of
the court’s exposure of the slanders used to malign and isolate Assange, and to
justify the unprecedented international pursuit of him over WikiLeaks’ exposure
of US war crimes, surveillance operations and diplomatic conspiracies.
The New York Times,
the Washington Post and other corporate outlets have
relentlessly smeared Assange as a “Russian agent” and depicted him as the
linchpin of a conspiracy hatched in Moscow to deprive Democratic Party
candidate Hillary Clinton of the presidency in the 2016 US elections.
Now that their claims have been
subjected to judicial review and exposed as a tissue of lies and fabrications,
they have adopted a policy of radio silence. There is no question that if the
court ruling had been in favour of the DNC, it would have been greeted with
banner headlines and wall-to-wall coverage.
The response exposes these publications
as state propagandists and active participants in the campaign by the
Democratic Party, the Trump administration and the entire ruling elite to
condemn Assange for the rest of his life to an American prison for the “crime”
of publishing the truth.
The editors and senior writers at these
outlets, such as New York Timeseditorial page editor James
Bennet, are in constant contact with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Behind the scenes, they work out an editorial line that will advance the
interests of the Wall Street banks and the military-intelligence apparatus. At
the same time, they decide what news and information they will hide from the
American and world population.
The efforts by the mainstream news
outlets to bury the ruling presents a clear example of the type of media
manipulation that has led millions of people to seek alternative sources of
news on the internet, of which WikiLeaks is itself an example.
Judge Koeltl’s decision made plain the
anti-democratic and dictatorial logic of the DNC case against Assange. He
warned: “If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning
the DNC’s political, financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because
the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or
other media outlet.” This, he stated, would “override the First Amendment”
protection to freedom of the press mandated by the US Constitution.
Koeltl’s finding was an absolute
vindication of Assange and WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications exposing the attempts
by the DNC to rig the Democratic Party primaries against self-declared
“democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.
The judge found these releases, together
with the
publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall
Street banks, in
which she pledged to be their
representative, were “matters of the highest
public
concern.” They “allowed the American electorate
to look behind the
curtain of one of the two major
political parties in the United States during a
presidential election.”
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