According to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close) marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one of enlightenment, justice, and peace.  It’s hard to see that change just yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the once-boring world of banking.

In the dark age of Kali Yuga, money rules; and it is through banks that the moneyed interests have gotten their power.  Banking in an age of greed is fraught with usury, fraud, and gaming the system for private ends.  But there is another way to do banking, the neighborly approach of George Bailey in the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Rather than feeding off the community, banking can feed the community and local economy.

Today the massive too-big-to-fail banks are hardly doing George Bailey-style loans at all.  They are not interested in community lending.  They are doing their own proprietary trading—trading for their own accounts—which generally means speculating against local interests.  They engage in high-frequency program trading that creams profits off the top of stock market ...

What do you call a private, profit-driven, market solution to a public, collective concern? I call it a business plan masquerading as public policy. I call it TARP.

Those on the political right claim that the achievement of personal responsibility commingled with the privatization of public services and institutions will guarantee social equity, freedom, and inclusion. To this end, they champion an ideology intent on uprooting public institutions by architecting a world premised less, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, “on the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified,” and more on the suffocation of the commons.

Some days I wonder whether terms like “public good” and “the commons” will be recognizable to my children. At their core, public institutions are intended to support the public good. In theory, at least, they ought to reflect the indigenous needs of “everyday” people and remain both accessible and accountable to the communities in whose trust they’ve been chartered. But in an era of “the privatization of everything,” what successful examples do we have of public—not private— solutions to collective social challenges?

For nearly four years now the federal government’s response to the economic crisis has been characterized by a cavalcade of bailout programs for the largest banks and financial institutions, with notably little assistance offered to citizens. The U.S. unemployment rate, for instance, remains virtually unchanged since the beginning of the crisis in mid-2007.  Instead of enacting programs aimed at reducing unemployment or the incidence of poverty the government has (without much oversight) introduced public funds into the private banking system in hopes of restoring private lending to pre-crisis levels through the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

TARP was created by the passage of H.R. ...