Get a life!

There is an increasing tension in Canada between the belief that the market must rule no matter how many vulnerable people are harmed, and an uneasy sense that as a society we are losing what really matters. An ancient proverb asks, "If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I?" Three recent books, ranging in perspective from global to local, put these very contemporary questions in perspective and elaborate some responses to them. Canadians might do well to listen. In When Corporations Rule the World, former Harvard business professor David Korten provides perhaps the most accessible analysis available of the harmful effects of growth-driven economic "globalization". He believes that: we are experiencing accelerating social and environmental disintegration in nearly every country of the world -- as revealed by a rise in poverty, unemployment, inequality, violent crime, failing families and environmental degradation. These problems stem in part from a five-fold increase in economic output since 1950 that has pushed human demands on the ecosystem beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining. With this as his point of departure, Korten documents the current crisis of governance in which power is shifting away from governments toward giant corporations and financial institutions that have no goal but to fatten their bottom lines in the short term. Who, then, is to be responsible for the public good, including the environment? Increasingly we are told that no one will be: An active propaganda machine controlled by the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, government restraint of market excess is the cause of our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species. Korten's analysis spotlights what drives corporate downsizing, how the "race to the bottom" of competing communities and subcontractors negatively affects environmental and labour standards, how and why financial speculation has replaced investment in productive enterprises, and the forces that make it virtually impossible for corporate managers to consider the public interest in their decisions. He offers compelling arguments for his conviction that, if the globalizing economy and the forces behind it persist in their current direction, social chaos and environmental degradation are the only possible outcomes.