Global Research: 16-09-2024,
Fifteen years have passed since the Occupy Wall Street movement focused attention on the inequities and hazards of large Wall Street banks, particularly those risky banks with trillions of dollars in derivatives on their books. “Move your money” was the obvious response, but what could local governments do? Their bank accounts were too large for local banks to handle.
Thus was the public banking movement born. The impressive potential of government-owned banks was demonstrated by the century-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the nation’s only state-owned bank. In the last fifteen years, over 100 bills and resolutions for local U.S. government-owned banks have been filed based on the BND model. But while promising bills are still pending, so far the allure of saving money, stimulating the local economy, banking the underbanked and avoiding a derivative crisis has been insufficient to motivate local legislators to pass bills opposed by their Wall Street patrons. State legislators have acknowledged potential benefits, but they have generally not been ready to rock the boat when the situation did not appear to be urgent.
Now, however, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis has come up with an urgent reason for a state to own its own bank – to avoid bank regulations designed to achieve social or political ends that state officials believe are inappropriate or go too far, including “debanking” vocal opponents of federal policy. The concerns are Constitutional, testing the First Amendment guarantees of free speech,