ities, counties, and states are all hemorrhaging hundreds of billions, and possibly even trillions of dollars a year in banking fees. The root cause of this extortion has been ignored, until now.

The Public Banking Institute’s (PBI) What Wall Street Costs America project is shining light on the fact that fees paid to private Wall Street banks simply for managing accounts for state and local tax dollars is bankrupting communities across the country. The combined total for all 50 states may be as high as $4 trillion. PBI has launched a crowdfunding campaign to find the true cost of what private Wall Street banks really cost in major cities in all 50 states:

What Wall Street costs one state in banking fees

In New Jersey alone, approximately $701 million in fees went to Wall Street banks just in 2015......

“New Jersey is $170 billion in debt. The State Pension Plan is underfunded by $113.1 billion. There is a proposal to cut benefits to state employees by $2 billion this year,” Bartl told US Uncut. “It is obvious that this $701 million could go towards mitigating these cuts to state employees.”

Aside from the exorbitant fees charged for simply managing public money, Wall Street traps states like New Jersey into expensive schemes to invest public money in high-risk financial instruments like interest rate swaps. In late 2015, it was revealed that New Jersey paid $720 million over a 5-year period to get out of a complex financial gambling scam that Wall Streeters convinced municipalities would be a sure bet.

“Wall Street is America’s biggest predator of our common wealth and public resources,” McRee said. “About 50 percent of the costs we pay for infrastructure, for example, go to private financing that we could do ourselves if we had our own public interest banks. But that just scratches the surface of the whole debt-service regime that our local and state governments are obliged to use.”

“A criminal cartel of private finance”

Through the What Wall Street Costs America project, PBI hopes to create enough public awareness and outrage by creating an interactive platform where people can not only see how much their state is paying in private banking fees, but learn how the bleeding out of public revenues is starving communities of the money needed to provide basic services.....