Order
Your
Signed Limited Edition of
The Divine Right of
Capital
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FOUR
IDEAS FOR REFORMING CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AFTER ENRON.
The
picture on the front page of the New York Times in early May was
memorable: five Enron directors with hands upraised, swearing to a Senate
subcommittee they were not responsible for the company’s collapse.
Pathetic as they seemed, they were telling the truth. Corporate directors
are not in any real sense "directing" companies.
And that’s the
problem.
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Join the (Quiet)
Revolution
Pranks
Wanted
What can people do to make corporations more responsible?
Ultimately we’ll have to
change the law.
Where do we start?
We
start by changing minds.
The way to do that is with pranks.
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Events
The Demise of Democracy:The Rise of Corporate Power
The Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center
July 28-30, 2002 * Duluth, Minnesota
A Zen Approach to
Building a Just
Economy
A six-week course
taught by
Marjorie Kelly,
based on
her new book,
The Divine
Right of Capital.
Ms Kelly will speak at
the
ReVisioning Conference
Friday, 26 April,
at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN www.JustView.org/revisioning.html
612.827.1894)
and at the
Alliance for Democracy's
5th National Convention
June 7-10, in Gettysburg, PA http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/
781.894.1179).
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Feudalism with a Digital Face?
‘Maximize shareholder value.’
That’s what corporate America invariably
insists we must do
— at any cost.
Ever wonder why?
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How Corporate Law
Inhibits
Social Responsibility
A
corporate attorney proposes a ‘Code for Corporate Citizenship' in state
law
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Read A Recent Book Review
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Causing a Bit of A
Stir:
The Divine Right of
Capital
For Journalists
Op-Ed
Pieces to Run
Free of
Charge
Read
Excerpts from
Divine Right of
Capital:
Introduction
Pillars
Preface
by William Greider
Applying Chaordic Principles to Corporate Aristocracy
The Corporation As Feudal Estate
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Links to Like-Minded Organizations
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Educators:
Order Divine Right of Capital
for use in your
classroom.
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Join
Marjorie Kelly
to discuss her
new book,
The Divine Right
of Capital
at a
location near you...
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Marjorie Kelly has revealed the monster that lives beneath all assumptions about the so-called "free" marketplace -- the "great lie" that many won't want to hear.
If the world is ever going to have a chance of being a decent place for all of humanity, we need to take a good hard look at the enormous legitimacy we give to a system that is founded on an outmoded idea.
This book is
the most important book of the last century if we want a sustainable
future. It shines light on the darkest underpinnings of capitalism,
showing us how the most dominant economic system in the world is
destroying the very democratic ideals which we claim to
champion.
-- John Renesch, author,
"Getting to the Better Future: A Matter of Conscious
Choosing"
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"The Divine Right of Capital is brilliant.So simple. So direct.
And so beautifully written.
It is the start of some very basic
rethinking. This could be a
very important book. I think we
have found our Thomas Paine
for the new millennium."
David Korten, author,
When Corporations Rule the
World.
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Contacting
Us
at Info@DivineRightOfCapital.com
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Marjorie
Kelly is
Publisher & Editor
of
Business Ethics:
http://www.business-ethics.com/
Good Ideas for Pranks Wanted
Pranks
Announcement of WTO closure goes to Sydney
to Canada's Parliament
Latest in series of WTO pesterings by The Yes
Men
Good Ideas for Pranks Wanted
What can people do to make corporations more responsible? Ultimately we’ll have to change the law. But if that’s where we end up, it’s not where we should start. We start by changing our minds, by changing our internal pictures of reality that tell us shareholder primacy is normal and legitimate. The way to do that is with pranks.
How did the American Revolution start? Not with writing laws, but with folks dressing up like Indians and throwing tea off ships. It started with a prank. Same with the feminist revolution, where women crashed the Miss America pageant, and did a sit-in at The Ladies’ Home Journal. We need some great pranks. I’d love to see some folks stage a sit-in at Business Week or Fortune, and refuse to leave until they put out a special issue on economic democracy. Or, in the spirit of Rosa Parks, refusing to sit in the back of the bus.
How about employees running John Q. Employee for the board of directors? They could put up bogus campaign posters all over the company and wear sandwich-boards at the stockholders meeting: "No Governance Without Representation." It might lead to some interesting conversations with the press: why can't employees run for the board? Aren’t employees part of the corporation? We can think of these as Tea Parties, like the Boston Tea Party. We hope to encourage Tea Parties like these around the country. Write us (bizethics@aol.com) and share your ideas.
Pranks help us wake up. And they allow us to have fun along the way – which is the only way to do things, when you are a marginalized group fighting a huge entrenched power. You’ve got to be light-hearted. You need esprit-de-corps, so you don’t feel overwhelmed. The aim is to educate people that the problem isn’t greedy executives or evil individual corporations like Exxon. The problem is the system design. The problem is state law that says corporations exist only to maximize gains for shareholders. The problem is wealth discrimination. How do we help people wake up to this? Good ideas are wanted – and the best will be posted on this site.
Read more about what you can do.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY
28, 2002
2:37 AM
CONTACT: RTMark
The Yes Men: representatives@theyesmen.org
Announcement of WTO closure goes to Sydney to
Canada's Parliament
Latest in series of WTO pesterings by The Yes
Men
May 28 - On Tuesday, May 21, a representative of the World Trade Organization announced the dissolution of his organization to a shocked but supportive Sydney audience (http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf, http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html ).
He stated the WTO would reconstitute as a new organization dedicated to assisting the world's poor instead of the rich (http://gatt.org/trastat_e.html). The bombshell announcement has had worldwide repercussions, sparking debate on the floor of the Canadian Parliament, where MP John Duncan took the floor to ask "what impact this will have on our appeals on lumber, agriculture and other ongoing trade disputes" (http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020525/338502.html).
At that point, WTO headquarters in Geneva denounced the "representative" as an impostor. "While we can appreciate [the impostors'] sense of humour, we would not wish for reputable news organizations like yours to be counted among those duped."
"It isn't humor this time," said Andy Bichlbaum, who "represented" the WTO in Sydney. "We really do want to dissolve the WTO and rewrite its charter so that the poor benefit rather than suffer from trade policy."
The group he belongs to, The Yes Men, have previously represented the WTO at two international conferences ( http://theyesmen.org/wto/, http://theyesmen.org/finland/ ) and on mainstream TV (http://theyesmen.org/tv.html).
Each time, they have been invited by people who mistook a Yes Men parody website (http://gatt.org/) for the official WTO site (http://www.wto.org/). The WTO reacted to previous appearances with outrage and attempts to shut GATT.org down.
After overcoming their initial shock, the audience of Australian accountants expressed enthusiasm for the change, and offered many thoughtful suggestions for how world trade could benefit the poor--moving the headquarters from Switzerland to a Third World country, for example."I'm as right-wing as the next fellow," said one of the accountants, "but it's time we gave something back to the countries we've been doing so well from." In past appearances, the Yes Men hoped to horrify audiences by taking free-trade ideas to their logical conclusions.
They argued for selling votes to the highest corporate bidder (http://theyesmen.org/wto/ppt/), making the poor "recycle" hamburgers to cure endemic hunger (http://theyesmen.org/hamburger/), allowing countries to commit human rights abuses with a system of "justice vouchers" modelled after pollution vouchers, and even enabling managers to administer electric shocks to sweatshop workers from afar by using a futuristic telepresence technology embedded in a three-foot-long golden phallus (http://theyesmen.org/finland/photos.html).
The joke was on the Yes Men, however, when these proposals failed to shock audiences, who repeatedly found it credible that such ideas would come from the WTO. Finally, the Yes Men decided to say "no.""We've already demonstrated that audiences of experts will accept anything whatsoever so long as it comes from the mouth of the WTO," said Mike Bonanno, a Yes Man who helped to prepare the lecture in Sydney. "This time, we decided to use the WTO's authority to lead people on a useful exercise that could actually produce something positive."
"It really is possible to dissolve and remake the WTO," said Bichlbaum. "The WTO, after all, was put together from a bunch of wishful thinking and previous agreements one day in 1994. It can just as quickly and easily be replaced by something much better, based on other agreements--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example." After the events in Sydney, the Yes Men are even more optimistic. "The accountants offered us all kinds of useful suggestions on how to make sure the new version of the WTO benefits the poor," said Bonanno. "We feel kind of bad for misleading them, but they came up with much better plans for the future than we could. We hope they'll accept our apologies and keep working with us."
CONTACTS:
The Yes Men:
mailto:representatives@theyesmen.org
CPA
Australia: mailto:barbara.magee@cpaaustralia.com.au,
mailto:rhonda.traversi@cpaaustralia.com.au
http://www.cpaonline.com.au/
WTO
Public Relations (current): mailto:enquiries@wto.org
WTO Public
Relations (previous): mailto:jean-guy.carrier@wto.org The WTO
representative's speech in Sydney:
http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf
CPA
Australia: http://cpaonline.com.au/
The CPA's
press release: http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html
WTO
dissolution announcement: http://gatt.org/irelease.html
Statistics about trade liberalization's effects on the poor:
http://www.gatt.org/trastat_e/
World
Development Movement: http://www.wdm.org.uk/
United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
The
primary goal of RTMark (http://rtmark.com/) is to publicize
corporate subversion of the democratic process. It has helped to sponsor
three of the Yes Men's appearances.
This article can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/news2002/0528-01.htm