Ronald Reagan Was a Horrible President

Imagine how different our national economic situation would now be if at the time of the Wall Street crash the federal government had taken over failing Wall Street banks, broken them up, and restructured them as locally owned independent, cooperative community banks and credit unions with a clear mandate to fund local homeowners and responsible businesses.

Far from being a radical idea, the result would be a system of financial institutions that would look very much like the one we used to have comprised of community serving local banks, mutual savings and loan associations, and credit unions—until the frenzy of deregulation that began building momentum in the early 1980s destroyed it.

Then imagine that instead of pouring trillion of dollars into Wall Street bank bailouts the government had directed that same money to economic stimulus spending targeted to local businesses, governments, and nonprofits putting people to work addressing the priority needs of our communities.

Those dollars could now be working to rebuild our local food systems, green our homes and buildings, build our solar and wind energy capability, create recycling facilities, roll back suburban sprawl, and provide our children with a quality education and our families with affordable health care.

We are talking literally trillions of dollars that went to bail out Wall Street—partly from the Treasury Department, but mostly from the Federal Reserve—that could instead have gone to rebuilding Main Street.