https://cowboysonthecommons.org/
November 3, 2016
North Dakota’s Public Bank Is Funding Police Repression at Standing Rock
by Matt Stannard
The brutal repression of indigenous and allied protesters at Standing
Rock has shocked the conscience of fair-minded Americans, particularly
those advocating economic and ecological reform. Although the protesters
had in some cases been encroaching on “company land,” they had done so
peacefully, and their chief modes of political action have been prayer
and nonviolent civil disobedience. The crackdowns of the last few weeks
have seen attack dogs and rubber bullets causing bloody injuries to
protesters, detention and malicious prosecutions, and other dehumanizing
behavior from the cops and soldiers deployed there by North Dakota
Governor Jack Dalrymple.
For those of us in the public banking movement, used to holding up the
Bank of North Dakota (the nation’s only public bank) as an example of
how promising public banks are, the recent news that Dalrymple and an
emergency spending panel voted to add $4 million in additional credit
onto a $10 million line from BND, to fund law enforcement expenses at
Standing Rock, is troubling. It means BND is using its heralded public
power over fractional reserve banking to pay for those rubber bullets
and a host of logistical expenses involved in arresting and evicting
protesters the federal government has refused to evict, citing free
speech concerns.
This financing is part of one of BND’s core functions: providing
emergency loans. A more positive deployment of that function happened in
1997, when BND provided emergency loans for the Grand Forks flood, at a
time when communities desperately needed loans before receiving
slow-moving FEMA reimbursements. Unlike the need to abuse peaceful
protesters, the flood was a real public emergency–the flooding caused
structure fires and destroyed dozens of buildings via fire or water.
Property losses in Grand Forks topped $3.5 billion. There were 50,000
evacuees. BND provided over $70 million in funds for relief.
The Bank of North Dakota was conceived a century ago in the molding of
distinctly American, agrarian-socialist populism. North Dakota farmers
were in trouble, getting cheated by the big banks and big grain
companies headquartered in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Those entities
knew they had farmers at their mercy, and so all the interest rates were
double-digit, all the loan terms were unfavorable (and less favorable to
those who relied on them the most), and as the grain companies operated
every grain elevator along the railroad route; those companies offered
farmers destructively low prices, often cheating on tonnage because the
farmers had nowhere else to go.
In 1915, led by a struggling farmer named A.C. Townley, a group of North
Dakotans formed the Nonpartisan League to push back against those
powerful grain and banking interests. The NPL ended up taking political
power in the state, creating both the Bank of North Dakota and the North
Dakota Mill and Elevator. Today, those two public utilities are the only
institutions of their kind under any state government in the U.S.
They’ve long outlived the NPL, whose inexperienced political leaders
were subject to constant attacks and red-baiting from big business
interests, exacerbating NPL infighting and corruption, culminating in
the recall of Governor Lynn Frazier, alongside whom the state
legislature had created one of the most progressive state agendas in
American history.
Since then, for understandable reasons, BND has been militantly
apolitical. BND President and CEO Eric Hardmeyer has explicitly
repudiated arguments that the BND ought to be a model, despite his
effective touting of its successes. The Bank exists to help the state
and its businesses function well and to maintain liquidity and economic
stability. BND created the infrastructure for North Dakota’s oil boom,
and if the state were to commit to a truly proactive transition to
renewable and clean energy (it has taken baby steps), the BND would make
it happen financially–with an efficiency that would put the rest of the
country to shame.
But in the present political reality, cops and soldiers are brutally
cracking down on Standing Rock protesters, and BND is funding it, and
that makes BND not truly apolitical, but a facilitator of injustice.
Public banks are tools, not sources of virtue in themselves. In the
hands of bad policymakers, they can prop up bad policies.
So what do we do with this unfortunate knowledge, besides continuing to
support the Standing Rock protesters, calling the governor regularly (if
you do, please mention that using BND to finance repression is
shameful), and pushing for a just and sustainable transition to clean
energy (including economic support for energy sector workers and their
families)? What do these unfortunate events teach us about our movement?
First, the awful actions in North Dakota don’t undermine the idea of
public banking. If anything, they’re more evidence against private
ownership and shareholding in both fossil fuels and the financial
sector. In financing those rubber bullets and smoke bombs, BND is paying
the security costs of private corporations, subsidizing the worst of big
oil capitalism. But as my colleague, Ira Dember, pointed out to me
yesterday, North Dakota is rich in wind and is building wind farms. That
four million dollars could have been better lent to develop additional
wind resources and technology, and to train workers to transition from
oil fields to wind farms and more. That depends on a larger movement,
which I’ll talk more about below.
Second, the actions illustrate the folly of pushing for state and local
control without accompanying universal human and environmental rights.
Economic and environmental justice advocates have long promoted local
autonomy as a bulwark against big corporations and their puppets in
national and state government. But local governments (often pushed by
state legislators and governors) can do violence to indigenous
communities just as they have enforced segregation and lynchings in the
South. Human rights and environmental protection must be encoded in
national and international norms and these norms need to have a
complimentary and non-oppressive relationship with local communities.
That makes our coalition-building and policy-making tasks bigger and
more challenging. It makes allies and communication more important, and
demands clarity about various movements’ and organizations’ ethical
frameworks.
Third, you can’t keep people you disagree with ideologically out of
single-issue movements. Sometimes this can be frustrating: There are all
sorts of people in the public banking movement, including a few
supporters who aren’t committed to ending fossil fuel consumption, and
even weirder and more disturbing, a tiny handful of extremists who want
to take down big private banks because they associate banking with Jews.
Thankfully, those toxic forces don’t show up in any significant numbers
(and the Public Banking Institute has explicitly repudiated them). While
the movement is primarily white and bourgeois, there are powerful
non-white, non-bourgeois voices in it, and its alignment with the New
Economy Coalition and other economic justice coalitions helps
considerably. It matters who you do your activist business with.
Finally, whatever your own organization’s commitment to justice, the
policies and institution your movement creates, if it is lucky enough to
create them, will only be as socially positive and ethically correct as
the people working inside of them, and the communities overseeing them.
Public banks can fund a post-carbon, sustainable energy transition–but
only if people successfully demand a post-carbon, sustainable energy
transition. Public banks can create safe and prosperous communities for
all, but only if that’s what communities are already committed to.
Public banking advocates, in particular, ought to emphasize the ways
public control of state and municipal finance can fund new structures of
work and production that neither exploit nor extract. That has always
been the most powerful argument for public banks: that they can produce
justice because as community-controlled entities, we can make them just.
Matt Stannard is policy director at Commonomics USA and was formerly on
the Public Banking Institute’s board of directors, but the views
expressed in this post are entirely personal.
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