Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown”
When costly projects like infrastructure stare down government budgets, taxpayers and politicians understandably get nervous. If federal financial support doesn’t take the lead, states and municipalities must come up with large amounts of money on their own usually through bonds and raised taxes. Another approach widely touted is “public-private-partnerships” – a financial collaboration that shares responsibilities and outcomes between private …
Constructing the Democratic Public Bank As the movement to create publicly owned banks across America picks up speed, new questions arise about how to make them truly focused on serving public interests. Our guest Michael Brennan, a Research Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative and Board Director at the Public Banking Institute, says public banks can be either “good” or they …
How did America’s financial system, founded to be a democratic tool of economic development, wind up instead a tool of oligarchic control? Alexander Hamilton intended that America’s financial system would enable individual initiative and collective well-being through a system of sovereign money and credit, independent of the British financiers who wanted to recapture their lost colony as an economic vassal …
As America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve is the hub of our banking world and connects institutional monetary participants and systems to its critical functions and resources. Access to this network is not guaranteed for those wanting to start a new bank, and the process is arduous. But when five Native American nations began exploring the possibility of creating their …
Big Corp Moves In As money systems diversify through new digital systems at all levels of governments internationally, some large corporations are capturing mega-markets through exclusive payment systems. Primarily in developing countries at this point, these corporations have created systems similar to Visa and Mastercard which can take exclusive, competition-free control of national payment processing. This dystopic prospect of corporations …
Who We Are It takes a comprehensive historical understanding to grasp the true social and economic dynamics that got America started as an independent nation. Global imperialist interests 250 years ago, like today, wanted more than to just retain their wealth; they wanted to lock in oligarchic control. Our guest Anton Chaitkin’s new book Who We Are – America’s Fight for Universal …
Would you trade considerable inherited wealth to address the expansive systemic inequities generated by our financial system? Our guest Chuck Collins did just that and has written a book on how dynasties of private wealth have secreted trillions of dollars in offshore assets by obscuring accounts and creating other types of subterfuge that are served by an extensive and exclusive …
Public banks of one form or another are emerging like Spring flowers. Across the USA a score of new public interest banking initiatives aim to fill service and credit voids that private finance won’t or can’t provide. Today we discuss three emerging applications of public bank principles: serving the substantial number of un-and underbanked people in California through the proposed …
Land – YO! The discovery of land as an alternative to income as a basis for taxation is a provocative new territory for those concerned about wealth inequality and public finance. Land value was favored by Adam Smith and promoted by economist Henry George as a fairer methodology for determining appropriate levels of taxation. Our guest is Alanna Hartzok, Founder and …
What Can YOUR Bank Do? It’s not often you hear a bank president say that his bank will instinctively “rush in” to help alleviate economic crises and cataclysms, but that’s what the publicly-owned bank of North Dakota does. Our featured guest, BND president Eric Hardmeyer, describes his model public bank in both historical and functional terms for a rapidly expanding audience …
