Time & Perspective Quote by David Korten

Profit, in Korten's framing, isn’t a neutral scoreboard; it’s a trail of extraction with a PR team. The line works because it refuses the comforting story that rising corporate earnings are simply the reward for innovation or efficiency. Instead, it names three familiar “profit levers” and recasts them as moral choices with human casualties: downsizing as the domesticated face of dispossession, “colonizing” as the blunt historical continuity behind supply chains, globalization as a system that widens the map of who can be squeezed.

Korten’s intent is polemical and strategic. He’s not offering a balanced taxonomy of business tactics; he’s building a causal indictment. “Have been able to” carries a quiet accusation: these gains weren’t inevitable, they were enabled by policy, ideology, and the public’s tolerance for corporate storytelling. The phrase “other people’s resources” deliberately punctures the language of markets, where land becomes “inputs” and labor becomes “cost.” It implies prior claims, stolen agency, and an ongoing pattern that survives rebranding.

Subtextually, the sentence also challenges the reader’s complicity. If profits come from layoffs at home and extraction abroad, then consumers, investors, and voters are upstream from the harm, not innocent bystanders. Context matters: Korten writes out of the late-20th/early-21st century critique of neoliberalism, when offshoring, mergers, and shareholder primacy were sold as modernization. His rhetoric is meant to de-glamorize that era’s corporate triumphalism by pointing to what the quarterly report leaves out: the social and ecological bill, exported to people with less leverage to refuse it.