Creating a Post-Corporate World (Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures Book 20)
Contents:
The Real Weath of Nations: Creating a caring economy. Originally published in Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, Edited by: Allard , Davidson, and Matthaei. Changemaker Publications, Chicago, IL. Who are organic food consumers? A compilation and review of why people purchase organic food. Solidarity Networks Transforming Globalization. Buying Time and Getting By. The Voluntary Simplicity Movement. The soul of money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life. Lynne Twist , W.
Towards a Green Social Policy. Moving Forward Program for a Participatory Economy. From the Outside Looking in: Study of economics as if people mattered. Schumacher , Vintage Edition 2d edition , African America Co-ops in conversation Audio. What is Peer-to-Peer PP? Social Solidarity Economy Values and Principles. Social Solidarity Economy in Europe: Educational resources of Leeds Development Education Centre. Manage an organisation and through the game, discover the values and competencies required in the Social and Solidarity Economy. The essential guide to doing Transition.
Getting Transition started in your street, community, town or organisation. International Newsletter of Sustainable Local Development. The Paradigm Shift from Inequality to Solidarity. Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. In the Struggle over Urban Space: Terence Yuen , Pauline Chan , Household and Solidarity Economy.
Public Policy for a Social Economy. European Society for Rural Sociology. Sociologia Ruralis, Vol 55, Number 4, October Worker cooperatives, a status to survive in a changing world or a status to change the world? Spain and France, two worldviews on worker cooperatives. Are labels delivering what they intend? Explicit value of fair-trade labels versus implicit value of fair trade characteristics.
The ties that bind? Exploring the basic principles of worker-owned organizations in practice. They could stand their ground because they had access to the common lands. The imperial forces called them witches. I would burn them all. How did the forces of Christianity, based upon the stories of a loving, healing Jesus, come to be aligned with the forces of an imperialist state and a corrupted church?
To answer this question let us now fast forward to the twentieth century and the questions of a man in another part of this world. Charles Avila was a Catholic seminarian in the Philippines in the s. He persuaded Avila and other students to accompany him on his regular visits to prisoners in various Philippine jails. During his visits Avila heard story after story of how these people had been evicted from lands they had tilled for generations.
The Peasant Question was this: Avila learned from the leading lawyer in the peasant movement that the philosophy of ownership which was the basis of property laws and practices in the Philippines, as well as of most modern legal systems, actually went a long way back in history - all the way back to Roman law.
Roman law developed the ownership concept which legitimized the accumulation of wealth by a few at the expense of the impoverishment of the many. As Avila was thinking about a topic for his seminary dissertation, he wondered whether there might be early Christian philosophers of the period of the Roman Empire who had anything significant to say about the ownership concept. Most of the faculty warned him that he would be wasting his time pursuing this topic; his social justice professor, however, urged him to dig into the Latin and Greek writings concerning that period.
Avila scoured through volumes and discovered that the early Christian leaders indeed had all dealt with the question of ownership and Roman law. The writings he discovered were of great assistance to the Filipino peasant movement. In Avila published his research and these patristic writings as a book entitled Ownership: Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.
Restore, I pray you, to them even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, and their houses.
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Christianity lost its mission of economic justice when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire and was adapted to or grafted onto, the Roman land law of dominium. From that time forward Christianity went hand-in-hand with the forces of conquest of the land-grabbing imperialist state. We bowed our heads to pray, and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land. We are searching for clues for how it came to be that fewer than three hundred multi-billionaires now have as much wealth as three billion people - half the population on earth at this time.
Thomas More , Chancellor of England, who some say was the most learned justice and scholar in the realm at the time, made passionate pleas against the cruel injustices when whole villages were being pulled down to make way for the more profitable industry of sheep farming and families were turned adrift onto the roads to starve.
His plan for a better England was based upon a thorough Common Ownership. In England in the Diggers were sounding a lot like land rights prophets. Leave off dominion and lordship one over another for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth! Over several hundred years 4, Private Acts of Enclosure were passed covering some 7,, acres. Probably the same sized area was enclosed without application to Parliament. About two thirds involved open fields belonging to cottagers while one third involved commons such as woodland and heath.
In the census of , more than half the arable land belonged to the villagers. By , only 2, people owned half the agricultural land in England and Wales and that 0. As the cash economy developed, the rent money accumulated into the hands of the landholders and the plight of the people worsened.
To survive, they sometimes were forced to borrow money from the landholders at high rates of interest.
In Britain made Ireland part of its empire and dissolved the Irish Parliament. By now the Protestants had the upper hand and were given a voice in the British Parliament while the Catholic majority had none. Tenant farmers had to give their entire crops to the landlords as rent. When their subsistence potato crops failed from blight, there was nothing to fall back on. Some three million people died of starvation and disease between and , while one million fled to the US and Canada.
Let us go to America now and examine the foundations of liberty and democracy. To fully understand the severe limitations in our current form of democracy it is necessary to trace the thread of the democratic ideal back to its fundamental tenets. Pondering the problem of persistent poverty within a democratic system of government, Richard Noyes - a former recent New Hampshire State Representative and editor of the book, Now the Synthesis: Capitalism, Socialism, and the New Social Contract - identifies the current land tenure system as "the one great imperfection, the snag on which freedom catches.
Noyes shows us that the "Age of Reason gave us a thesis with flaws. The securing of this right was to be the main duty of a democratic government. But the trouble lies with Locke's Second Proviso regarding property. Because they didn't have titles to the land, that made it vacant. In the Second Proviso the reasoning of the primary mentor of the founding father was faulty and limited.
In his justification for land enclosures and privatization Locke failed to grasp the consequences for democracy of a time like ours when so few humans would come to control so much of the earth, to the exclusion of the vast majority. Nor could he have known how the forces of a industrial economy would drive land values to such heights, to the benefit of landowners and bank lenders rather than wage earners. The property-in-land problem, insufficiently scrutinized by John Locke and the founding fathers, is the crack in the Liberty Bell.
It is the root dilemma of democracy. Having life and liberty without land rights breeds unhappiness, unemployment, wage slavery, suffering, militarization and even death. Democratic government as presently constituted, because it is not grounded and embedded in the principle of equal rights to the earth, cannot build a world of peace and justice. He was Speaker of the House for many years, a radical advocate of the abolition of slavery and the major proponent of land reform during Reconstruction. He wanted the fertile plantation lands of the South to be allocated to the freed slaves and poor whites.
In his view this plan would also help to solve the race problem by uniting freed slaves and poor whites on an economic basis.
This would do justice to those whose uncompensated labor had cleared and cultivated the southern land, he reasoned. He envisioned a land of productive and independent small farms. After this allocation there would still remain millions of acres - 90 percent of the land in fact - which could be sold to help pay the national debt, reduce taxes, and provide pensions for Union soldiers and reimbursement for citizens whose property had been destroyed during the war.
Confiscation was very much a live political issue in , but the forces against Stevens prevailed and his land reform work failed. No man in America has any right to anything which he has not honestly earned, or which the lawful owner has not thought proper to give him. If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital It is a question, not of human loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North Any attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections.
It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi. They secured 4, acres of land in Georgia for African Americans. New Communities and the Featherfield Farm project remains the largest Black owned single tract farm in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. For nine years following we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements.
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But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho [Ho Chi Minh] should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north.
The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U. Let us now focus for a moment on Jimmy Carter, an American president who started out with kind intentions and ended up with cruel ones. The Carter team had pledged itself to non-intervention in the Third World, to a sincere commitment to arms control, and to work for worldwide human rights. Carter accomplished much along these lines in the beginning of his term in office, but in the end he reversed himself and fell victim to Cold War fever. Klare so clearly describes in his important new book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict , the United States began a military build-up in the Persian Gulf area at that time which has continued to this day.
The remarkable transformation of Carter-the-kind-Christian from peacemaker to warmonger showed his susceptibility to Cold War fever and lack of any firm ground to stand on regarding the relationship of human rights to land rights and democracy. He played into fears that the godless communists were conspiring to take over the world, ignored the true economic principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and seemed to be unaware of the imperialist forces at play in the U.
All over the world we are claiming vital mineral, oil, and land resources as part of our national security and militarizing those areas. What or who will stop us if we cannot stop ourselves? Stiglitz is one of three economists to win the Nobel Prize in economics in In he was fired from his position as Chief Economist with the World Bank after he began to speak about his concerns.
In an interview in with Greg Palast, 36 a writer for The Observer London , Stiglitz described in detail the four-step plan used by the international banking institutions to extract wealth from around the world. In his view the process leads to financial barbarism, pillage and plunder and has resulted in immense suffering, starvation and destruction. Growing numbers of us are appalled and chilled to our bones at what the World Bank in which the U. Treasury has a 51 percent controlling interest , the International Monetary Fund, and other instruments of international finance and control are doing to our world.
Placing our country and our state, county and city or town on the firm and fair foundation of the human right to the earth is one of the most important endeavors of our age. In I was giving a workshop in Pasadena about Henry George and land rights economics when an elder raised her hand and said: Now what are we going to do about it?
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Some called her the grandmother of the counterculture. She was a close friend of Ralph Borsodi and in association with him played an influential part in founding the modern intentional community movement. Mildred also kept in touch with the land-value-tax movement and clearly understood how both of these approaches to land rights drew from the important work of Henry George. I have thus far presented several dimensions of the great and unsolved land problem from various vantage points. Now I will describe five way by which the earth can be claimed for the benefit of the people as a whole, detailing ways and means for securing common rights to water, oil and mineral royalties, and the rent of surface land:.
An example of direct action by exploited and mobilized citizens is the story of the Bolivian Water War, as Maude Barlowe told it in her article on water privatization in the summer Bulletin of the International Forum on Globalization. International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies have given corporate access to many water systems in developing countries.
After privatization, with the water system in the control of this company, rates increased and even tripled for some of the poorest customers. Water was shut off completely for others. No infrastructure improvements were made. Citizens who had built family wells or water irrigation systems decades earlier suddenly had to pay the company for the right to use the water.
Creating a Post-Corporate World (Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures Book 20) - Kindle edition by David C. Korten, Hildegarde Hannum. Download it once and. Read "Creating a Post-Corporate World" by David C. Korten with Rakuten Kobo. The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New At the end of the 20th century, public attention was focused on a deepening About this book .. The Relevance of E. F. Schumacher in the 21st Century.
An alliance of labor, human rights, environmental, and community leaders organized and fought back with peaceful marches. A public referendum showed that the vast majority wanted the company out, but they were either ignored or met with police violence. Using Gandhian tactics they engaged in strikes and blockades to take back their water. The government declared a state of siege, arrested the protest leaders, shut down radio stations, and sent in a thousand soldiers. A teenager was killed and many others wounded. After weeks of confrontation the government backed down and ended the contract with the corporate raiders.
Bechtel then threatened to sue the national government for lost investments and potential lost profits based on a bilateral investment treaty. No one was providing the city with water while the government and the corporation were in dispute. Then the water company workers began running the water system themselves with the help of the coalition that had been built. The water workers held regular community meetings to determine the need for water; they reduced prices, built new tanks, and laid pipes to bring water service to neighborhoods that had never had it before.
The service was fairly and efficiently cooperatized with the full support and inclusion of the workers and the community. The Cochabamba Declaration, the basis for coalition actions, follows:.
An Ecological Economic Order. Noyes shows us that the "Age of Reason gave us a thesis with flaws. In the USA today the top 1 percent of the people has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. John Abrams is the co-founder and CEO of South Mountain Company, an employee owned enterprise committed to triple bottom line business practice. Organised and edited by Marcos Arruda , November When Corporations Rule the World.
Under the Alaska Constitution all the natural resources of Alaska belong to the state to be used, developed and conserved for the maximum benefit of the people. The Alaska Permanent Fund was established in as a state institution with the task of responsibly administering and conserving oil royalties and other resource royalties for the citizenry.
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In , after a four year debate, the Alaska Legislature established the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to manage the assets of the Fund. That same year the Legislature also created the Permanent Fund Dividend Program to distribute a portion of the income from the Permanent Fund each year to eligible Alaskans as direct personal dividend payments.
Earnings of the Fund undergo special public scrutiny. Beautifully designed literature describes in detail the various components of the Fund. An Annual Report is distributed each year. There is an extensive accountability program and open meetings with opportunity for citizen participation. The Alaska Permanent Fund website keeps current all investment and distribution activities of the Fund. An unsung hero of our According to David Orr, "For the most part Reinventing the Future — John Todd. John Todd, a biologist and Earth steward, is at the forefront of the new field called ecological design, which applies the intelligence of nature to human needs.
How do we restore our land, create prosperous villages throughout the world, and solve our health crisis? In her lecture she takes a radical stance on eating habits, centered on raw milk, as a way Technology and Modern Ethics — Andrew Kimbrell. We are confronted with an ethical enigma; far from the simple idea of evil we harbored in the past, we now have Stephanie Mills, author of Whatever Happened to Ecology? Clean Eat the Sky: Think of pollution, and you may think of cars and airplanes. But one of the biggest culprits is the food we eat every day.
The Colonization of the Seed — Vandana Shiva. Normally the epitome of unnatural food, most foie gras is made by force-feeding geese copious amounts of grain in a process.. Caroline Woolard, a dedicated artist and organizer, speaks about the solidarity economy, the sharing economy, web 2. Jerry Mander asks the fundamental question: Delivered just a few weeks before the massive protest demonstrations in Seattle in Clean Reclaiming Community — David Morris. David Morris believes that we can create an economy as if community mattered.
However, the central and most determining feature of modern economies is the separation of those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of the decisions in What costs are we really paying for as participants in a world market economy?