Ellen Brown: Well, on our website, Publicbankinginstitute.org , we have a page that's by state: what the progress of the
legislation is in your state. Twenty
states have now brought bills of one sort or another for State-owned
banks. There are people you can get in
touch with if you'd like to help. In
some states we don't even have a group, and if you felt like forming a group
that would be great. Or, you can just
write to Public Banking Institute, or just look on the website and you can see
how to get involved. And of course we'd
love to have you come to our conference.
Rob Kall: All right, yes. Now, I have another question. I call the show "Bottom Up Radio Show," and I
know that centralization has been a big problem in the economic situation that
we're in. Can you talk about
centralization versus decentralization, and how that applies to public banking
and the work that you're doing?
Ellen Brown: Ideally, North Dakota is the prime
example. In that case, what they were
trying to do was to keep their money local, to be used for local purposes. So right now we have this system where the
Wall Street Banks obviously are gobbling up the little banks; it was because
they were dealing in risky derivatives and other things that the whole system
went down in 2008, that we had the credit crisis; and yet, we're bailing them
out, at the expense of the depositors now, which is an outrage.
So if you want tot keep an eye on your money,
and you want your money to be used for your own benefit, you need to keep that
money local, and so that's the good of a local bank. Plus, if it's a publicly owned bank run by
civil servants that don't have a dog in the race (they're not going to make any
extra money if they gamble on derivatives, or by churning loans, or by bonuses,
fees, commissions, etc.), then you're going to have a more honest system that's
just there serving the public interest as a public utility.
Rob Kall: As I was reading while we lost you for a
minute, one of your ideas for putting the brakes on Wall Street is to
nationalize the TBTF banks as Gar Alperovitz has advised in his New York Times
editorial and his new book?
Ellen Brown: Some people say the alternative is to break
them up (which is what Bernie Sanders is pushing for right now), but some people
say you can't break them up, that we need these giant entities to deal with the
other giant entities around the world and to deal with global things, to deal
with big global companies; and that if we don't have them, that all of our
global companies are going to take their business to the foreign giants. So the alternative is, if we can't break them
up and if we have to support them, if we're underwriting the things, we should
own them. Therefore, we can determine
what they do, which is not outrageous at all.
40% of banks globally are publicly
owned. China, for example, which is
running circles around us, owns their banks.
That is their funding secret: they own the banks, they can issue the
money, they can issue the credit, they can determine where it goes, they don't
have this parasitic financial sector that's draining 40% of profits away from
the whole economy.
Rob Kall: How does this compare with people like Ron
Paul and Dennis Kucinich who have talked about ending the Fed? Where does that fit into the picture?
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