Richard D. Wolff

Ethical banks are those that are subject to the usual banking rules and oversight but open themselves to direct access to their activities (they stress transparency) and focus lending on environmental and social priorities, etc. Here is a wikipedia list for the US; other countries have a generally greater presence of ethical banking:

USA

• Urban Partnership Bank, Based in Chicago. Successor to ShoreBank
• RSF Social Finance, based in San Francisco, not a 'bank,' but offers social investment accounts with rates comparable to bank CDs
• New Resource Bank, based in San Francisco. New Resource is a commercial bank that focuses on businesses that share their mission to progress sustainability within their community.
• First Green Bank, Based in Mount Dora, FL is a commercial bank dedicated to ethical practices and environmentally friendly investments.
• Beneficial State Bank, Headquartered in Oakland, with branches throughout California in Sacramento, East LA, North Hollywood, Fresno, Bakersfield, Santa Rosa, Porterville, and Visalia, as well as Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. Beneficial State Bank is a community development financial institution (CDFI), certified B Corporation, and a Global Alliance for Banking on Values member.
• Spring Bank, Based in the Bronx, New York, with branches in the Bronx and Manhattan, New York. Spring Bank is an FDIC insured commercial lender and certified community development financial institution (CDFI) with a stated mission to expanding financial inclusion in low-income neighborhoods.
• City First Bank, Based in Washington, DC, First City Bank is an FDIC insured, nationally chartered commercial bank with a mission to support and strengthen underserved communities in Washington DC and the surrounding suburbs.

Other value-based banks in the USA and around the world can be found with Global Alliance for Banking on Values.

There is a very old tradition of commentators responding to a period of serious crisis in the capitalist system (such as the end of the 19th century or the 1930s, etc.) by focusing on criticism of one or another part of the system rather than the system itself. Thus it is the government or it is finance or its is big business or it is monopolies rather than the system that is the problem. By system I mean the basic way production of goods and services is organized - the employer-employee model, say, versus an alternative system such as the worker coop model. The system is the last thing to be criticized by such folks as prefer to find a part wanting rather than the basic system wanting. Foroohar is in that old tradition in her new book. Socialist solutions would precisesly change the basic system from capitalist to something else rather than change mere parts....and nowadays socialists would add about changing just parts: society has been there and done that and it does not suffice.

Worker coops by their very nature and design would not be governed by the profit motive as it works in capitalism. In capitalism, the well-being of a small minority (major shareholders and boards of directors) depends on the profits they extract from their employees. In a worker coop, where the workers themselves are their own board of directors, their interests are not limited to maximizing profits but are likewise interests in the quality of the life and work and the life at home for workers. Their goals are multiple and complex versus the "bottom-line" focus on profits of capitalists. Thus their decisions, behaviors, and the social consequences of them will vary a great deal from what happens in capitalism.

On socialist planning: my criticisms of the USSR, PRC etc are not that the planned their economy but rather focus on how that planning was done, by and for whom? The governments in socialist countries planned without the mass base of society - the working people - being able institutionally to control and shape the goals and operations of that planning. Worker coops enable working people to control and shape the government that plans and thus the planning that results. I would anticipate planning as a feature worker coops will choose to coordinate the interdependent decisions of the different worker coops, but it will be a new and different kind of planning.

Rather than repeat in detail (as you request) those arguments, let me instead point you to where you can find them spelled out: Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012, Chapter 4.

"Free markets" are a utopian fantasy, a dream of people who want and need to imagine an economy functioning without any collective agent or agency to govern, regulate, etc. It is very anarchistic. It has been tried to various degrees and failed to come into existence. Its failure has not been for lack of ideological commitment or effort. "Laissez-faire" capitalism always oriented itself towards an utopian ideal of "free markets" as a distant goal of policy and hopes.

Many factors have precluded the achievement of the utopian dream of "free markets." Chalking it up to evil elites is too simple to be of use. Even if you believe that, you would need to explain how they achieved the power to do that, why no countervailing power overcame them, and so forth.

Every policy movement towards "free markets" over the centuries has been undone, stymied, frustrated, reversed, etc. That has to be explained in some serious analytical way, or else the conclusion that needs to be drawn is that it is an unworkable fantasy that human history has rejected. 

By the way, on the left, communism in its utopian formulations likewise defends itself as "never yet tried," leading to the same set of questions about why not etc that demand the same analytical response if the whole idea is not to sink into largely irrelevant fantasy.

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