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.

The Federal Reserve's newest bank president, a Republican who served as a top Treasury Department official during the financial crisis, called for policy makers to consider breaking up big banks to prevent future government bailouts. His proposals also include: Turning large banks into public utilities; and taxing leverage throughout the financial system. Seven years after the crisis, it is now time to move forward and end TBTF.

Maybe they can get away with it, but it certainly seems worthwhile putting up a fight to stop them.

Detroit's bankruptcy wasn't inevitable. Neither is Chicago's. But the austerity hawks don't want you to know that...When cities and states borrow money by issuing bonds, the lenders are typically high-wealth individuals, who purchase the bonds to get a tax break. It is a perverse system through which, rather than paying their fair share in taxes, the wealthy are instead able to lend that money to us, charge us interest for it, and then claim a further tax break on it.

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

Lean on Me. Hottest Year on Record. Movie: Spare Parts. Why We Need to End the War on Drugs. The Koch's Mysterious Swiss Bank.

The World Needs Doctors? Cuba Trains Them. Elizabeth Warren Rips Citibank. Movie: Selma. The Avian Tree of Life. The Cockroach.

Two years after we last investigated the the foreclosure crisis in most affluent black county in America, things aren't exactly looking up—except, maybe, for the banks.

BRICS and the SCO are the two largest independent international organizations to develop over the past decade. What role these new organizations will play internationally is not clear. Certainly sanction regimens will be harder to maintain because the SCO and the BRICS create alternatives. South Africa, for instance, announced that it would begin buying Iran oil in the next few months, an important breach in the sanctions against Iran.