By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public good. The Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully for over a century, and states like New York have recently seen legislation proposed to establish their own state-level public banking systems. Success at the state level informs the effort for a nationwide Public Banking Act proposed in Congress, which offers a vital first step towards building a more equitable and sustainable economy by establishing a federal charter for local and state public banks and creating a systemic channel to direct public deposits toward community investment.

To fully realize public banking’s potential, however, we must recognize that loans alone are insufficient for addressing all public needs. The loan model makes urgent community investment dependent on the ability to generate a profit and repay, when, in fact, the entire reason these initiatives require public support is the absence of a prospect for private sector profit. 

For this reason, we need to expand the public’s financial toolkit beyond traditional loans to include grants. The operating paradigm for the next generation must empower public banks to issue grants, thereby giving communities the financial resources they need and freeing them from the constraints of expected repayment. In what follows, we explore the groundbreaking potential of a Public Grant-Making Bank, which promises to revolutionize the meaning of money as a mechanism of Democratic Public Finance.

The Public Banking Act, as previously proposed, makes significant strides. It seeks to establish a national framework, providing legal clarity for states and municipalities to create publicly owned banks. This structure would confer local control over investment, ensuring these banks are governed by public mandates that prioritize community needs over shareholder profits. The Public Banking Act would give public banks access to the Federal Reserve’s payment systems and liquidity facilities, integrating them into the broader financial architecture. The legislation allows them to fund local priorities like infrastructure, affordable housing, and renewable energy. Crucially, it mandates adherence to standards related to environmental justice and democratic governance, steering financial capacity toward the public good. 

The Public Banking Act’s proposed changes to the existing financial system are powerful; however, the legislation still operates within a capitalist paradigm of loan-based financing. By focusing primarily on loans, even at favorable rates, the model retains a core capitalist constraint: the expectation of financial repayment. This expectation means that any essential community investment must carry a calculable path to profit or guaranteed revenue sufficient to service the loan. When a project is defined by its social or ecological necessity rather than its ability to yield a private return, the loan structure fails. For instance, a loan for constructing protective sea walls, implementing watershed restoration, or funding universal local public transit will never meet a private profitability threshold. We cannot allow the constraints of private profit to obstruct the necessary path toward collective flourishing and stability. Such projects are essential, non-revenue-generating public goods that communities require for collective well-being.

To meet critical needs, we must expand the financial toolkit of public banking beyond traditional loans. We need a revised Public Banking Act that establishes a new class of financial institution: the Public Grant-Making Bank. A Public Grant-Making Bank actively tackles pressing social and ecological challenges where traditional, loan-based financing proves inadequate. 

The first pillar of this model involves restructuring finance as direct grants, rather than as loans. Instead of relying on future repayment, public banks would issue grants to projects based on their public mission. A Public Grant-Making Bank evaluates proposals by assessing their anticipated social and ecological effects. For example, funding the establishment of community-owned broadband networks would be evaluated on their contribution to equitable digital access and educational opportunity, not on a financial return model. If the qualitative assessment is strong, the grant is made. On this logic, a grant is still debt; only, it is a qualitative obligation to improve social and environmental conditions, rather than a quantitative obligation to repay a financial sum.

A core commitment to qualitative assessment requires a decisive legal shift. Local public banks, overseen by community-led boards, ought to be granted full discretion to issue finance based on community needs. Granting this authority requires major overhauls of banking laws, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, to legally authorize such non-financial metrics over traditional financial prudence. This authorization must be coupled with a legal liability shield for bank directors, protecting them from fiduciary duty claims when making mission-aligned grant decisions.

Any radical institutional change demands an equally radical monetary theory. Our financial regulatory system is typically conceived according to an erroneous, yet dominant “loanable funds” model, which posits that banks act as mere intermediaries, collecting pre-existing savings from lenders and then allocating those scarce funds to borrowers. Under this view, money is a finite resource, and any capital loss resulting from a grant poses an existential threat to the bank’s ability to maintain its pool of savings. However, we know from the credit theory of money that banks actually create money as credit when they extend financing. This means that when a bank issues a grant, it does not transfer pre-existing savings, but rather generates fresh financial assets in the community’s accounts.

The result inverts the traditional view of deficits. When a Public Grant-Making Bank issues a grant, it creates financial capacity for a community. In the process, the bank does not draw down its capital. It undergoes no depletion of pre-existing funds. Instead, the grant constitutes a creative act of democratic public provisioning in its own right. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s sectoral balances approach is illuminating here. Just as, according to MMT, public sector deficits are private sector assets, we must recognize that the bank’s alleged deficit is actually the community’s financial surplus. The grants are not a loss; they are creative endowments that increase the net financial wealth of the public. For these institutions, therefore, we must reframe the reigning ideology of the balance sheet entirely.

While the credit theory explains the mechanics of how all banks create money, current law is designed to punish institutions that act on this reality for the public good; therefore, we must redesign the legal framework to make public grant-making possible. If the bank’s financial deficit is simply the community’s newly created financial asset, specific legal changes are required, such as amendments to the Federal Reserve Act and the Federal Deposit Insurance Act to establish what we could call a Systemically Essential Public Grant-Making Charter. Crucially, this charter and all associated exemptions would apply only to the bank’s non-repayable grants. The charter would exempt these banks from closure based on mission-related grants. We would mandate the creation of a Public Commitment Reserve—a dedicated and nominally inexhaustible fund explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States that covers the necessary operational deficit, effectively making the federal government the implicit equity partner. This mechanism ensures the bank’s stability while validating its singular mission by giving the granting function a 100% Risk Weight Exemption from standard capital rules like those stemming from Basel III.

Meanwhile, the new regulatory framework must reflect a new collective purpose. Regulatory oversight would necessarily shift from strict capital ratios to a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI). Regulators should utilize something like a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI), a qualitative and quantitative assessment tool that measures the Public Grant-Making Bank’s effectiveness. Instead of narrowly auditing assets and liabilities, the PMFI would evaluate the bank’s adherence to its public mandate, its effectiveness in achieving social and ecological outcomes such as specific climate adaptation goals or public health milestones, and its transparent governance structure. Performance would be judged not by profit margins, but by documented progress toward communal problem-solving, making the mission, not a zero-sum balance sheet, the legal measure of success.

The Public Banking Act can incentivize the creation of new banking institutions across state and municipal levels, but we hardly need to start from scratch. The existing landscape is already rich with institutions that currently implement grants, demonstrating that non-loan-based provisioning is a deeply established practice. Consider the vast network of federal bodies that allocate grants based on qualitative criteria: organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation fund research based on merit and public benefit, alongside cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This federal effort is mirrored at the state level by agencies like the Departments of Labor, Health, and Energy; development-focused bodies such as the Appalachian Regional Commission; and, of course, our public university systems. Beyond government, the sector includes myriad non-profits and community foundations, including large institutions like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Ford Foundation, programmatic groups like Habitat for Humanity, and even small, local initiatives run by churches and food pantries. These well-established institutions prove that grant-based financing beyond profitability is already a central function of financial life in the United States. 

The Public Banking Act already contains language for empowering these organizations to become licensed public credit issuers. Like for-profit banks, such organizations draw on systemic knowledge of their recipients’ projects and the shifting contexts in which they operate. All that is needed is to equip them with financial capacities to expand and transform their current mandates in response to communal and ecological needs. Importantly, then, there is no one-size-fits-all model for Public Grant-Making Banks. We need diverse and nimble credit allocators for a heterogeneous and changing world.

The design of the Public Grant-Making Bank yields a robust new approach for achieving economic stability. Rather than naturalize private market prices while fetishizing liberal budget-balancing, public granting banks allow us to challenge the political composition of investment and pricing in the first place. The work of economist Isabella Weber is instructive here, as her analysis highlights how public management of supply chains and targeted price control mechanisms for essential goods can be powerful tools for ensuring stability. Extending this logic to finance, the Public Grant-Making Bank establishes a powerful counterweight to capital markets, where the price of credit and the required rate of return are set by private risk and profit motives. A strong public sector that effectively sets the price of capital at zero shifts essential financial resources from speculative activity to necessary public provisioning. The current political volatility, including the rise of radically anti-democratic policies, behaviors, and sentiments, often stems from a deep-seated economic insecurity that financial systems designed purely for private profit have created. The Public Grant-Making Bank offers a design intervention that directly addresses this insecurity, ensuring new financial capacity is continuously deployed where it is needed most.

The stability provided by the Public Grant-Making Bank acts as a profound form of local political agency and resilience. Decades of unnecessary austerity, perpetuated by establishment Democrats, conservatives, and authoritarians, have destabilized communities by systematically robbing them of financial resources required to provide for basic needs. Will Beaman highlights this vulnerability in his argument for fiscal insurgency, noting that the political viability of progressive public projects is often threatened by legislative sabotage. At the same time, Beaman reminds us, the history of the United States is replete with inspiring examples of local and national credit creation that successfully resisted and overcame austerity. This in mind, the Public Grant-Making Bank represents a critical mechanism for fiscal insurgency. Because it operates on the principle of the legally protected creation of public credit for social ends, its budget is untethered from the state and municipal budgetary processes that constrain investment by recourse to poisonous neoliberal and authoritarian ideologies. This grants local administrators the authority to direct public investment, ensuring their decisions are democratically accountable while actively bypassing those financial constraints. Such enduring capacity acts as a vital institutional guarantor of political stability, ensuring communities can maintain essential provisioning even when political conflicts over the budget attempt to impose sudden cuts.

Thus a Public Grant-Making Bank is more than a policy fix; it is a profound political act that challenges the hegemonic conception of money as a fundamentally capitalist tool. Regrettably, progressives and leftists regularly equate money with capitalism, viewing currency as a mere expression of private competition and exploitation. This dominant view, however, not only fortifies capitalist interests, but also fails to see that money is a contestable and inexhaustible public system, a complex and interdependent hierarchy of obligations and benefits that can always be restructured to serve communal ends. Others on the left attempt to redeem money by embracing the promise of truly egalitarian “exchange.” Examples of this impulse include schemes advocating a return to allegedly pure, decentralized systems like direct barter, or proposals that champion digital currencies built on blockchain technology. Yet these approaches—rooted in the myth that money evolves from direct barter—typically accept the capitalist premise that money is merely a facilitator of micro transactions, thereby failing to embrace the hierarchy of money as a democratic design problem.

The Public Grant-Making Bank is a political project that importantly defamiliarizes what money is. By showing that financial capacity can be intentionally created and distributed based on social and environmental needs rather than the expectation of repayment, the bank clears the way for wide-ranging contests and creative building when it comes to democratic monetary design. Moreover, this approach reframes and reclaims the very idea of granting, not as the decree of a ruling authority, but as a shared commitment to the community and an affirmation of public trust. As a result, the Public Grant-Making Bank becomes an essential step toward achieving what we have elsewhere called Democratic Public Finance, a radical vision where our collective financial system is explicitly designed to serve society, not extract profit.

Passing the extended Public Banking Act and establishing the Public Grant-Making Bank requires a focused national political campaign, starting today. The immediate challenge is immense, given the second Trump administration’s active use of state power to defund social programs, attack democratically-controlled cities, and punish political enemies. Compounding this political sabotage, a nationwide affordability crisis continues to push prices higher across essential goods and services. Yet a clear political opening exists: the recent 2026 blue electoral sweep, a victory underscored by the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, signals an urgent public demand for structural solutions to the affordability crisis. The Public Grant-Making Bank can be a vital ingredient in this effort. We can begin straightaway by forging powerful coalitions, bringing together progressive legislators with organizations like the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Debt Collective. Success is hardly certain, but the collective activity of imagining and organizing for this transformative financial architecture is itself a crucial political project that helps transform what counts as possible for public finance.

When we finally acknowledge money as public credit, we empower public banks to transition from mere lenders to catalysts of collective prosperity, underwriting the essential work of ecological restoration and community-making with direct grants. The initial Public Banking Act gives us the start. Our challenge now is to extend its vision and construct a system where financial design itself actively guarantees a just and ecologically stable world.

qu3ercus:

discount-butlins:

motherhenna:

thebagelhut:

magicoftelevision:

autisticcosima:

my sense of humor: getting birthday cards with the wildly incorrect age on it for people

I see this and raise you: getting cards for a wildly different occasion and customizing them to fit the holiday you need

throwback to the time my partner put in his 2 week notice with a birthday card for a 2 year old

holy-muffins:

myfatfuckingface:

feathersescapism:

Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)

That Vonnegut quote brings this particular moment to mind:

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

I’d rather go out throwing pies than just rolling over and accepting that pie throwing isn’t going to solve anything. Yeah, the pie throwing doesn’t immediately solve the problem, but it doesn’t have to because it’s just a starting point. So throw the damn pie.

So throw the damn pie

Hi everyone, I am on a plane heading to New York to speak at the Nonprofit New York conference, and Wi-Fi is very spotty, so apologies for the poor grammar and coherence.

If you’re free next week, join me and podcast co-hosts Monique Curry-Mims and Valerie Johnson for a live recording of the Philanthropy podcast. Register here.

The past few months (years) we have all been inundated with terrible news about awful things happening all over the world. While we should continue paying attention to them and act when we can, it’s important to acknowledge that awesome things are also taking place.

Here are some hopeful and inspiring things below, in no particular order. A lot of this is from Instagram, news sites, and Buzzfeed.

·       Last week, the US experienced a blue wave in our elections, which was a welcome and much-needed bit of hope for many of us. Among the left's victories, Zohran Mamdani scored a decisive victory to become New York’s 111^th mayor, beating back not just the right wing, but moderate democrats, and showing that being unapologetically progressive is a winning formula.

. California passed Proposition 50, which allows Democrats to temporary redraw congressional districts to favor Democrats, and this will significantly help balance out the GOP's attempt to keep power during the midterms through redrawing districts in Texas to get more Republican House representatives.

·       Supreme Court denies revisiting decision on marriage equality. Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis refused to do her job of issuing marriage licenses to gay couple, claiming it was against her religion. Her case risked jeopardizing SCOTUS’s decision that legalized same-sex marriage. By not hearing the case, that decision stands.

·       Montana may have found a way for states to curb the effect of Citizens United, a destructive SCOTUS ruling that allowed corporations unfettered power to buy elections.

·       Costa Rica runs on almost 100% renewable energy! Meanwhile Scotland in 2022 generated 113% of its electricity demands through wind power; its renewable energy sector sustains more than 42,000 jobs.

·       Bus drivers in Okayama Japan have gone on strike. They are still working and driving their routes, but they won’t be accepting payment from passengers! Brilliant!

·       Trump is going to UK, where he will be welcomed by a gigantic picture of him with Epstein. Truly, it is a big, big picture, yuge. Thank you, UK activists.

·       Burkina Faso has made tremendous progress fighting desertification. It’s Great Green Wall project has created 4 million hectares of forest since 2022. This helps significantly with famines and other problems created by the land drying out.

·       The ozone layer is healing and might fully recover, thanks to policies that help decrease the use of chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFSs). Heck, scientists think in 10 or 20 years, it may heal completely.

·       The Ocean Cleanup has been tackling the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean by removing plastic and intercepting it before it reaches the ocean. It estimates that with enough support, 90% of plastic floating in the ocean can be removed by 2040.

·       Women rule in Namibia! Namibia becomes the first country where top government positions are held by women: Its president Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, VP Lucia Witbooi, speaker of national assembly Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, and secretary general of the ruling party, are all women. 57% of the country’s cabinet is women.

·       Youth uprising toppled Nepal’s government. Gen-Z protestors, rightfully angered over government corruption and media censorship, burned the presidential palace and used Dischord to elect an interim prime minister, Sushila Karki, known for her progressive activism. A nonprofit, Hami Nepal, played a key role. Read the inspiring story here. Similar uprisings are spreading to other countries. The media here in the US won’t cover it much, probably because they don’t want young people here to see how successful these movements can be.

·       Judge in Chicago rules that ICE agents can be arrested if they try to arrest people who are coming to or from court for their hearings.

·       ICE agents are burning out and quitting. Communities have been fighting back, deploying all sorts of creative tactics, including using whistles to alert one another of ICE presence, women dating agents to take pictures and expose these assholes to the world, and even gangs have declared war on ICE.

·       Ireland elects progressive, pro-Palestine Catherine Connolly in a landslide victory to be its next president. She won 63% of the votes, showing the world that you don’t have to appeal to fascists and moderates to win.

·       While we’re on the topic of Ireland’s awesomeness, the country is continuing to offer basic income for artists. 2,000 artists will be getting $1500 per month so they can keep making art!

. Portland's Heretic Coffee raises over 200K in a short time to help people facing hunger. The cafe decided to give free breakfasts to those losing SNAP benefits. Its effort went viral, and people have been pitching in.

·       There is a group of volunteer pilots who will transport people who need reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare from states where it’s illegal to states where it’s legal. It’s called Elevated Access and they’re awesome.

·       In Denmark, children 6 to 16 are taught empathy as a mandatory school subject. This has been taking place since 1993. And it works. Denmark has one of the lowest rates of bullying and crimes.

·       France becomes first country to pass laws requiring supermarkets to donate unsold food. Supermarkets partner with local nonprofits to distribute food to those who need it, instead of destroying it. It’s inspiring other countries to think about similar efforts.

·       Tucson City Council votes unanimously to oppose the Trump Compact, a fascist overreach trying to limit academic freedom, including requiring the banning of the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions, capping international enrollment, applying right-wing definitions of gender to campus bathrooms, and so on.

·       California, Oregon, and Washington State are banding together to create the West Coast Health Alliance to provide ensure health information and policies are based on science. This is vital as Trump’s destruction of the CDC continues.

·       Albany and Syracuse elect their first Black women mayors in history. Sharon Owens and Dorcey Applyrs became the first Black women mayors of Syracuse and Albany respectively. Meanwhile, Detroit MI elected Mary Sheffield, Conyers GA elected Connie Alsobrook, and Charlotte NC elected Vi Lyles.

·       In Dallas Texas, Oak Lawn church paints its steps rainbow after Governor Abbott orders cities to remove rainbow crosswalks from their streets. Dallas also rejected a 25Million deal with ICE.

·       Meanwhile, in Houston, also in response to the City removing a rainbow crosswalk, an artist, Nicky Davis, started offering to paint rainbow murals for free, and soon local artists have been painting rainbows everywhere! This shows once again how vital the arts are in fighting fascism.

·       Baltimore Maryland opens a 100% free full-service grocery store, and it’s inside a public library! There is no income testing, no requirements for people to show ID or demonstrate they’re poor.  

These are just SOME of the hopeful things that I've come across. It’s 2:30am in New York, so I need to sleep. Please put in the comment section other hopeful, inspiring things that are happening. Let’s remind one another that good people are not just fighting back against injustice every day, but are succeeding.

 --

Vu’s new book is out. Order your copy at Elliott Bay Book Company, Barnes and Nobles, or Bookshop. If you’re in the UK, use this version of Bookshop. If you plan to order several copies, use Porchlight for significant bulk discounts.

weaver-z:

I heard this metaphor growing up, and in my case, it backfired supremely, because I went out into my neighbor’s backyard where a rose bush was growing, and the one I tested had like 30 petals (it was yellow, but definitely a rose of some kind), and as a very logical lass, I came to the conclusion that you could have premarital sex AT LEAST ten times before your future husband would even notice something was up. Moral of the story? Test your metaphors on the weirdest and most neurodivergent child you know before writing your weird religious propaganda.