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Author: Marjorie Kelly Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers ISBN: 160994545X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
Why “wealth bias” is a holdover from a pre-democratic past—and how to restore a healthier balance of power: “Thought-provoking . . . well-documented and readable.” —Library Journal Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms—the fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine founder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profits for shareholders no matter who pays the cost. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly argues that focusing on the interests of stockholders to the exclusion of everyone else’s interests is a form of discrimination based on property or wealth. She shows how this bias is held by our institutional structures, much as they once held biases against African Americans and women. The Divine Right of Capital exposes six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic society but which we accept unquestioningly in our economy. Wealth bias is a holdover from our pre-democratic past. It has enabled shareholders to become a kind of economic aristocracy. Kelly shows how to design more equitable alternatives—new property rights, new forms of corporate governance, new ways of looking at corporate performance—that build on both free-market and democratic principles. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. But in The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that it is no more “natural” than any other human creation. People designed this system and people can change it. We need a change of mind as profound as that of the American Revolution—and this book provides practical guidance to help employees and communities change corporate governance and unfetter the genius of the free market.
Author: Marjorie Kelly Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers ISBN: 9781576751251 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
She calls for a movement to build economic democracy in two stages: first, by raising consciousness about wealth discrimination, and second, by aiming for structural change in corporate institutions."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Marjorie Kelly Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers ISBN: 1609941942 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Annotation In this radical critique of the corporate economy--newly updated with information on Enron and other business scandals--the cofounder and editor of "Business Ethics" questions the legitimacy of a system that gives the wealthy few disproportionate power over the many
Author: Marjorie Kelly Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers ISBN: 1609945220 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
A collection of company profiles that “succeeds in demonstrating how more sustainable business ventures can function in practice” (Publishers Weekly). As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs. To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work. “This magnificent book is a kind of recipe for how civilization might cope with its too-big-to-fail problem. It’s a hardheaded, clear-eyed, and therefore completely moving account of what a different world might look like—what it already does look like in enough places that you will emerge from its pages inspired to get involved.” —Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy
Author: Marjorie Kelly Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers ISBN: 1523099941 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
Seven principles for a just and sustainable system, accompanied by true stories of “the people creating the institutions of the next economy” (Kat Taylor, cofounder, Beneficial State Bank). The extractive economy we live with now—designed by the 1 percent for the 1 percent—enables the financial elite to squeeze out maximum gain for themselves, heedless of damage to people or planet. But in this compelling book, Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard show that there is a new economy emerging, focused on helping everyone thrive while respecting planetary boundaries. At a time when competing political visions are at stake the world over, this book urges a move beyond tinkering at the margins to address the systemic crisis of our economy. Kelly and Howard outline seven principles of what they call a Democratic Economy: community, inclusion, place (keeping wealth local), good work (putting labor before capital), democratized ownership, ethical finance, and sustainability. Each principle is paired with a place putting it into practice: Pine Ridge, Preston, Portland, Cleveland, and more. Included are stories not just of activists and grassroots leaders but of the unexpected accomplices of the Democratic Economy. Seeds of a future beyond corporate capitalism and state socialism are being planted in hospital procurement departments, pension fund offices, and even company boardrooms. The future remains uncertain—but Kelly and Howard help us understand how to nurture and grow those seeds into an equitable, ecologically sustainable economy that benefits all of us, not just the billionaires. “As champions of worker and community ownership, Kelly and Howard remind us that economic democracy is essential to political democracy and a viable human future.” —David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World
Author: Jonathan Nitzan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134022298 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 853
Book Description
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich Publisher: Metropolitan Books ISBN: 1429926643 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.