PCDF Bulletin #3
IDEAS
AND RESOURCES
AT THE LEADING EDGE OF CHANGE
March 29, 2002
From David C. Korten
PCDF
International Secretariat
Once again, my apologies for
the long silence. As you know, world events are unfolding with blinding speed in
a bit of a roller coaster ride. Stunned by the September 11 terrorist attack on
the United States and the massive assault on all forms of dissent that followed
there was a moment when civil society faltered and seemed in mortal danger.
Fortunately, it is now clear the movement is once again on its upward
trajectory.
The New Main Stream
Especially heartening was the
juxtaposition of 60,000 people meeting at the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, Brazil in celebration of the future we are creating together, with the
simultaneous gathering of representatives of corporate rule at the beleaguered
World Economic Forum in a state of siege behind police barricades in New York
City to contemplate why things no longer seem to be going their way. See
AlterNet -- Global Justice's New Face for an excellent collection of
articles on the contrast. Half a million more then took to the streets in
Barcelona to tell the European heads of state that the old world is no longer
acceptable. The momentum builds as the anti-globalization movement redefines
itself as a pro-justice, pro-democracy movement and shifts its stance from that
of a fringe element pointing out alternatives to that of a confident emerging
majority forging a new mainstream.
We are the Ones We’ve Been
Waiting For
September 11 was a wake up call
to the truth that we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for. We have too long
waited in vain for the arrival of an heroic leader equal to the challenge of the
current human crisis. Leadership must come from the bottom, from each and every
one of us.
Here in the United States the
horror of the terrorist attack was immediately followed by the horror of our own
government pressing ahead an agenda of militarism, civil repression, and new
hand outs for the rich and powerful — with barely a whisper of dissent from
within our two party political system. All among us who dared to raise our heads
engaged the immediate task of struggling to maintain a window for principled
dissent and to appeal to the common sense realization that in a terrorist
situation responding to violence with violence only begets more violence.
YES! magazine came out with a powerful Winter
2002 issue on the theme “Can Love Save the World?” to tell the
stories of more promising approaches. It proved so popular that we did an
immediate second printing. Groups all across the country, especially faith
groups, have been using it as a resource for study group discussions.
The full range of governmental
response to 911 demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt the enormous gap
between world’s needs and the priorities of those who govern —yet another
powerful reminder that the responsibility for leadership toward transformational
change falls by default to civil society. See my article titled
“Our Time to Choose” in the Winter 2002 issue of YES! The government
response is a compelling demonstration of the unfortunate truth that our ruling
institutions have no capacity for constructive leadership. On the positive side,
the movement is responding by redirecting a portion of its growing energy from
resistance to leadership.
The IFG Tells It Like It Can
Be
It is now more than three years
since members of the International Forum on Globalization met in San Francisco
in January 1999 to begin preparing a consensus document on Alternatives to
Economic Globalization. Predictably, agreeing on what we are for has turned out
to be a good deal more challenging than agreeing on what we are against. The
need, however, has never been greater and the initial payoff is now at hand.
A preliminary executive summary
of the
IFG report
“A Better World is Possible!: Alternatives to Economic Globalization” was
released at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre on February 1 and is now
available on the web in
PDF format. The full report will be released as a book in Fall 2002 by
Berrett-Koehler Publishers. The IFG plans to have a pre-publication version
available by early June. PCDF advisors Maude Barlow, Walden Bello, Helena
Norberg-Hodge, Sara Larrain, and Vandana Shiva are among the report’s authors.
This report is distinctive in a
number of respects, including scope, seriousness, and hard edge realism
regarding what is needed to achieve a just and sustainable world based on ten
essential design principles for democratic and sustainable societies. It is also
distinctive in reflecting a broad consensus of movement leaders from both South
and North.
The IFG is calling for a
thorough-going program of economic localization to ground both political and
economic power in communities —delegating upward only those decisions that
cannot realistically be made locally. A chapter on corporations concludes that
putting in place rules and regulations to hold global corporations accountable
to the public good is not sufficient. Because, the publicly traded, limited
liability corporate form allows for the virtually unlimited concentration of
economic power in the hands of absentee owners who bear no accountability for
the social and environmental consequences of how that power is used, its very
existence is a standing invitation to abuse. To have a just and sustainable
world, society is advised to eliminate that institutional form in favor of
human-scale enterprises democratically owned by engaged stakeholders who are
liable for their actions.
The chapter on international
institutions is equally hard hitting, calling for decommissioning the World
Bank, the IMF, and the WTO and replacing them with new institutions under the
United Nations with mandates exactly the opposite of the institutions they will
replace. In the place of a World Bank coaxing Southern countries into ever
deeper international debt and dependency, the IFG calls for the creation of a UN
International Insolvency Court responsible for helping countries work their way
out of international debt. In the place of an IMF that prohibits countries from
exercising essential oversight over the flow of goods and money across their
borders, the IFG calls for a UN International Finance Agency to help countries
put in place mechanisms to maintain balance and stability in their international
financial relationships. Instead of a World Trade Organization preventing
governments from holding corporations accountable to the public interest, the
IFG proposes a UN Organization for Corporate Accountability to work with
citizens groups and nation states to break up concentrations of corporate power
and hold all corporations with operations in more than one country to a high
standard of public accountability. Helping to finalize the report has been my
top priority over the past couple of months.
Response in Porto Alegre to the
preliminary summary of the IFG study by diverse constituencies from both South
and North confirmed the importance of this effort. I was particularly struck by
the independent responses of three Northern opinion leaders with strong
establishment credentials whom I would have expected to be skeptical of ideas so
profoundly at odds with the Washington consensus. In rapid succession I was
approached in Porto Alegre by Marcello Palazzi, a respected European leader in
the area of corporate responsibility; Tom Spencer, former conservative member of
the British parliament and former president of GLOBE, an influential
international grouping of parliamentarians; and Jim Garrison, president of the
State of the World Forum and the Commission on Globalization.
Each had a similar message. The
IFG report articulates a uniquely comprehensive and credible alternative to
corporate globalization that merits serious consideration in civil society,
government, and business circles. Each expressed interest in helping to get the
study into the hands of sympathetic establishment figures and to draw them into
the dialogue. Marcello and Spencer talked of exposing our proposals in forums of
concerned business and political leaders. Jim Garrison expressed his interest in
distributing the report to the Commission on Globalization commissioners to make
it a part of the Commission dialogue.
Grow Living Economies as an
Evolutionary Action
The “living economies”
initiative with the U.S. Social Ventures Network (SVN) mentioned in Bulletin #2
has taken off in the space of less than six months with a speed and energy that
suggests it is an idea whose time has truly come. SVN is an alliance of
entrepreneurs with a passionate commitment to the idea that business can and
should be a force for economic justice and environmental sustainability. Most
have built and own substantial businesses, which gives SVN serious economic
clout. The collaboration with SVN has given birth to a new organization called
the
Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) as an SVN project with
a mandate to promote living economies across the United States.
The timing is extraordinary as
the Enron scandal continues to unfold — revealing such moral decay that even the
business press is talking in strong terms about the corruption of the system.
There is a readiness to act to create a new values-based economy comprised of
values-based enterprises.
The conceptual framework for
the living economies initiative is set forth in
“Living Economies for a Living Planet,” a PCDF web essay. You may have seen
an earlier version. I’ve just completed and posted a major revision and update
and urge you to take a look. Feel free to use it in any way you find helpful.
The essay develops the
framework for an economic succession strategy aimed at replacing a global
suicide economy that is destroying the foundations of its own existence and
threatening the survival of the human species with a planetary system of locally
owned, living economies comprised of life-serving enterprises. The essay
develops four key ideas:
-
Transformational Change: The culture and
institutions of living economies are virtually mirror opposites of the culture
and institutions of the suicide economy. Far more than a course correction,
the changes ahead involve a deep cultural and institutional transformation.
-
Institutional
Pathology: Most of the dysfunctions of the suicide
economy can be traced to the pathological institutional characteristics of
publicly traded corporations — specifically size, absentee ownership, and
special limited liability protections. Healthy social function depends on
eliminating such pathological institutions in favor of economies comprised of
locally-based, human-scale, community oriented, fair-profit/nonprofit living
enterprises.
-
A Succession
Strategy: Reform strategies seek incremental
changes in the culture and institutions of the suicide economy. A succession
strategy centers on living into being the web of mutually supportive
relationships of a new economy comprised of living enterprises that will
ultimately displace and succeed the corporate-dominated suicide
economy. Millions of such enterprises already exist — although most struggle
to survive at the fringes of the suicide economy. Their future — and the
future of the species — depends on growing webs of business relationships
among one another to create locally rooted living economies. The strength of
living economies will grow as they offer an increasing and ever more visible
variety of viable, beneficial options for employment, shopping, and investing
aligned with the values of an emerging new majority.
-
Awakening
Consciousness: The potential for transformational
change of such magnitude and consequence arises from an evolutionary awakening
of a new cultural and planetary consciousness. The awakened consciousness is
able to see the profound and troubling truth that humanity is being held back
from the realization of new levels of human potential by the persistence of
cultural myths that lead to dangerously distorted interpretations of physical
and social reality.
American Patriotism and
Identity in the Reign of George W.
American has long suffered a
crisis of identity in the troubling contrast between the American ideal and the
American reality. The great and visionary words of the founding fathers of the
United States of America are an inspiration not only to Americans, but as well
to the world. Yet behind the grand vision of liberty and justice for all there
is the dark reality of lands expropriated by force of arms from the native
Americans to whom it rightfully belonged, slaves kidnapped in Africa and shipped
to America to work that land, and a long history of pursuing an imperialistic
foreign policy backed by military force and client dictators to establish and
maintain U.S. control of markets and resources far beyond America’s borders.
Since September 11, the
administration of George W. has attempted to portray any criticism of itself,
its policies, and it’s pursuit of endless war as unpatriotic. This accounts in
part for the claim of opinion pollsters that 80 percent of adult Americans
support the administration. This widely cited figure is highly suspect, not only
because of the difficulty of finding consequential numbers of people who truly
support the Bush policies, but as well because of the context in which the
polling is done.
There has been an unusually
strong desire among Americans for a sense of solidarity and community since 911.
The administration has played this to its own ends by a largely successful
effort to portray dissent as outside the consensus of loyal and patriotic
Americans who are standing together to protect America from its enemies. At the
same time, the administration — with the loyal backing of a fawning corporate
media establishment eager for official favors —has sought to lump together
protestors and terrorists in the public message and has let it be known that it
has the capability to monitor crowds, phone calls, and e-mails in search of
terrorist suspects. Now, in the midst of all this, a stranger calls and says:
“I’m taking a poll. Do you support President Bush and his policies in the war
against terrorism?” The only surprising result is that 20 percent of respondents
gave an honest answer.
The number of Americans asking
questions about current policies is far greater than such polls reveal. Indeed,
a great many Americans are not only increasingly alarmed by our government’s
actions, they are looking in a serious way at the disjuncture between American
ideals and the reality of racism and classism at home and the destructive impact
of U.S. economic and military power abroad.
We have a lot of serious work
to do here in America to turn the American ideal into an American reality.
YES! magazine highlights this challenge in its Spring 2002 issue on the
question:
“What Does It Mean to be an American Now?” It looks at the very different
American experiences of native-Americans, African-Americans, and others and
explores the meaning of those differences. Like the YES! issue on peace,
this issue on patriotism is in high demand by groups all around the country that
are using it to engage a dialogue on America as an unfinished project.
As you may recall, in addition
to publishing YES!, the Positive Futures Network, for which I serve as
Board Chair, sponsors a series of invitational “State of the Possible” retreats
for leaders of progressive movements from across the United States. We give high
priority to assuring diversity among the participants on many dimensions,
including racial. Through the experience of these retreats we have been
painfully aware of how the racial divisions in America splinter and weaken what
otherwise would be a far more powerful progressive movement. PFN’s Spring 2002
retreat will bring together a racially diverse group of 30 movement leaders to
discuss "Who Are 'We the People' in the 21st Century? Identity, Leadership, and
Transformational Change." Among other things, it will explore questions of
grass roots leadership, how the leadership experience is influenced by the
diversity of our backgrounds and communities, and what it means for developing a
leadership of the whole. It is one small contribution to the larger processes by
which global civil society is moving beyond the more familiar “alternatives”
role to reposition as an emerging majority forging a new mainstream.
So that’s the current view from
Bainbridge Island and the PCDF Secretariat. Hope you are all well and that your
work for the movement continues to bear abundant fruit.
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Posted March 30, 2002
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