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The Seeking a just, inclusive, and sustainable world that works for all
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NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES
Global Economics, Environmental Integrity, and
Justice By David C. Korten I’m thrilled to be meeting with you today. At a time when so many of our national politicians seem to be gripped by a bout of insanity it is greatly reassuring to meet with people who are bringing positive energy and values to a search for a new path for humanity. It is also exciting to see this energy building within the Christian faith community. Let us be clear. These are troubled times. Our economic and political systems are not just ailing; they are broken. For all the risks, however, we live in what is arguably the most exciting time in the whole of the human experience. As a species, we face both the opportunity and the necessity to accept responsibility for our role in carrying forward the work of creation to bring forth a world that works for all — for all people and the whole of nature. It is what theological Thomas Berry calls, The Great Work. We humans are a cosmic experiment with conscious free will. For better or worse Creation has granted us the power to know the difference between good — that which serves Creation — and evil — that which is contrary to Creation’s purpose — and to choose to act accordingly. Used well, this power is a gift — a great blessing that opens possibilities for creativity and service beyond those granted to any other species. Used badly, it is a deadly curse. As a species we are acting like reckless adolescents unmindful of our mortality and our responsibilities to others. We must now take the step to mature responsibility — a step that requires a cultural and institutional transformation of stunning magnitude. Never before in history have the world’s people faced the opportunity and the imperative to join together to make a collective choice as to what we wish to be and to bring our collective vision into reality — what an extraordinary moment. The Great Work now at hand requires that we bring the sum total of human experience and knowledge to bear in revisiting the most basic of questions. What is the nature of physical and spiritual reality? What is life and what is its purpose? What does it mean to be fully human? What is our relationship and responsibility to the spiritual force we call God? These are all deeply spiritual questions that call us to revisit basic questions of Christian theology such as those Professor Sallie McFague raised last night. The leadership in the great work of creating a new human civilization will not come from our corrupted institutions. Nor will it come from individuals consumed by a lust for money and power. It will come only from ordinary people acting from a deep sense of the spiritual unity of creation, which is why this initiative by the National Council of Churches is so important. It is a spiritual issue and our churches have an essential role. Incidentally, if you are looking for a source of hope that change is possible and for a wealth of ideas on how to become engaged in creating the world that can be, I urge you to take a look at YES! magazine. <www.yesmagazine.org>. We cover these positive developments and tell the stories of people working for deep change. Our most recent issue is on the timely topic: “Finding Courage.” That said, my assignment for this morning is to address the connections between global economics, environmental integrity, and justice — or perhaps more precisely the connection between corporate globalization, environmental destruction, and injustice. Then I’m supposed to outline the alternatives — and leave us all at the end with a sense of the possibilities for change. Let’s start with the big picture to see more clearly why a transformation of the culture and institutions of domination and empire is not only a moral imperative, but as well a necessary condition of our collective survival. This understanding is foundational if we are to be effective agents of transformation. How Many Planets
Unfortunately, most people miss the true implications of inequality because we are in the habit of thinking of money as wealth — which it isn’t. Money is a claim on wealth. It’s just a number that exists only in our heads. This next overhead helps us see the deeper implications of this reality. Making Money and Growing Poorer
The bottom half of this overhead is the Living Planet Index —a measure of the health of the world’s forests, freshwater, ocean, and forest ecosystems. This represents the life support system of the planet, the living capital that is the ultimate source of all wealth. The index has declined by 37% in the past 30 years. From the perspective of the planet, the good news is the species that bears the responsibility for this devastation will be gone well before the index reaches zero. It’s not especially good news, however, for us humans. Money is a claim on wealth. Money can grow virtually without limit, but its growth is increasing the claims of the few against the real resources on which all our lives depend. In a full world, equity becomes an essential condition of a healthy, sustainable society. We are told that those who make money are creating wealth that adds to the pie of society’s total wealth. No one loses, so therefore no one should begrudge the wealthy their proper reward for their contribution to the increased well-being of all. Of course it’s a bogus argument. Inflation of the financial bubble increases the claims of the holders of those assets against the world’s shrinking real wealth far out of proportion to any contribution they may have made to real wealth. As a result a fortunate few enjoy multiple vacation homes, private jets, and exotic foods, while the least fortunate are displaced from their homes and farmlands and condemned to lives of homelessness and starvation that bears no relationship to need, contribution to society, or willingness to work. The gap between glutinous extravagance and dehumanizing deprivation grows in proportion to the financial gap. Furthermore, as the corporate scandals of the past couple of years have made so glaringly evident, many financial fortunes are not simply unearned, they are based on active and intentional fraud, theft, and the destruction of human and natural capital. This brings us to another bogus argument. We are told that economic growth is the key to ending poverty and that environmental protection harms the poor. Again the truth is much the opposite. Growth in economic output actually accelerates depletion of the natural wealth on which all life depends and intensifies the competition for what remains — a competition the poor invariably lose. It’s the System
While our politicians are cutting taxes for the rich and launching pre-emptive wars on already devastated countries, the UN World Food Organization reports that the number of chronically hungry people in the world, which declined steadily during the 1970s and 80s, has been increasing since the early 1990s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that by 2008 two-thirds of the people of Sub-Saharan Africa will be undernourished. Forty percent will be undernourished in Asia. Right here in America, 3.3 million children experience outright hunger. Ten percent of U.S. households, accounting for 31 million people, do not have access to enough food to meet their basic needs. The only way to end poverty is to redistribute how we use the available, sustainable wealth of the planet. To do that, we must redistribute financial wealth. In summation: It is impossible to grow our way out of poverty on a finite planet. To end poverty we must achieve both equity and sustainability. Agenda for the 21st Century We confront a defining evolutionary moment for our species that leaves us very little time to accomplish the following:
Competing Stories The global economic and political crisis is at its core a spiritual crisis and is properly the concern of every person of faith because it involves profound values questions that go to the heart of who we are and what we value. We humans live by stories and our stories differ dramatically among us. Indeed, you might say we are a species divided by our stories. The great global clash between corporate globalists and global civil society that caught the world’s attention during the historic protest here in Seattle in 1999 against the World Trade Organization can be characterized as a clash of stories so different as to be from two wholly different worlds — which in many respects they are. The corporate globalists — corporate officers, PR spinners, media, politicians and economists — inhabit a world in which their power and privilege continue to grow — leading them to see progress at every hand. In their story the deregulation of economic life and the removal of economic borders is expanding human freedom and clearing away barriers to creating the wealth that will ultimately end poverty and save the environment. In their story they are champions of an inexorable and beneficial historical process of economic growth and technological progress that is eliminating the tyranny of inefficient and meddlesome public bureaucracies and unleashing the innovative power of competition and private enterprise. Their story portrays global corporations as the greatest and most efficient of human institutions. It celebrates the Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization — as essential and beneficial institutions that are expanding market freedom and driving the wealth creation process by increasing safeguards for investors and private property and removing restraints to a free movement of goods and services that is creating unprecedented wealth.
By contrast, civil society tells the story of a world in deepening crisis of such magnitude as to threaten the fabric of civilization and the survival of the species C a world of rapidly growing inequality, erosion of relationships of trust and caring, and a failing planetary life support system. Where corporate globalists tell of the spread of democracy and vibrant market economies, civil society tells of the power to govern shifting away from people and communities to financial speculators and global corporations dedicated to the blind pursuit of short-term profit in disregard of human and natural concerns. Civil society sees corporations replacing democracies of people with democracies of money, self-organizing markets with centrally planned corporate economies, and spiritually grounded ethical cultures with cultures of greed and materialism. In the eyes of civil society the corporate global economy is a suicide economy that is destroying the foundations of its own survival and the survival of the species. They see a corrupt political process awash in corporate money and beholden to corporate interests rewriting our laws to provide corporations with massive public subsidies while eliminating the regulations and borders that hold corporations accountable to some larger public interest. They see the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization as leading agents of this assault against life. The Publicly-Traded, Limited-Liability Corporation The institutional centerpiece of the global suicide economy is the publicly traded, limited liability corporation. Visit the headquarters of a publicly traded corporation and you see people, buildings, furnishings, and office equipment. By all appearances the people are running things. An organization chart will show clear lines of authority leading to a CEO who in turn reports to a board of directors. It is easy to think of a corporation as a community of people. It is, however, a misleading characterization precisely because in a publicly traded corporation the people, including the CEO, are all employees of the institution — paid to serve the institution at its pleasure and required by law to leave their values at the door.
The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is in the legal sense not a human institution. It is a pool of money, dedicated to the sole vocation of making money, on which a corrupted legal system has bestowed special legal privileges and protections not granted to real living persons. The people, including the CEO, can be dismissed at any moment, virtually without recourse. In effect management is hired by money to nurture money’s growth and reproduction even at the expense of life. Only the money, which the corporate officers are legally bound to serve, has rights. The problem is exactly captured by a well known scripture.
Life? Or money? Which shall we serve? Life is God’s sacred creation. Money is a human illusion. No person can serve both life and money. Neither can a corporation. In their advertisements and public statements corporations profess their commitment to people and nature. Read the business press, like the Wall Street Journal, and you get the real story of the push for ever greater profits and CEO compensation at all costs — especially in the reports on corporate crime. By law and structure, the publicly traded, limited liability corporation is a single purpose organization in the business of making money for money without regard to the consequences for people, communities, or nature. The publicly traded corporation and its employees are legally obligated to serve money to the disregard of life. It is not only incapable of acting with conscience, it is legally prohibited from doing so. Human persons who behave in a similarly self-centered and destructive way devoid of conscience are called psychopaths and are commonly deprived of their freedom as threats to society and confined to prisons or mental institutions. Yet in the suicide economy, corporate psychopaths are regularly rewarded with rising share prices and their CEOs are rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses. Corporate officers suspected of sacrificing share price to acts of conscience out of concern for workers, community, or the environment face a serious threat of dismissal. Powerful though global corporations may be, the ultimate decision power in the suicide economy resides in the global financial markets — institutions for which the only reality is money. Each day global financial markets exchange trillions of dollars of electronic money that exists only in computer memories as traders who act with a herd mentality place their bets on the price movements of various financial instruments. In a mere instant the actions of the money traders may make or break the fortunes of individuals, giant corporations, and powerful nations. The computer screens of the traders, however, tell them nothing of the consequences either for nature or for the millions — even billions — of people whose lives their decisions affect. The traders and their world are equally invisible to the ordinary people who bear the consequences of these decisions. It is an evil of the highest order. Those who make the decisions have no knowledge of the consequences of their actions and those who bear the consequences cannot identify and confront the oppressor that remains invisible and therefore unknown. It is a system designed not to self-correct. This perverse system is inexorably transferring wealth and power from the many to the few, creating an unconscionable and growing concentration of wealth and power that encourages wasteful extravagance on the part of the few while imposing deprivation and servitude on billions and accelerating the depletion of natural wealth it took our living planet billions of years to produce. Either of these trends will seal the human fate if allowed to continue. Global Governance We presently live under two competing systems of global governance: The Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. The former is primarily aligned with the corporate interest and the latter is primarily aligned with the human and natural interest. The Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), previously the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — are major institutional players in rewriting the rules of the global economy to circumvent democracy to rewrite the economic rules to favor the concentration of wealth and power. All three claim to be dedicated to the cause of the poor and the disadvantaged. But look at their policies and actions and you find the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO consider the ideal country to be one in which all assets and resources are owned by foreign corporations producing for export to generate foreign exchange to repay international debts. Their favored country has no public services. Power, water, education, health care, social security, and financial services are all owned and operated by foreign corporations for profit on a fee for service basis. Food and other goods for domestic consumption are all imported from abroad and paid for with money borrowed from foreign banks. This is not about meeting the needs of people — least of all the poor. It is about concentrating ever more power in the hands of the global financiers who control the corporations that are increasingly monopolizing the world’s resources, markets, jobs, information, money, and politics to their own exclusive ends. The real issues behind the resistance against corporate globalization are issues of justice and democracy — the right of each person to a voice and a means of living. It is about who will rule the world: people or money? Alternatives I have the privilege of being a member of an extraordinary international alliance of civil society leaders from both Southern and Northern countries called the International Forum on Globalization. We came together to educate the world on the realities of corporate globalization and to encourage the mobilization of a broad resistance movement. For the past three years we have been working to define a consensus among ourselves on an alternative to the corporate global economy. Last December we published a report on our conclusions titled Alternatives to Economic Globalization. Initially, the question of whether global rule making should be centralized in global institutions or decentralized to the extent possible to national and local levels was an important point of contention. Those of us from the North tended to favor a centralization of rule making and standards to set and enforce uniform labor and environmental standards for the world. Our Southern colleagues noted, however, that when rule making is centralized, the rules are generally made by the more powerful countries of the North and invariably favor their interest. They called instead for an international system that favors the localization of rule making at national and community levels to secure the sovereign political and economic rights of people — delegating upward only those decisions that cannot realistically be made locally. This would require a number of actions. Among others it means eliminating the institutional form of the publicly traded, limited liability corporation in favor of human-scale enterprises locally and democratically owned by engaged stakeholders who are liable for their actions. A chapter on international institutions calls for dismantling 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, we call 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, we call for a UN International Finance Organization 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, we propose 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.
The suicide economy features absentee ownership, monopoly, and the concentration of power delinked from obligations to people or place. It is within our means to replace the suicide economy with living economies based on locally rooted ownership and deeply held American ideals of equity, democracy, the rule of law, fair markets, and personal responsibility. Living Economies Consider: the vast majority of all enterprises are not organized as publicly traded corporations. They are human-scale, owned by real people, and many are committed to paying their workers a living wage, offering quality products and services at a fair price, and being good citizens. These enterprises provide the vast majority of employment, and account for most innovation. Under the present system they function at the fringes of the suicide economy dependent on its dominant corporate predators. Imagine the possibilities if these healthy enterprises were to free themselves from their dependence on the suicide economy and grow webs of business relationships with one another to create corporate free, living economies that give us new choices as to where we shop, work, and invest. Imagine a world in which every person has an ownership stake in the assets on which their livelihood depends and has a say in the management of those assets. It’s called economic democracy and it is an essential foundation for equity, democracy, and a true market economy. It’s more than a dream. People are already working to bring it into being and there is a national support organization called the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Michelle Long, who is the national co-coordinator of BALLE, will be joining me this afternoon to present two workshops on this topic and describe the practical things you can do in your community to contribute to economic transformation. Wake Up Call Of course we do face some interesting obstacles. Consider the new language that has entered the political discourse here in America in only the past few months. We used to talk about American democracy and the checks and balances of the American system. Now media pundits talk openly of American Empire and the ruling American oligarchy. The gap between the American ideal of freedom and democracy and the American reality of a tyranny of elite rule has become truly alarming. The twenty-first century and the third millennium got off to an interesting start. The forces of creation seem to be sending us a wake up call. First, a stolen election revealed the fragility of our democracy. Next, a stock market meltdown unmasked the reality of a bubble economy. Then, the 911 terrorist attacks shocked us out of a deep complacency regarding America’s relationship to the world. A wave of corporate scandals revealed the deep corruption of the system of corporate rule. And the gap between the actions of America’s ruling junta and the needs of America and the world grows ever wider and more visible.
Not only are the actions of our politicians at odds with our needs, they are also at odds with the values of the majority of Americans. Polling data make clear that the vast major of Americans embrace life values. We want a healthy environment, peace, economic justice and security for all, freedom, and democracy. We have no interest in imposing a U.S. military empire on the world. Recall that to get within even half million votes of his opponent, the man the Supreme Court appointed to be America’s president had to present himself as a compassionate conservative who would work for ordinary people, be fiscally responsible, leave no child behind, protect the environment, and pursue a peaceful, cooperative, and non-belligerent foreign policy respectful of the rights and interests of others. These were major themes of his campaign. They are what we need. They are what most Americans want. I see our court appointed president as a messenger sent by God to wake us up to the depth of the corruption of our economic and political system and to the reality that leadership for change must come from we the people. People Power Leadership
All over the world people are waking up to this reality. Over the past ten years, millions have taken to the streets protesting corporate globalization. On a single day in February 2003, ten million people took to the world’s streets in a massive call for peace in opposition to war in Iraq. It was the largest and most broadly international protest action in human history and a defining moment in a rapid unfolding of a global realignment of power and perception. The larger goal of this movement is to replace the institutions and mindset of empire with the institutions and mindset of deep democracy responsive to the needs of life. Global civil society is an extraordinary planetary social organism new to human evolutionary experience. It is giving birth to a new politics of hope, love, and healing and a new economy of loving service to life. Rather than mobilizing around an ideology or charismatic leader, it is converging around an emergent values consensus centered on a love of life as an alternative to a values system based on a love of money. Each of its millions of participants is a leader in his or her own right. It gains its power from the fact that it is an expression of deeply authentic values that flow from the awakening of a new cultural and spiritual consciousness deep within our being. Global civil society is giving substance to the essential truth that in a democracy, sovereignty resides in the people. When politicians lead we call it dictatorship. When private economic interests lead we call it corruption. When dictatorship merges with private economic interests around extreme right-wing nationalism in pursuit of imperial expansion we call it Fascism. Only when the leadership comes from “We the people” can we truly speak of democracy. These insights have especially important implications for those of us who enjoy the extraordinary privilege and responsibility of being citizens of the United States of America. Our country has been taken over by forces not of our choosing for ends contrary to the great ideals of liberty and justice for all on which it was founded — founded I might note in a rebellion against empire — and a king named George. We take justified pride in America as a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. We can shine that beacon bright and clear as a source of hope and inspiration for all. Or we can expand and consolidate the global dominion of the new American empire by military force. Yes, we must work to unseat America’s ruling junta of the far right in the next election. Far beyond that, however, we must also work for a deep political and spiritual transformation of our culture and institutions. ****** In these turbulent and frightening times it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment in the whole of human history. For this is the moment when we are being called by the deep forces of creation to awaken to a new consciousness of our own possibilities and to embrace the responsibilities to one another and to the planet that go with our collective presence on the living jewel of life called Earth. The time is now. The choice is ours. The work starts here. This is our time to speak. Our time to act. We’re the one’s we’ve been waiting for. _____________________________________________________ Dr. David C. Korten is the author of the international best-seller When Corporations Rule the World; and The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism. He chairs the board of the Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, and is president of the People-Centered Development Forum. Originally posted June 23, 2003 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This
graph addresses a very basic question. “How many planets endowed with an area of
biologically productive land and sea equivalent to that of earth would it take
to support current levels of human consumption of food, materials, and energy on
a sustainable basis?" This graph indicates we passed beyond the limits of the
human burden this planet can sustain sometime around 1980. As a species we are
now consuming at a rate of about 1.2 planets. Unfortunately, since we don’t have
another two tenths planet we are making up the difference by depleting natural
capital, both non-renewable capital, like fossil fuels, and the renewable
capital of our forests, fisheries, soils, water, and climatic systems. About 85%
of what remains is expropriated by the more fortunate 20% of the world’s
population to support our often wasteful patterns of consumption. The least
fortunate 20 percent of the world’s people struggle to survive on slightly more
than 1 percent. 
The
graph on the top of this overhead represents world stock market capitalization
— the total value of all the stocks traded on the world’s stock exchanges. It
tracks growth in financial assets. Much to my surprise, this statistic is
extremely difficult to find and I’m deeply indebted to Leslie Christian of
Progressive Investments for digging it out. What we’ve tracked so far only goes
through 1999, so the graph doesn’t show the more recent down turn, but the basic
picture is clear. Bear in mind here that although some 50 percent of Americans
own some stock, the richest 1 percent of households own nearly 50 percent of the
value of all stocks owned by Americans. Globally the ownership of stocks is far
more concentrated. Surely less than 1 percent of all households in the world
participate in stock ownership in any consequential way.
In
fact, the entire economic and financial system is structured to assure that the
gap between rich and poor keeps growing. As you see in this graph, worker pay
remained pretty much even with inflation throughout the 1990s. The economic
gains went to corporate profits, owners of stocks, and CEO compensation. This is
not accidental. The tools of economic and financial analysis seek to assure that
every public and corporate policy decision is made with the intent to maximize
returns to money, which means to people who have or control money — call them
the money people. If it appears that wages are rising, the Federal Reserve
raises interest rates to slow the economy to increase unemployment and maintain
a downward pressure on wages. The announced purpose is to prevent wage
“inflation.” The unstated purpose is to make sure that the gains of economic
growth and productivity are captured by money people rather than by working
people. 
