COMMONS MAGAZINE
The financial crisis of the past two years finally demolished the utopian fantasies of market fundamentalists. There is still much that needs to be digested about “what went wrong,” both in terms of what caused the crisis and the larger theoretical fallacies of neoliberal economics and policy. Happily, Raj Patel’s new book does a terrific job of explaining the latter and in sketching out the great potential of the commons.
The koan for our times might be: How can there be a devastating financial crash that produces no serious financial reform? Like all koans, this one is instructive because it forces us to contemplate the deeper reality that lies beneath superficial appearances.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Jane Addam’s masterpiece, Twenty Years at Hull- House. The centennial is an appropriate time to remember Addams as she was: a powerful leader and thinker committed to creating a living democracy in the teeming cities of industrial America. From her base at Hull-House, she and her settlement house colleagues, created the public institutions and practices that made modern urban life possible. Although she did not use the term, Addams was engaged in commoning.
The May 2010 issue of Cornell Law Review is a treasure trove of essays about the cultural commons. Rarely has the subject received such focused and sustained academic exploration in a major law journal.
Why has the international community been unable to bring the full range of commons issues and their representatives into strategic discussions? James Quilligan tackles this question in the spring/summer 2010 issue of Kosmos magazine, “the journal for world citizens creating the new civilization.”
It may be too early to declare it a runaway trend, but it is clear that businesses dedicated to producing “open software hardware” are gaining a foothold. In a short video, Phil Torrone, editor of MAKE and Limor Friend of Adafruit — two leaders in the field — give a quick run-down of thirteen companies that are now earning more than $1 milion in revenues from producing open-source hardware products.
This draft treatise is compiled from notes recorded at Ogallala Commons inaugural Commoners University on June 22-23, 2009 held at Casa La Entereza in Nazareth, Texas. (Sources of the notes were the participants: Andy Wilkinson, Father Ken Keller, Erin Hoelting, Darryl Birkenfeld, Julie Boatright, and Kim Barker.)
I. What is the commons?
We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and acquaintances are already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.
Does it matter who owns our local businesses? According to the economics texts the answer is “No.” The only question is “consumer value” which is to say, how much we get for our money. We are one-dimensional creatures; our psyches are essentially those of wall-eyed bass with better math skills.
Last week’s enactment of historic health care legislation eclipsed another momentous victory for the commons: the reclamation of the federal student loan program which had been captured and milked for decades by voracious private lenders.
The property rights crowd just can’t seem to comprehend that ownership rights are not absolute. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a social, ecological context. The latest installment of this long-running drama is the controversy between private landowners in Gunnison, Colorado, and river-rafting outfitters that take people down the river.
The question at hand: Are the rafters violating the private property rights of landowners when they float down the river?
I am a peripatetic economist, scholar and teacher whose career has included long stretches at Wellesley, Barnard and the City University of New York. Somewhere along the way, I became a bit green in my views on economic life and policy, although my “greenness” has a distinctly black undertone.
At the alternative climate summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, earlier this month, criticism was sharp and unrelenting about the false climate change solutions that imperil our commons. Rightly so. Many of the solutions proposed through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) are based on poor science (basic hydrology seems to be absent), lucrative carbon markets and only measly changes in Northern production and consumption – practices that got us into this greedy and perilous situation in the first place.
The noxious gusher of oil flowing from one mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented environmental disaster, no doubt about it. But will we learn the right lessons from it?
Social change is not something easily diagrammed on a chart. Even sweeping transformations that rearrange the values of an entire culture such as the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s and the Thatcher/Reagan Revolution of the 1980s begin imperceptibly, quietly but steadily entering people’s thinking until one day it seems those new ideas have been there all along. Even in our age of instantaneous information??“when a scrap of information can zoom around the globe in mere seconds??“people’s worldviews still evolve gradually.
Four years ago, the international press sent up red flares when the President of Boliva, Evo Morales, announced that he would reclaim his country’s natural resources for the benefit of Bolivians. As I wrote at the time, most press coverage took the “skeptical and fearful perspective of foreign investors, who consider themselves the rightful beneficiaries of Bolivia’s natural wealth. ‘Dammit!’ goes the subtext.
A century ago, con men got away with selling the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants looking to buy a piece of America and get rich quick. The swindle became standard joke for gullibility. ??Today it’s no punchline. Mayors and governors staring down massive budget gaps are putting bridges, buildings, parking lots, and more up for sale.
Anyone who works in clinical medical practice is keenly aware of Big Pharma’s relentless and intrusive marketing practices. You can’t avoid it. The pens, notepads and schwag plastered with the brand-name anti-depressants. The ubiquitous “detail” salespeople who schmooze up doctors and shower them with free samples. The physician junkets to exotic resorts to hear “educational” lectures by esteemed leaders of the field.