If Nature Is Sacred, Capitalism Is Wicked

If Nature Is Sacred, Capitalism Is Wicked

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/03/if-nature-sacred-capitalism-wicked

By: Jake Johnson
Date: 2016-10-03

In his remarkable study When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten recounts a meeting he attended ahead of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The meeting was led, Korten notes, by indigenous leaders who were anxious about the direction in which global environmental policy was being steered. They were also, quite justifiably, worried about who was doing the steering.

"In the conference's preparatory meetings," Korten writes, "corporatists...proposed that to save nature we must put a price on her."

We Never Voted for Corporate Rule

We Never Voted for Corporate Rule

The $66 billion sale of Monsanto is yet another reminder of how corporations have colonized the world and subverted democracy. To regain our future, we must claim our right to popular sovereignty.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/21/we-never-voted-corporate-rule

By: David Korten
Date: 2016-10-21

This column is the second part of a series. To read Part One, click here. 

In Part One, I argued that a healthy society requires that governments be accountable to the people for the well-being of all, and that corporations be accountable to democratic governments.

Last week, Bayer, a transnational drug and pesticide company, secured funding for its $66 billion offer to acquire Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of agricultural seeds. This follows the announced $130 billion merger of chemical giants Dow and DuPont, and ChemChina’s proposed $43 billion purchase of the seed and pesticide firm Syngenta.

Bayer, DuPont, Dow, Monsanto, and Syngenta are five of the world’s six biggest pesticide and seed corporations. There are claims, which I find credible, that the “Big 6” and their products bear major responsibility for pesticide-resistant weeds and insects, and are implicated in impoverishment of small farmers, collapse of honeybee colonies, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity and soil fertility—all serious attacks on the common good.  And similar consolidation continues in most every sector of the economy.

Pope Francis: Capitalism Is ‘Terrorism Against All of Humanity’

Pope Francis: Capitalism Is ‘Terrorism Against All of Humanity’

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pope_francis_capitalism_is_terrorism_against_all_of_humanity_20160802

By: Nika Knight
Date: 2016-08-02

Pope Francis surprised reporters on a flight from Krakow to the Vatican late Sunday when he blamed the “god of money” for extremist violence in Europe and the Middle East, saying that a ruthless global economy leads disenfranchised people to violence.

“Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person,” the pope told reporters, according to The Wall Street Journal. “This is fundamental terrorism, against all humanity.”

Pope Francis during a 2013 visit to Brazil. (Tânia Rêgo / ABr - Agência Brasil / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Alternative to Fervent Nationalism Isn't Corporate Liberalism—It's Social Democracy

Clerk Note: Called to your reading attention, because too often well understood definitions of political words aren't well understood, nor is the direction the nation and world are heading.

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The Alternative to Fervent Nationalism Isn't Corporate Liberalism—It's Social Democracy

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/11/alternative-fervent-nationalism-isnt-corporate-liberalism-its-social-democracy

By: 2016-07-11
Date: Jake Johnson

In his 1946 essay reviewing former Trotskyist-turned-reactionary James Burnham's book The Managerial Revolution, George Orwell made several observations that resonate just as powerfully today as they did when they were first published.

"The real question," he wrote, "is not whether the people who wipe their boots on us during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians: the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy."

Orwell recognized what many today fail to perceive: That free market capitalism is, in the words of Karl Polanyi, a "stark Utopia," a system that does not exist, and one that would not survive for long if it ever came into existence.