COMMONS MAGAZINE
There are few taxpayer ripoffs as brazen and long-standing as the student loan program. Now that President Obama plans to shut down the banking industry’s parasitic dependence on this program, worth tens of billions of dollars in risk-free profits, the banking industry is raising a ruckus about “socialism” and the fate of capitalism. Sorry, guys, we’ve been there before. This time the jig is up.
All economies require social trust to work. While there are many reasons for the lack of confidence in the marketplace today, surely one of the most important is the unreliability of price as an indicator of value. A lot of people just don’t trust prices as reflecting the actual worth of a house or corporation, let alone the intangibles of social life or nature that we also value.
This is symptomatic of the crisis of neoliberal economics and public policy. As I see it, there are a number of mutually reinforcing reasons for the waning confidence in the price system:
By Jan Hively
Now they are asking how we plan to spend our stimulus checks. Whether it’s the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration sending out stimulus checks, the message is clear. We should go out and buy more because the future of the economy hinges on the volume of spending. If we just spend enough, we will “kick start” the economy and get back to the good old days.
International interest in the commons continues to grow, spurred in no small part by new books like this latest one from Germany. Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, has now been published by oekom Verlag in Berlin. (The German title is Wem gehört die Welt – Zur Wiederentdeckung der Gemeingüter.) The book is an anthology of essays by a wide range of international authors, including Elinor Ostrom, Richard Stallman, Sunita Narain, Ulrich Steinvorth, Peter Barnes, Oliver Moldenhauer, Pat Mooney and David Bollier.
As desperate state governments scramble to close budget gaps, the latest tactic is to sell off public assets for a fraction of their long-term value, surrendering public control in the process. A new report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund documents the scope of this new phase of privatization as it affects public roads. Public Roads, Private Costs: The Facts About Toll Road Privatization and How to Protect the Public provides the first comprehensive overview of this troubling national trend.
The Washington Post ran a lengthy profile of Peter Barnes yesterday, citing the political traction that Barnes’ cap-and-dividend legislative proposal is getting in Congress. Reporter Steven Mufson noted, “With Obama and leading Democrats pushing for climate change this year, Barnes’s ideas have suddenly moved from written theory to political reality. In a recent visit to Washington, he said, ‘We only have one shot at this, and if we don’t do it right the first time, the planet is cooked.’”
By Jeff Conant
As the Fifth World Water Forum ended March 29 in Istanbul, a number of stories came out, each of which might have emerged as the big water story of the week.
The World Water Forum is a meeting of the most powerful interests in the water industry; it presents itself as a UN-led event but is more on the order of the World Economic Forum, an elite meeting of financial powerbrokers each year in Davos, Switzerland.
You have to hand it to Google – it really knows how to make a dangerous enclosure of the public domain seem like a beneficent gift to mankind. The company’s ambitious plan to digitize millions of out-of-print books will make unprecedented amounts of information and culture more accessible to everyone. But at what price? Google will acquire an impregnable monopoly over digitized access to books. It will be able to stifle future competition and limit how people may interact with their own cultural patrimony for generations to come. Not a good deal.
Many public sector institutions are beginning to realize that they don’t really know how to make their information and cultural treasures available to the public online — but they should. Governments, schools, libraries, museums and cultural institutions face all sorts of barriers of technology, law and social habit. And there are few existing models to emulate. So what’s a conscientious public institution to do?
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a key member of the House of Representatives Democratic leadership, introduced legislation April 1 to launch a federal Cap-and-Dividend policy to curb the climate crisis.
The Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, long a leader in progressive economic analysis, has published a new report that aims to let the commoners reap greater economic value from the natural resources that they own. “Valuing Common Assets for Public Finance in Vermont” takes a cue from the Peter Barnes’ book, Capitalism 3.0, and proposes ways in which the State of Vermont might reap greater public benefit from the private use of shared assets such as groundwater, mineral reserves, forests, fish and wildlife and even the Internet.
The Definition of “Work”
We are today surrounded by an abundance of productivity that the market does not recognize or value. In this consumer society, we think about “work” as what people do to pay for goods and services in the marketplace. If our work doesn’t earn money, it’s not counted as an economic asset. The power of the market is so strong that we often don’t recognize or value work that is essential to society’s future. The unpaid contributions of homemaking, parenting, volunteering, care giving and citizenship are not valued or nor appreciated.
The same process of online collaboration that gave us free and open source software – and later, Wikipedia, Flickr, Jamendo and the “folksonomy” tags for pools of content – is now moving slowly into the corporate world. The idea is often called “crowd-sourcing.” That’s the process by which thousands of people collectively participate in generating a shared body of knowledge – and then comment on and improve it. (Jeff Howe, who has written a book on the topic, hosted an open competition to crowd-source the cover for it.
The devastation that occurs when water is treated as a free-market commodity, and not as a public resource, can be vividly seen in the Chilean town of Quillagua. As described by the New York Times, “Quillgagua is among many small towns [in Chile] that are being swallowed up in the country’s intensifying water wars.”
The furor over the AIG bonuses is one of those periodic perfect storms of political culture which, for a brief flash of illumination, clearly reveals how American society is actually run. Clarity, it turns out, is scary. Or as investor Warren Buffett put it, when the tide goes out, you can see who’s not wearing anything. A lot of people have been caught “naked” by this scandal, and it’s a tawdry sight indeed.
In a series of short videos posted on YouTube, OTC Fellow David Bollier talks about many of the themes in his new book, Viral Spiral, with Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. The videos were produced by Brave New Studios, an affiliate of Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films project.
The commons-based Cap-and-Dividend plan to curb global warming can bust through the political deadlock that so far has prevented meaningful federal action on reducing greenhouse gases, according to Good magazine.
Reporter Ben Jervey notes that it represents a viable “third way” in between cap-and-trade proposals (which grossly favor the interests of energy corporations) and calls for a carbon tax (which is politically challenging since it will raise energy costs for U.S. households).
A government cannot be held accountable if there is a cloak of secrecy around its core deliberations and citizens are excluded from the process. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was supposedly about changing all that. Obama declared that only transparency could restore the citizen trust in government – a trust that the Bush administration had systematically abused.
This Friday will see a welcome development: an entire conference devoted to “The Law of the Commons.” Organized by the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the Seattle University School of Law will host a wide-ranging series of speakers about “popular impulses toward ‘common’ stewardship of resources in contrast and reaction to political, economic and legal pressures to enclose, privatize or commercialize the commons.”
Has the collapse of American banks, trillion dollar bailouts and other extraordinary government interventions prompted academic economists to re-think their free market orthodoxies?