Banking Secret Exposed

AFP.NET
By Mark Anderson

Deceptive corporate media sources often confuse small “upticks” in the economy with major rebounds. As homelessness and joblessness spread, even minor recovery signs, graded “on a curve,” might seem like prosperity.

Still, a large and diverse nation like America—populated by resilient people who are learning to cut up credit cards, protest the debt system and save more money—has a number of places to seek refuge.

A Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report lists 10 states and one district that offer calmer economic waters where one can set sail toward a better life. Those states are, starting with the best: Oklahoma, Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Louisiana, South Dakota, the District of Columbia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Nebraska and Virginia.

Places like Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida appear close to rock-bottom, while Texas, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Alabama and Maine are in the middle, adds the BEA, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department.

The fastest-growing states in America in 2009, according to a BEA chart, include those in the Great Plains and just to the south of the Plains, where natural resources have fueled local growth. AMERICAN FREE PRESS has maintained that natural resources represent real wealth, and money is simply a means to quantify and transfer wealth. Mining and agriculture are among the natural-resource activities cited by the BEA as a source of this growth.
“States like Oklahoma, which was particularly helped by growth in mining, and Louisiana and South Dakota have seen growth rates that would put much of the rest of the nation to shame,” online news site Huffington Post observed. However, states that relied on manufacturing durable goods and construction experienced major drops in local gross domestic  product, which is mainly a consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other global schemes that have closed U.S. factories or sent formerly good-paying jobs overseas.

Looking deeper, author and Federal Reserve critic Ellen Brown points out that North Dakota scores high because, “Only one U.S. state actually owns its own bank—North Dakota. As of last spring [2009], North Dakota was also the only . . . state sporting a budget surplus. Amid widespread economic wreckage, it has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate.”

Tackling what most media avoid, Brown summarized that North Dakota’s bank “is a major profit generator for the state, returning a 26 percent dividend in 2008.”

The bank “makes the assets of the state the assets of the bank.” The law requires all state revenues to be deposited in the state’s bank. Municipal deposits also are accepted. Illinois and New Jersey, featured in recent national newscasts over imploding budgets and crumbling municipalities, may want to seriously study North Dakota’s innovation.