What can happen when your city creates a new kind of bank—a public bank?
As reported by Next City’s invaluable Oscar Perry Abello in his The Bottom Line newsletter, major public banking plans have recently emerged from several California cities. The Los Angeles City Council voted in June this year to move ahead with the first city-owned wholesale bank, tentatively named the Municipal Bank of Los Angeles.
After all, many Californians not only remember the 2008-9 crash but the more recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Private banking obviously has its big risks.
But if your city creates a public bank, it has new options. Instead of depositing its funds in a megabank where it has no say on what the bank does with its funds, a municipal bank can shift resources toward your local community.
With the ability to take in deposits from city government, hospitals, universities, and other anchor organizations, a municipal bank’s lending activity can more easily reach small businesses—including minority business owners and green businesses. It can help revitalize the downtown, invest in local transit systems, and increase the stock of affordable housing—all without raising taxes or floating expensive bonds that double costs and further enrich Wall Street.
And under this circular economy model, unlike the case with most conventional financial institutions, most of the profits generated from loans and transactions would be reinvested in the bank, rather than going to private shareholders.
As the explainer video above, created by the California Public Banking Alliance, explains, the answer to “who decides” what gets funded is the public—these banks are public utilities, not profit making machines.
That means public money need no longer be handed over to builders of luxury properties, companies who ship local jobs overseas, or fossil fuel companies. Moreover, they are well situated to be first financial responders when disasters strike.
Here’s an insightful webinar from the Democracy Collaborative on this topic:
And the Democracy Policy Network—the millennial-driven progressive alternative to ALEC, you might call it—creates excellent policy kits like this one on public banking.
Some of you will recall our collaboration in 2020 with the brilliant, ebullient Fred Dewey, a democracy activist and cultural impresario based in Santa Monica CA before his death in mid-2021. He served as the executive director of the Beyond Baroque cultural center between 1996 and 2010, turning the 40-year old organization into the “the non-profit version of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore”, as he once told an interviewer.
Here’s Fred in action, reading and commenting on a short poem by his friend Philomene Long, “the Queen of Bohemia” and one of Venice California’s legendary “beat poets”.
My podcast partner Pete Davis and I got to know Fred over the last two years of his life—a great gift to us—interviewing him for our podcast and then hosting him for a webinar about his book, The School of Public Life:
Some months after his passing, I got to know a group of his friends in Southern California who were interested in keeping Fred’s legacy alive. I suggested the idea of a film in which a range of readers would take up his text “What Is Power”. The group found a wonderful LA-based video artist, Dana Duff, and we assembled a diverse group of readers from around the country.
Those readers included broadcaster Laura Flanders, friend of Solidarity Hall Grace Potts, and legendary dance figure Simone Forti—some 35 readers in all from the greater L.A. arts community and beyond.
The final product is not a “doc film” but an art film which Dana is now showing internationally at film festivals and galleries.
The video exists in two versions, one 13 minutes long (below, selected clips) and another at 40 minutes (the entire text).
There’s much more to say about Fred, a great and unquenchable spirit. For another time.
Did you miss last week’s Stronger Towns webinar conversation with Current Affairs author Allison Lirish Dean? It was pretty great and we even had a cameo appearance by Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn himself!
Coming soon from Solidarity Hall: an associated Substack called Street Catholic.
Several posts are already up at our Solidarity Hall Substack site, including this explanation of what on earth a Street Catholic is. (It’s kind of like what it sounds like.)
Many of you are aware that Solidarity Hall came out of a Catholics + others conversation related to social justice teachings. We still are very much in that conversation although we drew a few lines in the sand back a few years back when the boomlet for Catholic integralism first started bubbling:
For those Solidarity Hall readers who are mostly interested in this topic, we’ll begin publishing a separate Substack for you.
You won’t have to do anything special—your issue of Street Catholic will automatically arrive just like Solidarity Hall does. We’re not sure whether it will be a weekly or biweekly endeavor—at least twice monthly, we expect. (And if it’s not your cup of tea, just hit the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email.)
And big thanks here to some generous folks who became paid subscribers last week: Sasha Ongtengco, Jonathan Welle, Kevin Williams, Matthew Epperson, Pete Davis, Myra Jackson, Ron Green, Katherine Massam, and Kevin Jones.
And if you haven’t made the leap to paid status quite yet, we hope you’ll consider supporting Solidarity Hall. As people in my small Texas hometown used to say, we could sure use the rain.
See you next time—peace.