It´s Our Money with Ellen Brown

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - Who Really Owns Your Home? - 07/16/14

If you've got a mortgage, you probably assume that the folks receiving your
monthly payments are the ones holding your deed. But in Montgomery County,
PA., a dedicated Recorder of Deeds recently won a significant court battle
over the common bank practice of not recording changes in mortgage ownership
when they pool them into secured instruments for investors, stiffing local
governments of billions of dollars in fees and ruining their recorded
historical chain of property ownership. Ellen speaks with Nancy Becker and
the attorneys who pulled off this class-action local government victory.
Meanwhile, local mayors around the country have taken a formal stand for
enabling local post offices to serve their un-banked citizens who are
regularly gouged by pay-day lenders. Co-host Walt McRee speaks with Ira
Dember of BankACT about recent successes in the rapidly growing national
movement to turn post offices back into neighborhood banking centers.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - Eminent Domain to the Rescue? - 07/02/14

A flood of foreclosures in neighborhoods, cities and towns can cause
everyone's real estate equity to plunge. Some towns would like to step-in to
protect their communities, but they can't get the mortgage notes written
down to affordable levels for contractual reasons. The solution: use eminent domain
to claim the properties for the municipality, then renegotiate them on
behalf of struggling homeowners.  Ellen talks with the pre-eminent
legal mind behind the emerging eminent domain stratagem, Cornell professor
Robert Hockett, whose idea has been catching on in towns across America, including
some of the biggest.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - Why We Need Public Banks Now - 06/18/14

Unexamined assumptions often lock us into limited choices, especially when
it comes to the topic of managing public money. We assume there's only so
much of it and that if we need more we must deal with the de facto guardians
of its distribution, the big banks. Discovering that the public can source
its own money for public interests has generated a groundswell of new
efforts to create publicly-owned banks. On today's show, Ellen speaks with
Mike Krauss, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Project, about the need and the
issues underlying the growing public banking movement; on this week's
Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee talks with an elected public
official, Ed Brominski of Luzerne County, PA, who is leading the charge for
change despite the entrenched resistance of his colleague's unexamined
assumptions about municipal money management.

It's Our Money - Where They Hid Our Civic Treasure and How We Can Get Our Hands On It - 06/04/14

One of the best kept deceptions within common civic parlance is that our cities, states and communities are “broke” – a meme perpetuated by a lack of public knowledge about what governments do with their money and a highly profitable investment industry that uses those funds for substantial private profits that suck outrageous sums out of our common wealth. 

 

This week It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown provides a look into where our “buried” civic treasure can be found and how we can use it to create substantial public benefit. Ellen shows how private financing of civic projects has created repeated windfalls for banks and investors, and she later talks with Professor Tom Greco about how communities can create credit-based economies to get free of the all-encompassing web of civic debt. 

 

On the Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee discusses the location and contents of every community’s “treasure chest” with Scott Baker, an expert at evaluating how to determine how much is in it and how it can be used to dramatically change local economic prospects.

 

It's Our Money - The Dollar's Global Dance of Debt - 05/21/14

The status of the dollar as global reserve currency is being threatened by new international monetary powerhouses and the limitations of its debt-based control. This week, Ellen speaks with Mark Pash of the Center for Progressive Economics, who believes that issuance of currency as debt has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with a credit-based model that covers basic human needs prior to personal accumulation of additional affluence. Ellen also speaks with Mike Krauss on petro-dollar politics upending America's hold on global trade as the reserve currency. On the Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee talks with John Leonard of the PA Project about new public banking initiatives in one of America's abandoned industrial centers, western PA, and the promise that public banking agencies may offer to reviving the economy that region.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - 05/07/14

An Electoral Lock-Out of Political Challengers Helps Guarantee Wall Street
Profits

The major political parties have effectively locked-out any serious
democratic challengers to their control on creation of public policy. This
week, Green Party candidate for CA Controller Laura Wells talks with Ellen
Brown (herself a Green running for CA State Treasurer) about the
increasingly difficult path required of challenger candidates to even get
their voices heard. They discuss Governor Jerry Brown's proposed
constitutionally-mandated rainy fund that would guarantee the state's
commitment to pay Wall Street at the expense of its own needs, the subject
of Ellen's latest article ("Robbing Main Street to Prop Up Wall Street: Why Jerry Brown's Rainy Day Fund Is a Bad Idea for California")

On the Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee talks with Lauren Steiner
about a new initiative underway in Los Angeles to create a public
partnership bank even as a new report shows that the city pays significantly
more to Wall Street for fees and interest than it does on its own needs --
to the tune of over ¾ of a billion dollars!

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - All the President's Bankers - 04/23/14

Presidents and Bankers joined at the hip for a long, long time -- Nomi Prins

Ellen's guest this week is renowned banking wonk, writer and former investment insider
Nomi Prins, whose blockbuster book All the President's Bankers has just been released.

Nomi discloses the longstanding personal and political ties between
Washington and Wall Street that have enabled the concentration of global
wealth into the hands of a few.  Ellen brings these historical facts
together with the current bank rap sheet of fraud, conspiracy and bailouts
that characterize the landscape of big bank business, and discusses new

reports and a definitive study showing that these inside-power connections, not the public interest, run America.

On this week's Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee talks with Gwen Hallsmith,

the new Executive Director of the Public Banking Institute, about a just-launched series of classes called "The New
Economy Academy.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - 04/08/14

A sure sign that our monetary system is in deep distress is the proliferation of public movements trying to deal with the outfall of failing economies and struggling households. On this edition of "It's Our Money with Ellen Brown", Ellen speaks with two leading protagonists helping individual citizens take matters into their own hands by adopting new economic models and alternatives; attorney Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers discuss current public initiatives, the TPP, Obamacare and a foundational philosophy that asserts that individual citizens are the core of new civic leadership. On this week's Public Banking Report, co-host Walt McRee speaks with the leader of one of those new alternative movements, Marc Armstrong, who is launching BankACT.org, a lobbying campaign to help re-establish banking services at America's post offices.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - The Legality of Using Eminent Domain to Stem Foreclosures - 03/26/14

Cities around the country have been ravaged by significant numbers of community foreclosures following the mortgage loan scandals of recent years. Big banks have been wheeling and dealing these finance contracts, often illegally, to execute fraudulent takings of property or profiteering from servicing fees. But they may now be facing their Achilles Heel with challenges to their ownership by bold government leaders who want to stanch the bleeding of community economic health.  Ellen talks with the pioneer of this eminent domain legal stratagem, Prof. Robert Hockett of Cornell University, about the legal rationale and the probability of its success in Richmond, CA and elsewhere. Ellen also reviews notable recent monetary news items and co-host Walt McRee provides an update on news from the world of the public banking movement.  

 

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - 03/14/14

In the very first edition of this new program, Ellen provides a foundational
statement describing the nature of our debt-based money system, and what
this show hopes to achieve. With the recent 100th birthday of the Federal
Reserve and the appointment of its new Chairman, Janet Yellen, Ellen engages
the conversation about the Federal Reserve with noted Fed scholar and author
Prof. Tim Canova, Professor of Law and Public Finance at Nova Southeastern
University.  

Later, Ellen speaks with public banking catalyst Mike Krauss about the
rapidly growing interest in public banks and the organization behind the
movement to create more.