Living Wealth: Better Than Money

[marmar]

from Yes! Magazine, via CommonDreams:


Published on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 by Yes! Magazine

Living Wealth: Better Than Money
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.

by David Korten


If we are to slow and ultimately reverse the social and environmental disintegration we see around us, we must change the rules to curb the pervasive abuse of corporate power that contributes so much to those harms.Taming corporate power will slow the damage. It will not be sufficient, however, to heal our relationships with one another and the Earth and bring our troubled world into social and environmental balance. Corporations are but instruments of a deeper social pathology revealed in a familiar story our society tells about the nature of prosperity.

Empire Prosperity Story

The prevailing prosperity narrative has many variations, but these are among its essential elements:

* Economic growth fills our lives with material abundance, lifts the poor from their misery, and creates the wealth needed to protect the environment.
* Money is the measure of wealth and the proper arbiter of every choice and relationship.
* Prosperity depends on freeing wealthy investors from taxes and regulations that limit their incentive and capacity to invest in creating the new jobs that enrich us all.
* Unregulated markets allocate resources to their most productive and highest value use.
* The wealthy deserve their riches because we all get richer as the benefits of the investments of those on top trickle down to those on the bottom.
* Poverty is caused by welfare programs that strip the poor of motivation to become productive members of society willing to work hard at the jobs the market offers.
* This money-serving prosperity story is repeated endlessly by corporate media and taught in economics, business, and public policy courses in our colleges and universities almost as sacred writ. I call it the Empire prosperity story.

Few notice the implications of its legitimation of the power and privilege of for-profit corporations and an economic system designed to maximize returns to money, that is, to make rich people richer. Furthermore, it praises extreme individualism that, in other circumstances would be condemned as sociopathic; values life only as a commodity; and diverts our attention from the basic reality that destroying life to make money is an act of collective insanity. In addition to destroying real wealth, it threatens our very survival as a species. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/28/3455/

[Trillo]

1. I can't believe no one's replied yet.

This is a good article, well reasoned.

Recycling financial wealth to maintain a democratic allocation of access to real resources is, of course, totally contrary to the self-serving logic of corporate capitalism. Yet it is essential to democracy and social health, both of which depend on an equitable distribution of power, and an essential function of democratic government.

Community-based Economics

From a system-design perspective, a healthy society must either eliminate profit, interest, and for-profit corporations altogether, or use the taxing and regulatory powers of publicly accountable democratic governments to strictly limit concentrations of economic power and prevent the winners from passing the costs of their success onto the losers. This creates yet another system design issue. As government becomes larger and more powerful, it almost inevitably becomes less accountable and more prone to corruption.

[mdmc]

2. Glad to kick it

for the masses

[greendog]

3. Thanks for posting this!

It's a shame that valuable stuff like this gets buried under loads and loads of media generated drivel.

k&r