Reply #38: John Perkins spoke to this on Amy's show yesterday. [View All]

[EFerrari]

"We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a very failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world's resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans. We can’t even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.

And when we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we’ve got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their initial resistance. We’ve got them to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.

Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must. "

From Rush Transcript at Link:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/05/149254&mode=thread&tid=25