It's so easy to blame the banks for the state of our economy
Alan B,
Agree but, their involvement played a major role nevertheless ! They're far from innocent !
They went along with all the blown out of proportion prices & simply lent the money !
They're guilty of complicity.

Alan,

unfortunately for mankind, we cannot/must not dismiss the banks so quickly, nor let them off so lightly.
Even though they are the root cause of our problems, they are not the only one in the mix.
Your co-op idea sounds great, but for some glaring negatives.
You see, the reason they won't work today, is because we have become lazy and entitled.
In the good ole days we used to have to work just to survive.
In those same good ole days the unions kept pushing wages up, unconscionably so, to the point it made our goods and services to expensive to export.
Now you and I are allies in that you believe in your thorium based power generating which would bring the price of energy down to an acceptable level.
My pet worry is the banks, or more the Elite Jews who own or run (apparently) 97% of the banks in the world, and control governments and major political decisions.
Start and finance wars, and the list goes on.
As drastic as it sounds, kill these elite nut jobs with visions of grandeur, like the "one world order" or "one world government", you get the picture.
These are not the ramblings of an old mentally impaired fool, they are the conveying of facts gleaned over time, and I have still some of the examples from which I refer.
Alan, internal bickering aside, we are being manipulated and driven to a point where we will be dependent on a select few who have connived and contrived to ascert themselves as the overlords, and all to our detriment.
Back to co-ops for a second.
Alan, co-ops don't work in an affluent society, because no-one has needs or demands or responsibility any more.
There are very few things we agree on today, and they are mostly self serving, with little or no community benefit in them.

Seeing that implicating the Banks isn't enough to stir interest, let's put the focus on investors & the Commercial Welfare outfits. Speculators are probably worse than banks !

Well ?