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By Ben Jacklet
Between October and December of 2010, a team of researchers went door-to-door canvassing Main Street businesses from Ashland to Troutdale. The goal was to get a sense of the credit challenges facing small businesses and farms, and to gauge potential support for a state-owned bank to boost lending in Oregon.
The survey was not scientific. “I basically walked down the street and if the business was open I talked to them,” says Dan Lombardi, statewide small business organizer for the Main Street Alliance of Oregon.
Nor was the study objective. The Seattle-based national organization backing the research project, Alliance for a Just Society, is an advocacy group formed to support President Obama’s health care reform bill.
But the findings of the January 2011 “Direct from Main Street” report were compelling. More than half of the 116 Oregon-based business owners and farmers canvassed said they had struggled to get loans. Two-thirds of those who struggled to get loans said they had delayed expanding as a result. An even greater majority — 75% of all those surveyed — supported the creation of a state bank in Oregon.
What is a state bank and how might it look in Oregon?
Comments
So, in articles like this, they spread disinformation, begin with the charge that the Bank of North Dakota (BND) represents "socialism." If these folks would bother to read the Constitution of the U.S. and of many states, they would discover that currency and credit are SOVEREIGN functions, that is, requirements of governance, just like the postal service, the armed forces, etc. The use of the term socialism is just an ad hominem (name-calling) to scare people. In fact, what we have now is fascism--corpor ate control over the state.
It's important to understand that the "too big to fail" (TBTF) banks that were bailed out at the taxpayers expense own the Federal Reserve, that is, they control the money supply for the United States and charge us interest for doing so.
This is completely unnecessary, but they don't want you to know that. With this control, they determine when to contract and expand the supply of money to benefit themselves, which means stealing the fruits of our labor. It is just like the infamous financier Andrew Mellon said, "During a depression, assets return to their rightful owners." These folks believe that everything belongs to them and that they loan these things to us.
So, the current economic crisis (the 25th since 1890) is just one more robbery. The private banks are claiming that loans are available, but there aren't any folks with assets to collateralize to get the loan. Duh! They removed 40% of the money supply and kept the spigot off until massive numbers of people went broke, so these banks could foreclose on the assets.
As North Dakota exemplifies, a publicly owned bank behaves differently. Don't be fooled by the sophistry of the TBTF private banks and their minions. It's time to send them packing. As the community bankers of North Dakota will tell you, the BND not only helps them through participation, it doesn't steal their customers, like the TBTF banks. This is why there are more local banks per capita in North Dakota than in any state in the union.
For more, see www.publicbankinginstitute.org
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