Did America just wake up ?

Watching the Democratic Convention last night I re-examined my anti-Americanism. Usually consumed by the arrogance of power & unable to differentiate between what educator SA O'Neill distinguished as Freedom Not License, the US often believes they are 'free' to do what they want to whomever they want. The neo-con nightmare first arose out of right wing losses in WW2, but the revival of neo-fascism in the US was endorsed in the last two elections & echoed in Canada; small-minded, mean-spirited, cold-hearted corporate capitalism, gulag republicanism & heretical fundamentalist Christianity may now be history. Somebody say amen.

McCain's real POV

Washington Dispatch: In a taped sermon, the preacher McCain calls a "spiritual guide" calls on America to see the "false religion" of Islam "destroyed." Still, the candidate won't reject Rod Parsley's endorsement.

Citizenshop

I have come to the conclusion that the best way for us to maintain the balance between individual rights and community obligations is by thinking of our tax status as individual citizenshops, operating within a political-economy in which the national bank needs to become a membership-owned/citizen-owned credit union. Service fees would replace taxes, but those fees would either be lowered by individuals who provided benefits to others, or the fees would be lowered to those who needed access to defined levels of social credit depending on their needs, administered through programs re-developed on preexisting best practices.
Bureaucrats would be regarded as credit union employees, politicians would become board members.
Corporations would become history, because of the essential flaw in their having no legal conscience to bind them in a court of law. With the passing of corporations so would unions also pass away, except the credit union of citizens, and the union of bureaucrats. The civil employees in that union would all be employed to maintain the state according to the directions of the government, which would continue to be elected in "General Meetings" at the polls, and in accordance with a charter based on many of the customs and traditions of the House of Commons. The Board/Commons would be non-partisan, and would answer to electors as the board does in a credit union to the membership. Politicians would oversee the staff and develop policies for securing the mutual benefit of all members of all local, bio-regional, bio-territoral, bio-national and bio-international watershed societies.
Individually, we would all have the tax status of citizenshops, we would all be able to organize ourselves to certain degrees of limited liabilities through homeshop benefit societies (which could be co-ops that were either family-based or house-mate based) we would all also be allowed to organize our personal economies as members of community/community-of-interest co ops, buying clubs, workers co-ops, and other common arrays of customary associational behaviors, as defined as acceptable through new codes that would be created based on current charters, constitutions, criminal and family laws etc.
Privacy law and enclosure practices would need to be redefined based on negotiations that ensure access for all to the bounty of the commons in all local watersheds and across all territorial lands and waters.

The soul of common law is the crown charter, based on the philosophical view of the Earth and the inherent bounty of life here as being gifts of Providence to all life, gifts which, in the end, are beyond the power of any group or individual to oppose by will for long, and beyond the ability of any community to long deny to the living.

The essence of a society beneficial to all independent communitarians, would be a charter that guides custom, while allowing for privacy and associational freedom,
recognizing that we are symbiotic lifeforms living on a symbiotic planet.
I Am The Way I Am, meets I And Thou and flourishes.

Self-Incorporation revisited

I have friend, Bill Barret, of Planet Bean Fair Trade Coffee, and Bill says he's an anarchist and is horrified by the whole notion of self-incorporation, largely because in facing the real politik of acknowledging that corporations have more rights than citizens, and by embracing self-incorporation as a solution, it merely adds to the whole corporate problem, rather than solving it. He believes that the lack of conscience that is permitted to corporations (which is why they can't sign affidavits in court) would cancel out my perceived benefits, since individuals on trial would plead that their inc. did it, and not them, and that such a split would hold up in court.
I certainly think it's a fair argument, since clearly citizens should have more rights than corporations, and if self-incorporation did enable the schizoid separation of Inc. from Self, and therefor created a mechanism that allowed people to escape responsibility for their own actions, then the whole point of a self-incorporation economy would be lost.

In the end, as a means of overthrowing the present corporate facade, I think self-incorporation remains viable, and that the law that says that a corporation can't sign an affidavit in court, would have to be changed when all corporations became individuals. Inc. and Self would have undivided access to the dictates of individual conscience.

The problem of self-incorporated individuals having more rights than citizens remains troubling, since it would continue to create a society in which economic relationships are more important than political relationships (the basis of civil society.) I think the easiest solution to that conundrum is for self-incorporation to be a right of citizenship, for which an individual is automatically signed up, free of charge, probably at the age of 18, so that it comes with the right to vote.

In the end, the ability to differentiate between the Political and the Economic without actually being able to divide them, would guarantee an equality of citizenship in the political economy of the future, and if individuals remained legally responsible for their own actions, despite being incorporated, then a more ethical business environment could evolve inside a more egalitarian society.

The Incorporate Economy

I was talking to my friend Wayne F Smythe who was explaining that he had incorporated himself as a legal entity because he has more rights as a corportation then he has as a citizen. He said the business of Wayne F Smythe Inc. is running Wayne F Smythe's life, his expenses, his income etc. I thought to myself, that it's it, that's what has to replace the corporate economy, we need to create an Incorporate Economy in which only indidividuals can be incorporated. That's how you bring ethics to business. That's how you get around the problems of corporations with more rights than citizens but who legally have "no conscience to bind them" which is why they can't sign affadivits in court.
The Incorporation Economy needs to be an individuals only one, but those individual incs. can still regisiter businesses they form with one another. The business itself has no rights not guaranteed to all citizens. The individuals are thus responsible for their own actions, they remain protected as citizens by Charters of Rights and Freedoms, their purusit of profits is more easily governed by law, the whole tax system can be simplified, business and bureaucratic manageriats can be streamlined for greater effciency, and commonwealth benefits will flow more freely to all, entreprenurial innovations will be unleashed, labour unions would also change shape and character, and the disappearance of bad corporate behaviour internationally will create less stress between peoples.

The Creative Commons

In the 1970's Elderidge and Gould developed a new theory of evolution because the fossil record showed no evidence that organisms gradually developed new traits like losing tails etc. The new theory was called Punctuated Equilibrium and was devised to explain the lack of data. According to Punctuated Equilibirum something more akin to quantum leapings occur. Symbiologist Lynn Margulis believed the evolutionary jumps were occurring at the level of the cell, where new symibiotic relationships between proto-bacteria in our cytoplasm and the DNA in the nucleus of the evolved creature resulted because of a critical mass of new genetic information exchanges. What Essayist Lewis Thomas called failed attempts at predation.
I look at the sudden emergence of Creative Commons
as a form of punctuated equilibrium. CC is the copyright software at the root of such sites as Flickr or Science Commons. The science site says it all

Accelerating the Scientific Research Cycle

Science Commons serves the advancement of science by removing unnecessary legal and technical barriers to scientific collaboration and innovation.

Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle.

Web version 1.0 was largely about static information delivery, with interaction coming from email. It was itself a quantum leap from no web. It was also heavily corporate, and the web was used to consolidate the social darwinist dominant predator ideology of the biggest and the fastest winning the world and controlling the resources.
Web version 2.0 is the difference between dinosaurs and mammals. The great lumbering Dilbert-brained corporate dominance of the planet has already ended and the dinosaurs don't even know it yet.

The Battle for the Commons

In the days of Henry VIII, after his excommunication, the common-laws of Europe underwent a process known as the Reception, in which laws founded on precedents gave way to Roman civil law. The only nation to resist the Reception was England. That is why only nations once linked to the British Empire use common law today. It was the English habit of writing everything down and keeping it, that preserved the integrity and continuity of common-law.
Civil law is by definition subject to changes depending on who controls the law-makings powers at any given time.
NAFTA, GATT, the Prosperity and Security Partnership are all forms of Reception designed to undermine and destroy common-law.
The battle for the Commons is going to be fought over one issue: water. If water becomes a commodity common-law is dead. I have been waiting for twenty-five years for the moment of crisis, the time to act, the fight to pick, the line in the sand. For me it has come. I attended a meeting called by the newly created Wellington Water Watcher's about the renewal and extension of Nestles' permit to remove 3.6 million litres of water a day from the common aquifer that supplies Guelph and smaller communities to the south of us.
This battle needs to be fought on all fronts, locally, provincially, nationally, internationally. Guelph is a funny place, it is large town masked as a city with a reputation for a vibrant arts and activist community. It has a sense of destiny.
If we win this fight, we will unify a movement that will change the world, that will focus the fight for water rights in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World.
Resist the Reception, help Preserve the Commons.
www.wellingtonwaterwatchers.ca "Build it and they will come."