Korten: Yeah, nobody's going to say that that's our intention but it is exactly what's happening, because—
Kall: Well, there's a war against the middle class and it's been going on for years. But my question is, this new development, this "handout" of 700 billion dollars; you know, the way I think about it, Bush worked out a way to pry off about ten, fifteen billion dollars a month to give to Halliburton and military contractors for the last six years? Five years—with the Iraq war.
Korten: Yeah.
Kall: Here he's got a brilliant way to pry off 700 billion dollars all at once and then more after that and it seems to me like this is an unbelievably fast way, if the system is designed to destroy the middle class, this is a way to accelerate the process much further.
Korten: Oh Yeah.
Kall: What happens then?
Korten: When we talk about 700 billion we neglect the fact that we've already committed somewhere between 300 and 400 billion for Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie and AIG and there's no end to it. I'm also, I'm fascinated, nobody is talking about where will this money come from?
Kall: You've already told us; they just print more of it.
Korten: Well, yeah, are we going to borrow it from the same—I mean the way they print it through the federal reserve and the banking system ultimately we would be borrowing it from the same banks that we're using it to bail out. So essentially we're just trading their bad assets for a solid government guaranteed asset, at least if we can still assume that a government as far in debt as ours is, is a solid risk.
The alternative is that we need to borrow it from the Chinese and the Japanese and the Arab Emirates that have dollars to invest, but we're already seeing that they are getting pretty tired of financing an economic deadbeat and they're starting move their assets out of dollars, which is why the dollar itself is falling and it seems that in the end we're going to be borrowing money from the same banks that we're bailing out and just swapping, taking their bad assets and giving them better assets in turn. So much of this is a game of smoke and mirrors.
So, I'm delighted by what you're doing; you're the only place I'm so far hearing of a message asking these bigger questions about the financial system and what are the real deeper solutions.
Kall: Well, it just seems that unlike any time before the Democrats, and maybe the Republicans too, have an opportunity to look at the situation, see that it's broken and come up with a solution rather than throwing bandage on top of bandage and that's where you come in, because you have answers; you have a vision of a better world and can you spend a little time talking about the post corporate world the way you've envisioned it, the way you have described it in "The Great Turning" and in "The Post Corporate World"?
Korten: "The Post Corporate World" of course, I wrote it after "When Corporations Ruled the World" where I was focused on how the concentration and abuse of corporate power works and that book of course, was part of energizing the whole global resistance against corporate globalization. Now, many of us realize that just resistance alone: pointing out the bad is not adequate; we need a positive vision what I've come to there and is foundational in my thinking is that we need to create economies that function more like healthy ecosystems;
And the defining feature of healthy ecosystems is not the kind of brutal competition that we associate with Darwinism; it is indeed cooperation, the fact that ecosystems are involved in continuous mutual beneficial exchange optimizing the use of resources and energy to sustain life. They are also rooted in place everywhere, so if we begin to think about this in terms of economies, we start to think about what some of us call local living economies. I'm part of an organization on the board of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies which is working on actualizing this vision all around the United States and Canada the idea is to grow economies that are based on local businesses that are owned by local people that are engaged in the responsible creation of employment, goods and services using local resources and managing their businesses in ways that are environmentally healthy and stain the local ecosystem on which they and everybody else depends for their long time well being. One of the interesting things if you look into biology: in living systems there is no equivalent of money. Money is totally a human invention; it's not a natural thing.
Kall: I don’t think it's a part of indigenous cultures, either.
Korten: No, it's not, and of course, even in a beneficial money economy, certainly in our modern world, money is important, money has a function. But where we start to get really destructive is when we start monetizing and commodifying every relationship, so that everything we do depends on money from raising more of our own food, to every bite that we eat, we have to have money, as both parents go to work, we have to have more money for child care everything becomes monetized, it not only gives extraordinary power to those people who control our money supply which we're now seeing on wall street, but it also breaks down the relationships of caring, of affiliation, that are the foundation of community; and that comes back to the fact…
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