My guess is that, given the choice, practically everyone would prefer to bank with a member-owned cooperative, i.e. a credit union, than a for-profit bank owned by outside shareholders. I mean, think about it: sneaky fees and outrageous surcharges are anathema, because it's more important for members to be satisfied with their experience than to wring out every nickel and dime of profit at the expense of customer sat…
These "regulatory hurdles" that prevent credit unions from competing with banks were not created in a vacuum, they were created by the banks. No amount of Kickstarting will solve the problem of our political system's fetish for financial domination. The cause is obvious: as a for-profit institution, a bank has the money to lobby for preferable laws, let alone the laws they write themselves. If people began switching…
Where are you going to find politicians to vote for who cannot be influenced by money? Not on your ballot, because the one-party-with-two-wings has effectively made it illegal to run a campaign as an alternative. Greens and Libertarians are kept from the debates, kept from the ballot with restrictive measures, and certainly aren't owning the machines that "count" the ballots and determine the elections. (The election fraud from 2000 has never gone away, it just stopped being headline news. It happens in a recent past political election one of the presidential candidates called my house on election night to report their observance of the fraud- in some cases the absolute number of votes they got went down as more votes were counted. A mathematical impossibility.)