Our Minister for Finance: paschal.donohoe@oireachtas.ie
French Senior MEP Pierre Larrouturou is on hunger strike (maybe his 18th day now) asking for a minuscule but important tax on financial services to help Europe recover.
To send support: pierre.larrouturou@europarl.europa.eu
Dear Minister Donohoe,
Public banking & hunger striking MEP, trying to protect us from your decisions.
I am writing to respond to the Indecon Report you sent me that blocked earlier legislation.
The Indecon Report does not address:
1. Usury: The need for Public Banks in order to end Usury in Ireland
Usury: The practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.
2. Credit Creation: The public banks’ capacity to facilitate the State’s Sovereign Right to Create Money.
The power of Irish-owned banks to provide credit. The fractional reserve mechanism (if used by credit unions and post offices empowered as full commercial banks) would be exactly the institutions capable of delivering Fine Gael’s own recent Wellbeing-aligned proposal, meeting the housing needs, care and health needs, food and greening and Covid recovery support for small and medium sized companies – currently defunct.
3. Credit as A Public Utility: The Need To Establish Credit as a Public Utility.
Public utilities are a class of services provided to the public, including making power and water available. A public bank would provide businesses with the credit they need to operate and deliver their goods and services.
4. Interest-free credit. Consolidated interest should
be banned.
Banks do not need to charge interest as they already lend several times what they have in reserve and receive the money back in full. As well as using loans as securities to create more credit and provide more loans, on the strength of the first.
5. Lending Criteria & Fine Gael’s Wellbeing Objectives:
Your paper points out how there are different economic priorities for all demographics. Regional public banks served by real people, in a face to face role, as already exist in the many under-utilized but much loved post offices & credit unions, are the best situated to determine the diverse credit needs & assess social and environmental benefits of proposed enterprises. Regional public banks are the only way to realize your party’s Wellbeing objectives.
6. Public Expenditure. Imagine the fractional reserve leverage of all
public contracts and regional allocated funds passing through the public banks, multiplying regional inputs exponentially.
The charter for public banks for societal good, is in line with the Local Government Climate Action Charters and EU Green Deal and Just Transition criteria. The DOF and local authorities could draw down more of these funds for Ireland, if you could demonstrate the money was reaching the communities and not getting sucked off by the meat and dairy bosses and multi-nationals.
7. No money goes off-shore.
The benefits of an independent, not for profit bank system, is that public banks do not take any money out of the economy.
8. Set Up: Existing credit unions hold substantial savings, empower them as full commercial banks.
People have noticed how you’ve started to include Credit Union savings when you talk about bank reserves and you and I know that when the banks are at last forced to declare their insolvency, they will be trying to lay claim to these last savings of ordinary people.
9. Running Costs: There are people waiting at the door to put their money somewhere safe.
Member/owners of the new banks will be happy to pay charges. With customer services to be delivered by existing Credit Union and Post Office staff, the government outlay would be negligible. Passing State financial transactions through a public bank would cover its running costs many times over.
10. Mortgage resolution: If the government, which only leaves you to
agree – as all the other parties are behind regional public banks - choose to back the implementation, and pass EU money through the public banks, they would be in a position to buy Ireland’s entire mortgage portfolio and secure everyone’s homes. (You do need to legislate to bring house prices down in line with their value in real terms as well though, rather than letting private banks continue to offer 30 year mortgages for inflated figures that keep people inprisoned and keep the banks’ auditors agreeing that they can loan more on the strength of those loans. Otherwise, public banks will be just feeding the beast by offering mortgages to pay those same prices.
11.The introduction of a public bank would not create competition
for smaller lending institutions, as the report suggests, the resistance comes from the private banks who currently hold 100% of the power to distribute credit in Ireland, through those smaller lending institutions and through the government.
Eventually, in New Zealand (I think), a TD equivalent said to the Minister for Finance, “Just give them the bank”. And he did.
That is what you must do, Paschal Donoghue. Just give us the public banks. People are waking up to your unwillingness to allow the people of Ireland to help themselves. Maybe you too are waking up.
12. Pierre Larrouturou is the hero. He has been on hunger strike for 17 days now – He is the only person standing between you and inflicting abject poverty on the whole Eurozone.
He makes his case for the urgency of establishing a 0.1 per cent tax on buying and selling stock and a 0.01 per cent tax on all other financial transactions.
You are the enemy but you could be seen as a king, if you concede these obviously essential economic strategies: Tax on financial services and an EU public bank and Member states to have full public banks too.
Regards,
Frances Micklem
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