COMMONS MAGAZINE
When irresistible political fantasies collide with inexorable economic realities, the result is…..abject confusion.
Who owns the water? While oceans, rivers and other surface waters have been recognized as part of the commons going back to the Magna Carta—and beyond that to the Roman Empire, when the public trust doctrine was articulated to ensure people’s right to use seashores—the issue of groundwater has been less crystal clear. In many cases, it’s assumed that landowners are guaranteed rights to all water below the surface of their property.
The commons has surely come of age now that there is a video game to illustrate the political dynamics of enclosure! A hearty commoners’ salute to Molleindustria, an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers who create “radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment.” Their latest creation is the flash-animation Free Culture Game: A Playable Theory.
In the fight over the bailout, the rhetoric of Main St. vs. Wall Street is politically important in contrasting the real economy with the speculative casino economy. But we should also embrace all financial markets as part of the commons that sustains healthy communities.
Our sophisticated financial markets have been built over several generations and are regulated at taxpayer expense through oversight institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At a moment’s notice, the old rules and certainties about our economy have been tossed out the window.
For almost 30 years, the clear message from corporate headquarters, economic gurus and Washington itself has been that government has no useful role to play in business. Deregulate everything in sight and then let the market can work its magic—that was Ronald Reagan’s recipe for prosperity, which was eventually endorsed by most Democrats.
Sometimes enclosure is not a metaphor, but literal. A new report from Environment America, the public-interest group, documents how nearly 22 million acres of land – an area larger than the state of Maine – fell victim to development between 1992 and 2003. The sources: suburban sprawl, industrial growth, drilling, logging, mining. The loss of open spaces means that ecosystems will suffer as habitat for wildlife shrinks, and humans will have less clean water, fresh air and recreational spaces.
Peter Barnes gave this testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee in Washington DC on September 18, 2008. For more on the Cap and Dividend effort visit the website.
Now here’s a case lesson in how modern industrialized societies are so besotted by the powers of private property that they can’t help but attribute near-magical powers to them.
Geez, I didn’t know we taxpayers had $700 billion in loose change to spend on worthless mortgages….er, under-performing assets. Last I heard, it was far too expensive to spend a fraction of that on, say, universal health care, which would at least benefit everyone.…
The fallacies of the “tragedy of the commons” argument have been made many times since biologist Garrett Hardin made them in 1968. But given the persistence of the metaphor as a justification for privatization, it is always worth revisiting the issue. A recent critique of the “tragedy” myth, by Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism, appears in The Bullet, an e-bulletin of the Socialist Project, an organization based in Toronto.
Calling itself the “anti-bottled water bottled water,” a company called Tap’dNY is selling purified New York City tap water in bottles. “We don’t travel the world from Fiji to France seeking water or offer the usual bottled water gimmicks. We work with NYC’s public water system to source the world’s best tasting tap water, purify it through reverse osmosis and bottle it locally, leaving out ludicrous transportation miles.”
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p(photo-credits). Copyrighted image from Ashton Hughes Parish Council publication.
Global climate change hits us as an overwhelming, yet distantly abstract problem. It’s worth losing sleep over, but with the cool summer we’ve had here (only a few days over 90F—a rare blessing) not too many people in Minnesota are complaining about long nights spent tossing and turning.
Last year, one of the most significant triumphs for public access to scientific knowledge came when Congress enacted a law requiring all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be available for free on the Internet, under so-called open-access rules. We taxpayers pay some $29 billion a year for medical research, so it is simple justice that we ought to have free and easy access to what we’ve bought.
Ah, now I get it! The “ownership society” means that We the People get to own the distressed and worthless investments that Wall Street suddenly needs to unload. Imagine if all our Social Security funds had been privatized, as the Bush Administration sought in 2005.
Carl Malamud, the crusader famous for challenging restrictions on access to government information, is at it again. This time, he is taking on the State of California over its claims that its huge body of state law is copyrighted. Malamud argues that laws, regulations and safety standards should be in the public domain.
WWOOF is a profoundly bad acronym. Sure, it’s useful: it can function, in its various forms, as nearly every part of speech. It’s a verb (“I WWOOFed last summer.”). It’s an adjective (“This is our WWOOF farm.”). It’s a noun (“I am a WWOOFer.”). It’s even a gerund (“My WWOOFing was educational and productive.”).
There is a strip of US 192 in Osceola, Florida, that people used to consider “Tacky Town,” a drab stretch of road that was filled with junky tourist amusements and strip malls – a place with ditches lining the side of the road and no sidewalks. In the 1980s, as National Public Radio reported in a wonderful segment yesterday,
The Republican Party used its national convention to ridicule the very idea of public service. In her acceptance speech, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin joked, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” Similar sneers about community organizing were made by former New York Governor George Pataki and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
An international group of citizen activists has decided that one of the best ways to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, is to honor “Global Interdependence Day” on September 12. This year, the fourth Global Interdependence Youth Summit will be held in Brussels, Belgium, on September 9-13. The event aims at fostering new kinds of trans-national civic cooperation and global awareness.
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p(photo-credits). What can you find in the River? Decorate the Well in Gratitude Festival, produced by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, photo by Bruce Silcox.
When was the last time you went to a festival celebrating a new drinking fountain? Indeed, when was the last time you even knew about a new public drinking fountain being built?