Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 62

                             AGENDUM FOR CHANGE
                                       (continuation )


                RECLAIMING OUR ECONOMIC SPACES

   Both capitalism and communism acknowledge a basic truth expressed by the popular aphorism, "He who has the gold rules." Communist theory explicitly calls for worker ownership of the means of production. Adam Smith implicitly assumed worker ownership in his vision of an ideal market economy composed of small farmers and artisans, a circumstance in which owner, manager, and worker are commonly one and the same. In practice, both communism and capitalism have failed to live up to their ideal. Communism vested property rights in a distant state and denied the people any means of holding the state accountable for its exercise of those rights. Capitalism persistently transfers property rights to giant corporations and financial institutions that are largely unaccountable to even their owners. 
   There is an important structural alternative : a market economy composed primarily, though not exclusively, of family enterprises,small-scale co-ops, worker-owned firms, and neighborhood and municipal corporations. Malaysian consumer activist Bishan Singh calls it the community enterprise economy, as it melds the market forces of the money economy with the community forces of the social economy. Historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz argues that such a major restructuring of the American economy is already under way : 

   led by civic-minded entrepreneurs, innovative labor unions and effective local governments. The number of firms now experimenting with worker-ownership approaches 10,000, involving perhaps 12 million people --- more than the entire membership of private-sector trade unions. There are also more than 30,000 co-ops, including 4,000 consumer goods co-ops, 13,000 credit unions, nearly 100 cooperative banks and more than 100 cooperative insurance companies. Add to this 1,200 rural utilities and nearly 5,000 housing co-ops, plus another 115 telecommunication and cable co-ops. 

   A common element of these ownership innovations is that they establish local control of productive assets through institutions that are anchored in and accountable to the community. This tends to make capital patient and rooted, an essential condition of stable, healthy communities. Such initiatives are thus vitally important in building the foundations of healthy societies, but they are seriously disadvantaged by economic policies and institutions that favor the large, the global, and the predatory. Reclaiming our economic spaces requires that we transform such policies and institutions to shift the advantage in favor of the small and the locally accountable. To do so, we will need to restore the integrity and proper function of our financial institutions and systems, shift the social and environmental costs of production to producers and the users of their products, eliminate subsidies to big business, localize markets, deconcentrate capital ownership, establish corporate accountability, and restore market competition. The term transform is used advisedly. If these measures seem to run counter to the current trend toward the big and the global, that is precisely the intent. The goal is to transform an undemocratic and rapacious capitalist economy into a democratic and socially efficient market economy. 

                     FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS TAX 

  A small tax on the purchase and sale of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, and derivatives would be a disincentive to very short-term speculation and arbitraging and remove an important source of unearned financial profit. 

 GRADUATED SURTAX ON SHORT-TERM CAPITAL GAINS

   Capital gains on assets held only for a brief time are usually a form of unearned income and are appropriately taxed at rate higher than the rate of tax on earned income. A surtax on net short-term capital gains above and beyond the normal income tax would make many forms of speculation unprofitable, stabilize financial markets, and lengthen investment perspectives without penalizing long-term productive investment. The capital gains surtax on the sale of an asset held less than a week might be as high as 80 percent on the otherwise untaxed portion, falling to 50 percent on assets held  more than a week but less than six months, 35 percent on those held for more than six months but less than three years, 10 percent for assets held from three to six years, and 0 percent beyond that. 

One Hundred Percent Reserve Requirement On Demand Deposits

 AS far back as 1948, Henry C. Simmon, founder of the conservative University of Chicago school of economic monetarism, argued for a 100 percent reserve requirement on demand deposits to limit banks' ability to create money and to restore the money creation function to government. Many economists have since called for a similar measure The reserve requirement in the United States currently averages less than 10 percent. Phased in over several years to allow the financial system to adjust, this action would deflate the borrowing pyramid and help restore the connection between the creation of money and the creation of wealth. 

     TIGHT REGULATION OF FINANCIAL DERIVATIVES 

   Many forms of derivatives are basically high-risk gambling instruments that serve primarily to generate fees for the investment houses that package and sell them while creating dangerous financial instability. Like any other form of gambling, their creation, sale, and purchase should be tightly regulated and heavily taxed. Pension funds and other funds managed as public trusts should be strictly prohibited from trading in instruments so classified and from investing in companies that do. All publicly held corporations that engage in derivatives trading should be required to include a full report each quarter on their derivatives trading activities, report their potential financial exposure on such instruments, and reveal the proportion of their financial assets held in derivatives. 

Corporations Are Not Humans: Not Even Close ---Episode 61

                                 AGENDUM FOR CHANGE 

It's time to deal with specific measures to transform governance to reclaim our colonized political and economic spaces and restore the rights of the people. The aim is to limit the power and freedom of the largest corporations in order to restore democracy and the rights and freedoms of people and communities. This requires more than simple reforms. 

                 RECLAIMING OUR POLITICAL SPACES 

Political rights belong to the people, not to artificial business entities. The claim by corporations to to the same constitutional rights as natural-born person is a legal perversion without moral or legal foundation. As instruments of public policy, corporations should obey the laws decided by the citizenry, not write those laws. The corporate claim to First Amendment free speech protection , on which corporations base their right to lobby and carry out public campaigns on political issues, is particularly pernicious. By invoking this right, corporations achieve precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent : domination of public thought and discourse. 
   We must give high priority to legislative and judicial action aimed at establishing the legal principle that corporations are public bodies created by issuing a public charter to serve public needs and have only those privileges specifically extended to them by their charters or the law. These privileges are properly subject to withdrawal or revision at any time through popular referendum or legislative action. If a corporation persistently seeks to exceed the privileges granted by its charter --- such as consistently violating laws regarding toxic dumping --- it is the right and responsibility of citizens, acting through their government, to disband it by withdrawing its charter. It is the same as their right to abolish any public body that, in their judgment, no longer serves the public interest.

   Shareholders, managers, employees, consumers, and others have every right in their capacity as private citizens to express their political views for or against the corporate interest. They also have the right to form and fund not-for-profit organizations to advance any cause they choose to support in their private capacities using their personal funds. Corporations have no such natural right. They simply do not belong in people's political spaces.
   A first step toward removing corporations from the political 
sphere would be to eliminate all tax exemptions for corporate expenditures related to lobbying, public "education," public charities, or political organizations of any kind. The ultimate goal, however, is to prohibit the involvement of publicly traded corporations in any activity intended to influence the political process or to "educate" the public on issues of policy or the public interest. Furthermore, corporate officers should be prohibited by law from acting in their corporate capacities to solicit political contributions or political advocacy efforts from employees, suppliers, or customers. 
   The increasingly aggressive use by corporations of not-for-profit organizations as fictitious citizen fronts for corporate political lobbying highlights how thin the line is that separates corporate involvement in public education and charitable giving from overt political involvement. Even corporate giving to true public charities and the arts has become increasingly suspect. For example, when New York City proposed a sweeping smoking ban in public places in the fall of 1994, the Philip Morris Corporation made known to the city's many arts organizations it had funded that it expected their support in opposing the ban. 
   A publicly traded corporation will almost inevitably align its charitable giving with its own financial interests. There is little other basis on which it can justify allocating shareholder profits for charitable purposes. If corporations truly care about the communities in which they reside, then let them provide good, secure jobs and safe products, maintain a clean environment, obey the law, and pay their rightful share of taxes.  Let their managers, shareholders, and employees contribute to charitable and educational causes of their choice from their share of the corporation's distributed wages, salaries, and profits of the corporation.
   Similarly, any nonprofit organization in which 50 percent or more of the trustees are senior officers of corporations with more than $500 million in total assets should be ineligible for tax-exempt status on the presumption that it is a front organization operated to advance the corporate interest. When nonprofit organizations with corporate boards raise public monies, issue public statements, or make presentations to public bodies, they should be required to identify themselves as such. 

   Removing corporations from political participation is an essential step toward reclaiming our political spaces. It is not, however, sufficient. New York Times columnist Russell Baker all too accurately described the 1994 U.S. congressional elections as an auction, more of a bidding war to outspend opponents on negative campaign ads than a campaign of vision, issues, and competence. This trend has left American voters increasingly disillusioned with democracy and outraged at a government controlled by big-money interests. 
   Politics in America has been reduced to a system of legalized bribery. If democracy is to survive, reforms must get corporations and bribery out of politics. The ability to spend millions of dollars to saturate the electronic media, especially television,with negative messages about one's opponent has become a key to winning elections. So long as winning an election is excessively expensive and the only sources of adequate funding are powerful financial interests, policy will favor financial interests over the public interest. Setting term limits or voting incumbents out of office will accomplish very little.  Three deep and sweeping campaign reforms are necessary : 

1. Public elections should be publicly funded. Political action committees should be abolished, and corporations should be prohibited from making any kind of political contribution or using corporate resources to favor  any candidate or issue in a political campaign. 

2. Total campaign expenditures should be limited. Let candidates concentrate on competing to get their messages out as effectively as possible within a set spending limit ---a better measure of their ability to spend public funds responsibly. 

3. In return for their right to use public airways, television and radio stations should be required to provide exposure for candidates for public office on issues-oriented interview programs and debates on an equal-time basis. Informing the public about the views and qualifications of candidates for office is one of the most basic responsibilities of the news media in a democracy, and they should be held accountable for fulfilling it. 

   With their dominance of the mass media and their growing infiltration of the classroom, corporations increasingly control and shape our primary institutions of cultural reproduction, constantly reinforcing the values of consumerism and the basic doctrines of corporate libertarianism in an effort to align mainstream culture with the corporate interest.  To reclaim our colonized political spaces, we must reclaim our colonized cultural spaces. Three measures merit serious consideration : 

1. MEDIA ANTITRUST.  Special antitrust legislation for the media should establish that it is prima facie evidence of monopolistic intent for a single corporation to own more than one major public media outlet, whether a newspaper, radio station, TV station, or home cable service. Furthermore, the operation of a media outlet should be the primary business of the corporation that owns it. This would ensure that the outlet is not used primarily as a means to advance other corporate interests. No individual should be allowed to have a majority holding in more than one such media corporation. This would enhance the free-speech rights of the public by limiting the ability of a few powerful individuals and corporations to dominate access to the major means of public communication.

2. ADVERTISING.  In classical market economics, the role of business is to respond to market demand, not to create it. Tax deductions for advertising provide a public subsidy for hundreds of billions of dollars a year in corporate advertising aimed at enticing people to buy things that they neither want nor need and creating a consumer culture detrimental to the health of society and the planet. Advertising, other than purely informative advertising based on verifiable facts regarding the uses, specifications, and availability of a product, is not in the public interest. At a minimum, the costs should not be deductible as a business expense. In addition, as a pollution control measure, a public fee might be assessed on advertising in outdoor or other public spaces with the proceeds used to fund public-interest consumer education. Factual product information might be provided on demand through product directories, including on-demand directories that are accessible through computer services and interactive TV. 

3. SCHOOLS.  Schools should be declared advertising-free zones, administration of public schools should remain a public-sector function, and corporate-sponsored teaching modules should be banned from classroom use under the ban on in-school advertising. 

Reclaiming our political spaces goes hand in hand with reclaiming our economic spaces.

Corporations Are Not Humans : NotEven Close --- Episode 60

                                                          GOOD LIVING
                                         (continuation)

     From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community 
                                         (continuation)


                              SUSTAINABLE  LIVELIHOODS


   An important part of the demand for economic growth comes from the carefully cultivated myth that the only way we can keep people employed is to expand aggregate consumption to create jobs at a faster rate than corporations invest in labor-saving technology to eliminate them.  We neglect an important alternative --- to redefine the problem and concentrate on creating livelihoods rather than jobs.
   A job is defined by Webster's New World Dictionary as " a specific piece of work, as in one's trade, or done by agreement for pay ; anything one has to do ; task ; chore ; duty." A livelihood is defined as "a means of living or of supporting life." A job is a source of money. A livelihood is a means of living. Speaking of jobs evokes images of people working in factories and fast-food outlets of the world's largest corporations. Speaking of sustainable livelihoods evokes images of people and communities engaged in meeting individual and collective needs in environmentally responsible ways --- the vision of a local system of self-managing communities.
   We could be using advances in technology to give everyone more options for good, sustainable living. If we so choose, instead of demanding that those fortunate enough to have jobs sacrifice their family and community lives on the altar of competition while others languish in the ranks of the unemployed, we could be organizing our societies around a twenty-to thirty-hour work-week to assure secure and adequately compensated employment for almost every adult who wants a job. The time thus freed could be devoted to the social economy in activities that meet unmet needs and rebuild a badly tattered social fabric. 
   The possibilities are extraordinary once we acknowledge that many existing jobs not only are unsatisfying but also involve producing goods and services that are either unnecessary or cause major harm to society and to the environment. This includes a great many of the jobs in the automobile, chemical, packaging, and petroleum industries ; most advertising and marketing jobs ; the brokers and financial portfolio managers engaged in speculative and other extractive forms of investment ; ambulance-chasing lawyers ; 14 million arms industry workers worldwide; and the 30 million people employed by the world's military forces.
   This leads to a startling fact. Societies would be better off if, instead of paying hundreds of millions of people sometimes outrageous amounts to do work that is harmful to the quality of our living, 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. Why not organize to support them instead to do activities that are socially beneficial and environmentally benign, such as providing loving care and attention to children and the elderly, operating community markets and senior citizen centers, educating our young people, counseling drug addicts, providing proper care for the mentally ill, maintaining parks and commons, participating in community crime watch, organizing community social and cultural events, registering voters, cleaning up the environment, replanting forests, doing public-interest political advocacy, caring for community gardens, organizing community recycling programs, and retrofitting homes for energy conservation. Similarly, many of us could use more time for recreation, quiet solitude, and family life and to practice the disciplines and hobbies that keep us physically, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually healthy.
   Our problem is not too few jobs ; it is an economic structure that creates too much dependence on paid employment and then pays people to do harmful things while neglecting so many activities that are essential to a healthy society. It is instructive that until the last fifteen to twenty-five years, most adults---the majority women --- served society productively in unpaid work in the social economy. In many instances, these societies had a stronger social fabric and offered their members a greater sense of personal security and fulfillment than does our own.

   Although initiatives toward creating sustainable livelihood economies may evolve in different ways in response to different circumstances and aspirations, we may infer some of their features from the above principles and examples. For example, in urban areas, they would most likely be organized around local urban villages or neighborhoods that bring residential work, recreation, and commercial facilities together around sustainable production to meet local needs with a substantial degree of self-reliance. They would feature green spaces and intensive human interaction and seek considerable self-reliance in energy, biomass, and materials production.
   Human and environmental productive activities would be melded into local, closed-loop coproduction processes that recycle sewage, solid waste, and even air through fish ponds, gardens, and green areas to continually regenerate their own resource inputs. Urban agriculture and aquaculture, repair and reuse, and intensive recycling would provide abundant livelihood opportunities in vocations that increase sustainability. Organizing these activities around neighborhoods that are also largely self-reliant in social services would help renew family and community ties, decentralize administration, and increase the sharing of family responsibilities between men and women. Needs for transporting people and goods would be reduced. Locally produced foods would be fresh and unpackaged or preserved in reusable containers. 
   We might find a wide range of traditional and electronic-age cottage industries, many involved in various kinds of recycling, existing side by side with urban agriculture. Family support services such as community-based day care, family counseling, schools, family health services, and multipurpose community centers could become integral neighborhood functions, engaging people in useful and meaningful work within easy walking distance of their homes. Many localities may issue their own local currency to facilitate local transactions and limit the flow of money out of the community. Most adults would divide their time between activities relating to the money economy and those relating to the social economy. We would see a return of the multifunctional home that serves as a center of family and community life and drastically reduces dependence on the automobile and other energy - intensive forms of transportation. We might line our byways with trees rather than billboards. We might limit advertising to product information that is available on demand, only when we want it.
   On the path to true social efficiency, we would have ample time for other aspects of living, including recreation, cultural expression, intellectual and spiritual development, and political participation. We might travel to other facilities for cultural exchanges. We might maintain friendships and collegial relations with others around the world by videophone. Or we might conference on computer networks to share exotic recipes, ideas on how to organize a local food co-op, or experiences in campaigning to improve public transit service. We might tune in to the news broadcasts from Russia, India, and Chile to see how people there are reacting to election results in South Africa. 
   We do have the option of creating healthy societies that allow us to live whole lives. It is time to reclaim our power and get on with that task. 



     

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 59

                                        GOOD LIVING

                                            (continued

    From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community ---con't

                                                                    MATERIALS

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index"---that which we throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for use --- to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.
   Individual consumers are regularly urged to sort and recycle discards ---an important but insufficient measure. Many of the most important decisions are out of our hands, and much of the garbage related to our individual consumption is created and discarded long before any product reaches us. The market rarely offers us a choice of a daily newspaper printed on recycled paper using nontoxic, biodegradable ink. Nor can we ensure that the dutifully bundled newspapers we place at curbside for recycling will indeed be recycled. Such decisions lie in the hands of publishers, paper manufacturers, politicians, and government bureaucrats.
   
   Over a twenty-year period, assuming current levels of recycling, the typical American household "consumes" the equivalent of roughly 100 trees in the form of newsprint. Sixty to 65 percent of that newsprint is devoted to advertisements. Even though we may never read and have no interest in the ads, we are not given the option of subscribing to a paper without them. 
   According to the Worldwatch Institute, "most materials used today are discarded after one use --- roughly two-thirds of all aluminum, three-fourths of all steel and paper, and an even higher share of plastic. " The physical environment is disrupted to to extract the materials involved, vast amounts of garbage are generated, we work extra hours to earn the money to keep replacing what is discarded, and we become beasts of burden endlessly toting replacements from the store to our homes and then out to the garbage. This may be good for the economy, corporate profits, and executive salaries ; but it degrades the quality of our living. 
   Recycling not only reduces the environmental costs of resource extraction, it saves energy as well. Producing steel from scrap requires only a third as much energy as producing it from ore, reduces air pollution by 85 percent, reduces water pollution by 76 percent, and eliminates mining wastes. Making newsprint from recycled paper takes 25 to 60 percent less energy than producing it from virgin wood pulp, while reducing the release of air pollution by 74 percent and water pollutants by 35 percent. Reuse produces even more dramatic gains. Recycling the glass in a bottle reduces energy consumption by a third, while cleaning and reusing the bottle itself can save as much as 90 percent of the energy required to make a new bottle. 
   Germany has pioneered the idea of life-cycle product planning and responsibility. Government mandated programs encourage manufacturers of automobiles and household appliances to assume responsibility for the disassembly, reuse, and recycling of their products. Besides being environmentally sound, this practice relieves the consumer of the burden of disposing of those items at the end of their useful lives. Life-cycle management can be carried out through lease agreements in which the ownership of the item remains with the manufacturer, which becomes responsible for both maintenance and disposal and thus has an incentive to design products for maximum durability and ease of recycling. 
   Governments can encourage producers to design their products and packaging to limit disposal by charging them a fee to cover the estimated public cost of eventual disposal. Governments can also require that multisized and odd-shaped beverage and other containers be replaced with standardized, durable, glass containers that can be reused many times simply by washing and relabeling. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 58

                                         GOOD LIVING 
                                             (continued)

    From OverconsumptionTo Sustainable Community
                                             (continued)

                                  FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

  Our food and agriculture system is similarly designed to generate profits for giant chemical and agribusiness corporations with little regard for the health of people and the ecosystem. This system features chemical-intensive, mechanized production ; long-distance shipping ; captive contract producers ; migrant laborers paid bare subsistence wages ; and large government subsidies paid to giant corporations. The system is suited to the profitable mass production of standardized food products, but comes at the cost of depleting soils and aquifers, contaminating water with chemical runoff, and driving out the small family farms that were for many years the backbone of strong rural communities. This system delivers to the consumer highly processed, wastefully packaged foods of dubious nutritional value contaminated with chemical residues. Although the system abundantly fills supermarkets, it features misleading nutritional claims ; strongly resists any effort to inform consumers about additives, synthetic hormones, genetically modified 
organisms, and toxic residues they may be ingesting ; and gives consumers little option of choosing organically grown, unprocessed foods produced by local farmers. Our food choices have largely been reduced to whatever big corporations find it most profitable. 
   Even as adults intent on exercising healthful and responsible choice, we seldom have any way of knowing whether the piece of fish we are about to buy was caught by a massive foreign factory trawler sweeping the ocean bare with fine mesh drift nets or harvested by a local fisherman using environmentally responsible gear. We have no way of knowing whether a piece of meat is from an animal raised on properly managed, natural rangelands or from one raised on unstable lands from which tropical forests were recently cleared and fattened in feedlots on grain that might otherwise have fed hungry people. There is no way to tell whether the cows that supply our milk have been injected with artificial hormones, because under pressure from MONSANTO corporation, the government prohibits the labeling that would tell us.
   If our goal is to provide a good living for people, we need to transform our food and agriculture system as much as we must we must transform our habitats and transportation systems. Ou goal must be to optimize the use of land and water resources to meet an expanding population's needs for a nutritionally adequate diet, fiber, and livelihoods. And we must do it in an environmentally sustainable way.
   An appropriate system would most likely be composed of tens of thousands of intensively managed, small family farms producing a diverse range of food, fiber, livestock, and energy products for local markets. Farming practices would use bio-dynamic methods to maintain soil fertility, retain water, and control pests. The food system would be designed to limit, contain, and recycle contaminants---including recycling human wastes --- and would depend  primarily on renewable solar-generated energy sources --- including animal power and biogas --- for preparation, production, processing, storage, and transport. Steps toward such a system would include carrying out agrarian reform to break up large corporate agricultural holdings, providing adequate credit facilities for small farmers, creating farmer- based research and extension systems oriented to bio-intensive methods, requiring full and accurate labeling of food products, eliminating financial and environmental subsidies for agricultural chemicals, increasing the costs of food transport by eliminating energy and other transportation subsidies, and creating locally accountable watershed management authorities to coordinate measures for soil and water protection. 
   Although moving toward more localized food and agriculture systems and healthier, less fatty diets would require adjustments in our eating habits, this is not a vision of sacrifice and deprivation. Rather, it is a vision of a fertile earth and of vibrant and secure human communities populated by people with healthy bodies and minds nourished by wholesome, uncontaminated foods. The elements of this vision are technically and socially feasible. They simply require reconstructing the relevant systems in line with the human rather than the corporate interest. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 57

                                            GOOD LIVING---continued

              From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community
                                                  (continued)

                          URBAN SPACE AND TRANSPORT

   In Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns, David Engwicht reminds us that people invented cities as places devoted to human interaction.  The purpose of cities is to "facilitate exchange of information , friendship, material goods, culture, knowledge, insight, and skills" with little need for travel." Cities once consisted primarily of exchange places for people --- places such as shops, schools, residences, and public buildings. The pathways that connected exchange spaces were also places to meet and reaffirm relationships with neighbors. 
  The automobile has changed our cities in fundamental ways, colonizing ever more of the spaces that were once devoted to human exchange and transforming them into systems of parking lots connected by highways. Thus, many of the spaces that once brought us together have been converted into noisy, congested, polluting places that isolate us from one another and destroy the quality of city life. The faster and more densely the traffic flows through our neighborhood, the less we feel at home there and the less likely we are to relate to and befriend our neighbors. 
   The automobile is not only one of our least energy-efficient modes of transportation, it is also one of our least space efficient. When we take into account the multiple parking spaces that each car must have at home, office, shopping center, church, recreational facilities, and school, plus the amount of road space required for its movement, the total space required by each family car is typically three times greater than the space occupied by the average family home. 
   One reason people flee to the suburbs is to escape the environmental and social consequences of giving cities over to automobiles. When productive agricultural lands are paved over, we become separated from nature and one another by even greater distances, our dependence on automobiles increases,and per capita energy consumption skyrockets, both for transportation and to heat and cool the detached, single-family dwellings in which suburbanites live. There is sound foundation for the conclusion of urban ecologists William Rees and Mark Roseland that "sprawling suburbs are the most economically, environmentally, and socially costly pattern of residential development humans have ever devised." 
   Automobile companies sell their products as tickets to freedom, defined in many auto ads as the escape by automobile from city and suburbs to the unspoiled countryside. It is ironic, because the automobile has been perhaps the single greatest contributor to making our urban areas unlivable, turning our countryside into sprawling suburbs and strip malls, and making us more dependent on cars to survive the consequences of this affliction. 
   In 1950, the average American drove some 2,356 miles. That figure has risen to 6,014 miles by 1990. Greater Freedom ???? Roughly half of the miles Americans drive involve commuting to work on congested roadways. Between 1969 and 1990, the number of miles traveled to work by the average American household increased 16 percent. The second major use of cars is shopping. The average distance traveled for shopping increased by 88 percent. A third use is for matters such as business travel, delivering children to and from school, doctor visits, and church attendance ---up 135 percent. Social and recreational travel actually declined by 1 percent, perhaps because we had less time left for it. It is estimated that in the largest U.S. urban areas, 1 billion to 2 billion hours a year are wasted due to traffic congestion. In Bangkok, the average worker loses the equivalent of forty-four working days a year sitting in traffic.
   It is not difficult to figure out who benefits from this damage to the quality of our living. In terms of sales, the three largest corporations in America are General Motors (cars), Exxon Corporation (oil), and Ford Motor Company (cars). Mobil Corporation (oil) is number seven. 
   In 1992 Groiningen, a Dutch city of 170,000 people, dug up its city-center highways and took a variety of steps to make the bicycle the main form of transportation. As a consequence, business has improved, rents have increased, and the flow of people out of the city has been reversed. Local businesses that once fought any restraint on the automobile are now clamoring for more restraint. 
   It is a step that many more cities should take. Few measures would do more to improve the quality of our living and the health of our environment than organizing living spaces to reduce our dependence on the automobile. Other actions to help accomplish this include planning and controlling the use of urban space to increase urban density and the proximity of work, home, and recreation ; restricting parking facilities ; increasing taxes on gasoline ; and investing in public transit and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists.
   "Hold on," says the corporate libertarian. "What about the impact on the economy ? One job in six in the United States is linked to the auto industry. In Australia, it is one in ten. Unemployment would skyrocket and stock prices would plummet if we were to reorganize space to do away with the automobile. It would be an economic disaster."

   This important point is best answered with another question. Is it rational to structure an economy so that investors profit from socially harmful investments and the only employment people can find involves doing things that reduce our quality of life ? An intelligent species can surely find a better way to provide people with a means of livelihood. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 56

                CAN WE GET BACK TO THE GOOD LIFE ?

   Consider the difference between living in a community organized around walking, bicycling, and public transportation compared to living where public spaces are dominated by automobiles and freeways. An environmentally friendly, low meat, low-fat diet, based on natural foods may result in better health and increased mental and physical vitality than a diet high in animal fats. A life free from fashion fads, impulse buying, junk foods, useless gadgets, and the long hours of work required to buy them is a life free from much of what alienates us from the life of family, community, and nature. 
   Herein lies the tragedy of nearly fifty years of economic growth and national development. Rather than building societies that create a good life for sustainers and bring the deprived into the sustainer class, we have followed the path of encouraging overconsumers to consume more, converting sustainers into overconsumers, and pushing many of those in the sustainer class into the excluded class. In the process, we have often made life more difficult for those who remain in the sustainer class by displacing the production systems that once met their needs and by giving priority to public facilities ---such as highways and shopping malls --- that serve overconsumers rather than those that serve sustainers ---such as public transit, bike lanes, and public markets. 

          From Overcomsumption To Sustainable Community

   We commonly assume that moving from an overconsumer to a sustainer lifestyle requires giving up the things that make our lives comfortable and satisfying. There is another, more attractive, possibility : organize our living spaces and production systems so that we improve the quality of our living while simultaneously eliminating the excessive burdens we now place on the environment.  When I started visiting my daughter in New York City in 2000, it helped me to see the possibilities. Although New York is deeply afflicted with crime, poverty, and other manifestations of the inequalities of modern economic life, I did not experience the cold, impersonal city I had expected. Instead, I found a city of ethnically diverse local neighborhoods and small family shops that throbs with human energy and vitality I have rarely experienced elsewhere. New York is far from a model of sustainability and has much that detracts from the quality of life, but I came to appreciate visiting in NewYork in ways I had not anticipated. 
   With a high residential population density---an average of 5,000 people per square block, housed in multifamily dwellings ---a functioning subway system, and shopping facilities within walking distance of most residences, NewYork's per capita energy consumption is half the average for the United States as a whole. MOST RESIDENTS DON'T HAVE A CAR. When I now visit my daughter and her family in Brooklyn, I ride the bus and subway. More than 90 percent of my shopping needs were met within a three-block radius of my daughter's apartment : pharmacy, hardware, electronics, books, groceries, clothing, housewares ---all in abundant selection. My daughter maintains an office at home, in addition to her office in Manhattan, and she satisfies her office needs by walking to  software store around the corner, and two office supply stores within a five-minute walk. 
   Similarly, there's a vast array of restaurants of every conceivable ethnicity and price range, clubs with live music, theater, concert halls, dance, art galleries, museums, free public concerts(for both adults and for my 4-year-old grandson) and health clubs ---easily accessible by walking or subway or bus. An extraordinary system of parks and botanical gardens make nature accessible even within the city boundaries. If my daughter and family need to get out of the city, they take the train or rent a car from a neighborhood agency. Rather than feeling deprived by by a lack of a car, they feel liberated --- no commutes in heavy traffic, parking problems, insurance hassles, or auto repair ripoffs. They save thousands of dollars each year.
   I especially enjoy the nearby farmers' market. Here, four days a week, people who operated neighboring small farms, dairies, wineries, and kitchen bakeries sold their wares ---eggs and poultry from from free-range chickens, milk from cows not given to bovine growth hormone injections, organically grown fruits and vegetables, fresh meat and fish all free of additives and artificial hormones. When I go to Brooklyn, I love visiting these neighborhood markets and eateries, and getting to know, by name, the proprietors. These purveyors know most of the people in the neighborhood and they often can be heard talking about "Mr. Smith's recent boating accident while fishing, or about Mr. & Mrs. Jones's son getting admitted to a fine college." I live in Lake Jackson, Texas, population 25,000, and the clerks at BestBuy and HomeDepot don't know my name and don't want to know it. 
    

  

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 55

                                                        THE GOOD LIFE

   By organizing societies around the pursuit of material gratification, we have made a virtue of social dysfunction and diminished the quality of our living. Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with one another, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. 
   Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is our choice. To a considerable degree, it is a choice between organizing for the human interest and organizing for the corporate interest. By devoting ourselves to creating societies that enhance the quality of our living rather than the quantity of our consumption, we move simultaneously toward sustainability and a better life for everyone.  What are the possibilities ?

               CARING FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES 

Although a competitive instinct forms an important part of our nature, there is substantial evidence that competition is a subtheme to the more dominant theme of bonding, caring, and cooperation. As with all species that depend on social bonding for their survival, humans evolved to belong and cooperate as well as to compete. According to cultural anthropologist Mary Clark : 

     The early human species could not have survived without the expanded social bonding beyond parent and offspring needed to protect helpless human infants --- a job that mothers alone could not accomplish. Social bonding to one's group was a biological necessity --- for adults as well as infants. 

Things haven't really changed so much. Social bonding is as essential to the healthy functioning of a modern society as it was to more traditional or tribal societies. Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam refers to the bonding that characterizes a strong civil society as "social capital" and has shown its importance in a study of local government effectiveness in Italy. 
   Beginning in 1970, Italy created twenty regional governments. Their formal structures were identical. There were dramatic differences, however, in the social, economic, political, and cultural context in which these structures were planted. The localities ranged "from the pre-industrial to the post-industrial, from the devoutly Catholic to the ardently Communist, from the inertly feudal to the frenetically modern." In some localities, the new government structures were "inefficient, lethargic, and corrupt." In others, they were dynamic and effective, "creating innovative day care programs and job training centers, promoting investment and economic development, pioneering environmental standards and family clinics." 
   Professor Putnam found only one set of indicators that consistently differentiated those localities in which government worked from those in which it didn't. These were indicators of a strong and active civil society, as measured by "voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and literary clubs, Lions Clubs, and soccer clubs." Localities high on these indicators had what Professor Putnam called a highly developed social capital. Rich networks of nonmarket relationships built a general sense of trust and reciprocity that increased the efficiency of human relationships. 

We have given too little attention to the importance of social capital to the healthy functioning of societies and rarely consider the impact of economic structures and policies on its formation or depletion. How about your community ? Does it contain small local shops run by merchants you know by name, or only on mega-shopping malls and large retail chain outlets that send their profits elsewhere ? Is there a thriving farmers' market where you can get to know the people who produce your food, or only a supermarket selling food imported from thousands of mies away ? Are farms small, individually owned, and family operated, or are they controlled by huge corporate enterprises and worked mainly by itinerant landless laborers ? Do people devote their free time to Little League baseball, community gardens, local theater, community choirs, community centers, and school boards, or to watching commercial TV ? Are there credit cooperatives and local banks, or only branches of large urban banks that package local deposits into loans to international hedge funds ? Do residents consider the area their permanent home, or are working and professional people largely itinerant ? Are productive assets owned locally or by distant corporations ? Are local forests harvested selectively and sustainably by local firms to provide materials for local industry ? Or are they being stripped bare by huge global corporations that export the raw timber to distant lands ?
   The answers to such questions are powerful predictors of the sense of dignity, freedom, responsibility, prosperity, and security of local people and the extent to which relationships are characterized by trust, sharing, and cooperation. 

                        UNDEVELOPING THE SUSTAINERS 

Some 80 percent of environmental damage is caused by 20 percent of the world's population ---1.1 billion overconsumers. These are people who organize their lives around cars, meat-based diets, and the use of prepackaged and disposable products. Meanwhile, another 20 percent of the world's people live in absolute deprivation. However, there is another point that is generally neglected : roughly 60 percent of the world's people are presently meeting most of their basic needs in relatively sustainable ways. As members of the world's sustainer class, they travel by bicycle and public service transport ; eat healthy diets of grains, vegetables, and some meat ; buy few prepackaged goods ; and recycle most of their wastes. Although their lifestyles do not correspond to our vision of consumer affluence, neither do they evoke a vision of hardship, and in a properly organized society such lifestyles can be richly satisfying. 


      
                               

Corporations Are Not Humans: Not Even Close --- Episode 54

                          THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION 
                                               (continued)

                                                     GUIDING PRINCIPLES 
                                              (continued)

VI. The Principle of Common Heritage     Healthy societies recognize that the planet's environmental resources and the accumulated knowledge of the human species are common heritage resources, and it is the right of every person --- indeed every living being both present and future --- to share in their beneficial use. No one has the right to monopolize or use common heritage resources in ways contrary to the broader interest of present and future generations. Indeed, it is the rightful responsibility of any who own environmental resources to serve as trustees in the interest of future generations and of those who possess special knowledge to share it with all who might benefit. 
   Healthy social function depends on giving the rights and responsibilities defined by these principles precedence over all other rights, including the property rights of individuals, corporations, and governments. Being people-and life-centered rather than corporate-centered, these principles offer a clear alternative to corporate libertarianism's prescription for social dysfunction. 
   Healthy societies seek balance in all things. The recognize a role for both government and locally accountable businesses, while resisting a domination by powerful distant governments and corporations. Similarly, they seek local self-reliance while freely sharing information and technology, avoiding both external dependence and local isolation. 
   The appropriate organizational form for the ecological era is likely to be a multilevel system of nested economies with the household as the basic economic unit, up through successive geographical aggregations to localities, districts, nations, and regions. Embodying the principle of intrinsic responsibility, each level would seek to function, to the extent that it is reasonably able, as an integrated, self-reliant, self-managing political, economic, and ecological community. Starting from the base unit, each system level would seek to achieve the optimal feasible ecological self-reliance, especially in meeting basic needs. 
   To compensate for imbalances in environmental service endowments, units at each level would engage in selective exchanges with other units within their cluster, keeping those exchanges as balanced as possible. Households would exchange with households in their locality, localities with other localities in their district, and so on. The smaller the system unit, the greater the need for exchange. Thus, a substantial amount of household economic activity would necessarily involve external exchange. Although many households might grow some of their own food, it would be rare for a household to be self-sufficient. Community eco-economies would be somewhat more self-reliant, and so on, with regions being largely self-reliant.
   Organizing to meet economic needs as close to the local level as feasible would enable the application of the principle of subsidiarity, which maintains that governance authority and responsibility  should be vested in the smallest, most local unit possible. This would make it possible to maintain a market system in which market power is balanced with political power at each level. Local firms would enjoy a natural advantage, and there would be less long-haul movement of people and goods. 
   Less trade and greater local self-reliance may mean less consumer choice. In the Northern climates, we would eat winter or preserved vegetables and might put apples rather than bananas on our cereal. People in forested areas would construct their homes of wood, and those in hot, dry climates would build houses of earthen materials. Some prices might be higher. Overall, the sacrifices would be small compared with the prospects of greater economic security, caring communities in which people can walk the streets at night without fear, improved environmental quality, the survival of our species, and the creation of new evolutionary potentials. 
   As we reorganize ourselves into a multilevel system, it is likely that we will continue the present process of redrawing national boundaries. Countries that have grown too large and complex to be manageable may break up into smaller countries, as happened with the U.S.S.R. and has been debated in Canada. The present political movement in the United States toward greater local authority and autonomy is in part a response to the United States having reached an unmanageable size and complexity---even without the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Asia Pacific Economic Community, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It makes good sense to devolve to the individual states more of the powers once lodged at the national level, including the power to regulate commerce and trade. Conversely,many smaller countries may find that they are too small to be viable and decide to undertake some form of merger. In the not too distant future, we may look back on the present, almost frantic press to form ever larger economic blocks through regional and global trade agreements as the last desperate gasp of a dying era. 

   The principles of the Ecological Revolution point toward a global system of local economies that distributes both power and responsibility, creates places for people, encourages the nurturing of life in all its diversity, and limits the opportunity for one group to externalize the social and environmental costs of its consumption onto others. Instead of forcing localities into international competition as a condition of their survival, a localized global system encourages self-reliance in meeting local needs. Instead of monopolizing knowledge for private gain, it encourages sharing knowledge and information. Instead of promoting a homogeneous globalized consumer culture, it nurtures cultural diversity. Instead of measuring success in terms of money, it encourages measuring success in terms of healthy social function. 


         

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 53

              Localizing Economies, Globalizing Consciousness 
                                           (continuation)

   Economic globalization deepens the dependence of localities on detached global institutions that concentrate power, colonize local resources, and have no loyalty to any place. The greater a locality's dependence, the less its ability to find within its own borders satisfactory solutions to its own problems. Although advocates of economic globalization commonly argue that globalization creates interdependence and shared interests, the argument is a misrepresentation. What actually happens is a growing dependence of people and localities on global corporations and financial markets. The consequence of this dependence is to pit people and localities against one another in a self-destructive competition for economic survival, yielding ever more power to the center. 
   The power of the center stems from a number of interrelated sources : its power to create money, its ownership of the productive assets on which each locality depends, and its control of the institutional mechanisms that mediate relationships among localities.  This power resides increasingly in global financial markets and corporations, which have established themselves as the de facto governance institutions of the planet. The more global the economy, the greater the dependence of the local and the greater the power of central institutions. 

   If the world achieves an ecological age, people will be unified not by the mutual insecurity of global competition, but by a global consciousness that we share the same planet and a common destiny. This consciousness is already emerging and has three elements unique in human history. First, the formative ideas are the intellectual creations of popular movements involving millions of ordinary people who live and work outside the corridors of elite power. Second, the participation is truly global, bringing together people from virtually every nation, culture, and linguistic group. Third, the new consciousness is rapidly evolving, adapting, and taking on increasing definition as local groups meld into global alliances, ideas are shared, and consensus positions are forged in meetings and via the Internet, phone, and fax.
   This process is creating a growing web of understanding, shared interests, and mutual compassion that is the proper foundation of a global community of people. The strength and vitality of this web arise because its members --- unlike the Stratos dwellers who live in splendid, wealthy isolation --- are rooted in real-world communities of place. They experience directly the consequences of th spreading crisis. Their experience is real, and they are naturally inclined to the human rather than the corporate interest. 
   By participating in the social movements that are the driving force of the Ecological Revolution, growing numbers of citizens are committing themselves to rebuilding their local communities and reaching out to others engaged in similar efforts. They actively recognize the need to act cooperatively in the global human interest through voluntary processes based on consensus and shared power. 

                                  GUIDING PRINCIPLES 

   The formative ideas of the Copernican Revolution were produced by the scientific observation of physical bodies and can be traced to a handful of prominent scholars from the physical sciences. In contrast, the formative ideas of the Ecological Revolution are products of the collective human experience and the study of both living and nonliving systems. These ideas are articulated in countless consensus documents and declarations of citizen movements. They find theoretical grounding in the intellectual treatises of scholars from diverse  academic disciplines, including history, sociology, ecology, economics, biology, physics, general systems theory, and ecological economics. These ideas may be distilled into a number of guiding principles fr the creation of healthy twenty-first-century societies. 

I. The Principle of Environmental Sustainability   Healthy societies are environmentally sustainable, which means their economies must satisfy three conditions : 

   1. Rates of renewable resource use do not exceed the rates at which the ecosystem can regenerate them.

  2. Rates of consumption or irretrievable disposal of nonrenewable resources do not exceed the rates at which renewable substitutes are developed and phased into use.

  3. Rates of pollution emission into the environment do not exceed the rates of the ecosystem's natural assimilative capacity. 

   Any use of environmental resources or sink capacities greater than these rates is by definition unsustainable and compromises the opportunities available to future generations. The principle of environmental sustainability thus defines a collective property right of future generations that takes natural precedence over the individual property rights of the current generation. 

II. The Principle of Economic Justice     Healthy societies provide all their members, present and future, with the essentials for a healthy, secure, productive, and fulfilling life. There is nothing wrong with additional rewards for those who contribute more, but only if everyone's basic needs are met, the options of future generations are not impaired, and there are strict limits on the concentration of economic power. 

  III. The Principle of Biological and Cultural Diversity    Healthy societies nurture the biological and cultural diversity of the planet. Diversity is the foundation of evolutionary potential. Nurturing biological and cultural diversity is fundamental to our constructive participation in the evolutionary process. 

  IV. The Principle of People's Sovereignty { also known as the Principle of Subsidiarity}    In healthy societies, sovereignty resides in people. The purpose of the human economy is to meet human needs --- not the needs of money, nor of corporations, nor of governments. The sovereign right of the people to decide what uses of the earth best nourish their bodies and their spirit within the limits of the first three principles is inalienable. People are best able to exercise this right when : 

   * Ownership and control of productive assets is locally rooted, thus increasing the likelihood that important decisions are made by those who will live with the consequences.
   * Governance authority and responsibility are located in the smallest, most local system unit possible to maximize opportunity for direct, participatory democracy. 
   * More central system levels define their roles as serving and supporting the local in achieving self-defined goals. 

   V. The Principle of Intrinsic Responsibility     Healthy societies assign the full costs of resource allocation decisions to those who participate in making them --- an essential requirement for efficiency in a self-regulating economic system. This principle applies to individual persons, enterprises, and political jurisdictions. No entity has the right to externalize the costs of its consumption to another. The goal is to structure economic relationships so as to encourage each locality to live within its sustainable environmental means. Much as a global economic system offers maximum scope in privatizing economic gains while externalizing the costs, a more local economic system of self-reliant local economies encourages internalizing costs, because both the consequences of cost externalization and the power to require that these costs be internalized come together in the same locality and even the same persons. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 52

                         THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

                                             (continuation)

   Money is not an ordinary number after all. It is our ticket to the same things that people have wanted in other times and places. It is a measure of the life energies expended in its acquisition. It has become our  answer to the question "What am I worth?" and the measure of our collective worth and accomplishment as a nation. Professional charities have even made money the measure of our compassion. "Make a difference. Send us your check today." Defining ourselves in terms of money, we become trapped in a downward spiral of increasing alienation from living, from our own spiritual nature.  The cycle looks a little like this : 

QUEST FOR MONEY (widens the gap between ourselves, family, and community  = DEEPENING ALIENATION ( creates inner sense of social and spiritual emptiness) = ADVERTISERS ( assure us their products will make us whole) = BUYING THEIR PRODUCT ( requires more money) = QUEST FOR MONEY


   Rather than teaching us that the path to fulfillment is to experience living to the fullest through our relationships with family, community, nature, and the living cosmos, the corporate media continuously repeat a false promise : whatever our longings, the market is the path to their instant gratification. Our purpose is to consume---we are born to shop. Entranced by the siren song of the market, we consistently undervalue the life energy that we put into obtaining money and overvalue the expected life energy gains from spending it. The more we our life energies over to money, the more power we yield to the institutions that control our access to money, and to the things it will buy. Yielding such power serves the corporate interest well, because corporations are creatures of money but serves our human interest poorly, because we are creatures of nature and spirit. 
   Forced to reexamine who we are by the limits of the planet's ability to accommodate our greed, we find ourselves confronted with a beautiful truth. Whereas our pursuit of material abundance has created material scarcity, our pursuit of life may bring a new sense of social, spiritual, and even material abundance. 
   People who experience an abundance of love in their lives rarely seek solace in compulsive, exclusionary personal acquisition. For the emotionally deprived, no extreme of materialistic indulgence can ever be enough, and the material world becomes insufficient to our wants. A world starved of love becomes one of material scarcity. In contrast, a world of love is also one of material abundance. When we are spiritually whole and experience the caring support of community, thrift is a natural part of a full and disciplined life. That which is sufficient to one's needs brings a fulfilling sense of nature's abundance. 
   The implications are profound. Our seemingly insatiable quest for money and material consumption is in fact a quest to fill a void in our lives created by  lack of love. It is a consequence of dysfunctional societies in which money has displaced our sense of spiritual connection as the foundation of our cultural values and relationships. The result is a world of material scarcity, massive inequality, overtaxed environmental systems, and social disintegration. As long as we embrace money-making as our collective purpose and structure our institutions to give this goal precedence over all others, the void in our lives will grow and the human crisis will deepen. There is an obvious solution : create societies that give a higher value to nurturing love than to making money.
   Idealistic as this mat sound, it is entirely within our means.  The key is a shift in consciousness already being created through an emerging synthesis of scientific and religious knowledge that embraces the integral connection between reality's material and spiritual dimensions. Just as the Copernican Revolution ushered in the scientific industrial era by freeing us from misperceptions about ourselves and the nature of our reality, an Ecological Revolution, based on a more holistic integration of the spiritual and material, may usher in an ecological era that will open as yet unimagined opportunities for our social and spiritual development. However, to realize this goal, we must reclaim for people the power that we have yielded to money and a corporate-dominated global economy. 

          Localizing Economies, Globalizing Consciousness 

We humans have a distinctive ability to anticipate the consequences of our individual actions for our collective future and to change our behavior accordingly. We also have the capacity to discern repeating patterns in evolutionary processes and to distill from those patterns insights into how to maximize our own evolutionary potentials. One such regularly repeated pattern in the self-organizing growth and evolution of crystals, biological organisms, social organizations, and consciousness is a persistent advance toward higher orders of complexity. Systems with the highest evolutionary potential are those able to nurture a rich diversity within a coherent unifying structure. The greater the diversity, the greater the evolutionary potential ---if the unifying structure is maintained. 
   Arnold Toynbee found this pattern in his epic study of the growth and decline of the world's greatest civilizations. Civilizations in decline were consistently characterized by a "tendency toward standardization and uniformity." This pattern contrasted sharply with "the tendency toward differentiation and diversity" during the growth stage of civilizations. It appears to be a near-universal truth that diversity is the foundation of developmental progress in complex systems, and uniformity is the foundation of stagnation and decay. 
   Standardization and uniformity seem to be almost inevitable outcomes of a globalized economy dominated by massive globe-spanning corporations geared to mass production and marketing in a culturally homogenized world.  It is difficult to imagine a civilization moving more totally toward standardization and uniformity than one unified by Coca-Cola and MTV. The process of corporate globalization are not only spreading mass poverty, environmental devastation, and social disintegration, they are also weakening our capacity for constructive social and cultural innovation at a time when such innovation is needed as never 
before. Corporate globalization is leading us to an evolutionary dead end. 
   By contrast, economic systems composed of locally rooted, self-reliant economies create in each locality the political, economic, and cultural spaces within which people can find a path to the future consistent with their distinctive aspirations, history, culture, and ecosystems. A global system composed of local economies can accomplish what a single global economy cannot ---encourage the rich and flourishing diversity of robust local cultures and generate the variety of experience and learning that is essential to the enrichment of the whole. 

Corporations Are Not Humans ; Not Even Close ---- Episode 51

                         THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
                                            (continuation)

    As a philosophy of science, materialistic monism made possible the scientific and technological accomplishments of the scientific industrial era. As a philosophy of life deeply embedded in modern culture, it has led us to the brink of self-destruction, because it leads so naturally to the embrace of Hobbesian values that alienate us from any higher meaning or purpose.  Having embraced material self-indulgence as our purpose, an appeal to limit indulgence in the interest of economic justice or concern for future generations becomes a call to sacrifice the only thing that gives life meaning. It follows, as corporate libertarians sometimes maintain, that it is most rational for those who have the financial means to continue to enjoy the party for so long as it lasts. If they sacrifice these pleasures and the environmentalists are ultimately proved wrong, they will have sacrificed their reason for living to no end. If the environmentalists are proved right and the party ends in self-destruction, then at least they enjoyed it while they could. 
  Materialistic monism also prepared the way for an economics that, intent on achieving the status of a true science, embraced market prices, which can be observed and measured, as the sole arbiter of human values. It is impossible to understand or explain more than purely habitual human behavior without addressing the values, loyalties, aspirations, love, psychological conflicts, altruism, spirituality, conscience, and even metaphysical beliefs that inform them. Although central to our experience and well-being, they are often difficult to observe, let alone measure. Thus, as science defines itself, the term social science is a contradiction, because we lack the means to directly observe or measure many of the most important "causes" of social behavior. 
   This presses the social scientist to either redefine the prescriptions of scientific inquiry to fit the human reality or strip human beings of the qualities that make us truly human. Intent on achieving the stature of a science,economists chose the latter by postulating a hypothetical, economic man who mechanistically seeks only his own pleasure, defined in terms of measurable economic gain. Whenever a model requires a human decision maker---irrespective of gender---the economist thus substitutes the imaginary, decidedly non-human, economic man, who evaluates every choice on the basis of its financial return. 
   Having eliminated the human, economists then eliminated the behavior. Finding the interactions among people too hopelessly complex and difficult to measure, economists chose to observe the behavior of markets rather than the behavior of people. Market behavior involves prices and flows of money, which are more easily observed and measured. 
   Since a science must be objective and value-free, economics 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. The value of a human life is arrived at by calculating a person's lifetime earning potential or "economic contribution." As a cynic once accurately noted, "Economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing." 

   Contemporary philosopher Jacob Needleman suggests that, "In other times and places, not everyone has wanted money above all else ; people have desired salvation, beauty, power, strength, propriety, explanations, food, adventure, conquest, comfort. But now and here, money---is what everyone wants." Why does modern society choose to define itself and its values solely in terms of a quest for money ---a simple number of no intrinsic value ?At first it seems one of the most curious puzzles of our time, until the realization dawns that in a modern monetized society survival itself depends on having money. In the words of Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, in their New York Times best seller Your Money or Your Life, money becomes "something we all too often don't have, which we struggle to get, and on which we come to pin our hopes of power, happiness, security, acceptance, success, fulfillment, achievement and personal worth."
   Having accepted our dependence on money to meet our survival needs and constantly bombarded by advertising messages, we easily slip into a pattern of looking to money to provide us with a sense of achievement, identity, acceptance, worth, and meaning---forgetting the simple reality that only forgeries of the real thing are for sale. The real thing must be earned by investing ourselves in loving relationships, being good friends and neighbors, living by ethical principles, and developing and engaging our abilities in ways that contribute to the life of the community. 

   But marketing experts surround us with a different cultural message. They don't sell laundry soap ; they sell acceptance, achievement, and personal worth.  They don't sell automobiles ; they sell power, freedom, and success ---the opportunity to feel alive, connected, and free --- that which we really want. To buy what the markets offer, we need money. As Dominguez and Robin explain : 

     Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for. . . Our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs,we are trading our life energy for money. This truth, while simple, is profound.

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 50

                             THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION 

    We are now coming to see that economic globalization has come at a heavy price. In the name of modernity we are creating dysfunctional societies that are breeding pathological behavior --- violence, extreme competitiveness, suicide, drug abuse, greed, and environmental degradation --- at every hand. Such behavior is an inevitable consequence when a society fails to meet the needs of its members for social bonding, trust, affection, and a shared sacred meaning. The threefold crisis of deepening poverty, environmental destruction, and social disintegration manifests this dysfunction. 
   The collective madness of pursuing policies that deepen the dysfunction is not inevitable. The idea that we are caught up in the grip of irresistible historical forces and inherent, irreversible human imperfections to which we must adapt is pure fabrication. Corporate globalization is being advanced by the conscious choices of those who see the world through the lens of the corporate interest. Human alternatives do exist, and those who view through the lens of the human interest have both the right and the power to choose them. 
   Healthy societies depend on healthy, empowered local communities that build caring relationships among people and help connect us to a particular piece of the living earth with which our lives are intertwined. Such societies must be built through local-level action, household by household and community by community. Instead we have created an institutional and cultural context that disempowers the local and makes such action difficult, if not impossible. 
   To correct the dysfunction, we must shed the illusions of our collective cultural trance, reclaim the power we have yielded to failing institutions, take back responsibility for our lives, and reweave the basic fabric of caring families and communities to create places for people and other living things. These actions are within our means but will require transforming the dominant belief systems, values, and institutions of our societies ---an ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION comparable to the Copernican Revolution that ushered in the scientific industrial era. The parallels are instructive. 

                      COMPETING VISIONS OF REALITY 

    The Copernican Revolution was grounded in a basic change in the prevailing perception of the nature of reality. The issues involved bear examination, because they go to the root of our present crisis and help define the challenge of the Ecological Revolution. 
   Transcendental monism (the view that consciousness or spirit gives rise to matter) has formed the philosophical foundation of many Eastern cultures, at least until the recent onslaught of Western science, industrialization, global competition, and consumerism. Adherents of this tradition believe that consciousness is the primary reality and that matter is a creation of consciousness or spiritual energy. Based on the belief that all consciousness, as well as the material manifestation of consciousness, originates from the same underlying unity, transcendental monism considers inner wisdom, accessed through our spiritual connection with the infinite, to be the primary source of valid knowing. This tradition had commonly been associated with a denial of things material, a fatalistic acceptance of one's material condition, a strong sense of community, and a deep reverence for nature.
   In the West, the Judeo-Christian tradition took quite a different course, personifying God as a being who lives in a distant and separate realm and whose attention is centered on earth and its human inhabitants. In this tradition, God's will and wisdom were revealed through prophets, such as Moses, or through his incarnation as Jesus. The earth was believed to be the center of the universe, with the sun, stars, and planets revolving around it. These beliefs remained the foundation of scientific thought and moral and political authority in Europe until as recently as 500 hundred years ago. 
   Then in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, setting forth the thesis that the earth is only one among the planets that revolve around the sun, itself one of countless such stars of the cosmos. This led to a historic confrontation between science and the church as to whether scientific observation or divine revelation is the more valid source of human knowledge. Materialistic monism (the view that matter gives rise to consciousness or spirit) became the imge of reality embraced by science and unleashed what historians refer to as the Copernican Revolution. Adherents to this tradition believe that matter is the primary reality, physical measurement is the one valid source of knowledge, and the experience of consciousness is only a manifestation of the material complexity of the physical brain. For this tradition it is inconceivable that any form of consciousness exists independently of a physical presence. Materialistic monism has been the foundation of Western scientific training and culture throughout most of the scientific-industrial era. It has commonly been associated with a denial of the spiritual and an emphasis on materialism, individualism, and the exploitation of nature. 
   According to historian Edward McNall Burns, the significance of the Copernican Revolution is found in the fact that "No longer ned the philosopher pay homage to revelation as a source of truth ; reason was now held to be the solitary front of knowledge, while the whole idea of spiritual meaning in the universe was cast aside like a worn-out garment. The intellectual and moral authority of the church was greatly weakened. 
   The idea that only those things that can be measured are suitable subjects for scientific study and acceptable as causal explanations has helped science distinguish "scientific explanations from such prescientific interpretations as the whims of of the gods or the intervention of divine grace." However, it also meant that consciousness, values, aesthetics, and other aspects of human experience were excluded from consideration in scientific inquiry. By rejecting free will and moral choice as acceptable explanations for behavior, science effectively exempted itself from moral responsibility for the application of scientific knowledge.

    Seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes took materialistic monism to its ultimate extreme. He maintained that absolutely nothing exists except matter. If there is a God, he must have a physical body. In Hobbes's view, good is merely that which gives us pleasure, evil that which brings pain, and the only meaningful purpose in life is to pursue pleasure --- a value system that now serves as the implicit moral premise of corporate globalization. 
   The institutions of religion and science --- each with its own view of reality --- henceforth competed for the soul of Western societies. Dualism (the view that matter and spirit are two distinct and independent aspects of reality) provided the basis for an uneasy accommodation between religion and scientific world views. While the church ministered to a constricted spiritual life, secular society came to embrace the material world as the primary reality, materialism as the dominant value, and ultimately economic growth as the primary human purpose.