doodlemaier | Stop me if you've heard this one before . . . (Reply)

Yeah, I've posted stuff like this before, but it's because it keeps coming around on my little continuum (and the focus is a little sharper each time around)!

It became evident to me that to do more than merely slow the consolidation of power by the corporate juggernaut, it is necessary to create broad public awareness of attractive alternatives. I argue now that the problem is not the markets as such but more specifically global captalism, which is to a healthy market economy what cancer is to healthy body. Cancer occurs when genetic damage causes a cell to forget that it is part of a larger body, the healthy function of which is essential to its own survival. The cell begins to seek its own growth without regard to the consequences for the whole, and ultimately destroys the body that feeds it. As I learned more about the course of cancers development within the body, I came to realize the reference to global capitalism as a cancer is less a metaphor than a clinical diagnosis of a pathology to which market economies are prone in the absence of adequate citizen and governmental oversight. Our hope for the future is to restore the health of our democracies an market economies by purging them of the pathology.

When dealing with a cancer of the body, containment is rarely and adequate strategy. To become healthy, one needs a curative regime to remove or kill the defective cells. Some combination of surgical removal with measures to weaken the cancer cells and strengthen the body's natural defenses is likely to be more appropriate. There is a strong parallel to the task before us. Curing the capitalist cancer to restore democracy, the market and our human right and freedoms will require virtually eliminating the institution of the limited-liability for-profit public corporation as we know it to create a post-corporate world through actions such as the following:

• End the legal fiction that corporations are entitled to the rights of persons and exclude corporation from political participation.
• Implement serious political campaign reform to reduce the influence of money on politics;
• Eliminate corporate welfare by eliminating direct subsidies and recovering other externalized costs through fees and taxes;
• Implement mechanisms to regulate international corporations and finance; and
• Use fiscal and regulatory policy to make financial speculation unprofitable and to give an economic advantage to human-scale, stakeholder-owned enterprises.

I have no illusions that removal of the capitalist cancer will be easily accomplished. Rarely is cancer in any of its manifestations easily cured. On the other hand, I see no realistic prospect for the amicable co-existence of life and the global economy. They represent ways of being and valuing as antithetical to one another as the co-existance of cancer cells and healthy cells. Any seeming accommodation between them is inherently unstable and most likely to be resolved in favor of the cancer. On a small crowded planet with a finite life-support system, our choice as a species is basically between life after capitalism and a severe global-scale social and environmental collapse.

~David Korten, from the The Ecologist, May/June 1999