Money on the Left
Welcome to the podcast feed of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective. We are an interdisciplinary platform that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics, drawing on Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to forge new paths for left critique and practice.
This feed serves as the single audio home for all Collective programming, bringing you regular interviews, political economy analysis, and special series on culture and aesthetics—including Money on the Left, In the Loop, and Superstructure.
Presented in partnership with Monthly Review.
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Money on the Left
The Public Banking Institute
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In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street's private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democratically accountable banks. Through this work, PBI seeks to foster a wide-spread monetary and banking system that operates explicitly in the public interest, treating credit as a vital public utility rather than a vehicle for private extraction.
If private mega-banks are legally bound to maximize short-term returns for external shareholders, McRee and Winslow explain, then public banks operate under a legal mandate to generate shared prosperity, measuring fiscal success in terms of community participation, well-being, and resilience. During our conversation, we discuss the history of the PBI, the myriad projects that public banks can finance, diverse models for establishing public banks, and the organization’s efforts to serve as a catalyst for the growing public banking movement across the United States.
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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com