Your Mortal Enemy: Under Capitalism, Democracy is Now for Sale to the
Highest Bidder.
10/21/98
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Your Mortal Enemy: Under Capitalism, Democracy is Now for Sale
to the Highest Bidder.
Source: The Guardian (UK)
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: October 21, 1999
Byline: David Korten
Below is part of the text a speech given last fall by visionary
economist David Korten on how capitalism is a threat to democracy and
all living systems on this planet. He's great at demystifying marco-
economics and provides valuable intellectual tools for anybody
interested in challenging global corporate domination. A select
biography of his works is listed at the bottom of the text. Extracted
first are some quotes from the text below specifically about the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) the first dragon that we must all collectively
slay if we hope to save the planet. - patrick, RAN
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"The first positive step would be to dismantle the World Trade
Organisation on the ground that there is no legitimate need for a global
police force to protect global corporations from the actions of
democratically-elected national and local governments so that the
richest one per cent of humanity can become even richer at the expense
of the rest.
"The WTO is a powerful, but illegitimate and democratically
unaccountable institution put in place through largely secret
negotiations with little or no public debate to serve purposes largely
contrary to the public interest. The 99 percent of the world's people
whose interests it does not serve have every right to eliminate it."
The Guardian (UK), October 21, 1998
Your Mortal Enemy: under capitalism, democracy is now for sale to the
highest bidder.
What's to be done? Slay the beast of capitalism, says David C. Korten,
and return money to its proper role. An edited and amended extract of
Korten's Schumacher Lecture in Bristol on October 17, 1998:
FOR THOSE of us who grew up believing capitalism is the foundation of
democracy, market freedom, and the good life, it has been a rude
awakening to realise that under capitalism democracy is now for sale to
the highest bidder, the market is centrally planned by global
megacorporations larger than most countries, denying one's brothers and
sisters a source of livelihood is now rewarded as an economic virtue,
and the destruction of nature and life to make money for the already
rich is treated as progress.
The world is now ruled by a global financial casino staffed by faceless
bankers and hedge fund speculators who operate with a herd mentality in
the shadowy world of global finance. Each day they move more than two
trillion dollars around the world in search of quick profits and safe
havens, sending exchange rates and stock markets into wild gyrations
wholly unrelated to any underlying economic reality.
With abandon they make and break national economies, buy and sell
corporations, and hold the most powerful politicians hostage to their
interests. When their bets pay off they claim the winnings as their own.
When they lose, they run to govern-ments and public institutions to
protect them against loss, with pronouncements about how the poor must
tighten their belts and become more fiscally prudent.
In the United States, the media keep the public preoccupied with the
details of our president's sex life and calls for his impeachment for
lying about an inconsequential affair. Meanwhile, Congress and the
president are working out of view to push through funding increases for
the IMF to bail out the banks who put the entire global financial system
at risk with reckless lending.
They are advancing financial deregulation to encourage even more
reckless financial speculation. And they are negotiating international
agreements such as the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment intended to
make the world safe for financial speculators by preventing governments
from intervening to regulate their activities.
To understand what is happening we must educate ourselves about the
nature of money and the ways of those who decide who will have access to
it and who will not.
As a medium of exchange, money is one of the most useful of human
inventions. But as we become ever more dependent on it to acquire the
basic means of our sustenance, we give to the institutions and people
who control its creation and allocation the power to decide whether we
shall live in prosperity or destitution.
With the increasing breakdown of community and governmental social
safety nets, our money system has become the most effective instrument
of social control and extraction ever devised. The fact that few of us
think of the money system as an instrument of control makes it more
powerful and efficient as an instrument of wealth extraction.
What of capitalism, the self-proclaimed champion of democracy, market
freedom, peace, and prosperity? Modern capitalism involves a
concentration of wealth by the few to the exclusion of the many; it is
more than a system of human elites. It has evolved into a system of
autonomous rule by money and for money that functions on autopilot
beyond the control of any human actor or responsiveness to any human
sensibility.
Contrary to its claims, capitalism is showing itself to be the mortal
enemy of democracy and the market. Its relationship to democracy and the
market economy is now much the same as the relationship of a cancer to
the body whose life energy it expropriates.
Cancer is a pathology that occurs when an otherwise healthy cell forgets
that it is a part of the body and begins to pursue its own unlimited
growth without regard to the consequences for the whole. The growth of
the cancerous cell deprives the healthy cells of nourishment and
ultimately kills both the body and itself. Capitalism does much the same
to the societies it infests.
One reason we fail to recognise the seriousness of our predicament is
because we fail to see how capitalism is destroying the world's real
wealth. It destroys social capital when it breaks up unions, bids down
wages, and treats workers as expendable commodities, leaving society to
absorb the family and community breakdown and violence that are
inevitable consequences. It destroys institutional capital when it
undermines the function of governments and democracy by weakening
environmental health and labour standards, and by extracting public
subsidies, bailouts, and tax exemptions which inflate corporate profits
while passing the burdens of risk to governments and the working poor.
We are just beginning to wake up to the fact that the industrial era has
in a mere century consumed a consequential portion of the natural
capital it took evolution millions of years to create. It is now drawing
down our social, institutional, and human capital as well.
Democracy and markets are wonderful ways of organising the political and
economic life of a society to allocate resources fairly and efficiently
while securing the freedom and sovereignty of the individual. But modern
capitalism is about using money to make money for people who already
have more of it than they need. Its institutions breed inequality,
exclusion, environmental destruction, social irresponsibility, and
economic instability while homogenizing cultures, weakening institutions
of democracy, and eroding the moral and social fabric of society.
Though capitalism cloaks itself in the rhetoric of democracy and the
market, it is dedicated to the principle that sovereignty properly
resides not in the person, but rather in money and property. Under
democracy and the market, the people rule. Under capitalism, money
rules.
The challenge is to replace the global capitalist economy with a
properly regulated and locally rooted market economy that invests in the
regeneration of living capital, increases net beneficial economic
output, distributes that output justly and equitably to meet the basic
needs of everyone, strengthens the institutions of democracy and the
market, and returns money to its proper role as the servant of
productive activity.
It should favour smaller local enterprise over global corporations,
encourage local ownership, penalise financial speculation, and give
priority to meeting the basic needs of the many over providing luxuries
and diversions for the wealthy few. In most aspects it should do exactly
the opposite of what the global capitalist economy is doing.
Most of the responsibility and initiative must come from local and
national levels. Supporting nations and localities in this task should
become the core agenda of the United Nations, as the protection of
people and communities from predatory global corporations and finance is
arguably the central security issue of our time.
The first positive step would be to dismantle the World Trade
Organisation on the ground that there is no legitimate need for a global
police force to protect global corporations from the actions of
democratically-elected national and local govern-ments so that the
richest one per cent of humanity can become even richer at the expense
of the rest.
The WTO is a powerful, but illegitimate and democratically unaccountable
institution put in place through largely secret negotiations with little
or no public debate to serve purposes largely contrary to the public
interest. The 99 percent of the world's people whose interests it does
not serve have every right to eliminate it.
Addressing the real need to police the global economy requires an
organisation very different from the WTO--an open and democratic
organisation with the mandate and power to set and enforce rules holding
those corporations that operate across national borders democratically
accountable to the people and priorities of the nations where they
operate.
It should as well have the power to regulate and tax international
financial flows and institutions. And it should have a mandate to make
speculation unprofitable and to help protect the integrity of domestic
financial institutions from the financial markets and the predatory
practices of international financial speculators.
There are obvious questions as to whether such proposals are politically
feasible given the stranglehold of corporations and big money over our
political processes. Yet we could use this same reasoning to conclude
that human survival itself is not politically feasible.
Global corporations and financial institutions are our collective
creations. And we have both the right and the means to change or replace
them if they do not serve.
-----
David Korten is Chairman of the Board of The Positive Futures Network,
publishers of Yes! A Journal of Postive Futures. To subscribe call (800)
937-4451 or (206) 842-0216. When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian
Press, 1995; Globalizing Civil Society, Seven Stories Press; The Post-
Corporate World, Kumarian Press, 1999.