It is very satisfying to point out the inequities in life, to rail against the obnoxious ones among us, yet in doing so we become the obnoxious ones. We become the person cutting into line at the grocery, or cutting off another driver trying to get out of the parking lot, just to secure our 'proper' place in line, but in reality just sowing more inequity behind us. Such counter-productive behavior is almost human nature; I myself can be obnoxious and casually, even unconsciously and inadvertently, spew inequities and insults toward others who will then cut me off as I try to exit the grocery parking lot later on today.

Knowing the viciousness of mankind, seeing the viciousness even in myself, leads me to admire all the more those who can shrug off this constant darkness and defeatism that exists all around us, and in us, and strive for positive accomplishments.

So that is why I like Yes Magazine. Despite that it is soooo not cool, despite that it is soooo cheerful and optimistic that it makes me want to puke, despite these things and all the many things I despise about all beautiful and hopeful people, I still admire Yes Magazine. Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported.

I was inspired to highlight Yes Magazine because of how the below articles kind of slow walk a reader to co-ops, democracy at work, and community ownership, which all tie to Bernie Sanders support of co-ops and community ownership. They also have a story from yesterday, "Choosing a President in a Time of Climate Crisis," where the final paragraph is:

Trump’s climate denial makes him unqualified to lead the country. Clinton’s ambivalence and close ties to Wall Street and big corporations make her a less than optimal choice. Of the three, only Sanders has shown he will be consistent and decisive when taking on the crisis, and that his solutions will benefit all Americans.

So here's the articles I wanted to highlight, about wealth and nature, our maturing economy, and re-investing in our communities.

We Can Have a Living Earth Economy—But It Won’t Be Easy

Humanity has been acting like a willful child, demanding everything and leaving messes everywhere. It is time for our species to take the step to maturity, to acknowledge that care and cooperation are key to happiness—and even survival.

David Korten posted Apr 19, 2016

... The current failed system is a collective human creation based on human choices made over thousands of years in response to the unfolding circumstances of history. In the big picture, these choices reflect three foundational assumptions:

1. It is our human right to dominate nature.
2. Money is wealth and therefore a suitable object of sacred veneration.
3. Social order depends on institutions that centralize power in the hands of the few to rule over the rest of us so long as these institutions are subject to the discipline of the market and/or a system of popular elections.

If we step back and examine these assumptions, most of us immediately recognize profound fallacies:

1. Our human existence depends on the health of nature and the systems by which Earth’s community of life self-organizes to maintain the conditions essential to the existence of all life.
2. Real wealth is living wealth—those things with real intrinsic value, beginning with the land we depend on to grow our food and the water we depend on to quench our thirst. Money is useful in facilitating the exchange of things of real value but has no intrinsic value in itself
3. Life exists only in living communities that self-organize in response to diverse and ever-changing local conditions to create and maintain the conditions essential to their own existence. There is no equivalent in nature of the centralized command-and-control structures we humans currently favor. That is because they block the community’s ability to self-organize in response to the ever-changing local needs and circumstances characteristic of any living system.

In the midst of daily life, we rarely step back to confront these contradictions. And even if we do, most of us see no prospect that, as a small group of Earth’s more than 7 billion people, anything we can do might make a consequential difference. A normal first response is to assume that there surely are people who are smarter, better educated, and better positioned than I am who would have noticed and done something about it if there were really a problem.

This moment in history is special because it is now obvious that humans face terminally serious problems of global magnitude. Yet our dominant institutions are not solving the problems and, in fact, seem incapable in many instances of even acknowledging them. The current political backlash is one consequence. Another is a rush of local bottom-up initiatives aimed at reclaiming economic and political power.

My goal in this Living Earth Economy column series is to explore the nexus of these forces, the implications, and the possibilities they create. ... MORE

Why the Economy Should Stop Growing—And Just Grow Up

“How do we grow the economy?” is an obsolete question. Local initiatives across the world are looking for maturity instead as they rebuild caring, place-based communities and economies.

David Korten posted May 04, 2016

... We cannot, however, look to the economic institutions that created the imbalances to now create an economy that meets the essential needs of all in balanced relationship to a living Earth. Global financial markets value life only for its market price. And the legal structures of global corporations centralize power and delink it from the realities of people’s daily lives.

Restoring balance is necessarily the work of living communities, of people who care about one another, the health of their environment, and the future of their children.

The step to maturity depends on rebuilding caring, place-based communities and economies and restoring to them the power that global corporations and financial markets have usurped. Local initiatives toward this end are already underway throughout the world.

“How do we grow the economy?” is an obsolete question. The questions relevant to this moment in history are “How do we navigate the step to a mature economy that meets the needs of all within the limits of a finite living Earth?” How do we rebuild the strength and power of living communities? How do we create a culture of mutual caring and responsibility? How do we assure that the legal rights of people and communities take priority over those of government-created artificial persons called corporations? ... MORE

David Korten wrote these articles for his new series of biweekly columns on the “Living Earth Economy” for YES! Magazine. David is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, president of the Living Economies Forum, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, and the author of several influential books.

Why Give Breaks to Huge Corporations When We Could Invest Public Money Down the Street?

Photo by PapaBear/iStock

Cities and states fork over an estimated $70 billion each year to large companies that don’t need public assistance to thrive. We could spend that money on our own neighborhoods.

Kasia Tarczynska posted May 06, 2016

... agencies award and administer various businesses incentive programs, sometimes called “corporate welfare”—corporate income tax credits, upfront grants, sales-tax exemptions, free or cheap land, discounted energy for data centers. Kenneth P. Thomas, author of Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital, estimates that state and local agencies spend about $70 billion a year in public money on economic development

Over the years, Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center that promotes transparency and accountability in economic development and where I work as a researcher, has observed that too often the $70 billion goes to large, out of state, publicly traded companies that don’t need public assistance to thrive. After years of surging nine- and ten-figure “megadeals” (that’s what we call incentive packages of $50 million or more), we decided to put our observation to the test.

We conducted three studies to find out if what we have suspected for years was true: that there is actually a profound bias against small business in the allocation of state economic development dollars, and that the amount of incentives to attract or retain large companies dwarfs resources dedicated to support small and locally grown companies.

In 2015, we interviewed 41 leaders of small business organizations in 25 states representing 24,000 member businesses. They told us they believed that spending on business incentives in their states favored large corporations and that the current incentive system was not fair to small companies. “We suffer from the paradigm that it’s always better to bring in a business from outside to bring new jobs rather than investing locally to grow the economy,” one leader told us.

On top of that, we found that there is a mismatch between what small businesses need and what is offered to them by state economic development agencies. “Small business owners don’t call for more tax breaks or fewer workplace standards,” another leader told us. “They … need more customers in their stores, purchasing the products and services that they sell.” What small businesses really need, we found, is investment in their communities and customers who felt economically secure and had stable, well-paid jobs that gave them extra money to spend. By supermajorities, small business leaders said state tax incentives aren’t useful to small or growing businesses. ... MORE

One note, a personal note. In the last snippet the author refers to "large, out of state, publicly traded companies". To clarify, in today's globalized world, out-of-state also means international conglomerates, corporations whose majority shareholders may be foreigners, or even foreign governments. So when anyone of us buys anything at any wall street corporation, while it may supply a subsistence wage to the clerk, it's purpose is to siphon pure profit to the capitalist who owns the clerk and the store.

Which brings up the Triple Bottom Line concept: people/planet/profit

Which reminds me the Triple Pundit is another publication that I admire:
The Triple Bottom Line – the core of what we cover here at TriplePundit considers the social, environmental and financial performance of an organization.

Which reminds me I need to shut up and git.The bottom line is 99% of the money we spend is siphoned out of our state, our neighborhood, our community, and funneled through Wall Street and into the waiting hands of a billionaire living far, far, away. So that is a basic part of our task, to figure out how to stop spending our money in ways that simultaneously impoverish our own community while enriching distant shareholders.

We definitely have far to go before we sleep.

“We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”

― Albert Camus