A handful of corporations and financial institutions command an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in an assault against markets, democracy, and life. It’s a “suicide economy,” says David Korten, that destroys the very foundations of its own existence.
The bestselling 1995 edition of When Corporations Rule the World helped launch a global resistance against corporate domination. In this twentieth-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a New Economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.
From Publishers Weekly
This well-documented, apocalyptic tome describes the global spread of corporate power as a malignant cancer exercising a market tyranny that is gradually destroying lives, democratic institutions and the ecosystem for the benefit of greedy companies and investors. Korten (Getting to the 21st Century) points out his conservative roots and business credentials?and then proceeds to finger such classic conspiracy-theory scapegoats as the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations as the planning agents of the new world economic order he decries. Korten, founder of the People-Centered Development Forum, prescribes a reordering of developmental priorities to restore local control and benefits. Suggested reforms include shifting tax policies to punish greed and reward social responsibility, placing a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits at banks and closing the World Bank, which he claims encourages indebtedness in nations that can't afford it.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Korten (Getting to the Twenty-First Century, Kumarian Pr., 1990) brings impressive credentials to the task of blaming large international corporations for many of the social and environmental problems confronting people all over the world. Using numerous well-researched examples, Korten argues that not only do today's corporations exploit labor and the environment, but governments (particularly the U.S. government), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, aid and abet this exploitation through policies that favor capitalists over workers and small business. Although Korten speaks from an obviously liberal position, in an era when conservative political voices declare an unswerving faith in the benefits of unfettered free markets, a voice from the opposition offers a welcome balance. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Andrea C. Dragon, Coll. of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station,
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
If you can read only one book on how to understand and address the enormous challenges of our time, When Corporations Rule the World is it.
From The New Yorker
Required reading for women who want to peek behind the curtain of the global economy and figure out how to save ourselves and respond to the global SOS.
From Booklist
Beginning in the 1960s, social, economic, and political observers have expressed concern over the role of multinational corporations. As the global economy has evolved, it is the transnational corporation that provokes apprehension. In The New Realities (1989), Peter Drucker issued the early warning that the advent of the transnational company heralded a structural change in the world economy. Now Korten sounds loud the alarm. He blames the corporate quest for short-term financial gain for creating a "market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life." The solution, he argues, is to "re-create societies that nurture cultural and biological diversity [and get] corporations out of politics . . . creating localized economies." Korten's critique and his solutions are bold and unequivocal. David Rouse
Review
“This is a ‘must-read’ book—a searing indictment of an unjust international economic order, not by a wild-eyed idealistic left-winger, but by a sober scion of the establishment with impeccable credentials. It left me devastated but also very hopeful. Something can be done to create a more just economic order.”
—Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate
“Anyone serious about the systemic crisis we now face ought to read this updated version today. Korten captures the devastating and increasingly threatening dynamics of the corporate-dominated global system and has offered a vibrant, well-written, and important strategy for moving us beyond its destructive economic, social, and ecological logic.”
—Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?
“If every corporate leader who believes implicitly that consumerism is the path to happiness (and that rampant development is the road to global prosperity) were to read When Corporations Rule the World with an open mind, that world just might have a chance of becoming a better place for us all.”
—Toronto Globe and Mail
About the Author
David C. Korten is a cofounder and board chair of YES! Magazine, a cochair of the New Economy Working Group, the founder and president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, a founding board member emeritus of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, a former associate of the International Forum on Globalization, and a former Harvard Business School professor.
