Our Choice: Democracy or Corporate Rule
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.
We humans live by stories, says David Korten, and the stories that now govern our society set us on a path to certain self-destruction. In this profound new book, Korten shares the results of his search for a story that reflects the fullness of human knowledge and understanding and provides a guide to action adequate to the needs of our time.
Korten calls our current story Sacred Money and Markets. Money, it tells us, is the measure of all worth and the source of all happiness. Earth is simply a source of raw materials. Inequality and environmental destruction are unfortunate but unavoidable. Although many recognize that this story promotes bad ethics, bad science, and bad economics, it will remain our guiding story until replaced by one that aligns with our deepest understanding of the universe and our relationship to it.
To guide our path to a viable human future, Korten offers a Sacred Life and Living Earth story grounded in a cosmology that affirms we are living beings born of a living Earth itself born of a living universe. Our health and well-being depend on an economy that works in partnership with the processes by which Earth's community of life maintains the conditions of its own existence - and ours. Offering a hopeful vision, Korten lays out the transformative impact adopting this story will have on every aspect of human life and society.
“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 
