Insightful and educational article by Ellen Brown on our banking system, and why North Dakota has a model well worth emulating in the rest of the country. Highly recommended for those interested in better understanding our current financial situation, and for some real-world, workable public interest solutions to effectively solving them.

Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.

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In this dark firmament, however, one bright star shines. The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: North Dakota. North Dakota is also one of only two states expected to meet their budgets in 2010. (The other is Montana.) North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000 people, largely located in cold and isolated farming communities. Yet, since 2000, the state’s GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. The state not only has no funding problems, but this year it has a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it has ever had.

Why is North Dakota doing so well, when other states are suffering the ravages of a deepening credit crisis? Its secret may be that it has its own credit machine. North Dakota is the only state in the Union to own its own bank. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919, specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. The bank’s stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota.

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The BND’s populist organizers originally conceived of the bank as a credit union-like institution that would free farmers from predatory lenders, but conservative interests later took control and suppressed these commercial lending functions. The BND is now chiefly a “bankers’ bank.” It acts like a central bank, with functions similar to those of a branch of the Federal Reserve. It avoids rivalry with private banks by partnering with them. Most lending is originated by a local bank. The BND then comes in to participate in the loan, share risk and buy down the interest rate.

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The BND studiously avoids competition with private banks, but a publicly-owned bank could profitably engage in commercial lending. A successful model for that approach was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia , which served both central bank and commercial bank functions. For nearly a century, the publicly-owned Commonwealth Bank provided financing for housing, small business, and other enterprise, affording effective public competition that “kept the banks honest” and kept interest rates low. Commonwealth Bank put the needs of borrowers ahead of profits, ensuring that sound investment flows were maintained to farming and other essential areas; yet, the bank was always profitable, from 1911 until nearly the end of the century.

Indeed, it seems to have been too profitable, making it a takeover target. It was simply “too good not to be privatized.” The bank was sold in the 1990s for a good deal of money, but it’s proponents consider it’s loss as a social and economic institution to be incalculable.

A State Bank of Florida?

Could the sort of commercial model tested by Commonwealth Bank work today in the United States? Economist Farid Khavari thinks so. A Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, he proposes a Bank of the State of Florida (BSF) that would make loans to Floridians at much lower interest rates than they are getting now, using the magic of fractional reserve lending…

The state could earn billions yearly on these loans, while saving hefty sums for consumers. It could also refinance its own debts and those of its municipal governments at very low interest rates. According to a German study , interest composes 30 percent to 50 percent of everything we buy. Slashing interest costs can make projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable, but profitable for the state, while at the same time creating much-needed jobs.

Read The Complete Article

Also, for more on issues regarding the almost ponzi-like scams inherent in our current banking system, check out Brown’s webofdebt.com

Quoting from the dust cover on this book by Lee Siegal…

“Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The Web and its cultural correlatives and by-products - such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of ‘bourgeois bohemian’ - have turned privacy in to performance, play in to commerce, and confused ’self-expression’ with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine - that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but, rather, an appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Full of original insights, and bouyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture - for better or worse - in an entirely new way.”

Read more on this interesting book from reviews from The New York Times, Salon.com and Amazon.com

Though this year’s list of Academy Award-nominated documentaries is one of the strongest they’ve had in years, I’m hoping to see the award for feature-length documentary go to Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (along with the short doc category award going to my good friends Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert for their film The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant).

Burma VJ is a tremendously effective and important film about citizen media activists in Burma and the extraordinary risks they take to document government repression. The insights and lessons it provides for exposing not just the violent oppression of the military regime in Burma, but the influential power that grassroots, citizen-based media activism can have in confronting such oppression on the national and international political stage in the defense of human rights is transformative.

The video journalists and individual activists whose work is featured in this film took great personal risks to get this story out to the world. A number of them are currently incarcerated as a result of their roles in the Saffron Revolution. Some have been arrested and imprisoned by the government to lengthy sentences.

Please help the effort to free them by Signing The Petition To Free The Burma VJ Political Prisoners.

Watch a feature news story and interview with the film’s producers on Democracy Now!).

Watch an Interview with Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard and Khin Maung Win, Deputy Director of the Democratic Voice of Burma.

Ever wonder how North Dakota seems to be surviving the recession (depression?) as well as it is? Perhaps it’s their “socialist” banking system.

It has no automatic tellers or drive-up windows, doesn’t issue credit cards, and tends only a few thousand checking and savings accounts. Its only location is a glass, steamboat-shaped headquarters near the Missouri River, where the business moved from its original 1919 home in a former auto assembly plant.

The Bank of North Dakota — the only state-owned bank in the United States — might seem to be a relic. It was the brainchild of a failed flax farmer and one-time Socialist Party organizer during World War I.

But now officials in other states are wondering if it is helping North Dakota sail through the national recession.

Read The Full Report

Another commie liberal attacking America’s true economic achievers…

Warren Buffett’s Statement to Congress on Estate Taxes

Mr. Chairman, Senators, I appreciate the opportunity to express a few views on the estate tax.

I will limit my remarks to three points.

The first relates to the intellectual dishonesty employed by those who use the phrase ‘death tax.’ This term is clever, it is Orwellian, and it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead wrong.

More than 2.4 million Americans will die this year. About 12,000 of them will leave an estate that will be taxed when the exemption goes to $3 million, as Senator Grassley mentioned. It will be 9600 estimated and it’s been 19,000 when the exemption was (lower.)

That means that 99-and-a-half percent of estates will be tax-free. You would have to attend 200 funerals to be at one at which the decedent’s estate owed a tax. Indeed, far more people who die receive a large tax benefit. I don’t think that’s generally understood. Namely, a stepped up basis on appreciated assets.

If people insist on renaming the estate tax, it would be more appropriately labeled the ‘death present.’

The second point I would like to make is that in a country that prides itself on equality of opportunity, it is becoming anything but that, as the gap between the super rich and the middle class widens in dramatic fashion…

Twenty years ago, 1987, it took $220 million dollars to make the list. Now it takes $1.3 billion, about a six-for-one increase. The total wealth of the list in 1987 was then $220 billion. Now it’s $1.54 trillion, exactly a seven-for-one increase.

Tax law changes have benefited this group, including me, in a huge way. During that same period, the average American went exactly nowhere on the economic front. His income went from a median $26,061 to $48,201, almost exactly the increase of the CPI during the 20 years.

He’s been on a treadmill while the super rich have been on a spaceship.

Watch The Video/Read The Complete Transcript

This is rich. Cablevision Corporation has asked to review the constitutionality of the so called “must-carry” regulations, that call for your local cable provider to carry the local channels on the system.

That’s one thing, but their rationale for why they shouldn’t be required to do this is because cable corporations aren’t actually monopolies or duopolies, but are a “wide-necked vase in which all flowers can bloom.” As a colleague of mine pointed out, I guess that’s true as long as they own all the flowers along with the vase!

To paraphrase from the founder of today’s Market-Leninist state of China, “Let a thousand channels bloom!”

Read the full article from Multichannel News

Dean Baker nails it again…

It would difficult to imagine someone with a comparable record of disastrous failures being allowed to remain in most jobs. Would a nurse who routinely administers the wrong medicine and causes his patients to die be allowed to keep his job? Would a bank teller who leaves the cash drawer open remain in her position? How about the school bus driver who comes drunk to work?

In most lines of work, a certain level of competence is expected. Unfortunately, this is not the case for those who set US economic policy.

Read The Full Review

Also, it truly is a “Question of Priorities,” as Baker brings additional clarity and concision to the unnecessarily (and purposefully) convoluted economic situation, as well as detailing the negligence and even stupidity of the bank bail-outs, with this insightful interview.

Highly recommended.

Read The Interview

Tracy Rosenberg of Media Alliance delivers what is one of the best articles written on what public access is, what it represents, what it does, why it is important, and why it should be thoroughly protected. And the CAP ACT is current federal legislation which will do just that. Read more about the CAP ACT and how you can help support it here.

In May of 2009, I became a public access television producer. Couldn’t have picked a worse time.

Not because I don’t enjoy hosting and co-producing Media News. It’s a great joy to interview guests and try to shed a little light on the issues closest to my heart including: net neutrality and the digital divide, coverage of turmoil abroad and at home, the loss of local public affairs coverage and the rise in citizen journalism. I feel privileged to bring voices that need to be heard onto my local TV dial.

The reason it was bad timing is that the nation’s more than 3,000 public access centers are on the verge of extinction. Yours may go next week, next month or next year, but their days are numbered due to statewide cable franchising.

Statewide cable franchising is a term designed to put just about anybody to sleep, but here is what it really means. In the good old days, your local cable oligopoly, be it Comcast, AT&T or Time Warner, was required to go from county to county and negotiate for the right to be the cable provider of choice. In exchange for this mini-monopoly (whose value has been somewhat, but not entirely, degraded by the entrance of satellite providers like Dish and DirecTV), cities and counties could ask for things. Some were more or less asleep at the wheel, but many of them negotiated lots of great amenities: channels for governmental meetings to be aired, educational channels for the local schools and public channels for the citizens-at-large, sometimes including fully-staffed production studios that trained thousands of people in media making and citizen journalism.

Then AT&T decided this wouldn’t do, and launched their massive lobbying machine at the spunky and seriously undermanned PEGs (public, educational and governmental channels). They went state-by-state, legislature-by-legislature, and made their case that ever-rising cable rates could only be stemmed by more competition in the marketplace. The way to get more competition in the marketplace? End all this tiresome local negotiating and allow the giants to negotiate with one entity for all their franchises in the entire state. In my state, California, the law that became AB 2987 - The Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, assigned the Public Utilities Commission to that task. In the end, similar laws passed in 28 of the 50 states between 2004 and 2009.

The results are predictable. The laws and the outcomes vary from state to state, but essentially operational funds were gutted and channel-slamming, the act of layering multiple local PEG channels behind one menu so nobody will ever find them, became the rule. The lowest common denominator won out.

You can see why this might matter to me. But you might be wondering why this matters to you. After all, many of us are pretty overwhelmed with the amount of information we’re already sorting through and we may have never watched a public access television program.

But lets not forget a few things. In my state, only 66% of households have high speed Internet access in their homes. The other 34% don’t. Polls consistently show that more than 51% of American adults still cite the television as their primary source for news and information. There are a lot of people sitting around flipping their remotes looking for stuff to watch. And there’s not always much out there.

Even for those of us busily carting our laptops about, the Internet is a land of affinities. Sites emerge from Google searches you initiate or as links from places you already frequent and people you know. In some ways, it’s a bit of a closed circle.

I was once channel surfing with a friend late one night. All of a sudden she yelled out “that’s my hairdresser”. Turned out her hairdresser was a pesticides activist in her spare time and hosted a once-a-month program on the dangers of common household products. We weren’t looking for information on toxins in cosmetics. We started watching because we knew this person. And we stayed watching because we learned something: both about the subject and about someone who lived in our neighborhood.

That’s the importance of community media: the proximity that brings issues and people together that might never ordinarily bump into each other though they live side by side.

It is only mass communications that provides the opportunity for someone to stumble upon something unique when they tire of watching Inside Edition. Every time it happens, it’s a little miracle.

These are not miracles we can afford to lose and its not looking too good right now. There is a bill, H.R 3745, the Community Access Preservation Act in the House of Representatives, which will go a long ways toward blunting the most damaging effects of the statewide franchising laws. But it needs support. It’s not a partisan thing. Call or write your representative today and tell them “Hey, I want to be able to watch my county board of supervisors duke it out till all hours of the night. I want that working mom to be able to take GED prep courses on the TV around here. And I want my hairdresser to make the world just a little safer for teenage girls buying their first makeup products”.

It doesn’t totally compensate for those ever-rising cable television bills, but it helps.

And if you still have one, check our your local public access television channel. You won’t be sorry you did.

Read The Original Article from The Huffington Post

Nice write up from Henry Giroux on Howard Zinn who, love him or hate him, was a man who lived up to his principles. He was one of those special people whom, through one’s life and work, helped change the entire frame of how we approach history and how we should best approach it for understanding its true importance. I hope his work as an educator continues to serve as a positive example those engaged in teaching amongst all strata of academia.

There was something about Howard’s fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special - untainted by the often corrupting privileges of class entitlement.

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Howard refused to separate what he taught in the university classroom, or any forum for that matter, from the most important problems and issues facing the larger society. But he never demanded that students follow his own actions; he simply provided a model of what a combination of knowledge, teaching and social commitment meant. Central to Howard’s pedagogy was the belief that teaching students how to critically understand a text or any other form of knowledge was not enough. They also had to engage such knowledge as part of a broader engagement with matters of civic agency and social responsibility. How they did that was up to them, but, most importantly, they had to link what they learned to a self-reflective understanding of their own responsibility as engaged individuals and social actors.

He offered students a range of options. He wasn’t interested in molding students in the manner of Pygmalion, but in giving them the widest possible set of choices and knowledge necessary for them to view what they learned as an act of freedom and empowerment. There is a certain poetry in his pedagogical style and scholarship and it is captured in his belief that one can take a position without standing still.

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Howard was one of the few intellectuals I have met who took education seriously. He embraced it as both necessary for creating an informed citizenry and because he rightly felt it was crucial to the very nature of politics and human dignity. He was a deeply committed scholar and intellectual for whom the line between politics and life, teaching and civic commitment collapsed into each other.

Read The Complete Essay

As for how Zinn himself wanted to be remembered, he stated he would like to be thought of for ”introducing a different way of thinking about the world,” and as “somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.” 

The interview with Howard can be viewed Here.

This is one of the best, most concise, explanations I’ve ever read on how Wall Street banking firms are controlling the economy. Ellen Hodgson Brown describes an ongoing drama between Wall Street and Washington that gets next to zero coverage in the corporate press, and lays lie to the ongoing mythology of the “free market” that continues to intoxicate our nation’s prevailing political orthodoxy.

We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that US politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

Read The Article

Here’s an additional gem to help drive the point forward…
JPMorgan Chase Aided and Abetted a $250 million Ponzi Scheme