David C. Korten > Quotes

“In a political democracy, each person gets one vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote. Markets are inherently biased in favor of people of wealth.”
― 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

“The study concluded, “Imperialism can best be viewed as a mechanism for transferring income from the middle to the upper classes.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“The larger the corporation and the “freer” the market, the greater is its ability to force others to bear its costs and thereby subsidize its profits. Some call this theft. Economists call it “economies of scale.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“Greed is a high-paid corporate executive firing 10,000 employees and then rewarding himself with a multimillion-dollar bonus for having saved the company so much money.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

“In 1929, there were 20,000 millionaires in the United States and 2 billionaires. By 1944 there were only 13,000 millionaires and no billionaires.”
― 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

“The number of billionaires in the United States increased from 1 in 1978 to 120 in 1994.”
― 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

“Today’s business corporation is an artificial creation, shielding owners and managers while preserving corporate privilege and existence. Artificial or not, corporations have won more rights under law than people have—rights which government has protected with armed force. —RICHARD L. GROSSMAN and FRANK T. ADAMS”
― 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

“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

“Astronauts live on spaceships hurtling through space with a human crew and a precious and limited supply of resources. Everything must be maintained in balance, recycled; nothing can be wasted. The measure of well-being is not how fast the crew is able to consume its limited stores but rather how effective the crew members are in maintaining their physical and mental health, their shared resource stocks, and the life-support system on which they all depend. What is thrown away is forever inaccessible. What is accumulated without recycling fouls the living space. Crew members function as a team in the interests of the whole. No one would think of engaging in nonessential consumption unless the basic needs of all were met and there was ample provision for the future.”
― 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

“markets and politics are both about governance, power, and the allocation of society’s resources”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“When rights are a function of property rather than personhood, only those with property have rights.”
― 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

“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