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| With David Korten, Green Festival, Seattle, Washington |
David Korten Quotes
In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question.
Demilitarization presents a particularly obvious opportunity to eliminate significant waste of financial and physical resources while simultaneously eliminating one, perhaps the greatest, single cause of human suffering in our modern world. An estimated ten to thirty percent of all global environmental degradation is due to military related activities.
We politely use the term investor when we speak of the speculators whose gambling destabilizes the global market and then because they are investors we favor them with tax breaks and special protection.
Money is not wealth. Money is a number we agree to exchange for things with real value. The very vocabulary of finance and economics is a world of doublespeak that obscures such essential distinctions and in part explains why economists have such a hard time understanding either money or the economy.
Ironically we must conclude that the victory of global capitalism is not a victory of the market as much as it is a victory for central planning. Capitalism has simply shifted the planning function from governments which at least in theory are accountable to all citizens to corporations which are even in theory accountable only to their shareholders.
To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our 'garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.
Living capital, which has the special capacity to continuously regenerate itself, is ultimately the source of all real wealth. To destroy it for money, a simple number with no intrinsic value, is an act of collective insanity -- which makes capitalism a mental, as well as physical pathology.
To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions that honor life, serve life's needs, and restore money to its proper role as servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of species consciousness and function.
The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned by the people whose wellbeing depends on them.
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