Menhit
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Excerpt from an article by David C Korten: Life after Capitalism | Living Economies Forum
We live in a world being pillaged by the institutions of global capitalism to enrich the few at the expense of the many. It has become more than just a political issue. We have reached the point in human history at which the very survival of civilization and perhaps our species depends on replacing these rogue institutions with institutions supportive of democracy, market economies, and ethical cultures that function in service to life and community. Yes, your heard me right. We must replace the global capitalist economy with democracies and market economies. Now how's that for a radical idea?
For those of us who grew up believing that capitalism is the foundation of democracy, market freedom, and the good life it has been a rude awakening to realize that under capitalism, democracy is for sale to the highest bidder, the market is centrally planned by global mega-corporations larger than most countries, the elimination of jobs and livelihoods is rewarded as an economic virtue, and the destruction of nature and life to make money for the already rich is viewed as progress. Let us speak truth tonight. Global capitalism is not democratic and it systematically violates every principle of a market economy.
Under global capitalism the world is ruled by a global financial casino staffed by faceless bankers, money managers, and hedge fund speculators who operate with a herd mentality that sends exchange rates and stock prices into wild gyrations unrelated to any underlying economic reality. With reckless abandon they make and break national economies, buy and sell corporations, and hire and fire corporate CEOs--holding the most powerful politicians and corporate managers hostage to their interests. When their bets pay off they claim the winnings as their own. When they lose, they run to governments and public institutions to make up their losses with cries that the financial skies will fall if they are forced to suffer the market's discipline.
Contrary to its claims, capitalism's relationship to democracy and the market economy is much the same as the relationship of a cancer to the body whose life energies it expropriates. Cancer is a pathology that occurs when an otherwise healthy cell forgets that it is a part of the body and begins to pursue its own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences for the whole. The growth of the cancerous cells deprives the healthy cells of nourishment and ultimately kills both the body and itself. Capitalism does much the same to the societies it infests.
Another way of characterizing our situation is that we find ourselves unwitting participants in an epic contest between money and life for the soul of humanity. And it comes down to a fairly literal choice as to which we value more--our money or our lives.
The cultural and institutional choices we must now make in the favor of life will require changes of a scope and speed unprecedented in human history. Fortunately, we find ourselves facing this challenge at the very moment in our history at which we have acquired the knowledge, the technology, and the organizational capacity to negotiate the required changes successfully. The main question to be resolved is whether we will find the collective wisdom and the will to act in time.
It is a question that must be resolved individual by individual, community by community, and nation by nation. In some places, citizen movements are already engaging it on a national scale--as in the Philippines, Chile, and Thailand. Just last month I had the privilege of participating in new initiatives emerging in Hungary, Finland, and Norway.
But to my knowledge there is no country in the world in which the process has gained so much momentum as here in Canada in a wide range of initiatives such as alternative budgeting exercises, the Citizen's Agenda and MAI inquiry processes being led by the Council of Canadians, and initiatives of many groups such as the Parkland Institute and the Western Affairs Committee. This momentum gives you a special opportunity for global leadership. It also means you face the special challenge always presented to those who choose to sail in uncharted waters. You have no map and I have no map to offer, but I do hope to leave you with a few useful navigational devices.
At its core, the root cause of our collective crisis is two fold: a failure of our values and a failure of our institutions. We have created a global culture that values money and materialism over life itself. In our pursuit of money we have given the institutions of money--banks, investment houses, financial markets, and publicly traded corporations--the power to rule over life. Recognizing only financial values, accountable only for money's replication, and wholly unmindful of the needs of life, these institutions are wantonly destroying life to make money. It's a bad bargain.
Our flawed choice results in part from our nearly universal failure to distinguish between money and real wealth. An experience I had a few years ago in Malaysia illustrates the distinction I have in mind. I had a brief encounter with the minister responsible for Malaysia's forests. Seeing that I was Western and assuming I was probably an environmentalist, he wasted no time in poking my buttons by explaining to me that Malaysia would be better off once its forests are cleared away and the money from the sale is stashed in banks to earn interest, because the financial returns will be greater. The image flashed into my mind of a barren and lifeless Malaysian landscape populated only by branches of international banks, with their computers faithfully and endlessly compounding the interest on the profits from Malaysia's timber sales. It is a metaphor that sums up all too well the future to which our confusion of money and real wealth is leading us.
The very vocabulary of finance and economics is a world of double speak that obscures such essential distinctions. For example, we use the terms money, capital, assets, and wealth interchangeably, leaving us with no simple means to express the difference between money--a number that by social convention we agree to accept in return for things of real value--and real wealth--which includes such things as trees, food, our labor, fertile land, buildings, machinery, technology--even love and friendship--things that sustain our lives and increase our productive output. It leaves us prone to the potentially fatal error of assuming that when we are making money we are necessarily creating wealth.
Similarly, we politely use the term investor when we speak of the speculators whose gambling destabilizes global financial markets. Indeed we favor them with tax breaks and special protections. Language makes a difference. If we called them by their real names--speculators, gamblers, and thieves, they would be subjects of public outrage--as they should be.
As a medium of exchange, money is one of the most important and useful of human inventions. However, as we become ever more dependent on money to acquire the basic means of daily life, we give over to the institutions and people who control money's creation and allocation the power to decide who among us shall live in prosperity and who shall live in destitution--even suffer premature death. With the virtual elimination of subsistence production the increasing breakdown of community and public safety nets, our modern money system has become possibly the most effective instrument of social control and extraction ever devised by human kind.
We have sparred a lot on this issue.
