Dear Readers, this is from a contemporary sociologist that I have great respect for. He and Dan Foss wrote a good book on social movements, "Beyond Revolution," which when I was doing my research in that area provided me with a substantial basis for my own interpretation and insights into the nature of socializing movements as a cultural process. More on this another time.

In a dramatic series of events since late 2010, a new and intensified phase of public protest has erupted across both wealthy and poor regions of the world. Right across Europe, harsh programs of financial austerity have led to escalating protests and mass public campaigns; in the Middle East and North Africa, a revolutionary wave of civil unrest is gripping the international media; and less reported are countless smaller anti-government demonstrations taking place across diverse continents.

Readers, in case there is any doubt this article is essentially about the abuse and mis-use of the commons for profit, and all manner of additional economic atrocities perpetrated upon the communities who die and suffer as collateral damage to shareholder dividends and national economic policies which treat the areas where the mineral wealth is plundered much like the contempt commonly expressed for third world poverty.

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen Garrett Hardin’s classic article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”1 cited as an irrefutable argument for the superior efficiency of private property rights with respect to land and resource uses and, therefore, as an irrefutable justification for privatization. This mistaken reading in part derives from Hardin’s appeal to the metaphor of cattle, under the private ownership of several individuals concerned with maximizing their individual utility, pastured on a piece of common land.

There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine.

Readers, I have been offline for about a week due to a computer problem and then a computer bungle on my part which made a problem larger not smaller. I am still catching up on my email and associated w3 tasks, so my message needs to be short. There are also numerous things/issues boiling up locally that I need to be involved with. Most of these aspects are generally positive and related to these topics so I will probably come back with a short essay on it all. I will report more on this later. I may add to this particular later. As you may have noticed I generally like Hedges's writing.

Readers, the numbedr of commons related articles seem few and far between, and this is the primary reason I am publishing this. Some of the language is very libertarian, which generally I interpret as actually anti-commons in fact though framed as a "commons" as a "free space." The "unprecedented accumulation of wealth" as a validation is actually a bit dim. Wealth is actually only transferred generally, and exracting wealth from what eould be defined as a commons zone ends up being a stealth version of "free market" malarkey.

Readers, though Georgist economics is I believe a essential part of functional fiscal policy, Daly goes off onto shaky ground when he validates William Stanley Jevons's so called "Jevons's paradox. If you allow yourself to accept that technologies of energy efficiency automatically causes the increase in consumption, then you will miss noticing the examples where increased energy efficiency does not contribute to increased energy consumption. You will also miss how increased energy consumption is often hard wired into the economy by the intervention of capital interests for higher profits.

Readers, this article is in the category of building the commons, the novel idea that the process of governance as a commons should be controlled by communities of natural persons, if not also including the sustainability of the local environment. While electoral politics are to a degree an advancement over monarchies, electoral democracy is a weak form of democracy, particularly when and where corporations are allowed to have free speech in the form of corporate campaign contributions.

review by Michael Barratt Brown in Red Pepper, Feb/March 2010 published at
http://spokesmanbooks.blogspot.com/2010/02/public-cost-of-private-benefi...
Readers, this book and review refers to the British context, but I believe that that it is not substantially different than any other national context which has been dominated by the phony econo-theology of Free Market "economics." Admin