Keynote Address to Revitalizing Democracy Conference

Duluth, July 28-30, 2002

We come together here in Duluth as academics, labor, community activists, people of faith and others for a dialogue about democracy. This gathering calls us to examine basic beliefs about what we believe America is and can be and about the kind of world in which we want to live. It is a dialogue that inevitably brings into focus a competition between two powerful forces — the forces of corporate globalization and the forces of global civil society. They define a struggle between two visions of the human future based on sharply contrasting values, views of reality, and beliefs about what it means to be human.

    The stakes are high. Our social and environmental systems are in potentially terminal crisis. The existing institutions of political and economic power are failing us and must be transformed if we are to avoid the tragedy we humans are presently bringing down on ourselves.

    The theme of our conference is democracy, so let’s start there. One thing on which we can all surely agree with Mr. Bush is that democracy is presently at great risk. Mr. Bush tells us this risk comes from men of Islam faith who live in caves in places like Afghanistan. Such men have proven that they can cause us great physical damage and loss of life, but the far greater threat to human freedom and democracy comes from men who profess the Christian faith, live in white houses in Washington DC, claim sweeping police and military powers for themselves, declare perpetual war, launch unilateral pre-emptive military strikes against real and imagined enemies of their choosing, seek to recruit millions of Americans as informants to spy on their neighbors, and suspend the civil liberties of anyone they chose to label a potential terrorist — a category that in their minds seems to include anyone who dissents from their agenda. Yes! democracy is at grave risk and it is our sacred duty as patriotic Americans to defend it from its enemies — both foreign and domestic.

    A chilling pattern has emerged: The intentional cultivation of a climate of fear and suspicion. The vilification and suppression of a religious minority branded as unworthy of normal rights and protections. A demand for unquestioned obedience in the name of patriotism. The suspension of civil liberties and the exercise of police powers and secret informants to draw attention to “unusual” behavior. Mobilization behind an agenda of foreign conquest and domination. A descriptive term comes to mind.

    Here I quote international financier George Soros who was a young child growing up in Eastern Europe at the time of Hitler’s expansion.

“Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today comes from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business. This is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called fascism… The outward appearances of the democratic process are observed, but the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests.”

Fascism is not a term to be used carelessly. But we must be prepared to use it when it fits if we are to be true to our responsibilities as Americans to ourselves, our country, and the world. A consolidation of fascist forces in control of the enormous military and economic power of the United States would be disastrous for the whole of humanity.

    Great as the challenge before us is, it is far from new in the human experience.

    In her seminal book The Chalice & the Blade, feminist scholar Riane Eisler makes a distinction between dominator and partnership societies. Dominator societies embody a world view and set of beliefs about the human condition that defines every relationship by who is on top and who is on the bottom; who gives orders and who takes orders. Be a winner or be a loser. Rule or be ruled. Kill or be killed. The dominator society has its own golden rule: “He who has the gold rules.” So “Go for the gold,” and be sure you get more of it than your neighbor, because “It’s a dog eat dog world.” In a dominator world, hierarchy legitimates itself with the promise to impose peace and security by the use of overwhelming force on an otherwise chaotic and dangerous world.

    A recent issue of the New Yorker, carried a story on “The Next World Order,” by Nicholas Lemann, who points out that the present Bush foreign policy was outlined in the early 1990s by a task force headed by Dick Cheney who was then Secretary of Defense in the previous Bush administration. Paul Wolfowitz, current Deputy Secretary of Defense was its primary architect. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, documented it in the journal of Foreign Policy. Donald Rumsfeld, current Secretary of Defense, was a member. Their task was to define a foreign policy for the U.S. in the post-Soviet era based on the premise that the United States must strongly and unilaterally defend its position as the sole world superpower and use the full force of its military and economic power to prevent any challenger from emerging. It reflects a classic dominator world view and a vision of global empire now being advanced under the guise of a perpetual war against terrorism.

    The partnership model is built on a sense of community that supports relationships based on mutual respect, caring, and responsibility to and for the whole. It is based on a belief in democracy and the human capacity for compassion and cooperation. The golden rule of the partnership society is: “Do unto your neighbor as you would have your neighbor do unto you.”

    Eisler points out that all human societies and individuals embody both dominator and partnership tendencies. Although both are within the range of human possibility, the dominator tendency has prevailed over the past several thousand years — what we might call the human era of Empire.

    Yet Eisler also demonstrates that for many thousands of years before the dominator model was introduced by violent invaders, many of the earliest Western societies were organized on the partnership model.

    This leads to a crucial insight. We are not destined by some innate genetic flaw to lives of greed and violence, nor to societies divided between those who rule and those who bear the burden of their rule. It is a matter of choice. A matter of which tendency is rewarded by a society’s culture and institutions.

    Similarly, there is nothing immutable about human culture, institutions, or technology. They are human creations and if they do not serve us, it within our means to change them. Just as we have created authoritarian cultures and institutions that reward dominator behavior, we can choose to create democratic cultures and institutions that reward partnership.

    There has been a continuing tension between the forces of domination and the forces of partnership throughout human history. For more than 200 years America has had a central role in this drama.

    Recall that America was born of a revolt against a British king named George and his corporate cronies. Having gained our freedom we set forth to create a nation unique within the human experience — a nation of laws, democratically governed by the will of the people — all the people. Yet even from its heroic beginning this great experiment in democratic self-governance was an incomplete project. The founding fathers, who spoke eloquently of liberty and justice for all, owned slaves who worked lands stolen from native Americans. The great declaration of July 4, 1776 “that all men are created equal,” did mean men — not women — and more specifically men who had white skins and owned property.

    Indeed, a number of the framers believed it necessary to erect constitutional barriers to popular rule lest we fall victims to the whims of unruly mobs who would pose a danger to law, orderly government, and property rights. One of these barriers was the Supreme Court, which gave extraordinary power to a few graduates from elite law schools to override the will of an elected legislature, which might have more populist tendencies. The Electoral College was also intended to insulate the selection of the president from the passions of the masses. Senators were appointed by State Legislatures until direct election was introduced only in 1913. Women were guaranteed the right to vote only in 1919. It was only in 1964 that the twenty fourth amendment outlawed the poll tax that barred many African Americans from voting in the South. We still live with the anachronistic electoral college system, that from time to time awards the presidency to a candidate who fails even to win a plurality of the popular vote. Thus we now find the presidency in the hands of an ethically challenged man of limited intellectual endowment who fronts for an axis of evil named Ashcroft, Cheney, and Rumsfeld — even though he was rejected by the majority of Americans who cast their votes in the 2000 election.

    My point is this. We are not here merely to revitalize democracy — as important as this task may be. Nor are we here merely to save America and the world from the threat of a fascist tyranny — as important as this task may be. We are here to carry forward the great historic human project we call democracy — a task that is far from complete even here in America — and a task that at this moment in the human experience takes on an epic significance far greater than any of us may fully realize.

    The Era of Empire has been characterized by coercive hierarchy, competition, violence, the exploitation of people and nature, a division of the world into haves and have nots — and economic instability. It has become a human imperative that we now embrace the challenge of living into being a new Era of Community in which life is the defining cultural value, and deep democracy, grounded in equity, cooperation and partnership is society’s organizing principle.

    The ways of Empire are stressing the human and natural systems of the planet beyond their limits of tolerance and leading toward global economic collapse.

    Terrorism is but one manifestation of a world of exclusion and alienation divided between the obscenely wealthy and the desperately poor and powerless. The plight of the world’s children is a lead indicator of that stress.

    In a world in which a few enjoy unimaginable wealth, 200 million children under five are underweight due to a lack of food. Fourteen million children die each year from hunger-related disease. A hundred million children are living or working on the streets. Three hundred thousand children were conscripted as soldiers during the 1990s and 6 million were injured in armed conflicts. Eight hundred million people go to bed hungry each night.

    Here in the United States, 3.3 million children experience outright hunger. Ten percent of U.S. households, accounting for 31 million people, do not have access to enough food to meet their basic needs.

    Climate change is just one of the many indicators of environmental stress. Human activity — most particularly fossil fuel combustion is estimated to have increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to their highest levels in 20 million years. According to the WorldWatch Institute, natural disasters during the decade of the 90s — including weather related disasters such as storms, floods, and fires — affected more than two billion people and caused in excess of $608 billion in economic losses worldwide — more than in the previous four decades combined. In 1998 alone, three hundred million people were displaced from their homes or forced to resettle because of extreme weather events. It is no longer possible even for Mr. Bush to ignore the evidence.

    We are at this moment in the midst of a deep economic shock precipitated by financial scandals that have exposed the fraud and corruption behind the financial bubbles that created the appearance of prosperity in the 1990s.

    The global capitalist economy that bears primary responsibility for the current human crisis is best described as a “Suicide Economy” for it is rapidly destroying the living capital of society and planet on which its own existence and the survival of the human species depend.

    The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is the institutional centerpiece of the suicide economy. It is an institutional form legally structured to allow virtually unlimited concentration of power to the exclusive financial benefit of absentee shareholders who have no knowledge of, or liability for, the social and environmental consequences of the actions taken on their behalf. It is a legally sanctioned invitation to benefit from behavior that otherwise would be considered sociopathic — even criminal. It is the institutional enemy of both democracy and markets because it concentrates power without accountability and subjects our economic lives to a form of privatized central economic planning.

    The excesses of the suicide economy have sparked a massive global back lash by those who realize that we live in a time in which no nation can insulate itself from the fate of its neighbors. To have secure peace and prosperity for any one nation we must work toward a secure peace and prosperity for all nations and all people. Global civil society — which has emerged as the most inclusive, international, and potentially powerful social movement in the history of our species — gives us cause for hope for the human future.

    Global civil society was born as a resistance movement to counter the anti-life forces of corporate globalization. Over the past two years it has been undergoing metamorphosis from a nonviolent resistance movement to a global movement for justice and democracy. It is a force for deep transformative change to bring into being a new human Era of Community grounded in partnership, compassion, and a love of life. The Earth Charter articulates its underlying vision of the world that can be.

    The world we envision is quite different from that to which the culture and institutions of the suicide economy lead. We recognize that peace, justice, and sustainability depend on completing the democratic transition to a new human Era of Community.

    So where do we start? First of all we must be clear that the leadership the world needs will not come from the top— from those who hold positions of power and privilege. It will only come from below, from “We the People.” We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

    Second, there is no magic bullet solution to our crisis. We must act on many fronts and at many levels. Each of us comes to this gathering with our own list of essential actions. All are important. I will name just a few that are currently uppermost in my own mind.

Iraq: Let me start with a very immediate concern about the Bush war plans for Iraq. War is an essential foundation of a fascist agenda. Mr. Bush has declared the United States to be in a state of perpetual war. As the U.S. military assault in Afghanistan winds down, to divert attention away from Harkin Energy, Halliburton, and other intimate administration ties to the corporate scandals now erupting at every hand, Mr. Bush must create a military diversion. He is intent on manufacturing a pretext to launch a unilateral military assault against Iraq in a move to justify the exercise of wartime emergency powers and to increase military and police budgets and control. If he is successful in Iraq, it sets a precedent for a series of unilateral military actions against enemies real or imagined to maintain that justification. We must make clear that irresponsible military adventurism to serve a narrowly self-serving political agenda is unacceptable to the American people.

    Working for Political Reforms: We must create essential space for a responsive politics by implementing such reforms as instant run off voting, proportional representation, and public financing. These should be the centerpiece of a responsible Green Party strategy.

Economic Transformation

The institutions of the global economy have led the assault on democracy and life. Thus it is logical for those of us who stand in defense of democracy and life to focus at least as much attention on economic transformation as we do on political transformation.

    In part our attention is drawn to the fact that economic democracy is an essential foundation of political democracy. Justice Louis Brandis said, “You can either have great concentrations of wealth or you can have democracy. You cannot have both.”

    The truth of his statement has rarely been so clearly demonstrated. We in America have great concentrations of wealth. We have little more than an illusion of democracy.

    Most of my own attention is focused on understanding the dysfunctions of the suicide economy and articulating alternatives. This work has led me to the conclusion that the time has come to go beyond attempts to reform the corporate system in favor of creating a new economy that is free of the pathological characteristics that make the global corporate economy suicidal. It is a step that I submit is as important to the cause of democracy and the transition to an Era of Community as was the step our ancestors took when they eliminated the institutions of monarchy.

    Four characteristics of the publicly traded, limited liability corporation explain why it poses such a threat to democracy and account for much of its sociopathic behavior:

• Unlimited Size: The largest global corporations command more economic power than most countries. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-one are economies internal to corporations. The dominant trend is toward continued rapid growth in the size and power of individual corporations through internal growth, mergers and acquisitions.
  
• Absentee Ownership: The publicly traded corporation institutionalizes an extreme form of absentee ownership. A major portion of the ownership interests in most corporations are aggregated in professionally managed investment funds. The real owners are unlikely to know even what corporations they "own," let alone what devastation these corporation may be causing in the name of shareholder interest. They know only the financial returns produced by the managers of the portfolios in which they hold shares — which they may track on a daily or quarterly basis. Yet by law, custom and internal structure corporate management is accountable only to its "owners" and is required to place their interests ahead of all other interests in corporate decision making.
• Centralized Authority: A corporation is among the most authoritarian of human institutions. Its chief executive officer has the authority to hire and fire people, open and close facilities, buy and sell other companies, add or drop product lines, use corporate resources to shape public opinion and public policies in ways of his choosing, and move operations around the world — with virtually no recourse by the people and communities effected. It is an institution for imposing on society a form of privatized central economic planning.
• Limited Liability: The corporation's owners are exempt from any liability beyond the value of their shares for the consequences of actions taken by the corporation in their name, no matter how destructive or illegal. Directors and managers face almost no risk of personal fine or imprisonment for crimes committed by the corporations in their charge.

• Employees with safe, meaningful, family-wage jobs
• Customers with good service and useful, safe, quality products
• Suppliers with steady markets and fair dealing
• Communities with a healthy social and natural environment