Living Wealth: Better Than Money
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.
If we are to slow and ultimately reverse the social and environmental disintegration we see around us, we must change the rules to curb the pervasive abuse of corporate power that contributes so much to those harms.Taming corporate power will slow the damage. It will not be sufficient, however, to heal our relationships with one another and the Earth and bring our troubled world into social and environmental balance. Corporations are but instruments of a deeper social pathology revealed in a familiar story our society tells about the nature of prosperity.
Empire Prosperity Story
The prevailing prosperity narrative has many variations, but these are among its essential elements:
- Economic growth fills our lives with material abundance, lifts the poor from their misery, and creates the wealth needed to protect the environment.
- Money is the measure of wealth and the proper arbiter of every choice and relationship.
- Prosperity depends on freeing wealthy investors from taxes and regulations that limit their incentive and capacity to invest in creating the new jobs that enrich us all.
- Unregulated markets allocate resources to their most productive and highest value use.
- The wealthy deserve their riches because we all get richer as the benefits of the investments of those on top trickle down to those on the bottom.
- Poverty is caused by welfare programs that strip the poor of motivation to become productive members of society willing to work hard at the jobs the market offers.
This money-serving prosperity story is repeated endlessly by corporate media and taught in economics, business, and public policy courses in our colleges and universities almost as sacred writ. I call it the Empire prosperity story.
Few notice the implications of its legitimation of the power and privilege of for-profit corporations and an economic system designed to maximize returns to money, that is, to make rich people richer. Furthermore, it praises extreme individualism that, in other circumstances would be condemned as sociopathic; values life only as a commodity; and diverts our attention from the basic reality that destroying life to make money is an act of collective insanity. In addition to destroying real wealth, it threatens our very survival as a species.
Earth Community Prosperity Story
Consider these elements of a contrasting life-serving prosperity story that looks to life, rather than money, as the true measure of wealth.
- Healthy children, families, communities, and ecological systems are the true measure of real wealth.
- Mutual caring and support are the primary currency of healthy families and communities, and community is the key to economic security.
- Real wealth is created by investing in the human capital of productive people, the social capital of caring relationships, and the natural capital of healthy ecosystems.
- The end of poverty and the healing of the environment will come from reallocating material resources from rich to poor and from life-destructive to life-nurturing uses.
- Markets have a vital role, but democratically accountable governments must secure community interests by assuring that everyone plays by basic rules that internalize costs, maintain equity, and favor human-scale local businesses that honor community values and serve community needs.
- Economies must serve and be accountable to people, not the reverse.
I call this the Earth Community prosperity story because it evokes a vision of the possibility of creating life-serving economies grounded in communities that respect the irreducible interdependence of people and nature. Although rarely heard, this story is based on familiar notions of generosity and fairness, and negates each of the claims of the imperial prosperity story that currently shapes economic policy and practice.
The High Cost of Making Money
It took me many years in my work abroad as a member of the foreign aid establishment to wake up to the fallacy of the Empire story-the idea that advancing economic growth by maximizing returns to money is the key to ending poverty and healing the environment. The epiphany came during a conference in Asia at which nongovernmental organizations were presenting case studies of the social and environmental consequences of large aid-funded development projects undertaken to promote economic growth. In case after case, the projects displaced poor people and disrupted essential environmental processes to produce benefits for those already better off.
Eventually I came to realize that conventional economic growth indicators rarely measure growth in human prosperity. Rather, they measure the rate at which the rich are expropriating the living resources of the planet and converting them to products destined for a garbage dump after a brief useful life. The process generates profits for people who already have far more money than they need while displacing people from the resources they need for their modest livelihoods. In summary, the primary business of the global financial system and the corporations that serve it is to increase the wealth gap. It works well in the short-term for the privileged few, but it is disastrous for the society.
We see the effects in the current state of the world. The market value of global economic output has tripled since 1970. By conventional reckoning, this means we humans have tripled our wealth and well-being.
Yet indicators of living capital, the aggregate of human, social and natural capital, tell a very different story. The Living Planet Index, an indicator of the health of the world’s freshwater, ocean, and land-based ecosystems, declined 30 percent since 1970. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 15 of 24 ecosystem services examined “are being degraded or used unsustainably, including fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water purification, and the regulation of regional and local climate, natural hazards, and pests.”
Indicators of human capital-the skills, knowledge, psychological health, capacity for critical thought, and moral responsibility characteristic of the fully functioning person, and of social capital-the enduring relationships of mutual trust and caring that are the foundation of healthy families, communities and societies-point to equally unfavorable trends.
Even as living capital shrinks, the population that depends on it continues to grow. Meanwhile, the growing concentration of money means a few people are able to claim an ever-larger share of a shrinking pie of living capital to the exclusion of everyone else. According to a recent United Nations study, the richest 2 percent of the world’s adults own 51 percent of all global assets. The poorest 50 percent own only 1 percent. This distribution of ownership is a measure of the global distribution of power-and the gap is growing at an accelerating rate. The power imbalance allows the privileged minority to change the rules to accelerate their expropriation of the declining pool of real wealth, which increases the hardship and desperation of those excluded. We are on a path to an increasingly violent last-one-standing competition for the Earth’s final tree, drop of drinkable water, and breath of air.
By our measures of financial capital, we humans are on a path to limitless prosperity. By the measures of living capital, we are on a suicidal path to increasing deprivation and ultimate self-extinction.
Putting Life First
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires turning existing economic priorities and models on their head and making the values of the Earth Community story the foundation of our economy. We must:
- Turn from money to life as the defining value, from growing financial capital to growing living capital, and from short-term to long-term investing;
- Shift the priority from advancing the private interests of the few to advancing the individual and community interests of all; and
- Reallocate resources from supporting institutions of domination to meeting the needs of people, community, and nature.
We have enormous potential to improve the lives of all by reallocating resources from military to health care and environmental regeneration, from automobiles to public transportation, from investing in suburban sprawl to investing in compact communities, from advertising to education, from financial speculation to productive investment in local entrepreneurship, and from providing extravagant luxuries for the very wealthy to providing basic essentials for everyone.
The champions of Empire dismiss any such reordering of priorities on the ground that it will bring economic disaster and unbearable hardship. They ignore the simple fact that those results are already the lot of roughly half our fellow humans. The proposed reordering can avoid the spread of hardship and begin to alleviate the existing suffering.
Economic reallocation and democratization are no longer simply moral issues. They are imperatives of human survival and must replace economic growth and the pursuit of financial gain as the defining purpose of economic life.
The work of bringing forth a new economy devoted to serving the needs of our children, families, communities, and natural environments begins with building public awareness that there is an Earth Community prosperity story that offers a vision of hope and possibility for a positive future. Although a story so contrary to the prevailing Empire story is likely to be greeted with initial skepticism, the Earth Community prosperity story enjoys the ultimate advantage because it expresses the truth most of us recognize in our hearts: if our children, families, communities, and natural systems are healthy, we are prosperous. Whether conventional financial indicators like GDP or the Dow Jones stock index rise or fall is irrelevant.
Rules for Conserving and Sharing
To get from where we are to where we need to go we must recognize that the market is an essential and beneficial institution for allocating resources in response to individual choices. But it is beneficial only so long as it operates by rules that maintain equity and competition and require players to internalize the social and environmental costs of their choices. And it is not sacred. Without responsible governmental oversight, the market can lead to highly destructive social pathology.
By its nature, the market creates winners and losers. Furthermore, the winners are often those most skilled in finding ways to pass social and environmental costs onto others. The winners increase their share of the resource pie, which increases their economic and political power to shape markets and rules to improve their future prospects. The result is a self-reinforcing spiral of increasing concentration of wealth and power. This supports the unjust hoarding and profligate consumption of resources by a privileged class. In an increasingly environmentally constrained world, learning to conserve and share resources is an essential requirement of social order and well-being.
Even with adequate regulation to minimize social and environmental abuse, the health of a market system also requires public intervention to recycle financial capital continuously from winners to losers. In the absence of such recycling, financial wealth and power accumulate in perpetuity, increasing the fortunes of a few family dynasties at the expense of democracy, justice, and social stability.
Recycling financial wealth to maintain a democratic allocation of access to real resources is, of course, totally contrary to the self-serving logic of corporate capitalism. Yet it is essential to democracy and social health, both of which depend on an equitable distribution of power, and an essential function of democratic government.
Community-based Economics
From a system-design perspective, a healthy society must either eliminate profit, interest, and for-profit corporations altogether, or use the taxing and regulatory powers of publicly accountable democratic governments to strictly limit concentrations of economic power and prevent the winners from passing the costs of their success onto the losers. This creates yet another system design issue. As government becomes larger and more powerful, it almost inevitably becomes less accountable and more prone to corruption.
Paul Hawken has correctly observed that big business creates the need for big government to constrain excesses and clean up the messes. To maintain equity and secure the internalization of costs, democratically accountable government power must exceed the power of exclusive private economic interests. The smaller the concentrations of economic power, the smaller government can be and still maintain essential balance and integrity in the society.
There will be less need for a strong governmental hand to the extent that we are successful in eliminating sociopathic institutional forms, making community-based economies the norm, and creating a public consensus that predatory economic behavior now taken for granted as “just human nature” is actually aberrant and immoral. Responsible citizenship may then become the expected business norm. There will always be a need, however, for rules and governmental oversight to deal with what hopefully will be a declining number of sociopathic individuals and institutions who seek to profit at public expense.
Equalizing economic power and rooting it locally shifts power to people and community from distant financial markets, global corporations, and national governments. It serves to shift rewards from economic predators to economic producers, strengthens community, encourages individual responsibility, and allows for greater expression of individual choice and creativity.
The Essential Choice
The human species has reached a defining moment of choice between moving ahead on a path to collective self-destruction or joining together in a cooperative effort to navigate a dramatic turn to a new human era. The profound cultural and institutional transformation that is needed goes up against the short-term interests of the world’s most powerful people and institutions. The barriers to what we humans must now achieve are daunting. By any rational calculation, the needed transformation is not politically feasible. Yet it is essential to human survival and prosperity, which means we must set ourselves to the task of figuring out how to make the impossible into the inevitable.
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! His latest book is The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
© 2007 YES! Magazine
Great article! I think that in the West or most of the world now, we are brain-washed to believe that true wealth is amassing more and more money, and a person’s value is based on his/her pocket book. I think we need to start reworking that idea if we are to survive on this planet.
I couldn’t agree more.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
“By any rational calculation, the needed transformation is not politically feasible. Yet it is essential to human survival . . .”
Fidel Castro is correct when hs says it’s “Socialism or Death” and he’s not just talking about Cuba. The contradiction between what’s practical within a system that is killing us and what’s required for our very survival has reached a tipping point. It’s revolution or extinction (or at very least the collapse of civilization). Unless wealth is removed from power it’s all over and it’s later than we think.
“incentive” is a curious word: when applied to the rich, it means promising them more stuff; but when applied to the rest of us, it means threatening to take stuff away.
This was an interesting article, but frustrating because it mentions only in passing the one thing at the root of many environmental problems — too many people. Yes, the LPI has decreased since 1970, but the population has nearly doubled in that time, so how could it not? The earth is a finite resource, and barring some sort of techno-miracle, we are stuck with this one planet beyond the forseeable future (if you don’t buy this, try some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what it would cost to move a substantial population off-world, even if we allow for very generous technological advances. The answers are sobering). Finite resources + growth = eventual extinction. Since we can really change the game, our best strategy is to lose as slowly as possible, which implies conservation, but also limitations in the number of consumers. I remember Earth Day 1 well enough to recall that population growth was a major issue, but it seems to have vanished from the discussion among most environmentalists. Why? Without responding to our own numbers, no solution to a sustainable economy is possible, regardless of whether that economy is socialist, free-market, or something else.
I am going to send this piece to everybody I know, I don’t care if they get offended.
Those with a natural immunity to Dysfunctional Greed Disorder never fail to take into account the fact that the desire to hoard more and more wealth just for wealth’s sake, and the willingness to do “whatever it takes” to hoard said wealth is an addiction just as powerful as alcohol, gambling or cigarettes. No amount of lofty words and visions of hope will ever take hold until someone invents Prozac for Greed.
David Korten writes:
There will be less need for a strong governmental hand to the extent that we are successful in eliminating sociopathic institutional forms, making community-based economies the norm, and creating a public consensus that predatory economic behavior now taken for granted as “just human nature” is actually aberrant and immoral. Responsible citizenship may then become the expected business norm. There will always be a need, however, for rules and governmental oversight to deal with what hopefully will be a declining number of sociopathic individuals and institutions who seek to profit at public expense.
Equalizing economic power and rooting it locally shifts power to people and community from distant financial markets, global corporations, and national governments. It serves to shift rewards from economic predators to economic producers, strengthens community, encourages individual responsibility, and allows for greater expression of individual choice and creativity
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This is truly the insolvable dilemma of politics–how to keep corrupting power from transferring from one institution to another.
Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian cooperative circles as well as other governmental reforms seems to be pointing in this direction. Unfortunately Hugo has found it necessary to seek constitutional reform to allow him to maintain the presidency continually to insure that the momentum begun continues.
I think Hugo’s heart is in the right place but one must always wonder what sort of leader will succeed him and possibly misuse such power.
Viva la revolution’, power to the people!
It is very difficult to change from an Empire prosperity country into one of Community-based Economics, “By any rational calculation, the needed transformation is not politically feasible”…
It sounds as the Socialism of the 21st century project in Venezuela though.
With the entrenched capitalist greed running everything in the US those ideals seem impossible, but we must start somewhere, is there any commune or plans to establish one in North-America and run it based on Community-based Economics ?
The ’sea change’ is beginning. Another supporter of what David is talking about is Riane Eisler’s new work, Real Wealth of Nations.
Also, check out this blog www.seachangetoday.com
We can do this….
David Korten is a great economist, author, lecturer, and President of the People-Centered Development Forum. His most popular book is “When Corporations Rule the World”. All progressives should become familiar with this guy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten
More material about him and some of his Work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten#External_links
I hope Mr. Korten reads these comments. Bravo! It’s great to read that some of the ideas that my friends and family and I have been chewing over for the past several years are coming to the level that I hope Korten’s ideas are reaching. I, too, will share this essay with people I know. I wonder how long it will be before these ideas make it onto political party platforms? My experience so far says 20 to 30 years, but since the internet has speeded things up a bit, I will keep my fingers crossed that it will be much sooner.
Another Good Idea essay… long on theory and short on technique.
There are plenty of people, like me, who would like to shift to a more sustainable way-of-life, but we’re entangled with debt and obligations that make this a daunting prospect.
Should I buy a Prius or pay my wife’s medical bills? Should I trade my 30-minute commute for a job I can walk to (and a pay cut) or send my kid to college?
At this point, it takes money to enjoy a life-affirming lifestyle.
I think a lot of people are willing, but we don’t know how to jump off the treadmill without getting hurt.
Great article!
In the summer of 1967 I moved to San Francisco, dropping out of college for awhile to “find myself.” I had two suitcases, one half full of clothes and the other full of books and a few treasured records. I simply didn’t need any more than that to live my life.
Now, forty years later, I am moving back to California with my husband and children. Yikes, how on earth did I accumulate all of this stuff? And, more importantly, WHY did I imagine that I needed all of this stuff to create a life for myself and our family? Quite simply, I was brainwashed by the dominant coporate culture! (It slowly creeps in if you are not paying attention.)
We need to keep the corporate message out of the schools, teaching our children, instead, values that can be measured in units of planet, spiritual, physical and psychological health.
jjohnjj ~
Technique is not needed, proselytizing is.
Take simple steps, be conscious of your impact on the earth, lead by example, talk to your friends, neighbors. Instead of buying a new Prius, buy a low mileage used compact car. Buy thrift store clothing. Eat locally grown produce. There are many simple things you can do that add up over time.
This is a paradigm shift at the most basic level of human consciousness, it won’t be simple or fast, but it will happen.
The pendulum must swing back.
Well that is the theory of ‘we should…’ but not how. The details of how this is accomplished seem lost in the persuading that something should be done and ‘we should…’.
He did mention go local (while saying we should… get off multi-nationals) but … not the process of how to do so.
When once in the ancient sixties, health foods and organic were hippie stuff. Progressives of the hippie persuasion, whom later became the aging long haired lawyers, business’ers and doctors of today, as students and smart young people, did unheard of things like organizing food co-ops to save money on then very expensive and harder to find organic foods). Some of these food and retail co-ops became highly successful operations worth millions.
Small villages in rural areas in other countries form similar buying collectives and run a local co-op etc. Once small fasrmers in this country belonged to Granges.
To go local as this article hopes for… the author suggests the altruistic conversion of capitalist systems. A kind of voluntary shift from raw capitalism to a social utopia. Um… that might take a while… and we don’t have the time.
We need to make capitalism green..not just money. Profits need to be regulated so as to make them green. Charge an exxon for it’s overall carbon footprint responsibility and it will seek green profits instead of oil profits.
Much as the thought pains me, I much rather see a mega giant like exxon charge me outrageous sums for energy produced by exxon owned windmills stretching across farms and dairy pastures as well their vast solar collecting facillities in empty deserts, than pay them outrageous sums for planet killing oil and fuel.
With the aid of the internet, a whole lot of little communities online… can represent and be accessed by thousands of small towns, hamlets, villages and communities all over the world. Were they to form virtual Granges and buying networks or on-line co-ops, a Wikipedia of commercial interaction to maximize the potential buying power, mutual markets for local products (hey sending an e-mail from Sitka is no different from sending it across town or across the street.
The virtual network would have a inherent political potentiality in increased communications betweem the billions of little guys amid the few mega multinationals. Word of mouth political potentiality can motivate corporations to … choose to keep their customers and if profits means going green and lower profits would result from not going green (because of economic blowback to an unpopular corporation)… then a corporation will.
Trying to change capitalism into saintliness …may take awhile. Forcing corporations to sell green so we can buy green is faster and would accomplish much. Say if a company found that it was easier to make money by building windmills, the internet and the neo-grange online community might find customers for them. Like that dairy farmer who would love windmills paying into saving the family farm and since the grazing cows don’t mind… “it’s just common sense”. If he could.
The local community when offered an open free access (like Wikipedia) to a NEO-GRANGE it could indeed provide a multi-national competition of ‘locals’ … to vie with multinational corporations. The internet can provide the framework for localizing capitalism but I think making capitalism go green is more achievable than making it disappear.
There is nothing wrong with making a profit helping to save the world… the wrong is in making a profit from something which hurts the world. Make capitalism make its green $$$ …from going green.
In the end …green $$$ is green $$$ to a corporation… they really don’t care how they make it. If going green is what it takes to make the big $$$ green… then corporations will give going green… a green light.
If an internet Wiki style ‘multi-national of local communities’ connected markets and suppliers, local communities could…um…localize their overall capitalism potential and compete as a part of something with multinational effective power.
Make capitalism have a green profits… and we survive. Forget trying to change a capitalist into a socialist. It just confuses them. If you want to change the heart of a capitalist(and the destructive aspects of corporations and their rapacious power) then you have to go through their soul - their wallets.
Make profits green… it’ll save us and the planet… and even capitalism. If the money is in going green… then the greedy go green… a sane and constructive (not destructive) capitalism wouldn’t be that bad!
I posted earlier CD info about David Korten — glad to see his article here.
Best thing about K’s ideas: his economic models don’t call for ’state socialism’ and all the suffocating, prone-to-corruption centralized government power that system entails.
Instead he models a human-scale, people-accountable economic system that retains many ‘individual initiative’ aspects of capitalism while removing legal & institutional roadblocks to communitarian forms of investment and development.
Corporate charter law reform (via poitical action) is, I think, an implicit pre-condition for his model to come alive on a large scale. In any case, Korten fully understands that the world-wrecking nature of the present economic system is largely enabled by current charter law (written at the state legislative level.)
His ideas/models are as practical & ethically enlightened as any demmocratic progressive could hope for in the current age. If the present criminal system is finally brought down non-violently by people power, it’ll be by some version of the organic principles Korten illuminates.
Progresives need familiarity with these principles if we’re ever to do more than just verbally execrate today’s ruling ghouls and sociopaths.
While I laud Mr Korten ideas I would ask him and anyone else on this blog how can this philosopy succeed when the very people who are resonsibile for the mess the planet is in would embrace this philosopy about as quickly as they would go on a street corner and start passing out their wealth.
If you look at history of civilizations where the relationships between and the haves and the have nots has gotten out of balance, the change always comes from the bottom. In other words a revolution.
The French Revolution and our own American Revolution easily come to mind.
The problem here in the US is that most of the American people don’t realize there is a problem.
There are rich the haves the 1% of the population and there are the poor the have nots who comprise some % who live below a magic poverty line. I’m not sure what it is but for sake of discussion lets say is is 20%. Then there are the other 79% who I guess are neither, but with their big mortgages, 2-3 cars, and large consumer credit card debt and little or no savings live comfortable knowing at least they are not in the have no category. So as long as the official have nots are such a small number there is little chance of a revolution and uprising from the bottom.
The problem with the scenario I described above is that most of the people in the “middle class” as we so fondly call it do not realize how close they are to being in in poverty, because maybe their standard of living is higher than those living in poverty
but their ability to stay there is dependent on a whole lot of things not under their control like the ability to say employed. I believe the savings rate “for a rainy day” in this country is either zero o in the negative. So what happens when some one is laid off? It is common knowledge that it could take several months to find another even in times of low unemployment. So how do people survive when there are no 4-6 month reserve of “rainy days funds”? Need I go on you get the picture.
So how many people have to fall into poverty before enough of them rise up and takes the riches back and give them to the poor kind of like Robin Hood? I don’t know, but I can assure you that the vision of the world that Mr. Korten has will never happen as long as there is greed in the world.
Following is a link to an article called Greed…it is a bit long but once you get through it you will understand how greed works to affect and ultimately bring down civilizations. Because my prediction for our civilization called democracy that it has outlived its usefullness and it is only a matter of time before it collapses on itself. How much time??? The mayan calendar stopped at 2012
What will emerge from the ashes? Maybe a world that Mr. Koten envivions. But if you believe that this country can sustain the path that it is on, then you are living with your head stuck in the sand.
Korten’s message is basically the same one that indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers have been harping on for some time, using modern economic jargon. (see www.viacampesina.org ) What good is money if there are no buffalo to hunt, no pure water to drink, no medicines to harvest in the forest or on the prairie, etc…
And yes, my Mapuche friend from what is now referred to as Chile, says that greed is indeed a disease, for which indigenous people have proven medicines, to be taken during cleansing stays in nature with spiritual guides, etc… Greed, indeed, is a medical problem!
To those who believe there is no painless way to get out of the rat race, you are correct, but it doesn’t have to be intolerable pain. I view the work of so many people to recreate local food economies as on the front lines of this re-ordering of our economies. To build a local food economy you have to get outdoors, feel the texture of the soil, have to rebuild community relations between eaters and grower/eaters, have to ignore almost the monetary value of your personal time. But I find that the more time I spend gardening and urban farming, the better I am at maintaining a perspective on what is important to do, and the more interrelated and mutually empowering I become with others around me, and they with me. As we get better at it, new possibilities arise. Now we are opening farmers’ markets in low-income neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, by empowering local young adults to run their own markets, and of course the farmers are helping to subsidize the development of those new markets, bringing in healthy foods where they are least available at prices designed to encourage low-income folk to buy. Step by step, we can create the Earth Economy, right where we are. And we must do it! Jump off that conveyor belt to doom, you might skin your knee, but there will be people to help dust you off and grow the food you can cook for your next meal. Debts, yes, are debilitating entanglements. Declare bankruptsy! Call in Well!
WATCH/LISTEN:
Short Excerpt from D.K’s inspiring and lavishly-illustrated presentation of his new book “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community”. (2 mins)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9137094465741892883
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Korten Keynote on Free Speech TV (53 mins)
http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/contentviewer.php?content_id=1592
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Korten Interview on Free Speech TV
(27 minutes)
http://www.freespeech.org/videodb/index.php?action=detail&video_id=10798&browse=0
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David Korten author of “When Corporations Rule the World” on “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community” at the Veterans for Peace 2006 National Convention in Seattle. (30 mins)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9137094465741892883
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Watch David Korton presentation from the Green Festival in San Francisco (~45 mins)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5255862798390226525&hl=en
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http://www.davidkorten.com
Relevant wisdom from the 6th Century b.c. as writtn by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching:
“When the Great Integrity permeated our lives,
freely galloping horses fertilized the fields.
When the Great Itegrity was lost,
war horses were bred in the countryside.
There is no greater calamity
than acquisitiveness racing out of control.
Only those who know when enough is enough
can ever have enough.”
Signmaker:
When you realize that everyone is your brother, you also realize that everything goes better for when you cooperate with each other. Competition is a huge waste. The USA is a rotten apple - it’s nothing to brag about. We have to move on!
People such as this author are ENDLESSLY pointing out the way things ought to be without pointing out how we get there. CAMPAIGN SPNDING LIMITS is how we get there.
Oh man i really hate those rich people. It’s just so unfair.What? I’ve just been told that even thouh i’m poor i’m rich compared to most people on the planet. Well i’m not going to share what little i have when i still need so much more.Mr Korten i’m sure you have more then you need. Will you give the rest to me?
Gross Domestic Product portrays the total economic production of a society. Averaged over the number of persons in that society, it shows the average material welfare. Needed, however, in addition to the average welfare is a measure of the variability of welfare between persons. I suggest routinely reporting the ratio between, say, the income of the top 20% and the bottom 20%, currently a ratio of more than 10 to 1. Changes in average GDP are not the whole story. We need to know, and be concerned with, the distribution.
I’ve found that social awakening happens through a series of realizations, and each one requires casting off fears.
What if the methodology to reach Korten’s just society does require revolution?
Is that the current something that we’re afraid to talk about?
I rarely see much talk about it, even in a progressive forum such as this one. But more and more of the hands-tied realizations about the state of our world sure do seem to logically point to it, it seems to me.
We the People can incorporate and escape control by other corporations.
logos.9, I grew up in a community where the dairy farmers ALL had windmills!
My old community in NJ ( highest taxed state in the country, when I left it was #4!) was into conservation in the 70’s. ( In fact they have just started running a methane gas powered electric plant,) Isle AU Haut in Maine used to have solar powered electricity, don’t know if they still do because now I can’t afford the mailboat fee to go out there!
I admired 1 particular solar passive house being built in Burlington CO.,, and made that a goal of mine. I thought I would build a 4 unit passive solar house, and rent out 3 to help support me in old age. What happened? Jan. 20, 1981!
WhenI bought a house in Maine, I carried a compass with me; not one of the 20 houses I looked at was situated due east west, to derive maximum benefit from the sun. In the shortest coldest days of the the year, the sun hits the CORNER of the house, instead of shining in the windows.
[This money-serving prosperity story is repeated endlessly by corporate media and taught in economics, business, and public policy courses in our colleges and universities almost as sacred writ. I call it the Empire prosperity story.] For how long Mr. Korten? I’ve picked up a suspician , that this is the case, in recent decades, but don’t recall it in my business dealings with wealthy people prior to the 70’s. or from my Father who was a Wharton School Grad.
I would be really curious to hear how this has happened.
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son:
“The trouble is, everyone is NOT my brother. Hitler was not my brother. Nor Stalin. Nor the religious fanatics who fly planes into buildings and mutilate women’s genitals. They are my enemy, and, if you are supportive of the rights of women, homosexuals, athiests, or religious minorities, they are your enemies too.”
Hmmm…
In my world, one with minimal capitalist control and much like the indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, I believe that all living things are my brothers and sisters. I don’t have enemies because I do not compete with them for resources, popularity, wealth, or anything that would be of harm to others–in as much as is possible. I don’t judge others but find that I disagree with them on many topics.
It is not for me to decide how to act for others, only that I can control MY actions to avoid hurting others or myself, and show TRUE RESPECT for others no matter what their belief or culture, even if I think it may be wrong–according to MY beliefs.
As Americans we sure have come to think of ourselves, since the very beginning of the late 1600’s when Europeans first started swarming to this continent, as the world’s foremost authority on right and wrong for everybody–according to some edict or other of christianity.
Ever notice how those who don’t subscribe to christianity are often demonized as “evil to the core” and MUST be intent on our destruction which makes it right to destroy them and their culture? How f*&%^ed up is that?
I mean, we ARE the CHOSEN ONES…
aren’t we?
“and creating a public consensus that predatory economic behavior now taken for granted as “just human nature” is actually aberrant and immoral.”
I think we’re pretty much already there. The people are getting it.
I don’t think Korten is saying anything new here, but the way he presents it is beautiful.
7TH Son (aka Powerslave)
“The trouble is, everyone is NOT my brother. Hitler was not my brother. Nor Stalin.”
I don’t think everyone HAS to be your brother in a socialist democracy, but not everyone has to be your enemy either. You don’t have to like everyone you meet. I’m sure there will be nasties and sociopaths walking around until the very end of time.
“Nor the religious fanatics who fly planes into buildings and mutilate women’s genitals. They are my enemy, and, if you are supportive of the rights of women, homosexuals, athiests, or religious minorities, they are your enemies too.”
What about the religious fanatics who want women to remain barefoot, pregnant, and homebound? Or the ones that want religion to prevail over science in the classroom and the gov’t?
Osama Bin Laden might not be my pal either, but unless we change our policies abroad, we’ll just see more and more like him. And bombing the hell out of them will only anger them all the more.
“Eventually I came to realize that conventional economic growth indicators rarely measure growth in human prosperity. Rather, they measure the rate at which the rich are expropriating the living resources of the planet and converting them to products destined for a garbage dump after a brief useful life.”
Economic growth indicators were never meant to measure human prosperity! They simply exist to fool the majority into believing that if they don’t have a job where they are earning enough money to support their family, there must be something wrong with them.
Economic growth indicators are used to measure the impact they might have on the markets. And since the goal of capitol “markets” is to create wealth, you would have to be demented to believe that this data hasn’t intentionally been twisted or distorted by the “evil” forces of predatory opportunists. Just take a look at the sub-prime loan market; that alone should validate the evil forces at work in society.
“The human species has reached a defining moment of choice between moving ahead on a path to collective self-destruction or joining together in a cooperative effort to navigate a dramatic turn to a new human era. The profound cultural and institutional transformation that is needed goes up against the short-term interests of the world’s most powerful people and institutions.”
If you’re tired of the bullshit, as most of us are and have been for decades, then it’s time to join forces with THE WORLD JUSTICE PROJECT: http://www.abanet.org/wjp/home.html
Korten is right, of course, but I’ve been hearing many such pleas to return to some form of sanity or risk self-annihilation for about 30 years. Corporate capitalism has only gained in strength and ruthlessnes since then and we’re effectively doing nothing to stop it because it’s our religion. Not mine, but this culture’s religion. We fucking worship money and won’t hear of any serious challenges to its absolute rule over our society, our way of life, our daily lives. The fact that the “top” 2% own 51% of the wealth and the “bottom” 50% own 1%–all this has been more or less the case for decades and nobody really cares, except the predictable handful of us on the disaffected left who are summarily dismissed by 90% who own maybe 10% of everything. The top 2% never even hear about our alleged existence. Besides, Marx, who is the devil incarnate for 99% of Americans, was saying all this and more 150 years ago. So was Bakunin, William Morris, Kropotkin and hundreds of others, back in antiquity when it was somehow OK to actually accuse capitalism of all the social ills and injustices that have never left us, not for a moment. Those were the days. People even got together in meeting halls and vented, and then went out and did things. Now we type on keyboards.
Building small community-centered economies is a GREAT idea, but the powers that be won’t permit it. Just ask their bankers. Overthrow them all, somehow; nonviolence is nice and best, but survival may call for alternative strategies.
the challenge, in short, is to identify and extract the aspects of capitalism that are beyond economic darwinism.
along these lines, plz consider a paper I wrote called “fractional reserve banking as economic
parasitism”
http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wpawuwpma/0203005.htm
endorsed by two phd economists. printed in nexus
magazine, 60k world circulation. #1 top downloaded
economics paper. used by economics
teacher in australia as standard classroom material.
more info on request.
recent supporting material: “confessions of an economic hit man”
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251
Good article, from the heart.
Who was it, Buddah, that said the cause of our suffering is that we are hanging on too much? Or else we are trying with all our might to force our camels through the eye of a needle. As to our brothers, Adolph and Joseph, I think it was emperor Marcus Aurelius that wrote (Meditations) that even the worst of people are part of the devine.
I think we would all be much better off without worshiping punishment and angry gods and valuing compassion and non-judgemental understanding instead.
But what does this fool know? Only that Heaven and Hell, Satan and the Devine are all right here before us (or within us) but we don’t see. I can hear the gods laughing.
An outstanding article.
The only wealthy person is the one who realizes they have eneough. To a large extent, most of the problems in the world are caused by our incorrect belief that increased material/financial gain is the sole purpose for life and the source of happiness. This is patently untrue.
Signmaker says he wants money so he can retire and watch films. What if he invested in people instead? A circle of people who would gladly care for him when he is old, in repayment for the kindness and support he earlier provided them. What if he and his friends put on a play together in the park, rather than sitting alone together in a theater?
The needs of 3000 corporations destroyed Chile for a generation when on September 11, 1973, they began the war against the democracy of Salvador Allende’s government. Families lost 30,000-40,000 killed and torture ruled the day.
The needs of 3000 corporations are biting the hands that feed them by destroying the American worker and the American family.
This September 11th, let us come together and denounce again the actions of American exploitation at home and abroad. Let’s end poverty in the USA by supporting workers and worker’s rights
Before ‘modern’ criminal governments developed and monopolized hi-tech weaponry, abused citizenrys occasionally had a fair chance of using roughly matched weaponry to smash their elitist rulers and — sometimes– gain more humane governing systems.
Today, a violent citizen revolution in the US has no chance of useful success. Not just because of quantum imbalances in government vs citizen weaponry, but also because too many US citizens are already so deeply hypnotized, they can’t even do, as yet, something far more easy than violent revolution: Namely, simply confront the blatant rottenness in their political system and demand halfway-honest candidates, and an end to money buying-off elections.
And even if more outrages and worse personal sufferings somehow did make a majority of US average citizens ready for violent revolution anytime soon, it’d be mostly rifles and handguns against B-2 bombers, theatre nukes, and everything else the DOD and a robotically-loyal military has in store for anyone who tries to storm the gates of privilege & power.
But the one thing our durable core of tyrants and armed guards can’t control nearly as easily, is grass-roots, bottom-up reform (a toe-hold for which, might be achievable when the worst of the present puppets of capital privilege are swept from office in 2008 — replaced by only slightly-less corrupt Dems, true, but nonetheless sufficiently-less corrupt to maybe allow a peoples movement to flex muscle — if it’s organized enough to get a toe thru a crack in the gate.)
And yes of course the behind-the-scenes oligarchs will still be there, doing their systematic utmost to thwart and crush any genuine bottom-up reforms. It’s delusional to think it’ll be easy, but it’s also delusional to think it’s automatically impossible.
A non-violent cognitive revolution in the US, starting out as (and maybe remaining for a while) a progressive reform movement, wouldn’t necessarily need huge #’s of people in the beginning, to start undercutting some of tyranny’s crucial pylons . A conscious, co-ordinated national core of die-hard citizen progressives, helped by halfway decent Dems/progs in congress, could set several legal changes in motion, widening citizen economic empowerments and undercutting the power of corporate america to freely buy-off future elections, set policy, destroy themselves and us in the process.
Korten, for one, best details reform logistics in his book, When Corporations Rule the World - and for godssake good angry people, here, should at least read his and smiliar works before saying ‘nothing can be done.’
True enough, US society, as it is presently, is too far gone for rescue. There is now massive Greed(even by the poor), massive historical ignorance, massive values hypocrisy, massive appetitive decadence, massive and unconscionable violence toward Nature (and fellow humans), massive intellectual sloth, massive recreational idiocy, extensive racism, massively burgeoning toxic body blubber, and extensive, delusional religious infantilism - all of which mark America as a fatally-diseased culture; at the end of anything that ever resembled its initial promise.
Few here, and certainly not Korten, have any sentimental wish or economic design to rescue the corrupt system that’s yeiled all this horror. Korten’s design (which is hardly his alone), is to use what’s still viable and humanly decent in America’s otherwise-decayed body politic, to build, step by conscious step, first a universally humane economic system from the bottom-up — and from that, an amended set of US political governing rules which, at the very minimum, disallow private or disequalized election money from buying political office or political influence.
True, too, these principles aren’t new; true, too, there’s now no time left to dawdle or handwring any further.
Short of trying to read, think, talk, organize, and build something new and decent — it’s either doomed armed revolution, or worse, resigning yourself to life as a dehumanized servant; serving the needs of even more-dehumanized rulers.
There’s no reason in the world that the bad guys (by which I mean also, the bad parts of human nature), have to win and thus render us humans a degenerate species at best - or an extinct species at worst.
What I make myself do: Read, think, discuss, organize, and most importantly act personally to create in the outer world (beyond mere websites) the better world I know is possible.
And when I get completely disgusted and tired with all of it, I let myself fully feel this final emotion: An anguish at knowing the beautiful human promise I see in my kids is gonna be squashed in any world run by monsters like Bush.
(This is from another post that i think is relavent to this article, so i hope nobody minds me re-posting it, Ken - http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/27/3433/)
**********************
I’ve re-read some of these posts because i very much enjoyed this conversation. I think one thing MtnGoat said previously bears repeating:
(MtnGoat: 8/28 - 1:36 pm)
** The ship gots to be turned, and done so by using the most long term and wide ranging method which doesn’t create it’s own, justifiable resistance..the personal choice and conviction of each person to *choose* to act in ways that turn the ship in their own lives. The aggregate action in service of this, when augmented by the systemic, holistic synergy of a majority doing it for their own beliefs, would have a massive and unstoppable impact, to which no one could legitimately object because it would not involve coercion of those who do not agree. **
I concur. The only slight difference i’d prefer (and it is kind of a semantical difference) is rather than choosing based on “beliefs”, individuals chose based on “recognition”. I prefer the term recognition because sometimes folks have a tendency to get “married” to a belief and then they choose not to contemplate anything that threatens the “belief”. Then learning stops. In contrast, for things that are “recognized”, it is understood that the recognition can and most likely will evolve into something different as one continues to learn.
It almost seems as if there can be a “snowball” effect both bottom-up and top-down, and as it becomes more evident that caring individuals working together can “turn the ship around” more and more will likely choose to get on board. Money will NOT be the motivation, and thank goodness for that.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
******************************
I’d lastly like to add that I have read several of David Korten’s books, and I greatly appreciate the ideas he has compiled and put forth…reading his books was truly an enlightening experience for me….
Thank-you David Korten.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
Thank you DH. Finally… an Article that points out clearly, that until the Fundamental Assumptions of this INSANELY Destructive Economic “System” are clearly listed AND countered, nothing is ever going to get any better. Indeed, we are - collectively - on the fast track to total ruination. And, we are all guilty to the extent that we participate in it.
Time to start extracting ourselves.
there i go, dreaming again. good article.
Amidst the perpetual frustration (and comments thus) we all feel about HOW to implement these, or any, good and alternative ideas, something obvious comes to mind. The National Initiative. Of course, this is the movement/ability to empower the people to vote on the laws and policies of OUR own government. Yet, there don’t seem to be any ‘connect the dots’ comments about it here (sorry if I missed any).
It seems such an obvious connect. If people truly want to change things, and not just talk, why not promote, promote, and promote the National Initiative and then promote it some more?
Let me briefly elaborate; While big business, corporate power, the multi-nationals, etc. may be behind the madness, they are still dependent (to varying degrees, we all know) upon the LAWS. Sure, they break them and find ways around them, but more importantly, they influence legislation. The corporate powers are essentially the ones WRITING the laws.
If the people want to take back/gain for once true freedom, re-writing bad and protecting good laws is a very big key. And it could happen quickly, another important factor.
BUT, short of the people writing the laws, as long as there are large corporate powers, the laws will not change without long and drawn out struggles, perhaps even violent revolution. The National Initiative is a relatively fast and non violent revolution that has bigger teeth than any other ideas I have seen floating around at all.
Please someone disagree if this is not correct. Please. (and it may not be correct and i may just be stupid, but ….) anyone?
If we want to disempower the powers that be, what better way?
I’m not sure where this quote comes from, but I have it hanging on the door of my office at work:
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish as been caught, then you will find out that money cannot be eaten.”
Like many other posters here, I find Korten’s article to be quite wonderful in its assessment and exploration of the current ecomonic situation, but I found little in the way of solutions. This is not the “best of all possible worlds,” and surely market values and capitalism are not the best or all possible ecomomic principles, but I really don’t know how the power structure can be overturned. My philosophy, as I have written many times before on this site and others, is to “cultivate your own garden.”
It’s important to develop personal life styles that don’t depend on shopping at Walmart, buying food that is shipped from one end of the country to the other - or from one side of the globe to the other, or being sucked into the culture of planned obsolescence. Plant a garden, recycle, find recreational activities that are life-affirming and healthy, try to be a good example to others, and attempt to live in a way that supports the earth as well as humanity.
I have grave doubts as to whether this approach will make very substantial changes, but it seems better than the alternative. I have not seen any ideas from even the most eloquent writers or speakers that actually explore broad, viable solutions to the world’s economic and social ills. Perhaps there really aren’t any.
LeeAnnG says;
“I have not seen any ideas from even the most eloquent writers or speakers that actually explore broad, viable solutions to the world’s economic and social ills. Perhaps there really aren’t any.”
As I said, what seems so troubling is the lack of a HOW. If the people could legislate the law, the people WOULD vote to de-fund the war, keep the internet free, not raise postal rates for smaller print sources, not allow for multi-national corporate control based laws, enact campaign reform, enact gun control, create anti-trust or stop monopolization, enact environmental protections and do what must be done on MOST things.
The National Initiative is quite simple. Maybe that’s the problem, it’s too obvious.
Good points logos.nine. Some forget that the huge expenses in the military-industrial complex do not only feed and empower the corrupt, but also have the purpose of developing technology that can provide a small ruling group with total control over the planet. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and so even if some of the US power elites are humanistic and well-meaning, once they have the power to ruthlessly control the rest of the human population, it is virtually inevitable that they will set out to do so.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) spends money on devices that can incapacitate demonstrators without killing them, flying devices the size of an insect that can produce video and audio signals to be picked up by the spying agency, completely automated robotic killing machines, and much, much more.
The predatory elites understand the perspectives and arguments of someone like Korten, and their fear that the majority may someday catch on motivates them to speed up the process of enabling total information control and police and military power. They know we can all cooperate to produce a world where virtually every human has a decent standard of living, stability, health care, education, and satisfying employment, but they prefer to gamble the future of the human race in order to attain a world where the few (them) have extreme wealth and power and the many are but subservient powerless slaves.
It is extremely naive to expect such predatory elites to alter their behavior in response to “enlightenment” by exposure to Korten or Korten-like arguments, and to abandon their “Empire prosperity story” (which I have always called their “free market religion”).
kivals.
I’d sum it up this way: “learn or die”
Even “predatory elites” do not want to die.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
David Korten- the time to call for a new party based the ideas of your article is NOW.
Time is running out. Time is needed to organize, educate, acquire media access, put people on the ballot, etc.
It is a long process, well beyond November 2008, but there is no other choice. Procrastination is death.
How about this. Here is an idea.
Incorporate mirrors in the design of solar panels. The mirrors can both bounce light onto the panels and reflect light back out. More solar energy less global warming. Find out if the scale of this can be of significant magnitude to make a difference.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
Or how about this.
Battery banks.
Every neighborhood has their own. People charge the batteries (using solar, wind, Dynamo, whatever they want), and then they “deposit” charged batteries into the neighborhood battery bank.
This is a very “appropriate” scale. Plus it is decentralized.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
Here is another one. Neighborhood’s run their own wastewater treatment operations and are responsible for thier own trash disposal. This will sure help folks learn a bit more about “waste” in general. Plus, there are all sort of advantages to having your own wastewater treatment plant. If done properly just about everything could be re-used or re-claimed in a different form.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
There are many more “engineering” ideas out there. I think “Appropriate Technology” offers many opportunities.
Signing off for awhile.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
* I support HRes333 - Impeach the VP
Hey, you know what: Just for fun I referenced this discussion on “Wiki” in the “Appropriate Technology” article discussion.
Hey, now I have a “cross-reference”. Hm, wonder if that means a hill of beans. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
And regardless, this is an awesome article, and some of the comments were OK too.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
Ken Hausle,
I am afraid it is all in the odds and who has the power to play them. There are predatory elites who are willing to risk human extinction just to improve the probability that they can have total control (think Dick Cheney). So, from their perspective, they prefer to push the world into a situation with only two alternatives — their total control or human extinction, and they are betting we will choose the first. People like that see little difference between a roughly egalitarian future and extinction, though most of us see little difference between giving them total control and extinction. Therein lies the problem.
kivals - please do not talk to me as if i am a child.
I suspect the pressure is oh so all around the ole dick cheney fella just now. It is squeezing hard, i suspect. I don’t see any attack happening on Iran (>99% propability per my sensibilities).
And now it seems to me that many are starting to think about some better options…..couldn’t have happened sooner…..
Peace,
Ken Hausle
LOGOS NINE: I totally agree with and identify with your impassioned posting. There are a few things worth mentioning. Out of the great depression came programs that were designed to spread the wealth (and jobs) around. It’s pretty clear the US is in for another great depression out of which again I PREDICT there will be programs that approach a greater egalitarian design. SECOND: There are 2 huge factors that will make the upcoming paradigm change vaster and deeper than any of its historical counterparts. The factors include EARTH changes based on climate destabilization (and this could be related to the “end of oil,” too) AND the spiritual understanding that an age-phase transition has been reached. Just as we mark our calendar year in synch with the earth’s (annual) journey around the sun, there are very profound cycles embedded into time itself, for ours is a universe based upon cosmic clockworks, the orbital PLAN of planetary bodies, each infused with energetic imprints we do not have the wit to understand.
This planet tolerates enormous misery and suffering: slavery, various wars, holocaust, taking of indigenous lands through force, war on witches/women by the church, etc. It’s a shame that the cycles of transition appear to be baptized by and through the blood of innocents. For those who are caught up in the bloodbath of Iraq, perhaps they are the martyrs of our age, those that are laying down their lives that this planet never succumb to a worship of violence to the degree that character has been inculcated into our race for too many generations. Not only does this approach solve nothing and lead to evident blowback, which is another way of validating the Biblical adage that “the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the sons,” it now literally has driven mankind to the very cusp of survival. IF Bush, the never elected, and hardly legitimized by virtue of a record of lies upon lies and broken bodies laid everywhere to waste, is allowed to further this carnage into Iran, the KARMIC reverberations for our nation will be severe. VERY severe. This mad man must be stopped. I wish the military could enact a coup, recognize their true allegiance is to PROTECT the nation, not summon it’s destiny into further chaos, ruin and despair. Also, it’s time for those with weapons (as if they can overcome their military brain-washed programming) to recognize there IS no enemy, that, too, is a fiction. What price are they to pay with bodies rendered toxic waste dumps from their own exposure to DU in pursuit of a boogyman terrorist LIE! I’m sure others on this site feel as I do, we have to pinch ourselves: Can this REALLY be happening? Can civilized persons really be enabling this? Can thinking men/women think so wrongly? Sure, media plays a role, as do twisted religions, and sports, and the whole “gotta win” superficial macho conditioning. A wake-up call is brewing!
Ken Hausle,
Sorry if I offended. However, the only reason I would not take a bet with regard to Cheney bombing Iran is that I never want to profit from others’ misery.
KIVALS: The celestial portents show enormous tension between human rights and the controls of the authoritarians, particularly from 2010-2016. This will be a hugely trying phase for mankind as the world’s workers labor against the new tyranny of the pharaohs this time come AS the global corporate masters. In 2020 there is a configuration that speaks to me of a true world coalition of ordinary people that replaces these power-bastions. In other words there IS light in the tunnel. The bad news… I don’t see the egalitarian trends coming into dominion until around 2020, so we do have years of genuine tribulation between now and then. How many survive? Will there be war over oil, water or human rights? Will DU spread cancer rates? Will earth changes take many lives? All of these probabilities fall into a calculus NO prediction can entirely embrace. I can see the general ARC of those greater trends that have always acted as a mirror to the human condition.
Siouxrose,
I hope you are right.
All of the countries that enjoy a higher standard of living than the US (i.e. all of northern Europe, Canada) have achieved this to some degree. We really only have 2 choices - Rein in the Fascists who presently control our government, or become the worlds largest (and most heavily armed) banana republic.
i basically agree with pcsmith.
and sort of “tongue in cheek”, let me say that i ain’t right. Siouxrose may be, but i just don’t even care for the term “right” unless it is directional. Too much word-confusion. Too much talking…..
Peace,
Ken Hausle
Anyhow, why do you think the right-handed : left-handed ratio is something around 9:1 ? (I’m not sure about the exact ratio, but lets accept that there are a bunch more right-handed folks than left-handed folks)
I think it has something to do with the brain, and could even have something to do with an ancient struggle for dominance within a small group. I don’t know - who really cares unless it is going to inform how we can go forward and work together with each other. That is the main thing isn’t it?
Peace,
Ken Hausle
A start end the so called public school system
PORTLAND (AP) — Income levels are falling in Maine, even as they are rising nationally. That’s according to new Census Bureau data released Tuesday.
The Census Bureau says the median household income in Maine fell 1.6 percent from 2005 to 2006, to less than $43,000.
At the same time, the national median household income rose 1.6 percent. The national median is about $5,000 higher than in Maine.
Maryland led the country with a median household income of more than $65,000. Mississippi had the lowest, at less than $35,000.
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Excellent article on all levels. I think there are principally two things that make people crazy - sex and money. There is never “enough” of either if we get stuck in focusing on getting more of those two things. Maybe if we focus on giving, not getting, on sharing rather than on amassing, on realizing that our true wealth exists in each other, we’d stand a better chance of experiencing joy, fulfillment, self-expression and health on all levels. “Stuff” isn’t wealth; it’s just stuff. And trying to get more of it does more harm than good to all of us. I’m not speaking theoretically and I don’t have a lot of stuff - I learned this the hard way, and my life is richer in the things that matter as a result; I am happier and more joyful - and I’m no kid; it took a while to recognize that what I was chasing down was killing me. Not trying to preach or pontificate here, just sharing what I’ve learned in a fairly long life.
My post here is no doubt too long again.
Still, several posters want to hear some ’specifics’ about what average citizens can do, right now, to affect actions and legal status of corporations; or to create NPO state chartered ‘citizen capital’ banks, and a whole range of other things short of violent revolution or personal resignation..
I’ll try to keep each posting as little-wordy as possible, and break-up the various legal/political info into subsequent postings - assuming anyone’s interested..
As a former state legislator, I have some direct experience in using these areas of law in MT, and also worked on the citizen effort in CA to de-certify the charter of UNOCAL Corp (for a host of crimes.) The UNOCAL challenge was the first one undertaken by petitioning citizens since the 1940’s, anywhere in the country. For more info on the UNOCAL challenge, and on how this effort turned-out, do a Google search using any combination of relevant key search terms.
The actual but little-known powers that state statutes allow to average citizens surprises many progressive dissidents, once they learn about it. The political challenge of course is to elect enough progressives to a state legislature who’re willing use these basic legal principles to challenge corrupted power. This is an area of law that’s lain dormant for half a century until revived by AFD founder, Ronnie Dugger. Citizens’s ability to actualize these legal potentials at state levels, where government is measureably closer to the people, is no more a fantasy than any other state-level political effort.
More recently, Elliot Spitzer, as NY Attorney General, used NY’s version of corporate charter law challenge to prosecute and convict numerous Wall Street & NY corporate-based criminals whom Bush’s regulatory officials failed to prosecute at the federal level. Charter challenges to the corps these criminal worked for are still in litigation.
Some specifics:
PROGRESSIVE GOAL #1
Organize to re-draw your state’s corporate chartering statutes to ensure that charter issuances and renewals are accountable to citizen review boards; provide for state-financed popular election of review board members.
LEGAL BACKGROUND:
All US-based corps are chartered in one state or another, via articles of incorporation, in the name of “the people” (i.e., the sovereign electors) of that state.
All 50 states have statutory laws (state codes) that regulate — and attorneys general that enforce in the name of the people of that state — regulatory oversight of the corp’s internal governance, public performance, public benefit, financial transactions, etc. Such regs apply to both for-profit and not-for-profit corps.
The corporate laws of all 50 states, even as they stand now, contain basically-identical provisions to allow any individual citizen or group[s] of petitioning citizens to legally challenge the issuance of, or the subsequent annual renewal of, any corporate charter which,if successful, result in either dissolution of the corp and public confiscation of its assets, or other remedies ordered by judicial decrees in consultation with petitioning citizens’ reps.
I’ll post more later, if there are any interested reponses here. But before anybody pooh-pooh’s what I’ve written so far, as ‘too complex,’ ‘too slow a process,’ or ’subject to the same old money-bought election problems,’ I advise doing Online searches of this subject, and reading synopses of Korten’s newer books.
The UNOCAL challenge almost succeeded in dissolving that corp’s charter, and new efforts are underway to make it succeed in the nex petitiont round.
We all want quick reform. But reform approaches like this (and like womens’ suffrage, civil rights, etc.) often have to begin at grass root political levels & and persist upward from there, to the judicial or legislative levels. Initial losses are to be expected (like the UNOCAL challenge.) Sustained citizen efforts, though, especially in NY, where Sptizer is now Governor — and many of the worst corps are chartered — already have some pathways cleared for citizen action, and a citizen-friendly chief exec who’s openly called for citizens to begin mounting such challenges, themselves, by petition demands to NY’s also citizen-friendly Attorney General Cuomo.
This isn’t offered as any kind of deus ex machina for all America’s ills, but it is a potentially powerful tool for starting an organized citizen take-down of seemingly-impregnable corporate control.
Of course i agree with this article.
But before there were corporate empires, there was the Roman empire. And there is the Empire of Patriarchical power known as the ‘church’, which still exists as an empire.
Patriarchy IS empire. And as long as we take our beliefs about who we are as human beings, from patriarchal religions, we will not change the way we percieve reality. We will live in a limited box or system, and right now we need to break out of this, into an infinite universe. That means breaking the mental and emotional bonds that are created by limiting beliefs.
David Korten’s Living Wealth: Better Than Money adds to his long list of contributions and insights. As he and many responders here have acknowledged, “we must set ourselves to the task of figuring out how to make the impossible into the inevitable.”
It is respectfully submitted that Socioeconomic Democracy will allow and encourage the necessary transformation in perspective, showing how the impossible becomes trivial. SeD will significantly reduce or eliminate myriad serious societal problems — simultaneously.
Socioeconomic Democracy is a theoretical model socioeconomic system wherein there exist both some form of Universally Guaranteed Personal Income and some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth limit, with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all participants of society.
Those interested are cordially invited to visit the website of the Center for the Study of Democratic Societies at .
Rob George