THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

will have enough money to run an election campaign and who will
not.'
The root cause
While these concerns are relevant and poignant, I have come to the
conclusion that they are attacking symptoms rather than causes. In
modern Western history, power and influence have traditionally
been shared and/or balanced between Four ‘estates’ the government,
business, academia, and the media. Today, more blatantly and
directly than ever before, money is controlling all four of these
estates. Even CEOs of the most powerful corporations are obliged to
do what the financial market wants, or they are fired and replaced by
someone who will. Giving priority to long-term thinking over next
quarter's profits is brutally punished under the present money
system. At some level, we are all prisoners of the same money game.
In short, the money system is what creates the structural conflict
experienced by so many CEOs between stockholders' interests, their
own personal ethics, and their concerns for their grandchildren's
future. My contribution to addressing this dilemma is to propose a
money system that will harness corporate power and direct it
towards the goal of long-term sustain8bility (Chapter 8: The Global
Reference Currency Making Capitalism Sustainable).
Even though it may seem that the Corporate Millennium is looming
betbre us, this scenario is only one of the ways in which the power
shift away from the nation-states could manifest itself. The next
scenario - Careful Communities - reveals another very different set of
dynamics.
Careful communities
The other night I woke up from a strange dream.