When Corporations Rule the World Quotes

“In their quest to reduce all economic values to financial values, economists equated money with wealth, making money with creating wealth, and growth in the market price of an asset with growth in real value. They defined people as financial beings rather than living beings and ignored critical distinctions between the accumulated financial assets of individuals and the health and well-being of living communities. They forgot that the only legitimate purpose of an economy is to support households in making a living—not corporations in making a killing.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Real investment is long-term and produces real value for society. Speculation is short-term and expropriates for private benefit the wealth created by others while contributing nothing of value to society in exchange.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Community-based living economies are most secure, stable, productive, and innovative when they organize to meet their own needs with their own resources while freely sharing ideas and technology and trading their surplus in balanced exchange with their neighbors.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Our future depends on replacing a life-destroying capitalist suicide economy with a living economy devoted to life’s service. The need is urgent and imperative. The time to debate whether it is necessary or even possible has long passed. We must turn what seems politically impossible into the politically unstoppable. And we must do it in a blink of history’s eye.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. —ALANIS OBOMSAWIN of the Abenaki tribe”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Fifty Years Is Enough campaign organized by citizen groups on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), an international alliance of citizen advocacy groups, to boycott Nestlé products. Responding to evidence that bottle-feeding was causing thousands of infant deaths each year in poor countries, the boycotters demanded that Nestlé stop the aggressive promotion of its infant formula as a modern and nutritious substitute for breast-feeding. Nestlé launched a vicious counterattack, which spurred the rapid growth of IBFAN into a coalition of more than 140 citizen groups in seventy countries. As a result of the IBFAN efforts, the World Health Organization issued a code of conduct in 1981 governing the promotion of baby formula, and Nestlé made a promise—subsequently dishonored—to follow the code.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Societies would be better off if, instead of paying millions of people sometimes outrageous amounts to do work that is harmful to the quality of our lives, we gave them the same pay to sit home and do nothing. Although far from an optimal solution, it would make more sense than the wholly irrational practice of organizing societies to pay people to do things that result in a net reduction in real wealth and well-being.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“History and daily life demonstrate both our capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed and our capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and make it easy to live in balance with one another and nature. In consequence, they enjoy an abundance of what is most important to human happiness and well-being. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in consequence suffer scarcity and deprivation.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Since a science must be objective and value-free, economists chose to reduce all values to market values as revealed in market price. Thus air, water, and other essentials of life provided freely by nature are treated as valueless until scarcity and privatization render them marketable. By contrast, gold and diamonds, which have almost no use in sustaining life, are valued highly.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“No sane person seeks a world divided between billions of people living in absolute deprivation and a tiny elite guarding their wealth and luxury behind fortress walls.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“It should now be clear that the cure for the deprivations of poverty will not—cannot—be found in the economic growth of a globalized free market that weakens and destroys the bonds of culture and community to the exclusive benefit of global corporations. The necessary cure lies instead in restoring and strengthening these bonds. Our collective survival—not only of the poor and excluded but also of the relatively affluent and not yet excluded—depends on creating an institutional and values framework that advances this restoration.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“For growing numbers of people around the world, especially youth, minorities, and women, there is no longer a dream of a more prosperous and secure future, only the bleak prospect of exclusion, despair, deprivation, shame, and brutalizing violence.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“It is far from an incidental consideration that in its internal governance structures, the corporation is among the most authoritarian of organizations and can be as repressive as the most oppressive totalitarian state. Those who work for corporations spend the better portion of their waking hours living under a form of authoritarian rule that dictates their dress, their speech, their values, their behavior, and their levels of income—with no opportunity for appeal. With few exceptions, their subject employees can be dismissed without recourse on momentary notice.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“The world’s five hundred largest industrial corporations, which employ only 0.05 of 1 percent of the world’s population, control 25 percent of the world’s economic output.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Since 1991, retail firms have been going bankrupt at a rate of more than 17,000 a year, up from approximately 11,000 in 1989.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“General Electric (GE) shed 100,000 employees over eleven years to bring total employment down to 268,000 in 1992. During that same period, its sales went up from $27 billion to $62 billion, and net income from $1.5 billion to $4.7 billion.9 GE became smaller only in terms of the number of employees who shared the benefits of its growth in profits and market share. It shed its commitment to provide productive and well-remunerated employment for 100,000 people and their families. It retained its technical, financial, and market power.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“From 1980 to 1993, the Fortune 500 industrial firms shed nearly 4.4 million jobs, more than one out of four that they previously provided. During that same period, their sales increased by 1.4 times and assets by 2.3 times. The average annual CEO compensation at the largest corporations increased by 6.1 times to $3.8 million.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“interventions do little to decrease volatility. They simply transfer taxpayer dollars into the hands of speculators.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“The global economy is not, however, a healthy economy. In all too many instances, it rewards extractive investors who do not create wealth but simply extract and concentrate existing wealth. The extractive investor’s gain is at the expense of other individuals or the society at large.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Market tyranny may be more subtle than state tyranny, but it is no less effective in enslaving the many to the interests of the few.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“The more time we spend immersed in the corporate-controlled-and-packaged world of television, the less time we have for the direct human exchanges through which cultural identity and values were traditionally expressed, reinforced, and updated.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“We are ruled by an oppressive market, not an oppressive state.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“In the words of Paul Hawken, “Our minds are being addressed by addictive media serving corporate sponsors whose purpose is to rearrange reality so that viewers forget the world around them.”1”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“The scholar-journalist William Greider maintains that the policy direction of the Democratic Party is now set largely by six Washington law firms that specialize in selling political influence to moneyed clients and in raising money for Democratic politicians. Working closely with Republicans as well, these firms are in the business of brokering power to whoever will pay their fees.17 This is the sorry state of American democracy.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Before NAFTA we thought corporations could only buy Southern governments. Now we see they also buy Northern governments. —IGNACIO PEÓN ESCALANTE,
Mexican Action Network on Free Trade”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“A market in which economic power is unjustly distributed will allocate resources to producing luxuries for those with money while depriving those with no money of even the most basic necessities of life. Justice, market efficiency, and institutional legitimacy all depend on constant intervention by government to continuously redistribute income to maintain the equitable distribution of wealth that markets require for a just and efficient allocation of resources to meet the needs of all.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“the West did not prosper in the post–World War II period by rejecting the state in favor of the market. Rather, it prospered by rejecting extremist ideologies of both Right and Left in favor of democratic pluralism: a system of governance based on a pragmatic, institutional balance among the forces of government, market, and civil society.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“From the results, one can easily see that the whole point of privatization is neither economic efficiency nor improved services to the consumer but simply to transfer wealth from the public purse—which could redistribute it to even out social inequalities—to private hands. —SUSAN GEORGE”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“chief economist of the World Bank. Summers argued that it is economically most efficient for the rich countries to dispose of their toxic waste in poor countries, because poor people have both shorter life spans and less earning potential than wealthy people.20 In a subsequent commentary on the Summers memo, The Economist took this obscenity even further, stating that it is a moral duty of the rich countries to export their pollution to poor countries because this provides poor people with economic opportunities of which they would otherwise be deprived.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World