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Market fundamentalists selectively cull bits and pieces of market theory to argue that the public interest is best served when economic power is concentrated in unregulated globe-spanning mega-corporations engaged in monopolizing resources and externalizing costs for short-term financial gain. They distort market theory beyond recognition. Like cancer cells that attempt to hide from the body’s immune system by masking themselves as healthy cells, Wall Street institutions attempt to conceal themselves from society’s immune system by masquerading as agents of a healthy market economy. David Korten ☀

Throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s the United States had a system of locally owned and strictly regulated community banks, mutual savings and loans, and credit unions, many of them organized on a cooperative ownership model much like the Grameen Bank. They were organized and managed to serve the financial needs of the communities in which they were located and kept money flowing within the community in service to community needs. Banking deregulation over the past 30 years led to a wave of banking mergers and acquisitions that created too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks devoted to maximizing financial returns to Wall Street bankers and financiers. Rather than supporting local wealth creation, the system now sucks money and real resources out of the community. Both the microcredit experience and the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street financial crash vividly reveal that the values and interests of Wall Street stand in fundamental opposition to those of Main Street. David Korten ☀

Wall Street is basically dedicated to eliminating jobs or outsourcing jobs in order to increase financial profits of the biggest corporations to increase the financial assets of the world’s already richest people. Now what we need is a money system that… …is connecting real resources with real needs, creating real community wealth at the community level. But that requires a financial system that is rooted in the community and accountable to community interest and that operates by life values rather than financial values. David Korten ☀

Have you ever wondered why the Wall Street speculators who brought down the economy are still being rewarded with vast fortunes? Or why teachers, nurses, factory workers, truck drivers, and all the people who do real work are struggling to put food on the table? The pundits talk about a jobless recovery. But how can it be a recovery when jobs remain so scarce and pay so little? And why do so many people find that the harder they work, the more they owe the bank? Welcome to the phantom wealth economy—designed and managed by Wall Street bankers and corporations. They profit from packaging and selling worthless mortgages, manipulating share prices, and charging usurious interest rates. They thrive on financial bubbles, low wages, foreign sweatshops, tax evasion, and public subsidies. They overcharge us for medicines, tell us we can’t have essential medical treatment, pollute and pillage the environment, corrupt politicians, and get us ever deeper in debt. David Korten ☀

In my career in international development, I saw, time and again, that the most successful projects were not the largest or the most carefully, centrally planned; they were the ones that arose from the bottom up. Likewise, successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions. Their scope and their success may not, at first, be readily apparent. Social movements grow and evolve around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships instead of through top-down direction. New ideas gain traction, or not, depending on what works for those involved in the movement. Some alliances are fleeting; others endure. The organism, not the machine, provides the appropriate metaphor. The relevant knowledge resides not in the heads of outside experts but in the people who populate the system. The challenge is to help them recognize, organize, and use that knowledge in ever more effective ways. David Korten ☀

No one in official circles seems to be asking the more fundamental question: “How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is needed: toward creating living wage jobs that provide essential goods and services for all Americans in ways consistent with a healthy environment?” Fixing Wall Street, as we presently know it, will do little, if anything, to achieve what should be our real purpose. Since the September 2008 financial collapse, Wall Street has conclusively demonstrated that it is concerned only for its own profits and bonuses. Thanks to the taxpayer bailout and a constant flow of nearly free credit to the big banks from the Federal Reserve, Wall Street is once again reporting record profits and bonuses. Main Street, which has received far more modest public support, has not been so quick to recover from the effects of the crisis: high unemployment, low wages, consumer debt, bankruptcies, and foreclosures. It is a stunning contrast not lost on the properly outraged American public. David Korten ☀

It is sometimes difficult for progressives to understand just how inherently threatening our message can be to those whose sense of identity depends on clinging to their position in the collapsing hierarchy of power and privilege. Even if we call only for a world of love for all people and all beings, skilled propaganda masters of the right easily take our words and spin them in a way that make them feel threatening to their followers. Of course Van’s language is not so restrictive, and appropriately so. His honesty without malice or blame is why we love him and look to him as a leader. We on the progressive side best respond by being strong and centered in the artful manner of Joanna Macy’s Shambhala warrior, deflecting the thrusts of the forces of hateful violence in ways that disarm them without responding in kind. I believe the culture is shifting at a deeper level. Ever more people are awakening to the possibilities of a world beyond the old social ordering, a world that truly fulfills the American ideal of liberty and justice for all, and they are redefining their personal identities accordingly. The shift is only partially visible, however, because those who navigate it are less inclined to respond in kind to the voices of fear and hate and thus get less media attention. David Korten ☀

Corporate interests drove a policy agenda that rolled back taxes on high incomes, gave tax preference to income from financial speculation over income from productive work, cut back social safety nets, drove down wages, privatized public assets, outsourced jobs and manufacturing capacity, and allowed public infrastructure to deteriorate. They envisioned a world in which the United States would dominate the global economy by specializing in the creation of money and the marketing and consumption of goods produced by others. As a result, manufacturing fell from 27 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 1950 to 12 percent in 2005, while financial services grew from 11 percent to 20 percent. From 1980 to 2005, the highest-earning 1 percent of the U.S. population increased its share of taxable income from 9 percent to 19 percent, with most of the gain going to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. The country became a net importer, with a persistent annual trade deficit of more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars financed by rising foreign debt. Wall Street insiders congratulated themselves on their financial genius even as they turned the United States into a national economic basket case and set the stage for global financial collapse. David Korten ☀

Bank lending at interest isn’t the only way to create money. Critics of our present money-debt system have long called for a system of nondebt government issuance. A government institution would create needed money the same way that private banks now do, with an accounting entry. Instead of lending it into existence, however, government would spend it into existence to meet a public need, preferably a public investment in infrastructure, education, or technology development. David Korten ☀

Under a socialist system, government consolidates power unto itself. Under a capitalist model, government falls captive to corporate interests and facilitates the consolidation of corporate power. In a true market system, democratically accountable governments provide an appropriate framework of rules within which people, communities, entrepreneurs, and responsible investors self-organize in predominately local markets to meet their economic needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways. David Korten ☀

In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy and the market economy. For those of us who grew up believing that capitalism is the foundation of democracy and market freedom, it has been a rude awakening to realize that under capitalism, democracy is for sale to the highest bidder and the market is centrally planned by global megacorporations larger than most states. David Korten ☀

Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital-by money and those who have it-in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit. David Korten ☀

Since the early 1970s, a dedicated alliance of corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats has been laying the foundation of their takeover of U.S. political institutions by building a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, media outlets, and churches. The think tanks frame the language and the stories of the public discourse. The media outlets and churches disseminate the language and the stories. And the churches turn out voters. This infrastructure has proven a powerful vehicle for advancing a Politics of Empire based on division, fear, manipulation, and domination. It is a bullying politics reminiscent of a childish playground brawl that substitutes name-calling and character assassination for problem-solving and undermines the credibility of our political institutions. The challenge before us is to displace the politics of Empire with the politics of Earth Community based on inclusion, possibility, and partnership — an authentic values-based, problem-solving politics of mature adulthood consistent with the moral teachings of Jesus. David Korten ☀