What if the people owned the bank, would it make life easier – PB/TK
Open thread for night owls: Cities have sparked a movement to create publicly owned banks – By Meteor Blades / May 22 2017
At The Nation, Jimmy Tobias writes—What if People Owned the Banks, Instead of Wall Street? From Seattle to Santa Fe, cities are at the center of a movement to create publicly owned banks.
Craig Brandt got pissed that the City of Oakland, California, had no choice but to do business with financial crooks—specifically the scamster banksters of the Libor scheme. They confessed and paid fines that didn’t come close to making whole the cities and states that lost billions because of their crime. Brandt wanted more. He wanted the city to stop doing business with any banking institution convicted of a felony or required to pay more than $150 million in fines. The city councilors said no can do. Because if they did, there wouldn’t be left a bank big enough to do business with. All of them crooks, in other words. Here’s Tobias:
“After the City Council turned him down, [Brandt] started looking for other ways to wean Oakland off Wall Street. That’s when he fell in with a group of locals who have been nursing an audacious idea. They want their city to take radical action to combat plutocracy, inequality, and financial dislocation. They want their city to do something that hasn’t been done in this country in nearly a century, not since the trust-busting days of the Progressive Era. They want their city to create a bank—and, strange as the idea may seem, it’s not some utopian scheme. It’s a cause that’s catching on.
Across the country, community activists, mayors, city council members, and more are waking up to the power and the promise of public banks. Such banks are established and controlled by cities or states, rather than private interests. They collect deposits from government entities—from school districts, from city tax receipts, from state infrastructure funds—and use that money to issue loans and support public priorities……”
Continue to dailykos.com article: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/22/1665086/-Open-thread-for-night-owls-Cities-have-sparked-a-movement-to-create-publicly-owned-banks
