Upcoming Actions
Winter Soldier Testimonials
You can learn bout and watch explosive Winter Soldier testimony on the Iraq Veterans Against the War website. Here's a sample from YouTube:
Posted on Apr 10, 2008 by
Procession for the Future Debuts in Portland
Backbone Campaign's Procession for the Future is a touring parade, using high production value art and spectacle to animate our aspirations and deliver a compelling progressive vision for the country to spotlight progressive policy priorities, such as:
* Fair Trade, Living Wage Jobs & Healthy Local Economies
* Climate Stabilization, Ecological Sustainability/Future & Renewable Energy
* End of War, Dismantling of Empire & the Military Industrial Complex
* Election Integrity & Renewal of Democracy
* Housing, Education and Health Care for All
* Humane & Fair Immigration Policy
* Celebration of Diversity & Elimination of Racial Disparities
* Governmental Accountability and Transparency
The debut in Portland March 2-4 was a huge success showcasing this as a visibility and educational tool for our movement.
To view a slideshow of the event showing all the grand puppets and costumes Click Here
Posted on Mar 13, 2008 by
Corporations for the Public Benefit
Published on Saturday, December 8, 2007 by YES! Magazine
Only One Reason to Grant a Corporate Charter
by David Korten
This is an expanded version of a presentation given to the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA, November 13, 2007:
It is fitting that we hold this conversation on the future of the corporation in historic Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty. Deliberations in this very room more than 200 years ago were the first step on a long walk away from a king named George that launched a new nation and led ultimately to the end of monarchy. May the success of our forbears inspire us in our deliberations on the future of the private-benefit corporation.
The Big Picture
I recall my business school professors many years ago calling us to look at the big picture to identify the systemic cause of whatever immediate problem symptom captured our attention. We would do well to apply this wisdom as we look ahead to the role of the private-benefit corporation in a profoundly troubled 21st century. We must identify the deep systemic causes of the social and environmental crises unfolding all around us-no matter how troubling the resulting conclusions may be. Here is the big picture in brief outline.
1. Consumption: Growth in human consumption resulting from a combination of population growth and growth in consumption per capita is depleting the natural life support system of the planet, disrupting hydrology and climate systems, and threatening human survival.
2. Inequality: Unconscionable and growing concentration of financial power in a world engaged in an ever more intense competition for a declining base of material wealth is eroding the social fabric to the point of widespread social breakdown.
3. Institutional Pathology: The most powerful institutions on the planet, global financial markets and the transnational corporations that serve them, are dedicated to growing consumption and inequality. They convert real capital into financial capital to increase the relative economic power of those who live by money, while depressing the wages of those who produce real value through their labor. They offer palliatives that leave the deeper cause of our potentially terminal environmental and social crises untouched, because they are the cause.
Our future depends on a dramatic cultural and institutional transformation to reduce aggregate consumption and achieve an equitable distribution of economic power.It requires an epic institutional transformation to:
1. Reduce aggregate human consumption.
2. Redistribute financial power from rich to poor to achieve an equitable distribution of Earth's life-sustaining wealth.
3. Increase economic efficiency by reallocating material resources from harmful to beneficial uses. Examples include reallocation from military to health care and environmental rejuvenation, from automobiles to public transportation, from suburban sprawl to compact communities, from conversion to reclamation of forest and agricultural land, from advertising to education, and from global financial speculation to investment in self-reliant local economies.
4. Invest in the regeneration of the living human, social, and natural capital that is the foundation of all real wealth. This requires reversing the current process of converting the real wealth of living capital into the fictitious wealth of financial capital and accepting the resulting negative returns to financial capital. It may take us awhile to recognize that just as increasing financial capital at the expense of living capital makes us collectively poorer, increasing living capital at the expense of financial capital makes us collectively richer.
5. Accelerate social innovation, adaptation, and learning by nurturing cultural diversity and removing intellectual property rights impediments to the free and open flow of beneficial knowledge.
These are imperatives of the 21st century and it is difficult to identify a constructive role in addressing them for the private-benefit corporation-a term for any corporation chartered solely to serve the narrow and exclusive private financial interests of its investors and top managers.
The Private-Benefit Corporation
The private-benefit corporation is an institution granted a legally protected right-some would claim obligation-to pursue a narrow private interest without regard to broader social and environmental consequences. If it were a real person, it would fit the clinical profile of a sociopath.
The basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands to benefit wealthy investors far removed from the social and environmental consequences. That design has ever since proven highly effective in advancing the private interests of the world's wealthiest people at enormous cost to the rest.
The private-benefit corporation uses its economic power to privatize (internalize) gains and socialize (externalize) cost. The resulting concentration of wealth creates an illusion that wealth is being created, when the actual consequence is a net destruction of real wealth. It is an institutional form best suited to achieving outcomes exactly the opposite of those we humans must now pursue.
The only legitimate reason for a government to issue a corporate charter giving a group of private investors a legally protected right to aggregate and concentrate virtually unlimited economic power under unified management is to serve a well-defined public purpose under strict rules of public accountability. This defines a public-benefit corporation, which can be chartered as either for-profit or not-for-profit. The private-benefit corporation is an institutional anomaly, a creation of monarchy that properly shares monarchy's historic fate.
A New Economy
The work at hand necessarily goes well beyond redesigning the private-benefit corporation to hold it accountable for its harms. We need to bring forth a new economy designed to value and nurture life in all its many forms and unleash the full creative potential of the human species to this end. Organization theory suggests that such an economy will necessarily be decentralized, self-organizing, and grounded in principles of cooperation and mutual caring free from the distorting influence of the massive concentrations of centrally controlled and managed economic power the private-benefit corporation makes possible. This suggests a planetary system of self-reliant community-based economies comprised of locally rooted, human-scale enterprises that engage in balanced, rule-based fair trade at the margin.
As with any other segment of public life, markets must have a framework of rules defined and enforced by democratically accountable governments to secure the public interest. The freer the economy from distorting concentrations of economic and political power subject to abuse by the ethically challenged, the smaller such governments can be.
Business enterprise is integral to any economy. Business enterprises, however, may take many legal forms that confer no special rights or privileges beyond those of any natural person and properly limit the concentration of unaccountable economic power. These forms include cooperatives, partnerships, sole proprietorships, and special for-profit corporations with charters designed to balance public and private interests.
Each of these legal enterprise forms is more consistent with the beneficial function of markets than are global-scale transnational private-benefit corporations with internal centrally planned economies larger than the economies of most nations. Breaking up the larger private-benefit corporations into smaller component enterprises either rechartered as public-benefit corporations with clear public purposes or converted to non-corporate enterprise forms is an essential step toward restoring beneficial market discipline and responsible, rooted private ownership.
So where do we look for leadership in the monumental undertaking at hand? As continued denial of the reality of global climate change became untenable, private-benefit corporations turned from denial to an effort to turn the crisis into an opportunity to increase their profits. They are implementing energy cost savings and promoting carbon-trading schemes, ethanol subsidies, government guarantees for nuclear power, coal gasification, carbon sequestration, and other measures that treat symptoms within a business as usual framework of economic growth and financial returns to the already moneyed. Cutting costs through energy efficiency is clearly a positive contribution, but it must go well beyond the easy reductions that produce a quick increase in the financial bottom line.
Private-benefit corporations are not touching any proposal that would limit aggregate consumption or their own power. In its present form, the private-benefit corporation is incapable of voluntarily sacrificing profits to a larger public good. Yet this is exactly what would be required for them to provide leadership in reducing aggregate consumption, increasing equality, and redirecting the economy from producing what is profitable to producing what is needed for healthy children, families, communities, and nature.
Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital-by money and those who have it-in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit.
Leadership in advancing the deeper institutional changes essential to the human future must come from awakened citizens working from outside the existing institutions of elite power. This work begins with exposing the myths that blind us to the irreconcilable conflict between capitalism and democracy and to the potential of community-centered, life-serving market alternatives based on principles of responsible citizenship, community, and equity.
We are the people to whom the founders of our nation referred to as "We the People." We are the ones we've been waiting for.
David Korten is author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule to World. He is chair of YES! Magazine, where he writes frequently on issues of corporations and creating a living economy.
Posted on Dec 09, 2007 by
The Road Well Travelled
Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th October 2007
A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, "their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl."(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
So when I read the UN's new report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures(2). There were some bright spots - lead has been removed from petrol almost everywhere, sulphur emissions have been reduced in most rich nations - and plenty of gloom. But the issue that stopped me was production.
Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up with population. "World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased "(3). There will be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium development goal on hunger (halving the proportion of hungry people) would require a doubling of world food production(4). Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level(5).
There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water. "Meeting the Millennium Development Goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by crops by 2050."(6) Where will it come from? "Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion's share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater."(7) One-tenth of the world's major rivers no longer reach the sea all round the year(8).
Buried on page 148, I found this statement. "If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress." Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?
The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world's species(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: "if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?"
On Saturday, for some light relief from the UN report (who says that environmentalists don't know how to make whoopee?), I went to a meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham. They had come from all over the country, and between them they were contesting 18 new schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British government is now planning(12). The improvements to the climate change bill that Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, anounced yesterday were welcome. But in every major energy sector - aviation, transport, power generation, house building, coal mining, oil exploration - the government is promoting policies that will increase emissions. How will it make the 60% cut the bill enforces?
No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill's great get-out clause: carbon trading(13). If the government can't achieve a 60% cut in the UK, it will pay other countries to do it on our behalf. But trading works only if the total global reduction we are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part - possibly almost all - of the world's current emissions. Most of the nations with which the UK will trade will have to make major cuts of their own, on top of those they sell to us. Before long we will have to buy our credits from Mars and Jupiter. The only certain means of preventing runaway climate change is to cut emissions here and now.
Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties' policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters move behind them. We won't be prompted by the media. The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show. The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, is hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.
It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist's core beliefs(14). I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Cormac McCarthy, 2007. The Road, p55. Picador, London.
2. United Nations Environment Programme, 2007. Global Environment Outlook: GEO4. http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/report/GEO-4_Report_Full_en.pdf
3. ibid, p86.
4. ibid, p110.
5. ibid, p110.
6. ibid, p83.
7. ibid, p110.
8. ibid, p99.
9. Alok Jha, 24th October 2007. Warming could wipe out half of all species. The Guardian.
10. James Randerson, 26th October 2007. The edge of oblivion: conservationists name 25 primates about to disappear. The Guardian.
11. David Adam, 23rd October 2007. Carbon output rising faster than forecast, says study. The Guardian.
12. The organisation RoadBlock, which convened the conference, has lists of the government's new trunk road schemes. http://www.roadblock.org.uk/
13. HM Government, March 2007. Draft Climate Change Bill. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm70/7040/7040.pdf
14. p93.
Posted on Dec 06, 2007 by