Dear friends, We survived y2k! Now that we know nothing much happened, it all seems silly. But who really knew for sure?? I normally hate TV but I must say the coverage of all the celebrations brought tears to my eyes. Everyone connected, everyone there at the same time, everyone appreciating the Eiffel Tower, and indigenous dances, and all the rest. Inspiring. How peaceful and harmonious the world should rightfully be! What diabolical machinations our "leaders" go to in order to create warfare and strife! I wish there was a "Matrix" we could send them all to where they could be happy ruling a make-believe world. Then the rest of us could have a happy and real world. --- H. Springer (see message below) has begun to collect cj postings online. His website is MUCH more convenient that our own list archives for looking over what has been posted. Note that I've added his archive web address to the standard list signature. Many thanks for his efforts! You may also want to check out his main home page: http://www.members.home.net/h-springer/ --- I admire David Korten and am happy to post his speech (second message below). But he just doesn't get it re/capitalism. He seems to think corporations can be influenced to be benign and that capitalism can be regulated into being accountable. He hasn't done the numbers - it just doesn't compute! Reforming capitalism is like reforming cancer. The answer in both cases can only be surgery and removal. And as you all know, this does not mean violent revolution. Korten is right when he says democracy is the answer. But his notion of democracy, and what it should aim for, is insufficiently radical. If anyone knows his address, they might forward this, just in case he might read it. --- I've received some excellent feedback on my article draft. More would be appreciated! A revised closing section will be posted soon. all the best, & love, richard ============================================================================ From: •••@••.••• Date: 29 Dec 1999 20:51:33 -0800 Mime-Version: 1.0 To: •••@••.••• Subject: Re: into it's individual letters and documents hello Richard, I have started to archive the last two months worth of emails at: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/ and will continue to archive them. This will be the permanent home for cyberjournal's email archive and can also easily be linked to. I'm also toying with the idea of adding a site specific search engine later on. cheers, and a happy new year H. Springer *** Thank you for visiting CentrEx Alternative News http://www.members.home.net/h-springer/ *** ============================================================================ Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 11:25:13 -0700 From: Winston Weeks <•••@••.•••> To: "Richard K. Moore" <•••@••.•••> Subject: ....AFTER SEATTLE? By David Korten Reprinted with permission. From YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, P.O. Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. Subscriptions $24/year. 206/842-0216 or 800/937-4451; Fax: 206/842-5208; Email: •••@••.•••; Web: www.futurenet.org SPEECH GIVEN DECEMBER 3, 1999 AT WTO EVENT BY DAVID KORTEN .... ------------------------------------------------------------------ The following is part of a series of commentaries by people associated with YES! magazine and Positive Futures Network on the events unfolding in Seattle at the time of the World Trade Organization's meeting. Taking on the Corporate and Financial Rulers: Our Goal is Political and Economic Democracy -------------------------------------------- Gethsemane Lutheran Church, 199 Stewart Street, Seattle Friday, December 3, 1999 - WTO Week by David C. Korten Despite the scattered violence that has captured so much media attention, for the majority of peple in the streets, this week has been one of the most remarkably inclusive and hopefully significant acts of love, compassion, and solidarity in human history. The new union forged between working people and environmentalists is surely of historic significance. I have great admiration for the courage of the young people who acted here with well-informed commitment, putting their lives and liberty on the line in deeply meaningful and effective acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to assure that our message would finally be heard by those who have closed their eyes, their ears, and their minds to the reality of a world in deep pain. My heart goes out to all of you who have made it happen. We now have a critical opening in the long struggle to create a world that works for all. And we must use it wisely. As I have only a few minutes let's get immediately to the heart of today's subject. Of all the many important issues discussed in Seattle this week, in my mind the most fundamental is democracy. Who will make the rules by which we will live? Will it be people -- through the exercise of their birth rights as persons and citizens? Or will it be the institutions of the global economy -- global financial markets and corporations? In very practical terms, will we adapt ourselves to the system of global financial and corporate rule even as we seek to reform it -- sitting at its tables and seeking to use its power to achieve human and planetary ends? Or will we make a commit similar to the one made by those some 200 hundred years ago who decided the time had come to replace the institutions of monarchy with the institutions of democracy? It is a critical choice central to how we move ahead beyond the historic events of which we have been a part this week. The Publicly Traded Corporations, Limited Liability as an Institutional Pathology We must come to terms with the basic nature of the limited liability, publicly traded corporation -- the institution that dominates both the WTO and the global economy. It's a legal instrument designed to concentrate economic power without accountability -- which means it is both anti-democratic and anti-market. It is useful to recall that the modern corporation is a descendant of the chartered corporations -- such as the East India Corporation and the Hudson Bay Corporation -- that were formed by the British crown as monopolies to exploit colonial territories. They acted as governments unto themselves, fielded their own armies, and ruthlessly extracted wealth at the expense of the subject peoples. Contrary to corporate propaganda, the corporation was invented not to create wealth, as to extract and concentrate it -- and that is what all too many of them are still in the business of doing. Indeed, life's closest analogy to the publicly traded, limited liability corporation is the cancer. We get cancer when a genetic defect causes a cell to forget it is a part of a larger whole and to seek its own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences. Paul Hawken has compiled data suggesting that corporations in the United States now receive more in direct public subsidies than they pay in total taxes. That's only a small part of the story as it doesn't include the costs to society of unsafe products, practices, and workplaces or from outright corporate crime. In the United States we have over billing by defense contractors of $26 billion. Over billing by medicad insurance contractors of $23 billion. $54 billion a year in health costs from cigarette smoking. $136 billion for the consequences of unsafe vehicles. $275 billion for deaths from work place cancer. Pretty soon it starts adding up to some real money. In The Tyranny Of The Bottom Line, CPA Ralph Estes documented the annual costs imposed on the public by corporations in the United States. His total came to $2.6 trillion measured in 1994 dollars. This is roughly five times the corporate profits reported in the United States for 1994 and the equivalent of 37 percent of 1994 U.S. GDP. If we extrapolate this ratio to a global economy with an estimated total output of $29 trillion in 1997, we come up with a likely total cost to humanity upward of $10.73 trillion to maintain the infrastructure of global corporate capitalism -- with the benefits going primarily to the wealthiest 1% of the world's population that has any consequential participation in stock ownership. . It is sobering to note that the corporation is one of the most authoritarian of human institutions. No matter what authority a corporate CEO may delegate, he can with draw it with a snap of his fingers. In the U.S. system, which is rapidly infecting Europe and the rest of the world, the corporate CEO can virtually hire and fire any worker, open and close any plant, change transfer prices, create and drop product lines almost at will -- with no meaningful recourse by the persons or communities affected. Given that our largest corporations command economies larger than those of most states, this represents an extraordinary anomaly in supposedly democratic societies. With these characteristics in mind, let's review some frequently suggested responses to corporate rule. * Appeal to the corporate conscience to act more responsibly. This buys into the fiction that the corporation has the qualities and moral sensibilities of a human being. A legal contract has no conscience and no loyalty to people or place. The people who work for corporations are merely employees subject to dismissal if they bring to bear any interests other than the short-term profits of shareholders. * Let the dynamics of the global market place take their course and trust that market forces will correct the dysfunctions by rewarding the responsible corporations over the irresponsible. This suggestion is based on the false premise that market forces work naturally in the direction of rewarding corporations that internalize their full costs. It is a logical contradiction, since cost externalization is clearly an enormous source of profit. * Let the market decide as consumers and investors express their economic choices. People who want high labor and environmental standards will make their purchasing and investment choices accordingly -- paying higher prices and accepting lower investment returns where necessary. This presumes that corporations have a right to externalize their costs onto the community and that if people want it otherwise they must pay. It also requires that consumers and investors resist corporate wrong doing corporation by corporation, deed by deed, through consumer and investment boycotts. It strips us of our rights as citizens and reduces us to expressing our preferences only in our economic roles as consumers and investors. * Regulate corporations through governmental action. While regulation is essential in any market economy, relying on governmental regulation to reliably curb the excesses of corporations that command more resources than most states is a weak and temporary solution because of the inherent instability of the resulting balance of powers. Historically such balances have always broken down as corporation's have chosen to reassert their power. * Realign economic structures in ways that bring economic relationships into a more natural alignment with the public interest. This requires replacing the present system of unaccountable rule by a corporate and financial elite with a system of political and economic democracy -- a project comparable to the human project of eliminating monarchy. It involves the elimination of the publicly traded, limited liability corporation as an institutional form. I submit that this is the only option consistent with the goal of creating just, sustainable, and compassionate societies that work for all. It leads to an ambitious agenda, but one I believe to be within our means given how much is at stake and the evidence of a remarkable human awakening revealed by the events of the past week. Let me lay out some of its elements to illustrate the possibilities I believe we should be giving serious consideration. * Radical campaign finance reform o Public financing of elections o Free air time for candidates * Eliminate Special Corporate Rights and Exemptions o Legislation or constitutional amendment to strip away the legal fiction of corporate personhood. o Legislation to remove the corporation's limited liability provisions. Corporate shareholders should bear the same responsibility and liability for the care and use of the corporate property as does any property owner. * Eliminate Corporate Welfare o Withdraw corporate subsidies and tax breaks. o Implement cost recovery fees to offset otherwise externalized costs. * From Absentee to Stakeholder Ownership o Incentives for stakeholder buyouts o Education on economic democracy and ownership participation. o Restructure worker pension funds to exercise rights of workers as nonfinancial stakeholders. * Give Preference to Human-Scale Enterprises o Strong enforcement of anti-trust provisions. o Prohibitions on mergers and acquisitions. o Graduated corporate income and asset taxes. * Restore the Integrity of Money o Eliminate dependence on debt based money by imposing 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits. o Prohibit all lending for financial speculation - eliminate the buying of stocks on margin and prohibit lending to hedge funds. o Restore unitary community banking. * Reform international financial markets and economic management. o Currency exchange only on presentation of an invoice or airline ticket. o Restore national ownership and control of productive assets in low income countries -- a kind of international land reform initiative. o Eliminate Third World debts and the mechanisms by which they are created o Assign responsibility for matters relating to the international regulation of trade, finance, and corporations to an upgraded United Nations. o Close the WTO and the World Bank. o Reform and restaff the IMF with a new mission: to help countries balance international accounts and finance temporary short-falls in current accounts. Make it strictly accountable to the United Nations. I suggest we be clear that our goal is not to reform global corporate and financial rule -- it is to end it. The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is a pathological institutional form and financial speculation is inherently predatory. As a first step both must be regulated. The appropriate longer term goal is to rid our economic affairs of these institutional pathologies -- much as our ancestors eliminated the institution of monarchy. ------------------------------------------------------------------ David C. Korten is the author of The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism and When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of the Positive Futures Network, publishers of YES! and president of the People-Centered Development Forum (http: //iisd.ca/pcdf). He holds MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and has served on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Business. He has more than thirty years experience in Third World Development. ------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/afterSeattle.html ======================================================================== •••@••.••• - a political discussion forum crafted in Ireland by rkm - (Richard K. Moore) To subscribe, send any message to •••@••.••• •••@••.••• - an activists forum To subscribe, send any message to: •••@••.••• A public service of "Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance" •••@••.••• http://cyberjournal.org **--> Non-commercial reposting is encouraged, but please include the sig up through this paragraph and retain any internal credits and copyright notices. Copyrighted materials are posted under "fair-use". To see the index of the list archives, send a blank message to: •••@••.••• or to: •••@••.••• Recent postings are more convenientlhy available at: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/ To sample the book-in-progress, "Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative", see: http://cyberjournal.org/cdr/gri/gri.html Help create the Movement for a Democratic Renaissance! A community will evolve only when the people control their means of communication. -- Frantz Fanon Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
Share: