And now, the movie poster for The Olympics – or as John Stewart puts it, deference to the IOC’s bullying over unauthorized uses of the trademark “Olympics,” “The Quadrennial corporate sponsored international ring-based sports event.”
This poster was made by Smuzz, a British illustrator of sci-fi books, among other things who lives in Lancashire. Funny how the Games™ seem more of an excuse for corporate branding and image-polishing than something that belongs to the athletes themselves or to Londoners.
For those of you who (like me) have trouble reading the fine print on the poster, it reads: “£25 billion taken from depleted public funds. Square miles of public land permanently truned over to private contractors. £553M on security. 13,000 armed forces personnel – more than Britain deploys in Afghanistan. New police powers. Wholesale destruction of public parks, sports facilities, allotments, conservation areas, and public spaces. The Olympics – a self-governing multinational – transforming public property into private assets in every city it lands. Policed by G45. Sponsored by Dow Chemicals.”
Noam Chomsky recent gave a meaty talk, “Destroying the Commons: On Shredding the Magna Carta” that shows how fragile the rights of commoners truly are. Achieved after enormous civil strife, the Magna Carta supposedly guaranteed commoners certain civic and procedural rights. A companion document, the Charter of the Forest later incorporated into the Magna Carta, expressly guarantees commoners stipulated rights to access and use forests, land, water, game and other natural resources for their subsistence.
Both documents are now being shredded today with barely a peep of acknowledgment that centuries-old principles of human rights are being swept aside. Much of Chomsky’s talk is dedicated to his familiar critiques of US geopolitics and corporate globalization. But he has a few illuminating passages about the Charter of the Forest and modern-day enclosures, especially in the global South. Chomsky gave the speech at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Citing Linebaugh’s book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Chomsky writes:
The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization…. By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.
With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. The World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world….
The tech world frequently talks about open source software as a collaborative endeavor, but it is less apt to use the word “commons,” let alone engage in rigorous empirical analysis for understanding how software commons actually work. The arrival of Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons (MIT Press) is therefore a welcome event. This book is the first large-scale empirical study to look at the social, technical and institutional aspects of free, libre and open source software (often known as “FLOSS”). It uses extensive firsthand survey research, statistical analysis and commons frameworks for studying this under-theorized realm.
While most people may associate open source software with Linux, there are in fact tens of thousands of open source projects in existence. Many consist of no more than two or three participants, and may have only an irregular existence. However, many thousands of others attract a small but spirited team, and still others are huge, robust social ecosystems in their own right.
The authors of Internet Success, UMass Professor Charles M. Schweik and consultant Robert C. English, looked at the large universe of FLOSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net, a website that functions as a kind of clearinghouse for over 260,000 FLOSS projects (as of February 2011) and 2.7 registered software developers. The site provides most of the tools that developers need to find colleagues and build a new FLOSS program – a Web repository of code, bug-tracking utilities, online forums, email mailing lists, a wiki, file downloading services, etc.
While SourceForge is not the only such site for FLOSS projects, it is the largest and arguably representative of the universe of such projects. With support from the National Science Foundation, Schweik and English set out to study the pool of software development projects on SourceForge to try to determine why some succeed, why others fail and why others simply languish. They explain in excruciating technical, social science detail how they assembled and analyzed their datasets, which originate in a vast collection of SourceForge data on more than 130,000 projects as well as their own survey questionnaire of programmers.
In development that feels strangely like kismet, an encampment of dispossessed young people who wish to opt out of the corporate system and reclaim a basic freedom of working the land, have made their way to Runnymede, a hallowed site in the history of the commons.
Runnymede is where King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, settling the long civil war with barons and commoners, and leading to the Charter of the Forest that granted explicit commoning rights to commoners. Runnymede is therefore an appropriate place for contemporary Occupy-style encampments. It's where the king formally recognized that he was not above the law, and that the commoners have rights that must be respected. But history and king-like proxies have papered over such truths. (Peter Linebaugh's Magna Carta Manifesto is THE book to read on this subject.)
A group that calls itself Diggers 2012 is now trying to engineer a rendezvous between that past and a commons-directed future. After being forced out of their encampments in London, the Diggers are now establishing their own Runnymede Eco Village. (Thanks for the alert on this news, James Quilligan!) The Diggers want to secure their own right to the land and to develop their own autonomous system for self-governance and subsistence. Some want to create a banner, "We don't want workfare, we want landshare!"Security forces attempt to remove Diggers 2012 from their encampment at Runnymede.
After being shooed from one place to another, and suffering the destruction of their plantings, the Diggers decided to set up camp at Brunel University’s Runnymede campus, which has gone unused for six years and is poised to become a construction site for apartments. In The Guardian, columnist George Monbiot has a wonderful column about the encampment at Runnymede, which he described as “a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.
The Diggers are off on an out-of-theway, unused piece of land. Not exactly a prime location on which to attract attention. But they are nothing if not determined to make a point and build another world. As one camper explained: “Like our forbearers, ‘The Diggers’ of the mid 17th Century, we too will face the same forms of oppression as we attempt to make use of the disused land. And like the Diggers, we are committed to continuing our mission to make use of the disused land in the face of brute force. So if the bailiffs come, we may go, but we may too come back and keep coming back. For you can tear down our structures and rip out our crops, but you cannot kill the spirit of our vision. We are not here to fight anyone. We know in our hearts that our activities are just and reasonable. So we will carry on.”
It is time to pause and celebrate the improbable, wonderful life and career of Woody Guthrie, born a century ago today. Could such a voice of ordinary people ever make it as a songwriter/performer today? It’s remarkable how the “Oklahoma cowboy” drew together the strands of American folk music, hillbilly lyrics, cowboy songs and countless other regional influences to create songs that sound as if they had existed from time immemorial. In a way, they had. He was often renovating folk tunes that had already endured for generations and giving them more timely, politically inflected lyrics: derivation as original creativity. He sang about dignity and social justice; he sang about hard personal truths and political struggle. World Telegram photo by Al Aumuller, via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woody_Guthrie_NYWTS.jpg
Guthrie himself said, “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.” In today’s media-saturated world, in which posturing and PR optics drive talent to become facsimiles of the authentic (but never the real thing, lest it be caught by surprise in an unflattering light being all-too-human), Guthrie was the unvarnished, plain-spoken real thing.
Out of that stubborn authenticity came a raw eloquence that could not be suppressed. When Irving Berlin wrote the sanctimonious “God Bless America,” which went on to become a hit, especially as sung by pious conservatives like Kate Smith, Guthrie set out to write a song that would not be so darn complacent about America.
Raj Patel has been tracking the pathologies of the global food system for many years. An activist and academic who teaches at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, Patel has just published a second, updated edition of his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.
The problem with the food system is not that we don't produce enough calories to eradicate hunger, Patel notes. It's that the food system has its own priorities of institutional consolidation and profit, which means that more than 1 billion people in the world are malnourished and 2 billion are overweight – which is worse than when the first edition of Patel's book came out.
Patel has also been a serious student of the commons. His 2010 book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape the Market Society and Redefine Democracy, is a lucid overview of the fallaciious premises of market economics and its dismal performance. He also goes on at length about the ability of the commons paradigm to help ameliorate food sovereignty, environmental sustainability and social justice.MST: The Landless Workers Movement
Recommended reading is a recent interview with Patel at Stir, the vigorous, commons-oriented British political journal founded by Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh. (Incidentally, Stir is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a print run of a book collecting some of its best articles.)
Here are a few excerpts from Stir’s interview with Patel:
On genetically modified crops & climate change: “We have an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agro-ecological farming systems will be able to feed the world in the future. The GM advocates are saying, “What about drought-resistance and climate-change-ready crops?” That seems to be nonsense! To have a crop that is climate-change-ready is ludicrous because change is precisely change — it is so many different things. It could be new pests, rains coming at the wrong time; it could be too much rain, or too much heat. It is impossible to have a single crop that is ready for those possible changes. We’ve already seen the limits of that because Monsanto has a product called ‘Drought Guard’ — a genetically-modified crop that performs no better than any conventional crop in resisting anything but a mild drought. The problem with this is that climate change isn’t about mild anything but extreme weather events.”
The International Olympics Committee is one of the biggest, most aggressive marketers of the Olympic Brand. It should come as no surprise that athletes want a piece of the action for themselves. American runner Nick Symmonds has shown his appreciation for the true Olympic spirit by auctioning off a corporate sponsorship on his left shoulder.
Hanson Dodge Creative, an advertising and design agency in Milwaukee, won the right to pay Symmonds $11,000 to tattoo its Twitter hashtag on his left shoulder. As a piece by Stewart Elliot in the New York Times assures us, it’s only a temporary tattoo – but it will be there for the duration of the Olympic Games and 2012. Photo credit: Donald Gruener
The Olympics once prided itself on honoring amateurism in athletics – a standard that was often controversial on the margins because it was hard to enforce. Everyone needs to earn a livelihood somehow, and the eastern bloc countries for years had a form of state-sponsored professionalism of athletes. That said, is it an emancipation for athletes to be selling their bodies as a vehicle for corporate tattoos? Talk about “branding”!
Hanson Dodge bought the "tattoo rights" before Nick Symmonds won a berth on the US Olympic team. After he made Team USA, it meant that Hanson Dodge would now get far more public exposure for its $11,000 than originally anticipated. Symmonds proudly noted, “You’re never going to find a better cpm.”
Yes, athletes have become experts on advertising. A “cpm” is a trade term for “cost per thousand,” or the cost that advertisers pay TV, radio or newspaper outlets to reach a thousand consumers. One might say that Symmonds is a perfect representative for Team USA: sell, sell sell!
There is something very sad about the Olympics becoming little more than a strike-it-rich business opportunity. Symmonds is unapologetic. When he finished first in a race in June, he stuck out his tongue in defiance, and said: “My brand identity is to treat every day like it's your last, live life to the fullest.” Living life to the fullest apparently means acting like a boor and leveraging the cash value of Brand Symmonds.
A thousand-year-old tradition of farming commons in southern England may be jeopardized as housing prices drive out farmers and render the commoning rights moot. Yes, there are still self-identified commoners in England. BBC radio recently interviewed a handful of the remaining commoners who rely upon the New Forest in Hampshire to feed their cattle, sheep and chickens. The 23-minute radio report focused on how the farming commons is a way of life that has preserved the distinctive ecological landscape – and how this future is now in doubt.
New Forest is said to be the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, healthland and forest in the southeast portion of England. The land became a royal forest in 1079 when King William I shut down 20 hamlets and isolated farmsteads, provoking an uproar. He then consolidated the land into a single tract, the New Forest, which he used for royal hunts. New Forest, looking from Rockford Common. Photo by Three Amigo's Birding, at http://www.surfbirds.com/community-blogs/amigo/2011/12/19/peregrine-at-ibsley-common-new-forest.
The traditions of commoning in the New Forest are quite involved and detailed, as Wikipedia notes:
Commons rights are attached to particular plots of land (or in the case of turbary, to particular heaths), and different land has different rights – and some of this land is some distance from the Forest itself. Rights to graze ponies and cattle are not for a fixed number of animals, as is often the case on other commons. Instead a marking fee is paid for each animal each year by the owner. The marked animal's tail is trimmed by the local agister (Verderers’ official), with each of the four or five Forest agisters using a different trimming pattern. Ponies are branded with the owner's brand mark; cattle may be branded, or nowadays may have the brand mark on an ear tag.
Hollywood and the record industry got some serious comeuppance when the European Parliament overwhelmingly defeated a copyright maximalist treaty by a 478 to 39 vote on Wednesday. Ouch! This is a very sweet moment to savor.
The content industries and trade representatives had been negotiating the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for six years behind closed doors. Civil society organizations were absolutely barred from the process even though industry players had full and complete access and participation. The proposed changes to copyright law would have empowered copyright industries to throttle free speech on the Internet without due process; allow users to be barred access to Internet accounts; and force Internet service providers to act as copyright police by patrolling users’ web habits.
The idea behind the ACTA treaty was to negotiate a new global standard of strict copyright standards. It was also a sly tactical feint to use international policy venues to help impose stiff copyright rules on the US without having to go through the US Senate for treaty ratification (Obama could simply sign it as an “executive agreement”). The point of this subterfuge was to avoid any bruising public debate about or political fallout from much-hated provisions of the agreement.
The defeat of ACTA is a sweet moment because arrogant trade reps and industry moguls had airily dismissed critics. They thought that their insider access, lobbying dollars and propaganda campaigns could just ram the whole stinkin’ mess through. But after last year's huge Internet mobilization against SOPA and PIPA – the Stop Online Privacy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate – it was clear that Internet users were getting their act together as a political force. That anti-SOPA, anti-PIPA effort stunned Congress; industry-backed legislation that had previously sailed through was stopped dead in its tracks. The spell of the entertainment industry's cozy influence-peddling was broken, at least for a while.
When Dustin Hoffman was “the graduate,” he could at least consider a job in plastics. Nowadays the jobs have been sent abroad, communities are being destabilized by budget cuts, and many of the entry-level opportunities for young people, if they exist at all, are pretty soul-deadening. The world that is being bequeathed to the younger generation is in serious decline if not decadence – yet the corporate and political elite who run the show seem incapable of turning things around. Indeed, they don’t really seem to want to. What’s a twenty-something supposed to do?
Shareable Magazine has just released a lively book that provides a few answers. It doesn't offer any grand manifestos so much as a series of highly personal, evocative testimonies filled with rays of hope. Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis, is an eclectic collection of essays about the ways that young people are trying to build happier, wholesome, workable lives for themselves as the edifice of late-stage capitalism begins to implode. Edited by Malcolm Harris with Neal Gorenflo (New Society Publishers), the book brings to the surface, in authentic, heartfelt ways, the frustrations and triumphs of young people trying to find their footings.
Here are some of those voices:
An anonymous, self-described “nomad” describes why he has chosen of life on the road. It’s not as if he has a script or a deadline for his travels; he’s just wandering. He advises, “You need to be resourceful and confident, reasonably streetwise, but also open to the prospect that most people are basically good. The kindness of people I meet on the road continues to overwhelm me, and I aim to both repay it and pass it on as far as possible.” The nomad itemizes what’s in his backpack (his netbook, ancient mobile phone and waterproof jacket), and why.
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