David Korten's latest book calls for viewing the Earth as a living organism.
David Korten’s first fame came after he wrote “When Corporations Rule the World,” a 1995 best-seller that criticized the global corporate economy for oppressing less fortunate nations.
Twenty years on, he’s releasing an updated version of the book partly because corporate power has gotten even more concentrated, he said. On the other hand, “We now have massive global resistance movements and massive positive social involvements that are working to rebuild local communities and local economies,” Korten said in a phone interview from his home on Bainbridge Island.
Korten will discuss his ideas about the economy and environment during a presentation at 5 p.m. June 28 at Lower Columbia College. The talk, sponsored by the Interfaith Advocates for Justice, will be in the Health and Science building Room 101.
Korten’s name should be familiar to long-time residents. His family operated a music and appliance store at Commerce Avenue and Broadway in Longview for decades until the store closed in 2000.
After graduating in the top of R.A. Long High School’s class of 1955, Korten left for Stanford University with plans to take over the family business. But once he learned about imbalances in the world’s economy, the college student decided to dedicate his career to helping businesses in developing nations. His younger brother, Bob Korten, ended up managing the store.
David Korten, who turns 78 next week, is the author of more than a dozen books and co-founder of “Yes!” magazine, a national publication that advocates for humanitarian and ecological change.
In addition to the updated version of “When Corporations Rule the World,” Korten’s book “Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth” also was published recently.
That book espouses a philosophy that the Earth is “best understood as a living super-organism,” made up of billions of parts — just as a human body is made up of billions of cells, he said.
“This all creates (an opportunity) for rethinking our framework for Earth” he said. “Rather than an economy to destroy the earth to make money for people who already have all the money they could ever use, we’re beginning to recognize there is a deeper way of understanding ourselves.”
Korten is quick apply this philosophy to the local issue of coal exports.
“We now have an economy devoted to extracting toxins out of the ground primarily to make money for people who already have more money than they need,” he said. And exporting to China supports an economy that is taking away American jobs here and buying up our assets, he said. “It’s both insane and utterly stupid.”
Korten’s earlier works focus on the inequities of the global economic system, years before the term 1 percent became popular to describe the few truly wealthy people in the country.
Korten is disturbed that President Obama and many Democratic members of Congress support “fast track” authority for the president to negotiate trade deals — including the controversial 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“If you look at them more deeply, they are corporate rights agreements,” he said. “They’re not written for people or democracy. They’re written by and for corporate interests.”
Korten acknowledges that most economists don’t share his views — nor does he mince words who disagree with him.
“What we are taught as economics in school and what is preached by most mainstream economists is an ideology that is almost a religion and is totally divorced from reality,” he said. “What passes for economics is totally bogus.”
Another of Korten’s targets is Wall Street and the belief that accumulating money for its own sake is a worthy goal.
“The financial economy of Wall Street has almost morphed into a separate planet where there is no longer any concern for producing anything of value, but creating money and a growth of financial assets out of nothing,” he said.
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