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Public Banking: The Antidote to Wall Street’s Domination of the Economy – Part 2

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California Could Solve Its Budget Problems by Starting a Public Bank Like North Dakota Did

by John Lawrence

The most solvent state in the US is North Dakota which has low unemployment, no budget deficit and a burgeoning economy. The main reason is that the state has a public bank (BND) in which state revenues and pension funds can be invested making it unnecessary to send the money out of the state to Wall Street. All state revenues are deposited in the BND by law. Instead of Wall Street making the profits on North Dakota’s money, North Dakota is making the profits.

Instead of paying interest on debt bonds, North Dakota is reinvesting the interest its public bank makes on infrastructure improvements and lowering state income taxes among other things.

Whereas private banks are required by law to extract as much in debt service as the market will bear, a public bank can pass on the lower interest rates it has access to to its customers such as public agencies, local businesses and residents. Infrastructure projects are effectively interest free since the bank returns interest on its loans to the state treasury in the form of an annual dividend.   [Read more…]

Has Assad Crossed a Red Line In Syria?

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by Frank Thomas and John Lawrence

Is the Gassing of 1400 Syrians More of a Crime Against Humanity Than the Slaughter of 100,000 Syrians?

Frank Thomas’ take:

Russia’s ongoing multi-dollar sales of advanced massively destructive weapons to Assad’s government has exacerbated the killing fields in Syria. Yet Russia sanctimoniously thinks the rest of the world, namely the U.S., has no right of humanitarian intervention to protect the lives of innocents being slaughtered by chemical weapons and more so by Russia’s own prolific arms sales to Assad’s military forces.

Russia would remind us that for many years (1980-88) Saddam Hussein’s army blatantly used mustard and nerve gases at will against Iran and even the people of Iraq. Foreign Policy has just published CIA documents confirming Washington and other western nations knew of Iraq’s production and use of chemical gases and even delivered some raw materials. In fact, the U.S. incredibly falsely accused Iran of using chemical weapons. Super-hypocritically, we and others set the Iraq precedent that a tyrant government leader, no manner how barbarous, can use chemical gases so long as his tyrannical regime is on the right side of western interests.   [Read more…]

Global Warming is Cooking the Planet Now – Not in Some Far-Off Future

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90 Million Tons of Carbon Dioxide are Dumped into the Atmosphere Every 24 Hours

By John Lawrence

As Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, states in his book, Eaarth, global warming is not some far-off event that we will have to prepare for sometime in the future; it is here today and the effects of global warming are being manifested here today. Yet the oil and gas industry is pulling out all the stops to convince people that global warming is just a myth perpetrated by fuzzy headed liberals.

Extreme weather events, billion dollar weather events, are happening with increasing frequency just as Wall Street analysts are computing Big Oil’s stock price based on all the assets yet in the ground and which the industry is bound and determined to pump out on its way to becoming part of the atmosphere. If such were to be the case, kiss the earth, as a habitable place for the human species, good-bye.   [Read more…]

Public Banking: The Antidote to Wall Street’s Domination of the Economy – Part 1

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States, Cities and Pension Funds Have Gone into Debt to Wall Street When They Could Have Started a Public Bank and Paid Interest to Themselves

By John Lawrence

Public banks plow their revenues back into community needs like infrastructure, education, health facilities, local enterprises and other public banks. When municipalities, cities, states, countries and even smaller jurisdictions like school districts fund their deficits with Wall Street, the profits go into the pockets of executives and investors.

Currently, only the state of North Dakota has a public bank. As a consequence North Dakota suffered very little from the Great Recession of 2008, has a robust economy and no budget deficit. California on the other hand struggles every year with its budget because it pays a lot of interest on its loans to Wall Street. If California had a public bank similar to North Dakota’s, it would have no budget deficit at all and could fund its infrastructure needs out of its own revenues.   [Read more…]

Jazz in San Diego: Album Revue – Mike Wofford’s “It’s Personal”

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By John Lawrence

San Diego jazz musician Mike Wofford is best known for having been the accompanist for Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. He also was one of the promulgators of the west coast cool jazz sound, having played with the likes of Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne at the Hermosa Beach Lighthouse in the 1950s and 60s and later at Shelly’s club, the Manne-Hole, on North Cahuenga Blvd in Hollywood.

His current offering “It’s Personal” honors his wife, jazz flutist Holly Hofmann, who has been a major force in the presentation of jazz in San Diego for over two decades as well as, in my opinion, the best jazz flutist playing today. This album contains four originals by Mike and eight tunes from the jazz lexicon that are not often heard. This gives the album a fresh and vital quality which adds to the overall atmosphere of elegance, a Mike Wofford trademark. The time signatures are relaxed; the improvisations meld seamlessly with the tune statements, and the music flows effortlessly and creatively making this one of the best jazz albums of 2013.   [Read more…]

Extreme Weather Watch July 2013: Floods, Fires, Drought and Heat Waves

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by John Lawrence

From coast to coast, we saw a variety of record-breaking weather in July 2013. Several cities recorded one of their hottest Julys on record. A heat wave that lasted a week in middle July helped propel Hartford, Conn., Bridgeport, Conn., and Providence R.I. to their hottest July and calendar month on record. In the west Salt Lake City, Utah, Reno, Nev., Elko, Nev., Medford, Ore., Roseburg, Ore. and Bend, Ore. all saw their hottest July and calendar month in history.

Although July is typically the driest month of the year in the Pacific Northwest, it was exceptionally dry in July 2013.

Seattle, Olympia, Wash., Portland, Ore., Eugene, Ore. and Salem, Ore. were among the slew of locations in western Washington and western Oregon that recorded no measurable rainfall in July 2013. Only four other Julys since 1890 have had no rain in Portland (downtown). For Seattle, it was the first time in more than 50 years with no measurable rain in July.   [Read more…]

The New Pope Castigates “The Greed of the Market”

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Pope Francis, a Pope of the People, takes up the cause of the poor

by John Lawrence

I like this new Pope even though I’m not Catholic. What’s not to like about a Pope who eschews those fancy red shoes and wears the basic black Payless variety instead? He even carries his own luggage, takes public transportation and pays his own hotel bills. Clearly there is something different about this Pope. I liked Pope John Paul too,who articlulated the “preferential option for the poor.” The preferential option for the poor refers to a trend, throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible, of preference being given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society.

According to said doctrine, through one’s words, prayers and deeds one must show solidarity with, and compassion for, the poor. Therefore, when instituting public policy one must always keep the “preferential option for the poor” at the forefront of one’s mind. Accordingly, this doctrine implies that the moral test of any society is “how it treats its most vulnerable members.” The poor have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation. We are called to look at public policy decisions in terms of how they affect the poor.   [Read more…]

The US Has Not Created ONE Breadwinner Type Job in Over 10 Years

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Only part time, temp and minimum wage jobs are being created

By John Lawrence

A breadwinner job is a job that is sufficient to support a family, including rent or mortgage, car payment, adequate food and nutrition, health care, education and savings for retirement. That meant a job paying $50,000 a year in 2007 when the US economy peaked. At that time there were 71.8 million “breadwinner” jobs in construction, manufacturing, white-collar professions, government and the like. These jobs accounted for more than half of the nation’s 138 million total payroll.

Breadwinner jobs are the foundation of the Main Street economy. But after losing 5.6 million of these jobs during the Great Recession, less than 4 percent of these jobs have been recovered. The 3 million jobs recovered since the recession ended in 2009 have been mainly in part-time work, temp jobs and in health, education and social services (the HES complex).   [Read more…]

The Federal Reserve: Money Printer for Wall Street’s Benefit

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This is Part 5 of a multipart series on Wall Street.  Part 1 dealt with Republican economic philosophy over the last 30 years which has produced disastrous results for the American economy leading up to the 2008 crisis. Parts 2, 3 and 4 dealt with whether or not Wall Street banks should have been allowed to fail. Part 5 deals with the incestuous relationship between the Federal Reserve Bank and Wall Street.

By John Lawrence

The US Federal Reserve Bank is the central bank of the US. It’s mission is to control the nation’s monetary policy i.e. the amount of money circulating in the economy, and to maximize employment. It does this by raising or lowering interest rates. When interest rates are low, there is more money in circulation and it’s cheaper to borrow. Low mortgage rates encourage home sales and they also encourage the sale of large consumer items such as cars.   [Read more…]

June’s Extreme Weather Breaks All Kinds of Records

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By John Lawrence

Devastating fires swept through Colorado in June, where firefighters remain relentless in their battle against the West Fork Complex fire in southwest Colorado, which has burned for most of the month.
The West Fork Fire likely will burn for months, said incident commander Pete Blume. And crews are not expecting to make any real gains against the 117-square-mile burn until the summer monsoon season brings cooler temperatures and rains, hopefully in early July.

“This is a significant fire with significant problems, and we are not going to see any significant containment until we have significant changes in the weather,” said Blume, who is with the Rocky Mountain Type I Incident Command.   [Read more…]

One Sharp Health Care Experience: Uncoordinated, Sub-Standard, and Ultimately Tragic

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The opinions and views expressed in the following article are solely those of the author and his subjects and do not reflect the opinions and views of the editors and staff of the San Diego Free Press.

by John Lawrence

This article is about the shoddy treatment of one woman by San Diego’s Sharp Health Care. Her name is Donna Lichtenfels. I interviewed her by phone on Saturday, May 18.

Donna was an employee of Sharp Health Care. She had gone to work there in the corporate office in August 2011, and, as a condition of her employment, she had to take Sharp Insurance called Sharp Health Plan. She had no choice in the matter.

Donna has worked in the healthcare field for over 30 years. She started working in the field for Blue Shield of California as a claims adjuster and in fraud and abuse. She has worked for physicians and major hospitals all over the US. She also has written for several websites  including OpEdNews, Winning Progressive and Daily Kos under her pen name, Jillian Barclay. She currently is too sick to write.

Last July after a mammogram and a biopsy, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.   [Read more…]

Extreme Weather Watch: Two Rare EF5 Tornadoes Hit Oklahoma in May

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By John Lawrence

Two EF5 tornadoes hit the Oklahoma City area in May. The first tornado hit Moore, OK and had winds estimated at over 200 mph reaching a maximum damage width of 1.3 miles. State officials confirmed 24 fatalities due to the twister. The storm injured over 300 others with preliminary damage estimates totaling over $2 billion along its 17 mile, 40 minute path. The twister destroyed two Moore elementary schools, killing seven schoolchildren at Plaza Towers elementary and injuring many others. Moore was hit in 1999 by another EF5, which had the strongest winds ever measured on earth: 302 mph.

  [Read more…]

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