The ultimate power over both governments and corporations resides with global financial markets in which speculators gamble with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money. Corporate ownership of media and politicians renders democracy meaningless as the institutions of money rewrite laws to free themselves from public regulation, economic borders, and restraint on their ability to eliminate competition through mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances. Meanwhile the WTO, a body created at the instigation of the world's largest corporations to serve their financial interests, has been given the power to challenge local and national laws that conflict with the corporate view of global priorities. The economic growth we currently experience is destroying the real living wealth of society and the planet, thus reducing the pie of real wealth, in order to generate financial profits that go primarily to the already wealthy. The global victory of capitalism is a victory for democracy and the market economy.
Capitalism is the mortal enemy of both.
By definition, design and practice, capitalism is a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many, creating an illusion in the minds of power holders that it is an engine of prosperity rather than an engine of destruction and upward redistribution. A Planetary Society 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, human, social, institutional and natural. These indices are monitored as carefully as we now monitor GDP and stock prices. Any sign of decline evokes prompt corrective action.