We talk about the efforts in Vermont to create a new economy which includes a public bank that is designed to serve the needs of the public and protects public dollars from the risks of too big to fail banks with Gwendolyn Hallsmith, the new Executive Director of the Public Banking Institute. We also speak with Ellen Brown who has written numerous books and articles on public and postal banking and the big banks. This topic is especially timely given the huge bubble that is inflating on Wall Street at the same time that the world’s biggest economies are scaling back and there are numerous financial crises. Learn how to protect yourself and your community from the next crash.
Listen live here:
Progress Towards Public Banks that Serve Main Street with Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Ellen Brown by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant articles, books and websites:
15 Vermont Towns Say Yes to Creating a Public State Bank by Shadee Ashtari
Vermonters for a New Economy, Final Bank Study by Ellen Brown
Warren’s Post Office Proposal: Palast Aims at the Wrong Target by Ellen Brown
Bail-out is Out, Bail-in is In: Time for Some Publicly-owned Banks by Ellen Brown
Guests:
Gwendolyn Hallsmith is co-founder of Vermonters for a New Economy, and the new executive director of the Public Banking Institute, Hallsmith said: “It is clear that the bank lobby has a lot more traction in the State House than the cities, towns, and the citizens. It has been our contention that the state-chartered banks stand to gain by the legislation [to put public dollars into a state bank], and that their interests and the interests of the large out-of-state banks diverge on this issue.”
According to Vermonters for a New Economy, the bill is encountering fierce opposition, not from ordinary Vermonters, but mostly from lobbyists for big private banks. The group says that when Senate Finance Committee hearings began on March 18, the Finance Committee only invited representatives of big banks to testify concerning the proposal. This led a local paper, the Barre Montpelier Times Argus, to call the bill “politically unpopular” even though a large majority of towns supported it in the town meeting campaign.
A study by Vermonters for a New Economy, the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, and the Political and Economic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts states that a public bank would create “over 2,500 jobs” and add hundreds of millions in additional gross state product in the state.
According to the Public Banking Institute, public banks are countercyclical, meaning they are “capable of reducing the negative impact of recessions, because they can make money available for local governments and businesses precisely when private banks decrease lending.”
Ellen Brown, J.D., developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back.
In The Public Bank Solution, the 2013 sequel, she traces the evolution of two banking models that have competed historically, public and private; and explores contemporary public banking systems globally.
Brown developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. Brown’s twelve books include the bestselling Nature’s Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies.
Ellen serves as Secretary of the Treasury in the Green Shadow Cabinet and is running for Treasurer in California.