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Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth
Agenda for a New Economy From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth Author:David C Korten Nearly two years after the economic meltdown, joblessness and foreclosures are still endemic, Wall Street executives are once again getting massive bonuses, and there doesn’t seem to be the will in Washington to make desperately needed fundamental changes to the economy. Change will have to come from below. Updated with several new ... more »chapters, this second edition of Agenda for a New Economy is the handbook for that revolution.
The root of the problem remains what it was in 2008: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “phantom wealth”—mere numbers on paper—without producing anything of real value and without any thought of the social consequences. “Wall Street operates as a criminal syndicate engaged in financial scams and extortion rackets that impose unbearable costs on society while serving no beneficial function not better met in other ways,” Korten writes. In a new chapter, he looks at how events since September 2008 have simply proven that the predatory Wall Street leopard cannot change its spots.
Agenda for a New Economy is a report of the New Economy Working Group. In this edition, 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 sheets. We will lose nothing because, as Korten ably demonstrates, the supposed services Wall Street offers are simply a con game. Our real needs can be met more effectively in other ways, which the new edition spells out. And, having reluctantly given up on the possibility of any substantial change from the top, 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.« less