Keep the Change.

My Republican brother-in-law has been gloating all summer about the tax rebate: "I suppose you're sending yours back to the government," he says sarcastically. Those $300 and $600 checks now arriving in the mail are a triumph, the Bushies believe, because they prove that Americans, given half a chance, will take free money over abstract, pinko notions like the collective good. The tax rebate makes Republicans out of all of us.

Maybe everyone has a price. But surely not all of us are ready to go that cheap--kissing off clean air and water, public transit, and decent schools for $300. Goaded by my brother-in-law's challenge, I decided to find out what other people are doing with the money.

Sally Arnold, an elementary school teacher in Santa Cruz, California, is one of the thousands of people who have been deluging the offices of United for a Fair Economy in Boston and other social justice organizations with calls, eager to join a grassroots effort to do something constructive with the tax rebate.

"There's this feeling of impotence, like, `Don't say you're doing this as a gift for me!' "says Arnold, who is particularly dismayed by the problems she sees in her cash-strapped public school. "I don't know about Washington, but here in California there are still a lot of problems the government could address. One of my friends was saying the money they're giving away could be used to put solar panels on every public building."

After sitting around her living room with a half dozen "mutually outraged" friends, Arnold and the others decided to organize a protest and give their rebates away.

"We're just average pissed-off people. We might not be able to undo this whole terrible tax shift, but a least we could make a public statement," she says. "So I called United for a Fair Economy to learn how to do it and get some guidance." Spurred by Arnold and others, United for a Fair Economy and its spin-off organization, Responsible Wealth, created the web site http://www.rejecttherebate.org to organize a protest and start a "Reject the Rebate" petition. "We had to pull things together quickly, because we were getting so many calls," says Molly Lanzarotta of Responsible Wealth.

Visitors to the web site have three choices of where to send their rebate checks: 1) to groups working to promote greater tax fairness; 2) to local organizations that provide social services for citizens left behind by the economic boom; 3) back to the federal government.

"These rebates are the first installment of a tax package that primarily benefits upper income taxpayers who don't need help," says Responsible Wealths Scott Klinger. "They're leading with the most democratic element in these rebate checks. It's very clever on the Republicans' part. You could see it as a bribe to accept the rest of the tax package that benefits the wealthy."

Of course, thirty-four million taxpayers--26 percent--are getting no rebate check at all, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Another seventeen million taxpayers--13 percent--will get only partial rebates, averaging about half the advertised amounts of $600 for couples, $500 for single parents, and $300 for other taxpayers.

Despite the flurry of small checks going out this summer, "it's really our members who are benefiting the most from the overall tax cut, and that's really what the Reject the Rebate petition is all about," says Mike Lapham, co-director of Responsible Wealth.

Proving that upper income Americans are not all seduced by the idea of free money (even lots of free money), Lapham and his colleagues worked against the estate tax repeal. "I myself am in the top 5 percent in terms of wealth and income, and I individually stand to benefit from the tax cuts Bush proposed," Lapham says. "I hear a lot of complaints from people who say, `I earned this money and I ought to keep it. So why tax it away when I die?' You can make that argument about any tax. The real question is not whether it's appropriate to tax people when they die. The real question is where do we want the tax burden to be? On those with the greatest ability to pay, or do we want to continue to shift it onto lower income people who are struggling to make ends meet?"

Lapham's family has owned a paper mill for five generations. But in his view, the labor and public services of the community members in the mill town have as much to do with its success as his family. "It seems reasonable to me that when one of us dies, after accumulating a great deal of wealth by the labor and investment of the entire community, it's important for a portion of the wealth to go back into supporting those public services and the people who live there."

Another Responsible Wealth member, Jennifer Ladd, inherited family money from Standard Oil (now Exxon). "Even with estate taxes, my family passed on enough money that I wouldn't have to work if I didn't want to," she says. "I feel that the growing gap between people who have assets and people who don't is dangerous for the fabric of our society." In Northampton, Massachusetts, where she lives, Ladd sees crumbling infrastructure, a lack of affordable housing, and the increasing segregation of the wealthy from the poor as daily reminders of the widening gap. She plans to give her tax rebate check to United for a Fair Economy's efforts to address economic justice.

There's been a spontaneous groundswell as people of all incomes search for ways of doing something about a tax giveaway they believe is not in the public interest. It turns out there are quite a few new philanthropic and protest efforts aiming to capture the $39 billion floating around in loose $300 government checks:

* A web site called TaxRebatePledge. org, a grassroots project to get people to pledge their tax rebate checks to organizations fighting President Bush's conservative agenda, has received about $200,000 in pledges so far for the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and other groups.

* The Reform Jewish Movement, which opposed the tax cut package, is urging all Reform Jews to donate their $300 tax rebate checks to charity. Members of the nearly 900 Reform congregations across the United States will be asked to pool their rebate checks into Tzedakah (charity) Collectives. The Reform Movement will provide them with a comprehensive list of programs underfunded by the current federal budget, including education, health care, and low income housing.

* DonateRebate.org, a web site launched by the Gen-X group Third Millennium, links to the AOL Time Warner Foundation's Helping.org, where visitors can make donations using their credit cards to more than 70,000 nonprofits. (This is not a rebate protest site, however. In fact, the site notes, you can argue that using the tax rebate for private charity is consistent with the Bush philosophy.)

* Democrats are suggesting that people outraged at the election results contribute their money to the Democratic Party.

* Ralph Nader is using his rebate "to try to get others to help form a group to repeal the tax law that says we get a rebate," he says. The new group "will press for fair taxes on the super rich and corporations and for simplifying the tax code." It's tentative name is the Taxpayer Redemption and Simplification Organization (P.O. Box 19367, Washington, D.C., 20036). "That's redemption in a quasi-religious sense," says Nader, whose mission is to reawaken public spiritedness. "When Bush says, `This money belongs to the American people and I want to return it to them,' he's not returning it to them as a community. He's returning billions to rich individuals. The people getting the tax refunds are not going to put the money into upgrading drinking water systems and public transit systems. Those are not individual expenditures. They are community investments."

Or, as Sally Arnold puts it: "When you pool your resources, it means so much more. I can't go make a park for myself with a couple of hundred bucks."

What you and I can do, though, is join the groundswell to reject the rebate--and prove those cynical Republican relatives wrong.

Mea Culpa: In my last column, I did both Scott Stoermer of the League of Conservation Voters and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, a disservice. I reported that Daschle drove to a press conference denouncing the Bush energy policy in his S.U.V. In fact, it was House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri who went to the press conference in his S.U.V. Stoermer, when he told me the story, correctly identified Gephardt. I regret the mistake.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.