Life After Capitalism
Life After Capitalism
by David C. Korten (November 1998) "Under global capitalism the world is ruled by a global financial casino staffed by faceless bankers, money managers, and hedge fund speculators who operate with a herd mentality that sends exchange rates and stock prices into wild gyrations unrelated to any underlying economic reality. With reckless abandon they make and break national economies, buy and sell corporations, and hire and fire corporate CEOs (the heads of corporations) -- holding the most powerful politicians and corporate managers hostage to the speculators interests. When their bets pay off they claim the winnings as their own. When they lose, they run to governments and public institutions to make up their losses with cries that the financial skies will fall if they are forced to suffer the market's discipline."
"...capitalism's relationship to democracy and to the market economy is much the same as the relationship of a cancer to the body whose life energies it expropriates. Cancer is a pathology that occurs when otherwise healthy cells forget that they are part of the body and begin to pursue their own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences for the whole. The growth of the cancerous cells deprives the healthy cells of nourishment and ultimately kills both the body and itself. Capitalism is doing much the same to the societies that it infests."
"Another way of characterizing our situation is that we find ourselves unwitting participants in an epic contest between money and life for the soul of humanity. And it comes down to a fairly literal choice as to which we value more -- our money or our lives. And as you suggested, in many ways it is fundamentally a spiritual issue as much as a political issue."
"The very vocabulary of finance and economics is a world of double-speak that obscures such essential distinctions. For example, we use the terms money, capital, assets, and wealth interchangeably, leaving us with no simple means to express the difference between money -- a simple number -- and real wealth -- which includes such things as trees, food, our labor, fertile land, buildings, machinery, technology -- even love and friendship -- things that sustain our lives and increase our productive output. It leaves us prone to the potentially fatal error of assuming that when we are making money we are necessarily creating wealth."
"Similarly, we politely use the term investor when we speak of the speculators whose gambling destabilizes global financial markets. Indeed we favor them with tax breaks and special protections. Language makes a difference. If we called them by their real names: speculators, gamblers, and thieves, they would be subjects of public outrage -- as they appropriately should be."
