The Woman Who Just Might Save the Planet and Our Pocketbooks

By Fran Korten and Elinor Ostrom, YES! Magazine
Posted on March 14, 2010, Printed on March 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145889/

For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.
Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop. 

Fran Korten, YES! Magazine’s publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and the United States. She and Ostrom drew on one another’s work as this field of knowledge developed. Fran interviewed her friend and colleague Lin Ostrom shortly after Ostrom received the Nobel Prize.

Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All

Published on Thursday, January 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Outrageous SCOTUS Decision Should Reignite Most Necessary of Debates

by Ralph Nader

Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.

This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the sovereignty of “We the People”!
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel -  is, Only The Super Wealthy Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

Arts Podcasts Here

Occasionally, I interview artists for my podcast series, Broadcaster At-Large. I have decided to place them on this page rather than to create an arts page. This is because the future, as I conceive it to be, eliminates working "for a living" and thus allows everyone to work at their calling,which is my definition of "right livelihood", and not at whatever some "market" will pay for today, even if it is poison (Bhopal), pollution (Cap & Trade), or NBCE Weapons (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Energy).

Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life. His brother, Theo, supported him. What if Van Gogh had been an only child?

Why should we pay to live on the planet on which we were born?

Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive

November 30, 2009

Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive

By ASHLEE VANCE

SAN FRANCISCO — In many ways, MySQL embodies the ideals of the populist software movement known as open source, in which a program’s creator releases it to the world free of charge, and legions of volunteers contribute improvements that are also freely shared.
The start-up company came out of nowhere, building a database application beloved by vibrant, young Internet companies. Logging in from homes scattered around the globe, its workers seemed more a part of a virtual commune than a corporate monolith, and they relished taking on proprietary software giants like Microsoft.

But like most open-source companies, MySQL’s sales, tied to support deals, never matched the astronomical number of downloads for its product, about 60,000 a day. In January 2008, the founders decided to sell the company for $1 billion to Sun Microsystems. And this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle, which makes database software aimed at larger companies and tougher jobs, for $7.4 billion.

Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.

The rest of this New York Times article…

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The open source software movement is living proof that we do not need the profit motive to create innovation.

The M.O. of The Social Contract Renewed

The modus operandi (M.O.) of the book is the same one stated in the subtitle of this blog: Challenging the Assumptions We Live By. Kellia believes we can form any kind of society we will, because human beings are capable of change. But we can only change if we are willing to stop resting on our assumptions. Take, for example, the existence of money. Most of the world's problems stem from either the need or greed for money. What if we could abolish it?


If you think that is hopeless fantasy, you are locked in the assumption that money must exist. Think for a moment. What if money didn't exist? Have you ever read a book or seen a movie about a culture in which money did not exist? How do people access goods and services without money. How do they facilitate exchange? Many of you would come up with different scenarios: good, bad, or, if money didn't exist it would have to be invented. And those scenarios would be the start of an interesting conversation. Start that conversation by making comments on this blog.


But some of you simply could not wrap your brain around the idea of a world without money. It's for you especially, the folks who cannot think of things other than the way they are and seem to have been since time immemorial, that Kellia is writing the book.

Home of the Brave?

By John Steinsvold


[A thought-provoking "utopian" article, entitled "Home of the Brave?" which appeared in the American Daily which was published in Phoenix, Arizona on March 14, 2006. It was then republished on a website called The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy. ]



Economists concede that economics is an inexact science. What does that mean? Perhaps it means their economic forecast is better than yours or mine. Recently, economic indicators have been rising and people have their fingers crossed. Economists have given us reason to hope that the job market will improve and that the stock market will continue on a steady climb. Yet, the newspapers continue to report more layoffs and more jobs going overseas. 

Meanwhile, our economy is getting more and more complex. We associate complexity with progress for some ungodly reason. The following problems, however, have become inherent in our economy. What does that mean? It means they will be around for a while:

ARCHIVE: Thoughts on the Creative Process 5: Why Susan Boyle Makes Us Cry

by Kellia Ramares
[N.B.] Essays 1-4 are available on Machini-mations. 

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a link to a tape of Susan Boyle's bravura performance in "Britain's Got Talent." I didn't watch it at the first opportunity. Reality shows and talent shows are not my cup of tea. To me, they seem to be yet another fad in the drive to lower costs of TV production. But I kept seeing news items around the Internet about a singer who had wowed the judges and the crowd. When I finally gave in and took a look, she wowed me, too. In fact, I cried and have cried each time since, and I've watched the tape at least a dozen times. What's more, when I read comments about her performance, I saw that I wasn't alone in letting the tears flow. Far from it.

Some inconvenient truths about competition

by Kellia Ramares
Here is an excerpts of a story that appeared in the New York Times on October 21, 2009.  The title of the story was “$13 an hour?  500 sign-up, 1 wins a job”.
"The 34-year-old recruiter decided the fairest approach was simply to start at the beginning, reviewing resumes in the order in which they came in.  When she found a desirable candidate, she called to ask a few preliminary questions, before forwarding the name along to Chris Kelsey, the school's director. When he had a big enough pool to evaluate, she would stop. Anyone she did not get to was simply out of luck."
The paragraph above exposes the lie that one's employability is basically a function of the individual's own ability and that if you don't have a job, it is your fault.  Built into any competitive economic system are several fundamental, interrelated and inconvenient truths.

The Trouble with Money

by Kéllia Ramares

The current economic crisis is bringing monetary reform movements such as End The Fed, to the fore. These movements bring to light what is wrong with our current monetary system, i.e., it is the instrument by which people are held in debt slavery.

But these movements often call for a return to the backing of paper money with gold and silver. In other words, that we should be able to redeem our paper money for gold and silver – though I can't think of why we would want to do that;. gold and silver are too heavy to carry around. No more paper currency should be in circulation than can be backed by precious metal, according to the proponents of “real money.”

But returning to a gold/silver standard for currency will not stabilize our economy. The real problem with our currency is not its fiat nature.