Wall Street: “institutional manifestation of evil”
October 30th, 2009 by Jim JustDavid Korten, speaking at the recent Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California, says our economic system has not only failed – it’s evil, and deserves to die:
So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.
Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.
Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.
The full text of Korten’s speech was published in Yes Magazine. A one-page version is not available, so you have to click through five pages (most annoying!). The excerpt quoted about is found on the second page.
Korten argues that our economic and political systems no longer work for or protect the public interest:
From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.
Korten pleads for an economic system based on three foundational principles: ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy; and for a shift from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on the well-being of current and future generations.
Bring down Wall Street? Fat chance. But then again, who could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and disappear, virtually overnight?