As one of eight cities participating in the National League of Cities’ ‘Bank on Cities’ program, Louisville Metro will be “encouraging” the approximately 29,000 area households without bank accounts to get one.

Although the program is modeled off one that started in Pelositown San Francisco, its basic tenets are at once tangible and morally sound: To lift up the urban poor by rerouting their reliance upon shyster-prone payday lending services to the much safer alternative of banks because, you know: The suicide rate at Goldman Sachs has dropped just a little bit.

Essentially, Americans without a bank account are forced to live in a kind of fiscal limbo: Without a checking account one cannot gain access to most goods and services (i.e. leasing apartments, homes, and/or cars; obtaining credit cards; etc.) that have historically been made available to the Middle Class. As such, these 30 million “unbanked” individuals are forced to rely on (often) predatory money lenders, corporate usurers, and any number of shyster-prone “quick-cash” outfits whose interest rates are too often beyond the day-to-day means of the poor bastards who utilize them, costing them (the unbanked) billions of dollars annually.

Instead, the ‘Bank on Louisville’  initiative will focus on the development of personal checking and savings accounts, as well as how not to flush your money down the drain despite how trendy the practice may be. [Courier-Journal] Of course it could just be an effort to pump even more money into the banking system, but I digress…