Phoenix Goodman, co-founder of Public Bank L.A. debates with Jack Humphreville, member of the Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates on 89.3 KPCC on the creation of a Los Angeles municipal bank.
By Emily Alpert Reyes, LA Times. Los Angeles should explore whether to create a municipal bank that would finance affordable housing and throw its doors open to the cannabis industry, City Council President Herb Wesson said Tuesday.
Wesson tossed out the idea as part of a sweeping speech that set out his agenda for his final term. In addition to the bank, Wesson said L.A. must take new and innovative steps to battle racism, protect immigrants and build more affordable housing.
“When our grandchildren tell stories of us, what will they say? Will they say we were brave?” asked Wesson, who recently was reelected as council president. “When the history books remember us, will they say that we did everything within our power to improve the lives of the people we represent?”
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.