David Korten: Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.

from YES! Magazine:




The End of Empire
David Korten: Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.

by David Korten
posted Mar 28, 2011


In an earlier day, our rulers were kings and emperors. Now they are corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers. Wall Street is Empire’s most recent stage. Its reign will mark the end of the tragic drama of a 5,000 year Era of Empire.

Imperial historians would have us believe that civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great empires that emerged some 5,000 years ago. Much is made of their glorious accomplishments and heroic battles.

Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, the pillage and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished, and the lost creative potential.

Nor is there mention that most all the advances that make us truly human came before the Era of Empire—including the domestication of plants and animals, food storage, and the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/the-end-of-empire

http://www.amazon.com/Agenda-New-Economy-Phantom-Wealth/dp/1605093750/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301366289&sr=8-1

Nearly two years after the financial meltdown, economic recovery still seems a distant promise. Desperate, overwhelming need for change has not overcome Washington’s timid preference for the status quo. Joblessness and foreclosures remain endemic, and each day brings scandalous new revelations of outrageous Wall Street bonuses and corruption.

Issued as a report of the New Economy Working group, this substantially updated and expanded new edition of Agenda for a New Economy is a call for a national Declaration of Independence from Wall Street. What is needed, Korten argues, is a system that favors life values over financial values, roots power in people and community, and supports local resilience and self-organization within a framework of living markets and democracy. The new edition is a handbook for a nonviolent Main Street revolution – because change, as he explains, will not come from above. It will come from below.

The root of the problem, as detailed extensively in the first edition of Agenda for a New Economy, remains what it was in 2008: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “phantom wealth”—mere numbers on paper—without producing anything of real value and without any thought of the social consequences. In the new edition, Korten examines how events since September 2008 have proven that the predatory Wall Street leopard cannot change its spots and explains why a visionary new president opted for marginal reform. He fleshes out his vision of the alternative to the corporate Wall Street economy: a Main Street economy based on locally owned, community-oriented “living enterprises” whose success is measured as much by their positive impact on people and the environment as by their positive balance sheets. Most importantly, he offers a groundbreaking plan as to what we as citizens can do to break through the political paralysis and replace the phantom-wealth Wall Street system with a living-wealth Main Street system that is responsive to the needs and values of ordinary people.

"As powerful as Wall Street appears to be, its abuse of power has so eroded the economic, social, and environmental foundations of its own existence that its fate is sealed."


Eroded in what way, and why is its fate sealed? What will become of it, I wonder.