Nationalize the Banks.

Editor,

Giving taxpayer money to private banks and hoping they will loan it for the benefit of all, even with strict rules in which the banks will just find loopholes via which to steal our money, is the silliest of ways to approach rectifying the financial meltdown those banks, with utter contempt for the national good, created themselves.

What is needed is a not-for-profit national bank, run by the Treasury, whose purpose is to keep the wheels of American commerce turning, not to find the riskiest and most predatory means imaginable to make itself the biggest profit it can.

The American financial system should be nationalized, in the same manner as the national health insurance system should be nationalized. Cut the corporations out of the picture. It's what they deserve for having cultivated the practice of cutting the public at every turn.

re: "More Pain to Come Even if He's Perfect" (11/9/2008)