the necessary resources for productive investment and economic development.

Experience shows that, contrary to the extractive or parasitic private banking, public banking has proven quite beneficial to the developmental objectives of their communities and/or nations. Nineteenth century neighborhood savings banks, Credit Unions, and Savings and Loan associations in the United States, Jusen companies in Japan, Trustee Savings banks in the UK, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia all served the housing and other credit needs of their communities well.

Perhaps a most interesting and instructive example is the case of the Bank of North Dakota, which continues to be owned by the state for nearly a century, and which is widely credited for the state’s relatively healthy budget and its robust economy in the midst of budgetary problems and economicthe ravages wrought on today’s economies/societies by parasitic finance capital’s extraction of economic resources are even more destructive than was the extraction of feudal rent to the social fabric under feudalism. There are at least two major reasons for this judgment.

For one thing, the landed aristocracies’ appropriation of the major bulk of economic surplus, or rent, required production and, therefore, employment of the farming labor force. This meant that although the farming workforce was, of course, exploited, it nonetheless benefitted from production—albeit at poverty or subsistence levels of remuneration. In the age of finance capital, however, profit making or surplus extraction by the parasitic financial oligarchy is largely divorced from real production and employment, as it comes largely through parasitic appropriation from the rest of the economy. As