It´s Our Money with Ellen Brown

It‘s Money with Ellen Brown - The Privatization of Everything

For decades, the importance of public sector institutions has been undermined by powerful private corporate interests. How they have done it and how that process can be reversed is discussed by our guest Donald Cohen, the author of a new book called The Privatization of Everything – How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back.  Cohen is Executive Director of In the Public Interest, a national non-profit focusing on public goods and services.  Ellen also discusses the emerging concerns about central bank digital currencies, and historian and author Matt Ehret opens a discussion about the corporate supra-national movement that wants to privatize nature itself.  What could go wrong?

It‘s Our Money with Ellen Brown - Everyone Deserves to Have a Public Bank

Across the globe, public banks hold assets of about $50 trillion dollars in widely divergent countries and cultures.  While these publicly owned institutions have diverse types of organization and purpose, they share core principles of retaining local equities. In North America new efforts to create local public banks have emerged among First Nation tribes who have been obliged to use Wall Street banks for their substantial casino revenues. Our guest interviews today include a memorial tribute conversation with Dennis Ortblad, a former diplomat who opened that discussion with Pacific NW tribes and many other public banking initiatives, and with Dr. Thomas Marois, author of “Public Banks: Decarbonization, Definancialization and Democratization”.

 

It‘s Our Money with Ellen Brown -- Philanthropy -- Repression or Regeneration?

The trillion-dollar philanthropy industry has been accused of continuing a racist, colonialist system of economic and cultural suppression. That notion is in dramatic contrast to a broadly favorable appreciation for the largess of wealthy donors who contribute significant sums to thousands of public interest organizations and causes.  What lies underneath that patina of generosity?  Our guest Edgar Villanueva writes in his latest book “Decolonizing Wealth” that philanthropy is a vestige of a privileged society disassociated and disengaged from the financial realities that created the vast wealth that fosters it. On the flipside, according to Edward Quevedo and Mark Watson, our guests in a second segment, philanthropy can be a source of restitution and regeneration,. A new alliance for sharing the wealth is in the making.

It‘s Our Money with Ellen Brown - The OCC

The OCC

 

That acronym is not well known by many Americans even though it represents one of the most critical functions of our federal monetary system.  The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the OCC, is the manager of our system of "national banks" which comprise two-thirds of the banks in the country managing assets of about $14 trillion dollars.  As an independent bureau of the Treasury department, it oversees an industry that at times seems to go its own way with risky bank behaviors. But the OCC may be acquiring a tougher posture if President Biden’s nominee for its Director, Saule Omarova, is approved.  Our guest, Dr. Robert Hockett, is a close associate of Omarova and sees indications that we may be entering a new period of support for the public interest in our federal financial institutions.    

 

It‘s Our Money - We’re Still Fighting the American Revolution

We’re Still Fighting the American Revolution

 

Our guest is Matthew Ehret, author of the new book The Clash of the Two Americas Volume 1: The Unfinished Symphony. In it he shows how the young United States, guided by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and their successors, established a new financial model based on democratic sovereignty. But proponents of the old British model of colonial exploitation disrupted and continue to disrupt that visionary paradigm shift. Ehret points to the opportunity and the need to restore our visionary historical tradition by creating our own credit for the benefit of the people, following the original design of America’s Founders.

 

It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown - PPP’s and You

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 investors and public resources.  Sometimes it works out.  Often it doesn’t. Our guests, Drs. Alphecca Muttardy and Stephen Hubbard of the National Infrastructure Coalition, are experts in the field of infrastructure finance and PPP’s and delve into what America urgently needs in the way of infrastructure investment right now,  and why PPP’s aren’t the reliable go-to partners they claim to be.

It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown - Constructing the Democratic Public Bank

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 can be “bad”.  The difference depends on how these new institutions are designed and constructed.  Brennan has articulated clear design principles in a new paper titled “Constructing the Democratic Public Bank” to help ensure these banks are able to achieve the public interest missions they’re created to serve.  Brennan says that prospect can and must be designed into the bank before they even get started.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - Hamilton vs. Wall Street

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 of the mother country. Our guest Nancy Spannaus, professor and author of Hamilton vs. Wall Street, discusses the significance of Hamilton’s economic vision and principles, and how those principles have been eroded today.

It's Our Money with Ellen Brown - The Fed, Native Americans and the Chinese

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 own bank to keep their money under tribal control, they were surprised to find active Fed support for their pursuit. Our guest Dennis Ortblad, a former diplomat stationed in Germany, discusses his work with these nations and how the Fed seems to know its policies need improvement when it comes to launching minority depositories. Dennis also talks about Germany’s Sparkassen banks, which for the past 200 years have helped drive that country’s economic success and are one of the models inspiring the American public banking movement.  We’re also joined by Dr. Robert Hockett of Cornell University, who talks with Ellen about digital currencies and the prospect of China taking over as the host of the world’s reserve currency. 

It’s Our Money With Ellen Brown - Big Corp Moves In

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 being able to turn on and turn off transactional payments is the focus of our guest Nick Brown, who helped set up Visa’s debit card network.  We also visit with Dr. Robert Hockett, an expert on all things monetary including the Federal Reserve, who says it’s time for our central bank to focus on funding real production for the national interest rather than being a funder of boundless financial specialization.