Cumberland BC: The Cumberlander Articles Section
Uncategorized · 30th August 2007
Editor, with permission.
Excerpted from YES! Magazine Fall 2007
Stand Up to Corporate Power:
Living Wealth: Better Than Money
by David Korten
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.
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.
Read complete article HERE.
Stand Up to Corporate Power:
Living Wealth: Better Than Money
by David Korten
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.
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.
Read complete article HERE.