The Energy Optimist
Posted: Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 13:09
The Bank of North Dakota holds the state general fund as deposits, meaning the bank and lend money into existence using the general fund as the reserves. This allows the state to self-finance public capital projects without borrowing money at high interest from Wall St bond markets. This also means North Dakota's community banks have the state bank backing them up and guaranteeing their loans, which results in low-cost accesssible credit to North Dakota's small business and agriculture economy. This is win-win-win, for everyone, including the community banks, and is a central reason that North Dakota has the strongest economy in the US.
Vermont Commons and the Vermont Monetary Policy Group have been working on the issues of financial...
Posted: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 12:01
People are ensured inalienable or “God given” rights such as freedom of speech, freedom from unwarranted search and the right to bear arms in our society because those rights are established in the Constitution of the United States.
Corporations existed back when the Constitution was written, yet the word corporation is not mentioned even once in the document. Robots aren’t mentioned either. Can there be any way to interpret the founders’ intent as being supportive of the idea that corporations (or robots) have inalienable human rights?
You don’t have to be a Constitutional scholar to see that the answer is clearly no. It doesn’t matter if you are conservative or liberal; this is just common sense folks. This is an issue where Ron Paul...
Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - 10:27
How do we FREE VERMONT from this madness? Where is rule of law?
Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks by Scot J. Paltrow
(Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.
The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they...
Posted: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - 10:34
Gwen Hallsmith is Director of Planning/Development for the City of Montpelier and has earned international acclaim for her work on monetary issues. She's leading a citizen-businessperson committee that I am part of (along with people like Ben Cohen of Ben/Jerrys and Jeffrey Hollander of 7th Generation) that is working with VT Legislators on creating state-level monetary policy which will insulate VT from Wall St corruption. This movement includes exploring a State-owned bank like the highly successful Bank of North Dakota and also includes the conception of an alternative VT currency that could be legitimized by allowing the currency to beused to pay VT taxes.
Economic lifeboats are being built as the Titanic US financial empire sinks in...
Posted: Friday, December 16, 2011 - 15:20
Here's where the left/right political lines evaporate into meaninglessness, and we are forced to realize that there are only two political options: Local control and self-government, or central-state-government control and fascism. Centralist or decentralist. Those are the only real political paradigms we have. Everything else is a fictional choice.99% of Democrats and Republicans are Centralists who want to eliminate all of our rights to self-government and control everything from distant corporatist bureaucracies.
Many sustainability activists and progressives like Richard Heinberg and Mike Ruppert have realized that decentralization is the only path to sustainability and justice. Many Libertarians like Ron Paul have been advocating...
Posted: Thursday, December 15, 2011 - 16:26
Steven Howard of the Vt Campaign for Liberty lays it out in plain language, and he is not exaggerating.
Posted: Thursday, December 15, 2011 - 08:15
Lifeboat Vermont gets an important spotlight. With the US Constitution formally nullified by NDAA, and $29 Trillion in FED bank-bailouts revealed, how much worse does it have to get before VT takes back our God-given inalienable right to self-government?
Posted: Thursday, December 8, 2011 - 09:06
Libertarians, constitutional activists and Progressives UNITE! "The (supreme) Court stole our Constitution!" This is a fundamental issue that bridges the political spectrum. THE root cause of what eliminated constitutional rule of law is corporate personhood. This is the cause of the issues that Tea Party activists and OWS activists are mobilized around. Corporate-corrupt big government where corporations have inalienable human rights is beyond a perversion of constitutional law; it's outright fascism.
David Cobb of www.MovetoAmend.og explains it all in plain English, in this 10 minute video:
My take: When the effort to amend the Constitution to restore WE THE PEOPLE as sovereigns fails in DC, it will be even more clear that Vermont's...
An 11 minute video interview I did last week with David Cobb of MovetoAmend.org after an event in Montpelier that was sponsored by Ben and Jerrys.
Posted: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 14:06
By Mike Krauss of the Public Banking Institute as posted in PhillyBurbs (images added by me)
The American people have been asleep. That’s over.
The people are wakening and engaging in an expanding discussion about the present circumstances and future prospects of our nation.
The discussion began with the tea party patriots. But their protest at the injustice of the Wall Street bail out was turned to a focus on health care and taxes, as the money of the Republican right moved in to occupy the tea party.
The same way the money of the Democratic left hopes to occupy Occupy.
It’s all about money and power.
Americans are wakening to the reality that as wealth in America has been concentrated in the hands of the few, so too has political power...