One World  One World

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Introduction

  1. We are citizens of Planet Earth.
  2. A global problem is the whole planet’s problem, no matter where on earth it manifests.
  3. The welfare of Planet Earth, as a whole, is more important than the welfare of any individual country.
  4. We need political institutions to solve global problems.

Economic Justice

Imagine how you would survive on 1/20th of your income the way a person in the third world must.

Ecology

  1. Pollutants created anywhere on earth show up everywhere. We all live in one house.
  2. Despite vaccines that ensure child survival, the third world birth rates remain high. Religious leaders demand still more fecundity.
  3. Many political leaders ignore ecology because they are focused on short-term economic indicators.

Terrorism

  1. It is now possible to carry an atomic bomb in a suitcase, or to bring the Internet to its knees from a PC (Personal Computer) in Bulgaria. A technological society is highly vulnerable to terrorism.
  2. Terrorists are brainwashed to perform their insane acts. The world deserves the right to interfere with such brainwashing. Freedom of religion is not absolute.
  3. Terrorists can exploit the airline security of the laxest country. We need uniform global standards.
  4. Terrorists can threaten to kill us and our families. All the countries of earth must be compelled by law to stop them.
  5. The deeds of terrorists often go unpunished. We cannot allow terrorists to hide in protected enclaves anywhere on earth. It takes only one rogue nation to provide safe haven for them. The world will not be safe from terrorism until all the nations of the world agree to co-operate.

Disease

  1. Even with the drastic measure of killing healthy livestock, Britain had great difficulty bringing the hoof and mouth epidemic under control. It would be even more difficult to control a human epidemic. Airlines allow new diseases to travel around the earth in hours.
  2. When the US Immigration service discovers a person coming into the USA infected with tuberculosis, they immediately put them in strict isolation. Yet 1/3 of all people in the third world are infected with TB (Tuberculosis), and American tourists mingle with them, sometimes quite intimately, every day.
  3. The most effective way to control disease is to wipe it out globally. Polio and malaria continue to stalk the planet even though we had the technology to wipe them out decades ago. We made the mistake of leaving pockets of infection to fester.
  4. It costs $275 to cure a case of leprosy. It costs $0.60 to cure river blindness, yet most of the people who have these diseases cannot afford the cures. Our economic system does not provide baseline medical coverage for all.

Dictatorships

Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy, and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in, and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68)
Out of economic advantage, (e.g. to get cheap oil) democracies often support dictatorships. Dictatorships should be discouraged because they are:
  1. much more likely that democracies to start wars.
  2. suppressing their citizens.
  3. more likely to behave in ways that are planetarily irresponsible.
If a dictator took over your country, surely you would want your neighbours to help get rid of him. Democracies should work non-violently to eliminate all the remaining dictatorships, e.g. through literacy programs and trade sanctions. Theocracies, which look somewhat like dictatorships, would require democratic ratification.

Other Species

  1. We humans tend to act as if we were owners of Planet Earth. Some of our religions foster this naïve view.
  2. Other species have just as much right to live here as us. At a bare minimum, we must stop destroying the habitat of plants and animals. Extinction is Planetary Genocide.
  3. We treat the oceans as a giant sewer. That is no way to treat the dolphins and whales, or ourselves, since we too feast on the bounty of the sea.

Fourth Level of Government

To handle global problems we need global institutions. In the USA and Canada we have three levels of government.
  1. Municipal to deal with sewers, roads, public transport…
  2. State/Provincial to deal with education, tourism, welfare, mining…
  3. Federal to deal with external affairs, immigration, defense, criminal law, money supply…
Sometime there is another level between municipal and state/provincial called county or region. Each level has its exclusive areas of responsibility.

We need to extend to a fourth level, that would not meddle in the affairs of the existing three levels, that handles global problems such as ecology, waste management, inter-country conflicts, aviation rules, terrorism and disease control.

It would work like the American system of checks and balances with a with a president, senate and congress. Even a giant global bureaucracy could not be as short sighted and blind as the system we have now where each country cares only for its national interest at the expense of everyone else.

People are often afraid of a new level. This mirrors the suspicion of the original thirteen American colonies considering federating. Today, the benefits to creating America are obvious and the drawbacks don’t seem all that dreadful, but back in 1776, the founding fathers had serious doubts.

Options

  1. We have tried theocracies. They lead to the dark ages and the Spanish Inquisition.
  2. We have tried anarchy. It leads to chaos.
  3. We have tried the UN. It is not democratic and it has no teeth. It runs by rule of men rather than rule of law.
  4. Let’s give a fourth level of government a try.
I love my town; I love my country; I love my planet.

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