Volume 25, Number 3    December 2003

David Korten: Empire or Earth community?

“Democracy at the end of a gun is what the U.S. has the nerve to call democracy in Iraq,” said David Korten, co-founder of the Positive Futures Network and its magazine, YES! A Journal of Positive Futures. In the 5,000 year history of regimes trying to dominate others rather than live in partnership, Korten said the current world situation poses the greatest threat our species has faced. Globalization isn't the problem. U.S. global imperialism is.

“Humanity can still resist. The world's people can create a world of compassion, equity and love. We have the technology to do it. But we must choose such a future,” Korten said.
“Wars are fought for control of resources,” he said. The Bush administration thinks the U.S. is the lone superpower. But a second superpower emerged last Feb. 15 when untold millions of people around the world simultaneously took to the streets to protest the impending pre-emptive U.S. war on Iraq.

Suicide economy
Korten used visuals to describe our current “suicide economy”, controlled by a small, moneyed elite, “a perverse system that transfers wealth from the many to the few. This economy is booming — while chronic world hunger has increased since the 1990s. The people's resistance to IMF and World Bank policies seeks a sustainable economy that benefits all the people.

Even in the U.S., six million adults and three million children are hangry. “The welfare of a society can be measured by the welfare of its children,” Korton said. In the U.S., where goals are currently set by corporate leaders, 22 percent of the children live in poverty.
But Korten struck a note as hopeful as the title of his magazine, YES! “Hope lies in the awakening spiritual consciousness most visibly expressed in the global peace/justice movement.”