Young David Korten would be shocked to see himself now.
He can still remember how, as a politically conservative undergraduate at Stanford in the 1950s, he believed that US capitalism would save the world from poverty. Now he organizes protests and seminars against what he calls the evils of global corporate expansion.
Korten, 64, has become a leading figure in the anti-globalization movement, the diverse groups who first grabbed the public's attention in a big way when they disrupted world trade talks in Seattle two years ago.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
But he is no bomb thrower. (In fact, during most of the Seattle protest, he said, he was ill in bed and never marched in the streets.) What distinguishes him among the movement's thinkers, friends and critics say, is that he has an extensive background in how business is done in the developing world.
For three decades, after receiving his MBA and a doctoral degree in business from Stanford, he taught at Harvard Business School, trained business managers in Africa and Central America and helped dispense financial aid in Asia.
His metamorphosis into a globalization opponent, he said in an interview, came gradually. But even he is startled by the before-and-after contrast. At Stanford, he said, "I was an active Young Republican."
Critics call Korten a misguided idealist whose view of how companies should operate is unfair and outdated. His 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World, contends that multinational companies behave with little accountability and hold tyrannical power over the future of undeveloped countries.
The book has become a bible of the movement -- protesters at a World Bank meeting in Washington last year carried a banner urging people to read it. More than 100,000 copies have been sold, and it is required reading in many college business and political economy courses.
Largely because of that book, Worth magazine listed Korten in last mony's issue issue as one of the "100 people who have changed the way Americans think about money."
Korten now devotes much of his time to the International Forum on Globalization, a group that helped to organize the Seattle protest. He also founded two groups, the Positive Futures Network and the People-Centered Development Forum, that advocate changes in global trade policy and corporate conduct. Korten spoke about his proposals at a conference in New York's Rutgers Presbyterian Church a few weeks ago, as global trade talks were under way in Qatar.
As a psychology major at Stanford, Korten said the subject of economics interested him because it influenced people's behavior. As a senior, he enrolled in a seminar called "Modern Revolutions" and decided that poverty, not political ideology, caused rebellions.
"I concluded that the best thing I could do was go to business school and bring the secrets of modern American management to the Third World," he said. "And from there unfolded a compulsive need to ask questions."
He established a management school in Ethiopia while he earned his PhD., then joined the Harvard Business School faculty to work at the Harvard-backed Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua. In 1978, he and his wife, Frances F. Korten, whom he had met at Stanford, moved to Southeast Asia and administered aid programs for the Ford Foundation and the US Agency for International Development.
He said the aggressive expansion of US corporations into impoverished countries, going wherever labor was cheapest, increasingly troubled him. He recalled looking out his office window in Manila, where he worked from 1988 to 1992, watching as enclaves of executives flew in helicopters and clogged the streets with cars while the air filled with diesel exhaust. Outside that same window, he could watch people living in shacks atop a garbage dump.
Those disparities were the catalyst for a life change.
In 1992, he decided to move to New York, where he thought he could more directly influence industry leaders. He devoted himself to writing his book, giving speeches and encouraging the nascent anti-globalization movement.
His speeches, mostly to environmental groups and anti-globalization teach-ins, drew increasingly large audiences, including representatives of businesses. After a speech in St Louis in 1997, he was invited to visit Monsanto, a developer of genetically modified foods and a prime target of globalization critics. Korten began corresponding with Robert Shapiro, then Monsanto's chief executive. They even sent books to each other. But the friendship ended there.
Korten said that he still regarded Monsanto as "one of the most evil corporations" and that Shapiro, pressured for profits and a strong stock price, had deluded himself into thinking that genetically modified foods would help the world's poor.
Asked for his opinion of Korten, Shapiro said in an e-mail message, "I think he's a thoughtful man with fine intentions and values, but I continue to disagree with some of his premises and most of his conclusions."
John Cavanagh, a friend of Korten's and director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a research center in Washington, said Korten had helped to blunt a major criticism of the movement -- that it lacks a clear analysis of globalization's consequences."Among economists the line was, `Globalization is inevitable, get with the program,'" Cavanagh said. "David has helped change the debate with the argument that this version of globalization isn't inevitable."
But many economists reject Korten's view that globalization is self-destructive and is incapable of paying attention to side effects like environmental damage.
"People were talking in the early 19th century about the collapse of capitalism," said Alice H. Amsden, professor of political economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But during these periods, changes are made, institutional rules are amended and new organizations appear that, in a sense, strengthen capitalism for the next period of economic growth and development."
Korten describes his vision of the future as a network of locally and cooperatively owned businesses. The Kortens live on Bainbridge Island, Washington, a spot in the Puget Sound near Seattle that Korten calls the "land of ecotopia." He can practice some of his suggestions here, he said, like buying wine from producers he knows personally.
He acknowledged his need for some accouterments of the U.S. economy -- flying in airplanes and using computers and e-mail. He thinks a scaled-down economy wouldn't be so dependent on them. "I have no illusion about any of the change process being easy," he said.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
INSPIRING: Taiwan has been a model in the Asia-Pacific region with its democratic transition, free and fair elections and open society, the vice president-elect said Taiwan can play a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) told a forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the nation’s resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges. “Not only can Taiwan help, but Taiwan can lead ... not only can Taiwan play a leadership role, but Taiwan’s leadership is important to the world,” Hsiao told the annual forum hosted by the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation think tank. Hsiao thanked Taiwan’s international friends for their long-term support, citing the example of US President Joe Biden last month signing into law a bill to provide aid to Taiwan,
China’s intrusive and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific region are “illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” new US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said on Friday, adding that he would continue working with allies and partners to keep the area free and open. Paparo made the remarks at a change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, where he took over the command from Admiral John Aquilino. “Our world faces a complex problem set in the troubling actions of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and its rapid buildup of forces. We must be ready to answer the PRC’s increasingly intrusive and
STATE OF THE NATION: The legislature should invite the president to deliver an address every year, the TPP said, adding that Lai should also have to answer legislators’ questions The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday proposed inviting president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to make a historic first state of the nation address at the legislature following his inauguration on May 20. Lai is expected to face many domestic and international challenges, and should clarify his intended policies with the public’s representatives, KMT caucus secretary-general Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said when making the proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Procedure Committee. The committee voted to add the item to the agenda for Friday, along with another similar proposal put forward by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The invitation is in line with Article 15-2