David Orton was that rarity among humans, a man who practised what he preached. He was a "deep ecologist" [his term] -- one who believed that all life forms have an equal right to survive and flourish. By contrast, most people (including many of us) are "shallow ecologists" [also his term] -- people who believe in ecological principles but who tend to put "humans first," and who are part of an industrialized society that tends to see everything as a resource, to be used for the benefit of humans. He points out that even in forestry many take the "industrial" side and don't see anything wrong with clear cutting, for example. Orton laments that we can't get the attention of the young, who have "too much gear" with them and can't seem to do without all of their electronic devices and gadjets. Everybody "wants it all" and we end up destroying more and more in the process. We have to respect natural forces and adapt to them. We need many more David Ortons.
+
Silver Donald's statement, "We are winning, you know," is sometimes hard to perceive, but it is true. The "occupy" movement is a tangible shoot, but it is growing. There are other signs. The "buy locally" movement is spreading. Not only are people buying more local foods, but they are also taking time to read the labels on everything from clothing to foodstuffs. And in the past few weeks, I have witnessed consumers asking store managers why an item is imported from China or Mexico when those items are produced locally, usually at less cost. People are also expressing their disgust at how corporation executives' and politicians' greed and waste are depleting our financial and material resources, often increasing environmental pollution in the process. So there is hope -- change is coming. And every small step counts, and the action of every individual is important, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem at the time.
I am sure Jane was very pleased to see MacTavish! I am glad you got to chat with her one on one.
Viewers may be interested in attending the second annual Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots North America Training Summit 2011in New Orleans, LA. Although Jane will not be present, her mission to empower individuals to take action in their community will be. The event will take place October 21-22.
Through fun, interactive workshops and activities, the Summit provides participants with opportunities to:
- Learn the Roots & Shoots method of environmental service learning,
- Learn best practices for community centered conservation,
- Gain new skills and resources to start and mentor a Roots & Shoots group, and
- Interact with experts in science and sustainable development.
Networking with other leaders from across North America including Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States, participants will leave not only leave with new skills and tools, but also with relationships that will last a lifetime.
To learn more about this upcoming summit, please visit the Roots & Shoots website: www.rootsandshoots.org
Beaches are always the first choice to travel in vacations. Nice information about beaches. The beaches of Goa are the most popular beaches in all over the world. The Goa beaches are the first attraction in Goa. Anjuna beach, Baga beach, Varca Beach are the beaches which are most popular beaches in Goa. The climate near the beaches is very pleasant. The nature near the beaches is very fresh and beautiful.
Looked at the clip with Robert Bateman. In our small world Robert Bateman was the art teacher at Nelson High School, Burlington, Ontario where I spent some time. He was also a friend of one of my mentors, Ray Lowes, founder of the Bruce Trail Association. I last hiked with Ray in the mid 1990's when he was in his mid 80's.
With mentors such as Ray Lowes, who started to mentor me at age 5, and role models such as Bateman, who sold his early paintings in the halls of Nelson High School, I was influenced in making life decisions that included living in natural environments. I know a number of other people who were equally influenced and led parallel lives to Kathy and I. In the last third of my life I can now fully appreciate that I was one of the children that Robert Bateman and others were trying to influence and develop an environmental awareness. Their strategy worked! I think a Green Interview with those of us who can identify a change of direction in our lives due to the influences of people such as Robert Bateman, Ray Lowes, Farley Mowat to name a few, would be interesting. I can think of five individuals from Nelson High School of the 1960's whose lives were influenced to the same extent as mine. I'm sure there are many more who chose the road less travelled.
Thanks for making the interview and bringing this circle in my life back for me.
I think one thing that these candidates should be prioritizing is funding educational assistance. More college students are struggling to pay off the unsecured loans they borrowed to pay for their education up on graduation. The default rates for student loans are increasing, and loan companies are not the most forgiving in tougher times. These are not short term installment loans, they're long strenuous payments.
From the get go, I agree entirely. However, ProjectDemocracy.ca, which was VoteForTheEnvironment.ca last election, got South Shore St. Margarets wrong. I didn't vote from the heart, which for me is NDP, and voted Liberal based on the VoteForTheEnvironment recommendation. I didn't mind as I felt that from the perspective of the party leaders, Dion took the biggest stand as far as the environment was concerned. But, the site was wrong! By close to 10 000 votes! The true strategy for me would have been to vote for the party that I've always supported. This time around, though, it doesn't matter as the NDP are the clear choice.
GOOD ON YOU!, Silver Donald Cameron -- & fellow “pioneer” PWACer -- an independent bunch of "free thinkers and astute scribes cum observers of Canada's body politic, never more so than in this present Federal Election 2011 countdown ... Fingers crossed we get OUR Democracy, OUR Canada back on May 2nd!
-- Mary C. Kelly
Toronto Centre constituent*
*Bob Rae's riding -- and I'm a "Disabled NOT Disarmed" very politically engaged citizen working on his re-election campaign from my home base ... Already voted by Special Ballot in advance polls, since my disabilities preclude my being able to get to polling station on May 2nd but NO WAY preventing me from exercising my democratic right to vote for candidate and party of choice. Here in Toronto Centre, Bob Rae has commanding lead (which I hope will hold), liked him when he was NDP, like him now he's Liberal. Gives politicians a good name and is a very fine human being ... Likewise, I feel Ignatieff has been unjustly vilified by Harper "seek & destroy" attack ad assaults, he didn't deserve this, nor did Dion before him -- and am very sorry that both have suffered hits to their reputations. Whatever their real or perceived shortcomings, they stand head and shoulders above Harper in terms of integrity, true patriot love, personal and professional conduct, inside and outside the House of Commons.
This is really lousy. I will be cancelling my subscription to the Herald. I encourage others to do the same. If they do the right thing I will consider re-subscribing, but at the moment I am feeling exceedingly disappointed. I have emailed Mr. Leger and DePalma to let them know they are losing my readership, and why.
Thank you, Silver Donald Cameron, for yet another in a continuing series of enlightening and “right on” pieces in The Chronicle Herald. Your latest (again) champions what nearly a century ago was termed “the greatest need of the age,” viz. an abandonment of an anthropocentric, and its replacement by a biocentric, way of seeing and being in the world.
Don is of course right when he says that merely being intellectually aware of oneself as an integral part and manifestation of nature is insufficient, and that we must as well feel and experience the “features and creatures” of what we (now perhaps inappropriately) label the “non-human” world as having intrinsic value. As participants have witnessed, one way of helping further the natural world as having value in and of itself can be participation in experiential activities like a Council of All Being.
It was also instructive to read how Don has himself been sensitized to the world of animals by what he has been witnessing through his workroom window. From many sources, it also appears clear that such sensitizing can be nourished in childhood by others who are important in a child’s life and who themselves have a sense of identity with nature, and who, perhaps more often than not, act as mentors in activities or involvements of one kind or another, e.g. on camping trips in wilderness areas, by drawing attention to nature’s wonders in the course of everyday life. One can be pretty sure also that the personal example “important others” provide in how they act towards the non-human natural world is a hugely significant factor in influencing attitudes and behaviour.
A last thing to mention is what scientific knowledge and continuing discoveries are telling us about the wonders of a natural world in which, to borrow words of Saul of Tarsus for present purposes, we live and move and have our being. Evolutionary science is a prominent example of this. Its revelations (for those who acknowledge evolution for the fact it is) surely can only reinforce, deepen and enrich our sense of affinity and oneness with the living world around us. For example, see (in ascending order of difficulty), Daniel Loxton’s Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (2010), a children's book containing first-rate illustrations and appropriate for adults looking for a very simple introduction to the subject; Steve Jones’s Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated (1999), itself in need of updating because of the many new and significant findings in relevant scientific fields that have occurred since the book was written; Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True (2009); the exquisitely illustrated and superbly written Weidenfeld & Nicolson hard-copy edition of Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life; and for those who’d like a philosophically-based treatment (my own original plunge more deeply into the field), Daniel C. Dennett’s impressive Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1996). As the main title of Richard Dawkins’s last book puts it, summing up what our current knowledge of evolution and of ourselves as an integral part of it reveal, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
What a lovely, clear analysis. David Korten is on my very long wish-list of potential interviewees. He lives in Bainbridget Island, WA, which is really a suburb of Seattle, and I would have gone to see him last summer, if I had had time, when I was in BC. (I did interview Ronald Wright, Brian Brett, Bill Rees and Robert Bateman -- not a bad harvest. :-)
I've also written at length about these issues in my Vancouver Institute lecture "Energy, Environment and the Left," which is available in the Green Pieces section of this site. You might enjoy a look at that, Dan.
THanks for this comment. As it happens, student debt is something I know quite a lot about. My most recent book is A Million Futures: The Remarkable Legacy of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which is all about finances and access to higher education. More detail here: http://www.silverdonaldcameron.ca/million-futures
In 1995, David Korten wrote a book, When Corporations Rule the World, outlining, essentially and unfortunately, what is coming to pass in our society. It has been a number of years since I read that book but I still remember, internalized, a number of key concepts that form the basis of my thoughts here.
We live in a democracy, not a pure one where we all vote on every issue, but one where we are given the opportunity to select a representative through a vote, who then, supposedly, represents our public and civic interests while in office. This process establishes the power of the representative as the voice for the people.
Into this relationship is thrown the corporation a very specific business entity. Make no mistake, a corporation is not a democracy. It is an autocratic, top down rule, organization. With good leadership and vision it can accomplish many tasks efficiently, and it can effectively produce disaster if that leadership is mistaken. It is somewhat like the military service which is also an autocracy within a democracy.
By default, because corporations have been recognized as entities for quite some time, but mostly since the late 1800's, we have developed a relationship of the people, the representative government, and the corporation. It is the nature of this relationship that is significant.
David Korten's point is that it is the role of government to mediate the role of the autocratic corporation as it relates to the civil society that it represents. That is, government says to the corporation, "We recognize the efficiency of your autocracy to provide a service to society, so, we will license you do do a specific task that will be of service to our people, but that is all you will do." Corporations were licensed to build railroads, canals, and roads; make and distribute food; provide savings and loans; manufacture cars, clothes and whatever. And, they were restricted to providing the agreed upon service.
The nature of the relationship is therefore clear. The public elects the representatives who then carry out the functions of government, one of which is to license and regulate the role of the autocratic corporations, much as the civilian side of government in a democracy regulates its necessary, but autocratic, military. It is only by this understanding that military entities in democracies refrain from taking over the complete control of government of which they are certainly capable and which we see too often in other parts of the world.
Which brings us back to the corporation. Corporations are, by their nature, able to exert pressure through lobbyists, through campaign contributions, through control of media to do what the military refrains from doing, which is to take over the government. It is a more subtle form of take over that a coup, but in the long run, the elected representatives lose the essential focus as the protector of public interest and become the hand maidens of the corporation, even though is not a central function of government to protect corporate investments by use of public funds.
If I remember my college Economics 101 course (1950's) correctly, corporations raised money by developing a business plan and issuing stock. If investors liked the plan they bought the stock, the corporation followed the prospectus, and if all went well the corporation paid dividends to the stock holders. If not, the stockholders lost their money as I did when I bought Studebaker automobile stock. The government had nothing to do with the deal. (Sour grapes, I should have bought General Motors and got that subsidy.)
Governments raised money through taxes as they do now. If a school or other community improvement was needed they 'floated a bond issue' on which the people voted. If the bond issue passed, the government borrowed the money and build what was specified in the issue. It got paid back over 30 or 40 years, like old time mortgages, providing a sound, rated, investment opportunity to pension funds and others. Governments would also buy competitively tendered services and products to conduct their business from corporations but that was the only exchange.
What happened? I must have missed the class on the part where tax payer money is used to provide funding for corporations to start a business, to pump funds into businesses that are having problems, and to bail them out when they go bankrupt. We frequently hear, "Government should not be in business." I agree. So, why is government involved in convention centres (a bond issue), skating ovals (a bond issue), grants to furniture manufacturers (business plan and stock issue), subsidies to activities to numerous to mention, and all of the other "corporate deals" we see in the daily news?
Because, as David Korten predicted, corporations rule the world. They have convinced our elected representatives that following their direction is more important than mediating the ground between democracy and autocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy which all work counter to democratic principles. In raw terms it is privatization of profit and public assumption of loss. If you are a corporation, that is the best business plan you can have. If you are a taxpaying citizen, in commonly understood terminology, it sucks.
Nice post!Thank you for sharing some information with us.This will be a very good learning tool especially for students.I do believe that we need to be educated because without it,we won't be able to respond properly with the issues imposed by the environment.Even though we are in deep crisis nowadays,it's not a reason to give up our schooling.We should do something about it.Are you aware with student loans?Student loan debt is rising commensurate with a greater number of students paying higher tuition. Students borrowing money for college have racked up a higher amount of debt than those individuals who have financed any number of things in life with charge cards. In fact, the amount of money people while students have borrowed to finance education and its relevant accessories is about to blow by $1 trillion and gain momentum to the future. Loans of the student variety, customarily considered a “good debt,” are becoming a “bad debt for more graduates as they face high monthly payments working low paying jobs. I found this here: Student loan debt expected to hit $1 trillion and beyond in 2011.
Thank you very much for that thoughtful comment. He was a remarkable man, an inspiration (and a challenge) to the rest of us.
David Orton was that rarity among humans, a man who practised what he preached. He was a "deep ecologist" [his term] -- one who believed that all life forms have an equal right to survive and flourish. By contrast, most people (including many of us) are "shallow ecologists" [also his term] -- people who believe in ecological principles but who tend to put "humans first," and who are part of an industrialized society that tends to see everything as a resource, to be used for the benefit of humans. He points out that even in forestry many take the "industrial" side and don't see anything wrong with clear cutting, for example. Orton laments that we can't get the attention of the young, who have "too much gear" with them and can't seem to do without all of their electronic devices and gadjets. Everybody "wants it all" and we end up destroying more and more in the process. We have to respect natural forces and adapt to them. We need many more David Ortons.
+
Silver Donald's statement, "We are winning, you know," is sometimes hard to perceive, but it is true. The "occupy" movement is a tangible shoot, but it is growing. There are other signs. The "buy locally" movement is spreading. Not only are people buying more local foods, but they are also taking time to read the labels on everything from clothing to foodstuffs. And in the past few weeks, I have witnessed consumers asking store managers why an item is imported from China or Mexico when those items are produced locally, usually at less cost. People are also expressing their disgust at how corporation executives' and politicians' greed and waste are depleting our financial and material resources, often increasing environmental pollution in the process. So there is hope -- change is coming. And every small step counts, and the action of every individual is important, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem at the time.
Hello,
I am sure Jane was very pleased to see MacTavish! I am glad you got to chat with her one on one.
Viewers may be interested in attending the second annual Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots North America Training Summit 2011in New Orleans, LA. Although Jane will not be present, her mission to empower individuals to take action in their community will be. The event will take place October 21-22.
Through fun, interactive workshops and activities, the Summit provides participants with opportunities to:
- Learn the Roots & Shoots method of environmental service learning,
- Learn best practices for community centered conservation,
- Gain new skills and resources to start and mentor a Roots & Shoots group, and
- Interact with experts in science and sustainable development.
Networking with other leaders from across North America including Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States, participants will leave not only leave with new skills and tools, but also with relationships that will last a lifetime.
To learn more about this upcoming summit, please visit the Roots & Shoots website: www.rootsandshoots.org
Rebecca
Beaches are always the first choice to travel in vacations. Nice information about beaches. The beaches of Goa are the most popular beaches in all over the world. The Goa beaches are the first attraction in Goa. Anjuna beach, Baga beach, Varca Beach are the beaches which are most popular beaches in Goa. The climate near the beaches is very pleasant. The nature near the beaches is very fresh and beautiful.
Looked at the clip with Robert Bateman. In our small world Robert Bateman was the art teacher at Nelson High School, Burlington, Ontario where I spent some time. He was also a friend of one of my mentors, Ray Lowes, founder of the Bruce Trail Association. I last hiked with Ray in the mid 1990's when he was in his mid 80's.
With mentors such as Ray Lowes, who started to mentor me at age 5, and role models such as Bateman, who sold his early paintings in the halls of Nelson High School, I was influenced in making life decisions that included living in natural environments. I know a number of other people who were equally influenced and led parallel lives to Kathy and I. In the last third of my life I can now fully appreciate that I was one of the children that Robert Bateman and others were trying to influence and develop an environmental awareness. Their strategy worked! I think a Green Interview with those of us who can identify a change of direction in our lives due to the influences of people such as Robert Bateman, Ray Lowes, Farley Mowat to name a few, would be interesting. I can think of five individuals from Nelson High School of the 1960's whose lives were influenced to the same extent as mine. I'm sure there are many more who chose the road less travelled.
Thanks for making the interview and bringing this circle in my life back for me.
I think one thing that these candidates should be prioritizing is funding educational assistance. More college students are struggling to pay off the unsecured loans they borrowed to pay for their education up on graduation. The default rates for student loans are increasing, and loan companies are not the most forgiving in tougher times. These are not short term installment loans, they're long strenuous payments.
From the get go, I agree entirely. However, ProjectDemocracy.ca, which was VoteForTheEnvironment.ca last election, got South Shore St. Margarets wrong. I didn't vote from the heart, which for me is NDP, and voted Liberal based on the VoteForTheEnvironment recommendation. I didn't mind as I felt that from the perspective of the party leaders, Dion took the biggest stand as far as the environment was concerned. But, the site was wrong! By close to 10 000 votes! The true strategy for me would have been to vote for the party that I've always supported. This time around, though, it doesn't matter as the NDP are the clear choice.
I posted my piece before my colleague posted the site! It's up and running now.
Don
GOOD ON YOU!, Silver Donald Cameron -- & fellow “pioneer” PWACer -- an independent bunch of "free thinkers and astute scribes cum observers of Canada's body politic, never more so than in this present Federal Election 2011 countdown ... Fingers crossed we get OUR Democracy, OUR Canada back on May 2nd!
-- Mary C. Kelly
Toronto Centre constituent*
*Bob Rae's riding -- and I'm a "Disabled NOT Disarmed" very politically engaged citizen working on his re-election campaign from my home base ... Already voted by Special Ballot in advance polls, since my disabilities preclude my being able to get to polling station on May 2nd but NO WAY preventing me from exercising my democratic right to vote for candidate and party of choice. Here in Toronto Centre, Bob Rae has commanding lead (which I hope will hold), liked him when he was NDP, like him now he's Liberal. Gives politicians a good name and is a very fine human being ... Likewise, I feel Ignatieff has been unjustly vilified by Harper "seek & destroy" attack ad assaults, he didn't deserve this, nor did Dion before him -- and am very sorry that both have suffered hits to their reputations. Whatever their real or perceived shortcomings, they stand head and shoulders above Harper in terms of integrity, true patriot love, personal and professional conduct, inside and outside the House of Commons.
The URL in the article comes up as "Not Found."
www.HoweNow.ca
This is really lousy. I will be cancelling my subscription to the Herald. I encourage others to do the same. If they do the right thing I will consider re-subscribing, but at the moment I am feeling exceedingly disappointed. I have emailed Mr. Leger and DePalma to let them know they are losing my readership, and why.
Thank you, Silver Donald Cameron, for yet another in a continuing series of enlightening and “right on” pieces in The Chronicle Herald. Your latest (again) champions what nearly a century ago was termed “the greatest need of the age,” viz. an abandonment of an anthropocentric, and its replacement by a biocentric, way of seeing and being in the world.
Don is of course right when he says that merely being intellectually aware of oneself as an integral part and manifestation of nature is insufficient, and that we must as well feel and experience the “features and creatures” of what we (now perhaps inappropriately) label the “non-human” world as having intrinsic value. As participants have witnessed, one way of helping further the natural world as having value in and of itself can be participation in experiential activities like a Council of All Being.
It was also instructive to read how Don has himself been sensitized to the world of animals by what he has been witnessing through his workroom window. From many sources, it also appears clear that such sensitizing can be nourished in childhood by others who are important in a child’s life and who themselves have a sense of identity with nature, and who, perhaps more often than not, act as mentors in activities or involvements of one kind or another, e.g. on camping trips in wilderness areas, by drawing attention to nature’s wonders in the course of everyday life. One can be pretty sure also that the personal example “important others” provide in how they act towards the non-human natural world is a hugely significant factor in influencing attitudes and behaviour.
A last thing to mention is what scientific knowledge and continuing discoveries are telling us about the wonders of a natural world in which, to borrow words of Saul of Tarsus for present purposes, we live and move and have our being. Evolutionary science is a prominent example of this. Its revelations (for those who acknowledge evolution for the fact it is) surely can only reinforce, deepen and enrich our sense of affinity and oneness with the living world around us. For example, see (in ascending order of difficulty), Daniel Loxton’s Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (2010), a children's book containing first-rate illustrations and appropriate for adults looking for a very simple introduction to the subject; Steve Jones’s Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated (1999), itself in need of updating because of the many new and significant findings in relevant scientific fields that have occurred since the book was written; Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True (2009); the exquisitely illustrated and superbly written Weidenfeld & Nicolson hard-copy edition of Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life; and for those who’d like a philosophically-based treatment (my own original plunge more deeply into the field), Daniel C. Dennett’s impressive Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1996). As the main title of Richard Dawkins’s last book puts it, summing up what our current knowledge of evolution and of ourselves as an integral part of it reveal, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
What a lovely, clear analysis. David Korten is on my very long wish-list of potential interviewees. He lives in Bainbridget Island, WA, which is really a suburb of Seattle, and I would have gone to see him last summer, if I had had time, when I was in BC. (I did interview Ronald Wright, Brian Brett, Bill Rees and Robert Bateman -- not a bad harvest. :-)
I've also written at length about these issues in my Vancouver Institute lecture "Energy, Environment and the Left," which is available in the Green Pieces section of this site. You might enjoy a look at that, Dan.
THanks for this comment. As it happens, student debt is something I know quite a lot about. My most recent book is A Million Futures: The Remarkable Legacy of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which is all about finances and access to higher education. More detail here: http://www.silverdonaldcameron.ca/million-futures
In 1995, David Korten wrote a book, When Corporations Rule the World, outlining, essentially and unfortunately, what is coming to pass in our society. It has been a number of years since I read that book but I still remember, internalized, a number of key concepts that form the basis of my thoughts here.
We live in a democracy, not a pure one where we all vote on every issue, but one where we are given the opportunity to select a representative through a vote, who then, supposedly, represents our public and civic interests while in office. This process establishes the power of the representative as the voice for the people.
Into this relationship is thrown the corporation a very specific business entity. Make no mistake, a corporation is not a democracy. It is an autocratic, top down rule, organization. With good leadership and vision it can accomplish many tasks efficiently, and it can effectively produce disaster if that leadership is mistaken. It is somewhat like the military service which is also an autocracy within a democracy.
By default, because corporations have been recognized as entities for quite some time, but mostly since the late 1800's, we have developed a relationship of the people, the representative government, and the corporation. It is the nature of this relationship that is significant.
David Korten's point is that it is the role of government to mediate the role of the autocratic corporation as it relates to the civil society that it represents. That is, government says to the corporation, "We recognize the efficiency of your autocracy to provide a service to society, so, we will license you do do a specific task that will be of service to our people, but that is all you will do." Corporations were licensed to build railroads, canals, and roads; make and distribute food; provide savings and loans; manufacture cars, clothes and whatever. And, they were restricted to providing the agreed upon service.
The nature of the relationship is therefore clear. The public elects the representatives who then carry out the functions of government, one of which is to license and regulate the role of the autocratic corporations, much as the civilian side of government in a democracy regulates its necessary, but autocratic, military. It is only by this understanding that military entities in democracies refrain from taking over the complete control of government of which they are certainly capable and which we see too often in other parts of the world.
Which brings us back to the corporation. Corporations are, by their nature, able to exert pressure through lobbyists, through campaign contributions, through control of media to do what the military refrains from doing, which is to take over the government. It is a more subtle form of take over that a coup, but in the long run, the elected representatives lose the essential focus as the protector of public interest and become the hand maidens of the corporation, even though is not a central function of government to protect corporate investments by use of public funds.
If I remember my college Economics 101 course (1950's) correctly, corporations raised money by developing a business plan and issuing stock. If investors liked the plan they bought the stock, the corporation followed the prospectus, and if all went well the corporation paid dividends to the stock holders. If not, the stockholders lost their money as I did when I bought Studebaker automobile stock. The government had nothing to do with the deal. (Sour grapes, I should have bought General Motors and got that subsidy.)
Governments raised money through taxes as they do now. If a school or other community improvement was needed they 'floated a bond issue' on which the people voted. If the bond issue passed, the government borrowed the money and build what was specified in the issue. It got paid back over 30 or 40 years, like old time mortgages, providing a sound, rated, investment opportunity to pension funds and others. Governments would also buy competitively tendered services and products to conduct their business from corporations but that was the only exchange.
What happened? I must have missed the class on the part where tax payer money is used to provide funding for corporations to start a business, to pump funds into businesses that are having problems, and to bail them out when they go bankrupt. We frequently hear, "Government should not be in business." I agree. So, why is government involved in convention centres (a bond issue), skating ovals (a bond issue), grants to furniture manufacturers (business plan and stock issue), subsidies to activities to numerous to mention, and all of the other "corporate deals" we see in the daily news?
Because, as David Korten predicted, corporations rule the world. They have convinced our elected representatives that following their direction is more important than mediating the ground between democracy and autocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy which all work counter to democratic principles. In raw terms it is privatization of profit and public assumption of loss. If you are a corporation, that is the best business plan you can have. If you are a taxpaying citizen, in commonly understood terminology, it sucks.
Nice post!Thank you for sharing some information with us.This will be a very good learning tool especially for students.I do believe that we need to be educated because without it,we won't be able to respond properly with the issues imposed by the environment.Even though we are in deep crisis nowadays,it's not a reason to give up our schooling.We should do something about it.Are you aware with student loans?Student loan debt is rising commensurate with a greater number of students paying higher tuition. Students borrowing money for college have racked up a higher amount of debt than those individuals who have financed any number of things in life with charge cards. In fact, the amount of money people while students have borrowed to finance education and its relevant accessories is about to blow by $1 trillion and gain momentum to the future. Loans of the student variety, customarily considered a “good debt,” are becoming a “bad debt for more graduates as they face high monthly payments working low paying jobs. I found this here: Student loan debt expected to hit $1 trillion and beyond in 2011.