The people of Ohio won a big victory over the predatory payday lending industry this June when a new state law banned the sky-high interest rates that had trapped many poor Ohioans, as Tom Allio describes in the August issue of Sojourners. Below, Allio, who is chair of the coalition of faith-based consumer, labor, and human services groups that won the June law, describes the ongoing fight against the industry's attempts to reverse the law.

The payday lending industry is intent on rolling back the consumer-protection legislation promoted by the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending (OCRL), which was signed into law on June 2 by Gov. Ted Strickland. The industry is seeking two ballot initiatives for the November election. One would completely overturn H.B. 545. The second initiative would eliminate the central section of the bill, which prevents payday lenders from charging exorbitant interest rates -- rates that amount to an astounding 391 percent APR for the typical two-week loan.

And, as OCRL spokesman Bill Faith put it, "The industry is now using high-priced lawyers and misleading language to mask its efforts to legalize 391 percent interest." The misleading language is in the "summaries" of the referendums -- the words that payday lenders asked to use when gathering petition signatures to get their referendums onto November's ballot. The industry's wording, which was neither clear nor concise, omitted information about key consumer protections -- and did not even mention that both the referendums would repeal the 28 percent interest-rate cap that is the centerpiece of this June's anti-payday-lending law!

Under state law, summary language must be judged acceptable by Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers before the industry is allowed to begin circulating petitions. In June, Rogers rejected the proposed language of the first referendum because of its inaccuracy. Later, she rejected the industry's revised try at a "summary" because it was 17 pages long (only two pages shorter than the referendum itself).

The summary language for the second referendum petition has been approved, and the trade group for the industry has provided $850,000 for the Reject H.B. 545 Committee to assist in the hiring of the petition circulators and for other contracted services.

One thing remains clear in this ongoing "David and Goliath" battle in Ohio: The payday lending industry will do anything in its power to maintain its privileged, and predatory, position in the marketplace. Rumors are rampant that they are prepared to spend upwards of $15 million in this fight for their survival.

Tom Allio is chair of the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending and a board member of Sojourners.

Andrew Berg, an International Monetary Fund African department policy adviser, is a nice man. I know this because he spent some time talking earnestly with me after an IMF press conference in which I'd asked a pretty confrontational question about Malawi, whose 2002 famine is often partly attributed to IMF (and World Bank) advice, and whose current bumper crops are attributed to ignoring it.

Berg looks a tiny bit like The X Files' Agent Skinner, but what this conversation brought into focus for me is that the IMF is not a vast conspiracy of evil, cigarette-smoking men. It's a large, overly influential group of people who earnestly push policies that are often disastrous.

While many civil society advocates insist the IMF is imposing its will wholesale on poor countries, it insists it's just inspiring them to choose sound policies. Given the huge power imbalance here -- very poor countries often need IMF approval to help get other international loans and aid -- many critics, like me, view the IMF's claim as a farce. Berg's and his colleages' earnestness, however, convinced me that they genuinely believe they're empowering government officials to do the right economic thing in the face of their citizens' political pressure to, say, raise the salaries of civil servants when the price of food shoots up.

And the IMF's critics, including me, are wrong sometimes in blaming the IMF rather than other challenges poor countries face. Take Malawi's 2002 famine. After talking with Berg, I did more research, and discovered that he was basically right: The famine really was caused much more by bad (and likely corrupt) national governance, bad forecasts, bad weather, and bad roads, rather than by the country's agreement with the IMF to partly reduce maize reserves. (I wasn't taking Berg's word for this, but rather frequent IMF critic ActionAid's.)

It was clear that folks at the IMF did care about the food crisis (and, at least somewhat, about years of criticism from advocates for the poor). Berg agreed that policies like grain reserves should be considered on a country-by-country basis, and he was strongly supportive of crop insurance for small farmers. The IMF panelists I heard said that governments should respond to the food crisis by spending money on social safety nets. This may signal a partial change from the IMF's traditional preoccupation with cutting government spending, partly so governments can make national debt payments and partly on the theory that government spending would somehow "crowd out" otherwise-eager private investment.

Overall, though, the IMF is still disastrously wrong in its unjustified overemphasis on "market signals." Take Malawi's current abundance of grain, which happened largely because the government decided to subsidize fertilizer. In recent decades, various international "experts" have advised many poor countries to stop helping their farmers with affordable loans, seeds, and fertilizer. The theory was that it would be better for farmers to buy these things themselves after selling their crops on the world market -- a great idea if it worked, which it really hasn't.

Malawi's fertilizer program ran directly counter to the advice of the World Bank (which has since repented). And this advice was seconded by IMF executive directors' brief expression of concern last year that Malawi's "government interventions in grain and fertilizer markets have continued to impede private sector development." (At the same time, the IMF assented to the need to "protect ... pro-poor spending," and a recent IMF report says its Malawi staff is now "generally supportive" of the fertilizer program).

Perhaps the most relevant kind of market signal is the way in which, over the last four years, almost all the middle-income countries who had borrowed from the IMF (including 90 percent of its loan portfolio) have run for the exits to escape the IMF's policy, um, advice -- so that it is now mostly the world's poorest countries who are dependent on the nice, but wrong, people at the IMF.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an asssistant editor of Sojourners.

One of Jesus' most in-your-face stories, and a personal favorite of mine, is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager in Luke 16. I would loosely paraphrase its central insight as follows: "If you have the sense God gave a dog, you will realize that you can't hold onto money very long anyway, but you can keep the friends you make by giving it to those in need. You do the math." The passage doesn't say anything about burning sulfur, just about priorities and how to take the long view.

An attractive feature of this parable is that it sets a really low bar for divine commendation. The manager doesn't have sense enough to stay out of trouble to begin with. What's more, even after he has his "friends are friends forever" epiphany, he starts backsliding almost at once: He quickly gives his master's first debtor a 50% markdown, but for debtor number two the manager gets pointlessly stingy and only takes off 20%. He still gets praise for knowing what side his bread is buttered on.

And, because the kingdom of God is so often about taking things way over the top, the final verses go on to radically redefine what honesty and faithfulness are. Good stewardship is supposed to be about accurate accounting and careful saving, right? Not here. Money is inherently "dishonest," and impromptu unauthorized debt forgiveness is "faithfulness." (In fact, the master fires the manager before even seeing his accounting - the grounds for dismissal appear to have been less fiscal irresponsibility and more that he made enemies willing to accuse him).

The Protestant Work Ethic is not invited to this party, and you can virtually hear the groans of the prodigal son's responsible brother if he happens to look ahead from his seat in chapter 15.

Despite this parable, other parts of the Bible suggest to me that it's reasonable to save something for retirement. But I want to combine this conventional form of stewardship with long-view social accounting, which is why I'm excited about the special Web extra to our May issue about faith and finances. In it, my colleague Julie has accumulated a heaping helping of Web sites that can help you figure out how and where to invest retirement savings for the common good (and also where to free your mind with Bible study, teach your teenage kids about money, and plan - and pray over - your household budget).

Check it out – and e-mail it to a friend to share the abundance!

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

Normally I'm a big fan of science fiction, but I nearly swallowed my teeth when I heard America Abroad's recent program on the World Bank on my local NPR affiliate, WAMU, last Sunday. My choppers would have been a lot easier to stomach than the show's assertion that, in the 1980s, policies pushed by the World Bank and U.S., "had succeeded in solving the [developing world's] debt crisis."

Tell that to the African nations today that have to spend more on debt interest payments than on health care – in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. If that isn't a crisis, what is?

Tell it to the Jubilee activists around the world who really won the debt relief which has happened so far. Tell it to Rev. Duncombe and the other Jubilee USA activists, who are currently praying, lobbying, and participating in a rolling fast to support the Jubilee Act, which would expand debt relief to the 67 countries that need it in order to have any hope of meeting the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

In another apparent foray into a galaxy far, far away, America Abroad's show claimed not only that the debt problem had been solved, but that it had been solved by the market fundamentalist "structural adjustment" policies pushed by the World Bank and the U.S. (often under the paradigm dubbed the "Washington Consensus.") In reality, these policies not only shredded social safety nets and left millions of peasant farmers out in the cold, but also dramatically slowed economic growth.

Not to mention that market fundamentalism is not at all how China and India achieved rapid economic growth in recent decades, as one Harvard professor puts it:

With high levels of trade protection, lack of privatization, extensive industrial policies, and lax [sic] fiscal and financial policies through the 1990s, these two economies hardly looked like exemplars of the Washington Consensus.

Where did I find this radical anti-establishment propaganda? Actually, by entering the search term "Washington Consensus" into the World Bank's own website. But you won't hear such information on America Abroad, which attributed the Washington Consensus-driven policies' failure largely to local corruption.

In many cases, I enjoy cheesy fantasy on the airwaves. I kind of like that new television show about a vampire who fights crime. But America Abroad's straight-faced defense of "structural adjustment" – which has been such a resounding economic, moral, and social failure that even the IMF tried to hide it under a different name – is way too bizarre a foray into alternate reality for anyone to swallow.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

From September 6 - October 15, individuals and congregations will commit to fasting for a day or more in order to call for debt cancellation for desperately poor nations, joining Jubilee USA in supporting the Jubilee Act, H.R. 2634. (See Sojourners' August issue for coverage of the debt crisis.)

Rev. David Duncombe will be fasting, praying, and lobbying for all six weeks of the Jubilee USA fast. In 1999 and again in 2000, he engaged in 45-day lobbying fasts, part of an effort that helped to bring about Congress' authorization of $435 million to forgive some debts owed to the United States. Here, Duncombe reflects on what it's like to fast for justice while offering a prophetic—and pastoral—voice on Capitol Hill.

A typical day in the sixth week of my water-only fast would find me hobbling down the corridor of the House office building, leaning into my walker and headed for the office of a Republican member of the Financial Services Committee. Today I had with me a published statement on debt cancellation by the bishop of the congressman's church—which I hoped he would read.

This would perhaps be my fourth visit to his office. Although I had yet to meet him personally, I'd gotten to know his chief of staff and some of his front-office people. We'd talked of how foreign debt is crushing impoverished third world nations and how Jubilee's bill (H.R. 2634) proposed to cancel most of it. (I'd also done some informal marriage counseling with their harried receptionist.)

I'd been up since three this morning, in prayer and preparation for the six or seven office visits I'd make today if my strength held out. Each day it was harder to make my rounds down these long corridors. Yet often when I felt at the end of my rope, a refreshing surge of new energy came and I hobbled on.

As I grew thinner and weaker, office staff would ask, "How's it going today, Reverend?" Some began to worry about me. With a smile, I told them I was doing better than most of the 50,000 or so who starved to death that day (and whose plight I hoped to symbolize by my wasted body).

If my upcoming fast goes like my previous two extended fasts for debt cancellation in Washington, its effectiveness will depend not so much on what I say on my office visits, but on what is said by the fast itself—the day-to-day silent witness of a body growing visibly weaker. In a sense, a fast like this takes on a life of its own apart from me. There is something of a sacramental quality to the fast, something that carries its own grace and power. I am simply a vehicle for a fasting body, the sight of which seems to touch the souls of others.

Rev. David Duncombe, a retired campus minister and social activist, lives in White Salmon, Washington.

When Saddam Hussein's regime executed someone, it required the victim's family to pay for the bullets used. An appalling practice - but one which, Iraqis in the Jubilee Iraq campaign say, bears all too much resemblance to present-day demands that Iraq's people pay debts Hussein racked up during the Iran-Iraq war, which devastated the country and claimed around a million lives.

Western, Soviet and Arab creditors effectively bankrolled the Iran-Iraq war, and then in 2003 demanded that the Iraqi people take responsibility for the $130 billion debt. Since then, the Iraqi debt has been partially relieved, but only on the condition that the government reduce subsidies in the economically devastated country and pass a controversial oil law which could enable foreign companies to control much of Iraq's oil wealth.

Iraq isn't an isolated case. When rich countries cancel poor countries' debts they usually count this as charity, offset it against their aid budgets, and even require the recipients to implement often-harmful IMF economic conditions. They never consider whether they were wrong to make the loans in the first place.Around the world there are hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of examples, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where loans poured into the corrupt dictator Mobutu's personal accounts, and the Philippines, where a ridiculous, unusable nuclear power station was built on a geological fault line.

These are examples of the illegitimate or "odious" debt, an idea in international law that is gaining ground. The doctrine of odious debts would force creditors to behave responsibly when they make loans, ensuring there is genuine economic benefit to the recipient countries, and not simply handing out cash and credit to further political objectives or support exporting companies within the lender nation.

Momentum is building on odious debt, with campaigns being run by Jubilee Debt Campaign in the UK, Jubilee USA, CADTM and Eurodad in Europe, and Jubilee South representing people in debtor countries. Recently, Norway wrote off $80 million owed by Ecuador and others for ships exported on credit in the 1970s, admitting that the ships were "a development policy failure" and that therefore the seller "shares part of the responsibility for the resulting debts."

Creditors have tried for many years to ridicule the concept of odious debt as impractical, and handle debt relief on their own unjust terms. Now the tide is changing and 2007 is a critical year to add your voice to the debate - so check out the groups above, write to your representatives and demand that the chains of odious debt be broken, once and for all.

Justin Alexander is the coordinator of Jubilee Iraq. For more about odious debt and other problems with the current international debt regime, read Christina Cobourn Herman's article in the August issue of Sojourners magazine.