Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Public banking is one alternative model, and the grassroots movement that has formed around it intends to radically reimagine the banking system in the United States. Working with legislators across the US, advocates are pushing for the creation of public banks on the municipal, county and state levels.
At a recent forum at Oakland City Hall, experts from the public banking and community energy sectors explored how the creation of a public bank could help communities transition to clean energy while creating economic opportunities.
Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. How could California following that lead?
Significant savings of taxpayer dollars and sizable predicted profits were just two of the positive results of a 10-month study undertaken by the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico, moving the city one step closer toward creating America’s first new publicly-owned bank in almost 100 years.
Our narrator, having arrived in the capital of the Lakeland Republic, discovers that things are even stranger there than he thought…
Pope Francis’ revolutionary encyclical addresses not just climate change but the banking crisis. Interestingly, the solution to that crisis may have been modeled in the Middle Ages by Franciscan monks following the Saint from whom the Pope took his name.
Today, the Seattle Public Bank Coalition educates local policymakers and the public about the capacity of public banks to provide robust banking services while returning profits to the community.
If money is just an IOU, why are we delivering the exclusive power to create it to an unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent private banking monopoly?
The campaign for public banking was launched more than six years ago by Ellen Brown, a lawyer, researcher and writer who was surveying the ruins of the U.S. economy – nearly every state and countless municipalities drowning in red ink – and observed that North Dakota was getting along swimmingly.
In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown.
Public banking is a hot topic of late, both here on Shareable and in the world at large.
Welcome to the spring of sequester and discontent. Just ahead, whatever happens in the world of politics, a world of people are going to experience yet more cuts to education, housing, healthcare, and there’s no solution to poverty in sight. Even for those who were flushed with excitement last November, the new term is already feeling like a pretty glum place. What real change is likely to come? Probably not much. By how much are real wages going to grow? Probably less. ”If you counted poverty the way every other nation in the world counts it, a quarter of our society is in poverty,” says political economist Gar Alperovitz. So why is it then, that Alperovitz also says we may be witnessing the prehistory of the next American Revolution? What’s up?
