<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail-nH gmail-if"><div class="gmail-nH"><div class="gmail-hj"><div class="gmail-ade"><span class="gmail-hk gmail-J-J5-Ji"></span><span tabindex="0" title="Remove label Inbox from this conversation" name="^i" class="gmail-hO"></span></div></div></div></div><table class="gmail-cf gmail-ix" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td><br></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="gmail-cf gmail-adz" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="gmail-ady"><br></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="gmail-aeH" id="gmail-:a"><div class="gmail-G-atb gmail-D gmail-E"><div class="gmail-adF"><div class="gmail-G-Ni gmail-J-J5-Ji"><div tabindex="0" title="Settings" class="gmail-T-I gmail-J-J5-Ji gmail-ash gmail-T-I-ax7 gmail-L3" id="gmail-:9c"><div class="gmail-G-asx gmail-T-I-J3 gmail-J-J5-Ji"> </div></div></div></div></div></div><span class="gmail-hk gmail-J-J5-Ji"></span><div class="gmail-nH"><div class="gmail-nH"><div class="gmail-ha"><h2 tabindex="-1" class="gmail-hP" id="gmail-:90">Fwd: North Dakota’s Public Bank Is Funding Police Repression at Standing Rock</h2><span class="gmail-J-J5-Ji" id="gmail-:91"></span></div></div></div><div class="gmail-nH gmail-aHU"><div class="gmail-nH gmail-hx"><div class="gmail-nH"><div class="gmail-h7 gmail-ie gmail-nH gmail-oy8Mbf" tabindex="-1"><div class="gmail-Bk"><div class="gmail-G3 gmail-G2"><div><div id="gmail-:9p"><div class="gmail-adn gmail-ads"><div class="gmail-aju"><div class="gmail-aCi"><img style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);" class="gmail-ajn" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/profile_mask2.png" name=":0" id="gmail-:0_0-e"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail-ii gmail-gt gmail-adP gmail-adO" id="gmail-:9r"><div class="gmail-a3s gmail-aXjCH gmail-m15870b017c425ef2" id="gmail-:9q"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="gmail-m_-8833349622142589247Apple-interchange-newline"><div style="margin:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,helvetica neue,helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,helvetica neue,helvetica,sans-serif">Portside moderator <<a target="_blank" href="mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG">moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin:0px"><br></div><div><div><br>North Dakota’s Public Bank Is Funding Police Repression at Standing Rock<br><br>November 14, 2016<br>By Matt Stannard<br>Cowboy on the Commons (November 3, 2016)<br><br>For
those of us in the public banking movement, used to holding up the Bank
of North Dakota (the nation’s only public bank) as an example of how
promising public banks are, the recent news that Dalrymple and an
emergency spending panel voted to add $4 million in additional credit
onto a $10 million line from BND, to fund law enforcement expenses at
Standing Rock, is troubling. <br><br>The brutal repression of indigenous
and allied protesters at Standing Rock has shocked the conscience of
fair-minded Americans, particularly those advocating economic and
ecological reform. Although the protesters had in some cases been
encroaching on “company land,” they had done so peacefully, and their
chief modes of political action have been prayer and nonviolent civil
disobedience. The crackdowns of the last few weeks have seen attack dogs
and rubber bullets causing bloody injuries to protesters, detention and
malicious prosecutions, and other dehumanizing behavior from the cops
and soldiers deployed there by North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple.<br>For
those of us in the public banking movement, used to holding up the Bank
of North Dakota (the nation’s only public bank) as an example of how
promising public banks are, the recent news that Dalrymple and an
emergency spending panel voted to add $4 million in additional credit
onto a $10 million line from BND, to fund law enforcement expenses at
Standing Rock, is troubling. It means BND is using its heralded public
power over fractional reserve banking to pay for those rubber bullets
and a host of logistical expenses involved in arresting and evicting
protesters the federal government has refused to evict, citing free
speech concerns.<br>This financing is part of one of BND’s core
functions: providing emergency loans. A more positive deployment of that
function happened in 1997, when BND provided emergency loans for the
Grand Forks flood, at a time when communities desperately needed loans
before receiving slow-moving FEMA reimbursements. Unlike the need to
abuse peaceful protesters, the flood was a real public emergency–the
flooding caused structure fires and destroyed dozens of buildings via
fire or water. Property losses in Grand Forks topped $3.5 billion. There
were 50,000 evacuees. BND provided over $70 million in funds for
relief.<br>The Bank of North Dakota was conceived a century ago in the
molding of distinctly American, agrarian-socialist populism. North
Dakota farmers were in trouble, getting cheated by the big banks and big
grain companies headquartered in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Those
entities knew they had farmers at their mercy, and so all the interest
rates were double-digit, all the loan terms were unfavorable (and less
favorable to those who relied on them the most), and as the grain
companies operated every grain elevator along the railroad route; those
companies offered farmers destructively low prices, often cheating
on tonnage because the farmers had nowhere else to go.<br>In 1915, led
by a struggling farmer named A.C. Townley, a group of North Dakotans
formed the Nonpartisan League to push back against those powerful grain
and banking interests. The NPL ended up taking political power in the
state, creating both the Bank of North Dakota and the North Dakota Mill
and Elevator. Today, those two public utilities are the only
institutions of their kind under any state government in the U.S.
They’ve long outlived the NPL, whose inexperienced political
leaders were subject to constant attacks and red-baiting from big
business interests, exacerbating NPL infighting and corruption,
culminating in the recall of Governor Lynn Frazier, alongside whom the
state legislature had created one of the most progressive state agendas
in American history.<br>Since then, for understandable reasons, BND has
been militantly apolitical. BND President and CEO Eric Hardmeyer has
explicitly repudiated arguments that the BND ought to be a model,
despite his effective touting of its successes. The Bank exists to help
the state and its businesses function well and to maintain liquidity and
economic stability. BND created the infrastructure for North Dakota’s
oil boom, and if the state were to commit to a truly proactive
transition to renewable and clean energy (it has taken baby steps), the
BND would make it happen financially–with an efficiency that would put
the rest of the country to shame.<br>But in the present political
reality, cops and soldiers are brutally cracking down on Standing Rock
protesters, and BND is funding it, and that makes BND not truly
apolitical, but a facilitator of injustice. Public banks are tools, not
sources of virtue in themselves. In the hands of bad policymakers, they
can prop up bad policies.<br>So what do we do with this unfortunate
knowledge, besides continuing to support the Standing Rock protesters,
calling the governor regularly (if you do, please mention that using BND
to finance repression is shameful), and pushing for a just and
sustainable transition to clean energy (including economic support for
energy sector workers and their families)? What do these unfortunate
events teach us about our movement?<br>First, the awful actions in North
Dakota don’t undermine the idea of public banking. If anything, they’re
more evidence against private ownership and shareholding in both fossil
fuels and the financial sector. In financing those rubber bullets and
smoke bombs, BND is paying the security costs of private corporations,
subsidizing the worst of big oil capitalism. But as my colleague, Ira
Dember, pointed out to me yesterday, North Dakota is rich in wind and is
building wind farms. That four million dollars could have been better
lent to develop additional wind resources and technology, and to train
workers to transition from oil fields to wind farms and more. That
depends on a larger movement, which I’ll talk more about below.<br>Second,
the actions illustrate the folly of pushing for state and local control
without accompanying universal human and environmental rights. Economic
and environmental justice advocates have long promoted local autonomy
as a bulwark against big corporations and their puppets in national and
state government. But local governments (often pushed by state
legislators and governors) can do violence to indigenous communities
just as they have enforced segregation and lynchings in the South. Human
rights and environmental protection must be encoded in national and
international norms and these norms need to have a complimentary and
non-oppressive relationship with local communities. That makes our
coalition-building and policy-making tasks bigger and more challenging.
It makes allies and communication more important, and demands clarity
about various movements’ and organizations’ ethical frameworks.<br>Third,
you can’t keep people you disagree with ideologically out of
single-issue movements. Sometimes this can be frustrating: There are all
sorts of people in the public banking movement, including a
few supporters who aren’t committed to ending fossil fuel consumption,
and even weirder and more disturbing, a tiny handful of extremists who
want to take down big private banks because they associate banking with
Jews. Thankfully, those toxic forces don’t show up in any significant
numbers (and the Public Banking Institute has explicitly repudiated
them). While the movement is primarily white and bourgeois, there are
powerful non-white, non-bourgeois voices in it, and its alignment with
the New Economy Coalition and other economic justice coalitions helps
considerably. It matters who you do your activist business with.<br>Finally,
whatever your own organization’s commitment to justice, the policies
and institution your movement creates, if it is lucky enough to create
them, will only be as socially positive and ethically correct as the
people working inside of them, and the communities overseeing them.
Public banks can fund a post-carbon, sustainable energy transition–but
only if people successfully demand a post-carbon, sustainable energy
transition. Public banks can create safe and prosperous communities for
all, but only if that’s what communities are already committed to.<br>Public
banking advocates, in particular, ought to emphasize the ways public
control of state and municipal finance can fund new structures of work
and production that neither exploit nor extract. That has always been
the most powerful argument for public banks: that they can produce
justice because as community-controlled entities, we can make them just.<br>Matt
Stannard is policy director at Commonomics USA and was formerly on the
Public Banking Institute’s board of directors, but the views expressed
in this post are entirely personal.</div></div></blockquote></div></div></div></div></div>