Today, the International Day Against Homophobia, people around the globe are rallying in support of LGBT rights and acceptance. It is a day to acknowledge the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folk to love and live openly; to be safe, protected from violence and discrimination; to have access to quality health care and education; and to build families and legally marry. 

Here in the United States, this day also kicks off a week of actions urging Congress to pass H.R. 3017, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) of 2009. This bill would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A coalition of LGBT and ally organizations is calling for all supporters of equal rights to lobby their elected officials, raise awareness about ENDA, and help push Congress to enact basic employment protections for all.

Workplace discrimination

With no federal law prohibiting workplace discrimination, people in our country lose their jobs every day for being gay or transgender. Organizations working to pass ENDA have been collecting people’s stories of on-the-job discrimination: Thomas Bryant was fired in Indiana after he went to Human Resources to solicit help about a coworker haranguing him with homophobic epithets. And Brooke Waits lost her job in Texas the day after her boss opened her cell phone and saw a picture of Waits sharing a New Year’s kiss with her partner. 

The importance of enacting laws to protect transgender employees is highlighted in a 2009 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The study found that the rate of unemployment among transgender communities is twice that of the nation as a whole, which is especially debilitating in these economically challenging times. Additionally, a whopping 97 percent of the 6,450 respondents say they experience harassment or mistreatment on the job because of their gender identity.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Subsequent legislation has extended protections to guard against discrimination based on disability and age. If passed, ENDA would institute much needed basic protection for LGBT employees.

A federal fix?

Public opinion, and even corporate employment policy, has become much more inclusive than federal law in recent years. A 2007 Gallup poll showed that 89 percent of Americans believe gay people should have “equal rights in terms of job opportunities.” And as of September 2009, 87 percent of the Fortune 500 companies had implemented non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation. Protection for transgender employees, however, lags behind—just 41 percent of Fortune 500 companies include gender identity in their non-discrimination policies.
In the absence of federal policy, it has been left up to each state to decide how to approach protection for the LGBT workforce. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation; Minnesota was the first to ban discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity, in 1993.

Several states have since adopted LGBT-inclusive employment policies. But being gay or transgender continues to be a job hazard: Workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is currently legal in 29 states, while firing or harassing employees because of their gender identity is legal in 38 states.

Activists and lawmakers have been working to pass basic federal employment protection for LGBT folk for almost 40 years. The first version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in 1994 and has been introduced in all but one Congress since then.

This year, though, ENDA has a fighting chance. With ongoing organizing efforts from advocacy organizations, support from Democratic leadership, and 202 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, supporters are hopeful that ENDA could make it to President Obama’s desk during this session. As a supporter of ENDA, he would most assuredly sign it into law. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), sponsor of the current version of ENDA and one of three openly gay members of Congress, set an optimistic tone in late April when he told supporters, “The Speaker has promised we will get this done fairly quickly.”

Since then, however, public predictions of a quick vote have stopped. And time is running short for this legislative session. Although a vote in the House of Representatives has been expected for weeks, none has yet been scheduled. ENDA is still under review by the House Education and Labor Committee.

“We’re pushing really hard to bring the bill to a vote,” said Lisa Mottet, Transgender Civil Rights Project Director for the Task Force. “Time is running out and we’re very concerned that if ENDA doesn’t become law this year, it will be another several years before it has a chance.”

Rights for all, not just some

The last time ENDA was up for a vote, in 2007, gender identity was dropped from the bill. Frank, also a bill sponsor at that time, removed transgender protections in an attempt to pass a watered-down version. Not only did this action leave many in the LGBT community feeling betrayed, it wasn’t successful. A non-inclusive version of ENDA passed through the House, but it died on the Senate floor.

Now, with conflicting reports on whether or not a whip count has been completed and whether or not there are enough votes to pass ENDA untarnished, rumors are flying that gender identity may be dropped from the bill again. Some members of Congress have been quoted saying that prohibiting gender identity discrimination “goes too far” and opponents of the bill are gearing up for a fight.

So far, at least publicly, the issue is non-negotiable. Frank continues to assert that gender identity will not be dropped again.

LGBT-rights organizers have been working hard in recent years to ensure transgender people are not excluded from ENDA again. When gender identity was removed in 2007, hundreds of organizations—national, state, and local—rallied together to advocate for an inclusive version of the bill. And those who signed the following letter became the first members of United ENDA, a coalition working to win workplace protection for the entire LGBT community:

The undersigned represent the vast and celebrated diversity of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in this country … We are united in a common cause: We ask you to keep working with us on an Employment Non-Discrimination Act that protects everyone in our community, and to oppose any substitute legislation that leaves some of us behind.

United ENDA now has over 400 member organizations, including local grassroots groups, labor coalitions, and national advocacy organizations. And the commitment to oppose legislation that “leaves some of us behind” has stayed strong over the past three years. The groups have been lobbying Congress, sharing stories that exemplify the discrimination LGBT workers face, phone banking, and working with local and supportive media outlets to raise awareness and increase pressure on Congress. United ENDA is even organizing the “I Want to Work!” campaign, calling on LGBT people to apply for jobs with their Congressional offices. Mottet, among others, is confident that these efforts are working. “We have the votes to keep gender identity in.”

This week—starting today with the International Day Against Homophobia and ending in celebration of Harvey Milk Day on Saturday—people around the world and across the country are gathering in support of equal rights. Not equal rights for some, but equal rights for all. 

Sara Knight wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sara is a YES! Magazine media and outreach intern.

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Today, I will join thousands of others in a creative protest on a street that most Americans don't know exists. It is "K Street" in Washington, and it is home to thousands of corporate lobbyists who get paid six figures to buy votes in Congress. K Street is Washington's counterpart to Wall Street, and powerful people on both streets have been working hard, in tandem, to preserve our casino economy, our plunder economy, and our military economy.

The rally, led by Jobs with Justice, National People's Action, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU, comes at a critical moment. The Senate is headed towards a vote on a financial reform bill to put some checks and balances on Wall Street. The K Street lobby firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to gut the bill.

These are the same shady characters who pushed Congress to strip away the sensible financial regulations put in place after the crash of 1929, opening the door to the gambling insanity that caused the 2008 crash. Then they had the nerve to go back to Capitol Hill and demand trillions of taxpayer dollars to prop up the "too big too fail" banks. Today, pumped full of public money, these financial giants are now bigger than ever and handing out fat CEO paychecks.

With public anger at its height, this is the moment to shrink Wall Street and restore it to its proper role in serving the financial needs of small businesses and ordinary Americans. What we don't need is to "fix" Wall Street so that it can go back to business as usual. As David Korten puts it, policymakers need to be asking the fundamental question: "How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is needed: toward creating living wage jobs that provide essential goods and services for all Americans in ways consistent with a healthy environment?"

The pending financial reform bill would get us only partway towards this goal. And it's too early to tell how successful the K Street lobby will be in blocking or gutting even these modest reforms.

Fortunately, public anger does seem to be having some impact in countering Wall Street's limitless lobbying resources. Some amendments to curb Wall Street excess appear to be gaining ground, while others are being defeated.

Here are some highlights:

Financial Secrecy: Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders led the way on an amendment to force the Federal Reserve to reveal which banks received more than $2 trillion in emergency aid during the financial crisis (Sander's amendment passed 96-0). The legislation would also force most derivatives trading out of the shadows and onto open clearinghouses and exchanges.

Curbing the Casino: On the top of the K Street hit list is an amendment to force banks to spin off units that gamble in the dangerous derivatives that helped send the economy into a tailspin. And one of the great reforms of the Depression era is back on the table: the 1933 Glass-Steagall reform to separate banking functions between commercial and investment banking. Until its repeal in 1999, it helped stabilize the U.S. financial system and keep alive thousands of small banks. A transformed Wall Street would need to restore this sensible regulation.

Consumer protection: A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would help protect ordinary Americans from the worst abuses of greedy financiers, including predatory lenders and fraudsters.

What's missing?

Once this round of financial reform is over, there will be much unfinished business if we are going to shut down the worst parts of Wall Street and transform the rest so that we can have a financial system that supports an economy centered around green, vibrant Main Streets. Two key battles to come:

Breaking up the banks: Last week, an amendment to limit bank size, led by fair trade champion Senator Sherrod Brown, was defeated. As long as we have banks that are "too big too fail," taxpayers will always have to face the prospect of funding future bailouts. One way that people are already working to undercut the power of the big banks is through a campaign launched by Arianna Huffington and others to "Move Your Money." Thousands have answered the call to transfer their personal funds from Wall Street banks to local banks.

Taxing the speculators: There is growing momentum in the United States and around the world behind proposals to place tiny taxes (not more than 0.25 percent) on trades of derivatives, stocks, and currencies. This "financial speculation tax" would both put a damper on speculation and raise hundreds of billions of dollars that could go to green jobs, health care, and climate finance. My organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, has joined with allies around the world to press this issue at the upcoming G-20 meeting next month in Canada.

I'm looking forward to joining with the throngs on K Street, carrying our signs with the slogans: "Tax Speculators: Shut down the Wall Street Casino." This is the struggle of our lifetimes and only by bringing the message to the streets can we rein in the corporations and banks that threaten our democracy and our well being.

John Cavanagh is the director of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the co-author of 10 books and numerous articles on the global economy, including Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match (2008, Paradigm Publishers), written with Robin Broad.

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As a small girl, Enei Begaye knew to be quiet when visiting friends’ houses. Nearly everyone in the 4,900-person town of Kayenta, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation, worked in the area’s coal mines, Black Mesa and Kayenta, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Begaye and her friends would play quietly so they wouldn’t disturb sleeping elders back from the night shift.

Most of the Kayenta’s population lived in trailers set up by Peabody Energy, the company that owned the mines. Coal companies are major employers throughout the Navajo Nation. In fact, more than half the Nation’s General Fund comes from revenue from coal mining. Nor is resource extraction limited to coal—oil and gas are also collected, together comprising over a quarter of the General Fund budget.

As an adult, Begaye questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown. Apart from providing low wages and hazardous working conditions, coal mining has polluted the township and surrounding environment. The impact of strip mining has been documented since the late 1970s as eliminating existing vegetation, displacing or destroying wildlife and habitats, degrading air quality, altering current land use, and permanently changing the general landscape of the area mined.

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Peabody used billions of gallons of water from local springs and aquifers to move slurry—a mix of coal and water—through a 273-mile pipeline from the mines to the power plant where it would be burned. By 2000, water reserves in the Black Mesa were in serious decline. The company proposed using water from the aquifer that provided drinking water to Flagstaff and the northwestern areas of the reservation.

Navajo and Hopi communities rose up in protest. Begaye testified in front of the California Public Utilities Commission during a meeting to decide the fate of the Mohave Generating Station, which is powered by the coal from the Black Mesa mine. “I testified that I didn’t want the mine open,” said Begaye.  “We’ve seen the leak in the pipeline, seen the devastation to the land, and the social injustice—the springs dry up because the coal mines are using the drinking water.” She joined the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a grassroots group working to protect Black Mesa’s water supply.

In 2005, the Navajo and Hopi tribal councils passed resolutions to end Peabody’s access to the aquifer. Without water, and facing a Clean Air Act lawsuit, the Black Mesa mine and the Mohave Generating Station ceased operations. Peabody is now seeking to reopen the Black Mesa mine under a different permit in order to supply coal to a different generating station.

But the curb on coal mining on Navajo lands was a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation, where nearly 50 percent of residents were unemployed in 2004 and many residents depended on the low wage jobs the mines provide. Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents who lost their jobs. Now, she and other organizers with the BMWC see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition of Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally run economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.

“We realized that we can’t always be part of always saying no," said Begaye. "We have to be part of a solution, to build jobs. If we’re going to transition out of the fossil fuels economy, we have to find a way to transition our employment choices. Not only for the miners, but for the future generations of Navajos.”

The Navajo economy and tribal economic development needed to be fundamentally redefined, in a scalable manner that would provide jobs for thousands of Navajo youth. “The Navajo Nation wasn’t ready to shut down the mines,” said Wahleah Johns, former BMWC codirector. “They didn’t have a plan in place to take care of the mine workers who would be out of jobs. They didn’t have a plan for a transition. So, we felt it was necessary to talk about a just transition plan, to help to really take care of our people. These same workers are in our families, and we didn’t want to leave them high and dry."

To make that vision a reality, BMWC joined with allies—including Tó Nizhóní Ání, the Apollo Alliance, and the Sierra Club—to create the Just Transition Coalition, a group whose goal is to wean the tribes’ economy, energy, and employment off fossil fuels. Their campaigns against coal, they realized, were only band-aids: They had to create a viable alternative to replace it.

Black Mesa Water Coalition and their allies spearheaded a green jobs campaign beginning in April 2008 to diversify the Navajo economy and create opportunities for employment in renewable energy for youth. In July 2009, the Navajo tribal government passed a green jobs act, establishing a Navajo Green Economy Commission and Fund, which can apply for federal and local funds to create green jobs as well as sponsor small-scale, green developments that will help to create jobs for Navajo youth and provide needed services to the community.

The grassroots organizers see the Navajo Green Jobs legislation as a revolutionary shift for their nation, which will fundamentally change their economy while democratizing tribal government. The youth and community groups will continue working until their broad vision becomes a reality.

Yvonne Liu wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Yvonne is a senior research associate at Applied Research Center and author of the just released “Translating Green Into Navajo: Alternatives to Coal Mining and The Campaign for a Navajo Green Economy,” part of ARC’s Green Equity Toolkit.

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Theories about the cause of the sudden dip range from a computerized trading glitch to intentional market manipulation by Goldman Sachs. Either way, the speculation has focused attention on the fact that high frequency trading—rapid automated buying and selling of shares based purely on computer algorithms in response to price movements—accounts for some 50 to 75 percent of stock market trades. These trades are totally unrelated to real world events or underlying asset values and their only purpose is to extract unearned gains and manipulate markets. They have nothing to do with investment as that term is commonly understood.

Agreement seems universal that, although worries about Greek debt may have contributed to the market fall on Thursday, the size and speed of the drop had nothing to do with the underlying value of the companies that experienced violently gyrating share prices.

This was the backdrop for yesterday's New York Times editorial "A Week in the Life of the Economy," which noted it is still unclear whether Congress will act to protect taxpayers from another Wall Street meltdown or give in to Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists. It then goes on to urge Congress to "pass broad legislation to boost employment through aid to states, extension of unemployment benefits, and programs targeted to "small-business lending, infrastructure projects, green technology and summer youth jobs."

There is an important nuance here that aligns with the argument in my blog "Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street." Strict regulation of Wall Street is essential to protect the integrity of the economy, but neither Wall Street regulation nor bailouts are going to get people working. Wall Street is only interested in extracting society's real wealth, not in contributing to its creation. Giving public handouts to Wall Street in the hope that some of it will flow into the creation of productive jobs is a sucker's folly.

On the other hand, government spending to put otherwise unemployed people to work producing beneficial goods and services makes great sense. It increases tax collection to reduce deficits, recapitalizes the local banking system from the bottom up to the extent that wages are deposited with local banks and credit unions, and need not be inflationary even though financed with government-created credit or borrowed interest-free directly from the Federal Reserve (because unlike Wall Street bailouts, properly spent stimulus money is simultaneously creating real value).

David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

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For the first time since America first tested a nuclear weapon 65 years ago, the government has disclosed how many nuclear weapons are in our active stockpile. It is long overdue.

The good news is that this action enhances U.S. credibility as President Obama presses to reduce all nuclear arsenals and move towards their eventual elimination. “You can’t get anywhere towards disarmament unless you are going to be transparent about how many weapons you have,” Sharon Squassoni, a nuclear analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press.

The bad news is that we now know for certain that we have 5,113 hydrogen bombs ready to use. One alone can destroy a city. Why so many? And why was this secret in the first place?

Nuclear Secrets

Nuclear programs are profoundly undemocratic. No one voted on making or using the first bomb. Almost all information about the nuclear arsenal is secret, making it difficult for the public to have informed judgments or hold our leaders accountable.

Secrets were the name of the game during the Cold War, as both the United States and the Soviet Union kept the size of their arsenals hidden. Secrecy was justified, in part, by claims that it would keep the other side from being sure that they had enough nukes to take out all of the other country’s weapons first. Meanwhile, both countries competed blindly to finish first in an arms race.

We now know that the United States’ stockpile peaked at over 31,000 nuclear bombs in 1967. The Soviets also raced to build more bombs and, by 1987, we had over 68,000 nuclear weapons between us. Maybe part of the reason these numbers were secret at the time was to spare officials the embarrassment of explaining exactly why it was necessary to have enough weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over.

Previous Disclosures

Most of the previous disclosures about nuclear stockpiles have been the result of treaties with Russia. Both sides verified the number of missiles they were destroying under the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. The START treaties required both countries to count and verify the total number of strategic nuclear weapons, as does the New START treaty now under consideration by the Senate.

This is the first time, however, the government has publicly declared the size of the current active stockpile. Analysts have estimated the size of the U.S. arsenal for years. Turns out, they were pretty accurate. 

Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Committee and Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists had estimated that the active stockpile was 5,100 weapons, just 13 shy of the actual. Kristensen says he and others have “long advocated disclosure and argued that keeping the size of the nuclear arsenal secret serves no real national security purpose in the post-Cold War era.” The U.S. still has more room for openness. Norris and Kristensen estimate there are an additional 4,200 weapons in storage awaiting dismantlement. There are hints that the government will release precise information on this “inactive” stockpile later this year.

A Gain for National Security

So, geek satisfaction aside, what’s to gain from finally revealing our nuclear numbers? A lot, it turns out.

A little openness in our nuclear numbers could go a long way in building confidence that the U.S. is in fact disarming. This in turn increases the willingness of other states to fulfill their obligation to prevent the spread of these weapons.

This is precisely the effort now underway at the United Nations as 189 nations gather to discuss how to strengthen the 40-year-old nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This pact is the central barrier to the spread of these weapons.

Ten years ago, the members to the NPT specifically agreed on increased transparency in nuclear arsenals and disarmament efforts as part of their thirteen practical steps toward complete nuclear disarmament. A decade later, the U.S. is now finally delivering on that pledge.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking before the United Nations at the start of the NPT review conference, said, "For those who doubt that the United States will do its part on disarmament, this is our record, these are our commitments. And they send a clear, unmistakable signal.”

She's right. This is a major step forward and an important part of efforts to restore U.S. credibility and legitimacy so badly damaged over the past ten years.

Joseph Cirincione and Benjamin Loehrke wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Joseph is the president of Ploughshares Fund and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. Benjamin is a research assistant at Ploughshares Fund and a graduate student at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

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As the crowd pushed in close, an elder from CONAMAQ—the national council of the Ayllus and Markas indigenous nations in Bolivia—asked for blessings from Pachamama (the Aymara and Quechua name for Mother Earth). She sprinkled homemade corn alcohol at the four corners of a charcoal fire that spewed forth a pungent smoke from the offerings of incense and a llama fetus set atop it, and uttered a plea for the governments of the world to hear the will of the people to uphold the rights of Mother Earth.

After taking turns throwing handfuls of coca leaves in the fire and offering their own silent prayers, the crowd quickly dispersed, filing back into the stuffy university classrooms that housed more than a dozen working groups on themes ranging from climate finance to living in harmony with nature.

Thus began the work of drafting a Peoples’ Agreement, one of the more tangible outcomes of the World People's Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The conference, hosted by Bolivian president Evo Morales, drew more than 35,000 people from over 140 countries to the normally sleepy town of Tiquipaya, Bolivia, for a week, culminating with a celebration of Earth Day 2010.

Stark Contrast

The People’s Conference was a far cry from the UN climate conferences that have taken place for the last 15 years—most recently in Copenhagen last December. At the sterile UN talks, people in suits with armloads of paper rush around generic conference centers in a frantic mania. You could be anywhere on the planet. The same vendors offer you the same overpriced cup of coffee and stale croissant whether you’re in Bonn, Copenhagen, Poznań, or Bangkok.

There, civil society is kept on a tight leash. Their numbers are restricted, and UN officials spontaneously revise the rules of engagement at will. When civil society is allowed to speak, it is in short interventions, usually of 60 to 120 seconds. In the best of circumstances, when all of the seven recognized non-governmental “constituencies” (which include environmental, labor, business, and research NGOs as well as youth, farmers, and women—but not indigenous peoples) are allowed to participate, they have less than a total of 15 minutes at the opening meeting and at the closing plenary to voice their concerns, demands, and solutions to the most pressing problem the world has ever faced.

This shocking lack of public participation in decisions that will affect every person on Earth—particularly considering the dearth of adequate solutions being offered up by the world’s governments—was part of the impetus for the Bolivian conference on climate change.

It was also convened to create a counter proposal to the Copenhagen Accord—a document drafted behind closed doors in the eleventh hour of climate negotiations last December and rammed through by the United States. So far, even if countries lived up to the non-binding pledges to reduce greenhouse gases they made under the Accord, global temperature increases would be catastrophic to impoverished nations. But developing countries that refused to sign the Accord, including Ecuador and Bolivia, have been denied access to much needed climate finance.

A Peoples’ Alternative

While in Bolivia, Father Miguel D’Escoto, former president of the UN General Assembly and former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, decried what he saw as a corrupted system and called for the overhaul of an institution where the powerful call the shots. “The United Nations was created in the name of we the people,” he said. “And I think it’s about time that we the people take it over.”

D’Escoto added, “Democracy means having the possibility to join in the decision-making process.” The climate conference in Cochabamba provided just that possibility.

Each of the seventeen working groups began their work in March in virtual spaces in which participants from anywhere in the world could submit proposals on a particular topic. For me, the topic was climate finance.

In Bolivia, we spent our first day collecting proposals from students, indigenous elders, municipal officials, community organizers, labor leaders, and representatives of NGOs. Surprisingly, the room only grew increasingly full as we dove two, then four, then ten hours into the discussion.

Over the next 48 hours, sparks flew from the heated exchanges elicited by the town hall-style discussions anchoring our group’s work. Particularly controversial in the climate finance debate—and, I later learned, in the groups on forests and indigenous peoples—was whether carbon markets should be used as a source of climate-related funding, and whether that funding outweighed their potentially devastating role in commodifying nature. Overwhelmingly, these conversations conveyed a spirit of common purpose based on the belief that, to be effective, the solutions to climate change must be just and concrete, grounded in the lived experiences of communities that have been protecting the Earth for generations.

Thanks to the dedication of the more than 150 members of our working group to listen attentively to one another and to respond critically but respectively, after much negotiation we were able to reach consensus on Wednesday morning, day three of the process, on a three-page draft text outlining how developed countries must make restitution for the financial part of their climate debt. This in turn was put to a gathering of several thousand people in the local university’s coliseum, where an open microphone offered the opportunity for voicing approval, disagreements, and questions about the text. The facilitators again went back to the text and incorporated commonly raised issues.

By the end of the third evening, each group’s work was summarized in a few paragraphs highlighting the most essential demands and principles. Following the conference, on April 26, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, assembled the results into a single document and submitted it to the UN Framework Convention on Climate on behalf of the 35,000 participants in the World Peoples’ Conference.

The process was not perfect. Communication was a challenge for non-Spanish speakers. The logistics of collecting proposals through the Internet meant that a fast connection was a necessity. And travel to Tiquipaya was arduous and expensive. Some who overcame those hurdles were met with an even greater barrier: The Bolivian government blocked the formation of an 18th working group on the impact of extractive industries on collective rights, calling into question, among other things, the Bolivian government’s support of lithium, zinc, and silver mines.

But even in the face of contradictions between its rhetoric and actions regarding the environment and indigenous rights, Bolivia’s experiment with democracy opens up new ways of thinking about multilateralism.

With the submission of the People’s Agreement on climate change, a diverse array of voices will be incorporated into the UN climate summit planned for Cancún in December. While not a complete takeover, it’s a solid step in the direction of inclusion. And it blasts open the parameters of negotiation that have focused on temperature increases and atmospheric CO2 concentrations deemed too high by many, to the detriment of just pathways to climate stability.

What’s Next?

At an Earth Day rally in Washington, D.C., Reverend Jesse Jackson said that one way forward from Bolivia is, “to support the deep democracy and deep ecology proposals set forth by Evo Morales,” and the people from more than 140 countries who gathered in Cochabamba.

Jackson outlined four such propositions: Nature should be granted rights in a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth; those who violate those rights should face legal consequences in a climate justice tribunal (to be established by Earth Day 2011); industrialized countries should repay “climate debt” incurred by causing the climate crisis; and a worldwide People’s Referendum on Climate Change should be undertaken.

Any one of these is a massive undertaking. To bring all four into fruition would take a force of political will that the world has rarely witnessed. But what the World People’s Conference on Climate Change has demonstrated is that democracy, Bolivia-style, in all its dynamic and untidy forms, may be the best way to consensus at the international level, a consensus that is essential if we are to solve the climate crisis.

Janet Redman wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Janet is co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank, where she provides analysis of international financial institutions’ energy investment and carbon finance activities.

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Welcome to the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—an inclusive summit that one participant called "the people's response to the fraud of Copenhagen." More than 20,000 people from around the world participated. With footage from the conference and interviews with Maude Barlow, Naomi Klein, and Nnimo Bassey.

Video produced by Lauren Rosenfeld and Tupac Saavedra for YES! Magazine.

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The residents of Portland, Ore. are tearing their city up.

Literally.

The Portland-based nonprofit Depave, in partnership with Carfree Portland, has been organizing volunteer work parties to remove thousands of square feet of concrete pavement and "free the soil" beneath. According to Depave.org, getting rid of unnecessary pavement will "reduce stormwater pollution and increase the amount of land available for habitat restoration, urban farming, trees, native vegetation, and beauty, thus providing us with greater connections to the natural world." That's a lot of benefit to leave wrapped in cement.

But it's not all jackhammers and bits of broken rock. Working with local property owners, Depave teams have been replacing barren parking lots with urban gardens and community green spaces—key contributors to healthy, livable cities.

This video was produced by StreetFilms.

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Ten years ago these streets felt very different than the festive atmosphere this week. Under pressure from the World Bank, Bolivia's conservative government signed a 40-year lease, putting the city’s water system into the hands of the San Francisco-based engineering giant, Bechtel. Within weeks of taking over, Bechtel raised water rates by an average of 50 percent, much higher in many cases. People from the countryside, concerned that their water systems were next, joined the city in a series of massive protests that were met with repression at the hands of a dictator-turned-president, Hugo Banzer. A 17-year-old boy, Victor Hugo Daza, was killed by an Army sharpshooter.

But in the end the people of Cochabamba prevailed. The government finally caved in and Bechtel was forced to leave, its contract canceled. A year later Bechtel sued the people of Cochabamba in a trade court operated by that same World Bank, seeking a payment of $50 million after making investments in Cochabamba of less than $1 million. A huge international campaign—ranging from legal petitions to direct action at Bechtel’s San Francisco headquarters—forced Bechtel to settle for a token payment of thirty cents.

Coming just months after the 1999 Seattle protests, the Cochabamba Water Revolt was a vivid demonstration of what the struggles over globalization truly meant in people's lives. The Water Revolt, an inspiring story of David conquering Goliath, soon became legend in many circles, the subject of numerous documentaries and articles and even more doctoral dissertations.

A Legend with Mixed Results

This week’s tenth anniversary march was buoyant. Thousands of people lined city streets. Water Revolt fans and followers from the northern hemisphere came by the dozens to join in. David Solnit, the renowned maker of protest puppets, spent weeks working with Bolivian activists to make huge puppets for the anniversary march. Dozens of eye-catching masks with long, flowing bodies floated over the streets of Cochabamba. Mona Caron, the talented muralist from San Francisco, was here as well, leading a mural project to commemorate the historic events a decade before.

A decade later, what does the Cochabamba Water Revolt really tell us about the power of protest and about the challenges of getting people in an impoverished country access to water, the one thing they can’t live without? I wrote the first international reports from the scene of the Revolt a decade ago, and had a good deal to do with helping create the legend. But a decade later, it is a legend with markedly mixed results.

For Bolivia, the Water Revolt was the spark that changed everything. Emboldened by their ability to fight and win against guns and conglomerates, Bolivians took to the streets over and over again, winning more victories for economic self-determination. In February 2003, the people of La Paz and El Alto led protests that forced the government to drop a plan to tax the poor, part of an IMF-induced belt-tightening package. Later that year, nationwide protests stopped another plan by the government to sell off the nation’s gas at bargain prices through Chile to the U.S.

Each of these protests also left dozens of dead in its wake. Taking action in the streets in Bolivia proved, as always, to be a much more bloody and less cheerful exercise than in the North.

In December 2005, that demand for change found an expression at the ballot box with the landslide historic election of Evo Morales as President—an event that had its roots in the Water Revolt. The first time I ever met the President-to-be was in the streets of Cochabamba in 2000, as he pitched rocks at the shields of police firing tear gas into the protests.

Photo by The Democracy Center.

But the results, in terms of access to clean and affordable water, are far more mixed. Half the homes in the area served by the public water utility still have no water service; many of those that do have service only have it a few hours a week. A decade after people shed blood in the streets to retake their water, the company that manages it remains riddled with corruption, mismanagement, and inefficiency—a source of graft for the city’s mayor and the union that represents the company’s workers.

The political unity that marked Cochabamba during the Water Revolt has fared no better. This year there were two separate commemorations of the Revolt. One featured President Morales and the people who led the rural wing of the Revolt. Another, led by the famous head of the factory workers' union, Oscar Olivera, included workers and organizations from Cochabamba’s impoverished southern neighborhoods. Each commemoration took political shots at the other.

An Enduring Symbol of Inspiration

None of this should detract from the fact that the Water Revolt is a genuine symbol of the power a people can exercise when they are united and brave. Kicking out a foreign corporation hell-bent on profiting handsomely off water was a major victory. But the deeper lessons of the Water Revolt ten years later also include this: Protest is often essential to winning the space where positive change can happen. In a place like Bolivia, protest of that sort is often both dangerous and brave. As such, it becomes, rightly, a source of inspiration to those who participated in it or wished they had.

But once that space is won, the second part of that work begins: building the systems and making the concrete changes that actually deliver the goods that people fought for. That work, like building a public water company, is not nearly so romantic but essential nonetheless. A decade later, that remains the unfinished work of the Cochabamba Water Revolt.

Jim Shultz wrote this aticle for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jim is a contributing author and co-editor of Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (UC Press). His writings from the street during the Cochabamba Water Revolt shared honors for top story of the year in 2000 from Project Censored.

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The pea, radish, lettuce, and quinoa sprouts have emerged in my new backyard garden, outracing the chervil, cilantro, carrot, and chard seeds—and Wayde Lawler, my new-found Hyperlocavore buddy, is responsible for all this.

Wayde and I found each other via Hyperlocavore, a website that matches landless gardeners with land hosts. Wayde is a horticulture student at Merritt College in Oakland, CA; I'm a hobby gardener. For the past two years, I've ceded my small backyard to the resident deer, and settled for a 15-gallon tub on the deck with a pair of cherry tomatoes and some climbing green beans.

My inspiration for signing up with Hyperlocavore came from a February 21, 2010 presentation put on by Transition Albany, a local group trying to make Albany, Ca. more self-sufficient. The presentation included the movie HomeGrown, which documents a family in Pasadena, Ca. that–incredibly—grows three tons of food annually on 1/5th of an acre of urban land. Afterward, Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, spoke about her garden on squatted land in Oakland, Ca. where her neighbors are welcome to come pick what they need. I don't intend to raise a ton of food on my not quite 1/10th of an acre parcel, but if someone else were to take the lead, I thought we might have some fun installing a garden together.

The serendipity gods were surely hovering when I posted my Hyperlocavore request. Wayde Lawler was the only person looking for a North Berkeley site on that day; the following Sunday we met in my weedy backyard to look at the available space and my incomplete effort at a deer-proof fence. On Thursday, Wayde arrived with a borrowed pick-up and a cubic yard of planting soil. He whacked my weeds and planned the beds and we both schlepped buckets. By the end of the day, we had garden beds topped with partly-decomposed straw mulch occupying a 12 by 14 foot space.

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I like Wayde. In the month since, we've strengthened and completed the bamboo-lattice deer fence, begun planting, and begun to know each other. Aside from his ability to envision an idea, figure out a way to accomplish it, and follow through, I like his Midwestern low-key politeness. I liked meeting his wife, Taryn, and sharing returned Peace Corps volunteer reminiscences on the day that we sowed “goosefoot” (that is, plants like spinach, chard, and beet from the Chenopodiaceae family) seeds. I enjoyed having Wayde as our waiter when my housemate and I visited the restaurant where he worked, and I appreciate his stop-in for a first time experience at my community acupuncture clinic.

Although we haven't any formal agreement for sharing either the garden or its produce, I am not worried. So far, it has evolved that I provide land, water, and some labor—and Wayde provides expertise, labor, and inspiration. He brings his own tools although he is welcome to use mine, and he has paid for soil, plants, and seeds while I've bought a couple lunches. From what I can tell, we both feel we are gaining more than we are giving.

My Hyperlocavore experience to date has been entirely positive. But I can imagine scenarios where, as with any human interaction, it could have been sour. I'm glad that I had the courage to try something new. I'm glad to know Wayde and Taryn. And I'm looking forward to a summer of gardening—while shrinking my carbon footprint.

Pamela O'Malley Chang wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Pamela is co-founder of Sarana Community Acupuncture in Albany, California and a YES! Magazine contributing editor. This is part of a series of blog posts about the efforts of Transition Albany.

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Tax Day touches deep nerves about the fairness of our tax system and the way our tax dollars are spent. It also offers a great opportunity to talk about what we value most—and what kind of society we want to live in.

This April 15 will also be a day of tea party protests and cable news-stimulated rage. While some of this anger is misdirected, much of it is justified: It’s hard to stand by while many global corporations and wealthy individuals dodge paying their fair share of taxes.

Over the last half-century, we’ve witnessed a dramatic shift in who pays taxes. The responsibility has moved off the very wealthy and onto the middle class, off of global corporations and onto small businesses, and off the federal government and onto state and local budgets. And, by adding to our national debt, we’re shifting taxes from today’s taxpayers and onto tomorrow’s workers, who will pay interest for decades to come.


According to a new report from Wealth for the Common Good, an organization that I co-founded, the wealthy have received massive tax cuts, not only under President George W. Bush but also for decades before his election. Since 1960, America’s wealthiest taxpayers have seen their tax outlays, as a share of income, drop by almost half. The top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes starting at $2 million, saw the share of income paid in federal taxes decline from 60 to 33.6 percent between 1960 and 2004. During President Bush’s eight years in office, Congress expanded tax cuts to Americans with incomes over $250,000, adding another $700 billion to the national debt.

Meanwhile, despite fifty years of "tax cutting," the share of household income that middle class households pay in federal taxes has increased slightly, from 15.9 to 16.1 percent.

Congress has failed to close tax loopholes for global corporations, allowing thousands of profitable U.S. companies to pay no corporate income taxes—at all—between 1998 and 2008. For example, General Electric generated $10.3 billion in pre-tax income in 2009, but ended up paying nothing in U.S. taxes.
 
Global corporations dodge taxes by setting up subsidiaries in countries that have low or no corporate income tax. They claim their profits are made there and their losses are made in the United States, thereby avoiding paying any U.S. taxes. A small business, anchored in our country, has to unfairly compete against companies that utilize such loopholes.

When big corporations and high income individuals don’t pay their share, the bills get passed to the middle class and our debt grows. That’s hard to appreciate until things start to hit close to home in the form of cuts to public schools, veterans’ services, mass transit, and thousands of other services on which we depend every day. Our public service commons have been chronically underfunded for the last 40 years.

Reversing the tax shift would not only reduce the tax burden borne by the bottom 70 percent of taxpayers; it would also allow us to make long overdue investments in upgrading our aging public infrastructure and defending the commons.

In the United States, we tend to take for granted the advanced commons (public infrastructure, property, and knowledge institutions) that our ancestors built for us. We’re like fish who swim in an ocean of publicly funded services without seeing the water around us. Taxes are the way we pay for this healthy common heritage, ensuring that they exist for the next generation.

Here are five things you can do to support the commons this tax week:

1. Talk Taxes with Your Neighbors. See our “Tax Day Talking Points” to clear up some of the common confusions and myths about taxation.
2. Write a Letter to the Editor. It’s easy! Click here, decide your type of letter, enter your zip code, choose a newspaper. You can edit our sample letter or insert your own.
3. Sign a petition calling on Congress to let the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy expire.
4. Close overseas tax havens. Business for Shared Prosperity and Wealth for the Common Good are enlisting investors and small businesses to speak out against tax haven abuse. Go to businessagainsttaxhavens.org.
   
5. Support a financial speculation tax. See the petition to institute a modest financial speculation tax on Wall Street transactions including the purchase and sale of financial investments such as derivatives, hedge funds, and speculative stock trades.
   

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

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Bigger banks were supposed to lower costs for consumers. That was the promise made repeatedly in 1994 and again in 1999, when Congress dismantled laws that had long restricted the size and scope of banks, ushering in a wave of mergers that left the industry dominated by a few financial giants.

Testifying in support of the so-called Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999, Michael Patterson of J.P. Morgan used the word "consumer" no less than twenty-one times in his remarks. He told Congress that freeing up big banks to get even bigger would provide consumers with "greater convenience, more innovation, and lower costs."

Many regulators and lawmakers echoed his assertions. Robert Rubin, then Secretary of the Treasury and later a director at Citigroup, said that the "reforms" would "lead to better service and lower costs." Congress passed the bill by wide margins and President Bill Clinton enthusiastically signed it into law, promising that the changes would "save consumers billions of dollars a year through enhanced competition."

Just seven years later, the fees consumers were paying on their checking and savings accounts had skyrocketed, rising from $21 billion in 1999 to $36 billion in 2006. (And these amounts do not include credit card and ATM fees, which also shot up.)

That bigger banks would mean higher prices was plainly evident in 1999 to anyone who bothered to consult the data. For the previous five years, the Federal Reserve had issued yearly reports to Congress that showed that bigger banks charged significantly higher fees on checking and savings accounts.

The Fed's 1999 report, published five months before the Financial Services Modernization Act passed, found that overdraft fees were 41 percent higher at big banks compared to small. Big banks charged more for almost every fee imaginable, including 43 percent more for bounced checks, 57 percent more for stop-payment orders, and 18 percent more for ATM withdrawals.

But rather than allow the evidence in favor of smaller banks to guide policy, Congress decided to get rid of the evidence. At the urging of then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Congress ordered the Federal Reserve to stop publishing its annual report on bank fees. "The Fed fought to get rid of it," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the US Public Interest Research Group. "They said transparency was not a good use of their resources."

For most of the last decade, information on the average cost difference between big banks and small local financial institutions has not been publicly available. But, as it turns out, the firm that the Fed once employed to gather this data, Moebs Services, has continued to survey fees at more than 2,000 financial institutions. Moebs agreed to share its 2009 data with the New Rules Project. As our chart shows, the biggest banks still impose much higher costs on their customers than small financial institutions do.

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Not only are fees lower, but several studies have found that smaller banks and credit unions pay higher interest on savings accounts. In a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, researchers Kwangwoo Park and George Pennacchi examined data from 1998 to 2004 and found that rates on one-year CDs were an average of 14 percent higher at small banks (under $1 billion in assets) than at large ones (assets of $10 billion or more) and rates on interest-bearing savings accounts were 49 percent higher.

Why are small banks and credit unions a better deal? One reason is that they really want your deposits. Unlike big banks, which have access to wholesale funding, community banks rely much more on customer deposits to finance their lending and investments.

A second reason is that many small banks are more efficient than their big competitors. That may seem surprising at first. In many industries, more volume lowers costs, but in banking there's an upper limit—a point at which a bank's bloated bureaucracy makes the cost of doing everything more expensive, not less. Exactly where that threshold lies is a matter of debate, but some analysts suggest that the sweet-spot for efficiency starts as low as $500 million in assets and ends once a bank hits $4 or $5 billion. To put that in perspective, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase are about 300 times that size.

But perhaps a more instructive question to ask is not why are small banks a better deal, but how do big banks get away with charging so much more? After all, people have a choice about where to bank and free markets are suppose to drive down prices.

Christopher Peterson, an expert on consumer finance at the University of Utah School of Law, says there are two main theories. Those who believe the market is working contend that "bigger banks have more comprehensive branch locations, so people will pay a premium for convenience."

Another explanation is that banks are adept at obscuring their prices and make it hard to comparison shop. "I think our impulse in this country is to overestimate the ability of people to shop down fees that are not transparent," said Peterson.

Data includes banks, thrifts, and credit unions. Small institutions are defined as those with $100 million in assets or less. Medium are those between $100 million and $1 billion in assets. Large institutions are $1 billion to $50 billion in assets, and giant ones have more than $50 billion.

Source: Moebs Services

Indeed, the Government Accounting Office recently sent secret shoppers into 185 bank branches. They were unable to obtain detailed information on account terms at one-third of those branches and unable to obtain a comprehensive schedule of fees at one-fifth, despite the fact that such disclosures are required by federal law—a law that apparently is not enforced. More than half of the banks did not provide this information on their websites, either.

Mierzwinski says big banks have the advantage of having recognizable names and branches everywhere. Many people simply go to the nearest big bank branch and don't shop around. "They particularly don't compare the bank's penalty fees, which are so hard to find," he said. "Everyone advertises free checking, but 'free' only defines monthly maintenance fees."

If you bank at a big bank, all of this should prompt you to give some serious thought to ditching it. Even if you are good at avoiding penalty fees, why do business with a bank that charges exorbitant prices and attempts at every turn to hit its depositors with sneaky fees? Shop around instead for an institution that treats its customers fairly. Consumer advocacy groups say the best place to start is with local credit unions and community banks. The smallest have the lowest costs on average. But keep in mind that averages are just that; institutions vary and each should be evaluated individually according to how well it meets your needs and how responsive it is to your community. 

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that challenges the wisdom of economic consolidation and works to advance policies that build strong local economies. She is the author of the monthly bulletin the Hometown Advantage and the book Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses, which was named one of the top ten business books of the year by Booklist. 

This article is part of the New Rules Project's Community Banking Initiative and was originally published on Huffington Post as part of a partnership with their Move Your Money campaign.

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When it comes to economic growth, bigger is better. Or so says the mainstream wisdom. But more and more people—including, increasingly, governments—are realizing that equating growth with quality of life is to follow a broken compass toward a host of social and ecological problems. The state of Maryland is the latest government to look for a better way to measure progress: Governor Martin O'Malley's office recently announced the launch of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an alternative economic indicator that will allow the state to keep track of which activities actually contribute to quality of life—and which detract from it.

As University of Maryland researcher Dr. Matthias Ruth, with whom the state collaborated in the development of the GPI, told the UM NewsDesk, “The calculation of a Genuine Progress Indicator begins to correct the picture of how well-off we actually are. It counts as positive that which is actually positive—time spent with family, volunteer work in our communities, restoration of the environment, for example—and it subtracts the negative—time spent in our cars or loss of wetlands.”

The GPI will take into account 26 different quality of life indicators, putting price estimates, in dollars, on the negative—and positive—impacts of economic growth. The indicator considers, for example, the future costs of climate change and the strain of income inequality on social services; it also accounts for the value created by volunteerism and forest preservation. Taken together, the measurement should equip citizens and policymakers with a more clear-eyed picture of the costs and benefits of the state’s economic activity.

Already, the GPI is telling a very different story about the connection between economic growth and quality of life. A cross-sector partnership between the University of Maryland and several state agencies looked at data all the way back to 1960 and found that, by the early 1980s, Maryland’s growing gross state product (GSP—the state's version of GDP, the traditional measure of economic health) no longer reflected an increase in genuine progress. In other words, while economic activity increased, quality of life didn't. By 2000, GSP estimates were nearly 50 percent higher than what’s reported by the GPI—a measurement that, Ruth maintains, is closer to the real experience of citizens.

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Maryland can now use the GPI to forecast the impact of various future policy scenarios on the lives of residents. With full-tilt investments, for example, in things like green jobs, renewable energy, and compact urban planning, the GPI starts to outpace the GSP around 2025. By 2060, the difference between the two metrics is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The GPI is meant to complement the traditional economic indicator, the GSP, and is accompanied by a web-based interactive tool that allows Marylanders to forecast future scenarios for themselves.

Maryland isn’t the only government to reconsider its use of GSP (or gross domestic product, GDP, on a national scale) as a measure of progress. These indicators simply track the total amount, in dollars, of all the goods and services produced and paid for within an economy. A growing GDP has long been assumed to translate into new jobs, more wealth, and greater happiness—leading economists, politicians, and the mainstream media to scrutinize the jumping tick of dollar flow—but there’s a growing consensus that that’s not always the case. In 2009, for example, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced a new plan  for that country to begin measuring social progress in terms of the happiness of its citizens. And Bhutan, in Southern Asia, has been reporting its Gross National Happiness since 1972—during which time, despite low per capita incomes, levels of clean drinking water, literacy, and life expectancy have been on the rise.

The notion of an alternative economic indicator has been kicking around sustainability circles for years. An early ancestor to the GPI emerged, probably not coincidentally, from the work of University of Maryland economist Herman Daly in the 1980s. Subsequent iterations have caught on in the United Kingdom, where the New Economics Foundation has published their Happy Planet Index, a measurement of “the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered.”

According to its critics, the GDP is too blunt an instrument to be useful; it merely lumps together the frenzy of activity within an economy into a not-so-meaningful number that convinces us things are going well when they’re not. Without a means of separating economic good from bad, they say, undesirable events that stimulate the flow of money and stuff—like paving over a forest, spending a night in the hospital, or imprisoning a criminal—get lumped into the GDP and filed under “progress” as well. As Jonathan Rowe put it in a 2009 article for this magazine, “Sickness and the consequent medical treatment is good for the GDP. Health is not.”

Whatever the outcome of the GPI, Maryland should be applauded for taking a bold and transparent step toward a working relationship between nature, people, and the economy. No other state, in fact, has achieved anything quite like it.

Scott Gast wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Scott is an online editorial intern at YES!

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Last week’s enactment of historic health care legislation eclipsed another momentous victory for the commons: the reclamation of the federal student loan program, which had been captured and milked for decades by voracious private lenders.

As I’ve discussed over the past year, our free market-loving banks have no objection to socialism when it reduces their risks and guarantees their profits. That’s exactly what the student loan program did. The banks were only too happy to act as middlemen in making loans to students. It let them make risk-free profits, exploit a captive clientele, collude with colleges and universities to keep the game going, and jack up the interest rates and fees charged to students.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the government could save $94 billion over the next decade by bypassing the banks and making the loans directly, through college financial aid offices. A Government Accountability Office study found that the federal government’s costs would decline from $9.20 per $100 in loans made, to $1.70 per $100 in (direct) loans made. Big difference, huh?

That gives you an idea of the actual inefficiencies (i.e., unnecessary rake-offs) that private bank lending entails. As the shape of the student loan legislation changed, the CBO later lowered its savings estimate to $67 billion over ten years. This is still a rather substantial sum, especially since those savings will allow interest rates for students to be reduced from 8.5% to 7.9%.

It will also allow the amount of direct aid to students, through Pell Grants, to be raised. And more students (and parents) will be able to get education loans: The denial rate in the direct loan program is half that of the program for federally guaranteed student loans.

Naturally, Republicans and the Wall Street Journal are denouncing the direct government lending as a “government takeover” of banking.  “We now have the government running banks, insurance companies, car companies,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told the Washington Post.  The next step is to “take over the student loan business.”

It’s a cynical, disingenuous argument. The government is stamping out corporate socialism. That’s a “government takeover”? How can the government be taking something over that it already oversees (through its loan guarantees)? Ain’t no free market now. Just corporate dole.

The student loan program had become a classic case of socializing the risks and privatizing the profits. The major difference in the new legislation is simply this: Instead of letting the banks pocket all the profits for their role as risk-free middlemen, students and taxpayers will reap the substantial benefits instead. Sounds good to me.

A hearty salute to the Obama administration for persisting in its quest to reclaim control of the student loan program, and for its ingenious legislative tactics in overcoming the powerful banking lobby, which nearly scuttled this legislation.

David Bollier is editor of OnTheCommons.org and director of the Information Commons Project at the New America Foundation. His latest book is Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own.

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The United States and Russia reached agreement on a new START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to lower their count of deployed atomic warheads from 2,200 each to between 1,500 and 1,675. They would also cut their stocks of strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles from a current level of 1,600 each to 800. The treaty replaces the 1991 START agreement, which expired last December. Since each country still has about 10,000 weapons, mostly undeployed and in storage, the new START is a modest step forward. It is, however, a down payment on improved U.S.-Russia relations and a possible prelude to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the new treaty in Prague, the site of President Obama’s groundbreaking speech one year ago in which he set out a vision for a nuclear free world.

There are 23,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, all but 1,000 of them in the U.S. and Russia. To convince the other nuclear weapons states (the U.K., China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) to join negotiations for their total elimination, it is imperative that the U.S. and Russia cut their enormous arsenals first.

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Obama and Medvedev pledged to negotiate these weapons cuts as a step towards “a nuclear free world.” The talks almost ran aground when the U.S. announced it was putting new missile defenses in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, after it had canceled plans to site them in the Czech Republic. Russia views the expansion of U.S. missile defenses as a threat to the integrity of its nuclear arsenal. The parties agreed to finesse their differences by settling for language in the treaty’s preamble—which the U.S. argues is not binding—acknowledging that the size of offensive arsenals must be tied to the number of anti-missile defenses.

Powerful forces are arrayed against Obama’s vision. Forty-one Republican senators wrote to him warning that they would not ratify the START treaty if the president made any moves to cut back on the U.S. missile defense program. They have also exacted a stiff price by requiring an increase in the nuclear weapons budget, including plans for a new facility to manufacture plutonium cores for new bombs. And the nuclear weapons labs are raising questions about the soundness of the nuclear arsenal without further money spent on testing and weapons development.

Nevertheless, international expectations for progress in eliminating nuclear weapons are on the rise. In addition to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention to ban the bomb, the German Bundestag has just passed a motion urging major steps towards nuclear abolition—including removing U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Germany and beginning international talks on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

In May, the UN will host a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which contains a promise from the nuclear powers to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a pledge from all the other states not to acquire them. Tens of thousands of citizen activists will march from Times Square to the UN headquarters in New York, calling for nuclear abolition. Strategy sessions to develop next steps are planned by the Abolition 2000 Network and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. On June 5th, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is organizing in communities all over the world to urge negotiations to ban the bomb.  While President Obama qualified his call for a nuclear free world by saying it might not be achieved “in my lifetime," his very articulation of the vision has unleashed the aspirations of people all over the world, making the abolition of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come.

Alice Slater wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Alice is New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the coordinating committee of the Abolition 2000 Network.