Month: December 2021

Links to Matt’s Public Banking Series at Occupy.com

December 28, 2021
by Matt Stannard

There have been a few requests for the links to the 10-part series I wrote for Occupy on public banking in 2018. Here are all the articles in that series (I have several other articles both here at Cowboys and at Occupy, they’re searchable and if you have questions, you can leave them in the comments.
Reading through these articles at the end of 2021, three years later, particularly the ones whose titles are questions, I sense the need to follow up and answer some of them with the benefit of hindsight. There are still no public banks in the United States other than in North Dakota (a bank that isn’t being used for too many sustainable or restorative purposes, that does some good and also props up some bad) and America Samoa–and that bank was created administratively with no grassroots movement, and hence contains no grassroots agenda.

Enjoy the articles and get in touch if you want to have a public or non-public discussion about any of this.

Seizing the Public Banking Moment, 4/9/18

The Public Banking Movement Has Always Been About Justice, 4/16/18

How the Public Banking Movement Hacked Cannabis Banking, 4/23/18

Can Public Banks Help Us Re-write Our Financial Worldview? 4/30/18

A Tale of Two Cities: Can the Public Banking Movement Learn How to Fight? 5/14/18

Creating a Public Bank in New Jersey: Will the Inside-Outside Game Work? 5/21/18

Is the Postal Banking Movement Being too Careful to Succeed? 5/29/18

Cutting Out Wall Street and Putting the “Public” in Public Banking, 6/18/21

Public Banking Comes to the Territories, 7/2/18

As Finance Capital Pushes Back, Public Banking Must Build and Take Power, 7/17/18

Photo by Kurtis Wu, @kurtis_wu , whose photo contribution has been widely used and deserves a lot of credit for capturing the moment.

Solidarity Collective Creates Charter

by Matt on December 27, 2021

Over the past month, members of Solidarity Collective (there are 16 of us here now) have finalized a charter that outlines our shared beliefs and values, and the purpose of the collective and its resources. We are currently revising our membership process and conduct expectations. It’s hard, careful, slow, consensus-based work, made necessary by the unprecedented growth in numbers and activity we’ve experienced over the past six months. We continue to receive new inquiries every month and want to continue to grow as we can create the systems and spaces and accommodations to do it. The charter will help us help our visitors and applicants know what we’re about–and it will help us too, in our moments of inevitable confusion, overwhelm, and internal debate.

You can read the entire charter here.

You may find it interesting, as we did, that the charter is both considerably “doctrinaire” and also explicitly pluralist. We remain committed to being a big anti-capitalist tent, but we are definitely not for everyone.

Our podcasts contain discussions of the everyday procedures, tactical and philosophical discussions, analysis of local, national and global politics, and stuff we find entertaining and thought-provoking. You can hear them at our Patreon platform or on this Podbean platform (which also sources them onto Spotify, Apple, and more).