money moves the world and banking moves money welcome to the public bank solution conversations about an emerging new american institution a publicly owned partnership banks able to rebalance the scales of monetary control in service of the public interest and our common wealth brought to you by the public banking institute and its national association of partners and organizations hello and welcome to the public banking solution i was a creature of the public banking institute and this program we talk about what public banking is and the kind of impact that it makes and can make in the american society as well as our democracy and our economy and two we've been talking in the previous segments about how it works so our conversation today is with bad standard that is a member of the board of public bank institute but also the policy director for comment i mix u organizations that are seeking to materialize economic justice in our institutions in our laws in our policies and certainly in movements like public  banking and a variety of other material movements which are seeking to democratize the economy and protect the commons so when you say dr ties the economy but what does that really refer to well right now as you know the for example the practice of banking and the practice of the creation of money the creation of value the determination of credit decisions are kept in private hands and not only in private hands but in a very select elite few private hands we think as i know that the public banking institute believes that that those decisions have been made irresponsibly they've been made with a kind of aloofness and lack of awareness of how those financial decisions impact the everyday lives of ordinary working people working families and particularly disadvantaged groups groups who are on the margins of society economically  both domestically and internationally so these credit decisions that you're talking about are often not made locally though and that's her community bank or credit union savings alone those are locally based decisions but what happens typically is those the numbers of those banks are going down down down they've lost thousands in the last couple of years something i think you'll agree that the community should be deeply concerned about because these are front line credit exten are the decisions made by and large for who gets the money it's good that you brought up community banks because what we're seeing in across our cities not only in urban areas but many times in rural areas is a confluence of events all of which are tidy in different ways to the decisions of these of these large wall street banks these big private banks one of those is definitely a decline in community banks and there is a sharp decline in community banks across the country right now which is disastrous for communities because community banks small banks are really the first line of determinations of credit for small businesses and for other entities in the community they tend to have lending portfolios that are unique to the character of the towns in the cities in the communities that they serve and so they don't tend to they don't tend to have cookie cutter portfolios as to what those loans look like but instead tend to make their decisions based on the needs of the community so we're seeing those community banks in sharp decline we're seeing that at the same time that as a result of out of control wall street fees for handling municipal money as well as risky ventures such as interest rate swaps and other ways in which wall street banks of trapped unisa polities and what we're seeing is that as community banks decline city budgets also are in decline and city services begin to shut down and small businesses begin to fail and you have more and more main streets across america with boards on their windows and going out of business sales and you see situations where big box stores come in and replace local proprietors all of these things have human impacts human day to day impacts that are things that then we hear about in the news over the news doesn't always make those connections so when you see a police shooting in ferguson missouri you need to make the connection to the fact that ferguson missouri has a depleted municipal budget and as a result of that depleted municipal budget you have the cops essentially being tax collectors virtual tax collectors pulling people over and charging exorbitant fines and throwing people in jail so that citizens are kind of living in fear of these of having to pay multiple citations for them you see budgets depleted and so there is a lack of city services a lack of emergency services a lack of shelter services a lack of treatment services for people who might need some help in a public manner all of those things then spell the depletion of resources in cities in a kind of desperation and that's when the violence public banking institute and other new economy organizations is that we make the connections between the tragedies that occur in these cities and who's really pulling the financial strings and then of course how we can take back that control through public banks work around cooperatives sustainable economic enterprises in cities all of those things are connected together and much of what we do and i know much of what you do is connecting those dots so that the people in the media can see that as a systemic example of a systemic failure of the private banking system or the global large bank system you know i read  wonderful article in the on the news yesterday about how the state of north dakota with its flush economy with its surplus budget and with its very successful public bank  spending billions of dollars are on modernizing and improving the entire state's water supply and they can do that because they have a public bank because they have a robust public economy as well as a private economy because the community banks there can lend to private businesses when for infrastructure they're doing very well and as we know the public bank is a huge part of that now contrast of real risky financial practices with our money with detroit with detroit has money and as a result of that huge sections of the water infrastructure in detroit became privatized  or became subject to emergency management an elected emergency managers and then as a result of that everyone knows about this humanitarian crisis where these public private partnerships in water management in detroit started shutting off the water of those private citizens not the businesses mind you but the private citizens who are an able may have been just delinquent a couple of months behind on their water bills same thing now happening in right here in new jersey same thing happen beginning to happen in baltimore as well and in a lot of places with depleted municipal budgets compare that with north dakota who with their healthy budget engineered and sustained by the public bank of north dakota is able to modernize their water systems and no one's going out without water in north dakota and a huge part of that is that they have a bank whose mandate is to serve the people and that's really the key we want to solve these problems we need to materialize the empathy that we have for one another we need to materialize the spirit of cooperation that exists in human enterprise in the way that we can do that is by sustainable local economic growth which as those in the public banking institute know comes from public banks and you only need to look at the bank of north dakota for that example that's  creating you know it's not it's not enough to justify lancer p it's not enough for philanthropies is not the answer for the problems that we're seeing in our cities for the problems that we're seeing with municipal with municipalities the answers to hard wire economic justice into our institutions and the way that we do that is by democratizing that part of the economy specifically that's devoted to financial decision making right yeah  one of the things that common omics usa has focused on which i think is part and parcel of this economic justice and fairness concern is the value of the commons one of the things that we  the american mean the myth really is that the public can't really effectively run things and that it's better private industry will do everything better now that has not actually been proven to be true you know in some over half a billion dollars in interest rate swaps scams basically had to close down twenty four schools for thousands of teachers in the end just to pay debt so we're trapped in this system of dominance of dependence on the private issuance of money when we in fact have we have the right and the ability to issue our own now the commons when we talked about the commonwealth there was an earlier and earlier phrase built around the sense of community but the economy is focused on a private sort of an interest of how can we make a lot of money how we can who is if the bottom line is of our priority is to profit from this then the concern of a community is relegated to something much less so what you're talking about here is changing the priority altogether and allowing money then to be a relational device that a utility as opposed to a commodity its pursu for private personal interest that i've gone on a bit about more than i should have about the commons but i'd really like to hear you take a little bit more about how it critical the commons isn't with the role it plays into the general welfare  well being what it looks like what was and what part of the collins for me money and particularly the lending of credit for development and community purposes is more like the road than it is like a car the road or a building on the road the money is the root of the money is the utility it's a means to an end and as alan brown and many other really thoughtful people have said it is better then that money be a public utility and that the control of finance be a public utility than being in private hands because if it's left in private hands it's going to become much like the comments has become when privatized and i would say the only problem with your description of privatisation is that you were not enthusiastic enough in talking about the myriad ways in which privatized nation has failed as failed our economy has been able to meet the needs of the people in the case of water is we've been discussing before in every instance in every historical instance in contemporary instance of privatisation of water management in america  price of water for consumers has shot for magically up and the quality of water our protection from pollutants said water safety water quality issues has shot way down that is a universal truth in terms of the privatisation of water there's not a single community in this country where privatisation has resulted in either a higher quality of water or decrease in cost increase access to water it's always that those of us who are forces to be able to move around don't experience the struggles that you were referring to in ferguson and so forth and so many and citizens all around the country the majority of the people who are suffering are at the hands of our economic system are not seen since and when they were heard in desperation it becomes a story well so the public banking thing is a breakthrough for creating a new prospect for them it certainly can be i think that it's very important to keep emphasizing things like democratization and transparency and involvement and access and i think that we have to continue to push those values on the things we're talking about banks the control of money those are conceptually those are really value neutral things they are functions of the people that are running them and so what a public bank can give us in a community that a private that a big private is aloof from that community can't give us is both democracy and transparency right if you have a public bank then you can write down the people determine the direction and the values and the policies of that bank they can put it right in the charter or they can say this bank will prioritize these community needs and there is a transparency in the process that doesn't exist as right now in the private sector but does exist in a healthy democratized public sector example of what it's like to have your own bank where you can say look we have the ability to extend credit for purposes that we need including future generations so there's a bill if you want to speak to it that was on the state house in north dakota that said look what people are born in north dakota we're going to give them an inheritance or a dividend just being born here you have what i think you know how they do that five thousand dollars when you're born here and we'll put it in your name in our bank in our public bank and when you get to be twenty five we'll have grown to maybe twenty where you know and you can do three one of three things with it you can go to school you creation you can start a business or you can buy a home and so they have invest in the primacy of the public interest and of the long term generational improve it with because they have the ability with their bank depresses the role of taxes but increases the prospects of living there so imagine that model in the places the most vulnerable economic places in america the places that really are and that really have suffered sometimes intergenerational leverage suffered because of the poor economic decisions or myopic after nomic decisions of powerful people and so you take that model of  d and put that model in baltimore and let's see what happens let's see whether intergenerational equity whether investment financial investment in human beings truly pays off