Who benefits when a pastor in a small town in Florida threatens to burn the Quran? Or when a proposal to build a Muslim cultural center in Manhattan erupts into a national controversy?

And what can those of us who believe extremism is harmful do to stop it?

Terry Jones, the Gainsville pastor who was catapulted onto the global stage by his plan to burn the Quran, said his action was about standing up to Islamic extremists. But General David Petraeus and others tell us that this action would play into the hands of extremists. Extremists need anger and hate to recruit and motivate followers; without images of outrage like this, people might revert to peace, respect, and tolerance, which, after all, come pretty naturally to a social species like ours.

There’s another group of extremists who likewise rely on hatemongering. The extreme right wing in this country needs fear and anger to keep people distracted from the real sources of insecurity—a stalled economy that has been managed for the benefit of Wall Street and big corporations, two protracted and disastrous wars, and a system increasingly unable to support a middle-class way of life.

The extremists on both sides have an oddly symbiotic relationship—each thrives on the anger and vitriol of the other.

But Reverend Jones and others of his ilk can succeed only when moderate voices are silent. Quiet disapproval isn’t enough. We must take a stand often, courageously, and respectfully for tolerance and peace. Here are a few ways we can do this during an especially fraught anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

• Speak out in support of religious freedom, as the 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrow did recently in support of the proposed New York City Muslim cultural center.

• Speak up when you hear Muslims or other groups disparaged, whether in public or private, as ColorLines publisher Rinku Sen suggests in her recent column.
  
• Read out loud from the Quran or other Muslim texts on September 11, as the Network of Spiritual Progressives is doing (Brother Jamal Rahman, the Muslim Sufi member of our Interfaith Amigos, offers some verses from the Quran and from Rumi here). Or hold an interfaith candlelight vigil for peace, like the one planned by the Gainesville Muslim Initiative.
• Offer generous humanitarian aid to Pakistani flood victims because they need help and because it’s important for humanitarian aid to flow across religious divides.
• Examine your own prejudices—most of us have them. And consider what you have to gain and lose when others are treated as equals.
• Familiarize yourself both with the violent interpretations of the religions you encounter and with the interpretations of the same religious texts that emphasize love, compassion, and tolerance for all.
• Speak out for tolerance on blogs, Facebook page, in public forums, in your faith group, and in letters to the editor. Call out candidates for public office of any political party who use intolerance or people’s race, religion, or immigration status to whip up electoral passions. Just a few voices for tolerance in any community can change the tone of a dialogue.
• Monitor news and public-affairs media, and insist that they include voices for peace and tolerance in their programming, and not give undue importance to advocates of exclusion and intolerance. (A starting place is to sign Color of Change’s petition calling on businesses to “Turn Off Fox.”
  

In coming months and years, we can expect even greater social stresses from a flagging economy, the continuing wars, and the "natural" disasters that will occur with increasing frequency on an overheated planet. Those stresses will be multiplied if we allow demagogues to transform them into hate and anger. Silence won't be enough—we'll have to speak out if we are to stop the madness.

Question: What are you doing to counter intolerance? What have you found works best? Please leave your comments below.

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

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When politicians refer to natural gas as a "clean" alternative to oil and coal, they seldom mention a commonly used technique called horizontal hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.

But in New York, residents were concerned enough about the long-term environmental, health, and economic fallout of fracking that they convinced the state Senate to institute a moratorium on the practice. In a 48-9 bipartisan landslide, state leaders voted to prohibit fracking for nine months so they can evaluate the environmental and health impacts of the practice before deciding how to continue.

"It was absolutely the result of thousands of citizens weighing in with their senators,” said Katherine Nadeau, director of the Water and Natural Resources Program for Environmental Advocates of New York. “When that many people call, write, and show up, it gets results. The other side was spending obscene amounts of money, but the more compelling argument was that there have been serious tragic repercussions to drilling."

Those repercussions have included fatalities from exploding wells, 30-mile stretches of streams without any living organisms, exploding tap water, diesel fuel spills, sick children and adults, plummeting property values, farmland that is no longer tillable, the destruction of vast swaths of once-beautiful scenery, along with many other documented cases of harm to people and the planet.

Fracking involves blasting through shale rock to release the gas trapped deep below ground. Each fracked well uses between 3 and 8 million gallons of clean water—usually trucked in from rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and other fresh-water sources—that is then mixed with sand and a toxic stew of chemicals that drilling companies are not required to disclose. But Theo Colborn, a noted endocrinologist and water issues expert, has identified many of them as carcinogins, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors. They include acrylonitrite, ammonium bisulfite, benzene, boric acid, ethylbenzene, 5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazotin-3-one, formaldehyde, monoethanolamine, styrene, tetrachlorethalene, toluene, and xylene.

Much of the waste fluid is left underground, where these toxins have affected groundwater drinking supplies in many states.

First-Time Activists in “A Fight for Our Lives”

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. "The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health," says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. "Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them."

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

"Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn't ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health," says Dyrszka. "Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas."

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

"I was hooked," Dyrszka says. "Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there."

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

New York’s Recipe for Success

Wes Gillingham is program director for Catskill Mountainkeeper. He was on the floor of the Senate all day August 3, waiting with Dyrszka and fellow activists until the bill finally came to a vote around midnight.

"I got two reports from Senate staffers later," he says. "One said that for every 3 to 10 calls they got against the moratorium, there were 100 for it. Another told me it was 80-to-1 in favor”—despite the fact that drilling companies funded a counter-campaign claiming that allowing fracking will bring riches to strapped upstate regions.

Timing also had something to do with the vote's outcome. "The Gulf spill and Gasland coming almost simultaneously got a lot more people aware of the carelessness of the gas and oil companies and what's happening with unconventional gas drilling,” says Kevin Millar, a retired nurse anesthetist from Tioga County who belongs to New York Residents Against Drilling and the Coalition to Protect New York.

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Filmmaker Josh Fox brought his award-winning Gasland to many New York cinemas in early summer. Fox, who'd traveled to 24 states to document the heartbreaking human stories behind the industry hype about a "safe, clean fuel," has appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and other national shows. Gasland has been showing on HBO since debuting there in June. Its scene of a man lighting the water coming from his kitchen tap on fire has become iconic of fracking's dangers to drinking water. Everywhere it shows, more people join the antifracking movement.

In September, the New York Assembly will vote a similar moratorium bill. Activists are working to ensure it gets to the floor for a vote. Another focus is on educating outgoing Governor David Paterson, whom they expect to sign the moratorium bills (he had threatened to veto, but that's now unlikely, given the huge majority Senate passage).

The incoming governor will be the focus of attention post-election. Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins has called for a total ban on the practice. Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Rick Lazio say they are in favor of "safe" drilling. Activists are already showing up at Cuomo's statewide rallies to let him know that fracking isn’t safe.

Antifracking advocates believe their multifaceted approach—based on educating themselves, the public, and legislators—will work. They're optimistic that their concerns about their health, homes, and drinking water won’t be ignored.

"Cooperation from around the state made us succeed in the Senate," says Dyrszka. "None of us are being paid. Nobody's offering us money, now or in the future. We're just fighting for our lives, and that 's why we're winning these little battles."

Maura Stephens wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Maura is an independent journalist and associate director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and a founding member of the Coalition to Protect New York. She is writing a book, Frack Attack: Fighting Back, about unconventional gas drilling and the grass-roots people who are combating its dangers.

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In the verdant mountains of Niyamgiri, India, a movement led by the Dongria Kondh people is gathering speed. The tribe, whose members have called Niyamgiri’s mountains their home and gods for thousands of years, has been fighting an ongoing battle for the right to remain on their ancestral lands, protect their sacred home, and forge their own future.

Abundant deposits of bauxite lie beneath the mountains where the Dongria live, and London-based mining company Vedanta Resources plans to build an enormous mine in the heart of their land. 

The Dongria Kondh, who number just over 8,000, fear that this would mean the destruction of the forests and rivers on which they depend—and the end of life as they know it. “We are mountain people,” explained Rajendra Vadaka, a member of the tribe. “If we go somewhere else, we will die.”

Vedanta’s efforts to placate the Dongria with offers of money and development projects have not weakened the tribe’s spirit of resistance. They have seen, first-hand, the impact of Vedanta’s nearby refinery on other Kondh groups who were displaced in its path. Some now live in fenced-in concrete homes without land to farm; they depend on hand-outs or back-breaking jobs with Vedanta to survive.

Nor have aggressive intimidation tactics silenced the tribe. This week, according to local reports, two leaders of the Dongria’s resistance were abducted at gunpoint and have not been in communication with the tribe since. Unidentified people have blocked roads to prevent journalists from speaking to the Dongria, and mystery surrounds the death of a local activist in Niyamgiri last month.

The tribe has retaliated by using human roadblocks to bar Vedanta machinery from entering Niyamgiri. They also burned a Vedanta jeep when it was driven onto the mountain’s sacred plateau—the seat of the Dongria’s greatest god, Niyam Dongar.

Now, the Dongria Kondh are attracting support for their struggle from powerful sources far from India. Over the past three years, major Vedanta shareholders have been lining up to withdraw their investments from the company. Most recently, Dutch pensions giant PGGM withdrew investments worth $16 million. Earlier this year, the Church of England sold its shares, stating that Vedanta had failed to show “the level of respect for human rights and local communities that we expect.” In 2007, the Norwegian government divested its shares in Vedanta, advised by the country’s Council of Ethics that the investment posed an “unacceptable risk of complicity in current and future severe environmental damage and systematic human rights violations.” Scottish investment company Martin Currie followed in 2008.

Photos courtesy of Survival International.

Not long ago, the Dongria Kondh were little known beyond Niyamgiri. But supporters from Bianca Jagger, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Palin to Survival International and Amnesty have worked to share their story with the world. Even members of James Cameron’s Na’vi tribe showed up in London two weeks ago to express their solidarity with the Dongria Kondh during a protest outside Vedanta’s annual meeting.

Pressure is also coming from within the Indian establishment. An investigation published by the Indian government in March concluded that the mine “may lead to the destruction of the Dongria Kondh [as a people]” and Vedanta is currently undergoing investigation from India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Odisha state government.

Around the world, people have been moved by the resistance of this small tribe in the face of Vedanta’s bulldozers. But India’s Supreme Court has approved the project in principle, and work on the mine could begin in a few months. The movement is building momentum and Vedanta is feeling its force—but still more international pressure must be brought to bear on the company if the Dongria Kondh are to survive.

Tess Thackara wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Tess is the U.S. coordinator of Survival International.

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Two weeks ago, a federal judge in Arizona halted implementation of many of the most draconian elements of Arizona's controversial anti-immigrant law, Senate Bill 1070, just hours before these provisions were set to take effect. In doing so, the court echoed a conclusion reached in several other recent court decisions, public opinion polls, and ballot measures on immigration policy around the country: States cannot enact broad and regressive laws that violate the Constitutional rights of residents, regardless of their immigration status.

Many of the copycat bills proposed in states around the country following the passage of Arizona’s law have met, or are poised to meet, similar fates.

Legislators in 22 states have so far announced plans to introduce anti-immigration legislation based upon SB 1070—though many are now revising their proposals in the wake of the recent federal court ruling that questions the law’s constitutionality—and others may do so in the weeks and months ahead.

Yet many of these copycat proposals have already failed. The legislatures of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Kansas rejected broad anti-immigrant bills or amendments. In Arkansas and Nevada, proponents of anti-immigrant ballot measures couldn’t secure enough signatures to get their proposals on the ballot this fall. Meanwhile, conservative governors in several states, including Florida, Texas, and California, have all made it clear they would veto broad anti-immigrant legislation, and business leaders and law enforcement groups have spoken out against adopting the Arizona approach in their states.

Why is the anti-immigrant movement failing so overwhelmingly? Contrary to the current media narrative, the anti-immigrant sentiments reflected in bills such as Arizona's are only held by a select few. Polls consistently show that voters want action on immigration, but that they favor comprehensive immigration reform over enforcement-only laws. A full 84 percent of voters who supported the Arizona law in a June 2010 national poll also supported comprehensive immigration reform. State legislators and elected officials are listening to this voter sentiment rather than allowing the voices of a few anti-immigrant political opportunists to shape the debate.

They also know these are simply bad public policy proposals that promise to decimate state economies and communities. Arizona’s economy has certainly suffered: It has one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates, high budget deficits, and Latino business owners and consumers are leaving the state in droves. Boycotts in response to SB 1070’s passage are projected to cost the state at least $95 million in lost tourism and convention revenue alone over the next five years.

The Better Angels of Our Nature Arizona's immigration law offers us a choice between two long-standing traditions in U.S. history: fighting for human rights or looking away while they're eroded.

Rather than pursuing draconian policies that seek to exclude immigrants and fragment society, legislators are in fact championing policies that foster integration and a sense of community. They are ending the five-year waiting period for immigrant children and pregnant immigrant women to access state Medicaid and State Child Health Plus programs. They are extending in-state tuition rates at state universities to undocumented students—a policy currently in place in ten states. They are tightening enforcement of wage and hour protections, which apply to all workers regardless of their immigration status but are often exploited by unscrupulous employers who force undocumented workers to accept unsafe working conditions and unfair wage levels. And they are welcoming immigrant-owned small-business ventures—and their infusion of economic growth—into their communities as much as possible.

In fact, most of the nation’s police chiefs are rejecting Arizona’s ineffective approach to immigration enforcement and instead supporting measures like community policing legislation, which allow law enforcement professionals to build trust with residents to help solve crimes. Such bills allow state and local law enforcement to focus on the safety of their communities, leaving federal immigration agents, who are expressly trained to do so, to focus on immigration enforcement.

Policies that seek to exclude, segregate, and stigmatize foreign-born residents might be politically helpful to a small group of extremists, but they are also an assault on America’s values as a nation of immigrants committed to "liberty and justice for all." Thankfully, as the Arizona approach fails in state after state, we are seeing that elected officials and voters across the nation already recognize this fact.

Suman Raghunathan wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. The daughter of Indian immigrants and the former director of Chhaya Community Development Corporation, Suman has developed programs to engage immigrants in the electoral process at the NY Immigration Coalition and OneAmerica, including managing the nation’s largest voter registration project for new citizens.  Most recently, Suman was an immigration policy consultant, developing progressive policy agendas for Demos and the Drum Major Institute. She is also an immigration policy specialist with the Progressive States Network.

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In unemployed worker groups and common security clubs across the country, participants are facing two grim realities. The first is that jobs that vanished aren’t coming back. And the second reality is that if unemployed workers don’t stand up for themselves, no one else will.

“One thing is clear: Whether somebody has problems with foreclosure, or no food, or trying to get some training—workers don’t have any power,” said Tom Lewandowski, leader of an Indiana group organizing the unemployed. “So all this is about building power and it can only happen collectively.”

In northern Indiana, Lewandowski and other workers formed the Unemployed and Anxiously Unemployed Workers Initiative. In March, they successfully mobilized against legislation proposed in Indiana that would have cut unemployment benefits and eligibility.

“We had thousands of people go to lobby in Indianapolis and they completely revamped the legislation,” said Lewandowski. “Our folks saw that through collective action they could initiate something.”

In the last two years, as a result of the economic meltdown, over eight million jobs were eliminated. Corporate profits and CEO pay have bounced back at the biggest companies, but that isn’t translating into new jobs. In fact, many companies are pursuing a strategy of increasing productivity while shedding workers at a shocking pace.

As Stephen Pearlstein wrote recently in The Washington Post, “Companies have found ways to produce as much as they ever did, but with fewer workers. As a result, over the past year, output for each hour worked rose more than six percent, even as average hourly earnings have risen less than two percent. The rest of those productivity gains have gone straight to the bottom line, creating a record stash of cash on corporate balance sheets.”

A growing number of workers are facing the prospects of long-term unemployment and need to rethink how they’re going to survive.

As Don Peck wrote in The Atlantic, “The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men.”

For people among the ranks of the unemployed, underemployed, and those who love them, we need new strategies to face the changes.

One approach has been to form unemployment groups and common security clubs for the purpose of overcoming isolation, providing mutual aid, and taking action together to work for policies that increase economic security and create the jobs of the future.

Breaking out of the isolation that often accompanies unemployment is the first step.

“The jobless in the United States lose far more than their paychecks; they also lose precious social support,” wrote sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the Los Angeles Times in an article about common security clubs that serve as a lifeline for the unemployed. “Research has found that the health of those who lose jobs is likely to decline and the risk of dying rises. Many not only lose daily contact with factory and office friends, they also retreat from other social interaction.”

In northern Indiana, the Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers Initiative is a great example of folks organizing together.

“Part of our work is to help face the unemployment bureaucracy so people get their benefits,” said Lewandowski. They invite people leaving unemployment offices to join the group. Members volunteer at libraries on Sunday afternoons to help unemployed workers file claims online.

The Initiative meets weekly and is currently forming committees to help educate people about such topics as computer use, unemployment insurance, stress management in tough times, and green job opportunities. They invite anyone who has gotten a pink slip or anticipates one to join their organizing effort.

As with common security clubs, there is tremendous value for people facing economic insecurity to organize with others and help each other with food, rides, job networking, and other forms of survival. But it is also essential that workers stand together to defend unemployment services and benefits in the current political environment.

Neighbors for a New Economy Building a new economy is tough. One group of neighbors decided to do it together.

While some think the Great Recession is passing, there is a danger that politicians and the public will forget that millions of people are struggling to survive. Recently, conservatives in Congress blocked the extension of unemployment benefits for a month, arguing they are too expensive and provide a disincentive for people to work. While this is clearly a myth, it indicates that the unemployed may be used as a political football in federal budget politics.

With five job applicants for every one job opening, the only response is to get organized.  Common security clubs and other grassroots organizers pressed for extension of unemployment benefits during June and July. On July 22, Congress finally voted to extend unemployment insurance for 2.5 million Americans whose benefits had lapsed.

Common security clubs are helpful both in providing mutual aid for survival, but also for people to have a “home base” to lobby for changes.

There are systemic changes happening in the economy. Because of the depth of our economic and ecological challenges, it is not possible to return to a model of economic growth based on cheap energy and unlimited fossil fuels. Nor do we want to revert to an economy built on huge amounts of consumer debt—or an economy that transfers huge amounts of wealth to a few and puts the economic security of everyone else at risk.

One thing we know for certain: None of us can figure this out alone.

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck 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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Photo by Jane Braxton Little.

I arrived in Hiroshima looking for a party. It was August 6, 1966.

I was 23 and starved for American jokes, American English, American company. For the last year I had been living with a Japanese family and teaching English in Wakayama, where the only other American women were an older teacher and a pair of middle-aged nuns. Hiroshima seemed the elixir for my loneliness, a relief from the awkward mannerisms I had assumed in an effort to fit in with my Japanese hosts. I knew the city would be crawling with foreigners coming to observe the anniversary of the event that had made Hiroshima an international household word.

I, too, wanted to pay my respects to the city we had blown to smithereens. I was too young to remember the bomb but had grown up with Quaker pacifists who could not forget it. Most of my parents' friends were conscientious objectors who chose prison and government work camps over fighting "the good war." As a high school student I had made my own small anti-war statement by refusing to evacuate my suburban Philadelphia classroom during air raid drills. At Wakayama University I flaunted my pacifism by singing a Pete Seeger anti-nuclear tune in Japanese. I thought I knew all about war and its horrors.

In Hiroshima I set out on my own, amazed by the glass and steel high-rises that grace the broad avenues of the rebuilt downtown. Unlike traditional Japanese streets—raucous with boys on bicycles delivering udon noodles in porcelain bowls—Hiroshima was cosmopolitan. And it was filled with foreigners. I gravitated toward the English speakers, enjoying the escape from being the American professor, the anonymity of being one of many young blondes. By the time the memorial celebration got underway I was freelancing my fluent Japanese to American and British TV crews covering the day as if it were an athletic event.

I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been as young as 40—still old enough to have survived August 6, 1945 as an adult. It may have been the other foreigners and their cameras that emboldened me. Forsaking the respectful distance I generally accorded my Japanese hosts, I moved within 35-millimeter range and clicked off a shot. She noticed me, hissing her disgust. Embarrassed, I apologized.

Apparently stunned that I had understood her, she stared hard at me as if trying to reclaim her privacy. I expected her to slip into the deference I had come to expect for uttering even the clumsiest phrases in Japanese. Instead, she took me on.

In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome—one block from the Peace Museum that entombs the outlines of children's bodies, radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be walking to school when the bomb hit at 8:15 a.m.—there in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor. It was my government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on Japan, she told me. It was my country, my people who turned her home into an inferno roiling with flames that seared the living and the unborn alike. We—I—had murdered her daughter, her only son, her aged father and over 100,000 members of her national family. Her voice swelled from tight-lipped anger into furious rage before it struck a high-pitched frenzy, keening from word to word.

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A small crowd gathered. Other mourners joined in. Soon the words of the woman on folded knees were part of a chorus lamenting their untold losses, grieving their fear of helplessly handing down contamination to their children and their grandchildren's children.

I listened. This was a voice I had not heard from the generous families who had invited me into their homes. I had not heard it from my students, a cocky new generation bent on shucking the humilities of their elders and the memories of a war that ended before they were born. The Hiroshima mourners vented a national anguish and a pointed blame I could not have imagined behind the stoic silence I’d become accustomed to in Japan.

Finally spent of words, the woman in gray bowed deeply to her photograph and flowers, gathered them up and walked off with a curt nod in my direction. The crowd drifted into the sea of people milling around the Peace Park. The TV crews had long since left. I stayed seated until my bent legs revolted.

August 6, 1945 forever changed the world. Hiroshima is witness to our capacity and our willingness to destroy. I left the city humbled, my pretentious pacifism eclipsed by survivors destined to see that blinding flash replayed over and over again in horrific silence, a ghastly tape without a soundtrack.

Jane Braxton Little wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. A freelance writer, Jane earned a Harvard M.A. in Japanese cultural history. Her articles have been published in numerous national magazines, including Scientific American, Audubon, Nature Conservancy and YES! Magazine.

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How is it possible that the Ula Café and City Feed & Supply pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than profitable Wall Street firms and Fortune 500 companies? Multinational corporations—but not mom-and-pop businesses—are able to make use of overseas tax havens to avoid paying their fair share.

Tired of picking up the slack, small businesses are coming together to demand a level playing field.

A new campaign, Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse, is the result of an interesting convergence of domestic manufacturers, community banks, and small businesses that are fed up with how porous the global corporate tax code has become.

A Broken System

Over the last two decades, multinational companies have taken advantage of huge tax loopholes to move income and assets between foreign subsidiaries in order to dodge taxes. Responsible Main Street businesses and individual taxpayers are left to pay for U.S. infrastructure and the public investments that contribute to a healthy business climate, economy, and commons.

How does this work? A U.S. company creates a subsidiary in a secretive low-tax haven such as Bermuda, Luxembourg, or the Republic of Mauritius. In the Grand Cayman Islands, one building provides a mailbox haven to over 19,000 of these corporate subsidiaries.

These corporations shift assets and income between their subsidiaries. Profits appear to be generated overseas while losses are deducted from U.S. taxes. Because of the lack of transparency, it is difficult to assess just how much money is lost, but estimates range from $43 billion to $123 billion per year, including both individual and corporate tax avoidance.

That’s a major loss for the federal budget, with small businesses and individual taxpayers picking up the slack. Fifty years ago, one-fourth of federal revenue came from corporate income tax. Now, only seven percent does, says the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

Fixing the Leak

Which is why small businesses are joining the fight for tax justice, launching a petition drive on July 20th with 400 initial business signers.

Networks of businesses like the American Independent Business Alliance and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies include tens of thousands of new economy businesses. These enterprises are rooted in localities, pay their taxes and donate to local charities. Yet they are hurt by the unlevel playing field created by tax havens.

“Small businesses are the lifeblood of local economies,” said Frank Knapp, President and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and one of the lead signers. “We pay our fair share of taxes, shop locally, support our schools, and actually generate most of the new jobs. So why do we have to subsidize multinationals that use offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes?”

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), a long-time champion of closing tax havens, told The New York Times that the “campaign represents the first time in recent years that business people who believe tax havens are bad for business are mobilizing publicly to end the abuse.”

The campaign estimates that corporations using tax havens avoid between $37 billion and $60 billion in taxes (a number that does not include wealthy individuals). These funds, they argue, could be better used for public infrastructure and support for small businesses, which generate over 65 percent of new jobs. It could pay for initiatives like the recently debated Small Business Jobs Act; provide the seed capital for a $30 billion Small Business Lending Program through community banks; or fund a direct lending program through the Small Business Administration.

The coalition’s first report, Unfair Advantage: The Business Case Against Tax Havens, includes several examples of how responsible, tax-paying U.S. businesses are forced to unfairly compete against tax dodgers. For example, Wainwright Bank, a socially responsible local lender based in Boston, paid 11.8 percent of their income in federal taxes in 2009. Yet they have to compete against Bank of America—which paid no federal taxes in 2009 (despite $4.3 billion in profits), thanks in part to overseas tax havens.

Taking Financial Reform into Our Own Hands
We can't let this financial reform bill be our only response to the economic crisis.

The report, which I helped co-author, points out that tax havens contributed to the global economic meltdown by permitting companies to hide risky investments and behavior. Scratch the surface of the most shady dealings of the phantom economy in the last decade, and you’ll find an overseas tax haven. In a special investigative series, McClatchy News documented how Goldman Sachs, working through Cayman Island subsidiaries, “peddled billions of dollars in shaky securities tied to subprime mortgages on unsuspecting pension funds, insurance companies and other investors when it concluded that the housing bubble would burst.”

TransOcean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform that exploded, killed 11 workers, and led to a devastating oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, was designed to dodge taxes. In 1999, TransOcean moved its incorporation from the United States to the Cayman Islands and then later to Switzerland, with the stated purpose of lowering its taxes.

Some progress has been made in closing these loopholes: The Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act of 2009 increases transparency of cross-border transactions. The “Economic Substance Doctrine,” which was included in the health care reform bill, requires companies to have a business reason—other than tax avoidance—for shifting assets.

But there is plenty of further work to do. Congress should ban phony offshore corporations and block transfers of intellectual property, such as patents, designed to evade taxes. And Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse have identified nine specific policies to ban shady practices and generate tens of billions in revenue.

If local businesses are waking up, so should ordinary taxpayers. We can’t build healthy and economically vibrant communities when our wealthiest citizens and corporations maintain an unfair advantage.

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

Interested?

• Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy: Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.
• Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street: Why regulate a broken system when we can build a better one? Welcome to New Economy 101.
  

I’ve had a hard time wrenching my eyes away from the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon began spewing poison just over 100 days ago. Google Maps tells me that Grand Isle, Louisiana is 2,316 miles away from my office here in Oakland, CA and yet it feels like that oil is washing right up on my doorstep.

What makes the devastation in the Gulf feel so personal?

For me, it’s the stories of families that have lost everything, shrimpers and fisherman whose livelihoods may never recover. It’s the photos of oil-drenched pelicans, the same birds I remember seeing down in Florida as a kid. It’s watching our political system unable to muster the proper response to the crisis: a full out clean energy mobilization that could finally break our addiction to fossil fuels.

I’ve wanted to know what makes the Gulf disaster tear up our hearts because there are other environmental fights out there that need to feel just as personal.

For the last two months, I’ve been emailing and Skype-ing with Cynthia Ong, one of the leaders of Green SURF, a coalition of organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. Cynthia and her allies are working to stop a coal fired power plant that could have a devastating effect on the environment and community of the island.

The people of Borneo need the support of the international community to stop the plant. With most of the paperwork already approved and construction ready to begin this August, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, is one of the few people left with enough power to still pull the plug.

If Najib feels enough international pressure, there’s a good chance he will scrap the plant. But without a global response, the project will undoubtedly move forward.

Borneo is over 8,000 miles away from Oakland, yet this coal plant needs to start feeling just as close as Grand Isle and the Gulf coast.

Because if we can’t stop a coal plant in a famous place like Borneo, how will we ever stop the hundreds more being planned for less iconic places across the planet? And how will we begin to take on the even more difficult problem of the climate crisis—which is already hammering vulnerable communities but still feels distant and invisible for many of us?

The Internet has provided us with a powerful tool in this struggle. Not so long ago, we’d be reaching for an encyclopedia to look up where exactly Borneo is. Now it’s just a click away.

Images of the pristine beaches that will be ravaged by the coal plant or video of the coastal communities that may be forced off their land can be beamed directly to our laptops. Studies about how Borneo could generate its electricity needs from clean and renewable sources are freely available.

Perhaps most importantly, though, politicians like Prime Minister Najib can hear our voices—even if they’re 8,000 miles away. Green SURF is encouraging people to write on Najib’s Facebook page or send him an online postcard expressing opposition to the plant.

The global response to the coal plant generated by Cynthia and many others (she’ll be the first to credit the incredible work of many activists and community groups on the ground) is already beginning to have an effect.

Time to Get Unreasonable
Shrimper Diane Wilson might be going to jail for her high-profile protests against BP.

Earlier this month, The Star, a leading English-language paper in Malaysia, ran a story about the global pressure building on Najib. Just last week, Roz Savage, international activist and distance rower, was in Borneo to shine a spotlight on the issue with some creative actions that got the attention of the press. And throughout the summer, Green SURF and their allies have worked to submit hundreds upon hundreds of public comments criticizing the Detailed Environmental Impact Assessment (DEIA) of the coal plant, a key hurdle it must clear in order to be built.

 They seem to have been heard: On July 29, Free Malaysia Today reported that the DEIA was “laced with fraud, incompetence or plain negligence.”

Now, it’s crucial to continue to build opposition to the plant. At this point, spreading the story, photos, and videos of what’s happening in Borneo is the most important step that citizens around the world can take. Petitions, like the one up now at Change.org, are also circulating. Joining the SOS Borneo Facebook group can help you stay up to date with the latest developments.

Personally, I look forward to the day when we can look up and see solutions instead of disasters, whether they’re just around the corner or halfway around the world (showing those solutions is one of the goals of 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party this October).

For now, though, it’s important to look directly at the challenges we face, take a deep breath, and try once again to make a difference. 

Jamie Henn wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jamie is a co-coordinator of 350.org. In 2007, he co-organized Step It Up, a campaign that pulled together over 2,000 climate rallies across the United States to push for strong climate action at the federal level.

Interested?

• The BP Oil Spill: Ideas and actions for responding to the Gulf disaster.

• Bonn Climate Talks, Beyond BP: We must keep up pressure for a fair, ambitious climate treaty.
• 2010 a Tipping Point for Renewable Energy: 100 days into the BP disaster, it's time to quit claiming that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option.
  

It’s been a tough summer for the oil industry—or so you’d think.

BP’s geyser of oil has now made headlines for 100 days, each one a reminder that oil extraction poses dangers we can’t control.

Even with the temporary cap on the well providing a respite from new oil, there’s been little time for the industry to breathe a sigh of relief, much less burnish its image: A second well, even closer to shore, ruptured after being struck by a barge and began spilling more oil into the Gulf. In Michigan, 800,000 gallons of oil poured into the Kalamazoo River from a broken pipeline. In China, an explosion at an oil terminal caused a massive fire that took 15 hours and 2,000 firefighters to extinguish, as well as a nearly 300-mile large spill of thick crude oil, one of the worst in that country’s history.

And in the Arctic, May and June broke records for the fastest ice melt of any summer since recording began.

But even with the dangers of oil so clearly and horrifyingly illustrated, this summer is unlikely to end with any major constraints on the oil industry in the U.S.—the main responses will likely be a temporary moratorium on new offshore wells (not offshore drilling itself) and a stripped-down energy bill that tries to hold BP accountable for the costs of its spill.

Why? Why can't we muster the political will for a real response—one that would help us avoid future disasters by breaking our dependence on fossil fuels? Because of the belief, strongly held even in the midst of our shock and outrage, that there is no alternative to our current oil-based society, dangerous though we must all now recognize it to be.

But the truth is that there not only is an alternative to oil dependence, it’s already being built.

A new UN-backed study of renewable energy worldwide declared that the world has reached a “clear tipping point” for green power. In Europe and the U.S., renewable energy grew faster than fossil fuel energy in 2009—for the second year in a row.  Sixty percent of new electricity generation in Europe and more than half of new energy in the U.S. came from renewable sources. China built more than 37 gigawatts of renewable power generation capacity, more than any other country.

“If this trend continues,” the report notes, “then 2010 or 2011 could be the first year that new capacity added in low-carbon power exceeds that in fossil-fuel stations" on a global basis.

The report also found that more than 100 countries, half of them in the developing world, now have policies to promote renewable energy.

Achim Steiner, the UN’s undersecretary general, noted that there is “a serious gap between the ambition and the science in terms of where the world needs to be in 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. But [this research shows that] this gap is not unbridgeable."

"Indeed," he said, "renewable energy is consistently and persistently bucking the trends and can play its part in realizing a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy if government policy sends ever harder market signals to investors.”

That’s a big "if," considering the failure of the U.S. Congress to turn this summer’s oil disasters into strong climate legislation. But at least now, neither industry nor government can continue to claim that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option. 

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.

• Read more YES! articles about the BP oil spill.
• Solving the "It's Not My Problem" Problem
  A psychologist on why it's so hard for us to come to terms with the climate crisis.
• BP Oil Spill: Time to Get Unreasonable
  Shrimper Diane Wilson might be going to jail for her high-profile protests against BP. Why is she so sure it’s worth it?
• 13 Best Energy Ideas (Plus a Few Duds)
  

On Sunday, the website WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of classified intelligence reports from military operations in Afghanistan.

This set of documents is unquestionably the most important history so far of key parts of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. These are reports from troops and commanders in the field to other military officials—this is where they tell the truth, to themselves. It is significant that the Obama administration has not tried to claim the reports are not accurate. What they are trying to do is to have it both ways: claiming that disclosure of the reports somehow endangers U.S. troops, but at the same time disparaging the documents as showing nothing we didn't already know. 

These reports, of events already past, are hardly likely to endanger the troops in Afghanistan—the people and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan don't need Pentagon documents to know what U.S./NATO forces are actually doing in their countries.

The documents probably will have a significant impact on the U.S./NATO war though—just not what the White House is warning of. These reports will likely stoke even greater global anger around the world, as evidence filters out to those far from Afghanistan and Pakistan who didn't already know what the U.S./NATO occupation looks like. That will certainly mean rising anger towards U.S. policies and, unfortunately, towards Americans as a whole ... but more importantly it will spur enormous anti-war activity in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. And that means greater pressure on those governments still providing troops for Washington's war in Afghanistan. And most important of all, they will mean greater pressure than ever on the Obama administration to end the war and on Congress to vote NO on the current supplemental war funding bill.

There is no evidence yet of a new smoking gun among the individual documents. But taken as a whole, the documents provide a collective arsenal of evidence of a brutal war that never did have a chance to "succeed"—and evidence of what a government, through two administrations, were determined to keep secret from its own people and the rest of the world.

The documents chronicle escalating Special Forces' operations, drone attacks, and more. They describe activities like those of Task Force 373, a death squad that goes after named individuals on a kill-or-capture list. No trial, of course. Who knows how much of the intelligence that lands someone on that list is rooted in a neighborhood feud or tribal or political power struggle?  

General McChrystal's—and now General Petraeus's—"nation-building" efforts are failing. In places like Marja, last spring's poster-city of a new U.S.-backed "government-in-a-box," the hand-picked mayor-in-a-box, who spent most of the last 15 years living in Germany, is so unpopular that he has to be ferried into town on U.S. military helicopters for occasional meetings, and then quickly whisked away. The much-heralded spring 2010 offensive in Kandahar is on apparently permanent delay.  

I haven't yet read even a fraction of the 92,000 reports covering 250,000 pages. But the overviews provided by the international journalists to whom the reports were first made available are certainly consistent with the view that the "counter-insurgency" approach is already giving way to an old-fashioned Bush-style counter-terrorism war. That would mean that claims that protecting Afghan civilians is most important fade in favor of acknowledging that the military's role is simply to kill whoever they decide are the bad guys. So if the war becomes more of an air war, and drones are called in to do more of the dirty work so that U.S. troops are not at risk, and more Afghan or Pakistani civilians are killed as a result, well that's just part of the cost of war.

     An End to Constant War:
Seven reasons we're always at war...
and seven ways to quit.

The documents include evidence of far more civilian deaths than were ever reported in the press. Many of them were probably never even mentioned—or asked about—in the virtually non-existent Congressional oversight of these years. They detail massive levels of corruption, extortion, and constant violence inflicted on Afghan civilians by the U.S.-backed, U.S.-trained and U.S.-funded militias known as the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

And they demonstrate, again, the continuing links between Pakistan's top military intelligence agency, the ISI, and the top leadership of the Taliban—despite claims by Secretary of State Clinton and others in the Obama administration that Pakistan is a reliable U.S. ally that just needs to work a little harder on going after terrorists. The Obama administration's answer to the documents simply repeats their efforts to blur the very distinct organizations known as the Afghan Taliban (mostly based in Pakistan but operating in Afghanistan) and the Pakistani Taliban (who target the Pakistani government, and against whom that government has indeed acted) into a generic presence in Pakistan known as "the terrorists" or "the Taliban." Pointing to Islamabad's actions against the Pakistani Taliban says nothing about their officials' ties with and apparent support for the Afghan Taliban.

The Wikileaks Papers provide a treasure trove of new evidence of what we already knew: this war has already failed. Every death, of Afghan civilian or of U.S. or NATO soldiers\, is needless. Every dollar spent on military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan is wasted. The cost of this occupation and this war—in Afghan blood, in U.S. and NATO military blood, in the billions of dollars needed for jobs at home and real reconstruction in Afghanistan and elsewhere—is too high. We need to stop the funding for escalation now, bring the troops and contractors home, support Afghan and regional/UN diplomacy, and begin the long effort of making good on our huge debt to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Congress is voting on $33 billion to pay for Obama's already-underway escalation in Afghanistan—enough to pay for 500,000 good green union jobs at home and still have billions left to start paying down our debt to Afghanistan for real reconstruction and diplomacy.

Maybe, just maybe, this 21st century Pentagon Papers—the 2.0 version: Afghanistan—will provide the spark of anti-war outrage to make that happen.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

Interested?

• Should We Stay or Should We Go?:
  The time has come for a U.S. exit strategy in Afghanistan. But is "Out Now" a valid response? David Wildman, Sunita Viswanath, and Lorelei Kelly discuss how can we best support Afghan national stability.
• Raiding the War Chest:
  It's called "defense" spending, but how much of it is actually about defense? Here's how we could save billions, and still have billions left to make the U.S. and the world more secure.
  

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
  Van Jones lays out his vision for a just, green economy.
  
• 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).
  
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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.

Why This Crisis
May be Our Best Chance
We can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.

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.

Interested?

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

• Taking Financial Reform into Our Own Hands: Why we can’t let this financial reform bill be our only response to the economic crisis. 

• 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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