By Matt STANNARD on Occupy.com TUE, 7/17/2018
This is Part 10 in a 10-part series on public banking and economic justice. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9
If Los Angeles voters choose to lift the city’s ban on government-run banking services this November, the battle for a public bank in that city won’t be over. It will just be getting started, and the barriers will be enormous.
Los Angeles residents will vote whether or not to amend Section 104(g) of the City Charter as a prerequisite to the city forming a municipal bank. But this only means voters will have authorized a public bank – not voted for the formation of one. Feasibility studies, hearings and testimony, and, inevitably, backlash from proponents of private banking, will follow. Not all the interference will be engineered by Wall Street lobbyists. Some of it will come from purportedly neutral experts on banking who simply haven’t contemplated that banks ought to be public utilities instead of private enterprises.
Despite Los Angeles currently having one of the most robust, militant and energetic public banking movements anywhere, risk-averse public officials may well decide to stall on creating a public bank in the city. They might offer weaker or watered-down alternatives. They might end up rejecting the idea altogether.
The only thing that will stop them from delaying or killing the vision of public banking is the sheer numerical and moral force of activists, in the thousands. Nothing less will guarantee that Los Angeles gets its public bank. If there is not unyielding public demand, there will be no public bank.
WHEN VOTING DOESN’T MATTER
If you think I’m exaggerating about the difficulty of creating a public bank even when most of the people want once, consider Vermont. In 2014, “19 Vermont cities and towns voted on a measure calling for the Vermont Economic Development Authority, a statewide finance lender created in 1974, to be turned into a public bank. Fifteen approved the notion.” Vermont state Senator Anthony Pollina and five of his colleagues introduced Senate Bill 204 to direct the state government to deposit ten percent of its funds into the public bank.
But the legislation never passed, and Vermont never got its bank. Instead, in a compromise, the legislature authorized $350 million in local investment and lending in the state.
Who was Vermont compromising with? Not the voters. Rather, the state compromised with the private banking industry, which had vociferously opposed a public bank using its usual array of faulty arguments. The watering-down was not the result of voters changing their minds, or of activists in Vermont lacking good enough arguments, research and skilled advocates. It was the result of lobbyists from big banks throwing dust into the eyes of policymakers, and those policymakers being unwilling to fight for a purely public vision.
LAYERS OF IDEOLOGY AND BUREAUCRACY
Similar defeats of public banking measures have happened in numerous other cities and states. Part of the problem is that policies don’t change without layers of bureaucracy in the form of feasibility studies and consultation with experts.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with experts or even bureaucracy. As our experience with the Trump administration demonstrates, it’s nice to have people in government who know what the hell they’re doing. But where financial reform is concerned, and particularly radical reforms like public banks, the problem is that the experts are all from the private financial sector, and they don’t care about our egalitarianism, our core values, or our vision of an economically just society. So we have to make them care, and that requires us to use the only means available to us: public displays of will.
To see how the ideological deck is stacked against public sector financial institutions, we can look at Colorado’s state Banking Board. This Board has sole decisionmaking power over the granting of charters for banking in the state. Although their decisions can be appealed to Colorado’s courts, those courts almost never reverse Banking Board decisions, and don’t even require the Board to be consistent with the facts presented in its hearings. Instead, courts defer to the industry expertise and experience of Board members.
Currently, the Board consists of the president of Alpine Bank, the CEO of Fowler Bank, the CEO of NBH Bank, the president of Young Americans Bank, the president of First Bank, a lawyer from Great-West Trust Company, the senior vice president of Western Union Financial Services, and two members of the public. No one from the public sector is on the board; no public servants, no labor union representatives, not even any representatives from credit unions. What do you think these folks are going to think of proposals from a movement premised on the corruption and insolvency of private sector banking? What are they going to think of proposals that would eliminate the profit-making monopolies of private finance?
Similarly, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a banking task force recently rejected a proposal for a public bank in the city. Five out of nine members of the task force were from the private financial or real estate development sector (in one case a corporate finance lawyer), three were public officials, and one was an activist for Santa Fe’s public banking advocacy group. Slightly better odds than Colorado’s Banking Board, but still heavy on the commercial and private finance side.
And so it goes in Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, and so it will go in Los Angeles: Most city and state governments require that officials consult with experts before implementing reforms, and where banking is concerned, those experts are all tied to the neoliberal and capitalist ideologies of banking for profit. That doesn’t mean they’ll ultimately reject public banking, but presumption will weigh heavily against it.
While nobody is arguing that only advocates and public banking zealots should be on these committees, we should not be surprised if their recommendations lean strongly in favor of maintaining the status quo. They don’t see private finance, even Wall Street finance, as part of the problem.
GOOD IDEAS ARE NOT ENOUGH
The biggest flaw thus far in the strategic vision of many public banking advocacy groups is the assumption that public officials and financial experts must be won over first, and that sitting down with a group of them, or having one-on-one meetings with them, ought to happen prior to building mass movements. As we’ve outlined in several articles in this series, that assumption is changing, and activists are building coalitions of groups concerned with economic justice, environmental reforms and renewable energy, divestment from corrupt private banks and fossil fuel portfolios, and more. That’s a good start.
But mass movements require more than hundreds or even thousands of people. In big cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia or Seattle, we need supporters of public banking to number in the tens of thousands. At this point, it’s not even clear that there are ten thousand people in America who think public banking is a good idea. That’s a problem.
Mao Zedong may have been wrong when he said that political power only emerges out of the barrel of a gun. But political power does require the force of numbers. Apart from the rather anomalous and still-uncertain fate of the public bank in American Samoa – an anomaly that emerged from a very unique problem in that territory and which won’t be replicated in the states – the only successful campaign for a public bank in America in the last hundred and fifty years came in North Dakota, where a group of radical farmers, running on a radical platform of public ownership of financial institutions, took over the legislative and executive branches of that state government a century ago. And they barely managed to stay in power long enough to implement the Bank of North Dakota.
It’s that kind of energy, unending commitment, and radical vision of economic justice that is needed to establish public banks in cities and states today. Nothing less will get us there.
READ PARTS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Matt Stannard is Policy Director at Commonomics USA and a member of the Public Banking Institute’s Board of Directors. Matt Stannard writes about cooperative economics, law, politics and culture. His blog is Cowboys on the Commons. Click to read more by Matt on Occupy.com.
What If Banks Were Publicly Owned? In LA, This May Soon Be A Reality.
Trinity Tran is a powerful speaker. Addressing a rally in downtown Los Angeles for New York congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 33-year-old activist and organizer thundered, “We are witnessing the emergence of a solution, from profit and greed to collective prosperity. We can empower our community from the ground up. It’s time to take our power back.”
Tran’s organization, Public Bank LA, is leading the revival of an idea that had largely been discarded until the financial crisis. In November, Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity to approve a public bank for the city. If the measure passes, it would become the first government-owned bank developed in the United States since 1919.
The term “public bank” may confuse some into thinking that Los Angeles is about to create a bunch of branch offices where residents can open a free checking account. The idea is much more ambitious. Public bank enthusiasts want to finance local improvements in housing, infrastructure, and community development by employing the money citizens already pay to state and local governments for services. To them, it’s about democratizing the financial system.
The public has yet to be brought in on this idea, until now at least. The Los Angeles vote represents the first popular referendum on public banking since the financial crisis brought the public bank idea back into the conversation. For the vote to go their way, activists will have to demystify a technical financial concept, and answer charges from critics that a city-owned bank will prove too risky and too costly for taxpayers.
The activists say they’re ready for the challenge. “Until now, activists have been fighting in the ivory towers of legislatures, and off the radar of the populace, even though it’s in their best interest,” said Phoenix Goodman, an organizer with Public Bank LA. “We have the opportunity to bring this down to the grassroots, where it belongs.”
If you live in a city, anytime you buy something that includes sales tax, pay a parking ticket, swipe your transit card or renew a business license, money goes to the city treasury. It doesn’t immediately fly back out into the paycheck of a police officer or schoolteacher. All state and municipal governments have cash reserves they hang onto. The numbers are significant; Los Angeles has a current portfolio of close to $10 billion.
Cities and states typically store this short-term cash in bank accounts or plain-vanilla investments. Big banks like Wells Fargo or JPMorgan Chase use the funds to generate profits, through loans or trades, or whatever else they can conjure. They, for example, fund private prisons that house immigrant families. They fund pipelines that carry fossil fuels and are displacing Indigenous Americans from their land. And big banks continue to act badly with relative impunity ― wrist-slap fines ultimately paid by shareholders, and no executive seeing the inside of a jail cell.
Divestment activists have demanded that cities abandon big banks, with some success. In Los Angeles, activists won a separation from Wells Fargo, holder of $101 million in city bank deposits. But they soon discovered that the alternative to Wells Fargo is just another Wall Street giant. Community banks and credit unions lack capacity and often face legal hurdles and onerous collateral requirements to handle public funds.
“We knew divestment from one big bank to another predatory bank was unsustainable,” said Tran, who led the divestment movement in Los Angeles. Soon after, Tran co-founded Public Bank LA, which demanded a city-owned institution to keep government revenues out of Wall Street’s hands. A public bank could use those dollars as a deposit base, she argued, funding loans within the community for local public works projects, small businesses, or affordable housing.
These needs are critically unmet at the local level. Banks are reluctant to finance projects with a perceived risk, like affordable housing, and private investors don’t see the return on investment in replacing water pipes. If a city or state wants to fund something big, they usually turn to either the municipal bond market ― a $3.8-trillion financial industry giant that adds significant lifetime interest costs, or public-private partnerships with investors who have a profit motive at heart.
Because a public bank is not a for-profit business, it can offer lower interest rates than private options, saving billions of dollars over time. And because the city owns the bank, any interest income would flow back into its coffers. That reduces financing costs and facilitates more lending. Plus, the money stays at home, circulating in the local economy rather than traveling into an investor’s pockets or a risky trading scheme.
This may sound like it came out of a late-night college dorm brainstorm session, but public banking is used routinely around the world, including in one of the reddest U.S. states. The Bank of North Dakota, established in 1919 by progressive farmers seeking independence from big banks, makes loans throughout the state and partners with community banks on larger projects. It doesn’t lend out state deposits. But like all banks, it creates new money by extending credit, with deposits balancing the books. Public banks, then, expand the money supply available for economic development, and keep that money circulating where it was created.
The Bank of North Dakota has earned profits for 14 straight years, during the Great Recession and North Dakota’s more recent downturn from a collapse in oil prices, according to its 2017 annual report. Moreover, it supports the most vibrant community bank network in the country, with more branches and higher lending totals per capita than any other state. No North Dakota bank failed during the financial crisis.
North Dakota’s public bank has faced criticism, however, for investments supporting fossil fuels. A bank controlled by a California city won’t necessarily share the same lending portfolio.
“We want to create a bank that is answerable to one shareholder: the public,” said David Jette of Public Bank LA. “San Francisco and Oakland need affordable housing, Los Angeles needs more transportation infrastructure. These are things a public bank can do.” The Los Angeles City Council, recognizing a potentially cheaper way to finance city improvements, certainly got the message. Led by council President Herb Wesson, council members unanimously passed the initiative to put the public bank vote on the November ballot.
But the challenges to establishing a new public bank are significant. A Los Angeles chief legislative analyst report released in February stated that the city charter would need to be amended to accommodate a public bank. That’s what the ballot initiative would execute. The report also said that state and federal law would need to change as well, and that the city would need to apply for a state bank charter, come up with collateral and insurance to protect deposits, and provide startup funds to capitalize the bank and hire administrative staff.
“There is substantial cost and risk associated with operating a public bank,” said Beth Mills, a spokeswoman for the Western Bankers Association, a trade association and a leading opponent of the ballot measure. “Presumably the bank would be capitalized with taxpayers dollars. How would any losses resulting from loan defaults be paid at a public bank ― would taxpayer dollars be at risk?” Mills added that any savings from financing would be wiped out by the expense of hiring attorneys, compliance officers and consultants.
As well as money from deposits, a public bank would need additional capital, which could be used to cover losses if they arise. That could come from a municipal bond offering or public pension investments. In effect, outside investors would be lending to the public bank and betting on its success.
Los Angeles activists are also joining forces with counterparts in six other California cities to form the California Public Banking Alliance, which would work with the state to develop a standard license and a framework for regulating public banks. “We want to build a network of banks to be interdependent and support one another,” said Jette. “Los Angeles is a great place to test this out on a voting public.”
Even if the vote passes and all goes smoothly, a public bank in Los Angeles would still be years away. But if it works, the public banking concept has revolutionary potential. It could employ constituent deposits for the public good. It offers an escape valve for city officials to revitalize neighborhoods without necessarily having to raise taxes. And to the activists, it reimagines the role of finance as more than just a profit-seeking beast.
“Simply by founding a public-owned institution based on public needs, you bend the course of financial history toward regular people,” said Jette. “We can control our own financial fate. And if we win this, we will take that everywhere.”
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