An excellent overview of the last half century, giving historical perspective to how we got to where we are now. I surely want to share your hope that, armed with information, people can begin to see new alternatives. Let's just hope that access to internet will expand for those most in need. The corporate sector wants to limit our access to information such as this.

This article is a wonderful way to start the week. Thanks CD.

I hope he's right. I hope that a widespread sense of revulsion at the country bequeathed us by Reagan/Greenspan/Bush causes a quiet shift toward decency and a realization that we are, in fact, all in this together.

It has long been my belief...largely resulting from travels across this land...that the people of America were better than the leadership. We are decent, kindly and considerate.

We are skewed now by the propaganda that selfishness is OK...that it's fine to grab as much as possible for yourself and the hell with everyone else. Just shifting that idea could lead us to a better time.

We are also infected by fear...fear deliberately implanted by ugly, evil people.

If we can collectively ignore them...look toward each other for solace and guidance...maybe, just maybe we can emerge from this nightmare.

People will have to become much more aware than they are now..are way to easily manipulated by hot button issues..the power-money structure has the big megaphone for propaganda...has to start on the grass roots level of education...not easy the money interests have a stranglehold on the masses worldwide

People will have to become much more aware than they are now..are way to easily manipulated by hot button issues..the power-money structure has the big megaphone for propaganda...has to start on the grass roots level of education...not easy the money interests have a stranglehold on the masses worldwide

The paradigm shift that is needed is agreement that the Universe is the commons for all living creatures.

None of this is alien to the average American. We love SS and Medicare. We love our 'commons' National Parks. A lot of right-wing gun lovers are glad there is 'commons' state land where they are free to hunt. There is easily room to continue to build on these themes.

We are moving away from the Me generation into the We generation.

Here in my hometown, a plaza, centered on a Wal-Mart, was recently completed and named "the Warren Commons". Let's hope the corporate beast doesn't co-opt this idea the way it's trying to do with environmentalism and the healthful-eating movement. I believe this conception of the commons ties in with David Korten's statement that "real wealth is proportional to what resources you have left to use, and not on the present rate of consuming them." Let's continue to champion the interests of the common people versus the interests of the moneymakers.

the same mentality currently building drones took, divided and fenced the commons by force ages ago, and has used the same force ever since to ensure complicity, either labor or money, as the condition for returning, and remaining...

for commons to succeed, this mentality must be countered...

constantly...

Well, we all knew that some pain-in-the-ass Johnny One-Note would sail in and carp at a perfectly good, thoughtful, positive article just because of one lousy sentence:

"We’ve seen a fierce backlash against Barack Obama’s admittedly modest departures from rigid market thinking."

And here I am! Hey, if I didn't do it, somebody else would. I just wish the sentence had been left out, or that Walljasper would have written "pretextual feints" instead of "admittedly modest departures".

The first thing that must be done is to convince the majority of people that a society based on the common good, on sharing, on everybody having enough (but no one having too much), is worth fighting for. This article is a step in that direction.

But this idea is anything but new. A society based on these ideas would require a total transformation of our social, economic and political relations as well as our relationship to nature. In fact, the implementation of the idea of the commons is revolutionary.

The rule of corporate power did not start with some obscure Austrian economists working in the 1950's (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises etc). They just provided a new ideological packaging for very old ideas justifying a very unjust and destructive society.

Once we agree that it is worthwhile to fight for a society based on the principles of the commons, how do we get there? Is the ruling class just going to give up and say "ok, it's your turn"? No. They will fight with their considerable power to stop it. And, they have been successful for at least a couple of hundred years.

David Korten's "The Great Transformation" addresses the value of this type of society from a progressive point of view; Micheal Albert's Par-econ discusses how this society might function from an anarchist viewpoint, but neither of them address "how are we going to get there"? - the most important question of all. For that you need a revolutionary theory*. Until we address "how are we going to get there", a society based on the idea of commons will remain, just an idea.

*Also, not a new idea. Revolutionary theory has been developed and debated for over 150 years - just not in liberal circles.

The only thing in Common were going to be left with is our poverty soon. The pie has been stolen and the masses are being told they have no rights to any of it to start with. The real action now are the coming fights among the nobility as these people never ever have enough and will begin soon to fight over their ill gotten gains. we should realize the age of democracy is over and were heading not into some "commons based or socialist wonderland but instead into Ayn Randville also know as a new dark age of Feudalism and endless resource wars.

All this talk of Commons in order to sell a book!
This is method acting at its delusional height. No satirist could have dreamed of a better illustration of the absurdity of the US culture. The cover is a peach!

By the way if you care to look you will notice that a very real collective perspective is coming over the hills in the East and flooding down into our valley. It looks nothing like that cover. It is foot in the mud real.

GENERAL STRIKE (NATIONWIDE): 11/11/11

All those workers who can afford to, STAY HOME THAT DAY (a Friday).

All students who can afford to, STAY HOME THAT DAY.

All others, STAY HOME THAT DAY: NO SHOPPING, NO APPOINTMENTS.

EVERYONE: NO TV THAT DAY OR NIGHT.

STRIKE THE CORPORATIST-MILITARIST MACHINE WHERE IT MOST FEELS IT: IN THE WALLET.

CONTINUE AS NEEDED EVERY MONTH, ADDING DAYS.

SPREAD THE WORD.

Commons. Community.

The concept of PROPERTY owned Collectively by the Community for the good of all the people in that community.

Cummun..ism is not a dirty word.

The alternative is not Communism.

Western people must get out of the box called the English Language, particularly US English. Look at the behaviour of the Anglo-Saxon world if you disagree.

There are understandings aplenty elsewhere. Look around. Be humbled. The English culture is vital, young and excitingly brash but it is too often embarrassingly childish. People of other cultures (the Other) who speak it as a second language are now using it more effectively then the mother tongue speakers because they carry the meanings of their mothers and fathers into the it.

Despite its great strengths, original English has become a closed and hence bad operating system. It can be altered and freed whereupon it will have a life, but in order for this to happen the the original English speakers need their heads changed. They are the major problem on our planet.

This is the order of significance of these times.

The Achilles heal of the conservative movement is the large and massive exodus of federal money from blue states to red states.

This is not widely understood or reported even by the liberal or progressive press, because on face value it seems ridiculous, but it only seems that way.

Over the last thirty years Republican and corporate forces have conspired in secret and in plain sight to move as much defense plants and the larger active military bases to exclusively to red states using accounting tricks and what might otherwise look like broad contract placement as a cover.

I challenge anyone here and the press at large to spend time at any of the big defense information web sites like Defense Industry Daily and try to discern the true picture of contract placement and how the money is funneled.

It is a hard task indeed precisely because the defense industry goes to great lengths to hide what is becoming an obvious preference for placing military production and equipment design and manufacture in red states while covering their tracks by opening smaller company front offices in northern or blue states that then funnel money back to instillations in other states south of the old Mason-Dixon line.

Granted there are still large operations in some western states like Sunk works in California and Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago a few years ago.

But these are exceptions NOT the rule.

Take the time to flow any one particular contract and one will find that the vast majority of corporate headquarters of defense contractors are in a large swipe of the United States that begins in the Maryland-Virginia area and sweeps south across the Carolinas through Georgia into Florida and along the gulf coast into Texas.

Large amounts of new contracts due to the Iraq war and the War in Afghanistan and the large security state, built up by the Bush administration, highlighted in the recent series of articles in the Washington Post – when one does the leg work seems oddly to fall into states like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas.

It’s not so much as follow the money as follow the large payrolls.

Outside of the famous Bath Works in Maine one would be hard pressed to find a shipyard working on large Navy contracts not in a southern state, if one can get through the dense layers of cover regarding the lengths the Pentagon and the Defense industry put up to hide all this in plain sight.

WHY, because these large shipyards have massive payrolls that make or break a state when it comes to payroll taxes and the income generated to local business because the shipyard employees numbers in the thousands, while a software firm in California doing “defense work” only employs a few hundred if that.

I repeat follow the large payrolls, not where the Pentagon says it spends the money.

Go on do the leg work your self and follow an individual contract and see that the money always lands in one of those southern states where the leadership proclaims it is not a spend-thrift state, that they rely on the market and prudent conservative principles to govern and you will find that is the biggest lie told by conservatives and Republicans.

That the recent debate over cutting defense is mostly a ruse is only half the story. The real story is conservative state governments spread through out the southern United States depend on the Pentagon to keep them in the black, even though as the case of Texas shows is not enough to fix their budget problems.

In the recent un-read and little understood series of articles in the Washington Post on the massive police state built under Bush there is map that seems to show the money spread all over the United States, but one has to wonder indeed as the authors state in the article - a large nexus of office buildings with enough floor space to make 4 to 5 Pentagons is now being build in one single office space along a highway in Virginia, only a stones throw from DC and the Pentagon. One can only imagine what this massive payroll numbering in the, dare I say, hundreds of thousands will do for the state coffers there?

All this only begs the question, if only someone had the balls to ask it: why conservatives who scream and through fits over the market and the high-minded values of boot-strap capitalism are the biggest offenders when it comes to living off the Federal treasury and are draining the country to the tune of hundreds of billions and nothing more than profligate parasite police/war state fuck pigs who every day get more and more of the Federal pie and then have the nerve to say Defense cuts are off the table.

Indeed the public commons, the national treasury and the big lie all come to gather while these conservative hypocrites steal the country blind.

The question is what are you going to do about it?

Democracy is the expression of individual freedom in the political sphere. Free market capitalism is simply the expression of individual freedom in the economic sphere.

Freedom is equality of opportunity not equality of results. Economic cycles both up and down are the results of this freedom. Sometimes people make bad choices and sometimes they make good choices. The economy does not determine the outcome of the individual’s life. It is the sum total of our individual lives that determine the economy. If the economy shrinks, it is because for the most part the citizens made bad decisions. If the economy grows, it is because for the most part citizens made good decisions.

Freedom is neither a silver bullet to cure all of our problems nor a guarantee that nothing bad ever happens. It simply is the opportunity to determine our own future, for better or for worse. If you are unhappy with the circumstance of your life or your neighbors is unhappy with the circumstances of theirs, you only have yourselves to blame. Any movement away from these systems, democracy or capitalism, reduces freedom. Will you voluntarily give up your freedom or take the freedom of your neighbor because you don’t like what was done with it? Do you have that right? Do they have the right to take that freedom from you?

The Commons has been sacked .People need to take it back from corporate entities, and build it up again.This is not an easy task in today's environment but we will prevail if we stop allowing military madness to drain the treasury.and Banksters to pillage the markets.
peace

The Commons is an old and good idea as a piece of a much larger puzzle. But there are many parts and that is only a thread.

The key error of logic made to sell the variations of the Libertarian theme is that anything is done by a single individual working alone. You could have a perfect vision of a perfect society, but without millions of people willing and able to do the individual bits necessary you could be only one of those folk ranting on a street corner.

So if you are building a building such as Ayn Rand had of her protagonist, the visionary is at best the agent of those brought together to accomplish the goal, given some, but not all power for many decisions, they are still accountable to many constituencies that stand to benefit or be harmed depending on the decisions made, and in the case of Architecture that has to be done at every step of the way, lest folk be squashed like bugs, perhaps years after the building is constructed, as happened in Haiti or the less well known case in Oklahoma when "sky bridges" fell into a crowd in a concert in a hotel.

So in any effort there is a goal and a collective of people brought together to accomplish it and a much larger collective of people who will be affected by the enterprise.
The doing of it is a series of jobs that need doing and indeed organizing who does what and who pays and who benefits is one or a group of those jobs, but only one of the jobs and not the most important for all the power granted by the collective, to be their honest agent. That agent must be restrained from embezzling all the goodies or unfairly dumping the costs to others, or held accountable if they do so.

The concept of almost all human activity as an interwoven web of such collective enterprises only creates a view of how every one of them can be observed, that they can be functional or dysfunctional for their society, and do not favor one system or another by themselves. This is the start of a much more important thread than the discussion of the commons in general, that is only a part of that system.

What is needed in addition is to provide a moral compass to that structure as well by 4 key values that determine the quality of life any particular enterprise creates and any particular policy in that enterprise. Those key values are any Responsibility / accountability of leadership decisions to consider the benefit of all and not mainly themselves, the Empowerment of the entire collective to achieve the goals they set, and to apply that accountability to leadership, the Empathy of all to "Do unto others as they would have them do unto you", not as sympathy for coming out on the short end of a fight, but as righteousness that real justice be done in every case. And lastly a sharp focus on Reality, not always easy, and not always in your favor, but effort is futile if you imagine a magical leap to a place that cannot be obtained by the path set, no matter how disappointing the idea.