Every Mortgage-Holder Could Be a Debt-Free Homeowner Tomorrow If We Nationalized the Banks
Billionaire elites don't want you to understand that their slave-making usury system is a giant fraud
Corporatists have convinced the world to hate the word ānationalization.ā
As if āthe nationā (AKA you and me) shouldnāt ever own anything collectively.
Thatās why I prefer the word democratization.
As opposed to privatization, which is actually just corporatization.
When it comes to huge things like school systems and healthcare systems and other infrastructures like roads and telecoms and energy production and banking, corporations want you to believe that they alone have your best interests in mind.
The pro-privatization marketing machine wants you to believe that corporations aloneāāāthose non-human entities whose legal fiduciary reason for existing is to extract private profit for elitesāāācan deliver the widest-spread longest-term wellbeing and value to the world, far superior to a self-owned, self-controlled, not-for-profit collective institution.
What a joke.
Nowhere is this cruel joke more evident than in the parasitic realm of for-profit interest-based corporate banking. Finance is supposed to be a public utility that serves the economy, not the other way around.
Today, weāre going to discover the simple (and disturbing) truth that if America democratized its banks, every mortgagor could be debt-free homeowner tomorrow.
The Plan
The stats are terrifying: American citizens owe corporate banks $12.5 trillion for family residential mortgages and that debt load has been climbing for a straight decade.
Luckily, any democracy that understands nation-state economics could make this figure disappear overnight. Hereās how:
1. Democracy wealth-taxes the hyper-rich to the tune of $1.5Ā trillion
This might sound like a big scary number, but donāt worryāāābillionaires grew their wealth by more than $5.5 trillion at our expense during the pandemic, so taking back 27% of their unearned gains isnāt as crazy as it sounds.
2. Democracy buys all theĀ banks
Using our reclaimed $1.5 trillion, the nation will buy up all the for-profit interest-based corporate banks:
Weāll buy JPMorgan Chase for $333 billion.
Weāll buy Bank of America for $265 billion.
Weāll buy Well Fargo for $162 billion.
Weāll buy Morgan Stanley for $146 billion.
Etc etc. Weāll buy all of them.
For $1.5 trillion in spending, democracy would receive the stewardship of $28 trillion in assets and annual net profits of $150 billion⦠what a deal!
3. Democracy sets up a not-for-profit trust (or a bunch ofĀ them)
Letās be honest: Democracy and finance are too precious to be entrusted to politicians.
If we nationalized/democratized all the banks, the next round of corporatist politicians would just re-privatize/corporatize them.
So we need to spin them out of the federal and corporate control, into not-for-profit trusteeshipsāāābut with strong democratic protections and regulations to ensure they serve the publicās fiduciary best interests forever.
From there, these not-government-not-corporate not-for-profits would be legally tasked with delivering public utility banking, and any profits would be automatically donated to charity or used to fund UBI or whatever democracy decided was best. Itās our bank, after all.
4. Democracy declares a debt jubilee on everyoneās first million in mortgage debt on their primary residential domestic residence.
As we discussed yesterday, every nation that let interest debt compound forever was destroyed, but every nation that declared debt jubilees saw their economies boom and their nation thrive. And it makes sense: If you save people from wasting their money paying interest to banksters, they spend it on goods and services, which creates more wealth and jobs.
By wiping out the first million in mortgage debt on everyoneās primary residence, essentially every debt-strapped mortgagor will be debt-free homeowners.
The reason we wonāt erase all mortgage debt is that:Ā
a.) People who owe more than a million on a house are probably rich and donāt need that much house.
b.) We donāt want to let big-time property hoarders, Airbnb hosts, and parasitic land-lorders like Donald Trump off the hook for what they owe.
5. Our not-for-profit bank trust writes off theĀ loans
Rich people and land-lorders will still have to pay their outstanding mortgages, but now all the banking profits will be used to fund public improvements that contribute to widest-spread wellbeing.
And, since the bottom 90% no longer will owe the banks anything, our banks will simply delete the credit numbers owing on the bankās computer servers.
Thatās it.
Thatās what can happen when you de-corporatize the banks and democratize them instead.
First we owe the banksā¦Ā
But then we own the banksā¦Ā
Which means we owe ourselvesā¦
Which means we owe nothing.
Are you feeling disturbed yet?
Are you wondering, āHow is this possible?ā
Itās possible because interest-bearing bank credit is and always will be a legal fiction.
Interest is an invisible chain to extract human time and energy in order to extract wealth to enrich the richest non-contributors in human history.
Itās time to get rid of the invisible fictitious chain and start living in economic and moral reality.
Some people will argue that deleting interest amounts owing is actually stealing money from others, but itās simply not true. Banks sell bonds to the government in order to borrow for near-nil interest, and they use that money to bid up asset prices. This is myth money. Even the Fed says that private banks create most of the money in society. Banks have created hundreds of trillions in debt that isnāt and has never been real peopleās money. Itās a pure lie.
Democratizing the banks wonāt even hurt shareholders, because we bought them out. We are the shareholders now. Except now, instead of bank profits going to the richest shareholders on earth to then bid up asset prices, those profits can be funneled to the poorest people in society. Itās groundswell economics instead of trickle-down.
In conclusion
If we wealth-tax back $1.5 trillion of the $5.5 trillion that billionaires gained from the pandemic, buy the banks, and jubilee the debt, we can instantly wipe out $12.5 trillion in residential mortgage debt that Americans āoweā to corporate banks.
Most importantly, every mortgagor in America would be a debt-free homeowner.
The public would now be the recipient of billions of dollars in annual mortgage repayments made by the top 10%, which could be used to improve the nation.
And as a cherry on top, suddenly Americans would stop wasting $300+ billion/year on mortgage interest payments and start spending hundreds of billions per year into the real economy. This would create a huge amount of jobs and provide hundreds of billions in tax revenues for further public investment.
Oh, and we save democracy and freedom and avoid crushing serfdom.
And remember, because we wealth-taxed the hyper-rich to buy the banks upfront, we didnāt have to print money and cause a single cent of inflation. Instead of banks using our money to bid up asset prices and inflate price bubbles thanks to ever-increasing interest-bearing debt, weād actually see prices fallāāāor, at the very least, weād suddenly all have enough money to pay for things at their current prices.
(But even if we did initially print the $1.5 trillion debt-freeāāāwe printed $16 trillion with debt during the pandemicāāāwe could now wealth-tax it back as all that profit trickles back up to corporations and the rich people who control them.)
Now, of course, banks often sell off mortgages to third-party lenders. Debt jubilees can and always have simply wiped out all non-business debts, no matter who the creditor is. The point is to side with the working contributor class, not the creditor class, if you care about freedom.
And Iām not saying we should do this, but thereās also a third option besides taxing the hyper-rich or printing-and-taxing-back in order to take democratic control of the economic system that currently exploits every single man, woman, and child in this country:
We could just seize the corporate banks and creditor corporations and turn them into not-for-profits.
Because remember:
They were all built with our work and money anyway.