Corporate control of public sphere

At human level, the interconnected crises (food, energy, financial, migratory, democratic etc) and the successive failure of the Conferences on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009 and Cancun in 2010, are the expression of the increased commodification of both material and intellectual aspects of life (land, air/CO2, forests, minerals, genes, education, health, water...).

This ecological representation of water as a common good explains why the creation of the ‘water business’ and the commercial logic of ‘public-private partnerships’ is so unacceptable.

educated according to the management gospel of the water multinationals, according to which one is supposed to ‘make water pay for itself’. This implies that water is sold, commoditised, considered in the same way as oil.

Three reasons to be realistic: 1. Privatising services has often been shown to work in certain circumstances and to improve services (so uncompromising  condemnation doesn’t work);  2. Labour in power opened up public services to privatisation in the NHS, schools and elsewhere (allowing ministers to play yah boo politics); and 3. using “privatisation” as the main instrument of the campaign against government policies does not begin to encompass the sheer scale of the assault and the devastating effect it is having within the public services. It is too narrow a bridgehead. 

engaged in the destruction of the historic postwar compromise between the public and private sectors with the wholesale transfer of public functions to private enterprise.  Their project amounts to no less than a modern enclosure movement, in which it is not common land but what is still left in the public sphere as a whole that is being wrested from the people.

At the same time, the emphasis on “choice”, always a Trojan horse under Labour, will privilege the middle and professional classes at the expense of working class families.  Gove’s policies proclaim a universal intent; but even he admits that it is actually the middle classes who will benefit. And do not expect them to share their privilege.  Forget any notion that the “sharp elbows” of the middle classes will be employed to make room for less privileged families; they bond, network and move within their class, there is scarcely any cross-class “bridging”. Instead, look to proposals in the budget that will reflect, and be influenced by, the interests of middle and professional classes alongside those of the private sector.

Sir Paul Stephenson, who had resigned over the phone-hacking scandal the previous July, had now, like so many former ministers and senior civil servants, stepped through the revolving door into the agreeable world of the non-executive director. Of course Sir Paul’s background is not that of a typical mandarin. Being a senior policeman is not the same as being a senior civil servant. The son of a butcher, grammar-school educated and promoted through the ranks, Sir Paul reached the top of one of the very few public service careers that is genuinely open to talent regardless of class origins. Sir Humphrey Appleby (Winchester, Balliol, GCB, KBE, MVO, MA Oxon) he is not. But in some ways he is more in tune with the zeitgeist. It is the mandarinate that is out of touch – and, in fact, disappearing.

But the real interest of his story is not what Sir Paul knew, or should have known, about the misdeeds of the Murdoch newspapers. It lies in the assumptions he, and others, have made about the larger context in which he found himself operating.

besides making Sir Paul one of the few people of note who believe that there really are free lunches (and making Champneys’ manager someone remarkably free with his employers’ money), this leaves out of consideration the particular links that existed between Champneys, News International and the Met. Rebekah Brooks, the executive director of News International in the UK, was said to be a specially valued regular visitor, and Neil Wallis’ PR firm, which he set up after leaving the News of the World in 2009, handled Champneys’ public relations, as well as being employed to advise the Met. According to the Met, when he stayed at Champneys Sir Paul didn’t know about Wallis’ Met appointment. His ‘personal family friendship’ with Champneys’ manager had apparently not been close enough for it to have been mentioned.

Three people recounted how a Pacific Rim official boasted that cyanide was so safe that the official was willing to drink a glass of a favorite local beverage laced with the chemical. The official, we were told, backed down when community members insisted on authentication of the cyanide. “The company thought we’re just ignorant farmers with big hats who don’t know what we’re doing,” Miguel said. “But they’re the ones who are lying.”

As the anti-mining coalition strengthened with support from leaders in the Catholic Church, small businesses and the general public (a 2007 national poll showed that 62.4 percent opposed mining), tensions within Cabañas grew.

Along one wall is the Salvadoran version of the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in this case etched with the names of about 30,000 of the roughly 75,000 killed in the civil war. Thousands of them, including the dozens killed in the Lempa River massacre of 1981, were victims of massacres perpetrated by the US-backed—often US-trained—government forces and the death squads associated with them.

Mittal added that for people living in developed countries, the conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

The water service in the Senegalese cities has been partially privatised since 1996 under the form of a lease contract between the state and the Sénégalaise des eaux (SDE). 51 per cent of the capital of the latter is held by SAUR, renamed FINAGETION in 2005. It is a subsidiary of the Bouygues group, the fourth-largest group in the global water sector.

In an international context marked by the spectacular and repeated failures of water transnational corporations that have sought since the 1990s to take root in the cities of the global South, Senegal has therefore an emblematic character for the proponents of PPPs.

The government has in fact suddenly announced that the contract would not be renewed and that a tender would be launched in April 2011 for the selection a new operator, and that the tender would be for ‘total concession, that is to say, a corporation that no longer just distributes water and charges for its consumption, but will make investments’ (the very words of a government official).

Ali Abunimah, another Palestinian luminary, so robustly criticizes anti-Semitism that right-wing anti-Semites accuse him of being a covert Zionist, unaware perhaps that they’re reproducing a feature of Zionism.

In the months after being fired from a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois in August 2014, for condemning Israeli war crimes, I was periodically aggravated that some commentators were unwilling or unable to recognize that my supposedly anti-Semitic tweets actually defend Jews against essentialism. In those tweets, I warn against conflating an entire community with the behavior of a nation-state busy showering civilians with bombs and chemical weapons, a warning I offer in much of my work.

It was remarkably frustrating. These folks could obviously read, even if not competently. They all have impeccable credentials, but I tried not to hold that against them. I couldn’t understand their phonic malfunction until I forced myself to think like an apologist for ethnocracy. The political identity of liberal Zionists is filled with acute incongruity. They cannot consume or disseminate ideas without the magical benefit of denial. Disassociating Judaism from Israel renders Zionism superfluous. That kind of disassociation requires one to rethink the commonplaces of Israel’s self-image. It is more convenient to outsource failures of imagination to the Palestinian.

Nelson, a professor of English at UIUC, also spoke frankly about his affiliation with the Israel on Campus Coalition, a Zionist advocacy group funded by an extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim ideologue. Nelson also revealed his own ties to the editor of a far-right website that has been monitoring Salaita.

In both of my conversations with him, Nelson insisted that he has never spoken to anyone in the UIUC administration about Salaita’s case. But he did acknowledge that he has given advice to off-campus Zionist groups since the Salaita story broke. “I’ve had at least fifty emails from people about the [Salaita] tweets and some of them are from people who I’m sure have a role in one organization or another,” Nelson said. “I had a call from someone who does represent an outside organization asking for my opinion about whether that organization or other organizations should approach the Board of Trustees to make some statement against Salaita’s appointment and I advised that they should not,” he added. “I said that the academic process should run its course and that while it was fine for people outside the university to comment negatively about any faculty’s work, they shouldn’t attempt to influence university decisions.”

Nelson’s advice is disingenuous to say the least. The Zionist group or groups he is counseling on strategy hardly need to intervene directly when Nelson is effectively doing their dirty work for them.

In blog posts, open letters and news story comment threads, Nelson’s critics -- some of whom were longtime friends -- accused him of abandoning his principles and twisting the definition of academic freedom to serve his own political beliefs. A vocal opponent of the Israel boycott, Nelson suffers from a “blind spot” about Israel, some have said.

I believe faculty members generally have a social responsibility to try to speak rationally, not just hurl insults, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict regularly meets with abusive and counterproductive faculty remarks from both sides.”

Nelson believes it’s impossible to separate institutional boycotts from individual boycotts, and that no scholarly association has fully considered the long-term impacts of such actions, either geopolitically or in terms of academic freedom. He therefore opposes the boycott movement (the American Association of University Professors, of which Nelson is a past president, also opposes academic boycotts as incompatible with academic freedom).

This confirmed suspicions that the decision— taken without any academic consultation — had indeed been based on impassioned tweets that Salaita, a Palestinian-American, had posted during the first half of July as terrible destruction was wrought by the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Such routine misuse of a serious charge runs the grave danger of diminishing the gravity and reality of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism itself, doings its actual victims a real disservice.

one of the most striking aspects of the affair has been the willingness of self-defined liberals to either mitigate or endorse the firing of Salaita. As such, the case has also thrown light on the limits of liberalism and its acquiescence to the encroaching depredations of the corporate managerial culture that now afflicts universities across the world. Apart from anything else, this is a case of high-handed administrative behaviour, increasing corporate influence (the Board of Trustees is composed of powerful business people who know little about scholarship or teaching) and the steady erosion of the vital principle of scholarly autonomy.

The foundation is "orientated towards bringing foreign technology into Africa and opening up markets to foreign corporations, rather than building on the possibilities, capacities and knowledge the farmers already have", he added. The Gates Foundation maintains that farming in Africa is "back-breaking labour" and "science and innovation can make life easier and better for farmers by making farms more productive and sustainable".