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Private interests run the economy for the benefit of the very few and the financial elites designed it that way.

The economic sphere is now totally separated from the political sphere, making the flow of private capital immune to public scrutiny as it now stands. The economy is where the real power lies; so without the power to guide the economy in the name of people and planet, our political leaders have been unable to provide meaningful solutions to the imminent problems we now face.

Too much is at stake in too short a timeframe to be content with anything other than real solutions. Divesting from one extractive Wall St. behemoth only to reinvest into another would, at the end of the day, provide only an illusion of progress. The time has come to stop merely looking at the symptoms of a pernicious financial system; the time has come to do nothing less than radically transform the system itself.

By Jimmy Tobias, The Nation. From Seattle to Santa Fe, cities are at the center of a movement to create publicly owned banks.

When Craig Brandt marched into the City Council chambers in Oakland, California, in the summer of 2015, he was furious about fraud. The long-time local attorney and father of two had been following the fallout from the Libor scandal, a brazen financial scam that saw some of the biggest banks on Wall Street illegally manipulate international interest rates in order to boost their profits. By some estimates, the scheme cost cities and states around the country well over $6 billion. In June of 2015, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Barclays, among other Libor-rigging giants, pleaded guilty to felony charges related to the conspiracy and agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion in criminal fines to US regulators. But, for Brandt, that wasn’t enough. He wanted the banks banished, blocked from doing business in his city.