Industry sign banking north dakota moving checklist mobile
super-exciting based on all the fan requests that have come in specifically on a show about banking our first official panel on banking that's gonna happen right now call the big bank breakdown is is starting right soon I've got some fantastic guests here with me we're gonna break down the pipe our hierarchy down to what we can do from an individual and local perspective on our money on our activism and how we can basically make our money and our power work for us for the planet for each other rather than for the large banks who get globs of it have a lot of political support and pay a lot of fines to just go away and do what they're doing again anyway so with that I just want to introduce our fantastic panel here we've got Sean Stone who is an amazing actor and activist and involved in so many important causes that we're going to be talking about Trinity Tran who is here from public banking initiative in LA as well as a divesting LA initiative and david dayan who is an executive editor at american prospect and author of a fantastic book called chain of title which gets into the gusts of how individuals are impacted by the mortgage crisis still to this day so thank you guys for joining and thanks to all the fans who asked for this to happen so here we go we have for you five fast financial facts and and and what's important about these facts is that a lot of times the news doesn't actually on the mainstream connect the dots between what's happening from where the power is in our money flow in our financial system to what it's actually doing and how we can change that so this is the news this is the news right now that we've selected some highlights for that we're going to talk about and and and and they connect so we're going through this this high to low or where the power is to where it should go perspective of our monetary system of our banking system are the current state of the financial world and where we need to be so the first is something that happened this week which is that the Fed had one of their monthly meetings the Federal Reserve Bank got together as they do every month and they sidon what's gonna happen with interest rates what do interest rates do they show us the cost of money to banks for which it's always very cheap and then how we ultimately wind up paying interest on things like credit cards and student loans and so forth so the sp500 the stock market had a fantastic day after the Fed basically said we're gonna potentially keep rates even lower than where they are at some point in the very near future and what's interesting about this headline and if we could just bring it up again sp500 carves out the first intraday record since May 1 and this is the important part of that fact as the Fed fuels a stock market rally the Federal Reserve feeds the stock market the Federal Reserve does not feed the actual real people of this world it has the power to create money it has the power to decide where that money goes and this this little headline has a lot packed into it because it talks about where the benefit really is so I want to open it up to the panel so we can talk about that fact and your perspective on that so I'm Sean if you'd like to kind of frame that for us from a power perspective from a power perspective um yeah what you what you touched upon certainly is this notion that we have you know the banks essentially were loosening the interest the Fed wasn't loosening the interest rate so that we can fuel the stock market right rise in doing a documentary called century of war which I interviewed you for know me and was a lot of fun to work on but it was very dismal and are seeing the real impact of what the American economy looks like we talked about the country being the strongest in the world the economy being so stronger than you go to places like Detroit like Baltimore even in Los Angeles right here because we know there's this complete striation between wealth and poverty and actually ironically most people really are living in debt it's just a question of those that actually have access to more credit lines that actually have more assets as opposed to those that are complete squeezed as we know majority of people's country completely squeezed with very little to no assets and so they're just living as debt slaves and when talking to one young man in Detroit one of the great things that he quoted from the documentary was saying look you know people like myself you know young black men from Detroit I don't invest in Wall Street no one I know invests in Wall Street why we don't have any or we have no relationship with how to deal with these Wall Street you know companies we don't really know how to read this what we know or what we buy so if we could basically diversify and create more local markets people like Katherine Austin Fitz advocating for this how can we basically go back to the idea of more local based markets that we can figure out how to who are exchanging with and essentially if we're you know for going to shop at certain locations and certainly to you know basically we're choosing to interact economically with certain people and companies and thanks to networking internet and all this is a much easier and kryptos are making this more facile essentially we need to figure out ways of making giving people access to wealth who are not part of this upper class that can and can afford to invest and follow you know the trends The Wall Street Journal and whatnot of where to invest but the real people who are working to saying look I go down the street you know and I like Whole Foods but right now my steno investing in Whole Foods is we know at this point is not really gonna make you a fortune it was only getting in the beginning so how can we make markets and things like this growing burgeoning from the lower class perspective from the mom-and-pop perspective how can we do that that's one way of framing this discussion yeah and that's the shift the Federal Reserve is given 21 and and other central banks has given 21 trillion dollars of subsidy I call it subsidy they call it help to the financial system as it extends to itself today to CEOs of large financial institutions to derivatives transactions to speculation in the financial assets in the market and so forth 21 trillion dollars is a lot of money created from nowhere the big banks at the height of the financial crisis screwed over a lot of people and a lot of economies and we are still feeling the effects of that as you see local communities our individuals are and it's like what do you do they've only paid a hundred and sixty billion dollars worth of fines I say only because if you're getting twenty one trillion dollars of effectively free or low-cost money paying 160 billion over ten years really doesn't make that much of a difference and that's something where the financial revolution that we are embarking on right now needs to address now no Trinity you've basically been involved for a number of years in the financial institution revolution public banking divesting money putting in the right places how did how did you come to that well I mean once you realize the widespread devastation and how unsustainable the private model is it becomes a more moral duty to really stand up and fight for it and wrest power away from the banks and put it in the hands of the people and that's what you know we started with divest LA by targeting Wells Fargo inspired by what was happening at Standing Rock and we took the shift of the front lines from Standing Rock to LA City Council and pushed the City Council to divest from Wells Fargo which was a bank that with the city primarily banked with a bank with a you know a long laundry list of crimes against the people and we held the city to the fiduciary duty to protect the the taxpayers of Los Angeles so within nine months we love you davor hard-hitting campaign and developed a movement around what a technical implementation of divestment would look like and within four months we got the city of Los Angeles to divest forty million dollars of holdings from Wells Fargo six months later through through very targeted legislative advocacy we got the city to D bundle 800 Wells Fargo account and disqualify Wells Fargo because of their substandard Community Reinvestment Act rating but you know the successes of the divestment movement wasn't as clear-cut because when you look at the scope and scale of the cities of the size of Los Angeles to divest from Wells Fargo and move that money into a socially environmentally responsible Bank we knew that there were limited options and that at the end of the day there would be only a handful of big banking players that would be capable of handling the financial needs of the size of Los Angeles and and that you know that the big banking players were the US u.s. bank Citibank Union Bank well JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America and most if not all of those banks have been handed hand handed violations and the civil penalties from the Department of Justice so we knew we had to fight for another alternative right and and David you you have covered this this story of how individuals have been impacted by and are still infected by the the power that these banks have over their mortgages over their borrowing over their funding and you're still ongoing and in a lot of the work that you're doing and in a lot of these cases right yeah so I mean certainly we still see mortgage abuse out there in in the public we still have seen a number of finds that have been paid for conduct that happened post-crisis I mean I you know there's sort of a popular theory that that that all of this is residue from the housing bubble which was like sort of a big collective mistake I guess but you know certainly the stuff with respect to Wells Fargo force placed insurance putting junk insurance on the people's accounts when they purchase car the fake account scandal where they were cross selling trying to increase the amount of accounts on somebody's you know in somebody's name and and and fabricating documents for that we've seen this go over in a number of ways but we also have to sort of broaden our perspective and thinking about what is Wall Street right what are we talking about there when you talk about that number the new new high for the S&P I mean we know that about 10% of the population owns eighty four percent of the stocks and it's actually even tighter than that when you know that index funds are now a multi trillion dollar business there's a guy named John Coates at Harvard Business School it talks about the the problem of 12 that in the future will essentially be 12 people at that own effectively all of these stocks and that includes the asset managers and and that concentration of power is affecting you know the feds actions so it's a feedback loop between these large asset management companies like Vanguard like like Blackrock and so forth and the Federal Reserve itself in terms of their decision-making and we become so reliant on this rate structure and whether we're gonna raise and lower rates rather than building a productive economy and and and the the the you know rise and fall the stock market being based on that it's all just sort of air guy and in one of the things to even even the savings rates that that we get if we have you know ten dollars to five hundred to whatever in in in a bank right now these banks have gotten all this money right and they're giving effectively zero percent interest or really close to it the big banks on people savings accounts and the rates have raised from a zero interest rate policy to now I think we're what two percent between two and a quarter to four into a half and and the those those interest rates have really not budged people right I mean they have budged a little bit for the banks that ironically don't get as much help from the Fed so some of the online banks that's correct the new models that we have out there that effectively are giving about ten to twelve to fifteen times interest rate on savings for people who are giving them their money and not charging fees and not charging ATM fee so they're basically allowing people to get more back from the money that they have as opposed to taking it for themselves and and this is something that you know when we talk also about the debt that you know Sean you brought you brought this out is one of our five facts the debt in this country right now is at all-time highs consumer dot you know across housing across autos of course of course student loans all-time highs and that's when supposedly we're in a recovery like what's that about what's a permanent debt I mean that's the that's the thrust of what they wanted to create and I say they in a lose sense of you know the Oleg arks I would say the Oliver you know Princeton did a study saying we basically aren't oligarchy at this point so you know it's not I don't know how much of it was intentional and how much of it is just an aspect of what is banking economic banking banking sense right we talked in the documentary know me you mentioned Henry forward in like the notion of despite all forests flaws then I hate the business model business man's business model and I can resonate this you know working in Hollywood in the business like we want people to have money in their pocket because we want them to be able to buying goods right so every businessman wants to see workers making good wages like it doesn't make sense to have a system where you basically are putting people into into into into complete slavery unless you have a banking death system where it says I don't care if you have a wage or or a credit card so basically it's like you know what happened really from the seventies forth you know when you look at the blue-collar economics of anything to do with a union job right where you're paying now let's say a union job pays let's say $30 an hour and then you say well we're slashing the union jobs replacing them with service sector jobs that are paying let's say at most half of that you know sometimes as we know $10 or less an hour right many states it's like the you know the hourly wage it's like five six bucks in southern states I've been to friends that work there and the waitresses you know they're getting 5 bucks an hour kind of thing so they're basically living on what on credit cards so it's not the business man's model because the business model saying look I want you to have money so you can buy my goods so you can enjoy the economy so you can be part of the economy it's the bankers mentality which is to say I don't care as long as you're just making enough to pay off the interest and keeping this system of debt going until it all comes crashing down which is a question of just not if the when I believe right and and in terms of the solutions you talk about individuals who are indebted who haven't had a choice but to be in bed and indebted because of the wage structure because of the financial structure because of the fact that banks don't work as they are right now the big ones for the people they don't work for the economy they don't work for the people they're getting an effective free ride from the Fed from from the policies that we have today and people are upset like and we need to do something this is all about how do we create a financial evolution and revolution to basically get out of that and create something new and created through technology create it through better savings accounts created through better ways of of investing our money in things and in the world in a way that actually provides fruit to more people and not to Jamie Dimon who's running JPMorgan Chase and makes like multiple millions of dollars like a year so that's what we really want to do and internally like again you you've basically been at some of the forefront of seeing how people are changing by getting active behind some of these movements not just I mean in their own lives as well as in the movement itself exactly I mean stemming from the divestment movement once we realized that there wasn't a real ethical alternative to to other Wall Street banks we knew we had to create a new system and that the ultimate form of divestment was for to divest from Wall Street altogether so you're movin
from a system that's private based that's that's based on extraction where profit of resources our our siphoned away from our communities to a public model where profit and resources actually belonged to the community and gets reinvested back into the community so that that then launched the public bank la campaign which is now California public bank banking Alliance where we're pushing for a model that where as billions of our tax dollars now sit in Wall Street banks earn next to zero and interest and then gets leveraged to finance industries that actually harm our communities so instead of redirecting the flow towards Wall Street we're redirecting it back into our communities by creating a publicly owned system and a public bank essentially it's it's a financial institution that's owned by public and Tasya City a county a state orange APA the deposit base are the tax revenues and the fees that our city or crews and it has a social benefit purpose all of its lending activities are meant to to strengthen the local economies so so billions are now redirected being able to get reinvested back into our society to fund and address local pressing needs like affordable housing and green energy all of the things we need but don't have money for public banking provides the solution yeah and also a lot of the the solutions that are out there like you know we've been thankful to have aspiration for example sponsoring um their show and your questions and the reality is if we as people can not just complain but actually can act to change not just with what we say not just with what we do in the streets not just with petitions but all of that and actually moving our money into places where it works for us it works for communities that works for localities it works for the environment it works for how we while we combine in this world as individual so it doesn't float you know into the top it actually sustains and creates a foundation at the bottom yeah I mean that essentially what you're saying is that people have a vote and the vote is is is can be put forward with their money that it's not just every two years we kind of figure out what side and what what representatives we want to represent us in Washington is that people have a vote every day to figure out you know how how am I going to support the system that I want to see am I going to put my money in a system a financialized system that is going to send it around the world and do things that I don't respect or am I going to put it into a local system that's why I really like about the public banking ideas that's this idea of circulating money locally I mean we have this sort of terrible regional inequality problem right now where you know the Main streets have been decimated you have you have Walmart is the big store in in various cities or or maybe they're using Amazon or something and the money doesn't get circulated locally that small businessman that small project that with a public bank the the local tax dollars are being used to supplement local needs and that that is it creates a really positive feedback loop and could spur entrepreneurship and and local business and and things that I think ultimately are part of the American character and what we actually want to see in our country ya know I couldn't agree with you more you're nodding your head it just it speaks to what I think the millennial generation and younger are looking towards which is to say like why is it that we know when I'm putting money into into the pockets of big corporation so we've already seen what happened we've already seen that the Swiss study from 2012 where thousand corporations have like 40% of the world's assets in their control we've seen with that model created right it created money going up the up and basically saying looks like come back to me why is it that we don't have this mentality just as humans of saying I want to put money into my friends pockets out of put money into the people that I actually know and trust not just because of you know personally it could be networks but the idea of integrity like where is integrity in our economic system because for so long we've been under this illusion the spell that money can buy anything and it's like you know the Harvey Weinstein's of the world are great examples basically of like just the ugliness of business practices and behaviors that can basically just say well I have the money and them and the illusion of success so people want to invest with me and and I can get away with criminal behavior he's just one of many people like this who behaved this way in business most of which will never go down because you know unless Jamie Dimon gets charged with me too it's like people buy the point being that it's like it's more than sexual behavior it's their business behavior and their lack of integrity and so why are we not going towards this notion of hey we want it we want to work and and create communities I mean it can be done with Kryptos it can be done with sprite you know public banking it can be done at community levels going back to you know organic farmers and local farmers I mean it can be done step-by-step with what we choose in in a momentary basis of where you're gonna put our money and why are we not gonna emphasize those what you're going give back to the community that speaks so much more as a company than the one that's basically you know just saying we're gonna profit off of you and make billions and you know you should be thankful that we exist it's like no you should be thankful that we exist we are the basis we the humans that create your pyramid structure if we walk away from it your pyramid collapses well that's it and that's an important point because at the end of the day we have we have the power of where we put our money and we also need to have an easy way to actually utilize that money so if you're not necessarily doing something like running your own local business or being out in the streets or whatever it is what you can also do like how do how do we find places where we can aggregate our money in a matter where it takes it away from jamie dimon i personally think jamie diamonds like a deviant human right and and and not only that his bank you know JPMorgan Chase was charged with a felony and so you know one of the things that we need to do is understand that we don't give our money we don't want to give our money to two people who commit felonies against as Wells Fargo stole money from its customers you know we need to find alternatives whether it's public whether it's you know setting up an account right now with aspiration which by the way I did I just want to point out that a few days ago I'm riding a train from somewhere to somewhere and I literally took three minutes that's three minutes that's actually was two minutes and 58 seconds I'm actually rounding up just for conservative purposes here in case you need to like sneeze or whatever while you're doing this but to open an aspiration account and and and I did and and I funded it and I had all sorts of like sort of positive aspiration affirmations along that's okay go on to the next step this is great here you are super super easy and not only after you fund your account which takes three minutes and you create it you get a nice email saying thank you and and and some pleasant information about where you can move forward aspiration itself and and this is cool because because you don't you can't do this with JPMorgan Chase I promise you or Wells Fargo or Bank of America or Citigroup you cannot actually take your money and then very easily click on to having it invest in a fund that is actually socially responsible so there are ESG funds you can actually finance a fund for yourself invest in it take a piece of your $500 or $100 or $1,000 or $10 account and move it into an investment for the long term for the planet in the aspiration window it's it's super easy you can't do this on the main websites of main banks because they don't want you to they don't actually want you to open an account and move your own money into places that it will actually benefit you it's not that they want to do on this they're taking a fee aspiration doesn't necessarily take a fee for that aspiration allows you to basically move your money into places where it can do the most good in the quickest amount of time for the cheapest amount of cost to you and it doesn't pay you like 12 cents on the dollar to have it in their savings account it pays $2 right it has a 2% a PBY it has a 2% annual interest rate so right away if you do literally nothing with your money you get more money for having it staying with something like you know staying in an aspiration account than having it in JPMorgan Chase so like right away you can make more money not knowing anything but taking 3 minutes to set up that account and then you can invest it in better places and you can also donate it to charities they have this whole cool screen each guys is to take a look at it where you can actually choose as well to donate to charities so you can literally do everything online on a train in a few minutes and make a difference for yourself your personal finances which is important I mean we need to pay off those debts unfortunately that have been bestowed upon us by this unequal system and also to do something that's very easy in terms of managing your finances for the good of the planet for the good of yourself so seriously it's like it's if you can do it actually in less time than 2 minutes and 58 seconds do we have somebody who's gonna like do something for that like can we if somebody can't but add this like if someone can actually time themselves to open account in less than 2 minutes and 58 seconds please let us know right now you know do what I did take your phone do a stopwatch open the account take a selfie close you close your activity have your account and let us know and and honestly you will do better financially you will do better from standpoint managing your own money and and you will actually be helping to take money away from Jamie Dimon who I viscerally this really can I say hey I hate that guy hate that guy hey don't okay you know I think without speaking that aspiration in particular I would say that that we do have to be careful within the the kinds of changes were seeing in the financial of the banking system the personal finance system the craziest thing that happened this week of course was Facebook deciding to announce that they are creating their own currency that is and a digital wallet for it a bank that offers zero interest actually they you you put your money in that wallet and they don't give you anything but the convenience of being able to move that money a little faster than the current system and it is not a a national currency based it's it's it's backed by a reserve its own sort of internal Federal Reserve and it's backed by a global basket of currencies which means that this is something for all two billion of its users and it can be used to you know fly money from one place to another and and and deprive emerging markets or other central banks from actually having control over their own money supply so is is the value judgment between Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg is there is there something better or worse in there I'm not sure so we need to be careful about thinking about ways to democratize this and the public bank is a perfect example of how you can do that another example is you know empowering the Postal Service to create bank accounts that for personal level everyone can can access that that's that's something that is democratically controlled rather than controlled by oligarchs and controlled by people with other designs because of course what Facebook wants to do is just keep you on Facebook so that your all your your payments and everything is being done in that one place so they can sell you more ads so I think you know we have to think about what's important here and what's important is empowering local communities empowering local finance and and and and having it be democratically govern and public banks can work synergistically with smaller banks local banks community banks credit unions social socially responsible banks by our local public banking models but based after the Bank of North Dakota model which partners with local banks so extends their credit line creates new lending opportunities and ultimately bolster the economy when you look at California within the last 25 years we've lost 75 percent of our local banks and that you know with with lost of the banks they're you know then you then kill off the small medium-sized businesses that depend on those banks and then you kill off the alok economy that depends on those small businesses and this is crucially important the North Dakota is the one statement that did not have a single community bank fail during the financial crisis it has created record profits the Bank of North Dakota 15 years in a row and those profits have been cycled back into the state of North Dakota into their their public treasury to be used for more lending and and and more public services I encourage people to look at that model BND dot-gov and and if the Wall Street Journal it states it Bank of North Dakota is more profitable than Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan change if you are eighteen percent return on investment yes and actually in the wake of the financial crisis and this this is kind of key to because I hate Jamie Dimon but JPMorgan actually performed far far worse in the wake of the financial crisis after being subsidized by the Federal Reserve after being given a bailout by effectively us through sort of political maneuverings on Washington and still do not perform as well as as the public bank and did but and I just want to like bring that back for a second because again the part the part of the public banking idea North Dakota as it currently exists what we could have in general is a public banking movement and throughout cities and communities and states in the country speaks to something about individual empowerment as well as as does deciding where your money goes and taking it away from institutions who are speculating in a lot of derivatives at JP JP Morgan Chase Bank of America Citigroup all of these institutions bet money away from actual people because it's far easier this is the thing it's far easier to to to click something on a trading desk and invest in a currency in like Malaysia than to potentially fund a local development project or to fund a clean energy project or to fund an anti fossil fueled project because that's just not as easy so if we have ways where we can actually take that money back take the money that we are providing there is a reason these institutions top six banks in this country have so much ownership of our deposits and our assets because they have that power for so long if we can take that back and re address it in two places where we control it and we make money from that as well we're doing good for ourselves we're doing good for the planet we're doing good for each other we're doing good for the future you're still nodding I love it I mean it's it's look it speaks to this issue you mentioned individual empowerment I mean that's really where we have to go we have to go as I was saying it you know previously I was saying we as the people that basically are the base for this pyramid of power that's been created they you know it's human beings that are the base of that and at some level there's there's much human slavery still exists in the world the new levels of debt slavery that is even more massive than the humans then actual physical human slavery going on but this is a pyramid of power and it's built on the backs of real human beings and the more we can anything we can do to empower the human being to realize wait a minute this country we are the assets this country runs on us and actually like completely shift the way that we see the world it's not about you know oh you're born in insane this whole like you know Catholic Church in PO you know impose philosophy the government's picked up on you're born in debt that's not true every human being is an asset to this planet because of what the creativity the the w
rk that we're gonna put in the course of our lives you know basically we're here from the perspective of government it's like oh you're here as tax payer so great and all those you know we can basically project onto you how much you're gonna be able to you know to contribute or not to this economy and that's all backwards because really it's the human creativity that we have to foster in the ingenuity that we've seen that's what that's what creates economies and markets it's not Natural Resources its resources that we humans impart and say wait a minute we actually can use oil and now we can go to hydrogen then we can go you know it's a fusion this is fascinating we have basically expired our time here for this particular panel but again I just I just I just want to say thank you so much for all of your contributions your ongoing contributions to shifting the financial power away from where it's currently centered to our actual hands and and again if anyone has done less than 2 minutes and 58 seconds in terms of opening their own account you too can both get more on your savings and you can use your money to invest and direct into areas that are actually going to help everyone and and also if public banks if community banks if socially responsible banks like aspiration continue to accumulate these funds they can start to lend things out a cheaper interest rates than what we are paying which is now all-time high interest rates while banks get their money so cheaply on the big powerful banking side so in a way we can also direct how lending happens and how our investment money comes back to us and to the climate you know to potentially good climate environment and and socially responsible methods so I want to thank you guys the bill sorry we need okay one more thing one more important thing because this stuff actually works speaking with our ourselves our activism and our money actually works and you just had a fantastic victory really quickly we California is on the verge of a financial revolution a a bill a de 5/7 assembly bill 857 it's a grassroots initiative it's called the public banking act and it's now made its way through the state assembly and we just we voted and got voted through the Senate Banking Committee so we're a few steps away from California becoming the very first state in the nation to enable to enable cities and counties to create public banks every step of the way we've our grassroots movement have met well-funded lobbyists trying to kill this bill but we fought through it's been a very highly coordinated campaign with a grassroots network of activists representing 10 cities in California who are now standing up as California the fifth largest economy in the world against Wall Street to take our financial power back and put it in the hands of the people so take it back put it in our hands that's an amazing victory we need to keep going with that call you and also call your senators set up your own account with aspiration set up your account away from the larger institutions where you can actually have your money work for you and for our global community thanks so much thank you thank you guys so much
