Humanize the banking industry

 

 The International Financial Power is the main responsible for
Corruption, Looting and Economic Violence on the People

The International Day of the Banks, is celebrated on December 4, a date created last year, by means of a decree established by the UN to: "recognize the important contribution of the international banking in order to finance the sustainable development and this way to improve the quality of life of the world population".
Humanists have a very different view of the role of international private banking. We understand that they are largely responsible for the unsustainability of the current inhumane capitalist system and their actions brutally damage the quality of life of the majority of the world's population.
The creation of banking can take us back to its rudimentary origins, some 4000 thousand years ago in human history, with the first commercial loans in the Assyrian-Babylonian cultures.
The so-called "modern banking" began to develop in the European Middle Ages. Florence, Amsterdam and London can be considered the first cities where the private financial system gained momentum and then expanded throughout Europe.
The banks as auxiliary facilitators of production, savings and trade have been gradually generating a monstrous accumulation of power, based on that naturalized swindle that is usury, which drags us into economic chaos and the debacle of the productive economy.
We call banking not only the banks, but all the financial capital that profits from the collection of interest on credits, from the over-utilization of businesses linked to the granting of loans and from the subsequent appropriation of key goods and services. They earn money with the money, they lend, and when the borrowed money cannot be repaid, the bank charges them in "kind" (the house, the business premises, the land, other real estate, companies or state property, etc.) 
Today, private banks are part of an economic conglomerate, where on the one hand they compete among themselves disputing the world market, but on the other hand they act together based on common interests such as opposing and resisting any proposal for change that regulates and controls their actions.
Private credit, which sells itself as a tool for development, has ended up being a parasitic weapon of usury.
Private banking is the vanguard of a globalization that functions as a kind of financial imperialism. The accumulation of wealth, a historical tendency of capitalism, has overflowed the channels of productive investment to inflate speculative bubbles, systematize usury, and accelerate oligopolistic concentration.
At the beginning of the 70s of the last century, international usury was strengthened, indebting not only companies but also countries. Neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s ended the few barriers that international financial capital had in its globalization, with the opening of the markets and thanks to the great technological advances in telecommunications.
A true private para-state has been installed, made up of international financial power exercising dominion over the economy and politics through speculation and usury, as a true de facto dictatorship.

In 2008, a financial implosion took place in the economic core of the empire, which had, among other preconditions, the voracious indebtedness of US citizens. The governments did not take measures to limit financial power; on the contrary, the public banks of those countries subsidized the private banks with billions of dollars and euros, while the people lost their homes. Those who caused the biggest economic crisis in recent times were rewarded with more business, more money, more power. No banker went to prison (except in Iceland) and no bank was closed.

Between 2009 and 2014, large financial institutions paid $178 billion, to avoid sanctions and lawsuits for acts of corruption (market manipulation, tax evasion, falsification of data, financial fraud, money laundering from illicit activities) that were involved: Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Lloyds Banking Group, Santander, representing a good part of the largest entities in the world banking market [1].

The network of robbery and fraud in the banks is complemented and articulated with investment funds, risk rating agencies, tax havens, law firms, large international auditing and consulting firms, large accounting firms, large real estate agents, financial consultants, wealth management systems, stock exchanges and their agents, insurance and reinsurance companies, trusts, and numerous legal figures, in order to obtain an ever greater share of the profits in the economy.

The "fractional" creation of money, "bonds", "stocks", "commodities", "derivatives", are the main technical instruments, which make up what they call "financial assets" and "financial products", euphemisms with which they call the means of appropriating what the real economy produces, that of labor and capital.

The banks also manipulate the international financial organizations and have managed their global justice, through international tribunals like the ICSID. The US Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Central Bank, as well as numerous "technical" institutions are part of the core, of the big institutional instruments that are under the real control of the international private financial elite.

Evasion, capital flight and money laundering on a large scale, such as offshore banking and tax havens, are not presented to society as the highly corrupt facts they really are.

It is urgent to put an end to the Dictatorship of International Financial Capital, the main responsible for hunger, the depredation of the environment, social violence and a good part of the wars.

We humanists maintain that only the dismantling of the power of the banks and their replacement by credit from banks that lend without interest will be able to reverse this harmful and destructive direction. The banks are useful so as not to have to return to a barter economy. It is the State that must guarantee the public service of money, to oil the productive growth of goods, services and exchange in society.

The International Humanist Party proposes the creation of a public bank without interest. The State will not aim to profit like the private ones, but to finance the productive apparatus and the consumption of the population. The bank will only charge for the support of its logistic cost (administrative expenses).

Nationalizing the banks and administering the management of financial flow is a revolutionary and indispensable measure. The central banks of the countries cannot continue to be branches of global financial power. Public banks must emerge on the entire scale of the multilevel administration (states, provinces, regions, municipalities, mayors, communes, etc.).

Governments must stop bailing out banks - with the resources of the whole of society - in every crisis that occurs. They must rescue savers, pensioners and workers, nationalizing every private bank that collapses.

Humanists are aware that we cannot propose these changes in isolation, but that they must be part of a simultaneous change that generates a new cultural, economic, political and social system. We need growing citizen participation, the real democratization of society, administrative decentralization, so that savings are turned into production, into housing loans, into financing public works (works for the people in health, education, and quality of life).

We need to generate awareness that the financial system is par excellence the enemy of the economy and the democracies.

We will need to mobilize ourselves worldwide against private banking, capital flight, tax havens, offshore companies, the opacity of an unethical system that finances fraudulent, illegal and immoral operations, demanding the fulfillment of the responsibility and social function that banking must fulfill in each country and at the international level. There is an urgent need to create a global public banking system based on solidarity and, as long as private banking exists, to impose taxes on large speculative capital and financial transactions.

For humanists, only labor and capital are factors in the productive economy, and speculation and usury are not enough.

“Robbing a bank is a crime, but it is more of a crime to create one”,

attribuited to Bertold Bretch.

International Coordination Team
Federation of Humanist Parties