Commonwealth Or Corporatization

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Nine, Number Two
January/February 2000

(excerpts from Ralph Nader's speech, Dec. 1, 1999)

This is a definition to apply now as the world becomes increasingly corporatized and centralized in fewer and fewer corporations who have privileges and immunities that we as real human beings can never have. They take all the rights and privileges and generate a pattern of corrosive impact on the commonwealth of humankind. In our history we had a specific definition of commonwealth. Public lands and rivers were commonwealth. Farmers seeds were considered commonwealth.

The WTO is a brilliant, quiet coup d'etat by global corporations — an end run around state and local governments. They get what they want (that they could not get with these local and state governments) with patterns of secrecy, autocracy and exclusiveness that would never be tolerated in any democracy.

The scope of the power grab over the world by corporate globalization is so massive, and unaccompanied by any ideology that can be attacked, other than the profit-über-alles ideology, that we need a countering set of economic and philosophical and civic models to deal with it.

One of these is the notion of commonwealth, that seeds are the commonwealth of the planet. Food is a commonwealth. Their regenerative nature is a commonwealth. Commonwealth means that proprietary interests cannot distort its access and its consequences, nor control its utilization. Public airways are commonwealth. Ownership of the commonwealth of our planet is intolerable.

There is no global structure of thought that can confront the corporations. Transnational corporations are not challenged by any force that can come close to their level of organization. The many small attempts around the globe are not organized, and because they are not organized they tend to internalize among themselves what might be called a "rationalization of futility." Organization defeats discouragement and demoralization.

It will take the informed, mobilized power of citizens to defeat the greatest relinquishment of local, state and national sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable international body, in the history of the United States.

For the first time in this century groups are together that have never been together. We have to expand our own civic media. Part of what's happening in Seattle now is word of mouth, in small meetings with people from around the country and the world. We have the internet. We have books.

COMMONWEALTH OR CORPORATIZATION?