Solving global problems

Many of today’s problems are too huge and complex for one country or region to solve alone. A World Federation will be more effective in tackling our toughest challenges.
A movement that’s evolved along with our problems

The World Federalist Movement began in the aftermath of World War II as a way to prevent war and solve conflicts non-violently. Over the past few decades we’ve come to understand that our major problems are global but our institutions and laws are inadequate to solve them. Current movements and events such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, Los Indignatos, and others highlight the need to bring democracy to those who do not have it and protect it for those who have. A World Federation is the ideal structure to ensure both.
 
World Federalism
“This is the essence of world federalism: to seek to invest legal and political authority in world institutions to deal with problems which can only be treated at the global level ….”
 
New Globalism
“This right to democracy transcends national boundaries because in the era of globalization major public decisions are more and more being taken beyond the nation-state ….”
International Law
“Rather than being the product of global citizens acting within a transparently representative legal framework, international law continues to be forged by states in a piecemeal ….”
A peace movement is born

Following the horrors of World War II, the idea of a World Federation was first proposed as a way to prevent future wars and resolve conflicts peacefully. The idea is simple. In a nation with a Federal government, when states, provinces, and similar local governments have disputes with each other they take those conflicts to their Federal Courts where they are resolved non-violently. What if today’s nations became states in a single global Federation? They too could resolve their conflicts non-violently by bringing them to a Global Federal Court.
Our major problems have gone global

Over the past few decades, civilization has reached a point where our major problems are now global — including war, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, famine, climate change, overpopulation, poverty, pandemics, and nuclear accidents. However, our institutions have not kept pace with these threats. Nations propose treaties to handle international problems, but these treaties are often resisted by some nations, diluted during negotiations by others, and broken by a few — and when this happens there is little or no means of enforcement! Even when nations work together to address a crisis, responses can be very slow while tens of thousands die. A democratically elected World Federation will be a more effective way to address a wide range of global problems than our current system of international treaties, laws and institutions.

The corporate “New World Order”

Current movements around the globe are bringing attention to the effects that globalization and multi-national corporations are having on the planet and its people. While these developments have benefited some, they have also harmed others and damaged our environment. Many of these institutions have little oversight or accountability to anyone but their shareholders. A World Federation will pass and enforce global laws to protect people, profits and the environment.

How will a World Federation work?

A World Federation will address global issues in much the same way as Federal Governments address problems within a nation. Whether its structured more like a Parliamentary or Presidential system, each with its advantages and disadvantages, or some new form, it will be up to the people of the world to decide.

A world of solutions

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” A World Federation applies a different kind of thinking that’s ideal for addressing many of today’s seemingly insoluble problems.
Albert Einstein

“A world government must be created which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision. This government must be based on a clear-cut constitution ….”
Bertrand Russell

“Science has made unrestricted national sovereignty incompatible with human survival. The only possibilities are now world government or death.”
H.G. Wells
“A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient means of social justice to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity ….”

The Manifesto of the

Earth Federation Party

Foreword

 This manifesto summarizes, as briefly as possible, the multiple crises our world is facing and the kind of response necessary if we are to survive the twenty-first century. It demonstrates on every page why federal world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth is necessary in the very near future. In 1995, the report of the blue ribbon “Commission on Global Governance” outlined many of the global crises we confront today and stated that “the present generation knows how close it stands to cataclysms.” This manifesto shows this claim to be false. 

The present generation insists on remaining in denial and willful ignorance. Yet the arguments for federal world government are compelling and decisive. They are presented on nearly every page of this manifesto. Those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, need to listen and look. This manifesto is intentionally as short as possible so that it may be easily read and understood. It deals with the issues of terrorism, war, the environment, social movements, the U.N., the system of nations, and global economics. It may well be one of the most significant documents you will ever read.

The Prologue below describes the final crossroads that human beings face today. We can reap the insights of twentieth-century science showing the holism and interdependency of every aspect of our universe. Or we can continue in fragmentation, division, and mutual destruction. Our world of war, terror, massive poverty and misery, and environmental destruction cannot endure much longer. Human beings must become politically and economically whole or we will perish. The choice is clear and simple, and the momentous consequences at stake are not difficult to discern.

2. What the Earth Federation has accomplished to date, reviews the momentous legacy that we inherit from the generations who created the Constitution and the Provisional World Parliaments. A tremendous movement has emerged around the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. It has been translated into many languages and people in nearly every country are beginning to rally around the banner of the Earth Federation. Much excellent work is already accomplished. We do not have to invent the wheel. We are in a position today to set the wheel in motion.

3.  Humanity poised at the crossroads between destruction and liberation, expresses the reasons we are at a crossroads for human existence on this planet. It considers global economics, the nation-state system, the United Nations, and global social movements. It shows the interdependence of all these movements in the nexus of crises that we face on Earth. It shows the role of our major world institutions in creating and deepening these crises. We must choose for a civilized world order today, with a clear choice and decisive action, or we will surely destroy the Earth for ourselves and for all future generations.

4. Failure of the United Nations, considers the United Nations, its history, its structure, and its failure to transform our world into a world of peace with justice. It lays out the facts for all who are willing to see and hear, and shows clearly why the U.N. has failed. It details how the many worthwhile agencies of the U.N. could really do their job if they were incorporated into the Earth Federation and, for the first time, had adequate funding and authority.

5. The dead end environmental hopes of Rio and Johannesburg, looks at the Environmental Summits at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, at Johannesburg in 2002, and other treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. It documents the failure of the nations to live up to their environmental agreements (leading to ever greater planetary catastrophe) and why they do not and cannot act to save the global environment. It shows that the very structure of our world system, which is historically outdated and manifestly unjust, is preventing humanity from saving the planetary environment. 

6. the condition of our world at the dawn of the twenty-first century, considers the nexus of global crises that we confront at the outset of our new century. It provides the latest scientific facts documenting all these crises: the crisis of fresh water, the crisis of poverty, the crisis of arable land and viable fisheries to feed the people of Earth, the environmental crisis, the population crisis, the crisis of sickness and disease, the crisis of education, the crisis of global economics, and the crisis of global militarism.

It demonstrates in what ways these crises are all interdependent and interrelated and underlines how they all stem from the fragmented world system of so-called sovereign nation-states and global monopoly capitalism. It makes clear for each crisis why federal world government is the only viable solution. It specifies exactly how these problems are addressed by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, including how the Constitution specifically addresses the problems of militarism, terrorism, and war.

7. common sense economics under democratic world government, outlines the intelligent and fair economics that are being developed by the Earth Federation to create a world of prosperity and equity rather than one of scarcity and misery. The seven economic innovations outlined in Part Seven are readily understood and easily implemented. It makes clear that a world of plenty and justice is not merely a utopian dream but a very real possibility under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. All reasonable people can understand the rationality and simplicity of these options. Another world is truly possible.

Finally, Part Eight, where do we go from here? addresses the actions we must take at this historical crossroads to create a sustainable, just, and prosperous world order. These actions are common sense and based on clear, compelling arguments, and extensive factual evidence. Part Eight appeals to the poor majority of people on Earth to act on their own behalf and on behalf of a future for their children.

But it points out that we are all made poor by the present world order of injustice, misery, and war. We are all citizens of the Earth under the Constitution, and today we are all made poor by the wretched conditions that the old rotten system perpetuates into the future. It calls for all citizens of the world to unite under the Earth Federation. If many citizens of the Earth were to stand up on behalf of a decent world order at this crossroads of history, a world of sanity, peace, and prosperity would be just around the corner.

1. Prologue

1.1. Human history on planet Earth has reached its final crossroads. Human beings can continue on the road to imminent perdition, or we can rise to a new level of civilization for the Earth. This manifesto clearly describes that crossroads for all who care to see and hear. Our message is not a confused and sentimental longing for a better world as is so often heard today from groups seeking to protect human rights, or advance democracy, promote peace, or address poverty and disease. Our message is clear, precise, and specific. The reasons we are on the road to imminent perdition can be easily understood. And the reasons for the Earth Federation are clear, compelling, and decisive. This manifesto is about that choice. Time is running out when this choice will be available to us. The time for firm decision is now. There is no other time.

1.2. This choice is not an arbitrary or irrational one. For the concept of holism (unity) emerges as the fundamental insight of every twentieth-century revolution in science. The Einstein revolution showed that nature and the cosmos must now be understood holistically. And Quantum physics has shown this to be true on the sub-atomic level. On both the macro and micro levels, our universe exhibits unity as a seamless, interdependent field of space/time/energy/matter. Ecology and the biological sciences have also demonstrated holism at every level of living nature, including the encompassing ecosystem of the Earth.

1.3. The major sphere where fragmentation, division, and reductionism remain is the sphere of human social life in the system of territorial nation-states and the global economic system of violence, greed, and noncooperation. It is no accident that Einstein was an outspoken advocate of planetary federal government. He understood the inescapable holism of the world we live in. The choice before us is to convert our thinking to holism (the unity and interrelatedness of all persons on the Earth) or to continue into destruction with our fragmentation and violence. This holism is embodied in the Constitution for the Federation of Earth through a dynamic and comprehensive relationship of unity-in-diversity. We must immediately choose the holism of federal world government or we may soon perish from the Earth.

1.4. Today, a creative groundswell in the movement for a sane federal world order is making the current lords of the Earth tremble in their corruption and fragmentation. The people of the world are awakening to the lies and distortions of the media, their subservience to power, and the corrupt interests defending the old rotten order while destroying the Earth for future generations. We citizens of the Earth Federation are spokespersons of this new world order predicated on wholeness, democratic values, and the common good of all persons on Earth. They may imprison or kill us as individuals, but the groundswell of awakening among the people of the Earth is unstoppable. We are poised at a crossroads for humanity. We must choose wisely – for humanity – or we may perish from the Earth.

2.  What the Earth Federation has accomplished to date

2.1. We citizens of the Earth Federation, gathered at this historic Seventh Session of the Provisional World Parliament, recognize that we are building on the collective efforts of thousands of world citizens who worked tirelessly since 1958 (and throughout the twentieth century) to bring us the great legacy that we inherit today. They are to be honored and revered as prophets and designers of the Earth Federation that is destined to create truly civilized life on planet Earth for the first time in human history.

2.2. Our predecessors, some of whom are among our leaders yet today, gave humanity, first and foremost, the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. This document, one of the great milestone documents of human history, was forged to the finest quality by the effort of hundreds of world citizens in four Constituent Assemblies from Wolfach, Germany, in 1968 to Troia, Portugal, in 1991. Today, it has been distributed worldwide and translated into twenty-two languages. 

2.3. The Constitution is recognized by many people around the world as the supreme law for Planet Earth, superseding all laws passed by the approximately 190 territorial entities that today call themselves “nation-states” and claim the false right to pass laws for their territories not accountable to the rest of humankind. We understand today that no merely territorial entity has the right to claim absolute sovereignty for its laws unaccountable to the universal principles of equity, justice, freedom, and peace embodied in the Earth Constitution and widely endorsed universal declarations of rights and responsibilities, including the Earth Charter. True sovereignty resides with all the citizens who live on Earth, not within limited territorial entities.

2.4. The Constitution creates a parliamentary system that will not be subject to subversion and corruption as has turned the so-called liberal democracies into “national security states” dominated by executive branch secrecy and arbitrary power. There will be no need for executive secrecy and arbitrary power when all nations are demilitarized under the rule of democratically legislated laws. The world parliament has three houses (a House of Counselors representing all humanity, a House of Nations representing every nation on Earth, and a House of Peoples with proportional representation from 1000 electoral districts worldwide). The main branches of government under this Parliament (the World Judiciary, the World Executive, the World Police and Attorneys General, and the World Ombudsmus) are all directly accountable to the Parliament and have no power to suspend the Constitution, withhold spending of the budget, violate human rights, create a military apparatus, or otherwise subvert the universal guarantees given to all nations and peoples by the Constitution.

2.5. By recognizing the sovereignty of the people of Earth and universal economic and political rights for all citizens, the Constitution ends once and for all the power-politics of nation-states that struggle for economic advantage, control of resources, military hegemony, and spheres of influence. This struggle continues to destroy the rights and the lives of millions around the globe, as it has for centuries. It mandates equitable use of the Earth’s essential resources for all people, making possible a truly civilized world order under the rule of democratically legislated law for the first time in history.

2.6. Will there be “opposition parties” within the Earth Federation? Of course. Unlike the pseudo-diversity of today’s two party systems, a genuine diversity of voices is the heart and soul of democracy. Under today’s common one or two party systems, the group in power attempts to suppress, silence, co-opt, or eliminate its opposition. There is a lack of that mutual respect and unity necessary to legitimate the diversity of genders, cultures, religions, ethnicities, or political viewpoints.

2.7. Sheer diversity without authentic unity results in conflict, violence, and the rule of the most powerful. The Earth Federation is predicated on “unity in diversity.” Diversity is protected and encouraged precisely because it is encompassed by the unity of the universal rule of law and universal citizenship. Everybody has a voice and a stake in the welfare of the whole and of everyone else. A genuine plurality of voices listening to one another (rather than trying to suppress and drown one another out) is here made possible for the entire Earth.

2.8. The second great accomplishment of our predecessors was to take many active steps to actually initiate democratic world government under the Constitution. They have given us a body of provisional world law that has been carefully developed since the first Provisional World Parliament met in 1982, and they have begun elaborating the ministries necessary for the functioning of world government. Since 1982, the Provisional World Parliament has met in six different locations around the world, the Sixth in Bangkok, Thailand in March 2003, the Seventh in Chennai, India in December 2003, and the Eighth in Lucknow, India in August 2004.

2.9. Today, the world inherits from our predecessors a body of quality planetary law that serves as a model and a beacon for all humanity lighting the path by which we can move from a world of chaos, war, and imminent disaster to a world of peace, freedom, equity, and justice. The Sixth Provisional World Parliament established a Commission for Legislative Review to codify and professionalize this body of world law. When the first operative stage of World Government has begun, and the official World Parliament has been constituted, this body of law will serve as a tremendous gift to humankind, and available to the Parliament for review, modification, or immediate ratification.

2.10. Those of us worldwide who have personally ratified the Earth Constitution are now ambassadors and spokespersons for the Earth Federation, voices crying in the wilderness of global chaos, violence, and fragmentation, but also prophets speaking for the future of civilization and the greatest hope for humanity. The Earth Federation lives at the moment through us until the day when it will become recognized and embraced by all of humanity. On that day we will be honored and revered as courageous pioneers who selflessly struggled against tremendous odds on behalf of our precious planet Earth, universal justice, and a decent life for future generations.

3.  Humanity poised at the crossroads between destruction and liberation

3.1. Recognition of our great movement is happening everywhere among the poor and dispossessed majority of the world. Recognition that all the tired options of the past have long been exhausted and that the present world order is kept in place not by hope and vision for a better future but by institutionalized force and violence. This poor and dispossessed majority are the great hope for humanity and the Earth Federation.

3.2. Monopoly conditions dominated by global corporations and imperial governments enforce upon the world’s poor majority a global system of economic exploitation and domination. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, imperial governments, and the heads of multinational corporations work in secret forums to effectively eliminate all opposition to their criminal pillage of the planet and its resources. This system is one of planetary institutionalized violence, forcing unnecessary death and disease on untold millions who are victims of the rape of the planet by the rich and powerful. This system is enforced by the overt violence of strategically placed global weapons sales, counterinsurgency military training provided to dominant elites in poor countries, political manipulation, threats of economic sanctions or punishment, and outright invasions or bombings of countries that attempt to take an independent course.

3.3. Yet with the failure of the United Nations to prevent genocide against the Iraqi people culminating in the 2003 invasion of their country, and the total failure of the U.N. to prevent the complete devastation of Afghanistan over the past twenty years, it has become clear to the poor nations and peoples of the world that the U.N. is a false prophet and an ideological cover for the preservation of the system of global exploitation and domination. The recently created “International Coalition Against Terror,” illustrates the impotence and irrelevancy of the U.N. This coalition creates a permanent, global war system largely comprised of the wealthiest nations, most of whom have a history of colonial domination of other countries, who today produce most of the world’s weapons, including weapons of mass destruction.

3.4. Independent people’s movements, like the World Social Forum, have sprung up globally, determined to create a more just and equitable world order. There are also many non-governmental organizations working to protect human rights, relieve poverty, preserve the environment, or promote health-care throughout the world. They speak of “resistance” to the dominant order, of restoring “living democracy” to the planet, empowering the poor, canceling international debt, or “food first” for the world. Yet they offer no clear means for achieving these goals within a world system predicated on war, national imperialism, and power politics, only vague ideas about making economics and politics more democratic, more just, or more responsive to the needs of the poor.

3.5. The Earth Federation does not want to be “more responsive to the needs of the poor.” The Federation provides the means for eradicating poverty from the Earth. We do not work to make the existing institutions of power, domination, and exploitation (the “sovereign” nation-state and global capitalism) “more democratic.” There is no way to make the flawed and fragmented power-based institutions of today’s world “more democratic.” They are inherently totalitarian and undemocratic, whatever their ideologies may claim, and have produced a living hell for those unfortunate enough to be their victims.

3.6. The metaphor of hell is apt, for the institutions of the “sovereign” nation-state and their global economic system have created a living hell on Earth for the past five centuries through their policies of merciless conquest, genocides of indigenous peoples, brutal systems of slavery, vicious colonialism, endless colonial wars, world wars, and militarized neocolonial domination of today. Presently, for at least 1.5 billion citizens on this planet, and for the poor majority of the world, they truly represent the rule of hell on Earth. We understand that these institutions must be replaced by genuine federal world government and by an economic system premised on rapid sustainable development and the welfare of all the Earth’s citizens.

3.7. The key to solving the terrible global crises confronting humanity is the creation of global institutions capable of planetary action and premised on creating a world of equity, freedom, justice, and peace. There are no such institutions in the world today. Only democratic world government is capable of dealing with global crises on a planetary level. Gradual modification of the present flawed institutions of the world is a prescription for planetary suicide.

3.8. Approximately 150 years ago, another manifesto announced that a “specter was haunting Europe,” the specter of violent revolution and expropriation of the stolen wealth of the rich. We announce that a peaceful revolution is at hand, more far reaching than that earlier manifesto could have imagined. We announce that there is no need to expropriate the wealth of the rich to create global equity, freedom, justice, peace, and prosperity.

3.9. Our revolution is more far reaching because it is planetary in scope and because humanity is at the final crossroads. The earlier revolution was premature, for humanity had not yet reached its final crossroads. Our revolution for the first time in history creates planetary institutions that represent all the world’s people based on the principle of unity-in-diversity. No one is excluded. For the first time in history, the needs, rights, and interests of the whole of humanity are taken into account by democratic, truly planetary institutions.

3.10. The choice today is between certain chaos, barbarism, and destruction or democratic world government under the Earth Constitution. Our revolution abolishes not only the worst features of capitalism and monopoly corporate pillage as did that earlier manifesto. It also abolishes that other demon from hell that has wreaked havoc on the Earth for the past five centuries: the absolute “sovereignty” of nation-states. The so-called “sovereign” nation-state is a fragmented, irrational, and dangerous institution that has divided the Earth into approximately 200 competing territorial entities. Its very existence denies the sovereignty of the people of Earth. We must not only eliminate the worst features of capitalism. We must also eliminate the warring, imperialistic, and greedy institution of the absolute sovereignty of nation-states.

3.11. Since nation-states call themselves “sovereign,” and recognize no authority of law above themselves, they are always in a relation of chaos, struggle, and defacto war with one another. This fact was pointed out by Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and many other political thinkers. In this situation, action for the common good of humanity and the Earth is in principle impossible. The only authentic and legitimate sovereignty is that of all the people who reside on Earth. And the Earth Constitution embodies that sovereignty in effective world government in which all people and nations live under the rule of democratically legislated law for the first time in history. The holism of nature and the ecosystem of Earth is for the first time realized also in human affairs. The common good of the Earth and future generations can for the first time be effectively addressed.

3.12. The old order is dead and dying. The world is at its final crossroad. We can sink further toward imminent destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants led by the rich and powerful corporations, governments, and financial institutions concerned only to preserve their system of exploitation and domination as long as possible into the ever-darkening future. Or we can move to a higher level of human dignity and civilization on planet Earth by uniting in one world under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

4. Failure of the United Nations

4.1. Many nations and many well-meaning people in the world, however, have not embraced a truly new world order under the Earth Constitution but have followed the U.N. system based on the failed institutions of the past five centuries of the modern era. The United Nations was created by the victors of the Second World War in order to ensure their continued dominance in the affairs of the world. This has been illustrated in its sad history of veto upon veto, preventing the majority of nations in the world, representing the majority of the people of the world, from altering the world order in the direction of equity, freedom, justice, or peace.

4.2. The ideals embodied within the U.N. Charter, such as preventing “the scourge of war” are belied by its undemocratic organizational structure and its underlying assumptions. According to the U.N. Charter, the “scourge of war” is to be prevented in the last resort by the Security Council going to war. Such absurdities of our present world order permeate the document. The U.N. Charter is based on “the sovereign independence” of its member states, reaffirming the flawed and false principle of territorial sovereignty. For this reason as well imperial nations can ignore the U.N. when they choose, and go to war at will entirely outside of the U.N. system.

4.3. In practice, for the past five centuries, this doctrine of “sovereign independence” has meant that the powerful nations dominate and exploit the weaker nations. It has meant that the global north has become rich through exploiting the global south. Today, this system continues through the GATT system of the U.N., the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The global south (Africa, Latin America, South Asia) is poorer, more exploited, and more miserable today than ever before in history. The wealthy elite in the global north is richer today than ever before in history.

4.4. The United Nations has failed to prevent war. There have been some 130 wars since the advent of the U.N. resulting in some 25 million war related deaths, most of them civilians. The U.N. has failed to create security for the people of the world. It has allowed rampant world militarism with ever faster and more destructive weapons created and deployed at the staggering figure of approximately 850 billion U.S. dollars per year. Not only has military insecurity increased worldwide, the people of the world are today faced with an every growing number of insecurities connected directly with the failure of the United Nations.

4.5. Food insecurity has increased worldwide, as has water insecurity, insecurity with respect to health care, and insecurity of educational opportunities. Under the U.N., millions have been displaced from their rural lands and been forced into horrible slums in gigantic third world cities to be faced with community chaos and insecurity in the form of drugs, prostitution, violence, and crime.

4.6. The U.N. has failed to eradicate poverty. Global poverty is significantly greater today than when the U.N. was created. Today, largely under domination by the United States with its shameless promotion of multinational corporations dedicated to pillaging the planet of its resources and cheap labor in the service of private profit, the U.N. is turning more and more to “private solutions,” making deals with private, profit-making corporations to supply education, water, electricity, health care, vital drugs, farming, or transportation to so-called developing countries.

4.7. Dozens of countries around the world have seen their essential infrastructures and services that served the people privatized and destroyed by employee cutbacks, profit gouging, and holding poor populations hostage to their monopoly control of essential services. The bottom line is that the concept of “developing countries” is a misnomer, for most of the world remains merely a colonial service area to supply cheap resources, labor, and quick profits for the wealthy corporations and their sponsor governments. Under the present system, there is no hope and no real intention of these countries ever “developing.”

4.8. In addition, the U.N. has failed to limit the exploding global population that today is in excess of six billion persons and growing by eighty million new persons each year, numbers of people that the finite resources of the Earth cannot possibly support. Finally, it failed to protect the disintegrating environmental integrity of our planet despite holding huge conferences on the environmental crisis in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002.

5. The dead-end environmental hopes of Rio and Johannesburg

5.1. The June 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro was a milestone in a clear understanding of our human condition on planet Earth. The documents produced at Rio show the understanding that the global crises are all interconnected and interrelated. We cannot protect the environment without simultaneously eliminating poverty, eradicating war and militarism, controlling population growth, and restricting the drive for economic gain through acting on universal principles of what sustains and protects the common good of the planet and its future.

5.2. By the time the 35,000 delegates met at the Earth Summit in Rio, it was clear that all development on the Earth must be “sustainable,” for the planet could not much longer survive a model of development treating the finite resources of the Earth as an unlimited cornucopia for exploitation. Nor could the limited ability of the planet to absorb waste materials and pollution be treated any longer as an infinite cesspool, where industrial development indiscriminately externalized its costs and its wastes into the water, air, and soil. The people at the Rio Summit understood that sustainable development means meeting the needs and improving the quality of life in the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs while living lives of quality and dignity.

5.3. The delegates at Rio created one of the great documents of the twentieth century: “Agenda 21.” This document understood that workers and farmers in developing countries had to be empowered and protected, that protections and opportunities for women and children worldwide had to be strengthened, that education had to be disseminated to all peoples of the developing world. In short, sustainable development must necessarily mean reducing population growth, eliminating poverty, providing the education necessary for development. Agenda 21 also made it clear that definite, rigorous goals had to be set for the reduction of greenhouse gasses and ozone depleting gasses by nations and their industries, and that global fisheries, farmlands, grazing lands, and forests had to be preserved and restored. Many nations signed Agenda 21 and promised to achieve the goals set for them by the document.

5.4. The subsequent Earth Summit at Johannesburg, South Africa in August-September 2002 represented a widespread recognition of the failure of Agenda 21 and the hopes of Rio for bringing the world back from the brink of disaster. There was nothing wrong with the Agenda 21 plan itself. The nations of the world simply did not honor the commitment and demand to reduce greenhouse and ozone depleting emissions, to empower the developing world in ways that provided education, eliminated poverty, and reduced population growth, and to create a sustainable and integrated world economy and more equitable world order.

5.5. Why should any one of the 190 competing territorial units, each with its own internal problems and self-interest in mind, act for the common good of the Earth and future generations? The very assumption that they might do this was hopelessly naive. Why should any of the multi-billion-dollar corporations now pillaging the Earth act for the common good of humanity and future generations? Familiarity with their actions around the world demonstrates that these organizations are often criminal in nature and run by criminals. Several of the books in the bibliography to this manifesto document in detail the worldwide criminal interrelationships between multinational corporations, banking institutions, governments, and even global terrorism. How naive for the people at Rio to believe that any hope for the environment was possible under the current world system!

5.6. Many at Johannesburg recognized that governments alone (of which the U.N. is officially comprised) cannot save the world from disaster. Many governments are not representative of their own people: many are dominated by big business interests, some are dominated by religious extremists or criminal thugs (dictators), many are under the thumb of the big imperial powers or the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank. For this reason, many world citizens struggled at the Johannesburg conference to get a voice for the non-governmental organizations at the decision-making tables.

5.7. They argued that governments (and their corporate partners) alone are not capable of representing the interests of the future, the people of the world, or the planet itself. Some progress was made in getting NGOs recognized as a voice in the dialogue about the future of the world, and some people, sadly, believe this represents a success of Johannesburg. But in reality it only illustrates the complete failure and hopelessness of the U.N. process.

5.8. Agenda 21 failed not because its goals were incorrect or unrealistic, but because it was a product of a United Nations Conference recognizing the “sovereign independence” of each of the 190 territorial entities on the planet and affirming a global economic system of crass greed and pillage. Agenda 21 was merely a treaty, like the subsequent Kyoto Protocol on the environment, like the United Nations Millennium Declaration of the year 2000, and like whatever agreements emerged from Johannesburg. Subsequently, corporations and imperial nations acted to destroy the Kyoto Protocol from within by creating a system for “pollution credits” or, as they call it, or “global emissions trading.” This system has allowed them to continue trashing the environment while claiming that they are conforming to “free market” environmentalism.

5.9. The structure of the world system is deeply flawed and absolutely inadequate to the vital needs of the world to end poverty, war, population growth, environmental degradation, and social chaos. A system of 190 territorial entities all claiming sovereignty over some piece of land cannot possibly produce universal equity, freedom, justice, or peace in the world. A world economic system based upon the unbridled greed and self-interest of nations and corporations cannot possibility create sustainable development and save the planet from impending disaster.

5.10. ‘To bring new voices of NGOs to the discussion table may push governments and public opinion towards recognizing existing injustices. International groups of doctors and others have prompted resolutions about land mines, an international criminal court, and the environment. However, naively assuming that this produces adequate and responsible remedies is a recipe for total disaster. NGOs, like world citizens, have a healthy democratic function but not a right to speak for all humanity apart from world government. The nations of the U.N. do not speak for all humanity but only for themselves and their sovereign interests. Neither are such NGOs elected by the people of the Earth to represent their interests.

5.11. The U.N. system is as undemocratic and unjust as any set of institutions could possibly be. The U.N. failure to protect the global environment and create sustainable development is not the result of a lack of understanding of the problems we face. It is a result of an organization premised on the particularized and inadequate institutions nearly five centuries old (the nation-state and global capitalism) and entirely inadequate to address universal needs and interests.

5.12. To add a powerless “peoples’ assembly” to the already powerless General Assembly of the U.N., or to add the voices of a few NGOs to the dialogue about the world’s future, may seem to some a giant step, but it is a feeble gesture towards a democratic rule of law among nations. It is to ignore the living hell that is the world we live in for a good portion of humanity. It is to ignore the impending cataclysms nearly upon us of global population increase, global epidemics, global water shortage, global starvation, global collapse of fisheries and farmlands, global warming, global flooding of coastal lands, global ozone depletion, global war, and global social chaos.

5.13. Democratic world government is the only rational option, the only possible vehicle that can represent universal and global needs and interests. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is directed explicitly to the global crises faced by our planet: population, poverty, militarism, health care, education, and environment. It gives the elected representatives of the sovereign people of Earth the legal authority and the mandate to create sustainable development for the entire Earth and to transform the world to one of equity, freedom, justice, and peace. No other force on Earth can accomplish this task within the limited time available to us.

5.14. Replacing the U.N. Charter with the Earth Constitution does not mean dismantling many excellent U.N. organizations and their worthwhile infrastructure that can be used as a basis for the agencies of world government concerned with health care, the welfare of children, the rights of women, sustainable development, education and cultural exchange, labor standards, international shipping, postal regulations, meteorology, environmental standards, and other important fields. Many U.N. agencies do excellent work in all these areas despite the impediments placed in their way by sovereign nations and global economics. The Earth Federation will immediately increase the funding and global scope of all worthwhile U.N. agencies, converting them to ministries of the Federation. Many agencies of the U.N. are valuable and should be preserved. It is the U.N. Charter with its flawed assumptions that must be replaced.

5.15. The failed United Nations system is bringing the world ever nearer to complete disaster, as was recognized by many at Johannesburg. To invest more time and energy into that system is mad and even suicidal. We are one world, one humanity, one global ecosystem, one system of information and communication. We are deeply interdependent and interrelated with every other person on the planet. Yet we have failed to create any global institutions based on this truth. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is the only viable document based on this understanding. Its Preamble states that “Humanity is One,” and that the principle of “unity in diversity is the basis for a new age when war shall be outlawed and peace prevail,” and “when the Earth’s total resources shall be equitably used for human welfare.”

5.16. The Earth Constitution represents, for the first time in human history, planetary institutions, planetary vision, planetary responsibility, and democratically guided planetary planning for sustainable development and the welfare of future generations. This is the only truly viable, widely publicized option presently available as we face the crossroads of the early twenty-first century. Shall we continue on our disastrous course of attempting to deal with planetary crises through fragmented and divisive institutions nearly five centuries old?

5.17. Or shall we move to a new level of existence on this planet, perhaps fulfilling the very meaning of our historical pilgrimage on Earth? Shall we at last create planetary institutions representing all the people of Earth, all the living creatures of Earth, and the welfare of future generations? The Seventh Provisional World Parliament (who ratified this Manifesto), along with the many thousands of planetary citizens who have ratified the Earth Constitution worldwide, recognize that we are the prophets and harbingers of a truly new world order premised on the universal principles of equity, freedom, justice, and peace. Our responsibility is correspondingly great. We must continue activating a global movement among the peoples and nations of Earth to ratify the Constitution and initiate truly democratic, federal world government before it is too late.

6. Condition of our world of at the dawn of the twenty-first century

6.1. The crisis of fresh water. There is a growing shortage of fresh water worldwide. Every person living needs approximately thirty gallons of clean water daily. Yet hundreds of millions of people live on less than ten gallons daily. As the population of the planet continues to increase by eighty million persons per year, so does the need for water. Yet underground aquifers from which most water comes are receding at an alarming rate. Four decades ago groundwater levels could be found a few meters below ground. Today in many places special wells and pumping systems are required to access water 180 meters or more beneath the Earth. 

6.1.1. The size of the giant underground aquifers on which people depend for irrigation and to supply cities with water are steadily shrinking. The aquifer under the Midwest of the United States is half the size it was less than one hundred years ago. In addition, unsustainable industrial development has poisoned water systems around the world so that many groundwater systems are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins from mining, oil drilling, or manufacturing. 

6.1.2. Governments of the world have also not acted to preserve the water that falls in the form of rain. They have not acted to preserve the forests that retain fresh water over the land and serve as a conduit to move the water inland from the sea. Irrigation systems, accounting for seventy percent of the world’s freshwater use, irresponsibly waste immense amounts of water, often because of the drive to maximize profit rather than preserve the Earth for future generations. Meanwhile, drip irrigation systems are available that could conserve a tremendous volume of fresh water.

6.1.3. How is the global water crisis to be handled if not by democratic world government? Nation-states alone have no ability to deal with this global phenomena. Water patterns are global. Global warming is changing these patterns worldwide, creating droughts in some places and floods and hurricanes in others. Sources of water cross borders, as for example the sources of water in Bangladesh, with its immense problems of flooding, lie largely in India. Currently, water systems in many nations have been privatized, placed in the hands of global corporate criminals. Water prices have skyrocketed, while purity and protection of clean water supplies have evaporated. Only the World Parliament operating under the Earth Constitution can create a workable water policy for the entire planet.

6.2. The crisis of poverty. Poverty is greater and far more extensive today that ever before on Earth. 1.5 billion people, or close to twenty percent of the Earth’s population, live on less than one U.S. dollar per day. This means a large portion of the Earth’s population go to bed hungry each night. It means millions of malnourished children and immense human potential for creativity and development lost because malnourishment often leads to retardation or diminished intellectual capacity. 

6.2.1. It is often truly said that there is enough food grown globally to feed all people currently on the Earth. But the global economic system distributes that food to those who can pay, to the wealthy first world nations, leaving hundreds of millions of people in the developing world hungry. Poverty cannot be eliminated through giving resources directly to hungry people. Charity is not development. 

6.2.2. Poverty can only be eliminated through extensive programs of education, health care to eliminate the many diseases and diminished potential that go with poverty, non-exploitative finance capital to activate local and regional economies, and infrastructure development to enhance the economic multiplier effect that can come from widespread circulation of money between producers and consumers throughout the developing world.

6.2.3. There are no Earthly institutions that can accomplish all these goals in an effective and timely manner. To accomplish these tasks would take immense resources, planning, coordination, and oversight to provide education, health care, nonexploitative finance capital, and a high-quality infrastructure throughout the developing world. Only world government representing the Earth Federation could do this. Without effective world government, there is no hope of eliminating poverty and misery from the Earth.

6.3. The crisis of resources for feeding the people of Earth. There are at least four features of the Earth that humans and animals depend on for food and survival: farmlands, grazing lands, ocean fisheries, and forests. All of these resources are being degraded and destroyed at alarming rates. 

6.3.1. Farmlands lose many billions of tons of topsoil every year to wind and water erosion because of unsustainable farming methods. Farmlands worldwide are also being over-planted, leading to soil exhaustion and deterioration. Every year millions of acres of agricultural land are become unusable and are lost to human food production. 

6.3.2. Grazing lands, where herds of goats, cows, sheep or other animals are pastured, are becoming degraded and diminished through overgrazing. Overgrazing eventually destroys the land itself, leading to growing desertification worldwide. Deserts, increasing in size worldwide, are largely waste that cannot support human or animal life. By some estimates, fifty percent of the land in Asia and Africa is now useless for supporting life. 

6.3.3. Third, ocean fisheries are dying due to over-fishing and perhaps to the rise of ocean temperatures from global warming. The tonnage in fish harvests is diminishing each year. In some cases, such as the once rich North Atlantic fishery, the entire fishery has collapsed, costing the world millions of tons of protein once supplied by those fish each year. 

6.3.4. Finally, we are losing the forests of the world. Forests hold the soil from eroding, store fresh water and move it inland, moderate the climate, provide a habitat for the Earth’s wild creatures, and provide a wealth of biological materials for medicine and human well-being. They are also “the lungs of the Earth,” since they bind the carbon dioxide given off by most human industrial processes and give off oxygen to replenish the atmosphere. As with agricultural lands, grazing lands, and fisheries, forests are disappearing from our planet at an alarming rate. The world loses approximately thirty million acres of rain forest per year.

6.3.5. As with the other crises listed here, the causes of this are well-known and understood. And as with the other crises, the factors are intertwined with the factors causing all these crises. Global militarism at 850 billion U.S. dollars per year obviously wastes immense resources that should be used for education and development. Global militarism produces immense amounts of toxic wastes, and war itself creates environmental havoc. Global poverty contributes to the destruction of forests since most people in the developing world use wood for cooking. 

6.3.6. In addition, the global economic system of unregulated greed and self-interest unsustainably logs these forests for private profit. Global population pressures lead to over-farming, over-grazing, and overfishing, and hence destruction of the very basis for feeding future generations on this planet. Industrial pollution and the continued production of greenhouse and ozone depleting gases daily diminish the planet’s ability to support life in the future.

6.3.7. What institutions in our world possess the ability to mount a coordinated, carefully thought-out, well-financed, and strategically designed plan for dealing simultaneously with all these interdependent and interrelated crises? There are none, least of all the United Nations which we have seen is predicated on the fragmented institutions of the past and committed to the barbaric and outmoded systems of “sovereign nation-states” and corporate pillage. 

6.3.8. What is needed is not merely a coordinated policy of conservation, what is needed is a dynamic policy directed toward reversing the tremendous damage already done and restoring the Earth to ecological health. Only a World Parliament, representing all the people of Earth as well as future generations, with the authority and resources to carry humanity over the crossroad from possible extinction to a new world order of equity, freedom, justice, and peace, can provide the solution to these otherwise insurmountable problems.

6.4. The environmental crisis. The crisis of resources for feeding the people of Earth, like the water crisis, are part of a multi-dimensional breakdown of the planetary ecological systems. Depletion of the ozone layer that protects living things from the deadly ultraviolet radiation of the sun, destruction of the forests and phytoplankton in the oceans, exhaustion of fresh water supplies, and dumping of millions of tons annually of toxic wastes into the air, water, and soil, all constitute substantial disruptions of the health of the planetary ecosystem and portend eventual environmental collapse. 

6.4.1. Global warming is a widely recognized scientific fact that has already resulted in massive weather pattern changes, increased melting of the polar caps, and unprecedented “superstorms.” And it is widely recognized that global warming will inevitably bring rising oceans and flooding of the coastal lands of Earth, displacing more than a billion people and submerging a good portion of the Earth’s remaining farmland. Yet little is being done to change this nightmare scenario. We are told that the demand for oil (a chief cause of global warming) will increase by thirty percent in the next ten years. And today the nations and multinational corporations of the world are fighting (economically, politically, and militarily) to ensure the “stability” of countries housing old oil reserves and to control vast regions of Asia in the light of the new reserves soon to be available from the Caspian Sea basin. 

6.4.2. Under the current world system such madness (with the power and profit that the control of oil brings) is inevitable. Only a federation representing the entire Earth could have the political will and authority to convert the world to solar, wind, water, and hydrogen power, find ways of recycling and minimizing toxic waste, really protect the ozone layer, and restore the other essential features of Earth necessary for a quality human life for all persons.

6.5. The population crisis. The teeming slums and social chaos of Mumbai, Dhaka, Mexico City, or Rio de Janeiro spread diseases like Malaria, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and AIDS. They create pollution from cooking on innumerable charcoal fires, and they crowd more people into tiny areas than can possibly live on the resources available there. Such teeming slums in hundreds of cities around the world, create immense sanitation and water problems. They create social chaos, crime, drug and alcohol addiction, and they damage the environment simply because there are too many human beings in too small a space. 

6.5.1. All over the world, overpopulation is causing havoc. It is crowding more and more people onto agricultural lands and villages that cannot support them. Desperate for income and work, millions are being driven into the vast slums of monstrous cities where a nightmarish life of suffering and deprivation await. 

6.5.2. Eighty million persons per year are added to the population of the Earth. Many scientists estimate eight or nine billion persons on our planet by the year 2025. Yet even the current population cannot be sustained by the finite and diminishing resources of Earth. Ninety percent of the eighty million children born into the world each year are born into extreme poverty. Every new person requires another thirty gallons per day of potable water. Every person requires food, educational, health care, and infrastructural resources. Every person produces waste and pollution that must be absorbed by the environment.

6.5.3. While some governments have had limited success in reducing population, the problem is global, not territorial. Reducing population growth in Kenya will little affect the world’s bleak future if the planet continues to add eighty million new persons each year to its limited carrying capacity. Only democratic world government has the authority and resources to promote the health of the whole planet. 

6.5.4. The remedies are as simple as they are impossible under the system of territorial nation-states. Elimination of poverty, education, support for family planning programs, if done on a global scale with adequate resources and organization, can quickly reduce the birth rate on the planet. Some estimate that the Earth can only sustain reasonably well about 2.5 billion persons. Under the present world system, the goal of reducing the Earth’s population to this level is a mere chimera. Under the Earth Federation, a significant reduction in the planetary birth rate is a sensible and rational possibility and can be achieved within fifteen to twenty years of the inception of world government.

6.5.5. The net result will not be costly for the people of Earth. Population reduction through education, family planning programs, and the elimination of poverty will add to the world’s human resource potential, eliminate the cost of rampant diseases and the spread of AIDS, eliminate the costly effects of pollution generated by an unsustainable population, and free up the resources of the Earth for the prosperity of future generations.

6.6. The crisis of sickness and disease. Overcrowding, lack of basic sanitation, poor water quality, shortage of fertile land, inadequate nutritious food, environmental pollution all are causes of disease and crippling health limitations among the poor of the world. Fifty percent of the population of the world lack adequate sewage and sanitation systems. The sewage runs into local streams and rivers, and into the puddles in the dirt roads where children play and adults walk. Poor sewage systems threaten sources of clean water, compounding the risks and sources of possible disease. 

6.6.1. Waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid are common. These diseases have been eliminated in developed countries because we understand their causes and how to eliminate them through sanitation and clean water systems. The problem is not lack of knowledge and understanding. The problem is today’s world system that makes providing clean water and sanitation to the poor countries of the world a virtual impossibility.

6.6.2. Anyone traveling in South Asia, South America or Africa is struck by the number of crippled and maimed people living in every city, town, and village. Polio and other preventable crippling diseases are common. People unnecessarily crippled by these diseases often become less productive and less useful to the economic potential of their societies. Early death and a drain on the health care systems of poor countries also comes from such common diseases as tuberculosis, malaria, or AIDS. Tuberculosis is on the increase worldwide as is AIDS. Yet dealing with these diseases requires dealing with all the other global crises outlined in this manifesto. It requires effective sanitation systems for all, clean and adequate supplies of water for all, education and adequate health care systems for all, and nutritious, adequate food supplies for all.

6.6.3. The transformation to a decent world order required is not a luxury or a utopian dream. It is an absolute necessity if the world is to have a future at all. More than a century after microbiology discovered the causes of most disease, many decades after the development of the technologies of water purification and sanitation, many decades after the development of antibiotics and drugs adequate to control most diseases, unnecessary sickness and disease are still increasing worldwide. 

6.6.4. This epidemic of preventable sickness and disease among the world’s poor is a shame upon the humanity of us all. It cannot be dealt with apart from democratic world government under the Earth Federation. The Earth Constitution mandates health care for everyone, education for everyone, clean and sanitary environment for everyone, not just for those who can pay, not just for those who now dominate and exploit the rest for their own benefit.

6.6.5. The AIDS epidemic alone requires vast resources and coordinated efforts across the world. Yet these are not forthcoming under the present world system. The entire continent of Africa is being ravaged by AIDS, with an estimated 28 million cases in this year, 2003, as well as the other diseases mentioned here. Only the Earth Federation with the resources, authority, and coordinated planning to deal with simultaneously with global sanitation, poverty, disease, pollution, militarism, land degradation, global warming, human rights protections, and universal education can adequately address the AIDS epidemic or the problems of preventable sickness and disease.

6.7. The crisis of education. Universal quality education is absolutely fundamental to sustainable development, just as it is to the elimination of poverty, the prevention of disease, and the control of population growth. In the developing world, some 120 million children do not even go to elementary school. Even where schooling is available, many millions of poor children throughout the world must go to work at an early age to help themselves and their families survive. 

6.7.1. Eight and nine-year old children in bare feet, with no parents anywhere to be seen, beg pennies from automobiles at stoplights in Managua and Mumbai. The AIDS epidemic in Africa alone may leave twenty million children orphans within the next few years. These children, and others in similar desperate poverty throughout the developing world, have little chance of becoming literate, let alone gaining enough education to become effective agents in the transformation of global society towards equity, freedom, justice, and peace.

6.7.2. Poor nations, strangled by international debt to the World Bank and wealthy First World financial institutions, are being forced through structural adjustment programs to sell off public educational systems, transportation systems, water systems, health care, and other systems to private, profit-making enterprises. As a result education is becoming ever more elitist in the developing world as those who can afford to pay for private schooling get the tools necessary for success or escape from their native country to the first world, while the vast majority who are extremely poor are deprived of any opportunity for a decent education. Those who can afford an education often immigrate and this “brain drain” diminishes the number of skilled and educated people necessary for sustainable development.

6.7.3. Education, while absolutely essential to development, is not a priority for those remaining who struggle simply to survive from day to day. As with the other features of our planetary crises, education is not possible without eliminating poverty, without developing sanitation and clean water systems, without developed infrastructure from roads to computer terminals and telephone lines. Education is not possible while poor countries waste their resources on purchasing ever more sophisticated weapons from the first world arms merchants. Education is not possible when the Earth is adding eighty million new persons to its population each year. Education is not possible in the face of ever-increasing food shortages and water shortages.

6.7.4. To create an educated population capable of energetic and creative solutions for sustainable development requires the complete transformation of our present institutions and an integrated solution to the interrelated nexus of global crises. Only federal world government under the Earth Constitution would have the resources, universal vision, and integrated, global approach necessary to solve the world’s problems through putting education at the center of a global policy of sustainable development. Educated and energetic people can solve their own local sanitation and water problems, address the waste of their own governmental bureaucracies, initiate development projects, and control population growth.

6.7.5. The airwave communications spectrum supporting radio, television, telephone, and internet must be used by the people of developing nations for free education of their populations concerning sanitation, family planning, agricultural methods, control of disease, and development projects. There is tremendous potential for real institutional transformation through education that is next to impossible under present global institutions.

6.7.6. Corporations are interested in private profit, not education for fundamental change. Governments are often interested in militarism and staying in power rather than in fundamental change. Only world government under the Earth Constitution can solve the crisis of education and make possible a quality education for every citizen of Earth. Only world government under the Constitution is unafraid of fundamental social change, since its mandate is precisely fundamental change to a world of equity, freedom, justice, and peace.

6.8. The crisis of global economics. The vocal protests at World Bank meetings and meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) around the world emphasize the elitist nature of the global economic system, controlled by multinational corporations, First World financial institutions, and powerful First World governments. This economic system, despite the rhetoric of “free trade” or “development” is designed, as were its colonial predecessors, to benefit the powerful financial players of the world and to ignore the consequences for the rest of humanity and future generations.

6.8.1. Corporations have gained extraordinary power in the last few decades. Even to the limited extent that territorial governments can deal with multinational corporations with more assets than many governments themselves, the corporations have taken steps to ever more exempt themselves from the environmental or social consequences of their practices. Corporations can now sue governments before secret WTO tribunals if, for example, environmental laws interfere with the profit margin of corporations doing business in those countries. Global economic regulations are formulated in secret by the powerful and imposed upon the weaker majority of the nations of the world. They are not formulated with the common good of human beings or the planet in mind, but for the prosperity and profit of private financial institutions.

6.8.2. Who is to regulate corporations and the powerful governments that support them? Who is to speak for a rational, democratically planned, and equitably designed economic system directed toward universal sustainable development? Clearly the U.N. has been colonized by these very multinational corporations as well as dominated by the powerful governments that represent these corporations, primarily the United States. Clearly the World Bank and the IMF serve these same interests.

6.8.3. The present global economic system has destroyed jobs in mass on the local level worldwide. It has created a race to the bottom where many poor countries compete to sell off their precious natural resources or other export products to the lowest bidder. It has destroyed effective environmental regulations everywhere. It has led the economies of entire nations to crash and burn in a chaos of poverty, social disintegration, and unemployment. Some examples of this (out of many) are the destruction of the economies of Somalia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, with the ensuing horrific violence and social disintegration in each case.

6.8.4. A decent economic system for the world promoting universal prosperity and ending exploitation and domination in the service of private interests is impossible without federal world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Only enforceable world laws, applicable to all individuals (whether heads of corporations or heads of governments), can give us sufficient democratically guided economic regulation and activation to eliminate poverty and create genuine sustainable development worldwide. 

6.8.5. The principles of a decent global economic system are rational, common sense, and easily attainable. Some of these will be described below. At this point we wish to make clear that there can be no dealing with the numerous global crises outlined here without an equitable and thriving planetary economic system. Only democratically legislated and enforceable world law can create such a system.

6.9. The crisis of global militarism. Global militarism has not decreased with the end of the Cold War. Weapons sales worldwide have only increased, as has the amount most nations of the world spend upon their military establishments. Neither has the world been able to create effective treaty bans on land minds, antipersonnel weapons, depleted uranium weapons, nuclear weapons, intercontinental missiles, or space-based weapons. Chemical and biological weapons are still being researched and developed by many nations.

6.9.1. Powerful forces have tremendous economic and imperial interests in preventing any progress towards arms control or demilitarization. We have seen that the world currently spends approximately 850 billion U.S. dollars per year on militarism and war. It is sometimes said that only half this amount spent annually for the next two decades could transform the world into one of equity, prosperity, and environmental integrity.

6.9.2. Yet to make this claim is to say little or nothing in the face of the immense forces of the world arrayed against arms limitations or demilitarization. To make this claim without challenging the global institutions promoting war – the system of so-called sovereign nations and the global economic system that makes war and militarism extremely profitable for a few powerful corporations – is to state a merely utopian dream.

6.9.3. Nothing can control the militarism of the world under the present world system, not NGOs, not the U.N., not individual nation-states. Under the present system of militarized “sovereign” nation-states, there is a nearly inevitable temptation, within both large and small nations, to try to impose military solutions on what are essentially economic, social, and political problems. The result is inevitably disaster, spawning immense human rights abuses, devastation of civilian infrastructures, environmental destruction, rebellion and social unrest, radical terrorist groups, religious fundamentalism, and a host of other problems. The result of thinking in terms of violence and coercion (which is what all military thinking does) is that nations are involved in a complex and corrupt global power game that even leads them to arm and support some terrorist groups while trying to suppress others.

6.9.4. Extremist terrorist movements flourish under the conditions of a militarized, violent, warring world order. Such terrorist movements are an inevitable response to state terrorism. And nearly every military action by nations amounts to exactly this: state terrorism. The standard definition of terrorism (the illegal use of violence and coercion to achieve social or political goals) fits the military actions of nations as well as those of extremist groups. The solution to both extremist group terrorism and state terrorism is to legally abolish all terrorist and military activities worldwide. They are two sides of the same coin. 

6.9.5. World government under the Earth Constitution abolishes all military and concentrates on the economic, social, and political problems that breed extremism and social unrest. It encourages political, religious, and cultural pluralism so that all groups feel their voices are heard rather than suppressed. It addresses the roots of terrorism which involve the suppression of political participation, poverty, exploitation, and domination of the many by the few. By doing so it will break the cycle of violence forever.

6.9.6. Without effective world government under the Earth Constitution, there is no possibility of reaping the almost unimaginable benefits of converting the nearly one trillion dollars per year now wasted on world militarism to sustainable development and human welfare. The Constitution prohibits the world government from having a military of its own in any form. Therefore, no resources of the Federation will be wasted on militarism. Under the Earth Constitution, nations joining the Federation (and they will join in droves once they see the incredible benefits of uniting) are required by law to demilitarize under the careful supervision of the World Disarmament Agency.

6.9.7. Each nation joining the Federation is required to give half its last year’s military budget to the Federal Government and may keep the other half of this amount for its own purposes. Nations joining the Federation would immediately have not only innumerable benefits from a federal world government now very well funded with former wasted military money, but would reap the benefits of retaining for useful purposes half their own funds formerly wasted on militarism.

6.9.8. Here is the key to creating a decent and civilized world order and addressing all the crises outlined in this manifesto. The money for transforming the world order to one of equity, freedom, justice, and peace is readily available. This one source alone can provide 850 billion dollars per year. But there is no way to tap this cornucopia of now wasted wealth without the authority and legitimacy of democratic world government. The U.N. has failed miserably in this regard, for one cannot defend the integrity of the nation-state system, base global economics on the Western model of greed, financial exploitation, and corporate self-interest, claim that peace can be preserved by going to war, create U.N. armies called “peacekeeping” forces, and expect at the same time to diminish the insane militarism of the world.

6.9.9. Under the Earth Constitution all nations are disarmed and the world federal government itself is nonmilitary. All weapons of war and of mass destruction are carefully and systematically destroyed. Disarmed governments without armies and weapons do not invade one another or attack one another. Extremist groups do not emerge as “blowback” against military suppression. Disputes are handled by the World Court system designed to create a just and equitable world order and through political participation of everyone in the World Parliament. An independent branch of government is created (the World Ombudsmus) to represent those who believe their rights under the Constitution have been violated. The world police possess only weapons necessary to apprehend individuals, for only individuals (and not entire nations) commit crimes.

6.9.10. Crimes (whether in the form of manufacturing weapons, human rights violations by heads of state, or environmentally destructive policies by corporations) are committed by individuals, and a global society under the rule of law has the authority and means to arrest and prosecute individuals. The madness of attacking the people of an entire nation for the supposed crimes of a few is ended forever under the Earth Constitution. There will be no more bombings of the good people of Yugoslavia because their President is suspected of crimes, no more bombings of the good people of Afghanistan because it is suspected there are terrorists in their midst, no more invasions of the innocent people of Iraq because their leader is suspected of crimes.

6.9.11. The madness of the current world system of sovereign nation-states where an entire nation must be militarily attacked or economically punished because of the suspected crimes of a few must be abolished forever. The only way to abolish this mad system is to create a demilitarized Earth Federation where all individuals on the planet are equally subject to the rule of democratically legislated law. The powerful heads of corporations or imperial nations will no longer be exempt from arrest and prosecution as they currently are. Terrorists and violators of human rights will no longer be able to hide behind the borders of so-called sovereign nations as they often do today. For the first time in human history, universal justice and equity will be possible on our planet.

7. Common sense economics under democratic world government

The economics of a decent world order under the Earth Federation can be summarized in seven simple, yet fundamental principles. Once the official World Parliament is elected, it will have the authority to implement a global economic policy based on these principles.

7.1. First, extensive lines of credit in Earth Currency and nonexploitative loans will be made immediately available to individuals, businesses, and governments for purposes of sustainable development. The great lie of the present world order is that only those who possess wealth can loan money or create lines of credit. But real wealth is a product of natural resources, capital, and human labor. The world government can create immense lines of credit in Earth Currency to be used for rapid, sustainable economic development wherever this is needed within the Federation. 

7.1.1. With the creation of real wealth from development, these lines of credit can be repaid for only an additional small accounting fee. There will be no exploitative interest rates. And the value of Earth Currency will not be predicated on the global financial institutions that now devalue currencies of poor countries and manipulate the “convertible currencies” to continue to enrich themselves. 

7.1.2. The first twenty-five nations to ratify the Constitution (comprising a large portion of the Earth’s population, resources, and collective technological know-how) will form a substantially autonomous economic unit. The Federal government will immediately begin extending lines of credit for development, not merely to the already wealthy elites within these countries but to the poor or whoever has a sustainable, nonmilitary project in mind that would create wealth as well as benefit society. Individuals, businesses, and governments will have ample lines of credit available to them for only the cost of an accounting fee. Governments could reasonably focus on rapid development of infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, sanitation, communications), while businesses focused on goods and services.

7.1.3. Every poor nation knows that it is watched carefully by the imperial powers to ensure that it does not deviate from its subordinate role within the global system of domination and exploitation. Every nation knows that if it ratified the Constitution for the Federation of Earth alone, it would be economically punished for this by withdrawal of investments, recall of loans, or economic sanctions. Witness the forty-three years of suffering that has been imposed on the Cuban people because their government attempted to take an independent course that cared about its own poor and dispossessed citizens.

7.1.4. For this reason, a number of governments in the developing world must coordinate their efforts and plan to simultaneously ratify the Constitution. World government can easily begin with perhaps twenty-five nations simultaneously joining together to create the initial Earth Federation. Immediately such a group of nations ratifying the Constitution would become a substantially autonomous economic unit, using Earth-Currency and receiving extensive lines of credit for development from the newly created federal government. Withdrawal of investments, recall of loans, or threat of sanctions would not matter. The federal government would assume all international debt of these nations to be paid back in a reasonable manner at nonexploitative interest rates.

7.1.5. Approximately twenty-five nations would immediately enter into dynamic cooperation in the use of their resources, technologies, educated leaders, and development initiatives. Their debts would be removed under the current world order and they would receive extensive lines of credit for sustainable development based on the ability of their people to produce real wealth using finance capital, labor, and natural resources. Corporations or industries within these nations that refuse to cooperate in the conversion to Earth Currency would be nationalized or mundialized, whichever is most appropriate. The simple but liberating economic principles outlined in this manifesto would immediately take effect. The increase in prosperity, creative energy, and hope would be immediately evident and contagious.

7.1.6. There is no mystery about how to create prosperity. Place a great deal of money in the hands of people who wish to develop projects, employ workers, procure the necessary natural resources, and buy and sell locally and regionally. Money gets into the hands of ordinary people who then recirculate it through increased consumption and the purchase of services. There is no reason to take anything away from the already rich or oppose the policies of the World Bank or corporations operating outside the initial Federation.

7.1.7. Those who are rich may retain their wealth. What is eliminated is their ability to exploit others to make themselves richer. The World Bank may continue to offer its development loans to poor countries of the world. But who will want these loans when immense lines of credit are available to individuals, nations, and businesses at the cost of only an accounting fee? Exploitative interest rates are eliminated and with it the ability of those already rich to exploit and dominate the poor who need money for development purposes.

7.2. Second, large scale technology transfer and infusion of fertile ideas and techniques for sustainable development can be activated through common sense revisions of current intellectual property rights laws. As the writings of economists Michael Chossudovsky, David Korton, Vandana Siva, J.W. Smith and others have shown, one of the ways the wealthy world retains neo-colonial monopoly control on the global economy is through intellectual property rights, which have become a fundamental tenant in WTO regulations. The simple device of allowing any patented idea to be used for the payment of a reasonable royalty fee would make all ideas and techniques available to humankind for sustainable development purposes.

7.2.1. Through its system of absolute intellectual property rights, the current world system keeps the developing world in a low-tech condition, forcing them to sell their natural resources to the wealthy world to be there manufactured and sold back to the developing countries at a profit. It keeps monopoly control over marketable ideas and innovations, thereby belying its ideology of “free trade.” Versions of this policy have been going on since the advent of colonialism. They keep life-saving drugs from reaching the AIDS stricken countries of Africa. They keep seeds and key agricultural necessities profitably expensive while poor farmers starve worldwide.

7.2.2. The simple change of allowing any idea to be used if a reasonable royalty is paid, eradicates these intellectual property rights monopolies and liberates the poor of the world for efficient, rapid development. This modified system of intellectual property rights would also activate the regional economies of the world with a tremendous influx of new techniques and ideas. Scarcity would be ended and prosperity rapidly created.

7.3. The third simple principle for rapidly creating global equity and prosperity involves massive programs of education and empowerment of populations throughout the world through use of airwaves and other forms of communication for free global education on behalf of rapid sustainable development. Just as the present world system involves a monopoly on money creation and lending, and a monopoly on advanced technologies and techniques, so the present world order involves a monopoly on media and communications. The governments of the world have given away the airways and media for communication to private, profit-making interests. The electromagnetic spectrum from TV to radio to satellite communications is largely used for commercial purposes, for enrichment of private, profit-making corporations, and for propaganda on behalf of the current world system. These should be used for sustainable development and global free education that this requires.

7.3.1. We have seen that a massive worldwide educational effort is essential to rapid sustainable development and the elimination of poverty and unsupportable population growth. The technologies and means of communication are available to achieve this. All that is required is government that serves the needs and interests of all the world’s citizens and not government, as in the United States, that serves the needs and interests of the big corporations. 

7.3.2. Use of the available technologies and means of communication for rapid sustainable development would activate regional and local economies. People would learn sanitation techniques, family planning techniques, literacy, foreign languages, water purification techniques, techniques for generating nonpolluting forms of energy, techniques for increasing their income and quality of life. This simple change in the use of the world’s airways and means of communication would serve as a third major step for creating universal prosperity and sustainable development.

7.4. Fourth, simple legal steps would be taken fostering the empowerment of regional and local economies where money is retained within the locality and not siphoned off to foreign banks or corporations. Regions would produce as many goods and services for themselves as reasonably possible and economically feasible, and they import only what is necessary to complement the local economies. The amazing waste of energy and resources that now occurs in transporting goods around the world that could just as well be produced locally would cease. Regions would employ many at good wages creating a population capable of buying goods and services and businesses would develop in response to these demands.

7.4.1. In the United States, when a multinational “superstore” moves into a town, many local businesses begin to fold. They cannot compete with the ability of the superstore to procure cheap clothing, food, drugs, shoes, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, hardware and nearly everything else. The superstore may employ a few people at low wage jobs, but its profits do not remain in the community. They are sent back to corporate headquarters and to distant investors. The economy of the local community begins to die. Small businesses close up and unemployment increases.

7.4.2. This same phenomena also happen on a global scale. A soft drink or medical drug from a multinational corporation in a developing country may be able to undersell a domestically produced soft drink or drug. But the profits from the multinational soft drink or medical drug return to wealthy first world investors and are not recirculated within the local or regional economy. Very often, the developing country is even prevented from producing its own drink or medical drug by intellectual property rights regulations. These global monopolies strangle regional economies. 

7.4.3. The principle of health for economies, and for sustainable development of prosperity in developing countries, is to activate regional and local markets. This includes raising wages, producing locally whatever can be produced to supply the needs of the population, and creating a healthy interchange of supply and demand that keeps money circulating within the region.

7.4.4. The Earth Federation is not opposed in principle to “globalization.” Converting the world system to democratic federal world government is maximal globalization. But globalization of economics without the globalization of democratic world law has simply extended the current system of chaos and violence worldwide. Without world law, imperial nations and gigantic corporations exploit and dominate the poor of the world in their own self-interest. We need global planning for the future, global monitoring of the environment, and global trade where appropriate for the benefit of everyone involved. Globalization without democratic planning, regulation, or concern for the common good will necessarily result in the viciousness and corruption that we see everywhere in today’s “globalized” economy.

7.4.5. Today, the “anti-globalization movement” is providing vital resistance to this world system of economic domination and exploitation. Many of the individuals and organizations that participate in this movement are committed to democracy, justice, the ending of poverty, environmental protection, and human rights. They play a vital role in exposing the terrible legacy of economic globalization with respect to all these issues. However, the central focus of this movement is that it is against globalization. 

7.4.6. To be against all “globalization” is to be against planning for the future of the Earth. It is to be against the universal rule of law on Earth. They are “anti,” without having a clear vision of how the world can be transformed into a civilized world order. Vague notions of justice, democracy, or protecting human rights without a global, democratic, legal mechanism for achieving these are futile. The Earth Constitution gives humanity the specific political and economic means to achieve these goals.

7.5. Fifth, the market may be an efficient way of determining prices for many things, but certainly not for wages. There must be equal pay for equal work at good wages throughout the Earth Federation. Economist J. W. Smith points out that the rate of advantage of equally productive but unequally paid workers doing the same work is exponential, not arithmetical. Take the example of a worker in the developing world paid one U.S. dollar an hour for producing an item that is identical to the item produced by a first world worker making ten dollars per hour. Since the cost of labor largely determines the prices of these items, the developing world item sells for one dollar while the first world item for ten dollars. How many of the developing world items can the first world worker buy after working ten hours? How many items of the first world worker can the developing world worker buy after working ten hours? The rate of advantage in this simple example is 100 to 1 (Smith 2005a, Chapter One).

7.5.1. Under this rate of advantage there is no possibility of the developing world ever catching up with the first world through activation of its economies or sale of natural resources. The exponential rate of advantage ensures what has in fact been the case for decades: billions of dollars in wealth are transferred annually from the poorest segment of humanity to the wealthiest segment of humanity. The poor under our current world order are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer.

7.5.2. Markets have a useful but limited role in human economies. They are not and cannot be the solution to all problems as the imperial economic ideology has it. Markets can produce many (not all) goods and services efficiently. But essential services like water, electricity, and health care are much better served by good government. Nor can markets ensure just or equitable distribution of services or wealth. And they cannot ensure sustainable development that involves conceptions of the common good and the welfare of future generations. 

7.5.3. Markets are blind to all noncommercial values such as community, human rights, sustainability, equity, justice, and peace. Markets, as we know so well, will produce weapons of war if there is a profit to be made from this, or weapons of mass destruction. Markets (like big business) are morally blind and must be tempered by democratic, non-commercial values that are necessarily built into good government. Markets are not based on the moral principle of unity-in-diversity.

7.5.4. The principle of equal pay for equal work at decent, living wages will place cash in the hands of the poor in the developing counties and will produce an activated local economy while at the same time increasing global equity. As we said earlier, there is no need to appropriate the accumulated wealth of the rich to solve the global crises facing humanity. All that is necessary is to eliminate the means for the rich to continue to accumulate more wealth through exploiting those already poor. The exploitative, monopoly features of the current system listed here perpetuate both the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor and make global equity and sustainable development an impossibility. 

7.6. Sixth, economically stable and equitable laws will be enacted to promote worldwide land reform so that the land and its wealth can be returned to the people of Earth. The exploitation of the poor by the few who now control the quality land and resources of the world will rapidly come to an end. In general, land and resources will be recognized as belonging to the people of the Earth and need to be legally protected for the common good. Land and resources will be seen as the global commons and private property will be recognized for land use by individuals, governments, and businesses. That is, property rights will be converted from “absolute rights” to “conditional rights.”

7.6.1. Land is provided by nature, not built by labor, thus all natural resources are nature’s heritage for all. Applying Henry George’s concept of exclusive title to nature’s wealth restructured to conditional title (society collecting the land rent) instantly collapses those exclusive (monopoly) values to zero. The price of homes are the cost of building a house and the price of businesses will be the facilities themselves. Monopoly values have been converted to use-values owned by true producers. Just as with land, today’s technology, money, and communications monopolies are subject to the same efficiency gains. [This paragraph, not submitted at the 7th Session of Parliament, will be expanded and submitted to the 9th Session.]

7.6.2. The effectiveness of careful organic farming, with composting, crop rotation, and ecologically sound planting and harvesting has been repeatedly demonstrated. These farming methods produce many times the food per acre now produced by commercial agribusiness while conserving the soil and eliminating the pollution cased by chemical fertilizers. They are best done by small farmers who own and care about their own land and have a stake in its preservation. Even with the diminished quality farmland in the world today, a global program of population reduction, effective farming methods, and activated local economies can easily end hunger and create a world sufficient for all. 

7.6.3. Such programs of land reform have been attempted in individual countries such as Guatemala in the early 1950s, Chile in the early 1970s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, Cuba in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and Venezuela at the beginning of this century. In every case the United States has destroyed or attempted to destroy the government promoting the land reform. This has been a global policy of the imperial center since the Second World War. 

7.6.4. All good examples of economic health and common sense must be destroyed so that the world believes there is no alternative to global economic monopolies dominated by multi-billion-dollar corporations and protected by the military might of First World nations. The lethal combination of our present world system of sovereign nation-states (dominated as always by the imperial centers) and ruthless global corporations cannot but act to enforce a regime of global domination and exploitation. These consequences are built into these global institutions of the past five centuries.

7.6.5. Only democratically legislated law, enacted by a World Parliament representing all the people and nations of Earth, can formulate and effectively carry out a planetary policy of land reform. Such reform is badly needed not only to activate the local and regional economies of the world, but to end exploitation of the poor by the rich, to conserve the soil while reducing erosion and pollution, and to increase food production, rapidly ending hunger on Earth.

7.7. Seventh, the federal world government will engage in large-scale employment of the unemployed or underemployed millions in developing counties in a multitude of projects directed toward sustainable development and the activating of regional and local economies. These projects will certainly include replanting the depleted forests of the Earth, restoring the soil and grazing lands to integrity, building schools and health care centers, creating efficient, low cost sanitation and water systems, converting military installations and weapons factories to the production of peaceful goods and services, and converting the energy sources of the world to sustainable, non-polluting forms of water, wind, solar, and hydrogen energy. 

7.7.1. The condition of the developing world today is similar to that of the United States during the great depression of the 1930s. There is massive unemployment and hence no money to circulate within economies. The U.S. government had the vision to create vast public works projects and put hungry people back to work. 

7.7.2. The Earth Federation will undertake similar initiatives, thereby not only putting people to work and activating their economies, but creating the infrastructure necessary to a prosperous sustainable development. The nexus of global crises are too advanced and the threat to the future of the world too extreme to sit passively by and hope for private development efforts alone to succeed. The world needs sanitation and water systems now. It needs to restore the damaged environment now. It needs to deal with the crisis of sickness and disease now. It needs to restore soil, grazing land, fisheries, and forests now. It needs family planning and population reduction efforts now. It needs education for the masses now. It needs to employ the unemployed millions now. 

7.7.3. As one of the great speeches before the 1992 Rio Environmental Summit expressed this principle: “tomorrow is too late.” The global crises outlined here are upon us and action must be taken immediately to create a decent, prosperous, and equitable world order. We are at the crossroads of human existence. One road leads to certain disaster. The other to an equitable, free, just, and peaceful world order.

8. Where do we go from here? A call to the people and nations of the Earth

8.1. That earlier manifesto of 150 years ago demanded that “workers of the world unite!” The manifesto of the Earth Federation demands that the poor, the disenfranchised, and all decent people of the world unite. The problem is not simply exploitation and dehumanization of workers, although today this continues in sweat shops, extensive use of child labor, and starvation wage employment practices worldwide. The problem is the nexus of global economics and sovereign nation-states that continues the global system of domination and exploitation from generation to generation. 

8.2. At least a billion human beings fall outside this system of worker exploitation. They are not “workers” needed by the profit-seeking institutions, and are of no use to the imperial nation-states, and therefore are considered extraneous, useless, mere surplus to be allowed to rot and die in their hell of poverty or to be slaughtered as acceptable “collateral damage” through carpet bombings of their countries. The poorest of the world are of no concern to the world order as it now exists. It is they who are uniting for a new world order. It is the poor majority who are the hope of the world.

8.3. The poor majority who are the central hope for the world — and those caring and awakened people and nations who act in solidarity with them in their struggle to create a decent world order for themselves and their children. We are all made “poor” by the current world order. We are all degraded, manipulated, and shamed through our complicity with the rule of corrupt wealth and power. We are all faced with the historical, practical, and moral demand to save the Earth from further destruction and create a decent, sustainable world order before it is too late.

8.4. Why do the wealthy of the world and their minions in government fear us so much? They know we are not interested in taking their wealth from them. We are only interested in simple changes that remove global monopolies and eliminate the ability of private organizations and nations to continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Yet this very fact fills them with dread.

8.5. The thought of a world of equity and justice, where the few have lost their ability to dominate and exploit the rest, terrifies those who have never worked for a living but have only ruled, dominated, and exploited. They are mortified by the thought of civilized world order where the rich actually have to live in equity and justice with the poor, where special privileges have been abolished, where freedom and peace mean there can be no more military domination of the powerful over the rest, where no more profits can be reaped from selling weapons, pillaging, or defrauding the poor in a world of chaos and violence.

8.6. It is difficult for the average decent person to imagine how corrupt are most of the captains of industry, military, and government in today’s world. The ruling elite in business, military, and government know only power relations, influence pedaling, and corrupt deals with super-rich corporate executives, arms merchants, drug kingpins, regional warlords, dictators, torturers, shady financial investors, or slimy politicians. They have only contempt for the poor or ordinary decent people. The chaos of the political and economic worlds is so deep under global capitalism and the nation-state system that any talk of a decent world order based on universal values sounds like naive gibberish to their ears. Yet they fear us because they know that decent people everywhere respond positively to the Earth Constitution designed to create planetary justice, peace, and prosperity.

8.7. Is “human nature” so corrupt that government, military, or business will always attract to themselves twisted people who without remorse are willing to destroy human beings, our environment, and the welfare of future generations in their lust for wealth and power? Most ordinary human beings are honest and decent. The corruption is fostered by the institutions dominating our world. Fragmented institutions often attract fragmented and corrupt human beings to positions of power. Both the system of territorial nation-states and the global economic system are founded on immoral self-interest, the drive for domination, and structures of greed and exploitation. They cannot in principle be reformed to create a decent world order for they are fragments predicated on naked power, chaos, and violence. 

8.8. Fragments result in unredeemed conflict and power relationships. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is founded on the fundamentally different principle of unity-in-diversity. Diversity (of interests, races, ethnicities, religions, nations, cultures, and individuals) is protected and legitimated through the moral unity recognizing all equally as citizens and members of the Earth Federation. Diversity within the moral unity created by the Earth Federation does not corrupt persons into violence and greed as does fragmentation. 

8.9. We are all one as citizens of the Earth Federation and members of the human race. We have historical, practical, and moral obligations to one another, to our Earth, and to future generations. Under the Earth Federation, this unity-in-diversity is both a moral and a legal category creating, for the first time in history, government and business operating according to morally legitimate principles. Who will lead humanity into a new, morally decent world order premised on the principle of unity-in-diversity?

8.10. Solidarity with the Earth Federation is not likely to come from the comfortable classes of the First World nations who are conditioned to be passive, self-interested consumers and without compassion or concern for their fellow human beings around the planet. Solidarity with the Earth Federation will not come from the imperial nations or the multinational corporations who now dominate the world in their ignorance and corruption. Unity with the Federation can only come from the poor, those in solidarity with the poor, and those rare governments who have some concern for their own people and the future of the Earth. 

8.11. The poor of the world must organize under the banner of the Earth Federation! They must educate themselves, raise funds for educating others, send delegations to their leaders, write editorials, get on radio shows, hold town meetings, and hold ratification campaigns. Localities, villages, towns and cities may commit to the Earth Federation. There must be active pressure placed upon the governments of poor countries, and upon all decent governments. Chapters of the World Constitution and Parliament Association must be organized, and members must join the rapidly growing Earth Federation. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth must be studied and translated into ever more languages.

8.12. We must urge poor nations and their populations (and those nations and world citizens in solidarity with them) to work together and coordinate a simultaneous ratification of the Constitution by many nations. The effect on the world would be electrifying. Before the imperial powers and the multinational corporate criminals could even think in terms of blockades or sanctions, other poor nations would be clamoring to join the Federation. A truly new world order recognizing the equality and right to prosperity of all human beings would be unmistakable and irresistible. 

8.13. The majority of countries would immediately see that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from joining the Earth Federation. Soon the entire world would perceive that at last true liberation for humanity and the Earth was at hand. The tiny minority of powerful imperial leaders, bankers, and corporate executives who oppose this order would be overwhelmed by public pressure and before long the final operative stage of the Earth Federation would be reached and there would be peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice on the Earth. We do not mean a “utopia.” We mean a practical, workable, decent world order for the first time in history.

8.14. It is important to see that the first twenty-five nations ratifying the Constitution would not be forming another power block like North America or the European Union. If there were to be an African Union within the current world order, this would change nothing. It would simply create another military and economic block to struggle with Europe, Japan, China, the U.S. or other power centers. The world would remain in fragmentation and chaos. However, an African Union, or a Latin American Union, could easily be magna-regions within the Federation of Earth.

8.15. The initial Earth Federation is something truly new in human history, for it invites in all and excludes no one. It recognizes every human being as a citizen of the Earth Federation and invites every nation to be a member of the Federation with all the rights, privileges, and benefits that apply under the Constitution. It would take nothing from those already rich and oppose no one militarily or economically. It would end exploitation of nation by nation and person by person. And it would be clear to the world that the Earth Federation was the only institution that could address the nexus of global crises that threaten our extinction on Earth.

8.16. Our task is to communicate this message to the world. Our task is for the poor nations and peoples of the world to unite and organize behind the Earth Federation. The Federation is not an ideal we are promoting but a dynamic reality from which we live. Our every thought, breath, and movement must emanate from the living reality of the Earth Federation. Every human being must know and ratify the Constitution.

8.17. The poor majority of our planet must take the initiative to liberate themselves and their world. They must ratify the Constitution personally and collectively. The poor nations of the world (and those nations in solidarity with them) must act in unison and ratify the Constitution collectively. The Earth Federation will grow like wildfire until there is one citizenship, one system of justice, one World Parliament, one bill of rights, and one world order of peace with justice. Then, and only then, can the religious or the nonreligious affirm the final meaning of history as one world under God, Allah, Brahman, the holy cosmos, this sacred Earth, or this just world order.

8.18. All people on Earth are already citizens of the Earth Federation. For the only sovereignty is that of the people of Earth. We are already members of the new world order of equity, freedom, justice, and peace. If we act from this living reality, we will successfully pass the crossroads of imminent death and destruction. To unite under the banner of the Earth Federation is to act for the liberation of humanity, this precious Earth, and future generations.  

8.19. The poor, the dispossessed, and all decent people of the world must unite! We have nothing to lose but our misery, our chains of economic and political domination! For we are all victims in this present world of injustice and violence. We are all made poor and disenfranchised by this current world order. We are all already citizens of the Earth Federation! In the darkness of these times, we know that tomorrow is too late, and the time is now. A new dawn is rising for the world. Liberation for humanity is at hand. Citizens of the world unite!

Live Long & Prosper the Earth Federation!

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