A Planetary Alternative to the Global Economy.

• Author: Korten, David C.

Money or life? Which will be the object of our devotion? The organizing principle of our governing institutions? The standard against which we measure our accomplishment? This was the real issue at stake when tens of thousands of people from around the world gathered in Seattle at the end of November to stop the World Trade Organization's (WTO) deadly assault against democracy, humanity, and the planet.

As the WTO champions a new world order in which money rules, the old politics of left and right give way to a new politics defined by a choice between money and life as the measure of our lives and institutions. Will we give ourselves over to roles serving money as consumers and workers in a competitive global economy ruled by global corporations and financial speculators? Or will we act as whole human beings--citizens of planet earth--with the right and responsibility to create a planetary society ruled by people to the benefit of the whole of life?

The Global Capitalist Economy

Inequality and injustice are not accidental outcomes of global capitalism, they are its defining characteristics. In a capitalist regime, money is embraced as the measure of all value. The maximization of returns to financial capital becomes society's defining goal. Competition, individualism, and materialism are nurtured as favored cultural norms. Stock prices and gross domestic product (GDP) are the accepted measures of progress and well being. Inflation of land and stock values is encouraged, while wages are held constant or depressed, thus creating ever growing inequality by increasing the financial assets of a small elite relative to the incomes of working people.

Capitalism trains and selects as its leaders those imbued with a highly developed financial consciousness--"think money." Its favored institution is the publicly traded, limited liability corporation, which concentrates power in the hands of a chief corporate executive account able only to absentee owners who themselves are shielded from public accountability for the decisions made on their behalf. With a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term returns to its shareholders, the legal structure of the corporation virtually compels it to mimic a cancer--pursuing its own unlimited growth without regard to consequences for either itself or its host.

Though living capital--human, social, institutional, or natural--is the ultimate source of all real wealth, capitalism assigns it no value and makes no accounting for its depletion. The ultimate power over both governments and corporations resides with global financial markets in which speculators gamble with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money. Corporate ownership of media and politicians renders democracy meaningless as the institutions of money rewrite laws to free themselves from public regulation, economic borders, and restraint on their ability to eliminate competition through mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances.

Meanwhile the WTO, a body created at the instigation of the world's largest corporations to serve their financial interests, has been given the power to challenge local and national laws that conflict with its view of global priorities. Through the WTO the world's rich and powerful aggressively advance the negotiation and enforcement of international agreements to place the protection of property rights ahead of the protection of human rights, regulate governments to prohibit them from regulating global corporations and finance, remove barriers to the spread of a homogenized corporate-friendly consumer culture, mold all countries into a standardized laissez-faire capitalist economic model, press governments to privatize public goods and services, assure global corporations unrestricted access to natural resources, and provide public guarantees for private investors and speculators. The increasingly shaky legitimacy of this flawed...