Van Jones was the keynote speaker at the Netroots Nation Conference in Las Vegas, sharing ways to "put Americans back to work and pull America back together."

YES! Magazine's audience development director, Rod Arakaki, was in the audience and described the speech as, "fantastic—hopeful, sobering, and funny."

Van Jones is a former contributing editor to YES! Magazine and the founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build a green economy and pull people out of poverty.

Interested?

• Beyond the Politics of Confrontation
  

  Sarah van Gelder interviews Van Jones about making real change in the Obama era.

• Two Crises, One Solution
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• Lighting the Way to a New Economy
  How do local efforts to create community friendly economies add up to global economic transformation? David Korten's keynote address to the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).
  
• Americans Who Tell the Truth
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The average American woman uses 12 health and beauty products each day; the average man uses six. But how healthy are they?

Annie Leonard, the creator of The Story of Stuff, The Story of Cap & Trade, and The Story of Bottled Water, turns her trademark clarity to the subject of chemicals in cosmetics. Why, she asks, do we allow unregulated, untested chemicals—many of which have been linked to cancer, birth defects, or brain damage—into the products we rub into our skin every day? And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Video produced by Free Range Studios and SafeCosmetics.org.

See more of Annie Leonard's videos:

• The Story of Stuff
  The Story of Stuff will take you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration—exposing the real costs of our use-it and lose-it approach to stuff.
• The Story of Cap & Trade
  Asking tough questions about who cap and trade really benefits—and whether it will make a difference in averting catastrophic climate change.
• The Story of Bottled Water
  Should you be worried about your tap water? Yes, but not for the reason you expected.

Learn more about safe cosmetics:

• Toxic Beauty
  How can you spot—and avoid—dangerous chemicals in your cosmetics?
• Sunscreen Safety
  What's the difference between mineral and chemical filters?
• Hair Colors from Nature
  Changing or enhancing your hair color doesn’t have to jeopardize your health.
  

Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades.

The global media has presented Greece, tiny Greece, as the epicenter of the second stage of the global financial crisis, much as it portrayed Wall Street as ground zero of the first stage.

Yet there is an interesting difference in the narratives surrounding these two episodes.

Narratives in Conflict

The unregulated activities of financial institutions, which created ever more complex instruments to magically multiply money, created the Wall Street crash that morphed into the global financial crisis.

With Greece, however, the popular narrative goes this way: This country piled up an unsustainable debt load to build a welfare state it could not afford, and is now the spendthrift that must tighten its belt. Brussels, Berlin, and the banks are the dour Puritans exacting penance from the Mediterranean hedonists for living beyond their means and committing the sin of pride in hosting the costly 2004 Olympics.

This penance comes in the form of a European Union-International Monetary Fund program that will increase the country’s value-added tax to 23 percent, raise the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, make deep cuts in pensions and public sector wages, and eliminate practices promoting job security. The ostensible aim of the exercise is to radically slim down the welfare state and get the spoiled Greeks to live within their means.

Though the welfare state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly—periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.

In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe’s banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece’s $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part, French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.

The frenzied Greek credit scene didn't only feature European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt “disappear,” thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around, and, through a kind of derivatives trading known as “credit default swaps," bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country’s cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.

If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.

Hijacking the Narrative

There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors.

First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.

Photo by Asteris Masouras.

The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them. Promoted as rescuing Greece, the massive 110-billion-euro package, put together by the dominant Eurozone governments and the IMF, will largely go toward rescuing the banks from their irresponsible, unregulated lending frenzy.

The banks and international financial institutions played this same old confidence game on developing country debtors during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, and on Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. The same austerity measures—then known as structural adjustment—followed lending binges from northern banks and speculators. And the scenario played out the same way: Pin the blame on the victims by characterizing them as living beyond their means, get public agencies to rescue you with money upfront, and stick the people with the terrible task of paying off the loan by committing a massive chunk of their present and future income streams as payments to the lending agencies.

No doubt the authorities are preparing similarly massive multibillion-euro rescue packages for the banks that overextended themselves in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Shifting the Blame

The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one’s means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too. They secured bailout funds from governments in the first phase of the crisis, but don't want to honor what governments told their citizens was an essential part of the deal: the strengthening of financial regulation.

Iceland Busts the Banksters Democracy trumps capital as Icelanders say "no" to big bank bailouts.

Governments, from the United States to China and Greece, had resorted to massive stimulus programs to keep the real economy from collapsing during the first phase of the financial crisis. By promoting a narrative that moves the spotlight from lack of financial regulation to this massive government spending as the key problem of the global economy, the banks seek to forestall the imposition of a tough regulatory regime.

But this is playing with fire. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman and others have warned that if this narrative is successful, the lack of new stimulus programs and tough banking regulations will result in a double-dip recession, if not a full-blown depression. Unfortunately, as the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto suggests, governments in Europe and the United States are caving in to the short-sighted agenda of the banks, who have the backing of unreconstructed neoliberal ideologues that continue to see the activist, interventionist state as the fundamental problem. These ideologues believe that a deep recession—and even a depression—is the natural process by which an economy stabilizes itself, and that Keynesian spending to avert a collapse will only delay the inevitable.

Resistance: Will It Make a Difference?

The Greeks are not taking all this lying down. Massive protests greeted the ratification of the EU-IMF package by the Greek parliament on July 8. In an earlier and much larger protest on May 5, 400,000 people turned out in Athens in the biggest demonstration since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Yet, street protests seem to do little to avert the social catastrophe that will unfold with the EU-IMF program. The economy is set to contract by 4 percent in 2010. According to Alexis Tsipras, president of the left parliamentary coalition Synapsismos, the unemployment rate will likely rise from 15 to 20 percent in two years, with the rate among young people expected to hit 30 percent.

As for poverty, a recent joint survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found that, even before the current crisis, close to a third of Greece’s 11 million people lived close to the poverty line. This process of creating a "third world" within Greece will only be accelerated by the Brussels-IMF adjustment program.

Ironically, this adjustment is being presided over by a Socialist government, headed by George Papandreou, voted into office last October to reverse the corruption of the previous conservative administration and the ill effects of its economic policies. There is resistance within Papandreou’s party PASOK to the EU-IMF plan, admits the party’s international secretary Paulina Lampsa. But the overwhelming sense among the party’s parliamentary contingent is TINA, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no alternative.”

The Consequences of Compliance

Faced with the program’s savage consequences, an increasing number of Greeks are talking about adopting a strategy of threatening default or a radical unilateral reduction of debt. Such an approach could be coordinated, says Tsipras, with Europe’s other debt-burdened countries, like Portugal and Spain. Here Argentina may provide a model: It gave its creditors a memorable haircut in 2003 by paying only 25 cents for every dollar it owed. Not only did Argentina get away with it, but the resources that would otherwise have left the country as debt service was channeled into the domestic economy, triggering an average annual economic growth rate of 10 percent between 2003 and 2008.

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The “Argentine Solution” is certainly fraught with risk. But the consequences of surrender are painfully clear, if we examine the records of countries that submitted to IMF adjustment. Forking over 25 to 30 percent of the government budget yearly to foreign creditors, the Philippines in the mid-1980s entered a decade of stagnation from which it has never recovered and which condemned it to a permanent poverty rate of over 30 percent. Squeezed by draconian adjustment measures, Mexico was sucked into two decades of continuing economic crisis, with consequences such as the pervasive narcotics traffic that has brought it to the brink of being a failed state. The current state of virtual class war in Thailand can be traced partly to the political fallout of the economic sufferings of the IMF austerity program imposed on that country a decade ago.

The Brussels-IMF adjustment of Greece shows that finance capitalism in the throes of crisis no longer respects the North-South divide. The cynics would say, “Welcome to the Third World, Greece.”

But this is no time for cynicism. Rather, it’s a key moment for global solidarity. We’re all in this together now.

Walden Bello is a YES! Magazine contributing editor. He is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South, and a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, where this article originally appeared.

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• France (Not) to Repay Debt to Haiti: A prank website is bringing France’s colonial crimes into the spotlight.

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• The Virtues of Deglobalization: What do we do now that neoliberal globalization has failed? Walden Bello outlines 11 pillars of a deglobalized economy.

Yesterday was Bastille Day, the day that France celebrates liberty, equality, and fraternity, the famous ideals of the French Revolution. In the spirit of the day, a statement claiming to be from France’s foreign ministry announced that France would repay its former colony, Haiti, for the millions of francs it was charged to compensate the colonial power for the slaves it lost when Haiti achieved its independence.

It turns out that the statement is a fake. But it could have been true—at least, that was the implicit message of the news release, which appeared on a website designed to look like that of the French foreign ministry. The release, purported to be from the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign and European affairs, framed the decision as a bold and principled move and a way for France "to celebrate the cherished values of our republic." It promised that “the 90 million gold francs, which Haiti paid France from 1825 until 1947, will be reimbursed in a yearly budget over the course of 50 years. Economic advisors working with the Ministry have calculated that the total sum amounts to € 17 billion including adjustments for inflation and a minimal interest rate of 5 percent per annum.”

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January, France, Haiti’s former colonizer, was quick to lead the call for developed nations to forgive Haiti’s debt from past loans. Yet it made no mention of its own role in the creation of that debt.

While the fake news release—a common tactic of the prankster activists the Yes Men, but not yet traced to a particular group—doesn’t seem to have fooled any major news outlets, it did bring the debt (and its contradiction with France’s public stance) into the spotlight. The Foreign Ministry has responded by vehemently denying the release and is reported to be considering legal action.

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Years after Haiti achieved freedom from France—in a dramatic slave uprising that defeated Napoleon in 1804—France threatened to re-invade and demanded to be paid for the slaves it had lost. Though the payment was eventually reduced from 150 million francs to 60 million, it was still much more than the new nation could afford. Haiti took out loans from other creditors, including the United States and Germany, and finally paid off the reparations debt (plus interest) in 1947.

But for Haiti, spending more than its first century of existence in extreme debt was devastating. By 1900, 80 percent of Haiti’s national budget was being spent on servicing the French debt, according to historian Alex von Tunzelmann, who wrote that the so-called Independence Debt “did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope,” trapping Haiti in a debt spiral that has continued to the this day.

Many Haitians believe the debt they were forced to take on was illegal, and now think of it as France’s debt to them. In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide sent France a bill for more than $21 billion. France has ignored the claim.

Still, as when the Yes Men briefly convinced the world that the Dow Chemical Company was planning to pay restitution to the victims of the Bhopal chemical explosion, or published a false edition of The New York Times with the headline, “Iraq War Ends,” this is the kind of news that captures headlines not because it’s true, but because there are so many people who wish that it were.

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

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The current economic crisis, coupled with concerns about spiraling deficits and our staggering national debt, is, at long last, bringing military spending to the forefront of the budget debate. Not since the end of the Cold War and the discussion of a “peace dividend” has the Pentagon budget—generally considered sacrosanct—received such scrutiny.

In January 2010, President Obama’s formed the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to advise the administration on options for addressing the U.S. national debt. In response, Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) convened a bi-partisan panel of national security experts to generate a series of recommendations on how to cut the defense budget while preserving U.S. national security. The Sustainable Defense Task Force released its report, “Debt, Deficits and Defense: A Way Forward,” on June 11, in Washington, D.C.

The Task Force report does not include any recommendations related to the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It looks only at the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget. The report’s combined recommendations would cut $960 billion over ten years, an average annual reduction of roughly 17 percent below current spending levels.

Defense spending accounts for more than half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget. At a time when virtually every community in the country is facing critical budget shortfalls, defense spending has continued to grow. While the White House has announced a freeze on all non-security related discretionary spending over the next three years, the Obama Administration’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2011 (which will begin on September 30) includes a two percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget. This puts increasing pressure on most domestic spending programs. Over the last decade, total federal discretionary spending has grown by 28 percent and military spending (not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) by over 40 percent. Meanwhile, federal grants to state and local governments have grown by only 14 percent.

Since this photo was taken in 2006, the size of the military budget has continued to increase. Defense spending now accounts for more than half of the federal discretionary budget.

Photo by Turtlemoon.

The Task Force’s report proposes cuts such as reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,000 and cutting the number of submarines and missiles which carry them; cutting the total number of active duty members of the Army and Marine Corps to 50,000 below their levels before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; cutting certain weapons programs including the Joint Strike Fighter, the V-22 “Osprey” tilt-rotor aircraft, and the total number of Navy aircraft carriers; and reforming the Pentagon’s health care and compensation systems.

As one might expect, reaction to the Task Force Report has been mixed, with traditional Pentagon supporters attacking it for being poorly timed, given that the nation is at war, and claiming it will lead us toward a military ill-prepared to meet our nation’s security needs. Meanwhile, moderates and fiscal conservatives view it as a responsible way to make defense cuts in a time of severe budget austerity. Those who have spent years arguing that military spending is a drain on more important domestic priorities welcome it as a step towards a more common sense approach to military budgeting.

According to the Project on Defense Alternatives, one of the major contributors to the report who hosts it on their website, the report was downloaded over 100,000 times in less than a month.

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Congressman Frank and a bi-partisan group of House members plan to circulate a letter to their colleagues regarding the defense budget and the deficit. While the final text of the letter has not been released at the time of this writing, it is not expected to endorse the Task Force report specifically. It is expected, however, that the signers will pledge not to support any major deficit reduction package considered by Congress unless it includes defense spending cuts. A similar letter is also expected to circulate in the Senate.

Regardless of the impact this or any other letter has on the deficit debate in Congress, the Task Force report insures one important thing: supporters of reduced military spending now have an answer to the question, “how do you cut Pentagon spending without undermining our nation’s security?” At a time when all areas of federal spending should be subject to the budget cutter’s knife, it can no longer be said, even within the mainstream debate, that it’s impossible to identify significant savings in the Pentagon budget.

To view the report “Debt, Deficits and Defense: A Way Forward,” click here.

Christopher Hellman wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Christopher is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent ten years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues. He is a frequent media commentator on military planning, policy, and budgetary issues.

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The image catches your breath. The look etched on the mother’s face reveals more about the hard lives of migrant workers during the 1930s than any history book. The photo, by Dorothea Lange, is one of the most famous shots in American history and an iconic representation of the Great Depression. Lange captured it while participating in the Farm Security Administration’s photography project, a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took office with the promise of government action to relieve destitution, unemployment had reached nearly 25 percent. As part of that commitment, his administration created the WPA, a permanent jobs program that put 8.5 million Americans to work between 1935 and 1943. The WPA was a massive public undertaking that changed the face of a growing nation. In addition to providing jobs to millions, it brought the nation’s transportation system into the 20th century and brought art to people of all classes, leaving the U.S. with a rich legacy of oral history and artistic masterpieces.

Many organizations are calling for a modern incarnation of the WPA both to assist the nation’s 6.5 million long-term unemployed and to advance national priorities, from transitioning to clean energy to modernizing infrastructure to supporting the arts. A new WPA could help support:

Jobs

In 1938 the WPA was the largest employer in the nation. For every job it created, two jobs in the private sector were created indirectly. Today, with unemployment seemingly stuck above nine percent and concerns that young workers will never fully recover from slow-starting careers, a new WPA, like its predecessor, could be the answer. The WPA was an important strategy for lowering unemployment and reducing the human suffering of economic recession. Government can hire people that the private sector typically does not: the long-term unemployed, young people without work experience, people from chronically underemployed populations, older workers nearing retirement, and workers with criminal backgrounds. Job experience and training can help these workers move into new industries for the long term.

Green Infrastructure

The WPA created jobs and brought art to the public. In 1938, the WPA was the largest employer in the nation. Above, Michigan artist Alfred Castagne, paints workers employed through the WPA.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

A new WPA could also help modernize an American infrastructure in desperate need of overhaul. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a grade of “D” in categories ranging from drinking water to transit to hazardous waste management, and estimates that $1.6 trillion in investment is needed over five years to bring dams, bridges, roads, sewers and other public projects up to par.

The first WPA played a huge role in modernizing the United States’ 19th century infrastructure. Workers built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, and 125,000 public buildings. The WPA built parks, zoos, public pools, golf courses, and even ski hills, many of which are still in use.

This incarnation of the WPA should focus on creating green jobs to decrease U.S. reliance on fossil fuels. WPA workers could perform overdue energy assessments on public buildings and help boost their energy efficiency; build improved and expanded transit systems; or overhaul sewer systems to stop disastrous overflows and protect fresh water sources. 

The Arts

The WPA also brought art to the public through Federal Project Number One, which included the Federal Art, Theater, Music, and Writers’ Projects. During the life of the WPA, musicians performed 225,000 concerts for 150 million people, many of whom had never seen a concert. They also produced nearly 475,000 works of art, which still decorate post offices, courthouses, and other public buildings.

The Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photography project documented the life of the rural poor through photos. The motto of the program was “introducing America to Americans.” The project produced more than 160,000 photos, many of which are iconic today, and captured the struggles of thousands of Americans.

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The FSA was not the only project determined to “introduce America” to her citizens. The Writers’ Project original goal was to produce accessible, detailed guides to every state in the union so that people could learn about their country. But one of the project’s most enduring and important was the Slave Narrative Collection. Between 1936 and 1938, writers conducted more than 2,000 interviews with former slaves in seventeen states. The interviews gave ex-slaves the opportunity to describe what they had lived through and are an important part of the nation’s collective memory.

A modern day Writer’s Project could bring music, art, and theater back to cash-strapped public schools. It could also hire journalists and writers who have been laid off from the shrinking newspaper and publishing industries to collect oral histories from survivors of World War II and the Civil Rights Era.

True Majority is advocating for a new WPA, while Campaign for America’s Future and many other organizations are pushing the Local Jobs Act for America, a bill designed to save local jobs and services, authored by California Rep. George Miller. Notably, the Local Jobs Act lacks WPA-style funding for artists. You can show your support for a modern WPA by signing their petitions, and by calling on Rep. Miller to add funding for the arts to the Local Jobs Act.

It is difficult to quantify the priceless legacy of WPA projects; the highest honor that could be paid to the visionaries of the past would be to repeat their efforts. Maybe the time has come to “introduce America to Americans” all over again.

Kate McCormack wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kate is a freelance writer currently living and working in Zacatecas, Mexico. She volunteers with a transnational workers’ rights law center where she participates in outreach to migrant workers about their labor rights in the United States.

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Photos and audio by Kris Krug.

Eleven weeks into the oil disaster that is devastating the Gulf Coast, hope can be hard to find. For photographer Kris Krug, capturing the horrifying impact of our dependence on oil is "my chance to take a little bit of my power back." To those who feel emotionally overwhelmed by the disaster, Krug advises: "Do something. Action is the antidote to that despair you're feeling."

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We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and acquaintances were already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.

But, as Facebook's appetite for maximum profits kicked in, we knew there would eventually be a reckoning. The uprising began when Facebook instituted a new set of changes that make it harder and more confusing to protect your personal information on the site. Users had to opt-out of the default policy—which granted Facebook generous access to your data—rather than a more reasonable opt-in policy.

Then there were the site’s privacy policy statement. At 5,830 words, the Facebook policy is thousands of words longer than those of Flickr, Twitter and MySpace. And if you really want to protect your personal information, it’s been pointed out, you have to wade through 50 settings with more than 170 options. It didn’t help that founder Mark Zuckerman was openly disdainful of the very idea of personal privacy.

As Facebook’s hubris toward users and its predatory designs on private information became more clear, protest groups began forming on Facebook itself and elsewhere. Thousands of users have started to abandon Facebook the way that they once fled MySpace. It’s no longer cool to participate in a site that mistreats its users and then serves up the familiar corporate double-speak.

Enter four NYU college students with a plan. On Kickstarter, a site that lets people raise money for projects, the students posted their idea to build an open-source social networking alternative—one that lets you control your own personal information, with no corporate flimflam. They call it Diaspora—“the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”

Facebook is owned and designed for corporate investors, let us remember; Diaspora will be a digital commons, a site that lets the users own and control things themselves. While open platforms and commons may resemble each other, only a commons vests real authority and control with those who use it. Raffii Sofaer, one of the Diaspora programmers, said, “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub and have them hand it to our friends…We need to take control of our data. Once you give it away once, it’s no longer yours.”

After the New York Times wrote an article about the Diaspora project, the team was flooded with contributions and offers of assistance. They’ve already raised $140,000 (their original goal was $10,000), which will enable the developers to move from eating ramen noodles to apples, as they put it. The team plans to work crazy hours over the summer and release a first iteration of the software in September 2010. You can learn more about the project here. 

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The Diaspora platform will enable individuals to create their own nodes in a peer-to-peer network, rather than having everything go through a central hub dedicated to maximizing returns to corporate investors. Users will have control over their own private information, and the software will have a feature that lets you reclaim your data from the existing major social networking services.

As an open source platform, Diaspora will have open APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces), which will enable outsider developers to create new add-on modules to extend the capabilities of the program. Some of the contemplated add-ons include voice-over IP, instant messaging, and backups using distributed, encrypted protocols.

There’s no guarantee that Diaspora will be well-executed or embraced by a huge rush of Facebook refugees. But that is certainly a reasonable hope. The mere threat of Diaspora has already prompted Facebook to back-pedal on its privacy changes and launch a major damage-control offensive.

I see Diaspora as the revenge of the commons: a surge of collective action, enabled by the Internet, to reclaim what is ours. We don’t need no stinkin’ Facebook. The commoners can create their own platform. Godspeed, Ilya, Dan, Max and Raff! I hope you’re ready for your close-up.

David Bollier is an independent policy strategist, journalist, activist, and consultant with an evolving public-interest portfolio. He is the co-editor of OntheCommons.org and is the author of Silent Theft, Brand Name Bullies, and Viral Spiral.

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Three years ago at the first US Social Forum in Atlanta, residents of cities around the country met and found they shared a common goal: Make sure that city life stays accessible to everyone. They formed the Right to the City Alliance, a coalition uniting urban rights groups to allies in their own cities and across the country, from Los Angeles to Boston to New Orleans. The members share the belief that urban dwellers not only have the right not to be priced out of their communities, but to help shape and design them.

The New York City groups who came together, many of whose members were grappling with homelessness, life in shelters or on public assistance, and the loss of affordable housing options, were particularly energized.

"At that point, I didn't know what gentrification was," said Nova Strachan, a member of Mothers on the Move, part of the Right to the City-NYC alliance, who was living in public housing at the time. "Then they tried to privatize my building, and I found out quick."

The struggle hasn't gotten easier in the last three years. Just this month, due to budget cuts, thousands of New York families will lose their Section 8 housing vouchers, sending many of them onto the streets or into the city's overburdened shelter system. Meanwhile, housing prices (not to mention the median income numbers used to determine what's considered affordable housing) are going up.

For the people who attended Right to the City-NYC's workshop at this year's Social Forum—many of them low-income New Yorkers active with Picture the Homeless, Mothers on the Move, and other member organizations of Right to the City—gentrification isn't an abstract idea, but a direct threat to their neighborhoods and their ability to stay in them.

"How do you know when gentrification is coming?" asked Diego Quiñones, an organizer in Harlem with Community Voices Heard, one of Right to the City's member organizations. "What does it look like?"

The answers were forceful: More police harassment. Suddenly, you need a permit to barbecue, to use public parks, or to hold a street party; sometimes you can't get a permit at all. Neighborhood names get changed: Alphabet City becomes the East Village, Spanish Harlem turns into SpaHa. "You can't even stand in front of your property without the police coming by," said one participant. "Bike lanes!" shouted another. "We asked for bike lanes for many, many years—now suddenly we're getting some."

But there's one sign that stands out, clear evidence you're in danger of getting priced out of your neighborhood: the arrival of luxury condos, some of them built where affordable housing units used to be.

Following the financial crash, the condos got harder to sell and became especially noticeable: new buildings with enormous price tags standing empty in low-income neighborhoods. It was, said Rogers of Picture the Homeless, an "ugly image of people without homes and homes without people."

And so, when Right to the City sat down to prioritize its first projects (following a year spent in community dialogues crafting an in-depth policy platform, which calls for recognition of the rights to community decision-making power; quality, low-income housing; federal stimulus funds;  jobs; public space; environmental justice and public health), condos were key.

In the most comprehensive count of its kind, 150 residents and advocates walked the City's streets and combed its records, producing a report detailing just how many luxury condos were sitting empty in a city with record homelessness and an affordable housing crisis. 

In six low-income neighborhoods, they found 4,092 empty housing units, offered for an average price of $2 million, some of which had been on the market for years. Collectively, the buildings were $3.8 million delinquent in back taxes.

Members of Right to the City are now meeting with the City Council and other City departments about what to do with the information they've gathered. "We surprised City officials," said Quiñones. "They didn't expect us to be so organized."

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Right to the City is now pushing for New York City to acquire the delinquent buildings through tax foreclosure so that they can become permanent affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers (a pilot project of 400 converted units began in 2009); they're also proposing that tax breaks for condo developers be suspended. Civil disobedience in the form of condo takeovers and squatting is also under consideration, Quiñones said.

"I am nervous. I am afraid. But I'll be damned if I sit down and let them take my city just like that," said DeBoRh Dickerson, part of Picture the Homeless. "We've got a voice in this."

Right to the City is also supporting Housing Not Warehousing—a bill before the City Council, now with 28-cosponsors, which would require the City to officially replicate their count of vacant properties every year—and lobbying for "affordable housing" to be calculated according to local, neighborhood income rather than median income for the area, which is skewed by affluent residents of Manhattan and Westchester County.

"This is part of the move towards human needs and away from the profit motive," said Rogers. "It's why we need the Social Forum. It's bold, but this is the place to make bold statements."

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

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In São Paulo, where slums and homelessness are common, some 400,000 housing units are unused. Hundreds of homeless families took over a vacant 22-story building, creating housing, a library, and cinema.

In 1969, as I tried to grasp the root causes of hunger, I struggled to absorb the shocking picture my simple research was uncovering: While world food experts cried “scarcity,” in truth we bright humans were—and still are—creating hunger out of plenty. We’d turned our food system into a scarcity-creating machine, and were undermining the Earth’s food-producing potential, too.

I’ll make a one-page handout, I thought. I’ll pin it up here and there and we’ll all catch on, won’t we? For no one would do such a crazy thing, if they only knew.

My handout became a book, Diet for a Small Planet, which showed how our newly emerging diet—based on grain-fed meat produced with chemical inputs—reflects neither our bodies’ needs, nor what the Earth can sustain.

That was then.

Today, hunger’s toll breaks all records, and we’re now facing another huge downside to our reductive, extractive approach to farming: a warming climate. My daughter, Anna Lappé, has just released Diet for a Hot Planet, which continues the conversation I helped to start. She shows how much our global food system now drives the climate crisis—even more than transportation.

I’m beyond proud. It’s a fabulous book (moms have a right to say what we think), shocking and empowering at once. And in June the U.N. Environment Programme released a report backing up her message, calling out industrial agriculture, particularly large-scale livestock production, as among the world’s most energy-intensive and environmentally destructive industries. Among the UNEP’s recommendations? We individuals adopt plant-centered diets to lower our own carbon “foodprints.”

The report also highlights how agriculture itself can be part of the solution: Ecological farming actually binds carbon in the soil, and its abundant crop varieties can boost biodiversity. So it’s not agriculture per se, but a certain kind of agriculture, that threatens our planet (and our health).

I could never have imagined, writing my little handout 40 years ago, that today I’d be living in a world in which earth-friendly, hunger-ending farming is proving its potential from Ethiopia to Brazil to India to the U.S.—but where citizens still go along with policies spreading hunger and the destructive, corporate-controlled industrial farming that helps to cause it.

Clearly, we have to dig much deeper.

So, while I celebrate the UNEP’s call-to-diet-action, I wish the report had framed the problem more precisely. It names population and economic growth, which increase consumption of animal products, as culprits. Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, is quoted in press coverage saying, "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products.”

I wish the UNEP had emphasized that population growth and our kind of economic growth (producing vast waste) are themselves symptoms of deeper problems.

Almost all population growth in the next 30 years is predicted to be in poor countries, in large measure reflecting the lack of power many women have over their fertility and the dearth of economic opportunities available to them.

And the destructive planet-heating food production and distribution we now experience are themselves consequences of a particular kind of growth—centralizing control of farmland, processing and distribution by national elites and global mega-corporations; power that both reflects and strengthens their political influence. The deepening, gross inequities that result do in fact spur consumption of animal food by the better off—animal products produced using environmentally egregious practices.

But might the UNEP’s frame emphasizing “growth” itself as the problem further distract us from the root problem, deepening worldwide power inequities?

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If, by contrast, we were as societies redressing power inequities and reclaiming our democracy from private interests, and if our world’s poor majorities were gaining access to land and agroecological knowledge, enabling more local food distribution, too, then it’s possible we’d see the meat question differently. We’d see that those without access to animal food could produce and consume modest increases, integrating livestock into healthy farming—and reducing our collective climate impacts.

Of course, as author of Diet for a Small Planet, I also know that for the world’s minority who now consume much more protein than our bodies can even use, eating less animal food is great for our health and useful in sending countless messages through the market for saner use of resources.

But that’s a very different proposition than suggesting that overconsumption causes the crisis, and that less is the primary cure.

So I applaud all who are now embracing planet-friendly diets. Hurrah for us! But let such a diet serve as a daily reminder—a string around our fingers that we notice at least three times a day, reminding us of the root of our ecological and hunger crisis: the concentration of corporate power. From there, all that good plant food in our bellies can not only enhance our health, but also bulk up our courage to name this deeper challenge and take it on.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit news organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Getting a Grip 2. She is co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and is a YES! contributing editor.

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“Detroit embodies both the problem and potential for solutions,” says Maureen Taylor, USSF staff coordinator. “We believe the Social Forum process will stimulate some hope for the people of Detroit and help the people turn this city around.” Organizers expect 15,000 to 25,000 people  to arrive from around the country for the forum. And while the attention focused on Detroit may help turn the city around, Detroit’s bottom-up style of activism may also open up new ideas and possibilities for those visiting from around the country.

Detroit is known as the place where  thousands lost jobs when the automobile industry crashed well before the 2008 Wall Street collapse. White flight, expressways built through formerly vibrant African American neighborhoods, the outsourcing of manufacturing (and the failure of the Big Three to transition to eco-friendly cars or renewable energy technologies), along with the anger and violence that resulted from hopelessness and drugs have all played a part in Detroit’s demise. Solutions from city government have mirrored the lack of vision of corporate leadership. Neither the promotion of casino gambling nor the shiny new downtown towers have helped.

But in the neighborhoods, young media makers, owners of small businesses, former Black Panthers,  and a scrappy group of activists connected with the Boggs Center are setting a different direction for their city. They aren’t looking to corporations to bring in jobs-they have seen how those big projects suck up land and tax money only to leave town for lower wages or higher tax breaks some place else. And they aren't looking to the government for solutions. Many pinned high hopes on the election of Detroit's first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, in 1973 only to find he was taking the city in the same destructive direction as his predecessors.

For this group, protests are almost passé. They recognize that there are plenty of reasons to protest a massive, pollution-spewing incinerator, police brutality, and companies that are all too ready to cut off life-sustaining water and heat when someone gets behind on bills.

But these new 21st-century activists don't believe those who hold positions of power actually have the vision or capability to turn things around, no matter how much is demanded of them. Corporate and city establishment leaders belong to a dying epoch, they say. It's of limited use to make demands of a system that is on its way down.

Instead, these Detroiters are rebuilding their own future, creating the city they want to live in, and transforming themselves at the same time.

“Mayor Bing and corporate interests ... are top-down ‘leaders’ who can't see the grassroots Detroiters who are rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city from the ground up," says Grace Boggs, who at 95 is a leading thinker and activist in Detroit. Grace, who has been a Detroit activist  for more than 50 years, will be among the speakers at the opening session of the USSF.

The examples of this bottom-up renewal can be seen around the city and will be highlighted on the first day of the social forum. Here are just a couple that I encountered in a couple of days in Detroit.

Feeding the hunger

Myrtle Thompson Curtis and Wayne Curtis took a small, empty plot of land, brought together friends, members of a nearby church, and other volunteers, and began the Feed'om Freedom Growers. Tomatoes, greens, strawberries, and other crops grow in raised beds and in rows. They also teach classes on healthy cooking, and a book club was started by young people who work in the garden.

“I went to my old neighborhood, and I had to cry,” Curtis told a group visiting his garden as part of a tour sponsored by the Allied Media Conference. “There's nothing there. Nothing at all. They were telling me about their friends, who were my friends growing up, who are no longer with us.”

Slowly, their new block is changing. Myrtle Curtis was encouraged when neighbors down the street came out when they saw a crowd of people getting off a bus and out of a caravan of cars to visit the garden. “We don't see our neighbors much,” she said. “This area is too scary to mingle. But they came out to participate, and that's what it's all about.”

Now Wayne and Myrtle are looking to expand to an empty lot across the street from the garden, and they'd like to use an abandoned house that borders on the lot as a community center.

“It’s a question of money and control and misuse of power,” Wayne Curtis told the group. “This is a problem we need to resolve like adults,” he said. “I was homeless, and I walked past a grocery store, and I was hungry, and that didn't make any sense to me. ... How can we get this land. How can we get seeds and bees so we can make honey. How can we have an economy so that people don't go hungry.”

There are over 800 community gardens, ranging from the small and precarious, to large entities like Earth Works that are increasingly able to bring fresh foods to Detroit's food deserts and give Detroiters opportunities for meaningful work and involvement in their communities.

Security in a militarized city

Like in many U.S. cities, the standoff between police and community members all too often turns deadly. Most recently, the city has been mourning the death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was killed last month in a drug raid gone wrong.

Ron Scott, a founder some decades ago of a Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party, heads up the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality. Scott believes the community must learn to resolve its own conflicts and must redefine relations with police.

“What cities like Detroit are facing is increasing militarization,” he told me. “Police agencies used to be public service agencies that were an extension of the community, not a suppression of the community.”

The community can take the lead in redefining the relationship. Eighty percent of the conflicts in the community are related to substance abuse and domestic violence, he said. “We can intervene by mediating disputes and also by creating independent economic entities.” For example, a group that had been in conflict with police took an abandoned lot, started a garden project, and renamed it Peace Park, he said. They use the lot to mediate disputes themselves, rather than calling in police.

“The most important thing we're doing is taking responsibility for making sure in cities like Detroit that we can reshape communities the way we want them. The people running this city and others are not blatantly evil. It's that many of them are not capable of dealing with the collapse of the economic system. What happened in the past is not gone, but it’s whimpering and dying.”

“We’re working to build something that is creative and new in the city,” he said. “This movement, unlike movements of the past, is not based on one sex, one race, one ideological frame,” Scott said. “It’s based on love and appreciation, and transformation of humanity.

Scott and others are working to create more of these peace zones and—as fellow activist, author, and former prison inmate Yusef Shakur says—to turn predators into protectors and put the neighbor back in the ‘hood.

Detroit as a Model

The attention of thousands of activists will be like a mirror, raising the awareness of Detroiters themselves of the powerful innovations that they are bringing into the world. But it may be that the social movements represented here will also find new models and strategies from these grassroots leaders.

“I can’t begin to tell you how much Detroit means symbolically worldwide and nationally,” Grace Boggs says. “Detroit was once the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization and then became the national and international symbol of devastation of deindustrialization. Now it is becoming the national and international symbol of a new way of living-of great transformation.”

Detroiters are creating new ways of caring for one another and caring for the Earth, she says.
The U.S. Social Forum may be like a fierce wind that picks up the seeds of these grassroots innovations and spreads them across the American landscape. “What's happening this week here in Detroit,” Grace says, “is the beginning of something new.”

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is YES! Magazine's executive editor.

Interested? More on the US Social Forum in Detroit.

For nearly three decades, coal companies that practice mountaintop removal have been able to dump mining waste in valleys without a thorough permitting review—allowing them to effectively sidestep the Clean Water Act. Yesterday, in an important victory for Appalachian citizens and clean water advocates, the Army Corps of Engineers suspended its long-standing fast-track approval process (MWA Permit 21). Companies seeking to fill valleys will now have to seek "individual" permits for their projects, which will undergo greater scrutiny, including a public commenting process. Communities will now have a voice in the discussion of whether a valley fill permit should be approved in their backyard.

This positive step for Appalachian communities and waterways is the result of the growing movement to end mountaintop removal. The Army Corps received over 23,000 written comments on the proposal to suspend the NWP21 permits. Despite jeers, threats, and intimidation from coal industry supporters, brave citizens from impacted communities spoke up loud and clear during the public hearing process. These citizens, confident in their position that valleyfill permits should not be streamlined and deserve public comment, were unshakable. Here is a video showing the hearing in Charleston, WV:

Mountaintop removal is a form of strip mining that uses high-end explosives to literally blast off up to several hundred feet of a mountaintop. The resulting waste is most often shoved into adjacent valleys, burying headwater streams. These streams flow into rivers, providing drinking water for millions of Americans on the east coast. Meg Gaffney-Smith, Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers Regulatory Program stated that, due to “concerns with this particular type of mining technique, impacts to aquatic resources and water quality, and how well stream mitigation projects were performing....we believed it was best to suspend NW permit 21 in this region.”

Nationwide permits were created to regulate "activities that have only minimal impacts to the aquatic environment." As anybody directly impacted by mountaintop removal can tell you, burying streams has major impacts on aquatic life that reverberate through the entire ecosystem. Recent scientific studies have validated what local residents have been saying for years. Most recently, Margaret Palmer, in her blockbuster scientific study on the effects of mountaintop removal, stated, “The scientific evidence of the severe environmental and human impacts from mountaintop removal is strong and irrefutable. Its impacts are pervasive and long lasting and there is no evidence that any mitigation practices successfully reverse the damage it causes.”

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And while there is definite reason for celebration, the flip side is that the changes announced today are not codified into any rule or law. The Army Corps, at any time, can reverse this decision and reinstate the NWP21 process. If nothing else, the process will be reviewed once again when NWP 21 expires on March 18, 2012. Bills introduced into Congress would go a long way to stopping mountaintop removal altogether, a practice which has already destroyed over 500 mountains and buried and polluted over 2,000 miles of streams in the Appalachian region. Both the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) in the House and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S 696) are seeking to end valley fills associated with mountaintop removal, and both bills are attracting an incredible number of cosponsors. Since the economics of most mountaintop removal mining depends on the use of valley fills, passing these bills would go a long way to curbing the practice.

Thanks to the hard work of Appalachian residents and their allies around the country, we're one step closer to ending mountaintop removal.

Sandra Diaz wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sandra is the director for development and communications at Appalachian Voices. You can find out more about the movement to end mountaintop removal at ilovemountains.org.

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Photo by Alice Speri.

On June 4, 10,000 Haitians, most of them peasant farmers, marched for food sovereignty and an end to Monsanto's recent donation of seeds. The banner reads: "Defend food sovereignty in our country and the planet."

We’re putting together a national network, RENHASSA, to show what our alternatives are today. The whole peasant sector is coming together to tell everyone about the policies we want. Our mission is to advocate for Haiti to be sovereign with its food and to promote national production.

We’re mobilizing politically for the policies we want. We publish articles and do community radio programs about our positions. We’re also doing media campaigns and having meetings to educate people about growing for local and family consumption as much as possible, instead of buying food from other countries. People are starting to recognize and change their habits to just buy local goods.

But the state must exercise its responsibility toward its people. When we talk about reconstructing Haiti, we can’t just talk about houses. It’s got to be a whole plan. We have to talk about reconstructing land—about total reforestation.

First, we have to decentralize the Republic of Port-au-Prince, which got created during the U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934. Services now exist only in the capital. People died during the earthquake for an identity card or a copy of a transcript, because they had to come to Port-au-Prince to get them. Services must be in all departments [akin to states]. All the people who are in the countryside have to have the resources to stay there.

Second—and this is the essential element—is the relaunching of agriculture in this country. We were almost self-sufficient until the 1980s. We have to fight and pressure the state so that it prioritizes agriculture. Otherwise, we’ll always have to depend on multinationals and non-governmental organizations for our food. The government has to take responsibility for that.

We’re not in favor just of food security, which is a neoliberal idea. With food security, as long as you eat, it’s good. But we only produce 43 percent of our food. 57 percent is imported. We need food sovereignty, which means that for everyone to eat, we produce it here at home. We could produce here at least 80 percent of what we eat.

You can’t speak of food sovereignty without speaking of family agriculture. We need that and we need indigenous seeds. We need for peasants to have their own land.

We have threats from multinationals, mainly to grow jatropha [whose seeds produce oil which can be used for biofuel]. The Jatropha Foundation is lobbying hard to start growing. Jatropha puts us at risk, because we don’t have enough land to be able to divert some toward biofuel. Haiti is only 27,760 square kilometers. Their plan would have us produce even less food, and would force peasants to be expropriated. Plus, they’d be using a lot of water, which could create an ecological disaster. It’s a death plan against the peasants.

We’re mobilizing people against growing biofuel. Last October, when the government was considering giving contracts to grow jatropha, we held a big march and sit-in; we gave a petition to parliament. We said, “No, Haiti’s land is for growing food.” We met with the minister of agriculture and the World Food Program.

We’re also mobilizing against GMO seeds, and we’ve just declared war against Monsanto. This battle has just begun.

Besides food sovereignty, our other main priority is integrated land reform. We can’t talk about food sovereignty if people don’t have land. They have to have land to be able to market—that’s the only way we can get away from food aid. Our plan is to take the land from the big landowners and give it to the peasants to work. And the food has to be organic, without any chemical fertilizers which destroy the land. We don’t use anything [unnatural in our cultivation process].

A Future for Agriculture, a Future for Haiti
Haiti's way forward is tied to food sovereignty and a renewed focus on local agriculture.

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Now even if people have a little handkerchief of land, they don’t have the technical support to let them plant. The state has to give us credit and technical support and help us store and manage water. Préval said he was doing "agrarian reform" in his first term. We called it agrarian demagoguery. He just gave out a few parcels, divided into very small plots, to his political clientele and political party—even to people who weren’t in Haiti. And his government didn’t offer any technical support.

That’s not what we need. The agrarian reform we want is for those who work the land to have the right to that land and all its infrastructure.

The cultural reality of Haiti is that peasants each want their own little piece of land to produce their own food. But there has to be cooperative land. Peasant organizations can create collectives to produce food for export and make money, but for that there has to be integrated land reform with technical support, credit, water, everything. We must have government support.

Right now, the government doesn’t even exist for us. It’s saying to the international community, “Here’s our country. Come take it.” They’ve given away the whole country, and now we have [U.N. Special Envoy Bill] Clinton, who is a tool of the big multinationals. So, on top of all our other fights, we have to fight to change the state.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She authored the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives, and is associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

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• Read more from Beverly Bell's blog from Haiti
  

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When the students of Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif. heard that members of the Westboro Baptist Church—an extremist anti-Semite and anti-gay group known for blaming tragedies, including September 11 and the Virginia Tech shootings, on American tolerance for homosexuality—would be protesting outside their school, they did not sit quietly.

The church had announced that it would picket in front of Bay Area schools and Jewish institutions, holding its trademark signs (such as "God Hates You" and "God Hates Fags"). The students of Gunn High gathered to meet them, waving signs and singing songs in celebration of love and acceptance.

It's become common for communities to respond to the Westboro church's visits with counterprotests celebrating diversity and tolerance, which often dwarf the Westboro group and drown out their message.

Video courtesy of Not In Our Town.

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Alfonso de Jesus Garcia Perez is the general secretary of AMECA (Mexican Association for Cannabis Studies), one of Mexico’s leading drug-reform NGOs, created in 2000 by specialists and advocates. In this interview for YES! Magazine, he proposed alternative solutions to curb the wave of drug-trafficking violence (23,000 people killed since 2006, according to Senate estimates). Among other topics, Garcia Perez expressed his views on the new U.S. National Drug Control Strategy, an AMECA proposal to regulate marijuana, and challenges faced by activist groups and NGOs to openly debate drug issues amid one of the worst security and economic crises in recent Mexican history.

Erich Moncada: What factors contribute to the violence in Mexico?

Alfonso de Jesus Garcia Perez: I blame the Mexican and American armies for any group or armed band participating in organized crime. There is no other source of illegal weapons. Whenever there are weapons confiscations from criminal bands and we check their weaponry, if it is not American-made, it is foreign-made. We are immersed in NAFTA, and geopolitically, all the strategic control belongs to the intelligence services of the United States. This violence is caused by an illegal arms trade. Who is selling these weapons? There is always an American or a Mexican public servant involved.

Erich: What measures can civil society adopt to fight this phenomenon?

Alfonso: If we want to reduce violence, we need to apply some control measures over our armies, our public officials, and our police officers—both from Mexico and the United States. Citizen control is possible. There’s been a lot of buzz about the model of citizen supervision or accounting, in coordination with local and federal congresses, to evaluate and follow up on police and military activities. This is just one option. Another option is to stop attacking consumers, who are only used for extortion purposes and, at the same time, stimulate police corruption. If we reduce police corruption, violence will decrease. A crime-prevention strategy is also necessary. We need to educate our society to deal with our governments’ authoritarian behavior and the actions of organized crime.

Erich: What is your opinion of the Mexican government's strategy to fight drug-trafficking organizations?

Alfonso: It is outrageous that so many people have to die to prohibit marijuana usage. This is an utter failure. Prohibition has never been successful in reducing drug consumption. (Author’s note: Drug use in Mexico grew from 3.5 million in 2002 to 4.5 million people in 2008, according to the 2008 National Addiction Survey.)

There is no democracy, nor citizen participation, to control police and government. Therefore, corruption is rampant. If there is impunity, fighting crime is almost impossible. Corruption and impunity rates remain untouched.

Erich: What do you think about the 2010 National Drug Strategy presented by the White House? What strategies could the U.S. government put into practice to fight the drug problem at home and help Mexico at the same time?

Alfonso: It is progress to acknowledge that drug use is not going to be reduced by waging a war against consumers. It is a positive step forward, but more needs to be done. Why? Because American democracy protects personal decisions and freedom of choice. As long as consumers are not affecting other people’s rights or physical integrity, they should not be persecuted. We are preparing a request to the Mexican Senate to talk to our other two NAFTA partners (Canada and the U.S.) about opening the debate. We demand activists and consumers vent their points of view in a public tribunal. If representatives are willing to search for new solutions, we need to be heard. From the U.S. I expect an open debate, the disposition to adopt new scientific perspectives, and different ways to understand reality. We need to listen to each other with no prejudgments and disqualifications.

Erich: AMECA has attracted public opinion by proposing to regulate marijuana. What can you tell me about this initiative?

Alfonso: Cannabis prohibition is mandated by the Federal Health Code. It is not a criminal justice issue; the law never explains the reason or main argument behind prohibition. We propose cannabis be declassified from the harmful drugs schedule to regulate its consumption, and we want to set up an educational and health process instead of criminal prosecution. It is a human rights issue. First, we want to repeal criminalization policies. Police officers have nothing to do with consumers. Second, the state’s relationship with consumers could take the form of (drug) educators and health specialists—like psychologists or doctors—and provide a monitoring process of the user’s health and social integration. This must be voluntary, not compulsory. Most consumers are recreational. Supervising users is justified because our society is still uneducated. Consumers and members of our movement agree that this monitoring process should be done by an educational or health council.

Erich: Suppose your proposal is passed. What might be the immediate effects?

Advice for Obama from the Hemisphere
Latin American and Caribbean leaders share their recommendations for the U.S. relationship with the hemisphere.

Alfonso: First effect: Underage consumption will drop a great deal. Drug dealers or corrupt police officers—to me, they are pretty much the same—would no longer profit from this lucrative market. All their business is underground. They don’t care if they are selling drugs to a kid or a grown-up. Once cannabis is regulated, there will be no buyers or sellers willing to risk their freedoms to sell drugs to a kid. Another positive effect is harm reduction. Education and prevention policies will be viable because drug use will no longer be taboo. Consumers could come out in public without fearing police harassment. If, during the monitoring process, health consequences are discovered, a harm-reduction public policy can be implemented. This type of policy is impossible under the double standards of prohibition. Another benefit is a considerably lower level of violence and fewer dead people. But the greatest business is designer drugs, and that will require us to come up with solutions.

Erich: What is the biggest challenge facing reform?

Alfonso: I believe this or any other initiative on the subject may prosper if we are allowed to express our opinions. So far all the debates in Mexico have been conducted by the government…they have never allowed a bilateral debate. Whenever we organize events, festivals, or write a press release or a legislative request, our proposals have been ignored. We are never invited to Congress to participate in debates on these issues. When we arrive at Congress they never give us the chance to speak at the stand; censorship is exclusively imposed on the debate. But the day will come when they finally give us a space to challenge their views.

Erich: Some American citizens are horrified by the rampant violence in Mexico. What can they do to help us out?

Alfonso: It would be nice for them to be critical like us with our own government and armed forces. They must be conscious that the weapons used in Mexico are coming from their country. American citizens should be open to dissenting opinions and in favor of ending the global censorship. It is really important to raise our levels of information and conscience.

Erich: What comes next for AMECA?

Alfonso: We are going to reinforce our initiative with signatures. Another festival will take place on July 4th in Mexico City to celebrate citizen support for reform. Then there is our next stage: A referendum. It will be organized in Mexico City to raise 4,000 signatures to request an official ballot without depending on the politicians.

Erich Moncada conducted this interview for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Erich is a freelance journalist from northwestern Mexico, specialized in drug policy and politics.

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