KEVIN DANAHER

• Co-founder of Global Exchange, husband of Medea Benjamin
• Socialist
• Believes that high-level U.S. government officials may have deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur

Kevin Danaher received his doctorate in sociology from UC Santa Cruz in 1982. Thereafter, he worked as a senior analyst at Food First; then as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and then as a professor (for four years) at American University's School of Government. In 1988 Danaher co-founded Global Exchange with his wife, Medea Benjamin, whom he married in 1984.

Danaher was, along with Ms. Benjamin, a key organizer of the violent 1999 protest riots against capitalism and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. When Danaher was later asked whether violence could ever be justified as a form of political expression, he replied that the violence at the WTO protests was insignificant in comparison to the state-sponsored ravages of worldwide capitalism:

"You have to put it in the larger context -- between 20,000 and 30,000 children die every day from hunger and hunger-related diseases. This is genocide, and it's on a scale with slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust. This is created by the global market economy. In order to protect the people who are perpetrating the policies that produce that violence, the capitalist state sends the police and sometimes the military out into the street to commit violence against us. So you have the structural violence of the capitalist system, then you have the violence of the capitalist state ..."

Rejecting free-market economies and globalization, Danaher urges communities nationwide to create “sustainable local economies” of their own. He is a founder and an executive producer of numerous so-called “Green Festivals,” two-day events that, according to Global Exchange, “brin[g] together hundreds of green economy companies, social justice and environmental organizations, speakers,… and tens of thousands of attendees hungry for a transition to the green economy.” Over the years, Danaher has spoken on energy- and environment-related topics at hundreds of universities, and for many community organizations, throughout the United States.

In a January 20, 2001 article that appeared in the Socialist Worker, Danaher condemned “the top-down globalization promoted by the big corporations” and the “constant drive to maximize profits.” In an interview with Socialist Review two months later, he suggested that capitalism's excesses and its disregard for human well-being would inevitably sow the seeds of its own destruction:

“It's almost like when Marx talks about capitalism having a strangely progressive effect in bringing workers off the land together into the factories, and that sets the objective basis for trade union consciousness.”

According to Danaher, capitalism encourages people to "pursue an unsustainable pattern of resource consumption” and ultimately results in "grotesque levels" of "social inequality." To address these issues, Danaher urges fellow socialists “within the progressive movement” to “get involved” in “corporate accountability campaigns” designed to promote “a systemic critique that seeks to end corporate rule, rather than simply make corporations less destructive.” “Our task," he says, is “to prevent the biosphere and millions of people from being destroyed by the built-in rapaciousness of global capitalism."

In the aftermath of 9/11, Danaher exhorted Americans not to view the terrorist attacks “as an act of war,” lest they succumb to the type of “nationalist sentiment” that “separates us from the people of other nations.” Rather, he counseled, 9/11 should be seen "as a crime against humanity," so as to encourage "the potential for uniting humankind against the scourge of terrorism." He urged the United States to work for the establishment of an international criminal court to deal with such cases. And he suggested that to effectively abolish international terrorism, America would have to do more to alleviate global poverty -- so as to win the hearts and minds of the world's people.

In October 2004, Danaher was a signatory the 911 Truth Statement, a call for "immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." Fellow signers included Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin, Richard Falk, Randall Hayes, Michael Lerner, Cynthia McKinney, Mark Crispin Miller, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn.

In November 2008, Danaher spoke at San Francisco’s seventh annual Green Festival, promoting renewable energy and a diminished reliance on oil and coal. He shared the stage with, among others, Van Jones, the revolutionary communist who would later become President Barack Obama's "Green Jobs Czar."