David Korten Quotes
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We can have democracy and a prosperous, just, and sustainable human future. Or we can have corporate rule. We cannot have both.
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There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity and vision.
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The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned by the people whose wellbeing depends on them.
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An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate.
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Global competition is about winners and losers.
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I think one of the most important skills of a local organizer of a local economy is an ability to put on a terrific street party.
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As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency.
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The current system is organized around financial values over life values. We need to shift that locus of power down to the community level because the financial markets recognize only money and thereby only financial values.
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Living capital, which has the special capacity to continuously regenerate itself, is ultimately the source of all real wealth. To destroy it for money, a simple number with no intrinsic value, is an act of collective insanity - which makes capitalism a mental, as well as physical pathology.
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Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life.
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So, there is enormous instability in the global economy with a shift of winners and losers.
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As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and be-come more detached from people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on colonizing our planet, reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.
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Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.
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If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth.
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Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.
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It will take some time before a politician will capture the imagination of the American people and have the vision and understanding to do what is necessary for a better future for the people of America and the world.
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In the US, most progressives start to see the differences between internationalism and economic globalization.
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But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.
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It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.
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Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.
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Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.
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Not exclusively, but the bulk of our local economy should be covered by local currencies, which is more efficient than having global currencies which lose connection with reality in the markets, shops and communities of the people.
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Money is not wealth. Money is a claim on wealth.
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As long as you have a system that is based on the rational that if you are making money you are thereby making a contribution to society, these financial rogue practices will continue.
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An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.
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If you're living in the community and you own your local businesses and you're engaged in the local economy you should have a definite interest in the strength and health of your community, the caring relationships that bind people together.
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Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.
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Europeans say they are proud of their social fabric, of strong rights for workers and the weak in society.
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In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.
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There was a time in the United States when most of our financial institutions were local. Which essentially meant that local communities were able to create their own credit, or their own money, in response to their own needs. We still depended on banks, but it was a much more democratic process.
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