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Synthesis/Regeneration
A Magazine of Green Social Thought
Selected articles on Green economics
- Spring 2002 A Call for a Citizens’ Agenda Against Corporate Raids on the Treasury and an Outburst of Wartime Opportunism   "Since September 11, members of Congress have served up a nonstop buffet of corporate pork legislation. Under the guise of “national security” our federal treasury is being raided and our democratic rights are being taken away while Congress feeds sympathetic campaign contributors at taxpayer expense, sends working people to fight, and leaves the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and American families to suffer."
- Fall 2002 Preventing the Next Enron Will Require More than Nader’s Proposed Reforms   by Pete Dolack. "...we should have our eyes open, understand that these sorts of reforms should be merely “transitional,” and that we should be asking for far more while working toward the end of the entire system that subjugates the large majority of the population for the benefit of a relative handful at the top. We need a candidate who understands the difference between illusory reform and real structural change, and who can articulate this effectively."
- Fall 2002 Reclaim the Genetic and Water Commons   by Vandana Shiva. "Privatization based on exclusive rights of corporations to vital resources like biodiversity and water is an enclosure of the commons. Reversal of this enclosure requires a recovery of the commons through a combination of actions."
- Fall 2001 Which Road to Qatar: Food First or Export First?   by Vandana Shiva. "Underlying the rejection of further globalization for market access are three basic realisations. The first is that food security requires food first, not export. The second is that globalization is intrinsically flawed because it puts commerce above survival and its expansion threatens to create more environmental destruction, more poverty and greater inequality. The third is that export dominated agriculture creates poverty, unemployment and malnutrition ..."
- Summer 2001 If We Oppose the Corporate-Dominated Economy, What Do We Replace it With?   by Richard Whitney. "The need to develop new, more democratic and socially responsible means of operating our economy is one of the reasons why it is imperative that the Green Party be a movement-based party. It must never adopt the premise that getting "Green" politicians elected to office and getting a certain quantum of legislation passed is going to solve all of our problems. Whether it's workers' cooperatives, workers' councils, some form of popular citizens' councils, democratic unions or some combination of the above, we will need to develop new democratic institutions ... that can be prepared to either take over or replace and transform the corporations that presently dominate our economy and our lives."
- Fall 2000 Paradigm Shift: Challenging Corporate Authority   by Paul Cienfuegos. "Beginning in the early 1990's—thanks to the seminal work of Richard Grossman and his colleagues at the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD)—Americans started to rethink how we go about challenging the harms that corporations get away with day in and day out in every community. We began to rediscover what an appropriate relationship looks like in a democracy between 'we the people' and the fictitious subordinate creation we call the "corporation." And we began to learn how to reframe our analysis of what the problem is."
- Fall 2000 Co-ops: The Post-Corporate Activism   by Keith Wright. "Working through consensus and living in a shared community brings people together in ways that aren't so common in mainstream housing options. These interpersonal dynamics coexist with composting, organics, nontoxic cleaning supplies, and sustainable consumption. Cooperatives are democratic and egalitarian models of business ownership and decision-making. The synergy that all of these factors create significantly undermines corporate myths. The profit motive is not necessary for human achievement. People can live sustainably and be better off for it."
- Fall 2000 A Further Political Analysis of Michael H. Shuman's Going Local   by Howie Hawkins. "By tying ownership to communities—whether through cooperatives, municipals, or simply residential restrictions on stock ownership in otherwise conventional capitalist firms—community corporations undermine one of capitalism's key conditions: capital mobility. The community corporation is just one of the ways Shuman suggests for building community self-reliance in the face of corporate globalization. I want to focus in this second part of the review on some of the other planks in Shuman's platform for community-based economics."
- Winter 2000 A Planetary Alternative to the Global Economy   by David Korten. "Consider the possibility of a planetary society in which life is the measure of value and the defining goal is to assure the happiness, well being, and creative expression of each person. Well-being and progress are evaluated on the basis of indices of the vitality, diversity, and productive potential of the whole of society's living capital—its human, social, institutional, and natural capital. ... Any sign of decline evokes prompt corrective action. Leaders are trained and selected for their highly developed planetary consciousness—"think living planet."
- Winter 2000 Community-Based Economics   by Steve Welzer. "The emergence of the Green movement and a post-socialist radicalism during the 1970s was based on, among other things, a recognition that (a) we have to look deeper than the level of capitalist property relations to understand the forces that have been degrading the biosphere and destroying organic community, and (b) counteracting these forces will require a break with the trajectory of developmentalist civilization more radical than that envisaged by the socialists."
- Winter 2000 A Democratic Economy and a Democratic Worklife   by Don Fitz. "The fundamental problem with economic systems of the 20th century (whether market capitalist or command statist) is that they have been controlled from above by a domineering elite. A Green economy of the 21st century needs to be a democratic economy wherein an empowered populace makes decisions. Ecological destruction manifests itself both as the domination of people by people and the domination of nature by people. An ecological economy will be one which simultaneously overcomes both aspects of domination."
- Winter 1996 The Seventh Generation Act   "The Model Act draws upon both economic theory and the ancient wisdom of Native Americans. The Great Law of the Iroquois League imposed a duty upon leaders to "have always in view not only the present, but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground—the unborn of the future Nation," and the Iroquois tradition is to consider the impact of decisions on the next seven generations. The Model Act proposes that business be forced to take such long range impacts into account by ... making business pay for them." Excerpted from: Getting Business off the Public Dole: State and Local Model Laws to Curb Corporate Welfare Abuse by Robert W. Benson.
- Spring 1993 Trading as If Community Matters   "The question is whether we should create rules that maximize or minimize long distribution lines. The question is whether we should create rules that enable or disable a sense of community. The question is whether we should create rules that give voters the right to influence their future or whether we want to pre-empt local and national authority to encourage greater resource flows." —by David Morris, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
- Summer 1998 The Alternative to Globalization   "The key point is to empower nations and communities to retake control over their local economies and to make them as diverse as suits local needs. This moves from the present situation in which all economies compete with each other to one in which goods and services are supplied more locally." —by John Norris.
- Spring 1993 Development and Democracy   Paul Fleckenstein: "...development smothers individual choices and forces compliance with externally determined patterns that have no regard for social or ecological balances. As with the Green Revolution, it depoliticizes power by economizing it—by equating progress with increased sales and incomes. Expanded market relations assume an inevitable character which help justify social deprivation and ecological destruction." "
- Spring 1993 Market Economy: Deep Roots of Dysfunction   Joan Roelofs: "The other side of production for market is the destruction of a self-sufficient lifestyle. Social fabric and community are torn apart. The increasing dependence on money for all essentials of life results in a frenzied pace of work (for those who can obtain paid jobs), idleness for others, great inequities in life chances ...."
- See issue #21 Green Economics (Winter 2000) Table of contents.
[26 jan 01, updated 4 oct 2002]
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