Union Perspectives

Today, our Commons are mostly invisible in life in the United States, but about two billion people around the world depend on Commons for their livelihood, like water, fisheries, farmland, roadways, air and other natural resources vulnerable to theft and seizure by corporations that want to do fracking, privatizing, or monetizing every aspect of these resources. The push for privatization is a way for corporations to plunder our commonwealth and life blood ends up with such results as our groundwater sold for brand-label bottled water, the patenting of the human genome, and the replacement of shareable agricultural seeds with proprietary GMO (genetic modified organisms) that must be bought year after year. The word Commons was termed in the 16th-19th centuries by the English gentry. They would seize the village pastures, forests, and waterways for their private use. These seizures were called “enclosures.” This drove the people who now were dispossessed from their Commons to the citie