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Why not state and municipal banks?
One of the most useful laws the Mississippi legislature could enact would be a statute authorizing municipalities to charter their own municipal banks. The legislature should also charter a state bank on the lines of the Bank of North Dakota. The article cited below discusses the efforts of the City of New York to persuade the state to enact legislation to allow municipalities to charter banks.
I previously wrote an article on this subject, but the following article from The Nation prompted me to mention this subject again.
Why Shouldn’t the People Own the Banks?
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Speculation: The following syllogism is key to the “logic” of fundamentalism:
The Bible, being the literal and inerrant Word of God, must be internally consistent because all true statements are consistent with one another.
The Bible contains the following statement: (Fill in the blank)
All the other statements in the Bible must be consistent with the statement in #2, above.
To accept #1, the general premise of this syllogism, requires considerable tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
Here’s the rub:
Even if one grants—for purposes of argument—that the general premise is true, it is universally agreed by scholars that the Bible was written by different people living in different times, under different circumstances, in widely different cultures, and in different languages. Accurate interpretation requires knowledge of and fluency with all these different contexts in which the Bible was written. No one will ever know all that is needed to be known about these contexts to ascertain with certainty what any passage of scripture was intended to mean by the author.
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Thoughts on Trump and the current political situation as of Friday, January 8, 2021.
- The fall of Trump is not tragic: A clever fool cannot be a tragic person, especially one that is also a monster. Donald Trump is both.
- The fall of Trump’s enablers will not be tragic when it happens. There is always a reckoning for toadies, scoundrels, and inciters. Dante put them in the 8th circle of Hell. Trump will throw them under the bus.
- Trump’s enablers, still trying to “preserve his legacy,” remind me of the curse that Robert E. Lee laid on the south when he declared that in spite of the South losing the war its cause would go on. The cause was slavery, not southern manners. Lee was no hero.
- A friend with experience in a nursing home informed me several years ago that Trump had dementia and it can only become worse.
The Republicans, standing in the midst of the wreckage of the Capitol from the insurrection Trump incited, are still hesitant to get rid of him. What comes next?
2021–07–11
We know what came next. The Republicans blocked Trump’s second impeachment and have doubled down on obeisance to Trump. They are echoing Trump’s utterly groundless allegations of election fraud and are presently engaged in an effort to erase the public’s memories of the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s rôle in inciting it.
Republican legislatures have taken up the myth of voter fraud, and under the guise of fraud prevention, are passing numerous voter suppression laws in their state. A supreme court packed with right-wing appointees has already ruled on the constitutionality of Nevada’s new voter suppression statutes and held that the new laws did not violate the Constitution[1].
The Republican Party has a demographic advantage in the Electoral College with sparsely-populated states having the same number of senators as the most populous state[2]. The Democrats have had a majority of the popular vote in most of the presidential elections since 1980 but have usually won a minority of electors. The founding fathers inserted this provision as the price of the slave states’ ratification.
A nation with a minority government is inherently unstable because the majority of the people lack the necessary power a majority should have in a democratic republic. More discussion of this later.
