Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS
VIctor Milne: I quite appreciate that when we start off from a small base, a large percentage rate of increase is insignificant. We are, however, talking about the Big Five in Canada. If they (and all the other big banks in the world) were to achieve a 64-fold multiplication of profits in 50 years, the impact would be far from insignificant. I agree that they are not going to do it, but that is what they are trying to do with no regard for the effects it will have on society and the environment. Weick: A couple of points here: One is that there is a difference between trying and doing. In the long run (which, as I'm sure you know, is not the same as a long time), it is not likely that any type of business will be able to increase its profits, or grow, more rapidly than the growth of the economy unless, of course, it cuts into the growth and profits of other types of businesses. In the case of banks operating in any one country, the question I would ask is whether their growth and profitability is being driven by rapid economic expansion - that is, the demand for the kinds of products they provide - or whether it is driven by increasing market share. In the case of Canada, I'm not sure of which is the foremost reason. I would, however, suggest that our growth has been relatively unspectacular, so increasing market share must play a role. My other point is, where is government in all of this? Surely one of the outstanding functions of government is to ensure responsible business behaviour. It is the business of business to grow and be profitable. It is government's responsibility to ensure that business does not grow at the expense of the environment or consumers. All too often, it fails to meet that responsibility, and in fact abandons it. I worked for a very large oil company years ago. It hired some very good environmental scientists and had a much broader understanding of environmental issues than the government agencies it had to deal with. The government agencies had little data of their own and were in fact relying on the industry to provide information which would then form the basis for regulating the industry -- a little like trusting the fox to guard the henhouse. Currently, at least in Canada, the capacity of government agencies to ensure responsible business behaviour is pretty close to zero -- witness the mess in the Health Protection Branch. Currently, the government of Canada is in trouble for pepper spraying some protesting students at the University of British Columbia. This is probably the best thing that could have happened for the government because it focuses attention away from the fact that has arrived at a point where it is virtually incapable of doing anything but pepper spraying. Milne: I apologize for giving my comments a misleading focus on banking alone, which I had not intended to do. As I see it banks are at the top of the industrial food chain. All the other industries want to increase their profits by 10 per cent per year or whatever their industry standard is. So the point about the banks' profits is just that it is an indicator of what is happening throughout all industries. Take an oversimplified chain. We focus first on a manufacturer of widgets, who wants to increase his profits by 10 per cent per year. Upstream from this is the machine tool manufacturer who wants to increase his profits and beyond that the steel company supplying the raw material for both widgets and machinery to make widgets. Downstream from our widget manufacturer is the trucking company transporting the widgets and the retailer selling them, all wanting to increase profits. Helping to finance all of these operations are the banks. What is the impact on the environment of all this? Are we not accelerating towards the Limits to Growth--if we have not indeed already passed them. Weick: My point, again, is that there is a tremendous difference between what business would like to see happen, and what will actually happen. Everybody wants profits to grow at 10%, but if the economy actually only grows at 2%, very few firms will realize their profitability objectives, and many will in fact lose money. And I would again point out that, when it comes to Limits to Growth, it is not profits that we should focus on, but costs and revenues. By costs I mean all of the resource inputs that a firm must use to undertake production. In the case of some types of business, such as the production of oil and gas, the environment itself is an input. For a very long time, it was treated as a free input. Now increasingly, there
[PARKER:1460] Column 10-25-98 Celtic Colors (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 10:20:16 -0400 From: Parker Barss Donham [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PARKER:1460] Column 10-25-98 Celtic Colors 25 October 1998 To appreciate the quirky, counterintuitive economics that drive Cape Breton's Celtic Colours International Festival, picture a fog-shrouded evening in Ingonish 11 days ago. Any of the four acts playing Ski Cape Smoky lodge that Wednesday night -- Archie Fisher, a renowned Scottish folk singer reminiscent of Pete Seeger; Anita Best, a founding vocalist with Figgy Duff whose work preserving Newfoundland culture has made her a national treasure; Eleanor Shandley, a high-octane Irish singer whose incandescent voice electrified the festival; and Bernard Felix and Norman Fromanger, a delightful button accordian-electric base duo from the French-descended community around The Rock's Port-au-Port Peninsula -- could have captivated the audience single-handedly. Instead, concert-goers got all four. Though the lodge was packed, it held only 220 chairs, and no one was more than 50 feet from the stage. At $10 each, that meant a gate of just $2,200 to pay seven first rate folk musicians -- three of whom, counting Shandley's guitarist, had crossed the Atlantic to be there. That was but one of four musical events gracing small communities across Cape Breton that night. Gaelic singers, pipers, and fiddlers -- including five from Scotland -- presented a traditional Gaelic evening at the Christmas Island Fire Hall. Step dancers and Cape Breton square sets filled Port Hood Consolidated School. A dozen first rate fiddlers, singers, and instrumentalists, including Mary Jane Lamond and Dave MacIsaac, explored the mystical connection between the Cape Breton fiddle and the linguistic rhythms of Gaelic at Glendale Parish Hall. That was Wednesday. The festival ran nine days. Twelve thousand people attended 32 concerts at 26 different venues -- mostly community centres and school auditoriums, with just a few large events in concert halls and convention arenas. That doesn't count the Festival Club jam sessions that began each night around midnight, as musicians drifted back to Baddeck's Inverary Inn from their concert performances. For nine nights running, the public could pay $5 to hear the best Celtic musicians in the world improvising 'til dawn. These mix and match sessions were the festival's soul. You might hear three members of the hot Irish group the Bumblebees play a lively 45-minute set with, say, Cape Breton's Dave MacIsaac or Fred Lavery. Then PEI's intensely energetic Acadian band Barrachois might take the stage, or more accurately, take to the air two feet above the stage. Then a haunting a capella Gaelic singer. Then two dueling Irish harpists playing Ashley-like riffs off one another. A thundering duet in the wee hours of last Sunday morning -- featuring guitarist Gordie Samson, the year's hottest Cape Breton artist, and the Irish-bred, US-based button accordianist John Whelan -- was, by aficionado consensus, the festival highlight. Last year, Celtic Colours made its headquarters in Sydney, but in what will rank as the dumbest marketing decision of the year, the Delta Sydney this year declined to offer any discount on the roughly $100,000 worth of hotel rooms the festival purchases. So organizers switched the base camp to the more centrally located Baddeck. "They may have been the only game in town," said organizer Max MacDonald, whose comfortable voice you might recall from Buddy and the Boys and the Cape Breton Summertime Revue, "but they weren't the only town in town." Here are some more quirky economics. The move from a city of 27,000 to a village of 1,500 had the unexpected result of boosting Festival Club attendance from 100-150 a night in Sydney to 200-300 in Baddeck. Go figure. So far I haven't mentioned the dozens of workshops (in square dancing, step dancing, song writing, Celtic musicology, Gaelic language instruction, and Cape Breton history), art exhibits, milling frolics, square dances, and banquets that took place throughout the week. Or Celtic Colours in the Schools, a program that saw Gaelic singer Jeff MacDonald and young Cape Breton fiddlers Mac Morin, Mairi Rankin, and Lisa MacIsaac give more than 30 free performances in public schools around the island. Among the audience at each event, you'd hear southern drawls, Aussie twangs, and clipped Scottish brogues -- visitors who had come to Cape Breton after learning about the festival in Celtic publications, by word of mouth, or on the Internet. To judge from ballots filled out for door prizes, around a third of the audience came from off island. Celtic Colours is as wildly popular with musicians as with fans -- and for the same reason. Its unique, dispersed character, with
FW: David Korten: Democracy for Sale (fwd)
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 20:36:54 -0400 From: Eric Fawcett [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: s4p all lists [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: s4p-54: e--David Korten: Democracy for Sale MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk From: The Guardian (UK), October 21, 1998 Your Mortal Enemy: under capitalism, democracy is now for sale to the highest bidder. Faceless bankers now move two trillion dollars around the world every day, searching for quick profits, breaking national economies and putting ever more pressure on natural wealth. What's to be done? Slay the beast of capitalism, says David C Korten, and return money to its proper role. An edited and ammended extract of David Korten's Schumacher Lecture in Bristol on October 17 1998. For those of us who grew up believing capitalism is the foundation of democracy, market freedom, and the good life it has been a rude awakening to realise that under capitalism, democracy is now for sale to the highest bidder, the market is centrally planned by global mega-corporations larger than most countries, denying one's brothers and sisters a source of livelihood is now rewarded as an economic virtue, and the destruction of nature and life to make money for the already rich is treated as progress. The world is now ruled by a global financial casino staffed by faceless bankers and hedge fund speculators who operate with a herd mentality in the shadowy world of global finance. Each day they move more than two trillion dollars around the world in search of quick profits and safe havens sending exchange rates and stock markets into wild gyrations wholly unrelated to any underlying economic reality. With abandon they make and break national economies, buy and sell corporations, and hold the most powerful politicians hostage to their interests. When their bets pay off they claim the winnings as their own. When they lose, they run to governments and public institutions to protect them against loss with pronouncements about how the poor must tighten their belts and become more fiscally prudent. In the United States, the media keep the public preoccupied with the details of our president's sex life and calls for his impeachment for lying about an inconsequential affair. Meanwhile, Congress and the president are working out of view to push through funding increases for the IMF to bail out the banks who put the entire global financial system at risk with reckless lending. They are advancing financial deregulation to encourage even more reckless financial speculation. And they are negotiating international agreements such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment intended to make the world safe for financial speculators by preventing governments from intervening to regulate their activities. To understand what is happening we must educate ourselves about the nature of money and the ways of those who decide who will have access to it and who will not. As a medium of exchange, money is one of the most useful of human inventions. But as we become ever more dependent on it to acquire the basic means of our sustenance, we give to the institutions and people who control its creation and allocation the power to decide whether we shall live in prosperity or destitution. With the increasing breakdown of community and governmental social safety nets, our money system has become the most effective instrument of social control and extraction ever devised. The fact that few of us think of the money system as an instrument of control makes it more powerful and efficient as an instrument of wealth extraction. What of capitalism, the self-proclaimed champion of democracy, market freedom, peace and prosperity? Modern capitalism involves a concentration of wealth by the few to the exclusion of the many; it is more than a system of human elites. It has evolved into a system of autonomous rule by money and for money that functions on autopilot beyond the control of any human actor or responsiveness to any human sensibility. Contrary to its claims, capitalism is showing itself to be the mortal enemy of democracy and the market. Its relationship to democracy and the market economy is now much the same as the relationship of a cancer to the body whose life energy it expropriates. Cancer is a pathology that occurs when an otherwise healthy cell forgets that it is a part of the body and begins to pursue its own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences for the whole. The growth of the cancerous cell deprives the healthy cells of nourishment and ultimately kills both the body and itself. Capitalism does much the same to the societies it infests. One reason we fail to recognise the seriousness of our predicament is because we fail to see how capitalism is destroying the world's real wealth. It destroys social capital when it
Re: FW: David Korten: Democracy for Sale (fwd)
So the solution is: capitalism in a small scale. I am not impressed. Capitalism by definition needs profits and needs to grow, and it can only put up with a linited form of democracy. Not to mention, that to solve the global problems of raw-material distibrution, water conservation, sustainability or even defense against random asteroids, we need more integration in the future, not less. In the last few months people seem to dare to say stuff like capitalism is dangerous for our future. I hope they'll have the courage soon to draw the logical conclusion: only a system based on collective ownership and collective distribution will be able to be meaningfully democratic and practical for our survival. Eva ..cut. The challenge is to replace the global capitalist economy with a properly regulated and locally rooted market economy that invests in the regeneration of living capital, increases net beneficial economic output, distributes that output justly and equitably to meet the basic needs of everyone, strengthens the institutions of democracy and the market, and returns money to its proper role as the servant of productive activity. It should favour smaller local enterprise over global corporations, encourage local ownership, penalise financial speculation, and give priority to meeting the basic needs of the many over providing luxuries and diversions for the wealthy few. In most aspects it should do exactly the opposite of what the global capitalist economy is doing. Most of the responsibility and initiative must come from local and national levels. Supporting nations and localities in this task should become the core agenda of the United Nations, as the protection of people and communities from predatory global corporations and finance is arguably the central security issue of our time. The first positive step would be to dismantle the World Trade Organisation on the ground that there is no legitimate need for a global police force to protect global corporations from the actions of democratically-elected national and local governments so that the richest one per cent of humanity can become even richer at the expense of the rest. The WTO is a powerful, but illegitimate and democratically unaccountable institution put in place through largely secret negotiations with little or no public debate to serve purposes largely conltrary to the public interest. The 99 percent of the world's people whose interests it does not serve have every right to eliminate it. Addressing the real need to police the global economy requires an organisation very different from the WTO - an open and democratic organisation with the mandate and power to set and enforce rules holding those corporations that operate across national borders democratically accountable to the people and priorities of the nations where they operate. It should as well have the power to regulate and tax international financial flows and institutions. And it should have a mandate to make speculation unprofitable and to help protect the integrity of domestic financial institutions from the financial markets and the predatory practices of international financial speculators. There are obvious questions as to whether such proposals are politically feasible given the stranglehold of corporations and big money over our political processes. Yet we could use this same reasoning to conclude that human survival itself is not politically feasible. Global corporations and financial institutions are our collective creations. And we have both the right and the means to change or replace them if they do not serve. Dr David Korten is president of the People-Centered Development Forum in Washington State, USA http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf and the author of 'When Corporations Rule the World' and the forthcoming 'The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism'. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
