General

Global Auction of
Public Assets: Public
sector alternatives to the infrastructure market & Public Private
Partnerships by Dexter
Whitfield

380 pages, Spokesman Books, Nottingham. England. ISBN 978 0 85124 773 1

This book explains why public infrastructure has a vital
role in economic development, increases productivity, generates employment and
improves community well-being.

Steve Thomas and David Hall
PSIRU, University of Greenwich
December 2003

Electricity blackouts can be serious events that cause human suffering and economic disruption. Even in the best-run systems, there will be a risk of black-outs because of human error and extreme weather conditions. However, it is important to designate a security standard that strikes a good balance between security and cost and that this standard is maintained. For example, in Britain, the standard for generation is that there should be enough generating capacity that there should only be blackouts due to shortage of generation in 8 winters per 100 years. There is no performance standard for the networks despite the fact that blackouts due to network failure are much more common than those due to generation shortage.

The Commons Conference, Uvic
April 30, 2006
Harold Munn
 

Let me begin by acknowledging that the practice of religious faith in the context of the commons is widely perceived to be a contradiction in terms. By definition, so it seems, a faith community could never be genuinely affirming of a religious or theological commons. Faith communities, it is often understood, consist of groups of people gathered around divinely-revealed truths which can broach no discussion of those truths without violating their relationship with the divinity which has supplied the community with the inviolable truths. Such a faith community draws its very essence from its experience that its revelation is unassailable. Like-minded believers congregate together as a congregation, but are unable to affirm the commons in which no group may claim an ultimate authority. Their reception of that divine authority, the abandonment of which constitutes the ultimate apostasy, cannot allow the sanguine acceptance of other claims to truth within the equality which is the essence of the commons. Yet, if we remove the sense of the absolute nature of the divine from the centre of the faith community, it's not clear what would be left that could be called a faith community. It appears that a faith community would by necessity attempt to subvert the commons either by using it as an opportunity to further the agenda of that faith minority, or by attempting to co-opt the commons to become a larger embodiment of that particular faith community.

Summary Report, Canadian Council on Social Development, 2003. 

The erosion of the financial capacity of nonprofit and voluntary organizations
has prompted particular interest and reflection on the part of the sector and its
funders. Divergent funding policies, regulations and practices work singly or in
combination to facilitate — or hinder — nonprofit and voluntary organizations in
pursuit of their missions. Recent trends in funding, however, appear to threaten the
continued viability of the sector. Much organizational time is now devoted to
chasing short-term sources of funding, often at the expense of the organizations’ mission
and core activities. The primary objective of this study is to document the changing funding landscape in Canada and to assess the impact of these changes on the financial capacity and long-
term sustainability of nonprofit and voluntary organizations. Through our study, we
hope to bring to light the challenges and opportunities that nonprofit and voluntary
organizations across a range of sectors face in trying to fulfill their missions.  
 

Neoliberalism, Property and the Public Domain
Andrew Wender
for The Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain, 2006

Part One: Must Our Notions of the Public Domain Be Founded on Proprietary Concepts and Discourse?

If the concept of the public domain is to be most effectively deployed within Canadian life now and in the future, those who wish to invoke it should plainly recognize that, in a pivotal sense, the raison d’etre of the liberal capitalist paradigm and its integral institutions is little other than privatization.

Part 2: Intellectual Property Law as a Prime Agent of Privatization, and Challenge for the Public Domain

As we have noted, intellectual property jurisprudence represents a paramount institutional challenge to be grappled with by those who wish to strengthen the public domain against encroaching privatization. Encompassing, at its heart, the property rights surrounding trademarks, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets, intellectual property law is fused together, at the level of its Renaissance– and early modern–era genealogical foundations, with “the early stages of capitalism.” As if by a metaphysical sleight–of–hand, this area of law effectively reduces, to the corporeal form of property and commodities, multiple manifestations of an essentially intangible entity, knowledge. In the process, intellectual property doctrine acts as a prime, institutional agent for “protect[ing] the legitimacy and intellectual suasion of the liberal world view”. It achieves this by converting the nebulous phenomena of knowledge and creativity into concrete, economic existents, and, therefore, by “treat[ing]…knowledge as atomistic bits of information to be made useful and profitable”.

James McCarthy, CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2005)

Neoliberalism, the Privatization of Nature, and the Commons
At first glance, neoliberalism has meant enclosure and destruction of commons and
public goods. From the privatization of state assets and collective property to attempts to
create new markets for environmental goods, and from the international expansion of the
concept of ‘regulatory takings’ to the increased use of user fees to ration access to public
goods and spaces, more and more of nature is being subsumed by markets.1 In the pro-
cess, many of the institutional arrangements for the protection of nature won in earlier
struggles have been challenged or diluted.2 The negative consequences are familiar
and grim: increases in socially produced scarcity, growing inequality, and often acceler-
ated depletion or degradation of the very resources market mechanisms were supposed to
protect. Biophysical nature turns out to function as a ‘commons’ whether we like it or
not, in the sense that it is impossible to keep private natures truly cordoned off from
the rest of the world – a principle well illustrated by the widely-discussed case of Cana-
dian farmer, Percy Schmeiser, who was taken to court by Monsanto for patent infringe-
ment after its genetically modified seeds blew into his field and took root.

PRESS RELEASE: 17 May 2006

THE COPY/SOUTH DOSSIER
Issues in the economics, politics, and ideology of copyright in the global South.
Researched and published by the Copy/South Research Group May 2006
ISBN: 978-0-9553140-1-8 (printed edition) Not restricted by copyright

OVERVIEW:
The aim of the dossier is to open up debate on the real impact of copyright laws affecting the people of the more than 150 developing countries in the Global South, many of whom have never read a book, have no access to the Internet and are facing an indeterminate future. The dossier highlights issues that are not only unique to the Global South, but also focuses on those issues that affect both sides of the North - South divide. This dossier is addressed to the general public, researchers, educators, librarians, activists, and organizations concerned about access to knowledge who want to learn more about the global role of copyright and, in particular, copyright's largely negative role in developing countries of the global South. In more than 50 articles totalling 215 pages, we, in the Copy/South Research Group, who have researched and debated these issues over the past 12 months, have tried to critically analyse and assess a wide range of copyright-related issues that impact on the daily lives (and future lives) of those who live in the global South.

A Tale of Two Conferences - Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons, George Caffentzis, University of Maine
Abstract
In the last decade the concept of the commons has increasingly become the basis of anticapitalist thinking in the antiglobalization (or, as some now have it, "the global justice") movement. It has been politically useful both as an alternative model of social organization against the onslaught of "there is no alternative" neoliberal thinking and as a link between diverse struggles ranging from those of agricultural workers demanding land, to environmentalists calling for a reduction of the emission of "hot house gases" into the atmosphere, to writers, artists, musicians and software designers rejecting the totalitarian regime of intellectual property rights. But, like any concept in a class society, it can have many and often antagonistic uses. Our paper will show that there is a use of the concept of the commons that can be functional to capitalist accumulation and it offers an explanation as to why this capitalist use developed, especially since the early 1990s. The conclusion of this paper will assess the political problem that this capitalist use of "the commons" (both strategically and ideologically) poses for the anticapitalist movement.
[This paper is also available at: http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/caffentzis.htm

Originally published in SEEDLING, July 2004

"The leaves, the roots, the trunk, the orchard, and the ecosystem? It is our Western conceit to focus on the apple." - David Bollier

Little by little the ground we stand on or thought we were standing on, both tangibly and intangibly - is being stolen from us, fenced off, and converted into private property. Under the corporate regime of market and trade, the elements of our environment, long taken for granted as being public domain, are being commodified and privatized. Ownership claims litter the countryside, the airwaves and even the ?genetic? codes of living organisms, seeds and software. They pollute forest tracts and arctic wilderness.

Originally published in SEEDLING, January 2004

The culture of commodification and exploitation for private gain has systematically diminished the commons and the public domain ? not only in tangible goods such as public services utilities and public spaces such as parks and even highways, but also in the intangible goods of ideas and information, now increasingly referred to as Intellectual Property.

We are all impoverished as a result. 'In the end,' as one scholar puts it, 'the public domain is whatever intellectual property is not.' He goes on to say, 'You have to be a lion- or jackal-lover of truly limited imagination or unlimited commitment to argue that gazelles are to be understood as no more than whatever is left over after their adversaries have finished feeding.' The industry itself presents this image. An ad in the journal Nature Biotechnology for a law firm specializing in 'intellectual property litigation' carried the text, 'In the biotech world, be the predator, not the prey,' under a photo of a stalking tiger.