Before getting underway, I want to thank a number of my friends and colleagues at the New America Foundation: Michael Calabrese, Director of the Public Assets Project, who helped bring off this conference and consulted with me on my report; Ted Halstead, president of the NAF, and Steve Clemons, vice president of New America, both strong supporters of this project. I am also grateful to the Surdna Foundation of New York City for its support of my report, and to the Turner Foundation and the Ford Foundation for its support of the Public Assets Project at the New America Foundation.

Thank you, also, to the participants on today's three panels, whom we will introduce individually soon. Some of you came from quite a distance. I am grateful for your participation.

I am pleased that so many people turned out for today's conference. Personally, I think there is a broad interest in the idea of "the commons" in America today -- the idea that the American people must reclaim greater control over the assets that we already own -- and reclaim the structures of governance that manage our lives and resources.

I also believe that there is a great deal of interest in the political sovereignty of "the people" -- in the sense of "We the people" -- as distinct from the categories of the market and economics. Thomas Frank's entertaining new book, One Market Under God, talks about "market populists" such as George Gilder, Bill Gates, Wired Magazine and Fast Company. They are among the cheerleaders saying that the market is a populist, egalitarian place that represents and defends the "little guy" more than our own government, not to mention nonprofit institutions.

This is perhaps an inevitable, seductive myth in these times of market triumphalism. But however empowering the new Internet marketplace, and however deficient our government is in many respects, I believe this proposition is just untrue. The problem is, people haven't yet found an overarching language for expressing our sovereign interests as a people beyond anything now represented by politicians, government or business. Happily, the idea of the commons allows us to do just that.

Today's conference is an attempt to build a rough scaffolding for understanding the many commons in American society. We will be looking chiefly at two things -- one, a new analytic framework of the commons as applied to diverse areas of public policy and American life. And two, we will be looking at a number of specific commons that are being abused. Our nine panelists will talk about a number of areas in which business interests are appropriating our public assets ranging from public lands to the Internet to nature to public schools and cultural spaces.

In my remarks, I will focus chiefly on the first item, the overarching analysis, the framework for understanding this thing called the commons. Then, for the rest of the day, the three panels will focus on the dynamics of the specific commons about which they are knowledgeable.

Let's start by saying that there is a huge variety of commons in American life, even in a nation with the most muscular market system in the world.

Not many Americans realize that they own nearly one-third of the surface area of the country as well as the mineral-rich outer continental shelf. Huge deposits of oil, uranium, natural gas and other mineral wealth can be found on public lands, along with rich supplies of timber, grazing lands, and fresh water. A great many of these resources are leased or sold for below-market rates, while being environmentally abused in the process. Anna Aurilio of U.S. PIRG and its Green Scissors Project will speak to these issues.

The American people also own incredibly valuable assets such as the electromagnetic spectrum, which broadcasters have used for free for decades, giving very little in return in terms of money or public-interest programming. In fact, political candidates spent between $700 and $1 billion in the 2000 elections simply to buy access to the airwaves we already own! Now the broadcast industry has captured another 6 megahertz of so-called digital spectrum -- in addition to their existing spectrum -- a spectrum grab worth as much as $70 billion -- an appropriation with serious consequences for American competitiveness as the robust wireless industry tries to compete with Japan and Europe.

The American people also own important types of federal R&D, much of which is simply given away for free or at discount prices. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the major beneficiaries of federal R&D. The drug companies let taxpayers shoulder the huge risks and costs of inventing most breakthrough drugs, including some of the AIDS drugs that we're hearing so much about these days. Then the government gives drug companies exclusive patent rights to the new drugs -- and the companies graciously agree to sell them back to us, or to African countries, for exorbitant prices.

Many parts of the aerospace industry, the computer industry, and others, have also been built on the back of research, innovations and resources sponsored by the federal government -- much of which is later privatized with modest or no returns on investment accruing to taxpayers.

The U.S. Government is one of the most important publishers of authoritative research, database collections, technical reports and court rulings. Here, too, valuable resources that our tax money has created are often given away on the cheap to information vendors who then re-sell them for high prices. Alternatively, many of these taxpayer-sponsored resources are locked up and not made readily available, notwithstanding the ease of publishing them on the World Wide Web. While most Members of Congress have managed to create their own websites to publicize their press releases, there is still no easily searchable database of Members' voting records based on a bill's name, subject or Member's name.

The commons must also be understood as our democratic culture in its broadest sense. Our civic institutions, the broadcast airwaves, our public spaces, the public forums in which we can talk to each other as a democratic people -- these, too, are under siege by market interests which are trying to privatize and commercialize them. This can be seen not just is the wall-to-wall commercialism of broadcast television, with hardly any airtime for serious public affairs journalism, local programming, or educational programming. We also see the commercialization of our culture in the many new initiatives to turn the Internet into a pay-per-use vending machine and extend intellectual property rights to unprecedented new extremes.

Some examples: At the Summer Olympics, the Olympics Committee claimed property rights in news of sporting events, raw tabulations of the results of competitions and even real-time diaries of Olympic athletes that hometown newspapers wanted to publish. Many information vendors are seeking to privatize the ownership of public facts, as contained in database compilations -- a move that could privatize control over stock quotes, baseball box scores, and other collections of facts.

Disney may have made a lot of money privatizing folk stories from the public domain such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Br'er Rabbit -- but that doesn't stop them from trying to extend the term of copyright protection so that Mickey Mouse won't enter the public domain in 2003, after 75 years of taxpayer-enforced copyright protection.

The market enclosure of the cultural commons can also be seen in the commercialization of the public schools -- through the pseudo-educational Channel One, through brand name products in textbooks, and through school districts selling Coca-Cola and other junk food vendors exclusive access to captive audiences of school children. This, at a time when childhood obesity and diabetes are becoming serious public health problems.

The commercialization of culture is in fact reaching almost Lenin-esque proportions as sports stadia, parades, city festivals, the football bowls, subway stops and Broadway theaters are being renamed after corporations and bestrewn with ubiquitous corporate logos. The marketization of American culture is so far-reaching that thousands of citizens tried to sell their votes via websites in the 2000 elections, computer software can now slice out brief seconds of silence on the radio in order to save time and insert more ads per hour, and one of the most popular tattoos is the Nike swoosh -- the branding of flesh. The latest rage is captive audience marketing which ambushes you at the gas pump, in the elevator, in the movie theater, and in the bathroom.

The enclosure of the commons, as these many examples suggest, is a wide-ranging political, economic and cultural phenomenon. Yet there are also a great many common underlying dynamics at work here. That, in fact, is why "the commons" is useful as an analytic framework. It helps organize and explain a wide diversity of phenomenon that otherwise are only seen in isolation -- episodic outrages, not systemic problems.

So