The author of When Corporations Rule the World presents a critical handbook for economic revolution in this revised and updated edition.Despite the lessons learned from the economic meltdown of 2008, we are more vulnerable than ever to the same kind of economic havoc. Wall Street executives have returned to their culture of massive bonuses, and our leaders in Washington remain unwilling to make desperately needed fundamental changes to the economy. Change will instead have to come from below.
Agenda for a New Economy is the handbook for that revolution.
In this revised and updated edition David Korten has fleshed out his vision of the alternative to the corporate Wall Street economy: a Main Street economy based on locally owned, community-oriented “living enterprises” whose success is measured as much by their positive impact on people and the environment as by their positive balance sheet.
We will lose nothing in the process because, as Korten ably demonstrates, the supposed services Wall Street offers are simply a con game. And Korten now offers more in-depth advice on how to mount a grassroots campaign to bring about an economy based on shared prosperity, ecological stewardship, and citizen democracy.
As David Korten showed in the first edition of this hard-hitting book, the steps taken to address the financial meltdown - including pouring trillions of dollars into bailouts for the Wall Street institutions that created the mess - did nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. Korten identified the deeper sources of the failure in Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating money out of nothing, without producing anything of real value in return. Its major players engaged in speculative trading, bought into asset bubbles, stripped corporate assets, created debt pyramids, and engaged in predatory lending in the mortgage and credit card markets.
In this revised second edition, Korten evaluates how far we have come in the year since the first edition's release and traces both the progress made as well as the ongoing setbacks. Korten also explores the transition to Main street and the momentum towards real wealth and how such a movement is manifesting itself across the nation. In a new chapter, Korten examines how the Obama administration has yet to address the root causes of the system failures to avoid ongoing economic, social, and environmental crises.
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