THE WASHINGTON UNION PAPERS: NO. 12

HOW PUBLIC BANKING CAN END THE DEBT CYCLE & BOOST THE ECONOMY

To the People of the United States,

There is no true economic liberty for a people shackled by debt. A nation whose wealth is drained by private banking interests, whose government borrows at interest from those who contribute nothing to its prosperity, whose citizens are burdened with loans that will never be repaid, is not a free nation. It is a nation held hostage by financiers, a republic in name only, a debtor state whose fate is dictated not by the will of its people but by the whims of its creditors. The illusion of prosperity masks the reality of servitude. The workers toil, the entrepreneurs innovate, the industries produce, and yet, the wealth they generate is siphoned off before it reaches them, funneled into a system designed to enrich those who control the mechanisms of finance rather than those who create real value.

This arrangement is neither natural nor inevitable. It is an invention, a deliberate construction designed not for the prosperity of the many but for the enrichment of the few. It is the machinery of financial control, a system engineered to keep wealth in the hands of those who produce nothing while those who labor, create, and build are held in a state of perpetual economic servitude. It is a conquest not waged with armies but with contracts, not with chains but with interest rates, not through open force but through a quiet and relentless erosion of financial independence. It is a tyranny so insidious that it does not need to announce itself as such—it merely embeds itself into every aspect of economic life until its victims no longer recognize their servitude.

There was a time when the oppressor ruled with the sword, when conquest was marked by marching battalions and declarations of dominion. But brute force, for all its immediate effectiveness, breeds resistance. It invites rebellion. And so, the masters of finance learned a new method. They understood that a man bound by chains will fight to break them, but a man bound by debt will defend his servitude as though it were freedom. They learned that economic control, if properly wielded, would not require coercion but compliance. The borrower does not revolt against his lender; he fears him, he depends on him, he prays that he will be allowed to borrow again. He believes that his shackles are his security.

And so the chains remain, not made of iron but of obligation, of compounding interest, of contracts that stretch not just across years but across generations.

The cycle is self-perpetuating, for it is designed to be. Debt begets more debt. The man who seeks to own a home does not save; he borrows, and in borrowing, he pays not just for his house but for the wealth of the lender who does nothing but approve the loan. The student who desires an education does not invest in his future; he indebts himself to it, entering the workforce already in servitude, not to an employer but to an institution that will extract its due long after his degree has lost its value. The family that seeks healthcare does not receive care as a right; it pays, and if it cannot pay, it borrows, ensuring that sickness is not just a matter of health but of financial ruin.

Every aspect of life is touched by this system, not by accident but by design. The financial class has ensured that no necessity is beyond their grasp, that no fundamental human need can be met without tribute. To live in this economy is to pay rent not just on one’s home but on one’s survival. It is to be taxed at every turn, not by a government that reinvests in the public good but by a private system that takes without giving, that extracts without replenishing, that profits without producing. Every dollar that moves through this system is intercepted, siphoned, claimed before it can reach the hands of those who earned it. The wages of the worker are not his own; they are earmarked from the moment they are paid. His rent, his loans, his medical bills, his credit cards—all are lined up in waiting, ensuring that his labor serves not himself, not his family, not his future, but the perpetual engine of financial extraction.

This is not an accident. It is not a failure of policy. It is not a malfunction of an otherwise fair system. It is the system. It is working exactly as it was intended to work. It is a masterpiece of economic subjugation, so complete in its design that its victims do not recognize their oppression but instead defend it, convinced that their debt is the price of modernity, that their struggle is the natural state of existence. They are told that to question it is to misunderstand economics, that to resist it is to be reckless, that to suggest another way is to invite chaos. And so they remain where they are, laboring endlessly, producing endlessly, and yet never truly owning what they create, never truly controlling the wealth they generate, never truly free.

But history has shown that no system of control, no matter how well disguised, can endure indefinitely. There comes a time when the weight becomes too much to bear, when the burden becomes too obvious to ignore. There comes a moment when the people look up from their ledgers, from their bills, from the endless cycle of work and payment, and they see the reality of their condition. And when that moment comes, the foundations of the system begin to tremble. For a financial empire, no less than a political one, relies on the acquiescence of those it subjugates. When that acquiescence is withdrawn, when the debtors refuse to play their assigned role, when they no longer accept the terms that were written for them, then the system that once seemed invincible collapses under the weight of its own excess.

The masters of finance believe themselves untouchable. They believe that they have perfected the art of control. They believe that their institutions, their contracts, their laws, will protect them forever. But they forget that history is filled with the ruins of those who believed the same. They forget that every empire built on the suffering of the many has eventually been torn down by those who refused to suffer any longer. And they will learn, as all rulers of unjust systems have learned before them, that a debt-ridden people, when they rise, do not ask for reform. They demand revolution.

Yet this cycle is not unbreakable. The financial stranglehold that has reduced nations to servitude and turned citizens into debtors can be undone, not through appeals to the beneficence of the banking class, nor through the slow erosion of reform, but through the radical restructuring of finance itself. The answer is simple, and it has always been before us. A nation that controls its own money must control its own banks. The wealth of the people must be safeguarded from the extractive hands of private interests. The debt cycle must be shattered by a new system—one that treats finance not as a weapon against the people but as a tool for their prosperity. The solution is public banking.

Public banking is the key to economic sovereignty. It is the mechanism by which a nation ensures that its financial resources serve its people rather than enslaving them. It is not a radical experiment but a return to the fundamental principle that the power of credit should rest in the hands of the people and their representatives rather than in the vaults of predatory institutions. It is the means by which an economy can be made to serve the many rather than the few, by which the wealth of a nation can be reinvested rather than extracted, by which prosperity can be built upon a foundation of productive labor rather than speculative finance.

Consider the simple but devastating contrast between the private banking system and what a public banking system could offer. In the current model, every dollar of government spending that is not immediately covered by tax revenue must be borrowed. That borrowing does not come from the people, nor from institutions that serve the national interest, but from private lenders who demand repayment with interest. The people do not benefit from this arrangement. They do not receive dividends from the profits generated by their government’s borrowing. They do not see their wages increase as a result of this financial maneuvering. They do not gain economic security from the accumulation of debt in their name. The only beneficiaries are the lenders, the financial institutions that profit from the necessity of public spending, the bondholders who grow rich on the backs of taxpayers who will never see relief.

Now imagine a system in which the government does not borrow from private banks but from a national public bank owned by the people themselves. The interest paid on loans for infrastructure, for economic development, for national security, for public investment does not disappear into the pockets of private creditors but is returned to the public treasury. The burden of debt is no longer a drain on the nation’s future but a means of reinvestment in its own strength. The financial system ceases to be a parasite and becomes a source of national power.

The same principle applies to individual lending. Under the current model, workers are forced to seek credit from private banks whose sole objective is profit maximization. Mortgages, student loans, personal credit—all are structured to extract wealth rather than to facilitate prosperity. A worker takes a loan to purchase a home, not as an act of ownership but as an entry into decades of indebtedness. A student borrows for an education, not as a means of self-improvement but as a lifelong financial burden. A public banking system would turn this equation on its head. It would offer credit at fair rates, not as a means of exploitation but as a mechanism for shared prosperity. Instead of draining workers to feed the banking class, it would empower them to build real, lasting wealth. Instead of trapping generations in an endless cycle of repayment, it would ensure that borrowing is a tool for advancement rather than a sentence to economic bondage.

Public banking is not an abstraction. It has existed before, and where it has been implemented, it has thrived. The Bank of North Dakota, the only state-owned bank in the United States, has operated for over a century with remarkable success. It reinvests its profits into the state rather than distributing them to private shareholders. It supports small businesses, funds infrastructure, and provides financial security in ways that private banks cannot and will not. It is a model for what the entire nation could achieve if it were to reclaim the financial system from those who use it as an instrument of domination rather than as a tool for the common good.

The establishment of a national public bank is not a matter of convenience; it is a matter of national survival. The debt system that now governs our economy is unsustainable. The concentration of financial power in the hands of a few is not merely unjust but dangerous. The continued dependence of the government on private creditors is not merely inefficient but self-destructive. The only path forward is the one that returns control of credit, of finance, of economic destiny itself to the hands of the people.

To those who say this cannot be done, let them explain why a nation that built its own industries, that forged its own steel, that electrified its own cities, cannot build its own banks. This country has never lacked the capacity to create, only the will to defy those who would hoard power for themselves. We split the atom, we put a man on the moon, we bridged continents with steel and ingenuity. We have built empires of commerce, empires of innovation, empires of production. But we are to believe that banking—a system of ledgers, of credits and debits, of transactions no more complex than the railways we laid or the skyscrapers we erected—is beyond our reach? That it is some untouchable domain reserved only for those who have exploited it for their own enrichment? It is a lie, a deception, a myth woven by those who have convinced us that their rule is permanent, that their dominion over finance is immutable. It is not. It is nothing more than a fortress built on paper, a monopoly that has been allowed to exist only because the people have yet to seize what should have been theirs all along.

To those who say this is an attack on the free market, let them explain why the current system should be considered free at all. What market is free when a handful of institutions dictate the terms of credit, when entire industries live or die at the whim of speculators, when the value of a currency, a home, a job, is determined not by production, not by labor, not by actual economic growth, but by the decisions of unelected financiers in marble towers? A system where failure is rewarded, where the reckless are bailed out, where corruption is normalized—this is not a market, it is a rigged game, a tilted table where the dice are loaded and the dealer is in on the con. Free markets imply competition, yet in the realm of finance, competition has been eradicated. The megabanks absorb the small banks, the investment firms buy out their rivals, the corporations grow fat while the worker is told that stagnation is the natural order of things. They dare to lecture us on free enterprise while they construct monopolies, while they write the rules in their favor, while they extract from the economy rather than contribute to it.

To those who say that reform is enough, let them answer why after every crash, every bailout, every financial catastrophe engineered by the private banking system, the same institutions remain in control, unchallenged, unrepentant, and unrestrained. Let them explain why, when the banks gamble away trillions and bring economies to their knees, they do not face consequences but are instead rewarded with public money, shielded from prosecution, allowed to carry on as though their crimes were mere miscalculations rather than acts of economic warfare. The system does not punish them, for the system was built to protect them. When the worker stumbles, he is cast aside. When the homeowner struggles, he is foreclosed upon. When the student cannot pay, he is burdened with interest until the day he dies. But when the financier destroys the livelihoods of millions, he is rescued, rehabilitated, restored to power as if the catastrophe had never occurred. Reform is the illusion that something is being done when in truth, nothing is changing. Reform is the balm applied to the wound to keep the patient from realizing that the blade is still in his back. The bankers do not fear reform; they design it, they shape it, they guide it to ensure that nothing of substance will ever threaten their hold on the economy. The only thing they fear is the one thing they cannot control: the people waking up, the people demanding more than scraps, the people deciding that they will no longer be ruled by institutions that have failed them time and time again.

The truth is undeniable. The system as it stands is not one of economic necessity, but one of deliberate manipulation. We are not asking for something new. We are demanding the return of what should have been ours all along—the control of our own economy, the right to direct our own financial future, the power to ensure that banking serves the people rather than the other way around. If they tell us it cannot be done, it is because they fear what happens when we realize that it can.

There is no true economic freedom without financial sovereignty. There is no real national strength when a country must beg for credit from those who serve no interest but their own. There is no justice in a system that binds generations to debt while rewarding those who gamble with the livelihoods of millions. Public banking is not just a policy—it is a necessity. It is not merely a proposal—it is a demand. The American people must no longer accept servitude disguised as stability. They must no longer tolerate an economy that thrives on their indebtedness while offering nothing in return. They must seize control of their own financial destiny, reclaim what has been taken from them, and build an economy that serves the people rather than exploits them.

The time for waiting is over. The time for action is now. A republic that allows its citizens to be shackled by debt while its financial class flourishes on their suffering is not a republic at all. It is a machine of extraction, a system of legalized plunder, a government not of the people but of the bankers. It is a rigged game, a crooked order designed to ensure that the many struggle while the few feast. That system must fall. Not gradually. Not through half-measures. Not through the empty promises of politicians who bow before the altar of finance while speaking the language of reform. It must be dismantled, torn apart, ground into dust so that something better can take its place. This is not a request. This is not a plea. It is an ultimatum. The workers, the builders, the entrepreneurs, the students, the families of this nation must stand together and demand what is rightfully theirs—a financial system that serves them, not one that feeds upon them like a parasite growing fat on the lifeblood of the people. They must demand an end to the banker’s tyranny, an end to a system where the same institutions that foreclose on homes are bailed out with taxpayer money, where corporations are handed trillions in free credit while the worker drowns in interest, where wealth is hoarded, speculation is rewarded, and labor is robbed of its worth.

There can be no compromise with this system. There can be no negotiating with those who have built their fortunes on suffering. They will cry foul. They will call it radical. They will scream that public banking is an assault on free enterprise, that it is an attack on the sacred pillars of capitalism. But what they truly fear is the loss of their dominion. What they truly fear is that the people, once awakened, will refuse to be chained any longer. What they truly fear is the end of their free ride, their ability to conjure wealth out of nothing while demanding endless toil from those who actually build, actually create, actually sustain this nation. Let them fear. Let them tremble. Let them know that their time is running out. Public banking is not the future. It is the only future worth fighting for, and fight we shall. We will not be lectured by the robber barons of Wall Street. We will not be told to tighten our belts by the very men who gorged themselves on our labor. We will not ask for permission to reclaim what is ours. The economy must be rebuilt from the ground up, the financial order ripped from the hands of those who have used it as a weapon, and placed firmly in the hands of the people. The debt machine must be dismantled, the wealth of the nation returned to those who produce it, and the chains of economic servitude broken once and for all. The fight is here. The time is now. Either we rise, or we submit. Either we take back control, or we remain slaves to a system designed to devour us. The choice is ours, and history will remember whether we had the courage to seize what is rightfully ours.