Portside

Despite North Dakota's collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. Farmers were losing their farms to Wall Street bankers. They organized, won an election and passed legislation to create a public bank. The Nonpartisan League's rise to power was fast and had a lasting impact on North Dakota. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota's population, could do following that state's lead.

What was the purpose of the 2011 US intervention against Qaddafi? Was it for humanitarian purposes alone? Qaddafi's greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank. This project was destroyed by NATO. Ellen Brown finds the motivation to be money, oil and banking.

It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. — Attributed to Henry Ford

Countries do need to be able to buy foreign products that they cannot acquire or produce domestically, and for that they need a form of currency or an international credit line that other nations will accept. But countries are increasingly breaking away from the oil- and weapons-backed US dollar as global reserve currency. To resolve the mutually-destructive currency wars will probably take a new Bretton Woods Accord.

Central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates.

Gayle McLaughlin, the bold mayor of Richmond, California is threatening to take underwater mortgages by eminent domain from Wall Street banks and renegotiate them on behalf of beleaguered homeowners. A member of the Green Party, which takes no corporate campaign money, she proved her mettle standing up to Chevron, which dominates the Richmond landscape. Richmond’s city council is only one vote short of the supermajority needed to pursue the eminent domain plan.

Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika--the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.

The municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as “unsecured” claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.