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THE PUBLIC OPTION IN BANKING: HOW WE CAN BEAT WALL STREET AT ITS OWN GAME

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1. THE PUBLIC OPTION IN BANKING: HOW WE CAN BEAT WALL STREET AT ITS OWN GAME | Froogalizer.com, on August 6, 2009 at 4:02 am said:

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2. 

   Blair T. Longley, on August 6, 2009 at 8:11 am said:

   http://www.marijuanaparty.ca/forum.html

   I added this post to our thread

   Some Monetary System articles,

   which continues my discussion of

   these kinds of issues posted there.

   http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/public_option.php

   THE PUBLIC OPTION IN BANKING:

   HOW WE CAN BEAT WALL STREET AT ITS OWN GAME

   Ellen Brown, August 5th, 2009.

   As Webster Tarpley said in the previous post,
   Ellen Brown seems to be sort of social credit.

   To quote from Ellen Brown’s article:

   … In Canada, the trendsetter in public banking is the province of Alberta. Alberta’s publicly-owned banking system, called Alberta Treasury Branches or ATB, was initiated during the Great Depression to give the private banks a run for the public’s money. According to a government publication titled “These Are the Facts: An Authentic Record of Alberta’s Progress, 1935-1948”:

   “The Treasury Branch system enables the people to pool their financial resources and to use these resources for their mutual benefit thereby enabling them to progressively free themselves from the stranglehold of the existing financial monopoly. These Treasury Branches provide effective competition for chartered banks thereby ensuring banking services at reasonable rates.”

   From 1929 to 1933, the average annual income in Alberta had fallen from $548 to $212, a staggering 61 percent drop. Interest payments continued to bleed the farmers of cash, and taxes had increased. In 1935, Albertans decided they wanted a change and swept the Alberta Social Credit Party into power. In 1938, the system of Alberta Treasury Branches was set up literally as a branch of the provincial government. The stated goal of the ATB was to “provide the people with alternative facilities for gaining access to their credit resources.” Bankers initially scoffed at Alberta’s attempts to establish a competing economic system, but Albertans had high hopes and rushed to deposit their meager savings in the Treasury Branches. The government invested in the ATB only once, contributing $200,000 in 1938. That was all that was necessary, as the system was self-funding after that. By 1946, the ATB was turning an annual profit of $65,000. According to a booklet titled “Albertans Investing in Alberta 1938-1998,” by 1998 the ATB had remitted $68 million to the provincial government.

   It is my understanding that this Social Credit experiment in Canada was significantly arrested by cases the government of Alberta lost before the Supreme Court of Canada, since the constitution of Canada clearly gives power to the Federal government over the money system.

   The theoretical powers of the Bank of Canada are excellent, some of the best in the world, if not the best. However, that was only in theory, according to the way the constitution of Canada was written, and according to the how the Bank of Canada was originally created, and still theoretically exists today. In practise, the government of Canada has given away at least 95% of the power to make money out of nothing to private banks. Furthermore, the government of Canada has stopped using the Bank of Canada in the way that it should be done, but rather the government of Canada goes begging to the private banking cartel to borrow money, that private banks make out of nothing, which then the government of Canada is obliged to pay back with interest. Since that system went into ballistic exponential growth in the 1970s, when governments began to spend more and tax less (especially to tax corporations less and less, compared to the taxes upon individuals) the government of Canada has paid over 2 trillion dollars in interest to private banks, for the use of money that the government of Canada could have created for itself, interest free. That was clearly the greatest crime ever committed in Canada. With the contemporary bailout money, and other similar scams, that astronomical sized fraud against Canadian taxpayers has even increased more dramatically. Of course, the vast majority of Canadian taxpayers that are being fleeced by that are continuing to be abysmally ignorant brain dead sheep when it comes to this, as my 25 years of work on the political contribution tax credit has overwhelming proven is a basic social fact. In my opinion, it is far more probable that the brain dead Canadian sheeple will be slaughtered before they wake up enough to prevent themselves from being routinely fleeced by the banksters. 25 years of experiences from my talking with Canadians have proven to me that they are almost all incompetent idiots, barely worth talking to. When I started I did not believe that, but I surely believe it now!

   To continue quoting Ellen Brown:

   In the United States, the trendsetter in public banking is the state of North Dakota, which has owned its own bank for nearly a century. North Dakota is one of only two states (along with Montana) that are currently not facing budget shortfalls. Ever since 1919, North Dakota’s revenues have been deposited in the state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND). Under the “fractional reserve” lending scheme open to all banks, these deposits are then available for leveraging many times over as loans. Other banks in the state do not see the BND as a threat because it partners with them and backstops them, serving as a sort of central bank for the state. BND’s loans are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) but are guaranteed by the state. North Dakota has plenty of money for student loans, makes 1% loans to startup farms, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, and is generally not feeling the pinch of the credit crisis at all.

   Theory and Practice: The Proof Is in the Pudding

   A bank charter brings with it the privilege of creating “credit” simply as an accounting entry on the bank’s books. The flaw in the private banking scheme is that banks create the principal portion of their loans but not the interest, which is continually drawn off the top as profit. New borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create this extra profit, making private banking effectively a pyramid scheme; and like any pyramid scheme, it has mathematical limits. Today, those limits appear to have been reached. Personal and national debts have gotten so large relative to incomes that it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction of solvency. We soon won’t have the money even to pay the interest on our existing debts, let alone to incur new ones. Public banking does not suffer from that flaw, because interest is not drawn out of the system but is returned to the public coffers. Public banking is thus mathematically sound and sustainable.

   That is the theory, but there is nothing so persuasive as putting it to the test. Like with the public option in health care, we need to pit the public banking option against the private banking option and see which works best. My money is on the public option.

   I would bet on the banksters winning not the public.

   Of course, the money SHOULD be a public utility.

   The money system SHOULD never be privatized.

   However, the money system has been,
   and the powers that gave banksters
   have enabled them to take control
   of the mass media and politicians,
   and to constantly privatize more,
   and more, and more, every day!

   Thus, we are ALREADY inside of the
   runaway fascist plutocracy juggernaut.

   The vast majority of the public already act like IDIOTS.

   Furthermore, their lack of contact with reality is DEEP.

   THERE ARE MATHEMATICAL LIMITS TO EXPONENTIAL GROWTH …

   It is impossible for the human population
   and human activities to continue endless
   exponential growth, and anything which
   stops that is, by definition, a real form
   of DEATH CONTROL, & therefore,
   revolutionary monetary systems must
   be based upon radical death control.

   The same goes for the previous post and
   the rest of the reactionary revolutionaries.

   There can be no technical fix or monetary reform
   that is sufficient to resolve these deeper problems.

   A fundamental problem is that
   endless exponential growth is
   absolutely not possible, and
   no new technologies can do
   anything but postpone the
   problems, while they shall
   thereby grow even worse!

   The ONLY real solutions, in both the shorter & longer terms,
   require different death controls, to make the real changes
   in the debt controls fit within and work within reality.

   Indeed, the kinds of collapses & genocides
   that I predict are the only real solutions
   that will be left, given that the vast
   majority of citizens are IDIOTS,
   are the new death controls, that
   shall drive the real changes in
   the real human ecologies, &
   “learning” from those will
   likely be our best hope.

   Reply
   • 

     Robert Searle, on August 6, 2009 at 1:46 pm said:

     Personally, I think it is largely a waste of time, and energy trying to get rid of the so-called banksters, as there are far more important issues to deal with notably global warming which could even end our planet, and civilization atogether!!

     With Transfinancial Economics (a modernization if you like of Social Credit) it would be possible to achieve massive global change of a high order in record time. And yes, it could be done by working in a enlightened way with corporations, and banks who hold the real power in the world.

     Reply
   • 

     Bob Walton, on August 7, 2009 at 1:26 am said:

     “the government of Canada has given away at least 95% of the power to make money out of nothing to private banks”

     “the government of Canada has paid over 2 trillion dollars in interest to private banks, for the use of money that the government of Canada could have created for itself”

     I should point out that your criticism is directed at the Bank of Canada and not to the Alberta Trust Bank Ellen writes about and whose success you apparently do not dispute.

     “banksters
     have enabled them to take control
     of the mass media and politicians”

     We have the same problem in America which is why we all need to encourage people to turn off the TV and start reading Ellen Brown.

     “revolutionary monetary systems must
     be based upon radical death control”

     “the kinds of collapses & genocides
     that I predict are the only real solutions
     that will be left, given that the vast
     majority of citizens are IDIOTS”

     Please note the following: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

     Although I was born in America, I am a proud descendant of Canadians of Scottish origin and I find your elitist comments about Canadians and “radical death control” to be repugnant. Perhaps you are writing out of frustration but this kind of talk usually comes from the enemies of liberty.

     Reply
     • 

       Blair T. Longley, on August 7, 2009 at 2:28 am said:

       Indeed, MASSIVE FRUSTRATION!!!

       If you care to, take a look at

       http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=loi&document=index&dir=court&lang=e&textonly=false

       “Major Court Cases Relating to the Federal Electoral Legislation ” in Canada.

       My name, LONGLEY appears twice on that list.

       Once in the middle and once at the end …

       Our Web site has this link about the current situation:

       http://www.marijuanaparty.ca/article.php3?id_article=413

       That provides further links to the entire background of it …

       As my first post stated:

       … “the vast majority of Canadian taxpayers that are being fleeced by that are continuing to be abysmally ignorant brain dead sheep when it comes to this, as my 25 years of work on the political contribution tax credit has overwhelming proven is a basic social fact.”

       I did not come by that opinion easily.

       It was due to 25 years of work, including 2 court cases against the government about the laws governing the funding of our politics.

       Of course, you have the same problems in the USA as in
       Canada, except probably not merely 10 times worse, but
       probably a hundred or a thousand times worse than here.

       By the way, I think your reference to “liberty” to be nothing but
       empty transcendental poetry, signifying nothing in our reality.

       I have been more fully developing my ideas in the thread

       “Some Monetary System articles” in our English forum:

       http://www.marijuanaparty.ca/forum.html

       However, I believe that is of no significance.

       The banksters are almost certainly going to start wars,
       and impose martial law, and nothing we can really do
       can stop them from doing that, and thereafter, we all
       will be into totally unpredictable future scenarios …

       Reply
3. 

   Joseph Danison, on August 7, 2009 at 2:59 am said:

   Thanks for another incisive article. Your argument gains depth and insight with each new essay. I see a book taking shape. It’s a pleasure to follow along!

   Reply
4. 

   Ellen Brown, on August 7, 2009 at 2:05 pm said:

   Thanks. I wish I had time for another book! but hopefully. Sorry I didn’t see the long diatribe above earlier; I normally don’t allow postings that call people idiots and so forth, and it’s far too long. But since it’s up there with responses, I’ll leave it.
   P.S. I’m Scottish through Canada myself, through Detroit, GM/Ford, Great Depression — all left a great scar on my father and grandparents, prompting me to write.

   Reply
5. 

   DrKrbyLuv, on August 8, 2009 at 5:25 am said:

   Ellen,

   Thanks for another great article!

   I agree, we need to be pragmatic in not simply waiting for Washington to “save” us; we need to be proactive at the state level. Why not, as a start, take away the “monopoly” to create money?

   Money from Washington comes with ropes attached – it is far more efficient to keep as many decisions at the local level as is possible.

   State banks enable us to at least partially “disconnect.”

   Larry

   Reply
6. 

   furniture, on August 12, 2009 at 7:40 am said:

   I wish I had time for another book! but hopefully. Sorry I didn’t see the long diatribe above earlier; I normally don’t allow postings that call people idiots and so forth, and it’s far too long.
   Your argument gains depth and insight with each new essay.

   Reply
7. 

   Skyland, on September 3, 2009 at 2:49 pm said:

   OK. I’ve read Web of Debt and now I’m scared. I’m 66 years old and can’t start over. Already I’ve lost half my savings in supposedly conservative mutual funds in 401k and IRAs. Now the government wants to cut Medicare and Social Security. Where the heck can I create a safe haven so I don’t lose the little I have left? Stocks are out. I got burned twice and never again! Banks could close any time, who knows. The FDIC doesn’t have enough funds to cover us all. Government securities used to be the safest place one could keep their money.
   Where does a peon like me keep their money safe? In my own safe in the basement? Buried in the yard? Under my mattress? I used to think people who thought like that were crazy but now I understand.

   “Web of Debt” is a real eye opener and should be required reading for everyone in the U.S. Thanks, Ellen, for researching and writing this hugely informative, fascinating and thought provoking book.

   Reply
   • 

     Ellen Brown, on September 4, 2009 at 2:52 am said:

     Thanks! That’s why we have to work to fix the system and fast, before our meager savings disappear. I heard someone say on a talk show that he was well diversified, some under the floor boards, some under the mattress, some in the backyard.

     Reply
8. 

   jraymondcpa, on August 6, 2010 at 7:05 pm said:

   http://jraymondcpa.com/irs-problemshome.php

   Reply

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