The failures of Wall Street-run banks, which currently dominate the American financial system, are plain for all to see. When Wall Street is in charge, communities and small businesses can’t access the same credit that wealthy corporations can. We need a public option for communities, especially rural, Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities, to keep their money invested at home.

Bank executives frequently make risky investment decisions to boost quarterly profits, but then need bailouts when those investments go bad... and for-profit banks rarely face any significant accountability for socially-destructive investments such as financing new fossil fuel developments.

What the banking industry really doesn’t want you to know, though, is that viable alternatives to their profit-taking model have been successful all over the world, including here in the United States. More than 900 public banks holding $49 trillion in assets are currently in operation worldwide. And here in the U.S., the Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully since 1919, putting millions of dollars into the state’s general fund every year while offering lower-cost banking services to the state’s residents AND maintaining a high level of stability in the financial crisis of 2008 while other banks circled the drain.

Public banks can save municipalities and states money, create jobs and boost the local economy, and lend counter-cyclically to blunt the impact of Wall Street’s booms and busts. As the Public Banking Institute puts it, public banks “allow communities to declare their independence from risky, expensive, for-profit banks, and keeps taxpayers’ money working at home.”

So to facilitate the development of public banking across the United States, Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have recently introduced The Public Banking Act of 2023. The bill would create the supportive regulatory framework for public banks to succeed, and also set baseline standards for public banks relating to “environmental justice, tenant protections, labor standards, democratic governance, and consumer data privacy.”^[1]

This legislation deserves our support -- and the support of any elected official who cares more about their constituents than they do about campaign cash from the banking industry and predatory lending lobbyists.

Sign on as a grassroots co-sponsor of the Public Banking Act of 2023 now!

^{[1] Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez Introduce Public Banking Act}