The Community Bank

One downside of globalization has been the loss of  non-virtual community in banking interests.
Though it's kicking up my allergies, I decided recently to re-read Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis. It is dusty. The antagonists are incontrovertibly racist. Still...I learned from this book.
When I was a kid, I read a lot of Sinclair's books because they were forbidden for children in my house. I had gotten to that age where I was sure no one would notice if I snuck a book out of the bookcase to read, as long as the homework was done; but I could pretend it was ongoing. Sinclair seemed to have a dark, fatalistic, obsession-driven view of the world to me then. I needed him to set up opposite poles of that in my psyche. Of course, I had no idea what a "psyche" could be. However, I did know there existed in my thoughts and reactions, a set of decisions about what I wanted to do at any given moment in time. I would read, and read, hoping against hope I would never be a Lewis character. I did even more of that with the even more forbidden, Somerset Maugham. My dad kept
those novels in an old WWII army trunk in his closet. But I digress, aye?
Today, as I re-read Lewis, I realize how unique a thing a community bank has become since this novel was written. I remember that twenty years after this book was published, every bank I knew of in the Midwest was controlled by New York banks. I was shocked by that reality until I saw It's A Wonderful Life, even earlier in my childhood. I actually believed our street corner bank was our city's bank.
In the Lewis book, published in 1947, banks would be,central, in one character's imagination, to capturing new veterans, returning from WWII, encouraging them to deposit some funds, and take out
'hefty mortgages' for places to live.
Apparently, a veterans' center at that bank needed to enfold veterans as soon as they emerged from planes, trains, and automobiles in their home towns. Recent vets, and according to one Melissa Harris Perry show this week, especially female vets, have a high rate of homelessness and suicide.
Austerity be damned, Paul Ryan.
These vets do need to come home to families, not billionaires. Now whose children did you claim to be so worried about, because these people are someones children. Just because they are already born doesn't mean they deserve to be scrapped.
We need a lot of socially productive ideas in this country right now. And they are not going to be
generated or nurtured by profit motive alone, or by increasingly invasive austerity budget state
government. Grow up austerity mongers. You already know this country needs new investment, and you really don't need more people to starve before you admit it.
Mr. Ryan's good buddy, Mitt Romney,  should know it too. I can't be sure. He just seems to forge straight ahead with nonsense...wearing blinders.