The President Is the Emperor; the CEOs Rule the World

While reading David Korten’s book, When Empires Rule the World, I had a phone conversation with a friend, Steve Gehring, a corporate attorney in Omaha. When I told him what I was reading, I wasn’t sure how he would respond. But he immediately replied, “Lee, they already do.” He wanted to emphasize that, based on his decades of experience in representing corporations, the “when” in the book title did not refer to a future time of what could happen, but that corporate rule was in effect now. Steve’s opinion added force for me to Korten’s point when Korten writes:

Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet, with the largest among them reaching into virtually every country of the world and exceeding most governments in size and power. Increasingly, it is the corporate interest rather than the human interest that defines the policy agendas of states and international bodies.”

Before learning of Korten’s book, I had not yet shaken fully free from the notion that politicians and governments are the primary rulers of the world. But the book shattered that notion. What I’d learned in civics class went out the window. I realized that my view may have fit the past, but not the rapidly changing present. Not that I hadn’t been aware of the armies of well-funded corporate lobbyists and the revolving door that sent government leaders into corporations and corporate leaders into governments. But somehow that was not the same as putting corporations and their CEOs on the actual throne of being in charge. The book got me scrambling to catch up with where we are today, not where politicians and news analysts say we are. It was another moment when chunks of my worldview were changing. This chunk was not a minor adjustment. The stars that ruled the world were rearranged in my constellation of who truly were the governing powers. 

Getting Beyond Nation-States—Bad Ways, Good Ways

I like love of country quite a bit, but nationalisms not so much.

I affirm the value of natural boundaries like watersheds, but not political boundaries marked on maps by governments seeking their own advantage.

I think nation-states are tentative and auxiliary locations to identify with, not absolute, primary locations to soak with blood in order to defend them.

I want the “we” of nation-states to mature into the “all of us together” identity that shows we recognize ourselves within Earth’s community of life with ALL species.

For these reasons, I wish that those managing global corporations would use their magnificent opportunity to shape Earth Community. Alas! They’re muffing it. Badly. So now we get “corporatocracies” in which governments of nation-states serve the worldview of global multinationals for domination of all that lives, and the commodification of everything.

Those who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated economic unit…. What they are demanding in essence is the right to transcend the nation-state, and in the process, transform it.

— Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinationa Corporations (1974)

Much wiser than those managing the global corporations are the immigrant advocates whom Lane Van Ham writes about in A Common Humanity (U of Arizona Press, 2011). These advocates also transcend the nation-state with their language, rituals, and direct actions, but they do so to solidify that we are “a common humanity.”

Why US AID Doesn't Bridge the Rich-Poor Countries Gap

Ever since reading When Corporations Rule the World, the international bestseller by David Korten, I’ve regarded corporations as more important than governments in figuring out how the world works.

When the book came to me as a gift in 2002, I was immediately impressed by Korten’s personal story. I read how he began his career in international development with the United States International Agency for Development (USAID), because he wanted to improve the wellbeing of poorer countries.

But he became disillusioned as he saw too many development projects bypass the people to whom he’d understood USAID wanted to give a hand up. Who benefited? Only the corporate developers working on the project and the elites of the country in which the project was being constructed. The locals, instead of seeing their lives improve, were often worse off.

When he spoke up about what he saw, he was invited to make changes. But after eight years of trying and getting little result, he decided that the USAID ship was too big for him to turn around. He left and turned to nonprofits, writing, and speaking as his preferred vehicles for changemaking. The economy became his focus as he realized that his desire to give poorer people and countries a better chance required a different economic model. That focus, of course, resonates with me as it does with his international audience.

On Not Allowing Economic Fundamentalists like Margaret Thatcher to Have the Last Word

Because I grew up in religious fundamentalism, I often heard, “There is only one way of salvation.” That is also the position of many devoted to MultiEarth economics. Most famously, Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain 1979-1990, used the slogan, “There is no alternative,” as she advocated for free markets, free trade, and global capitalist economics. Her unswerving commitment to such neoliberal globalization was one of the reasons that Thatcher and her contemporary, U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, got along so famously well.

It was during the Thatcher-Reagan years, the 1980s, that I shared with a friend a couple of essays critiquing neoliberal global economics. I had heard Elsa Tamez, the essays’ author, deliver these in person. Tamez, a Mexican theologian and seminary president in Costa Rica, delivered her critique of neoliberalism speaking against both its theology and its economics. Since my friend carried a progressive view into his work as an investment portfolio manager, I hoped for some creative conversation. So, when he returned the essays, I asked, “Well, what thoughts do you have?” But he simply walked away smiling and quoted Thatcher’s slogan: “What’s the alternative?”

I stood speechless. I hadn’t expected to hear a fundamentalist quotation coming back to me. But I quietly resolved that someday I would have an answer. Without knowing it, he increased my desire to understand and live an alternative economy.

Many alternatives to economic fundamentalism are being lived out daily. The alternatives I’m finding get expressed regularly on another website I’m part of, www.jubilee-economics.org.

The Spirituality of Geographical and Economic Conquest in the U.S.

I’ve come to realize that assessing an economy’s spirituality is essential to determining whether that model works on our one planet home. For example, the conquest of the First Peoples on our continent by Europeans has become only more abhorrent to me the more I have realized the spirituality that was used to justify this conquest and expansion into other people’s land. The “wild West,” the invading European settlers claimed, was like the Promised Land that the Hebrew people headed for after their exodus from Egypt.

I have visited some of the Spanish missions along the West Coast of the U.S. Each time my gut aches about how European Christians enslaved First Peoples to build the mission complex. In crass violation of Indigenous ways, the European, MultiEarth expansionists, forced their technological worldview on the First Peoples. The sustainable agriculture of Indigenous people was scaled up through technological enhancements for greater productivity in the short run. Children of the First Peoples had their culture and language schooled out of them even as they were indoctrinated with Christianity by missionary teachers completely unable to appreciate or comprehend the sacred worldview they conquering.

Just as the spirituality of conquest undergirded those early events, it has continued in U.S.-Native American relations into the present. The OneEarth ways of Native Americans do not fit with the MultiEarth views of Progress, Growth, and The Market. But any path of Progress that so genocidally excludes the First Peoples and their OneEarth worldview is no path I want to walk. I ask, “What moral and spiritual authority make such behaviors over centuries okay?”

My desire, still not achieved, is to walk a OneEarth path as well as traditional First Peoples do.

Goldman Sachs Doing God's Work?

Remember the bold theological claim of Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, that Goldman Sachs was doing God’s work? That’s what he told an interviewer in November 2009, just over a year after the 2008 financial meltdown. (John Arlidge, “I’m Doing ‘God’s Work’. Meet Mr. Goldman-Sachs,” The Sunday Times, November 8, 2009)

His assertion of divine approval for economic policies was quickly countered by one of his critics, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who said, “It’s probably best to leave the gods out of discussions of economic policy.”

But for me the gods are always in economics. So I do not quarrel with the Goldman Sachs CEO for connecting deity and economics. But I do quarrel with his undiscerning, self-justifying theology. Far from doing the work of Creation’s God, Goldman Sachs is a global leader in implementing the mammonistic theology of the MultiEarth worldview. At the moment, no entity can hold them accountable.

The only way Goldman Sachs can be thought to doing God’s work is if we measure their work by the theology of the MultiEarth economic religion. That theology is fair game for every Goldman Sachs critic who understands economic religion. Blankfein shows that he cannot distinguish between the spiritual path of Mammon and that of the God of all Creation. This dangerous level of unconsciousness at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere deserves our criticism, whether we deliver it in satire or in exposure of the utterly damaging impacts such ignorance of paradigms has. For when MultiEarth economic religion reigns, the wellbeing of Earth and most of her inhabitants, expecpt for Blankfein and his peers, are the worse for it. 

Separating Secular from Sacred—Endarkenment, Not Enlightenment

Recognizing the religious nature of MultiEarth economics is essential to understanding it. That’s what this blog believes. But, of course, few people think of their economic activity as expressing their religion. Most people identify themselves as adherents to one of the faiths that has emerged across human civilization. “I am a Jew,” we say—or Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or some other faith.

Here’s what’s so fascinating (and tragic). All of these faiths reject the economic religion which is at the core of the MultiEarth worldview. They consider it the worship of false gods. An idolatry. A faith that destroys lives, the environment, and undermines cultures. So how does it happen that MultiEarth economics remains so disconnected from religion in the dominant Multi Earth mind?

The answer lies, I think, in the dualism that entered into Western civilization from the age of reason onward, an age referred to as the Enlightenment. Though at that time (the 17th century) it was enlightening to end the unhealthy enmeshment of religious authority that blunted the rigorous inquiry of science, the dualism that resulted has today brought us a new “endarkenment.” For example, what is “secular” and what is “sacred” got put into separate containers. The traditional religion with which we identify resides in a container marked “Sacred.” But economics and our religious devotion to it lives in a separate container named “Secular.”

These separate silos mean that the social teaching of what we consider to be our faith rarely, if ever, challenges our economic decisions. As a result, religious people make decisions that okay cheap wages or slave labor, permit mountaintop removal for access to coal’s polluting energy, justify endless war on terrorists or whoever, fund and lobby politics into corruption, and punish those who try to blow the whistle on any of these.

This dualistic view of reality means we do not usually comprehend how a timeless statement once made by Jesus, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” rebukes us. He flatout rejected global capitalism and every other MultiEarth economy.