A Baltimore mayoral candidate may have the most on-point application of public banking we’ve seen in the whole economic democracy movement. By Matt Stannard for the Public Banking Institute. There’s a special place in my heart for Baltimore, where I’ve visited many times, and where some of my closest friends live. And several weeks ago I had the chance to interview Joshua Harris, a mayoral candidate who, ever ... Read more

The private banking system that dominates North America and Europe works very well indeed, writes Ellen Brown – for the bankers. As for us, it’s a disaster, as the banks use their monopoly over the creation of money itself, at interest, as a tool to extract ever more value from us and the entire economy. But there is another way! By Ellen Brown in The Ecologist. Above photo: New Yorkers Protest the $3 trillion Wall Street ... Read more

By Zach Cartwright of U.S. Uncut. Cities, counties, and states are all hemorrhaging hundreds of billions, and possibly even trillions of dollars a year in banking fees. The root cause of this extortion has been ignored, until now. The Public Banking Institute’s (PBI) What Wall Street Costs America project is shining light on the fact that fees paid to private Wall Street banks simply for managing accounts for state and local tax dollars is ... Read more

By John Duda in www.community-wealth.org. A report from our gathering at the CUNY School of Law How can cities redeploy their economic development resources to focus on building a more inclusive economy grounded in broad, local ownership?  How can policymakers get strategies like worker cooperative development the support and resources needed to reach truly meaningful scale? How can collaborations between communities, local government, and ... Read more

There is an enduring myth that people who rely on public assistance are unwilling to work.  By David Cooper, www.epi.org However, there are 41.2 million working Americans (nearly 30 percent of the workforce) who receive public assistance—and nearly half of these workers (19.3 million) have full-time jobs. Not surprisingly, these workers are concentrated in jobs paying low hourly wages. A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than ... Read more

By Jesse A. Myerson, www.thenextsystem.org Markets before capitalism  In her seminal work “The Origin of Capitalism,” the late scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood took on the credo that “capitalism emerged when the market was liberated from age-old constraints and when, for one reason or another, opportunities for trade expanded.” Schoolchildren in the US are commonly taught to conceive of the broad variety of political-economic systems, both those ... Read more

By Paul Buchheit in Common Dreams. (Photo: Ken Teegardin/cc/flickr) It came up in the Republican debate again, the curious notion that striving for less inequality is somehow a form of “class warfare.” The implication is that the richest people earned everything they have through their own initiative and hard work. But most of them have exploited an American financial system that has facilitated the transfer of our national ... Read more