While bank bailouts fatten Wall Street, states continue to battle the credit crisis. In the search for innovative solutions, some political candidates are proposing that states generate their own credit by setting up their own banks.

We've written quite extensively about local currencies here over the past five years, and will continued to do so in the weeks ahead. As the U.S. Empire's imminent bankruptcy begins to catch up to us all, forward-thinking towns are taking financial matters into their own hands.

More below the fold.

Most interesting, perhaps, is this line:

Editor's Note: RSS up to Russell Longcore's DumpDC blog for more.

You may have seen Edwin Vieira’s three-part series at DumpDC.com,
which was a dissenting opinion about secession. I think that his
analysis is wrong in all but one point. After all he is a Yankee and
educated at Harvard (Just kidding, Ed…kind of…mostly). But there is one
point he makes that is unarguable. That is the absolute requirement of
a seceding state to wield the Power Of The Purse.

Agenda for a New Economy's subtitle is "From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth" This is the essence of the book, and a key phrase to remember. It summarizes the difference between Wall St. and Main St. in a simple phrase. Phantom wealth is the creation of money from money "unrelated to the creation of anything of real value or utility": through accounting entries, inflation of asset bubbles, speculation, corporate asset stripping, predatory lending, risk shifting, leveraging, and creating debt pyramids.

Editor's Note: North Dakota keeps appearing as a state that is managing to keep its financial head above water. Of the 3 F's - Fuel, Food, and Finance, the third seems to be the most difficult for citizens to wrap their minds around. We advocate that the Vermont state legislature aggressively move to consider establishing a public-owned state bank and alternative currency. We'll need both in the months ahead.

Ellen Brown is a California attorney and the author of eleven books, including “Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free,” available in English, Swedish and German. Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

During this time of financial and economic crisis, it is worth recalling that credible alternatives to our current financial system exist, if largely unrecognized, and deserve serious consideration. There is a vast, diverse, and largely unread body of literature on monetary questions. Some of this is an underground literature caught up with dubious conspiracy theories, eccentrics and cranks, and unlikely utopian proposals, but some of it is the work of serious, evidence-based, pragmatic thinkers offering plausible alternatives. 
   

It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.

This morning's inspirational eMail from filmmaker Michael Moore floored me.  Had almost added him to my junk mail filtre... then this.

I was wrong about Moore, and can only hope he comes to Vermont to make a film about the Independence movement...

• Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota.

Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation... The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

• Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us.

Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change.

I got a big shock today when I changed my Fidelity Account from one account to another. Knowing the dollar is going down the tubes, I jumped on the gold bandwagon and enrolled in the Fidelity Select gold mutual fund. A little note popped up saying, "A short term trading fee of .75% will be assessed on any shares of FID SEL GOLD you have owned 29 days or less." What is going on here? Why are they trying to discourage speculation in this gold fund?