Mike Krauss and Vermont Public Bank video

Jay OwenReforming Global Finance, Community Development Solutions

“Ethical markets recommends this informative video on why Vermont needs a Public Bank.  Congratulations to my colleague Gwendolyn Hallsmith and all my fellow advisory board of the Public Banking Institute and our fearless leader, Lawyer Ellen Brown, author of The Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution, in which I was honored to  write the Foreword.

~Hazel Henderson,  Editor“

Mike Krauss

MikeKrauss

Mike Krauss is a former officer of Pennsylvania county and state government and former Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee giving him broad experience in American politics and government. He is currently a director of the Public Banking Institute and is chair of The Pennsylvania Banking Project, a non-partisan public policy advocacy organization. He is a lecturer and occasional commentator on talk radio. His byline has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, in the web site www.Opednews.com and regularly as a guest columnist in the Bucks County Courier Times. He is currently researching a social study of post World War II suburban United States.

Craig Barnes interviews Gwen Hallsmith and Mike Krauss, 2014

In addition, we print here, a three-part series originally appearing in the Bucks County Courier Times about public banking, giving strong arguments about its ability to help build stronger local economies. It also appears, along with a multitude of his other writings, in his blog, http://mikekrauss.blogspot.com/

From The Bucks County Courier Times:


The public banking debate, Part 1 of 3

The American middle class and democracy: going, going . . .

Posted: Sunday, June 1, 2014 6:00 am


By Mike Krauss
The Bucks County Courier Times

The American middle class and the democracy it supported are going down faster than the Hindenburg.

With every passing day the United States looks more like the old Europe of aristocratic privilege which the first Americans cast off.

That’s the conclusion of university researchers and think tanks now getting their fifteen minutes in the news; and one scholar, Thomas Piketty, whose book “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” seems to have awakened even some American politicians.

But I doubt the readers of this column need any Ivy League experts to awaken them to the reality they experience every day and can see with their own eyes.

Since the Reagan years, the income and wealth of the nation have been steadily and grotesquely concentrated in ever fewer hands.

Unions were once a force for the middle class. But ‘free trade” sent the jobs off shore to fatten the wallets of the one percent and corporate CEOs, while the real wages of workers have not kept pace with the cost of living.

The political parties that were once broadly representative agents of our democracy have been reduced to irrelevance. They no longer control election financing, and those elected toe the corporate line; kept in line by a system of legalized bribes and post-Washington rewards.

Wall Street and the corporate elite own the federal government. The Supreme Court has locked in their domination with the most far reaching excess of any court in American history, declaring that corporations – created in the law by the people – have the same rights as the people whose law created them, and can spend at will to buy elections.

Continue Reading