Fast Company, June 26, 2019: The one strategy that could finance the whole Green New Deal
For the latter half of 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux and activist allies from all over the country camped out in North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was likely to harm their native lands through an invasive engineering process and inevitable oil spills.
And at the same time, the hashtag used to protest the pipeline, #NODAPL, started appearing scrawled over Wells Fargo billboards across the country. Wells Fargo was one of around 15 banks that directly invested in the pipeline, and in drawing the connection between the bank and that controversial project, activists began to call attention to just how broad and diverse the banks’ reach was.
Instead, organizers began to rally around the idea of a different type of financial institution: public banks. As the name implies, they are publicly owned, often by cities, and accountable to the people who live there, not their shareholders.
Public banking’s appearance in the Green New Deal resolution drafted by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey in February further cemented its potential as a tool to create a more stable and just economy—and one that can center concerns of the public, like environmental matters, in its operations.
