At the Brink with William Dudley Bass

2011-10-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

Turning Points?

The Occupy Movement Keeps Spreading AmidRapid Change

TheOccupy Wall Street movement is alive and growing rapidly. It continues toexpand and spread despite early cries of an early death. Even in the face ofridicule and dismissal the movement continues to defy predictions. Themainstream mass media and the punitive pundits among the 99% who’ve sided withthe 1% continue to scoff at the protesters as “stinky hippies and punkrockers,” or “communists, socialists, anarchists,” even “racists.”

Theselackeys for the 1% ignore the masses of families with children, middle-aged professionals,blue- collar workers, and just regular folks supporting OWS at their peril. Thismass welling up of dissent and “I’m not gonna take it anymore!” protests hasreached a tipping point where anything can happen.

Peopleare pissed off! More and more people are getting pissed off! Yet they’re notretaliation in the form of mass violence and rioting. And the dismissivechattering harpies of the mainstream media reveal their own ignorance.

Severalrecent events are worth looking at as harbingers of change. These points ofnote are:

· Many on the streets and on social media are already callingit a “revolution.” It was unexpected and spontaneous, although one can pointback to the Arab Spring, the mass protests in Wisconsin, and the riots in theEuropean Union as inspirations.

· There is the beginning of convergence where somepolice, military personnel, and war veterans have joined in the rallies andmarches with the Occupy demonstrators.

· On Saturday, October 15 the Occupy movement isnationwide and goes worldwide. I saw photos from places as unusual as theAlaskan tundra and Antarctica with protests signs. Violence breaks out in Rome,Italy between anarchists and police.

· Veteran U.S. Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas (retired)challenged the New York City Police Department in Times Square on October 17,challenging the cops on why they’re reallythere and shouting “There’s no Honor in harming unarmed civilians.”

· On Tuesday, October 25, former Marine Lance CorporalScott Olsen (retired), veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, was wounded bypolice officers clashing with Occupy Wall Street protesters in Oakland,California. He suffered a fracture skull and required brain surgery from aprojectile fired by police. Many other protesters were wounded by rubberbullets, tear gas, and flashbang grenades used by the police. These twoincidents galvanized military support for Occupy Wall Street, especially byveterans disenchanted, even appalled by the Global War on Terror.

· Escalation of Police violence is increasing withintimidation of protesters, selective enforcement to harass protesters, massarrests, the use of SWAT teams, the use of agent provocateurs to infiltrateOccupy groups and incite or fake violence between demonstrators and police toprovoke excuses for police retaliation, and in the case of New York City, theCIA working with the NYPD in an unconstitutional arrangement.

· Baby Boomers are in the process of passing the batonto Generation X. Even though many people of all ages are involved in the Occupymovement, large numbers of those actually camping in “occupied” areas tend tobe Gen X and younger.

· Aside from primarily police attacks, the Occupymovement is a peaceful one. The majorities I’ve read about and spoke withpersonally have no desire to engage in fights and battles with cops. Theysimply don’t want to get injured is part of it, and while they’re willing to bearrested they don’t want to be caught in a war. Efforts are made to urge fellowdemonstrators to stay peaceful. Much is said the quickest way to lose thesupport of the Middle Class and Main Street is to engage in battles with thepolice and riots that destroy homes and small businesses. Novel terms are usedsuch as bloodless revolution and nonviolent guerrilla warfare.

· More and more are seeing a convergence of commonthemes between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bothshare many of the same complaints and agree on the problems but differentsolutions.

o The Tea Partybegan as a Libertarian upwelling with Representative Ron Paul of Texas as thecentral figure, yet it was quickly coopted by the Republican Party and financedby billionaire far right conservatives such as the Koch Brothers, allied withFox Media, and pumped up by celebrities such as Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, andMichelle Bachmann, leaving Ron Paul and his Libertarian crowd cut out andostracized. The Democratic Party, however, tried to claim the Occupy movementand was rejected. Many in the Occupy crowd had voted for Barak Obama, feltbetrayed by him, felt he sold out to the Big Banks and the corporations, andthus scorned him. The Occupy movement claimed to represent the 99% and declaredthat included the Tea Party, too (to the horror and indignation of many TeaPartiers) and warned the Democratic Party to back off. Exceptions were made forpeople such as Jesse Ventura, Independent and former governor of Minnesota, andRepresentative Dennis Kucinich, progressive Democrat from Ohio. Even so, theOccupiers refuse to embrace any politician and have held the feet of many tothe fire. Things are rapidly mixing and gelling at the same time.

· The lack of overarching, centralized leadership, onceviewed as a weakness, is now being reframed as strength. With social mediatechnologies mobile bands of protesters network with a blend of spontaneity andintention around the globe.

Clichés abound. This isamazing. Awesome! Outrageous! Inspiring! And it continues do morph and changeeven as Winter approaches in the Northern Hemisphere. Will our world tip over?Lean into it.

By William Dudley Bass

October 29, 2011

Electoral Reform is Overdue and Needed Now

2011-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

ElectoralReform is Overdue and Needed Now

Electoral reform is urgent. Manyproposals have been presented in numerous countries including the United Statesover the years with little results. There is too much inertia within the Establishment. The politicalmachines and the transnational corporations including the Big Banks controllingthem easily resist such threats to their power.

It’s easy for them to do so as they control thevoting: they simply vote “No!” when real change is presented. We jerk aboutlike puppets on strings and deride one another as “sheeple” or “bloodthirsty communists” or “capitalistpigs.” Aren’t you tired of that? I’m tired of it.

What will work? It will take noisy massmovements out in the streets combined with quiet and deliberate politicalactions to legally infiltrate the Establishment by winning at the ballot box toinitiate changes. If we can actually win power even when we win an election. And it seems too late as so many challenges demandingsignificant transformation, not just change, are avalanching down upon us all.

Electoral reforms are a must as it will allow usto more effectively and radically address our problems. Open, free, and fairelections under the eyes of impartial observers and vote collectors andcounters are vital for any functioning republic. Elections are one of thecornerstones of Democracy. This is especially so for a democracy such as theUnited States of America that is a constitutional federal republic.

Yet we find our political parties and theelectoral process corrupted by Big Money, i.e. private control of the moneypower. Two dominant parties, Republicans and Democrats, work together so muchto control elections at all levels from the national to the state and localthey are often detested as “the two-headed snake.” Together they acceptfinancial support from the same corporations to such a degree many politiciansare generally considered “bought.” Such corporations leverage this specialrelationship to finance powerful lobbying groups to advocate on their behalf.

The two parties partner up to dominate stateprimary and caucus systems, control debates including marginalizingreform-minded Republican and Democrat candidates such as Ron Paul (R-Texas) andDennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), block or reduce third and other minor parties fromaccess to the electoral process, and create celebrity dramas around majorcandidates to obscure real and serious issues they don’t want to address oreven acknowledge.

While electronic voting machines have manyadvantages, obviously fast and efficient in an age of digitaltelecommunications, enormous populations, and multiple languages, they generateadditional problems. They are apparently easy to physically tamper with forfraudulent purposes and can also be easily hacked into, even by remote control.

Perhaps worse, these public machines are ownedand repaired by private corporations. These corporations own the software andrefuse to allow government officials or independent observers “inside” theseelectronic voting machines, machines they consider their private property. Suchmachines don’t leave a paper trail, and any printed could be done after beingtampered.

In turn some, such as ES&S (Election Systems& Software) and Diebold were founded and controlled by Far Rightwingfamilies such as the Ahmansons who embrace Dominionist or Reconstructionistbeliefs. These are powerful, extreme Christian sects who believe America originallywas and once again should be a Christian nation. These theocrats believe theBible should replace the U.S. Constitution as the highest law of the land.

Numerous still unresolved controversies andallegations of election fraud and bloodless coups remain from the past threepresidential elections (2000, 2004, 2008). Some controversies predateelectronics and go back to corporate interference in elections of the 1960s.

Thom Hartmann, successful entrepreneur, liberalpolitical activist, and progressive radio host takes on the privatization ofour politics. “Why have we let corporations into our polling places?” he asksas he considers polling places to be “sacred to democracy.” Hartmann stands thecorporate infiltration and subtle takeover of our electoral process ranks asthe “greatest” of “all the crimes against” American citizens and theirdemocratic republic.

Elections are also a show and a sham inone-party states and other governments where police, the military, and privatemilitia and gangs intimidate voters. Even in America we’ve had businessespressure workers to vote a certain way or risk losing jobs, promotions, andbenefits all the while proclaiming “And you’re still free to vote for whomeveryou want.”

Electoral reform as well environmental reformcannot occur without also instituting significant reforms of the financial andeconomic sectors. Some of these reforms may require constitutional amendments.Others may be accomplished in other ways including at state and municipallevels.

Just for the United States alone:

· Ban political partiesfrom politics. They’re free to assemble, but cannot run candidates or endorseissues, candidates, referendums, bills, nor donate or give money, labor, andresources to politicians and candidates.

· No financialcontributions from any organization – corporations, NGOs, labor unions, clubs,religious groups, etc. shall go to politicians, political candidates, andreferendums and bills, etc.

· Financial contributionscan only be from 1) a fully transparent government election fund.

· And/or 2) individualAmerican citizens from their personal funds, not their corporations ornon-profits or any other organization and must be fully disclosed, i.e.transparent.

· All electronic votingmachines and their software must be open to public audit and possiblytransparent public or community control, or we return to or develop a newsystem of secret ballots and public control. We cannot permit private,corporate ownership and/or control of any aspect of our voting process.

· Abolish the ElectoralCollege.

· Abolish Winner-Take-AllVoting and replace with an alternative system from several proposed, includingopen, direct elections with IRV, Instant Run-off Voting.

· All election campaignsfor all public offices, especially at the national and state levels, must beconsiderably shortened in length of time. As we debate what is the appropriateamount of time per electoral office, we must consider the amount of time ittakes to campaign for office in small nation-state such as the United Kingdommay not be practical in a vast, sprawling federal union of 50 states andterritories. Barring political parties will shorten this.

· Territories such asPuerto Rico must vote for either statehood or independence.

· Regarding theLegislative branch, study the merits of a unicameral body (one house) vs. thecurrent two-house one vs. proposals for a tricameral system of three houses. Tricameralsystems vary including the third house as a “People’s House” or a “NationalWisdom Council,” to name two very different examples.

These are my proposals. There are manyindividuals and groups out there with a number of proposals from all sides ofthe political spectrum. Some share certain things in common, such as gettingcorporations out of our voting systems and ballot boxes, or banning politicalparties from elections, or abolishing the Electoral College.

There are back and forth arguments for oragainst term limits, salary caps, interpretations of responsibilities (isserving upon being elected to public office an honor, a volunteer service, apaying job, a career, or all of those?), etc. with heated emotions andmisinformation all around, and they can be deliberated upon as well.

Yes, electoral reform is overdue and needed now.We may disagree on the details, and most of us can agree on two items: 1)reforms are needed, and 2) reform is urgent.

What reforms do you propose?

WilliamDudley Bass

Seattle,WA

October20, 2011

Seealso my article “Abolish Political Parties from Elections” on my blog “At theBrink” from earlier this month at: http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2011/10/abolish-political-parties-from.html

Sources:

Hartmann,Thom. Screwed: The Undeclared War Againstthe Middle Class – And What We Can Do About It. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.San Francisco: CA. 2006, 2007. Pp. 143 – 148.

Kovacs,Eduard. “Electronic Voting Machines Highly Vulnerable to Man-in-the-MiddleRemote Attacks,” Softpedia. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Electronic-Voting-Machines-Highly-Vulnerable-to-Man-in-the-Middle-Remote-Attacks-224130.shtml.September 2011.

THNReporter. “Man-in-the-Middle Remote Attack on Diebold Touch-screen VotingMachine,” The Hacker News. http://thehackernews.com/2011/09/man-in-middle-remote-attack-on-diebold.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheHackersNews+(The+Hackers+News+-+Daily+Cyber+News+Updates)&utm_content=Google+Reader.September 2011.

Abolish Political Parties from Elections

2011-10-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

AbolishPolitical Parties from Elections

Yes, abolish political parties from electoralcampaigns at every level. Ban them from lobbying on behalf of their agendas.Ban them from endorsing candidates. Ban them from organizing frontorganizations, shell companies, PACs, shell NGOs, and other rackets on behalfof candidates and party agendas. Ban political parties from giving money,assets, and even volunteer services to candidates. The term “candidate” refershere to both human beings running for elected office or nominated for anappointed position as well as proposed legislation including laws, bills,referendums, etc.

Abolishing political parties and any similarorganizations from the political process is a necessary, even urgent electoral reform.Many may view it as a radical reform. Which it is, especially when you considerone of the earlier meanings of the word radical is “root.” Returning to our roots, in a sense, as the AmericanFounding Fathers abhorred the concept of political parties.

The Founding Fathers had just survived theRevolution. They had different views, opinions, understandings, and judgmentsconcerning many issues. Even so they put aside many of their differences inshared sacrifice for the common good. They did not anticipate political partiesin America, surprisingly as they had existed in the UK and British Parliamentfor a little over 130 years prior to the end of the war. The Founding Fathersalso had intense dislike of these parties and dismissed them as “dangerousfactions.”

Political parties in the UK were associated withquarreling groups competing for power. The home islands of the British Empire wereriven with factions and “political clubs” representing different religiousgroups, aristocratic nobles, nationalist groups, fed up peasant farmers, andincreasingly politicalized merchant classes. Such political parties in the UKwere associated with civil wars, revolutions, and rebellions. The Americans,having recently emerged from their own revolutionary war, wanted no part of suchvicious internal strife.

What the Founding Fathers preferred, firstthrough the Articles of Confederation and later in the Constitution with theBill of Rights, was group deliberation arriving at agreements. They upheld avision of logical collaboration to resolve conflict and address issues wherepeople and groups put aside petty differences and personal beliefs for thegreater good and the common weal. The best interests of the community, thestate, and the nation were placed over the narrow competitive drive forpersonal power, regional domination, and group self-interest.

Such “groups” were churches and religious groupsas well as organizations rooted in different socio-economic classes, states,cities, counties, the frontier, and trades competing for power and resources.Many of the Founding Fathers, while understanding the rational for differentgroups to self-organize around common local causes, still expected these samegroups to subordinate their narrow self-interest to the general welfare of the nation.

Political parties were viewed as divisive andself-serving. They would compete for power at the expense of their fellowcitizens. Rather than collaborative processes of deliberation with wisdomtempering headstrong emotions, political parties would rile up the masses andagitate them against one another so rabble-rousers could manipulate them toseize power. The possibility of election campaigns between such parties was viewedwith dismay and disgust.

The Founding Fathers feared such elections woulddivide the nation rather than bring forth the best and brightest together inwise republican government. The United States of America was to be aconstitutional democratic republic with measures built in to prevent mob ruleand tyranny. The Founding Fathers achieved astonishing success in many areas,such as navigating together constant changes and many obstacles from the end ofthe Revolution through the Articles of Confederation to establishing theConstitution. They dealt with commerce and financial battles between thestates, the first armed rebellions against the national government, and even amovement to create an American monarchy.

A system of government was set up with a Federalsystem balanced with state’s rights, with triangular “checks and balances”between the three “branches of government,” with separation between “church andstate,” with an independent press, and a Bill of Rights. Dismal failures,however, were to haunt the Founding Fathers and their descendants. Theseincluded the failure to conclusively address slavery and racism, women,property rights, relations with Native American tribes including genocide,whether or not to have a national or central bank and if so would it be publicor private, and the failure to envision the rise of political parties and theircorruption of the political process.

The irony is political factions began early onin the process to organize people into parties around shared beliefs opposed byothers. The first such political parties began to emerge during theadministration of the first President, George Washington. Eventually thoseFounding Fathers who chose to stay in politics were drawn inexorably into thesenew political parties. Once in, they embraced them and leveraged them to pursuetheir own agendas.

Political parties do have much to offer. Theyprovide poles of polarity for people with shared beliefs and values to rallyaround. Political parties organize people; raise funds, pool resources, andwork to campaign on behalf of their candidates and planks (public lists ofissues they support or condemn). Once in power they have entire teams of loyal,like-minded people to draw upon to quickly fill positions in government officesand institutions. And these parties track and monitor each other, plotting toreturn to power or stay in power. To some degree they do take the best interestof the general public to heart or else they would not be elected.

For a secular nation with many differentreligions, classes, regions, and ethnic groups political parties served twoadditional purposes. One, they served as a secular church or temple of sortsand those passionate about politics and engaging in games of power came toregard politics as a sort of secular religion. Two, political parties were ableto pull together people from different groups and in doing so establish broadalliances and coalitions across the nation.

In doing so they have entrenched themselves inpolitics in ways where they do far more harm than good. Political parties haveproven destructive, and it is time for them to go. They embody and exemplifythe worse aspects of tribalism. It may be a Postmodern world, and these partieshave reduced loyalty to blind, violent tribalism. In many other countriespolitical parties arm their members to engage in violent election campaignsthat resemble mini-civil wars. Many political parties also have armed militiasand even armed forces. In totalitarian nations one political party is often identifiedas synonymous with “the state” or “the people.”

In the United States today, the Democratic andRepublican Parties are both polarized within between vitriolic, internal factions.They have become so broad in their attempt to be the Center many no longeridentify with these parties and are fed up with how both parties fail toaddress truly serious and complex issues to focus instead on riling people upover emotionally-laden social issues. Both parties have been corrupted and arebeholden to the Big Banks, Big Corporations, Big Unions, Big NGOs, Big PACs andSpecial Interest Groups, and their swarms of lobbyists. Political parties,especially when they get big enough to earn attention, serve as routes ofinfection into our government by Big Business and the banksters. Yes,politicians from time to time attempt to overthrow the yoke of the money power,battle corruption, punish corporations, or regulate the financial sector.Sometimes it’s all a show. Often the politicians don’t have the power to enactmeaningful and deep reforms.

They work together to squash dissent within theown ranks from innovate visionaries as well as extremists. Republicans andDemocrats work together to maintain control over the machinery of governmentand dominate the electoral process. As such they block reforms and prevent therise of any minor political parties to major party status. Viable third partiessuch as the Libertarians and the Greens today and the Progressives, Bull Moose,and Independent parties of bygone eras don’t have the power to seize power andinstead often serve as spoilers to draw votes away from the other two. This isoften glossed over with the justification third parties have the freedom tohighlight controversial stands publicly avoided by the major parties buteventually coopted by them.

We need to clear out the logjams of politicalparties and release their stranglehold on our elections and politics.Significant reform is necessary in numerous areas now. As long as politiciansrely upon outside corporate structures to raise, capture, hold, and funnelwealth to then and their election campaigns they will rarely if ever fully votefor the public interest. They will instead work to benefit their benefactors.They are beholden to the outside Money Power. Many well-intentioned men and womenbecome politicians to sincerely make their county, city, state, and nation abetter place. They even want to help make the whole world a better place. Andonce inside they find they have to compromise away their values not in the bestinterest of the nation for the common good but to betray themselves to upholdthe powers of their benefactors.

We need major reform of our entire electoralprocess as well. Political parties already block such reforms and will continueto block any threat to their chokehold on elections and thus on power. Thanksto the Democrats and the Republicans and all those parties preceding them inpower Government has become separated in the minds of the people from thepeople and instead identified with the party in power. If a hallmark ofTotalitarian regimes is identification of one party with the government, whatwould we call it when we see the same two parties in such domination of thepolitical machinery as to be identified with the government?

Tyranny. Tyranny disguised as democracy becausepeople were led to believe they had choices they could freely vote for.

Political parties…Abolish them all!

To be clear, the Constitution gives human beingsthe freedom to assemble and the right to free speech among others. So peoplewould have the right to organize into political clubs and parties to discusstheir passion for politics over rounds of beer. Political parties are free toespouse their opinions and views. They would simply be banned from politics.

What does this look like?

To be effective, abolishing politicalorganizations from the political process means:

· One cannot hold publicoffice, an appointed government job, or employment in a government position asan active candidate of a political party. Similarly, military members have toresign from the military to serve in civilian capacity in government.

· Political parties cannotrun candidates for political office or support them for appointed positions.

· Political parties cannotendorse candidates for office or any appointed position.

· Political parties andtheir members cannot organize and work on behalf of any candidate as an activemember of any political party.

· Political parties cannotcontribute, loan, donate, or otherwise give funds to candidates and referendumsorganizations.

· The ban on participatingin elections and supporting members for appointments include all levels ofgovernment from the national to the state and local levels.

· Political partiesinclude PACCs, clubs, NGOs, unions, or any group that masquerades and claims itis NOT a political party yet behaves as one.

· Political parties andrelated organizations may not endorse, front, or otherwise have armed gangs andmilitias.

· Campaign finance andother electoral reforms must be instituted as well. Such reforms will reinforceone another.

Ina long, round about way perhaps the original views and intentions of theFounding Fathers toward political parties will be vindicated. Perhaps aConstitutional amendment is necessary to abolish the participation of politicalparties in the political processes of our nation. Or maybe this can be donewithout such an amendment.

In other countries around the world the people must also find methods to liberate themselves and their political processes from political parties. Such reforms will also empower politicians to take on the Big Banks and the Corporations as well as institute reforms in any area. Political parties clog the machinery of government as tumors from inside a body choke off life.

We the People can reclaim our Governmentas one of the people, by the people, and for the people.

byWilliam Dudley Bass

Seattle,Washington

USA

Cascadia

PlanetEarth

Friday,October 14, 2011

Give a Damn! Occupy Seattle! My Impressions from a Few Hours on the Streets

2011-10-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

Give aDamn! Occupy Seattle!

MyImpressions from a Few Hours on the Streets

For the first time in ten years I felt We the People had Purpose. Purpose with a capital P. And greater clarity than themainstream mass media would dare admit. As zombies staggered down Wall Streetchasing dollar bills recently, at least they gave a damn.

The mainstream mass media think it’s cute whencrowds of otherwise “normal people” dress in bloody rags and paint themselves upas zombies to parade about setting new zombie world records. The same media,however, heap scorn and ridicule upon all those “crazy people” costumed aszombies to protest the insane gluttony of Wall Street and its cronies. Well, atleast those zombies give more than a frakkin’ hoot. They gave a damn.

When elderly war veterans, middle-age White ladieshobble together down the street with old hippies, tattooed punks, the newlyhomeless, Native Americans, grizzled union workers, and white-collar office workers,all getting in the way of our fellow 99-percenters willing to slave away forthe Puppet Masters among the 1% superwealthy, well, we have an insurrection,folks.

A young man in Downtown Seattle held up his signand challenged us: “GIVE A DAMN!”

Damn right.

GIVE A DAMN!

Bright, blue letters blazed neon from cardboardon a wooden slat stick.

It’s time. Leave the Parties behind. Coffee,tea, water, and whiskey; milk and soy, almond whatever. It’s time. Time to getto get serious.

On Saturday, October 8, 2011, just the other day,but already feeling like once upon a time, I bussed into Downtown Seattle withmy friends Syd and David to participate in Occupy Seattle, the local uprisingof dissent inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests. We met others we knew.People asked us about the protests and voiced support for us from the bus stopand on the bus. I felt somewhat shy as well as proud so sat quietly on the buswith my enormous sign. Earlier, David, Syd, and I chopped down and rewrote myprotest poem to make it appropriate for the demonstration. In bold,colorful letters it hollered out loud and clear:

“WHY STOP @ WALL ST.?

OCCUPY THE BANKS!

SEIZE THE FED!”

Once off the bus I held that big sign aloft withpride. As I carried it during the rally and the subsequent march, it suregenerated lots of attention and commentary. Those who understood the intricaciesof the global financial system including the relationships between the Big WallStreet Banks, the Federal Reserve System, and the international central bankingsystem voiced support.

“Right on!” people said. “Gotta stop the Fed.End the Fed!”

“Yes, go right to the source,” I shouted back.And to a man with questions about what the Fed has to do with all thisprotesting, I explained the Federal Reserve and stated the proposals rangedfrom abolishing it to reforming it including placing it under the Department ofTreasury. It must at least be placed under transparent public control and beheld accountable. He got it. I kept on.

“My stand is we must have public control of themoney power similar to civilian control of the military power,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said and nodded his head. Hereally got it this time, and his thoughtful, scrunched-up face relaxed into asmile.

I stood on the sidewalks and curbs of WestlakePlaza and held up my sign. I also accidentally bumped a few people with it,too. My sign was big! Maybe too big! And my shoulders got tired.

Man, I was glad for all that weight trainingover the years. I held up my sign a long time. Later on the march I knockedsome popcorn out of some dude’s cup full of popcorn at a bus stop as I strodeby. Oh, he was angry. I apologized and moved forward.

As so many passionate people swarmed around me Ifelt waves of hope, love, and solidarity. I was on Purpose.

My long-time, dear friend Syd Fredrickson, aveteran activist settling down into the comforts of middle-age life with a job,a home, and a husband, had come back out on the streets. She was outraged atthe destruction and dysfunction wrought by the corporations upon ourenvironment and communities. She felt depressed how corrupted the political processwas and how beholden many politicians were to the Puppet Masters of the moneypower.

And she felt hope, something she hadn’t felt ina long time. Syd had mellowed out over the years, however, and had become farmore compassionate and loving and less righteous and one-sided. She’s alwaysbeen a stand for inclusiveness and agreement making, especially consensus.Everybody knew Syd. Everyone loves Syd. And she is a passionate woman, agoddess of smoldering fire.

With a smile, she moved through the crowds greetingpeople while I stood like a silent sentinel. She had a feel for where to go andwhen, except she was always losing sight of her husband, David Wright, in thecrowd, and he, her. I love Syd for her focus on the positive and forchampioning what’s possible without complaint. She marched around holding upher sign, which read in letters red, blue, green, and red again:

“LET’S CREATE A CARING ECONOMY.

The Extreme Inequality is Killing Us –

Our Commons, our Democracy.”

Sing it, Syd!

David Wright was one of the cofounders ofSustainable Ballard and remains active in many environmental and neighborhoodcauses. He also focused on the positive and reached out with his simple demandfor a new awareness. His sign shouted loud and clear, without any blaming and shaming.It simply declared:

“WE WANT COMMUNITY RIGHTS!”

Profoundly hard-of-hearing like me but much moreoutspoken, David was in his element navigating the crowds. He was a champion ofneighborhoods and communities coming together politically to educate people onsustainable urban agriculture, recycling initiatives, and other actions toencourage people to grow their own food and reduce waste.

This movement began with the first “occupation”in New York City back in mid-September. In Lower Manhattan on September 19,2011 people from Occupy Wall Street began protesting against “the 1%,” thepercentage of superwealthy Americans whose control of Big Banks and largecorporations dominate the rest of us, i.e. “We are the 99%!” To the surprise ofmany, it quickly ignited widespread unrest.

This largely peaceful uprising has now spread to25 American cities and is merging around the world with other uprisings. Thereis growing international solidarity against the Global Empire of “the bankstersand robber barons.”

Occupy Wall Street is merging with the ArabSpring, the anti-austerity revolts within the European Union, the insurrectionin the UK, and uprisings elsewhere for a cry for global democracy and freedomfrom tyranny. Saturday, October 15, has been declared a day for OccupationEarth. I saw a declaration for “Occupation Everywhere!”

Unlike traditional territorial and colonialempires of old, this attempt at World Empire is financial and economicsubjugation disguised as democracy and free market enterprise. The Big Banks,the international central banking system, the Corporatocracy, the G20 and theBretton Woods Three, the military-industrial-intelligence complexes, and thenational security states are interlocked together in a web of global alliancesheld together by the Financial and Power Elite (the 1%) and their Allies fromthe 99%.

Guess where the largest concentration of policeofficers was positioned? Right in front of the entrance to Chase Manhattan. Howironic, too, as Bank of America just across the street was abandoned to theoccupation. BoA didn’t seem popular with anyone today, not even the cops, especially after announcingits imposition of high debit card user fees after all that work to get peopleto switch from using credit cards to debit cards. A well-dressed, middle-agedman accompanied by his wife held up a cardboard sign simply stating “Bank ofAsshole.” No one stormed the bank, although the word was out the police in St.Louis, Missouri had to sent SWAT teams out to protect BoA from its customers.

Apparently so many had sought to close theiraccounts, Bank of America stopped doing so, customers got angry and mad andmade threats, and BoA called out the cops. Have you ever noticed “Labor Wars”are called labor wars and not management wars? That the Big Banks and the Corporatocracyare so powerful and so entrenched local governments will used whatever armedforces they have, including the police and state national guard, to protect thebanks and corporations and not the general public.

I was glad my wife and I switched from the BigBanks to our local credit unions. There we are owners. My sign shouted “OCCUPYTHE BANKS!” While I wasn’t going to charge the cops guarding the doors or throwany rocks, no way, I would join any mob in any attempts to peacefully yetpowerfully enter the bank lobby. And it didn’t happen. Wasn’t gonna. Not today,anyway.

Close to 5:30pm we began marching. We marchedall the way from Westlake Plaza to across from the Columbia Tower, rallied forabout a half hour or more, then marched back. We stuck to the sidewalks most ofthe way, a few agitated demonstrators went out into the street and wondered whyaren’t we taking to the streets like people did in Tunisia and Egypt and evenWisconsin? Like people used to in America? We had agreements with the police tokeep it peaceful and not obstruct traffic. Pissing off motorists is not goodpublic relations. Nor being seen fighting with cops. Especially not letting themedia focused on a handful of misfit types with wild hair and clothing stylesas representative of the rest of us.

“Stinky hippies?” Yeah, a few. So what? Maybe ifpeople who’ve never camped out before in their lives would spend a few nightsdown in the streets without regular bathing and shaving they might get a clue.They might even look and smell like “stinky hippies,” too. Oh, shudders! Imagine being soldiers enduring weeks andmonths of constant combat in terrain from Afghanistan to Iraq. Go watch Restrepo, the award-winning documentaryfilm about the Battles of the Korengal Valley and then talk about stench.

I have to roll my eyes at these kind of derisivecomments by middle class pretenders. There were all kinds of people. Real fleshand blood human beings. Well-dressed people rallied and marched, too, even afew in suits but more in business casual. People of different ethnic groups andages. All kinds. Even military veterans in dress uniforms. The wars of Empireleft many of them “all fucked up” with blown off limbs, shredded genitals, andunhinged minds while the big corporations profited from their labor in defenseof Big Oil, military contracts, and “free trade” with “democracies.”

Either the banksters and the corpo-corpses intheir ignorance and greed don’t understand the bottom line of business is notmoney but human beings and their relationships, or, in a more sinister way,they do understand as to exploit people while they can.

Earlier this Saturday Native groups came out forIndigenous People’s Day as a counterweight to Columbus Day. Anti-war protestorsshowed up and joined in. So did labor union men and women. There were children.Not a lot, but they ranged from babies to teenagers. Many marchers appeared tobe middle-aged people who were fed up with banks, corporations, and thecorruption in government.

I saw Muslims and Jews and Christians, or to bemore accurate Jews and Muslims in the traditional clothing associated withtheir religions and Christians praying openly when a minister took the stageand called out to Jesus to save everybody. I ran into Pagans I knew, recognizedBuddhists, and even saw a sign or two by what appeared to be a small cluster ofAtheists. I would imagine people from a variety of faiths stood together in theplaza. Many students crowded around. And many who were unemployed, underemployed,deep in debt, overtaxed, uninsured, and had been foreclosed upon. One held up alarge sign echoing recent news one million military veterans are unemployed.

“SERIOUSLY?? ONE MILLION JOBLESS VETS -SERIOUSLY!!”

Our numbers, however, felt disappointinglysmall. Perhaps a thousand people were involved earlier in the day, and maybe 400then 600 later during the march. Maybe a thousand again at the end. I heardPortland, Oregon had many more, and they’re a smaller city.

Near the plaza a small number allowed themselvesto be arrested for blocking an intersection or crossing the street when orderedto move or not move by the cops. Those who honked their horns in support of thedemonstrations were pulled over and ticketed by the cops, especially if they honkedafter 10:00 at night. We got many honks from drivers earlier in the day,cheers, thumbs up, and curious looks. Even the customers on the notorious Duckamphibious tour buses seemed to support us and one of their drivers pumped hisfist. Cabbies pumped their fists in support, too. Right on, damn right.

“MR. OBAMA, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL STREET!!”

Thus shouted a sign in neat, stenciled lettersheld up high on a tall slat by a well-dressed White gentleman in his 60s. Hewas professional, silent, solid, and full of grit. A “stinky hippie?” I don’tthink so.

“END CORPORATE POWER NOW!” sung out from raggedcardboard. Seems pretty clear to me. You?

“END THE FED!”

An old man scooting along in a wheelchair withthat hanging off his back. Yes, end the Fed. We locked eyed and nodded. Bothgave the other thumbs up. We knew. Go to the source.

“COLLEGE USED TO GET ME A JOB!” shouted a signheld aloft by a young woman. Being a Liberal Arts graduate, I had my opinionsabout the purpose of education, it ain’t about the job, and my opinion heredoesn’t matter. I get her point. And I support it.

A young blonde woman all dressed up purple forwhite-collar work raged under her cardboard sign. Hers shouted in blue and red:

“I Went to the UW and all I got was a SHIT-TONof DEBT!”

Yeah, I get it. My wife can’t seem to pay herstudent loans off decades after she graduated. Took me many years, too. Studentloans cannot be discharged in BK, in a bankruptcy. They are set up as a form oflegalized loan sharking. Ever heard of the industrial-academic-financialcomplex? The money mill feeds the academic mill feeds the industrial mill andaround and round till the whole damn wheel broke off and crashed. It was toolopsided and out of balance, corrupt and rotten to the core. And its own employeesconditioned to think they’re helping people, people who are so desperate to getin because that’s what they’ve been led to believe they do what desperatepeople do; go to loan sharks. It’s nice if the loan shark office looks good andcarries some degree of credibility up front, but it’s all a racket.

“GIVE A DAMN!”

That guy with the goatee and cap was everywherewith that neon blue sign. More power to him. I chugged a long with my big sign,feeling old, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t hear for the love, but I was herebecause I love, and I care.

I only witnessed two openly hostile people. Oneyoung White woman in the passenger seat of an SUV who maintained a steady “FuckYou” middle finger at us as her driver sped down the street. The other was atall, Black man who came over to those sitting down in the street blockingtraffic and complained to them. “Look, I support your cause,” he said. “But whyblock the busses, huh? Why block the busman? We folks trying to get home, wegot things we gotta do, too, so why block the busman, huh? Why not just keepmarching? Why block the busman like that, huh? Shit, people, let the busesthrough.”

After about 7:00, I caught a bus home, too. Ihad a household full of people to get back to. Wife, kids, and foreign exchangeguest students awaited for me to return home. Friends were over for a surprisevisit and dinner. It seemed another world, and I didn’t transition well. Whilesupporting the general themes of the Occupy demonstrations, my family andfriends wanted well-articulated positions from the protesters with clarity ofproposals advocating what they stood for and not simply long lists ofcomplaints and self-victimizing.

Everyone there generally supported Occupy WallStreet, but didn’t want riots nor wanted to hear self-declared victims whinehow persecuted they are on a drama triangle of their own making. Furthermore,people down there, regardless of how terrible things are, and they are terriblefor many folks, have to get hate out of their hearts.

Well, I was down there. I saw some hate, moreanger, but little rage. I did see many expressions of love, forgiveness, andcompassion. Most of these expressions seemed sincere and were also backboned byfirmness. President Obama’s lack of spine and the Republican lack of heartexasperate the majority of people not just downtown in Occupy Seattle but inevery conversation the grim power plays between Democrats and Republicansarise. Many loathe the “Dimocrap-Repugslug” two-headed snake with the head of abraying donkey on one end and a mud-slinging elephant on the other. People werefed up with political parties. There even seemed to be growing sentimentagainst third parties.

I felt moved and inspired by my experience ofOccupy Seattle. This is even so despite the at times chaotic and disorganizedaspect of the protests, such as late starts, communication delays, and the lackof cohesion between some of the groups down there together. I experienced awonder and an awe I had not felt in over a decade. Indeed, I felt hope, and I’mnot one to usually waste time hoping.

People are fed up. That is clear. This is arising up of the masses in a spontaneous manner. Both the Democrat and theRepublican Parties don’t seem to quite know what to do with this insurrection.Both are also trying to co-op the movement. Tea Partiers and Coffee Partiersfind things to hate and to love about this unexpected revolt with riots. (Atleast so far.) But people on all sides are frakkin’ fed up! And both sidesconstitute the 99%. People are dismayed, angry, and even ashamed. Many feeldespair.

“THEY GOT BAILED OUT, WE GOT SOLD OUT!” manyshouted.

Incountries around the world people everywhere are fed up with the currenteconomic and financial situation. We are furious about the tyranny of the BigBanks and the Corporatocracy upon our lives in all areas, not just politics.This Saturday coming up, October 15, remember, is Occupy Earth, so please makea point to go down and offer support.

Ifeel this is the reemergence of the Cultural Creatives spearheading change.Cultural Creatives were first identified back in 2000 by sociologist Paul H.Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson. They saw those who transcended andmoved beyond the old paradigms of right vs. left, of conservative vs. liberal,of the spiritual and religious vs. political-environmental-economic activists,of progressives vs. traditionalists as the Cultural Creatives.

Therewere estimated to be 50 million in America and 80-90 million in Europe backthen with more elsewhere. The Cultural Creative Awakening was prematurely snuffedout along with the Anti-Corporate Globalization Revolts of the late 1990s/early2000s after 9/11 and the Global Long War on Terror. The dramatic trauma of the9/11 attacks and the anvil and hammer of the Patriot and related Actsrearranged priorities.

Recallthe violence of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Revolts. They were large-scaleriots involving many tens of thousands of people in a global revolt. Most ofthe people I saw in Occupy Seattle had no desire to repeat such violence. TheCultural Creative integration of spirituality and political activism wasvibrant and evident even if the label “Cultural Creative” is no longer in thepublic awareness.

Isaw a tremendous effort on both sides to keep things peaceful when I wasdowntown. Even the few arrests were staged and relatively peaceful. One guywent around patting his chest with one hand and quietly reminded people to"occupy your heart first." A burly Christian minister strode out intothe streets before a phalanx of police, turned to face his fellow protesters,and shouted "No more blood! Keep it peaceful!"

He spun around slowly in all directions, a giant of a man, his face contorted with righteous indignation. This time he bellowed.

"REMEMBER, NO MORE BLOOD!"

Iwas reminded six days earlier by a Buddhist teacher to not make the other myenemy. Toward the end of my beginner Vipassana or Insight Meditation course,Rodney Smith, an ex-monk and Buddhist teacher here in Seattle, spoke foremotional self-control. “Feel your emotions, of course, just don’t allow themto run you. You have choices here.” After I raised my hand and asked how do Imaintain such equanimity during street protests and described Occupy WallStreet, he nodded and said, “I got it.”

“It’sfine for you to go out into the streets and protest,” he said, “as long as youdon’t make those on the other side your adversary.”

Ikept reminding myself of his words as I watched both the police and some of themore agitated demonstrators. In some ways, we were all on the same side.

Manyof the police officers expressed support at least for the general ideasexpressed by many the protesters. The cops seemed much better trained to handlecrowds as well as to attack and arrest. I hope this largely peaceful aspectcontinues throughout these protests everywhere.

Wasthere rudeness and provocations from a few on both sides? Yes, from a few protestorsacting like asses to cops ticketing drivers and fining them $114 for honking insupport especially after 10pm. So far it was very unlike my experience in the 1999Battle of Seattle against the WTO. During the struggle cops attackeddemonstrators and innocents alike to provoked much of the fighting while smallbands of anarchists and looters took advantage of the chaos to engage in hit andrun vandalism.

Iwas most impressed by my friend David Wright. Fearless and confident, he reachedout to the Seattle Police as fellow human beings. He often went over to shaketheir hands and say “Thank you” for their service. David explained to thosecops who would listen what he could about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Inreturn many cops voiced support for the movement. Education was a majorcomponent to success. David saw us all as human beings. “Everyone down here ispart of the 99%,” he muttered. Then he shouted out loud in unison with manyothers as he pointed to fellow marchers in the streets:

“WEARE THE 99%!

YOUARE THE 99%!”

Isang it, too. The roar of the protesters, the drums, the honking of car horns,and the guitars and banjos drowned out my voice. A man dressed in the Americanflag screeched upon a whistle, while another blasted the air wide open with a vuvuzela,a South African horn made famous for its strident buzzing during the 2010 WorldCup soccer games.
At one point David quickly scribbled together a sign for the cops, scrawling:
"POLICE: YOU ARE THE 99% TOO! JOIN US!"

Iam reminded, too, of Paul Hawken's vision of “Blessed Unrest,” his depiction ofvast waves of activism in all areas emerging against the forces of Empirearound America and the world. To his great surprise and delight instead of onlya few hundred thousand groups he discovered over two million groups. Theirnumbers continue to rise. No one leader rules over anyone. No one overarchingidea unites them. But a worldwide network of activist groups network togetheron issues local to global. They often disagree on many points, and agree onmany more.

Thismovement has great promise. It evokes many of the protests that erupted duringthe beginnings of the First Great Depression including the Bonus Army Revolt of1932, a peaceful protest and camp-in by the veterans of World War I. The BonusArmy was crushed violently by U.S. Army forces under Republican PresidentHerbert Hoover.

OccupyWall Street also has much in common with and many in it are inspired by thecivil rights marches, freedom rides, sit-ins, and anti-war rallies of the 1960sand early 1970s. Many of those resulted in violent riots, too, so much thatsome historians refer to the turmoil of that time as a disorganized,multifaceted civil war or quasi-civil war.

Nowso many more want peace. They want peace. I want peace! People demand peace! Liberty!Justice! Respect! Love! Power! Blessed Unrest is peaceful, loving, andpowerful.

Istand with the Cultural Creative viewpoint here - we need creative action inall areas, spiritual and physical, heart and mind, spirit and soul. I value theintegration of spiritual action and political activism. I uphold the powerof prayer and the focus of meditation while taking a stand for urgent action inthe here-now of our physical, mundane reality.

Mybiggest heroes are those who, despite their deep character flaws and they allhad them being human beings, turned from violence to nonviolence and were ableto build political activism upon a foundation of spirituality. These heroes ofmine are from fairly recent history. Three still live today although they’reelderly. My heroes are Attorney Mohandas K Gandhi of India, the Rev. MartinLuther King, Jr. of America, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, formerPresident Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also ofSouth Africa. There are others of equal valor, but these are the ones Iremember from all the many candles blazing on the cake.

Tenlong years after the horrors and mayhem of 9/11, a long-wiggling chrysalis hasgiven birth to a new, more mature, and wiser butterfly. The names may no longerbe the same, but the Cultural Creatives, the Anti-Corporate Globalization movement,the Blessed Unrest network of networks, and the Postmodern digitalrevolutionary entrepreneurs are emerging and mixing in whole new ways from thechrysalis. Already the results are astounding.

Andas people shouted and sang along the way, one man with a bushy beard darted andran among his fellow marchers. One man on a mission, he dashed about pattingone hand over his chest and reminding us all to occupy our hearts first.

AdamKahane quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., at length throughout his 2010book Power and Love: A Theory andPractice of Social Change. We share the same hero, and King’s writingsinspired the title of Kahane’s book. Theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich alsoinspired Kahane. Addressing power and love as what they are rather than whatpeople think they do or lead to, Adam Kahane affirms Tillich’s realizations.For all three men power is the drive to recognize and achieve one’s purpose andthe love the drive to unite and become whole.

MartinLuther King, Jr., wrote in “Where Do We Go From Here?” a title that feelsalmost prescient these days, about his take on power and love. King felt peopleconfused power and love with their polar opposites so much that love,unfortunately, became “identified with the resignation of power, and power withthe resignation of love.” You can almost hear him sigh.

“Nowwe’ve got to get this right,” King goes on. “Power without love is reckless andabusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

WhatKing said next underlies and unites all the crises converging today, includingthe ones bringing people out in droves to Occupy Wall Street, Seattle, andcities around the world. “It is precisely this collision of immoral power withpowerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

Yes,now that we’ve occupied the streets and challenged the Mammon of Wall Street,we have to work together to determine where we go from here and what are outnext steps.

Firstwe remember over and over again to occupy our hearts.

Dothat, and we will truly, finally, after all these millennia, transform ourspecies. Occupy Wall Street! Occupy the Banks! Seize the Fed! And, yes, occupyyour heart.

As the Dalai Lama said, “World peacemust develop from inner peace.”

You have to care.

ByWilliam Dudley Bass

Seattle,Washington

Cascadia

October10, 2011

Occupy Wall Street? Occupy the Banks! Seize the Fed!

2011-10-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street? Occupy the Banks! Seize the Fed!

Occupy Wall Street?

Why stop at the door?

Occupy the Banks!

They made us all poor.

Seize the Fed!

Think we’re dead?

We’re far from beat!

The Occupy Wall Street protests are spreading across America. They’re growing in number. Other demonstrations for causes specific to different local and regional areas are merging into the national tapestry of Occupy Wall Street. Now protestors gather in the nation’s capital for Occupy Washington, D.C. A loose, leaderless web of networks with many different causes, there is one overarching theme: people are fed up with “corporate greed.” Even some individual military personnel, both veterans and those still in uniform, from different branches came out in support of the demonstrations. One old Army veteran posted one of his buddies from the Marines declared he “didn’t fight for Wall Street, but for America.”

The United States of America at its worse is a schizophrenic place. It is a constitutional democratic republic on paper with a once vibrant and prosperous economy. As such America is a beacon of hope and admiration for much of the world. The best aspects of America continue to inspire people. There is, unfortunately, the nightmare side of America with its muddied racism, genocide of Native American Indians, massive penal system, great economic disparity, out of control intelligence agencies, CIA torture in secret prisons, multitudes of military bases scattered across Earth, and gruesome clandestine medical and biochemical weapons experiments.

Our United States is also part of a growing global empire in the making. As such the U.S.A. is the bastion of finance capitalism where corporations and big banks dominate and influence politics. The political machinery is deeply corrupted by the Corporatocracy and not just in the nation’s capital. The money gamers heavily dominate the so-called pillars of democracy, the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the Judicial Branch.

This impacts state governments as well as county, town, city, parish, and other municipal governments. The international realm is affected. Large corporations own the mainstream mass media, the so-called guardians of truth. Large universities and much of academic research and development depend on corporate power and are manipulated with corporate largesse.

This is how it works. In finance capitalism many businesses operate with various degrees of, let’s face it and call a shovel a shovel and not a rake or a hoe, with various degrees of dictatorship. People have their rights and freedoms, yes, and as such rights pertain to the political sphere where they are generated, upheld, and protected. Our freedoms fall under different umbrellas: constitutional rights, civil rights, human rights, etc.

Yet the moment one walks through the door into the workplace, either physically or virtually, one surrenders their rights to the dictatorship of "the Boss." Your "rights" exist in name only and must be upheld in a court of law. Otherwise you are told how to dress or not dress, what hair styles to have or not have, when to go to the restroom, and pressured to vote a certain way or worship a certain way, or get paid less because of your age or gender or sexual orientation, or else, "hell, go get yourself another job if you don't like it here."

The corporate power structure has conditioned us to accept such impositions on our liberties. The "Puppet Masters" who control the money power have achieved an end run around the institutions of nation-states to dominate all the rest of daily life. Eventually their power became so great they infiltrated and corrupted governments at all levels in many countries.

Corporations now have constitutional rights of personhood. Corporations dominate the American workplace and marketplace. People who work usually work for a company, even if it is the company they founded. Even solo entrepreneurs and small business owners leverage the tools of incorporation to protect themselves. Now we have large transnational and multinational corporations dominating not only our work and market places but also our political institutions.

Corporations as concepts are not bad or good. They are business entities designed and constructed for business purposes. Corporations provide logical structures for organizations of human beings to work efficiently to create, produce, and deliver products including goods and services. Corporations are tools. Except they’ve become imbued with rights and protected by government and all the agencies at government disposal from the Supreme Court to local municipal police. Corporations have become too big for their britches and have gone insane. They need to be stripped naked and reconstituted as organizations whose sole purpose is to conduct business in the marketplace and not engaged in politics.

Big Banks are corporate entities. Even the Federal Reserve System, or simply “the Fed,” is an incorporated entity. The Fed is the central bank of the United States. Although on paper an equal in relationship to the central banks of other countries, the Fed dominates the global and national landscape. Its primary partner is the European Central Bank from the European Union. These central banks interlock with one another to form the international central banking system. Above the central banks sit the BIS, the Bank for International Settlements. It is the central bank to the central banks. The BIS was set up by the central banks to help govern them but are in fact owned by the various central banks.

And that’s not all. The BIS along with interlocking nation-state regimes set up the Financial Stability Board (FSB) above them. The FSB in turn works not only with the central banks but also with the economic and financial bureaucracies of the various nation-states, in particular the G7 and G20. Short for “Group of Seven” and “Group of Twenty,” the “G’s” represent the nation-state regimes with the largest and most influential economies. Furthermore, the FSB works closely with yet a third chain of command in this interlocking global financial empire, the so-called Bretton Woods Three (BW3).

Nominally part of and thus under the United Nations Organization, the Bretton Woods Three is named after the resort town in New Hampshire where Allied representatives came together to create a new economic world order toward the end of the Second World War. They are the World Bank Group (WBG), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Some of the names have changed during the evolution of this global financial system, and that’s what we call them today. We also call this system the “international bank cartel,” for they behave as such while denying they are a cartel, and its champions and leaders “banksters.”

The World Bank Group alone is further divided into the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the International Finance Corporation, the International Development Association, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank Institute. It is headquartered inside the U.S.A., as are the Bretton Woods Three and the UN itself.

What’s missing here in this complex of overlapping hierarchies? The answer is Big Wall Street Banks and their allied financial giants in other countries. The banksters on Wall Street, in the City of London, and elsewhere own their central banks. The Federal Reserve System is 100% owned by Wall Street in a complex tether designed to deflect visibility into such “ownership” and thus accountability. The Big Banks also dominate the smaller banks and businesses of Main Street.

Just as the Big Banks of Wall Street own the Fed and other central banks, the central banks own the Bank of International Settlements and thus the Financial Stability Board. They also have ownership in the BW3 and influence the G7/G20. Bottom line: the "Titans of Wall Street" and their allies around the world own the international central banks and through them the BIS and the FSB. Furthermore these monster banks exercise enormous influence on UN organizations including the BW3 and the G20. These banks also control companies from giant corporations down to small businesses via the loans made out to them.

And there’s infighting. It’s not all monolithic. They're not communist. The biggest banks love to swallow up as many rivals as they can, sucking in commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies into one deregulated black hole of consumption. Behind the Big Banks is the Euro-American superwealthy families who control the bulk of the shares of these large financial institutions as well as the big corporations that also borrow from these banks. At the level of the superrich it becomes a game, leveraging other people’s money and generating money from essentially nothing, exploiting labor and destroying the environment deluded by the mistaken belief their massive acquisitions of wealth will protect them from the collapse of civilization and the biosphere.

These supranational organizations, including the central banks, the BIS and FSB, the UN, the G7/G20, and the BW3 all remain above the laws of any one nation-state, can not be taxed, pay no taxes, and set their own rules to benefit themselves. None of them are democratic, transparent, accountable, or even capitalistic or socialistic. They are corporatist and reflect the integration of private corporations and public government under a monopoly that on paper looks diverse but networked together.

This form of human organization has a name, fascism. It is fascism with a little “f” to distinguish it from the blatant, ultranationalist Fascist political parties that so tarnished themselves in the Second World War. It is a fascism cloaked in the trappings of democracy such as “free elections,” cloaked in the mirage of capitalism with so-called “free markets,” and in some cases cloaked in the mantel of “socialism” with “government services for the people.” Little-f fascism does not even use the term “fascism” for itself but shies away from it all together, preferring instead to make de facto emperors out of presidents, prime ministers, and central bank chairmen. It’s all “nod, nod, wink, wink” “in the national interest” “for the public good.”

This is empire not by military conquest of territory followed by economic exploitation of colonies. That model was finally killed in the Second World War as an ultimate failure. Instead this is empire by the creep of financial control into all areas of life.

We have a creeping dictatorship growing slowly and patiently, expanding its powers across the planet by taking over first the banks, then the corporations, then the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and by infiltrating governments from the international and national level down to the local municipal levels dominate individuals and families by controlling jobs, the work place, the market place, the banks, the lenders, the borrowers, credit, debt, cash, coin, the machinery of printing and minting, and yes, the many branches and institutions of government at all levels.

The banksters control money. They own the money. Look at an American one dollar bill. A U.S. Dollar is a Federal Reserve Note. Even when the banksters cry for governments to bail them out, it is not merely to save their skins but to entrap the naïve and the well-meaning public servants within governments deeper into their web of deceit. Our government has to borrow the very money it bears the cost to print, mint, distribute, collect, and destroy from the central bank, from the Fed. On the international side the U.S. government borrows heavily from other nations, especially China.

So massive and deep is the Federal debt that it is often noted the majority of “revenue” raised by the IRS through taxation goes to pay off the interest on the debts to the Fed and to China. (China is a different model, a central bank under government control, its government being a Communist dictatorship in bed with crony capitalism disguised as a peoples’ republic. Which is why government control of the money power means nothing unless government is transparent, democratic, and accountable.)

We could instead, for example abolish the Fed or put it under Federal control such as within the Department of Treasury. We can set up public banks at all levels from Federal to local. We can regain control of our money and our monetary policy. We can determine and set a standardized fixed measure of value for money rather than let it float against other currencies or peg it to limited commodities.

Until then We the People of Earth are to some degree all slaves to the invisible global empire of the banksters.

We the People of Earth, not just of America, or Europe, or any one country, even China, but all the people, must take control of our money. We must institute radical reforms, truly radical and revolutionary reforms, to establish public control over the money power similar in principle to civilian control over the military power. Such public control means placing all financial institutions under either direct public governance or within private enterprises regulated by government agencies in the public interest. This must be done in ways that are transparent, accountable, and answerable to the people in a democratic manner.

The anti-austerity demonstrations and riots in Europe and elsewhere, the demonstrations for freedom earlier this year in Wisconsin, and now the Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Washington, D.C. protests are part of the leaderless revolution. Activists and analysts began to recognize bits and pieces of it, and this movement is diverse. It ranges across the right and the left from the Tea Party to the Coffee Party. It ranges from Libertarians championing individual freedoms to Socialists trumpeting social responsibilities. Such extremism on the fringes gave rise in turn to the “Extreme Middle” as those in the Center rise up with a mix of both.

In the late 1990s we saw a flowering of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Revolts. The terror attacks of 9/11 and the resulting Global Long War on Terror squashed the anti-globalization movement, rearranged the socio-political-economic landscape, and sped up the creep of a global empire masquerading as an alliance of independent, democratic nations. Even so, there was David Korten’s astute observation we have arrived at the tipping point for "a Great Turning," where we can turn from global empire to world community. Paul Hawken shined a light of hope, encouragement, and action upon the more than two million and growing activist groups of all kinds networking together without any single leader or ideology to challenge the tyranny of governments and corporations and make the world a better place. Hawken called this network of networks rising up from among the common people "Blessed Unrest."

The alternative was clearly spelled out by Jarod Diamond as planet-wide collapse of a now-global civilization entering the same phases experienced by every preceding local and regional civilization in collapse.

We human beings, we the people, We the People of Europe, We the People of America, We the People of every land and every country, We the People of Earth, spearhead this unrest! Let us work together, resolve our differences and disagreements, and confront serious global challenges threatening to wipe us out. Let us cooperate and face head-on what many of us do not want to see, the real possibility of global collapse. Our planetary civilization stands at the brink of an abyss.

One of the very first things we must do is to take control of our money. And as you do so know full well that cash and coin, what we call money, is not true wealth. Money has little value. Yet it is the control of money which provides the keys to leveraging the creation of value to generate assets and build wealth, a wealth accessible to all in a fair and regulated market place where people can openly engage in business with one another to support themselves, their families, their communities, and exercise wise stewardship of our common, shared resources.

Yes, our air, our water, our soil, our minerals, our airwaves, our forests and oceans and deserts and wildlife, our energy, even our Internet. We are one species on one planet sharing one biosphere. We move together through one solar system in one galaxy among a multiverse of possibilities. Yes, our multiverse appears infinite and vast. Our galaxy alone overflows with abundance, as does our solar system. Earth has many rich resources, but all of them are finite, and yet many of them, if properly stewarded, are sustainable.

It begins with the money. Follow the money if you like. Don’t let the overlapping intricacies of the Global Empire of the financial elite and their allies in power stop you. This battle demands our constant vigilance. It goes far back in time.

In the pre-Revolutionary British Colonies in North America the original imperialists were giant transoceanic corporations and pirates with a King’s Charter in hand. They traded in furs, tobacco, and human slaves and plundered what they couldn't or wouldn't buy. During and after the American Revolution there was a serious rift among the Founding Fathers over whether or not to establish a European-style central bank. Presidents George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and even John F. Kennedy all had their different battles with the Big Banks and their cronies in Big Business. On an on from the earliest attempts of “money powers” to control the governments of early states to within the U.S.A. the Banker’s Coup of 1913 to the Business Plot of the early 1930s.

The Banker’s Coup in stages accomplished two goals. One, it established the Federal Reserve System as a private central bank owned by “the Titans of Wall Street” but misrepresented to the public as a Federal network of twelve independent banks. In addition, the tax regime of the Internal Revenue Service was set up as the infamous IRS. This was also disguised to the public. The IRS was and is still presented as “Internal” when it collected taxes upon monies earned externally as well, “Revenue” instead of legalized theft, and “Service” as if such robbery by a government that could create its own money as needed without taxation was indeed of service to people and their families and businesses. The U.S. didn't need a national income tax system until a central bank was finally and successfully established by the banksters and their allies in Congress and the White House.

The Business Plot was a coup attempt by Eurocentric Nazi and Fascist sympathizers among the Big Wall Street Bankers to overthrow “communist” FDR. The plotters conspired to install a popular retired Marine officer as a benign dictator. The Marine in question, however, was two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler. A man of tremendous integrity and courage, he refused, blew the whistle, and faced Congress.

Although the U.S. government saw fit to bury the plot during a time of economic turmoil, domestic upheaval, and growing wars abroad, Smedley Butler returned to his Quaker upbringings and became a Pacifist. In 1935 he published his famous book, War is a Racket in which he described his personal experiences invading countries and waging war on behalf of American corporations and Wall Street banks cloaked in the name of American liberty and democracy.

Sound familiar?

Occupy Wall Street is a beginning. A great place to take a stand and move forward from. Move on from there.

Let’s sing it, shout it one more time:

Occupy Wall Street?

Why stop at the door?

Occupy the Banks!

They made us all poor.

Seize the Fed!

Think we’re dead?

We’re far from beat!

By William Dudley Bass

Seattle, Washington, Cascadia

Note: For greater research and detail of analysis with proposal of long overdue and thus by necessity radical economic and financial reforms to help prevent Collapse and instead transform Civilization, see the following articles posted to this blog:

1. “Restructuring the Human Economy,” http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2008/12/restructuring-human-economy.html

2. “Tearing into the Second Great Depression,” http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2008/12/tearing-into-second-great-depression.html

3. “Corporate Power in a Planetary Democracy,” http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2010/01/corporate-power-in-planetary-democracy.html

4. “Collapse is a Choice,” http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2011/04/collapse-is-choice.html

(NOTE: I reprinted this in William Dudley Bass on Earth at the Brink at http://williamdudleybass.com/MyBlog/occupy-wall-street-occupy-the-banks-seize-the-fed/ on Tuesday, November 15, 2011. Thank you.)

From Compromise to Conflict: America Gets Positional and Forgets How to Get Along With Itself

2011-08-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

Several essays I read recently by different pundits and news analysts gave me pause. They addressed different points of the same view. Much has been written about the rising vitriol in American public discourse with the spread of far-right and far-left extremism to infect the great middle.

Note the resurgence of armed militias and racist groups with the rampant rise of violent hate groups first under President George W. Bush with many more under President Barack Obama. The tragic shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D) and others around her this past January triggered a national debate that went beyond passion to inflammatory rhetoric. We have become a nation polarized and divided that refuses to get along with itself.

There have been calls for a military coup, threats of martial law, and fears of riots. Even the specter of a possible civil war or revolution has been raised as our nation reaches levels of polarization not seen since the 1850s with the possible exception of the 1960s. The uprisings sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East with rioting and protests in Europe and elsewhere, including the American state of Wisconsin, have been hailed as harbingers of similar upheaval here at home. London burns as I write.

The recent “Budget Deal” reached early this August between Republicans and Democrats was another case in point. Yes, a deal was reached. After much rancorous and extremely ugly arguments in Congress and the White House and across the nation. It was so bad even Representative Giffords came out of rehab to cast her first vote since she was shot in the head. And it was a deal no one liked and everyone hated. Much was made of “Look at us! At least we made a bipartisan deal.” The agreement was bipartisan in name only and the U.S.A. was promptly stripped of its sterling AAA credit rating, the stock markets crashed and crashed again as gold soared, and other nations from China to Europe scrambled.

There was a time Republicans and Democrats were able to wheel and deal to get effective legislation accomplished. Of course, they did not satisfy the ideologues chomping with dismay in the wings of both parties, but the vast majority of Americans were pleased. Years ago, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and Senator Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, were famous for fierce debates over many issues. After the votes were cast this way or the other, however, both would go out together for beers and laughter. Former Senator Teddy Kennedy was another stand-taker who mastered the art of compromise.

Now compromise is a bad word. It was noticed recently that President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, political polar opposites, are among the last waves of baby boomers passing through American politics. They have not mastered the art of compromise and both come across as “nice.” While Boehner has run a company, Obama has not. Neither developed the experienced of going nose to nose and toe to toe with opponents in management, in the labor unions, in the military, in combat, or against the Soviets.

The generations passing and for many already passed are the ones that grew up in the World Wars, survived the Great Depression, and went eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet Empire with fingers on the nuclear triggers. Many ran large companies or colleges and universities. Most of them were military veterans, and many had experienced the horrors of combat.

These men and women knew in a crisis to all come together for the national good, not tear the country apart. They had heard enough of that from their elders regarding the horrors and the aftermath of the Civil War. These men and women also knew that for different folks to all work together everyone has to compromise. Compromise was a form of sacrifice. It was good.

Now compromise is shunned, even ridiculed. Politicians act like spoiled children fighting over toys in the playroom oblivious to their own house burning down. People talk of “cooperation and collaboration,” but we see this more among NGOs and today’s business enterprises as entrepreneurs and big corporations alike struggle and adapt to survive the Great Recession. We don’t see it in government. This paralysis extends up into the international and down into the state and municipal governments as well. As the country runs out of cash, credit, and amasses even more debt the more people argue with politicians eyeing the next election campaign rather than the deep and broad reforms not only required, but also demanded.

As the memories of the Second World War with its total war fade, many today forget that many times in the past, not just World War II but others as well, that surprisingly often more soldiers would die in one day of battle than in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq put together. There were many battles with extremely high casualties, not to mention the widespread slaughter of civilians by both sides. Few really want to repeat total war, obviously, but many forget its cost. Now there is sloppy and callous talk among war planners in government of using mini-nukes and bunker-busting nukes in military first strikes or even on the battlefield.

We have politicians in power who don’t or can’t relate to these matters. Instead of compromising, they go positional over values. They make values more important than reality with real results. The polarization between our politicians is a reflection of the even greater polarization and anger among the general public. There is a lack of leadership, leaders that can compromise and that means being strong enough and possessed of enough liberty and self-confidence to compromise their own values.

Values don’t exist out in reality. They live in our speaking. They dwell in our inner worlds of our minds. They are anchored by beliefs, and beliefs are made up in our minds. Facts are used or discarded at whim to fit not reality but whatever people want to believe to thus justify taking extreme stands on their values.

Of course values are important. They are ingrained in our Declaration of Independence, in the U.S. Constitution, in the traditions of all the world’s religions, and in the ethics of secularists and others. A sense of values was what brought past generations together to push through the wars and calamities of 1914-1991. They also had enough sense not to let these same values get in the way of working through their own differences to achieve even greater results.

In surveying all this, I realize one possible reason my wife Kristina and I sometimes have differences over issues in a way that perplexes me. She often uses the word “values” in our arguments and conversations. I do not. I certainly take stands on issues, but I am also quite willing to change my mind and work with others, especially when shown evidence that is contrary to any of my beliefs. We are almost ten years apart in age. I’m among the last of the baby boomers, too, and she identifies with Generation X.

Recent studies indicate GenX and subsequent generations place much greater emphasis on values than prior generations did. They are more extreme in taking stands for their values. I recall conversations about morals and for ethics and getting clear as to what our credo was. Beyond that I don’t remember a heavy emphasis on “values.” I also grew up in the revolutionary and turbulent 1960s. Instead of being polarized between two extremes, there were multiple factions quarrelling with one another. The term “values” was tossed out as an archaic concept. There were more important things, such as eradicating war, poverty, racism, and sexism.

I for one don’t want any more violence here at home or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. I certainly don’t want to see the United States of America fragment into revolution and civil war. My stand is we return to civil discourse and hold our politicians accountable to do the same. As American citizens we elect our politicians, and they hire our bureaucrats. Our military would be wise to remember their sworn oath is to uphold the Constitution, not pledge personal loyalty to any one person or office. And our political leaders must begin to demonstrate leadership. Along with the love, what little they show, they also must demonstrate spine. Some backbone! Keep in mind a healthy spine is strong and flexible. A sick spine is soft and swollen or rigid and brittle.

If we are to really be a stand for values, then allow for the values of compromise, agreement making, cooperation, and collaboration. These values in turn will safeguard most others. We have too much at stake as multiple crises converge upon our species.

We can work together. We are already doing so in realms as diverse as business and activism. The spread of new portable technologies facilitates these actions. Our politicians, however, seem content to bicker until some fabled earthquake brings down the temples of government. I certainly oppose corporate control of politics, and as businesses prove themselves more adaptable and resilient what will happen? Perhaps we need new models of self-government, one grounded not in ossified traditions of the past but in newer models of local-global cooperation, resource sustainability, and engaged, collaborative leadership.

What will it take for you to take a stand for what you believe, and be willing to compromise the same for higher values such as the survival of our country and our world so we can transform our differences to build a truly prosperous global civilization?

William Dudley Bass

August 8, 2011

Farewell, Atlantis. May you be a beacon for a United Earth Federated Republic

2011-07-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

Atlantis the lost continent may lay buried under the mud at the bottom of the sea, but Atlantis the space shuttle soared high into Space. Captain Christopher Ferguson, United States Navy and a NASA astronaut, is the Commander of the last space shuttle. Not only is the last shuttle for America but also for the world. The only other one was the Soviet Buran that flew once, unmanned, and then was shut down. In some ways the Buran was a superior vehicle and in other ways not. In any case, no other nation-states are positioned to launch such massive ships. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the United States has become an overextended and nearly bankrupted empire. It now depends upon the Russian Soyuz to transport humans and supplies to the International Space Station. Unless something goes awry, Atlantis has 12 days to complete its mission.

Atlantis blasted off to cheers and tears this morning of July 8, 2011. This mission is the 33^rd for Atlantis and the 135^th for NASA’s shuttle program. Almost a million people came to watch the Cape Canaveral, Florida and the NASA Kennedy Space Center may well turn into Postmodern ghost towns. Thirty years of glory with its share of tragedies stirs powerful emotions. Many people remain passionate about the exploration and colonization of Outer Space. Not just Americans, but people from all around the world. Russia, China, India, Brazil, the European Union, even Iran.

Even as private corporations with wealthy investors race to commercialize space travel and industry, American President Obama has charged NASA with bold, new missions. The United States is to send astronauts to a major asteroid or dwarf planet by 2025 and a manned voyage to Planet Mars by the mid-2030s. There is talk of building bases on the Moon sheltered inside ancient craters and also deep inside old lava tubes and caves. After all both Luna and Mars have water. And there is more water in the Universe than we dreamed of. Recently a young star only 750 light-years from Earth was discovered gushing gigantic jets of water into space from its poles. The sheer quantity of water jetting into space was estimated to be “a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second” at “velocities of two hundred thousand kilometers per hour,” said astronomer Lars Kristensen in the Netherlands. So there is plenty of water out there.

Even so we are a planetary civilization on the verge of Collapse. Yes, collapse with a Big “C” as defined by Jared Diamond, the author of books of great reckoning. A Pulitzer Prize winning evolutionary biologist and geographer-historian, his work Collapse: Why Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed seized the popular imagination. As a global civilization divided by warring economies, nations, religions, politics, tribes, and ethnic groups we expend enormous treasure and blood on war and violence. We have a huge list of serious problems threatening to overwhelm us from wars to global climate disruption to financial collapse to poverty, hunger, epidemics, pollution, environmental destruction, the domination of the money power by the global financial elite, and many more. We are not able to afford to develop and launch the technologies and machines, train the people needed, and create the logistical support base. Our governments are torn by too many competing priorities, priorities that exist as such from the viewpoint of a nation, but fall away to become moot points once the perspective of a Democratic World Government (DWG) is held.

Successful exploration, settlement, and development of Outer Space have many benefits for humanity back on Earth. New sources of raw materials and other resources, more living room to ease population pressure back on the home planet, launching sites further out and with less gravity to explore further and deeper into Space, and the development of new medicines and other products and technologies that shift from specialized use in space to the more general marketplaces on Earth. The concerted effort it would take to develop Space would demand a high degree of global cooperation. The collective effort to collaborate on such a level would break down barriers to unity and integration between formerly hostile groups and foster an evolving sense of belonging not only to a particular tribe, religion, or nationality but also to a united planet. Which in turn would feed back into uniting humanity to address the convergence of many serious problems, problems we have caused in our greed, ignorance, and willfulness, that threaten our civilization with Collapse.

A global cooperative as a Democratic World Government would be the only way to generate a truly massive space program of the caliber and expense it would take to explore, settle, and develop Luna, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and in orbit around these worlds and Earth. Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn wait even further out in the future. We or our children and grandchildren may witness and participate in the founding of not just a unified Planet Earth but also a Solarian federation.

Atlantis has blasted off and now swings around our world in low or near-Earth orbit. While a shining light of triumph for the United States of America with the International Space Station being a monument to Russian-American and other global cooperation, let us stand for an even bigger, deeper picture. The space shuttle Atlantis, in her farewell mission, can serve as a beacon to inspire those passionate for space exploration to take a stand for Democratic World Government. A great place to start is to go to https://voteworldparliament.org/ and vote “Yes!” in the on-line Global Referendum for a Democratic World Parliament. Otherwise any significant space program based upon nation-states will never reach those higher frontiers beyond launching satellites and tourists. Without a view from Space of a distant, small, and majestic Planet Earth by far more people than the small number of Apollo astronauts who watched the Earth in awe, we may never achieve the local-global integration necessary to solve our problems.

Sources:

“Democratic World Parliament through a Global Referendum,” Vote World

Parliament. https://voteworldparliament.org/.

Emotions,” Space.com. July 2011.

http://www.space.com/12222-nasa-space-shuttle-atlantis-launch-emotions.html

Fazekas, Andrew. “Star Found Shooting Water ‘Bullets,’” National

Geographic Daily News, June 2011.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110613-space-science-star-water-bullets-kristensen/.

Kavanagh, Michael. “Jared Diamond’s Collapse traces the fates of societies to their

treatment of the environment,” Grist: A Beacon in the Smog. February 2005. http://www.grist.org/article/kavanagh-collapse

Wall, Mike. “Tears and Cheers: NASA’s Shuttle’s Swan Song Brings Strong Emotions,” Space.com.July 2011.

http://www.space.com/12222-nasa-space-shuttle-atlantis-launch-emotions.html

By William Dudley Bass

July 8, 2011

Where are you, the Government, shut down?

2011-04-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

One of my most influential trainers is Harv Eker of Peak Potentials out of Vancouver, British Columbia. He constantly reminded my fellow students and me that “Your inner world creates your outer world.” OK. Thoughts and emotions lead to actions. The unconscious mind really drives the conscious mind to leverage the body to create and implement, or to regress and shut down.

Harv, dressed in black and highly animated up on stage, was dynamic. “Now stand up and say it out loud,” he urged. “Together!” We stood up from our chairs and all said together “My inner world creates my outer world.” It is as true for communities and organizations of human beings as well as for individuals. Harv went on to remind us with loud enthusiasm “How you do ANYTHING is how you do EVERYTHING!”

I live in the United States of America. A native of Virginia, I’ve lived almost two decades in the City of Seattle which overlays King County in the western part of Washington State. It is April 2011. Recently, close to midnight last Friday, April 8th, the American Federal Government narrowly averted a total shutdown. A partial shutdown was underway. The Republicans and Democrats, the two major parties that currently dominate U.S. politics, are more interested in bloodless civil war than in peaceful cooperation and bipartisanship. As large groups, they approach the art and craft of politics, including compromise, as schoolyard bullies with a regressed, reactive emotional intelligence. Yes, individuals stand out for collaborative policy making, but they are run over by tsunamis of angry and divisive people more intent on destruction rather than creation and innovation.

In my own state of Washington the financial warfare 3,000 miles back east has infected our state and local government. The state government is paralyzed with decisions regarding budgets, taxes, and services. The city and county governments where I live are engaged in unrelenting, neverending battles over mass transit issues and other services costing more than what is available to spend. Other governments in other areas of the world seem really shut down or in a state of warfare, from Afghanistan to Libya to Ivory Coast and elsewhere. The European Union is lurching from one financial crisis to another. The United Nations is bereft of power and agreement.

Back home Americans rail against the Government shutdown. Some even call for it, bring it on, they say; let it force us over the brink to see what happens, clean house, etc. etc. Others scramble to prevent it from happening and to maintain a status quo. Neither approach is healthy and neither is sustainable. The underlying issues, fundamentally who and what controls the Money Power, is barely recognized and not even addressed. And yet, we the people are at choice here.

We are the government, are we not? Have we abdicated responsibility to those with the money and the power and the media skills? Have we forgotten government is of the people, by the people, for the people? That the institutions of government from the global to the local are composed of fellow human beings? That “all these governments” are our governments? That the government is us?

Where in our lives are we shut down? Where are you shut down in your life? Where am I shut down in mine? Look at it. Consider it. After all, our inner world creates our outer world. How we do anything is how we do everything. Be present to what is happening now. Are you reacting? Or responding? Making decisions? Or choices? Devising criticisms and wrong-making, or generating solutions? Blaming and shaming? Or accepting things the way they are and moving forward from a stand? Are you out for revenge and to “teach ‘em a lesson,” or are you free to forgive and exercise compassion? Where are you open? Vulnerable? Are you busy talking, or do you listen? Are you trying to be fair and just, or are you implementing transformative change?

For me I feel shut down most from fear of things that exist in my mind. Fear of being ridiculed as “deaf, dumb, and stupid.” Fear of failing, fear of letting down my wife and family and even myself, fear of my own triggers from old traumas still running my life, fear of wasting money and time to pursue my dreams, fear of losing everything I love, and on and on...and on. I react to fight, flee, or freeze. My practice is become present and self-aware faster and faster to defuse these triggers, make healthier choices with intention, and move through and beyond my imaginary fears. I can set aside my right- and wrong-making, my judgements, and work with people from different backgrounds and beliefs to focus on solutions to generate results. And to be with failure so I can learn from failure. My intention is to graduate from the reactive phase to higher, more creative and possibly integrated levels. I can go there temporarily while experiencing creative, integrated, even unitary states of consciousness, but I’m far too reactive to currently maintain these temporary states as long-term levels.

What is happening from Washington, D.C. to Madison, Wisconsin to Olympia and Seattle, Washington, and indeed around the world is the outward manifestation of our inner world. We are at choice to change all of that. To be effective such change has to first arise from our relationships with one another. To go deeper into cause, for all change to have effect out in the world we must first change our inner world. For how everything shows up stems from how we chose to do anything.

Empire of Bases for Wars without End

2011-04-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

Hey, guess what, folks? It turns out the leaders of the United States don’t even know exactly how many American and Allied military bases exist. Furthermore, the number of wars the so-called, unofficial but still real Euro-American Global Empire is engaged in does not match the official count. Because there are more violent military and intelligence operations occurring simultaneously than Empire wants to admit. When Special Forces engage in covert hostilities behind enemy lines of a state or quasi-state we are not technically at war with, or when the CIA fires drone missiles into countries that we’re also not technically at war with, isn’t that “war?”

There are two ways the great, borderless superpower of today behaves in a similar fashion to empires of old.

During the height of many large, polyglot empires from the Roman to the Mongol to the British, the imperial Center, i.e. the homeland realms, were often in a state of prolonged peace. Except, of course, for an occasional civil war for control of the state. The majority of the population enjoyed the illusion of a peaceful world of trade and commerce free of war. What they actually meant, however, were their cities and countryside were free from invasion.

The far-flung borders and colonies of these empires, however, were often in a state of chronic warfare. These conflicts included tribal wars, local ethnic rebellions, and frontier guerrilla wars. There were unique situations where off and on border wars raged between large empires without either committing fully to what would have been a Phyrric victory. Ancient History buffs may note one case in particular, the Roman-Parthian Wars. A Modern example would be the American-Soviet Cold War, although the Soviet Empire suddenly collapsed at the end of it.

Today, the dominant region of the Euro-American Global Empire is called “the United States Homeland.” “Homeland” is a post-9/11 term that recalls a time not all that long ago when the Nazis emphasized Germany as “the Fatherland.” The Soviet Communists did the same with Russia as “the Motherland.” The focus has shifted from American liberties and protecting Constitutional rights to enforcing Homeland Security with domestic surveillance and militarization. The militaristic and ultranationalist “feel” these terms evoke is quiet different from the peaceful, loving reverence many feel for “Mother Earth and Father Sky” for example.

The second similarity is the vast number of military garrisons empires establish to maintain control of far-flung regions, whether it is political control, to promote and protect certain religions and corporations, to defend against enemies, to hold territory, or to allow for safe commerce to flow. These imperial frontiers and colonies were dotted with numerous forts, castles, and other fortifications. The First and Second World Wars destroyed the concept of “forts.” Now they are called “bases.” Forts became something preteen boys built back in the bushes from which to lob rocks and sticks at one another.

No one seems to know exactly how many military bases the United States alone has. The numbers and locations keep changing, and that seems to be a convenient excuse. There are also numbers of intelligence bases, secret prisons or black jails, and centers for black ops. Some bases are large, sprawling complexes shared with many Allied nations. Others are in urban basements and nondescript buildings. Others are relatively tiny, small-unit forward operating outposts such as the U.S. Army’s Restrepo in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan (eventually abandoned, it was made famous by author Sebastian Junger whose book about that was turned into an award-winning film documentary).

Investigative reporter Nick Turse of Asia Times attempted to find out. First, the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report states that of 2009 there were 662 military bases outside the U.S.A. in 38 nation-states. Then when the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense addressed the Senate, she claimed there were 507 permanent bases. But the Pentagon lists 4,999 total sights in American states and territories as well as in other countries. At the same time, the Base Structure Report does not include small bases, covert bases, forward operating bases, or floating mobile naval, naval air, and naval-air-marine bases. In fact one criteria is that bases have to be larger than 10 acres if overseas or have a Plant Replacement Value to repair and maintain the facilities greater than $10,000,000. In reality many bases are smaller.

To add to the confusion are what appears to be deliberate concealment of facts. There’s no mention of bases in Afghanistan when there are over 400 there. A little over 80 are listed in Iraq when there are over 500 more not listed. There are blacked-out sites in other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There are also bases run on our behalf by other nations and their own local national security and military-intelligence apparatus. There are covert bases operated by the CIA and possibly other secretive intelligence departments. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has bases in its Drug Wars. The DEA, for example, trains primarily at the Quantico Marine Base in the American state of Virginia, along with the FBI. My native state of Virginia, by the way, has at least 27 military and joint military-intelligence bases listed by a family business that helps military personnel find, sell, or rent homes. Some of the world’s largest bases are located in Virginia.

Many of these may not fit the criteria for size and PVR to be listed, which in turn makes them easier to hide. The power of Empire is brilliantly dispersed across the globe yet concentrated in small arenas difficult to track. The military-industrial-intelligence complex has a life of its own that outlives the temporary rotations of politicians and bureaucrats. The system itself develops its own inertia and demands for secrecy and consumption of blood and treasure that fortifies the frontiers while hollowing out the increasingly unstable homelands. The peace once felt in the homelands begins to crumble under environmental, economic, socio-political, and ethnic stress.

As far the number of wars the United States and its Allies are engaged in, many have their heads buried in the sand. Politicians and mass media pundits are either bemoaning or celebrating the U.S.A. is currently in Libya, its “3rd war,” after Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re forgetting a few things. We’re still in the Global War on Terror, the ugly GWOT, against al-Qaida and its allies across Europe, North America, Asia including Indonesia and the Philippines, and North, East, and West Africa. As the term GWOT has fallen out of favor under the Obama Regime, many in the military now refer to it as “the Long War” while many Neo-Cons like the designation of “World War IV” (after the Cold War being WWIII).

Under this umbrella America is engaged is military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and the Philippines. And now Libya. In addition there was or is possibly and likely covert action in Iran and Sudan. We’re still in a technically unresolved war of sorts with North Korea. Then there’s the Drug War, still quite violent and nasty, moving from Peru and Columbia into Mexico. It is now consuming Mexico with horrific violence while spreading not just north into the United States but also into Central America and Jamaica. I won’t begin to mention short-term interventions in various African countries or the on and off ones in Haiti.

This system of imperial overreach fosters the illusion of peace through security at home. These numerous wars, while certainly not on the scale of the World Wars, have a severely negative economic, environmental, and sociopolitical impact. Financial and material resources are extracted and expended in a one-way waste of destruction and corruption. They drain resources from everywhere and generate even more terrorists, criminal cartels, corruption, and war profiteering. Maintaining thousands, even hundreds of military and intelligence bases drain treasuries and stretch resources and distribution networks. The more an empire expands itself in order to defend itself, the more there is to defend and therefore the more it expands itself. Ultimately this hollows out the colonies and the rot spreads back to the home countries that implode within or explode outward.

The Euro-American Global Empire, however, is not the final goal of Empire. The interlinked web of international Central Bank cartels, Big Bank robber barons, the Corporatocracy, the National Security State, and their allies among the military-industrial-intelligence complex appear to have a longer vision. The rest of can’t discern but so much and have to be careful with speculation. The global elite seem to be moving with deliberation and patience. Based upon history and current events, they’re creating opportunities out of regional chaos and global crises to reconstruct humanity into some kind of neo-feudal, neo-fascist new world empire all dressed up pretty as a global democracy with elections and “free markets.”

A such working together in a cohesion at once both messy and surprisingly efficient, the global elite seek to dominate the finances and marketplaces of the entire planet. The bulk of the people working for them are unawares and believe they’re just doing their jobs. These people, the soldiers and spies, the sailors and bank tellers, the pilots, bureaucrats, managers, technicians, whoever is working for them, and I have myself at one time, are merely cogs in an Orwellian machine. They’re the unwitting stormtroopers whose patriotism and commitment to serving the common good is manipulated to serve the interests of Big Business, Big Banks who loan to those corporations, the National Security States that project and protect these interests, and the superfinancial elite who own and/or control these systems with a certain discretion. Based upon this, there may be an intention to actually break down the United States and the European Union after first using them to network then break up the rest of the global system. After all, the global elite don’t want any one nation-state remaining too powerful to challenge the implementation of a world dictatorship disguised as a democracy, nor to have their own empire associated with another. It’s difficult to tell for sure. Academics are too chicken to go there, and conspiracy theorists often muddy the waters with unsubstantiated claims.

What can the rest of us do? They global elite and their creeping empire are formidable enemies. And they aren’t the only ones. Criminal gangs, narcoterrorists, rogue states, armed racist militia, petty tyrants, corrupt governments, terrorist groups, religious fundamentalists, lone wolves with resources, they all add up. And we face impending systemic collapse on a global scale from the convergence of problems threatening to overwhelm us, problems that we can solve if and only if we can work together.

The best solution toward that end is building a constitutional Democratic World Government with transparent institutions. The best place to begin here is to vote in and support the Global Referendum for a Democratic World Parliament. Vote “Yes!” at https://voteworldparliament.org/.

It is a pragmatic place to start. Another is get involved in your local and regional even national governments to “take it back” from both the global empire builders and the ultranationalists and isolationists. So we can turn from our planetary civilization away from world empire to world community and democracy to craft our Democratic World Government. Join fired up activist networks determined to make a difference at all levels of civilization, such as Four Years Go. So go join FYG at http://www.fouryearsgo.org/about/overview/.

Beyond that, it is vital we the people take control over the Money Power from private and quasi-public institutions such as the international Central Banks. We must establish public control of the Money Power. And such public control must be transparent and the Money Power held accountable and audited. A similar example is the civilian control of the Military Power in America and its Allies. This struggle may be our hardest battle, far more difficult than establishing a Democratic World Government. What difference does it make to have the legal institutions of freedom, justice, and unity in place if it becomes all an illusion if the Global Elite continues to dominate the world through whatever institutions exist with the sheer power it wields from mass, concentrated wealth and the ability to control politics and economies?

Websites & Sources to review:

Bilchik, Gloria Shur. “Military Mystery: How many bases does the US have, anyway?” Occasional Planet: Real Change, One Progressive Idea At A Time:

http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2011/01/24/military-mystery-how-many-bases-does-the-us-have-anyway/

Department of Defense Base Structure Report (2010): http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/bsr/BSR2010Baseline.pdf

Four Years. Go: http://www.fouryearsgo.org

Turse, Nick. “Empire of Bases 2.0” Asia Times Online: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MA12Df01.html

Virginia Military Base Homes at Military By Owner: http://www.militarybyowner.com/military_bases/virginia.aspx

Vote World Parliament: https://voteworldparliament.org/

by William Dudley Bass

April 7, 2011

2011-04-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Collapse is a Choice

Collapse is a choice. We can choose to work together across Planet Earth for life, liberty, health, and prosperity or for global collapse and omnicide. Wait, let me say it plainer. We can choose to work together for life or die. Remember, wherever you live right now is on the same planet in the same biosphere as people in other neighborhoods on the far side of the globe. Except, of course, for a few spacefarers who hope to come back to their beautiful and precious world below.

Our species, as far as we know, originated in East and maybe Southern Africa and has spread all over Earth and walked on the Moon. We can choose to pull together or die. Retreating into your fortress with stockpiles of supplies or fighting other people over race, religion, nationality, language, geography, resources, and violent politics will not help anyone and shall make things worse. You, yes, I’m talkin’ to you, men and women and children, must get over your rage, your shame, your fear, especially fear that is all made up in your minds as False Evidence Appearing Real. Because there are real things out there to be truly afraid of but nothing to be paralyzed by. Me? I know as I went through the same process. I had to get over my desire for vengeance.

Our news is full of doom and gloom, from the mainstream mass media to alternatives on the furthest fringes. In the midst of all the negatives the majority of politicians and their pet economists are saying what most people want to hear and wish could be true: “Folks, things ARE getting better. These trends prove it. See, this and that are going up while that and this are going down. It IS a new day for another new beginning again! Yes, times are hard, but they don’t last forever, and this is proof they’re not.”

Meanwhile many of those who know better and know otherwise, regardless of their ethnicity or their political or religious beliefs, are shaking their heads “No, you idiots!” while stomping around in circles pulling out the remains of their hair then sighing in frustration. I confess to having done some of that myself before I reminded myself to breathe and wiggle and breathe again; then be still. Conservatives and Liberals, Socialists and Libertarians, Progressives and Regressives; across party lines you will find a rising tide of dissent, dismay, anger, and resignation. The magnitude and reality of Collapse simply overwhelms.

It does not have to be this way. Collapse is a choice. We don’t have to be automatons to our own reptilian and mammalian brains or even our subconscious. We don’t have to react with fight or flight or freeze to what’s coming at us right now. Engaging in blame games and one-upmanship is merely another way of rearranging the deck chairs on theTitanic as she sinks forever into the cold North Atlantic.

“Collapse” is a term made popular by Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist and geographer-historian who sees relationships between things, events, and systems as few do. Noted for his tedious and well-documented research as well as his deep vision, Diamond’s work is a reckoning. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it was his Collapse: Why Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed that seized the popular imagination.

Science and history provide the answers to what happened that brought civilizations to the brink of collapse. The first step seems to be our shortsighted destruction of our environment with its relentlessly uniform results: environmental collapse leads to economic collapse leads to state collapse leads to social collapse. These phases overlap during transitions, and in turn social collapse leads to further ecocide and political turmoil. In many cases food shortages lead to riots, revolution, mass migration, civil war, warlordism, and even cannibalism as government and society disintegrates and people go hungry. Cannibalism, interestingly enough, proves to be the common last resort during extended famine. It demonstrates the desperation of human beings at all levels of society. While there is a distinction between biological collapse resulting in omnicide, the death of all life locally or even planet-wide, and social collapse, where human society including culture, the state, and the economy, collapses. In several cases, however, there were local, even regional extinctions of human populations.

These scenarios repeated themselves in different societies at different times and civilizations in different areas of the planet. The outcomes of certain choices remain the same: change and adapt to survive and maybe even thrive, or the population vanished. Today, for the first time in known human history, we are a global civilization. We are united in nearly every way as a people except in our political institutions. There is, unfortunately, no democratic world government with an Earth Constitution under which we are integrated into a federated, planetary republic.

Indeed we are being pulled in two opposing directions which tear at us every time we try to move forward to address larger problems. One is the centrifugal force of fragmentation with increasing division and warfare between polarized ethnic groups, nations, and religions. I call it the dark side of neo-tribalism. It is a focus upon locality to the violent exclusion of others or the conquest of others to exploit local resources.

The other force, in spite of this warfare or rather in its own way a cause of such strife, is Empire. Call it the American Empire, preferred by mainstream academics, or more correctly the Euro-American Global Empire. Or even the New World Order, preferred by conspiracy theorists even though it was declared such by an American president at the height of victory. Whatever it’s name, it does not matter. This new form of empire mutates with intention as it positions itself to dominate everything as we speak. It is an unofficial, de facto but very real empire with no clear title. In fact it masquerades as multinational coalitions and as election-loving democracies. This imperium uses financial conquest to consolidate economic power to then influence and control political power from the international realm all the way down to local towns and counties. What makes this convoluted regime so insidious is that it's controllers seem perfectly fine to let these local states war against one another to increase their overall profit and power.

Currently it functions as a neo-feudal imperium that maximizes the national security states and tax regimes as well as the military-industrial-intelligence complex of the USA and its allies to enforce its will. The rise of corporate power and the big banks to a level we call “the Corporatocracy” backed by and controlled by an informal yet intentionally deliberative international cartel of central banks that in turn dominate politics creates what Italian dictator Benito Mussolini called “Fascism.” Except this newer, post-modern fascism allows squabbling, co-dependent nation-states the illusion of sovereignty with “democratic” elections while maintaining a vice grip on economic and financial power. Neither the calculating Empire nor the reactionary neo-tribalists take our world challenges seriously or seem to care or, worse, view the coming catastrophe as opportunities to expand power over what is left.

Meanwhile we face an almost cosmic convergence of multiple severe challenges on a planetary level. This has never before been experienced in human history as far as we know. We are fast approaching the tipping point after which it will be too late to address them before being overwhelmed. Our list, yes, yours and mine, our list of problems is long. Overpopulation, environmental, economic, financial, energy, political, health, geopolitical, wars and violence and weapons of mass destruction, fundamentalist religions, infrastructure demands, education reform, the coming Singularity with the merger of computers, robotics, AI, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, and genetics. And many more.

Even each category has a long list. Environmental problems alone include global climate disruption, toxic industrial and agricultural pollution as well as garbage, deforestation, desertification, nuclear radiation, uncontrolled urbanization, disease epidemics, overfishing, acidification of water, increased salinization of fresh water, invasive species, loss of topsoil, loss of wilderness and natural habitat, loss of natural resources, food safety and food availability, the commodification of fresh water, ecological impact of warfare, and mass extinction.

We the People of Earth can start in several places at once. First we human beings can request a shift within ourselves in how we humans think. Goodness, we are running out of time as the tsunami of catastrophe sucks the bay dry before it thunders ashore. “Request” is civil, and now, however, we must demand, yes, demand this shift of ourselves. We must leverage our individual inner worlds together to create our common outer world. Willis Harman of IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, used to call for a “global mind change” before his death.

Right now you can vote in a grassroots, online Global Referendum for a World Parliament, and a Democratic World Parliament at that. Establishing a democratic world federation won’t be easy, but many plans have already been crafted, and voting “Yes!” for such a Parliament is a good, early step. There are numerous alliances of NGOs beginning to form global cooperatives to provide innovative solutions and implement change now, such as Four Years Go. You can also “take back” your own country and local governments, too. Not to withdraw into obscure isolation, but to cast out empire builders and isolationists both. Creative people with clear views who can work together openly with others to address global problems through a united, world republic is a great place to start. It is a choice. We don’t have to give up and fall toward cannibalism and extinction. Collapse is a choice.

I don’t care if you’re a Libertarian or a Socialist. Come together to find a way to acknowledge each other and integrate individual liberties and social responsibilities. And by the way, here’s a little secret. There is no “way” to find. There is no more any “we must find a way.” You are now the mapmaker. We are all mapmakers. Together. It’s time to blaze new trails into a different wilderness, that of our very own relationships.

by William Dudley Bass

April 5, 2011

Websites to View:

Vote World Parliament: https://voteworldparliament.org/

Four Years. Go: http://www.fouryearsgo.org/

Guns, Germs, and Steel: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/index.html

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: http://www.grist.org/article/kavanagh-collapse

Derailed

2010-10-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

Derailed

My house burned down on the morning of Saturday, March 20, 2010. We lost almost everything, “we” being a post-double divorce blended family with my wife Kristina and our three daughters from prior marriages. Fortunately no one was burned or injured in anyway. Thankfully no one was killed in what the fire fighters called “a killer fire.” So far there are no lawsuits flying and we continue to work things out with our insurance company. A small number of items survived in the garage, which was the least damaged part of the house. Our two cars survived simply because they weren’t there. It was a horrible time. We moved five times through temporary housing until we settled down in a rental in early June. We were all stressed out and some of us had nightmares. One day all I had to wear was women’s clothes. We were humbled and awed by the generosity of many people including strangers. People gave us money, gift cards, clothes, food, utensils, pots and pans, and furniture. Lots of furniture. You should see our house now. It’s a crazy quilt of stuff. And it works.

This fire was an initiation. Although into what we’re still discovering. We thought we would bounce back fully by now. Oh no. People who have survived catastrophic house fires say it takes months, even years to get over the losses. Thank goodness it was in Washington State in the American Pacific Northwest and not in a remote place or an impoverished, war-torn developing country. We have much to be grateful for. And we are grateful. We’ve maintained our sense of humor, though sometimes it’s tough. People were very generous in many ways. It all felt so humbling to allow ourselves to receive after being such givers in the past.

My oldest daughter had celebrated her 16th birthday the night before and had a number of girl friends over for a slumber party. Eight of them were still home with her when they noticed smoke rolling out from the heat vents and up from the stairs below. My wife and I had just left about 11:00 am to run errands; she to the vet and me to pick up the two youngest girls from their own sleepover parties elsewhere. At first the teenagers thought it must be one of them burning something on the stove. But no, no one was even boiling water for tea. The stove was turned off.

Thick, toxic smoke rapidly filled the house. These kids couldn’t even get out the front door. So they dashed out to the back deck almost one story up and jumped off into ferns and bushes. Many of them were in underwear and tee shirts or in pajamas.

The fire was catastrophic. The whole structure was in flames in less than a half-hour. It was a beautiful, model solar energy home designed and built by local but now-deceased architects. Their two sons owned it. It was a two-story structure almost 4,000 square feet built on the edge of a bluff looking out down a long, wooded ravine toward the Salish Sea and the Olympic Mountains beyond. After losing our other two homes in the Recession we had hoped to eventually buy this house. Of course, that didn’t, couldn’t happen.

From a home office point of view our library was destroyed. Our computers were melted. A friend of mine did extract the hard drives from 3 of them and managed to save most of the data. I cracked open my melted Nikon, extracted the memory card, and happily discovered almost 800 photos on there. Now we back up “into the Cloud.” We lost almost a half-million dollars of personal possessions. Much of that were items Kristina and I had purchased over the years, but most of it was the accumulated wealth of generations from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and many aunts and uncles and even great-aunts and uncles. A lavish but old Buddhist shrine from my wife’s Japanese side of the family vanished in the fire. Photography was a serious hobby of mine, so most of my photographs and slides, tens of many thousands of them, are gone forever. Baby books, mine, my parents, and those of my children, gone forever. High school and college yearbooks, gone forever. I was also the family historian, so I’d accumulated boxes and boxes of archives from family members back East. Miraculously some survived, such as the contents of the old Bass Family Bible Box, but most of these papers disappeared in the flames and smoke forever.

Our family was woefully underinsured. It was complicated by overlapping real estate transitions and by misleading information from a particular agent in over his head. We'll probably just receive a tiny fraction of the true value of what we lost after the insurance company depreciates and devalues our possessions. Certain staff have been kind and generous in serving us and it is not enough. I encourage everyone to video record all your possessions and store it offsite. Don't waste time writing down everything. It'll take forever and you won't do it.

We are still recovering. And still reeling from prior disasters. Furthermore, the aggregate of international companies my wife and I once worked for as self-employed independent contractors crashed in the recession back in late 2007-early 2008. Not only did we lost our high-paying positions, but to our horror all our savings and investments in this venture. We were shocked to discover that two men high up in the network allegedly embezzled almost two billion dollars from over 3,000 people. Greed got the better hand within an alternative structure designed to allow middle and working class families to pool resources to gain access to sophisticated financial structures. We were all defrauded. Including those of us who worked there. It was outrageous, embarrassing, and gut wrenching.

These two monsters are now in jail, but the money seems gone. We don’t know if we’ll ever see any of it again. The dominoes tumbled. We were unable to find high-paying positions although I did pick up a part-time retail job and some small free lance writing projects. Kristina worked as a business coach and consultant, but it was very intermittent. As our home near Lake Wenatchee slid into foreclosure and then our home in North Seattle, we entered into a tedious short-sale process that finally completed this August of 2010. We moved to Edmonds, then the fire happened that Saturday morning. We felt we were drowning.

The fire was estimated to be at least 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit at times because the nails remain straight. This meant the flames were so hot it burned the wood right off the nails faster than the nails could sag beneath the weight of burning wood. Investigators determined it most likely appeared to have been faulty wires in the wall downstairs in my oldest daughter’s bedroom or maybe the wires from an outlet in the same wall. Looked as if old aluminum wires separated from copper, they arced, sparked, and set the wood afire. The lack of sheetrock facilitated the spread of the flames. Nor did the fire alarms go off at first as the smoke rolled out. The fire fighters and the investigators mused that if it had happened in the middle of the night there certainly would’ve been fatalities. And I’m sure I would have been one of them as it would’ve been my nature to rush into the fire and fight it. But the toxic smoke would’ve taken us out first, it was explained to us.

As it was it took over 30 firefighters from Edmonds, Lynnwood, Mukilteo, and maybe Shoreline responding to a two-alarm fire. We were only there 3 months.

The fire was the latest in a series of crushing hammer blows to our family. We move on anyway. In working with a therapist and counselor we became familiar with the term “derailment.” We were derailed by the loss of our jobs, our savings, our homes, and especially by that fire and the constant moving around afterwards. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Now my wife's mother is moving into our temporary rental with us. The bank foreclosed on her condo, declined the offers from a short-sale attempt, and got zero offers at an auction. My mother-in-law had once retired early, thrived on a frugal lifestyle, and was to a degree financially free. Yet with the loss of her funds in the same embezzlement that hit us she found herself looking for work with little success and is now in dire straights. So another BAM! And we have to maintain our wits about us, laugh at all the funny things around in, appreciate our friends and family, and remember that our glasses are at least half-full and certainly not empty.

My apologies for the impact all of this has had on my blogging here. It’s taking me for longer to get back up on my feet than I thought. I also have a lot of train track to rebuild before even getting back on it, too. It’s going to take time. We have plenty of that. We hope. There’s much to do, much to be grateful for, much to still laugh about, life to live for with all its work and play. Aye, indeed, life goes on for us the living. Thank you.

William Dudley Bass

October 1, 2010

* This was jointly published on the author's autobiographical blog "Cultivate and Harvest."

Grassroots Global Democracy On-Line: Vote “Yes” for World Parliament Now

2010-01-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

Almost a year after I first urged people to vote in the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government, humanity continues to blunder toward global collapse where worse case scenarios are fast becoming the most likely scenarios. Those who sound the warnings may as well be shouting into the hurricane for even more seem eager to ignore and deny the mountainside of complex troubles avalanching down upon us.

Those who are aware wonder what more can they do if anything. Many struggle alone or in small groups in the cause of their choices, large organizations have gone deep to stay alive but focus upon only one cause, with much of their energy diverted to fundraising, while the rest of us feel resigned, cynical perhaps, apathetic, demoralized, even depressed. I call this the “whatever syndrome,” as in when you tell someone that this time the sky really is falling or the wolves are actually killing and eating the sheep they just shrug their shoulders, mumble “Whatever,” and go back to doing whatever they happen to be doing. “Whatever,” right?

Folks, there IS something positive each one of us can do.

Vote “Yes!” for a Democratic World Parliament. And do it now. I voted “Yes.” Tell others to do it, too. Go to the website http://www.voteworldparliament.org and vote.

This is a grassroots, planetary movement. It is a worldwide internet-based voting via global referendum. You can find out more about it at its companion website http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com.

A recent book called Rescue Plan for Planet Earth: Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum advocates for the wisdom and practicality of building a unified planetary democracy. The author is Jim Stark of Canada. He lives in rural Quebec and served as a global anti-nuclear weapons activist during the Cold War.

His is a brilliant book. I have long struggled without success over what we can do to work with nation-state regimes, stateless nations, the UN and the Bretton Woods Three, or bypass all of them in some local-global grassroots initiative. Established institutions are inherently resistant to overtly surrendering power. Mr. Stark comes up with a brilliantly simple answer to a complex problem. The answer is to leverage telecommunications technology including the Internet as well as mail-in paper ballots from across Earth to launch, maintain, and sustain a Global Referendum for planetary democracy.

Jim Stark throws down a challenge for all of us, and it is a challenge any one of us capable adults can answer. Vote. Yes, vote. His Global Referendum is a way to involve all of us, even if we disagree with it.

Vote World Parliament is an NGO, a non-governmental organization, active in the pursuit and creation of transparent, democratic world government. While some people quibble over the wording of its ballot proposition as it currently exists, it is simple and direct. The ballot proposition asks:

“Do you support the creation of a directly-elected, representative and democratic world parliament that is authorized to legislate on global issues?”

That is it: “Yes” or “No.”

VWP works in alliance with WATUN, the World Alliance to Transform the United Nations as well as other global democracy NGOS and activists. Even though this grass-roots initiative seeks to bypass the UN, there are still sizable contingents who seek to radically reform what we already have.

Until recently VWP used to be called Vote World Government, short for Vote Democratic World Government. The name change, precipitated by coalition building with other pro-global democracy NGOs, stemmed largely in part from the unusually extreme fear and negativity wrapped around the term “world government.” The majority of Earth’s democracies maintain a parliamentary system, and while a world congress is clearly possible it was decided to go with the term “parliament.” Too many world citizens associated the term “world government” – even when preceded by the world “democratic” – with world dictatorship, far-rightwing conspiracy theories, and global empire. So many people, even if they laugh at the far-right wing conspiracy kooks, are still leery of the term “world government,” fear global tyranny, and view the term “One World Government” as scary and ominous.

The reality of the matter is that our alternative to Democratic World Government is planetwide collapse with all the horrors that entails or a worldwide empire. And we do have a world empire in the making right under our noses, the defacto Euro-American Global Empire dominated by the financial elite and their allies including the international bank cartels and the Corporatocracy. The emphasis of that neo-imperium is local-regional-national-global financial domination followed by economic domination followed by police and military domination with overt control of the political process, the most obvious process, being the last to achieve. The recent United States Supreme Court decision reinforcing the power of organizations including the principle of corporate personhood is a recent significant step in this direction.

At any rate, it was felt “world government” turned people off but “world parliament” proved enrolling. In addition getting an Earth Parliament or Congress established would be another crucial step in the creation of a true Democratic World Government. It is clear that such an enormous undertaking will take many steps even with the mountain coming down upon us.

I also take issue with assuming the best form of democratic government is going to be a European-style parliamentary form vs. the American three-way checks and balances system. I myself have not made up my mind which would be best for humanity. Both systems have their pros and cons. It would be best to leave that up to wisdom councils to sort out and a planetary constitutional convention followed by another referendum on that. I would imagine the best and brightest among us to evolve something even more evolved than what we have now. This is especially pertinent as we have experienced the paralysis and fragmentation inherent in parliamentary systems and the abuses and creeping “stealth” despotism that mar the American system. Jim Stark is upfront, of course, as favoring the Canadian system, which is indeed one of the better ones on Earth, as he is Canadian and thus more familiar with it. Nor is the fundamental issue of the people taking public control of the Money Power not addressed in these gatherings. Such an important economic and financial issue must be addressed. For now, however, let’s vote in this referendum! Let’s focus one step at a time and help build our Democratic World Parliament. We can move on from there.

These are all mere quibbles, however, quibbles. The greater priority is to get this referendum going worldwide. And that means starting locally.

Many will oppose us from all directions. There are those who desire world government alright, but are working hard to create a financial and political planetary dictatorship. There are racists, religious fundamentalists, nationalists, and those in the Corporatocracy and the military-industrial-intelligence complex who will oppose democratic world government as a threat to their power. There are the quasi-libertarian conspiracy theory kooks who recognize the above menaces as real, which they are, but collapse every move toward a democratic world federation as part of the One World Government conspiracy. These me-firsters make no distinction between the forces of what author/activist David Korten calls Global Empire and Earth Community. Instead these freedom-without-responsibility types denigrate concepts of universal human rights and universal social responsibility. There will be those who actually support the concept of Democratic World Government but may vote “No” because they don’t like parliaments. Come on, people!

There are also the capitalists who still cling to illusions of a free and unregulated marketplace and the communists who cling to the dictatorship of the proletariat as central state control who will oppose this. And there are the Anarchists who naively believe in no government or hierarchy at all but loose networks of individuals and neighborhoods cooperating together without competition and violence. I would imagine, however, that Jim Stark is right in his statistics-based assumption the majority of human beings would prefer a transparent, democracy world government of liberty, peace, health, and prosperity. And if the chance to vote in favor of such occurred most would vote “Yes.”

Let us set aside our differences to work together now. One step at a time, breathing as we go.

This Global Referendum to vote for a democratic world government is hands-down the best, most effective tool we have to leverage people and technology around the world in service of Earth and humanity. So go vote, and I encourage all of you to vote “Yes!”

Again, go here and vote: www.voteworldparliament.org and declare yourself for Democratic World Parliament that can legislate on global issues and help us meet our planetary challenges as one politically-united species. And join me in thanking Jim Stark and his team for such a great book, a brilliant concept, and a hands-on nuts-and-bolts approach to implement their vision. Jim Stark and all of you at Vote World Parliament, thank you.

William Dudley Bass
Friday, January 29, 2010

Sources:

Bass, William Dudley. “Vote Yes! For Democratic World Government,” At the Brink with William Dudley Bass. Seattle, WA: 2008. http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2009/03/vote-yes-for-democratic-world.html

Stark, Jim. Rescue Plan for Planet Earth: Democratic World Government through a
Global Referendum. Toronto, Canada: The Key Publishing House, 2008.

Vote World Parliament, www.voteworldparliament.org

WATUN, http://transformun.org

Faith vs. Data vs. What’s Really Important Here

2010-01-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

A recent blog post by master blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin highlighted the tension between faith and data. First, allow me to distinguish between those two words.

I define “faith” as a belief in something without any evidence and often in the face of evidence to the contrary. Boiled down having faith is the desire to believe. And humans want to believe what they wish to be true.

Sometimes faith is a negative. Witness, for example, all the bloodshed committed and endured in the name of religions, notorious for demanding faith in many things for which there is no empirical evidence and with each religion claiming competing and opposing “truths” for faiths at odds with each other. Religious institutions demand faith from their followers.

And yet faith is what drives people to push on through great hardship and challenge to ultimately succeed. Faith inspires people to attempt and actually achieve amazing things often in the face of ridicule, harassment, even “proof” held up and waved in their faces to demonstrate their foolhardiness. People with such faith often seem to have the last laugh, though. And let us remember the many millions sacrificed, enslaved, tortured, murdered, injured, emotionally exploited, and financially manipulated in the name of religious faith. And, too, that faith propels people to rise above such horrors. Without faith people become resigned, cynical, and apathetic. They become embittered and give up or lash out.

“Data,” on the other hand, is evidence organized into information. All information is composed of data. Sometimes that data is clearly true and sometimes it’s clearly false and yet at other times it’s unclear, confusing, or at best anecdotal. As evidence, however, data and the information derived from it are held up as “proof.” Empirical evidence is evidence that is clearly, objectively, and quantifiably measured and holds up to scrutiny and testing especially via scientific, mathematical processes. In today’s Information Age, however, the sheer avalanche of data feels like too much to handle.

“Data crowds out faith,” blogs Mr. Godin. And yet, he says, without such data people won’t believe. Without anything to go on they won’t believe anything, or rather, they use that as an excuse not to believe something which challenges their current beliefs. Yet too much data overwhelms. Too much information becomes a flood that drowns out all listening. People want to run away from it. I’ve certainly been guilty of bringing forth a mountain of data to back up my arguments, and I’ve also been guilty of taking great leaps of faith without much data and sometimes even in spite of data.

The “real mission,” as Seth Godin sees it is “emotional connection.” That’s what’s really important here.

The bottom line is that people will believe whatever they want to believe regardless of what is put in front of them. It does not matter if the issue is sales and marketing, political and economic policy, historical controversies, religious doctrines, UFOs, ghosts, God, whatever. People may be influenced and manipulated in their belief structures, and ultimately they believe whatever they want. A successful belief is not based upon purported facts and figures or even faith. A successful belief is based upon the strength and power of the emotional connection between the person and the idea they choose to believe in enough to embrace. And when entire populations get caught up in that emotional connection to a belief critical mass occurs for good or evil. On of my history professors from Hampden-Sydney College used to say to us that “what people believed happened in history is often more important than what actually occurred.” Entire nations will make choices and take action based upon belief in various histories that later turn out to be false. It’s the emotional connection to any belief, even a false belief unsupported by the facts, that so drives a people into action.

Comments regarding President Barack Obama by Joe Klein in the recent issue of Time caught my eye. Obama, despite his charismatic oratory, is a cerebral “loner” away from the public pulpit. Klein noted that two other “arid” intellectuals who were elected president, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, were each ousted after one term and followed by “world-class emoters.” Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were famous for their folksy ability to reach out and connect with not just the masses but with those in private meetings. Both were able to reach out across party lines to hold the center together. The American people threw out a Democrat and a Republican who were arid loners despite their intelligence and voted in a Republican and a Democrat, respectively, who manifested and displayed empathy and high emotional intelligence. Both Reagan and Clinton were reelected.

The best salespeople are those who enroll others to believe in products and services enough to buy them. As my former father-in-law, a highly successful salesman and former fighter pilot, once told me, “People buy what people want.” When I pointed out that advertising uses psychology to manipulate people to consume what they think they want, he merely shrugged his shoulders and stated again that ultimately “people buy what people want.”

As critical as health care reform and addressing catastrophic climate change are, just to name two pressing problems, President Obama is faced with an enormous problem: many Americans intellectually understand these are important issues, but they don’t care. They really don’t care. They don’t have an emotional connection to those problems. In fact the way American voters see their public servants addressing those issues actually repels them. The mangling of health care reform by both Democrats and Republicans particularly dismays Americans.

Without emotional connection the deepest faith and the most impressive spreadsheet or encyclopedia or scientific research or PowerPoint presentation means nothing. The same can be said for socio-political movements and their champions as well as for companies and their sales reps.

Emotions have often been ridiculed. Without mastering how to relate to one’s fellow human beings, however, even the mightiest fall.

William Dudley Bass
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Sources:

Klein, Joe. “Now What? Hitting the Reset Button/Starting Over,” Time. Vol. 175, No. 4, February 1, 2010: 22-29. http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1955401,00.html

Godin, Seth. “Too much data leads to not enough belief,” Seth’s Blog. January 21, 2010. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/too-much-data-leads-to-not-enough-belief.html

Corporate Power in a Planetary Democracy

2010-01-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

Democracy lost on January 21, 2010. It is a significant loss in the on-going war (let’s cut to the chase here folks, this ain’t “tension” between factions within a national democracy; it’s a war for global domination between those favoring American democracy and the transnational corporate elite). The United States Supreme Court rule 5-4 in favor of Big Business and the financial elite. The Corporatocracy won another round in its efforts to not just influence but dominate the government of the most powerful nation-state on the planet. Little noticed in the outcry is that labor unions also achieved a victory, although unions have been in decline for decades now and are dwarfed by the financial elite.

This ruling gives more power to the principle known as “corporate personhood.” Corporations are created by human beings. They outlive people, often influence and dominate society at all levels from local neighborhoods to international, and are composed of people from numerous nation-states who are often not citizens of the countries in which corporate power is wielded. Corporate personhood is a fiction made real as the result of abuses by a California court in a 1880s dispute between local county and state governments versus the transcontinental railroad industry. The courts were sympathetic to the railroad barons and their corporations; a deliberate misreading of the records occurred after the Court reporter, a former railway executive, inserted his own pro-railroad comments into the record. This led to the U.S. Supreme Court upholding corporate personhood on behalf of the railroads in 1886. This success by Big Business, the Big Banks that loan money to and thus control Big Business, and their allies in Government achieved momentum over years and decades until the current Supreme Court again ruled in favor of corporate personhood.

The danger here is that organizations now have the same rights as the human beings who created them. Specifically, corporations (and labor unions, too, and indeed any organization) now have a legal right to free speech and this entails not just advertising and marketing on behalf of political candidates but donating money to various political parties and their candidates. Prodigious amounts of money. Human beings limit their personal financial structures for a reason. It was John D. Rockefeller, one of the iconic titans during the transition from “Big Business” to what we today call the Corporatocracy who said “Own nothing, control everything.” The wealthy as well as any middle class businessperson who can do so take advantage of laws favorable to the financial elite to shield their wealth as well as personal liability behind corporate structures.

Armed with such “rights” granted by the Supreme Court compounding a 19th Century error, corporations can now spend huge amounts of money to buy or buy off candidates for political office as well as elected officials. Candidates favored by the Corporacrats will have the financial support to make winning an election far more likely. Candidates not favored can be intimidated into line. Corporate control of the media further skewers the politics. Of course, we don’t even mention the potential in an otherwise developed nation for bribery, graft, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption here, corruption often associated with developing nations where transnational corporations often wield more power than governments. Nor have we considered corporate corruption of non-elected or appointed officials and other government employees. This will impact how other governments and businesses in other countries engage with the United States. Politicians, even those aspiring to “do good” and implement reforms will be reduced to dogs dancing for the biggest corporate hand-outs. The revolving doors between corporations, government, the military-industrial-intelligence complex, research institutes, big banks, and secret societies will spin easier and faster. And maybe even spin at a more relaxed pace.

My stand is this: Only humans have rights, not their organizations. No organization is to have the same rights as individual human beings. All governments, NGOs, corporations, unions, banks, clubs, even the marketplace operate at the discretion of people, not the other way around. Healthy businesses offer many wonderful services and help us generate wealth, but they have no business having the same constitutional rights originally reserved for their human creators.

It is clear, too, that more than ever democratic world government is required in the face of the complex challenges inundating our fragmented species. In fact, a global grass roots effort to by-pass both the failed United Nations and the emerging global empire and help establish a Democratic World Parliament is gaining momentum. Go to http://voteworldparliament.org/ and vote.

It is also clear that a constitutional, democratic, federal, planetary republic alone is not enough. Or rather, building such a government is not enough. We must have an integral, democratic capitalism that is sustainable, encourages entrepreneurship, and is socially and environmentally responsible. These are enormous challenges we face and face as a species, not merely any one nation-state.

For now, a perfect place to start, especially as an American voter is to go to and join http://www.movetoamend.org/ and support them. You can join Facebook and become a member of “Abolish Corporate Personhood Now.” If you are a citizen of any other country, you can do whatever you can to reduce control of your communities by transnational corporations and increase democracy in your governments and businesses. All can certainly vote for a Democratic World Parliament. In addition, large numbers of people working in and for corporations are basically good people. You know who you are. You have the power to help all of us change things, reclaim democracy, and help corporations focus on what they were originally designed to do: generate economic abundance and financial wealth.

Finally, I quote below from my own book in progress, We the People of Earth:

· “Corporations are legal business structures created by human beings. Corporations are not persons and do not and shall not have the same rights as individual human beings. Corporations exist by privilege and operate in the marketplace within the law. Human beings have the right to form corporations and other business entities. People have the right to work and a right to conduct business and generate money within the framework of law, they have the right to protect legally acquired assets with corporate structures, but their corporate creations themselves have no such rights. Any law in any nation-state including both international and local jurisdictions that grant corporations the same rights as human beings and granting corporations the status of personhood shall be abolished as we transition into a transparent, democratic planetary republic.”

William Dudley Bass
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Global Disaster Response to Haitian Earthquake a Prelude to Moves toward Unification?

2010-01-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

The Indian Ocean and Asian earthquake and tsunami of December 2004, which claimed about 230,000 lives and probably more from the East African coast to the Indian subcontinent to Indonesia and Thailand, caused the entire planet to vibrate. It also elicited the first truly global response to a humanitarian disaster. We even saw two former American presidents of opposing political parties, George H. W. Bush the Republican and Bill Clinton the Democrat, working together and working together as friends to help lead the relief and reconstruction efforts. The May 2008 Typhoon Nargis disaster in Myanmar/Burma was a potential international aid response but was thwarted by the military junta in power. There were and have been other significant disasters, many that did elicit aid from different countries responding to a crisis in another, including famines, but nothing of the scale of the global response to the 2004 tsunami.

In Haiti in the wake of the devastating January 2010 earthquake we see it again and in a more evolved fashion. The response to the quake was immediate, far more immediate by the United States, for example, than it’s response to its own 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. In fact strong aftershocks continue as I write. Our response to Haiti’s crisis is beyond international; it is global. Fellow human beings from around the planet have rallied to support their own in a small nation-state ravaged even before the giant quake by decades of poverty, dictatorship, coups and low-level civil wars, military occupation, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction. This planet-wide response is just beginning to be noticed as we are still in the thick of it all. Reasons for the rapid and global response range from the ease of new technology to U.S. President Obama’s charisma and decisiveness to geographical ease of access (as opposed to the difficulties of helping remote areas of conflict-addled Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and China in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.)

The Haitian earthquake is catastrophic and heart wrenching. The outpouring of aid is almost as overwhelming in its generosity and scale. Of course, controversies abound. Concerns are expressed about the militarization of aid, the intervention of American armed forces, outside exploitation by transnational corporations to rebuild Haiti on their terms instead of Haitian ideals, how to address environmental ruin, how to address political, drug, and gang violence and endemic corruption, and on and on. There is also infighting between different organizations. These are legitimate concerns even as much good is being done right now by some of the organizations others are denouncing. For the most part relief efforts appear to be running as smoothly as possible considering the horrendous challenges amid collapsed infrastructure and mounting death, injury, and disease tolls. It seems horror unites us in a crisis.

Many of the political, military, economic, and environmental issues raised in the wake of the Haitian earthquake would be non-issues if we had an established, democratic world government with an integral democratic capitalist economic system. Instead of nation-states and big corporations and lawless gangs jostling for power and influence we would have one unified planetary government responding with unified institutions all under world law. We would have an integrated global response to such a calamity just as China or America respond internally to their own local or regional disasters. We would be able as a democratic world government to go into areas that would otherwise be torn by warfare between countries, tribes, and religious groups. And as a planet with unified economic and financial systems based upon principles of integral, democratic, sustainable capitalism that are social and environmental responsible we would minimize any corporate exploitation or local corruption.

In Haiti, too, we have the collapse of yet another so-called “independent” nation-state. As a unified, democratic, federal planetary republic where we build interdependence that is transparent and effective. Of course, we have a long ways to go to achieve those goals. And more disasters will strike and often strike without warning. The world-wide self-awareness of global unity that stems from first the Indian Ocean tsunami and now the Haitian earthquake are promising steps on the way to achieve democratic world government.

William Dudley Bass
January 21, 2010

© by William Dudley Bass

Will Space Exploration Expedite the Unification of Earth?

2009-10-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

The less than two hundred human nation-states of Planet Earth appear doomed to endless squabbling and bloodshed despite grand proclamations of international cooperation. And who can blame them? Our problems feel too vast and overwhelming for the average person including our politicians to understand. It is easier to go to war and kill each other. It is easier to pollute our environment. It is easier to bail out our faux economy with made-up money. It is easier to go shopping, buy shoes for the kids, and get drunk while watching the latest celebrity scandals on television. Nuclear disarmament in an age of terrorism? Biological warfare? Global warming and climate change? Global climate disruption? Global warming leading to ice ages? Fundamentalism and extremism on the rise in most religions? Poverty? Disease pandemics, hunger, bigotry and discrimination, pollution, deforestation, desertification, overpopulation and mass extinction of species along with weapons of mass destruction freak us out. What are we to do?

Go to Mars.

Explore the Solar System.

Yes. Launch probes beyond the Kuiper Belt toward the nearest stars. Build colonies out in space, on the Moon, and on Planet Mars. Prepare to study exobiology on Earth-like planets outside our Solar System. The current issue of The Christian Science Monitor: A Weekly Review of Global News & Ideas features on the cover an American rocket blasting off into the title “SPACE: Where Next? Why Now?” followed by the heading of a collective of articles entitled “Star Trek: This Generation.”

Peter Potts, staff writer for the Monitor, wrote “as exploration of space becomes increasingly expensive, many experts around the world think we have reached a hinge moment in history when joint ventures are the best – and perhaps only – way to undertake distant exploration, both manned and unmanned, of the cosmos.” Peter Potts goes on to give voice for many who “now believe it’s time for true collaboration….to push mankind to the next threshold of space exploration and to forge a new spirit of cooperation among nations. In other words, a sort of Star Trek Starfleet Command.”

Packing a doomsday punch, Potts quotes space historians Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy who write “An important bloc of the space community believes that humanity has a finite period of time to colonize other worlds before conditions on Earth no longer sustain human migration.” Folks, we are talking about the survival of our species and perhaps of Earth life itself … as we know it. This ain’t a disaster flick like the upcoming “2012.”

The challenges are many to overcome. National pride, suspicion between the Europeans and the Americans on one side and the Chinese on the other, the militarization of space with to us futuristic weaponry, funding amid roiling economic turmoil and an epic global recession, the spread of atomic weapons and ballistic missile technologies, and incessant warfare on the ground.

It is time, however, past time, to put aside our national, ethnic, and religious differences in the name of planetary unity and integration. Only a world government with world law can successfully address the next stages of world peace with space exploration and colonization. Science fiction including Star Trek is full of interstellar empires. Instead of these tyrannies let us remember the United Federation of Planets. Let us take a stand this world government, our world government shall be a constitutional, democratic republic and not a dictatorship or worse, a dictatorship cloaked as democracy. Vote “Yes!” in the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government at www.voteworldgovernment.org.

Space exploration gives humanity a singularity of purpose we can all grasp amid the magnitude of scientific evidence that our global civilization releasing so much carbon will negatively change the next 100,000 years of Earth’s climate.

The bottom line is world government of one kind or another is likely to be established if humanity survives. Let’s determine this government is a democratic world government. Or survival isn’t worth it.

William Dudley Bass
October 23, 2009

Sources

Archer, David. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Potts, Peter. “Star Trek: This Generation.” The Christian Science Monitor: A Weekly Review of Global News & Ideas. Volume 101/Issue 113, October 25, 2009: 13 – 18.

The Challenges of Global Demilitarization

2009-10-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview in Time Magazine, Kofi Anan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, was asked whether or not “the U.N. should be given the authority to intervene militarily in situations like Darfur.”

“I’m not sure the member states are ready to give the U.N. a standing army….It’s a question of will. And I don’t think you will see a U.N. army,” Mr. Anan replied.

As local crises converge into global crises and threaten to overwhelm us, as the movement to create a democratic world government continues to move forward, national and ethnic military forces will remain perhaps the greatest obstacle to such a government. There exist today a number of different global citizens and democratic world government parties, alliances, coalitions, and institutes. One of the most prominent is the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy, which was founded in 1947 in Switzerland but is now headquartered in New York City across from the U.N. building. There’s WATUN, the World Alliance to Transform the United Nations. There is even the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government where any citizen on the planet can vote in favor of establishing a representative, democratic world government (click on the link below in “Sources” and vote).

International laws and courts are in existence and others have been proposed. Constitutions for world governments of one kind or another have been written or proposed. Various debates have gone on for years over what structure should a world democratic government take. For example, would a European-style parliament or an American-style tripartite system of checks and balances be best for a united Earth? Would the global legislature be bicameral or tricameral? What role would a Supreme World Court have? Would each current nation-state become a state or province of the world, or would boundaries be redrawn to better reflect regional geography and local ethnicity? Would a democratic world government be a world federation of separate republics or a single federated world republic? These are important questions, but perhaps we put the cart before the horse here.

A number of leaders from around the world have recognized the benefits of democratic world government from scientists such as Albert Einstein to former U.S. presidents such as Harry Truman to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The latest world leader calling for global cooperation to address planet-wide crises is U.S. President Barack Obama. But not even Kofi Anan believes humanity is ready for standing U.N. armed forces. Even in an age of squabbling co-dependent nation-states and stateless-nations, the concept of national sovereignty, regardless of how archaic and obsolete it has become, still reigns supreme. It is a supreme illusion made even more ironic as so many groups of people who are dependent upon each other are so quick to kill and maim each other as global catastrophes loom.

To go further than Mr. Anan’s observation, how will we the citizens of Earth disarm our various militaries? What steps shall we take? There are almost two hundred armed forces from the various nation-states in addition to many thousands of armed gangs, paramilitaries, ethnic militias, religious militias, private militias, private security contract (mercenary) companies, militarized police and intelligence forces, rebel armies, secessionist armies, and terrorist groups. It will take a tremendous, almost unimaginable level of trust for a nation-state to stand down and demobilize their armed forces. A small nation may feel gobbled up by the larger ones, and the larger ones gobbled up by a swarm of smaller ones. For world powers with de facto empires such as the United States, the European Union, Russia, and China it will require a leap of faith of not just their leaders but also their citizens.

Certainly over long periods of time as the forces of globalization and unification continue to move forward with both positive and negative results, the many different nations of Earth will learn to cooperate together, work out disputes peacefully, and grow accustomed to living together in a federated world republic. The 13 original British colonies in America did, and eventually after several wars with themselves and their neighbors also learned to live peacefully with Canada, Mexico, and even Cuba despite many differences. Even more remarkably is the rise of the European Union after centuries of barbaric warfare.

Today the international focus is on the spread of nuclear weapons. The current nuclear powers struggle with the temptation to produce more weapons while attempting to gradually destroy their stockpiles without sacrificing a sense of security. Challenges arise with developing nations with unstable regimes acquiring atomic weapons such as North Korea and Iran. Serious concerns exist regarding India and Pakistan and the fact by sharing a common border negates any chance of stopping a nuclear launch. Israel has a stable government, unlike Iran, but keeps its nuclear weapons secret. Israel feels its very existence so at stake it is feared it may be prone to use those weapons. Other nations feel the need to catch up and hold their neighbors at bay, if not with nuclear weapons then certainly with mass chemical and biological weapons. A corresponding development is the spread of ballistic missile technologies and the beginnings of robotic and space-based weapons. And, of course, terrorists from the right and the left seem eager to get their hands on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

In addition to weapons of mass destruction, we have the mass proliferation of guns, bombs, and ammunition. We have naval, amphibious, and air forces as well with massive arsenals of weapons. Our armies have tanks, artillery and batteries of rockets. So with the advocacy for global referendums with talk of world federalist meetings and world constitutions what else can we do? What do we really want? And what is our next step?

First, local, regional, national, and world-wide education is necessary to bring people’s awareness to the necessity for a democratic world government to 1) address our converging global challenges that threaten us with extinction, and 2) preempt a global dictatorship and empire in the making with the additional challenge of realizing that the so-called “One World Government” or “New World Order” would most likely be a neo-fascist, corporatocratic regime cloaked in the trappings of democracy, such as we saw happening in America under Bush-Cheney.

As part of this educational process people can be engaged as citizens in the Global Referendum for a Democratic World Government. Yes, we need a Constitution for We the People of Earth. We can have global referendums on that issue, too. We can vote yes, we want such a Constitution, and yes, we want to send delegates there to represent the many nations of Earth and design the architecture of a constitutional world democracy. We want to vote on accepting that Constitution. Engaging the average men and women around the planet in this manner furthers their education on the issue and awareness of the necessity for planetary unification and democracy. It instills civic pride and a sense of we are really all one people on one planet.

When the time comes for actual integration of the nation-states into a democratic world federation, two principles must be reiterated: 1) civilian control of the military and 2) public control of the money power.

Integration and unification will take time even after a world democratic regime is established. We will advance in stages. Perhaps not every nation-state will join right away or they may join in different degrees if we allow a wait-and-see approach. For example, there can be a mutual, simultaneous surrender of arms and demobilization of personnel by percentages among all the member nation-states. Perhaps the first reduction of military forces is by 10% to demonstrate good faith then by another 25% across the board. Smaller militaries will be phased out faster than larger militaries.

Integration of individuals from the armed forces of many nations into unified units will also facilitate this process. An issue here will be language and location of bases with ethnic sensitivity. For example one would not place a unit composed predominantly of Indian Hindus in a predominantly Pakistani Muslim area, but one could put Swedish or Brazilian or Kenyan forces there. Eventually troops may be so mixed around the planet that over time such issues become non-issues.

After a democratic world government is established with the acknowledgement that actual integration and unification will take time, years even, will we even want or need planetary military forces? Crime and terrorism may well persist indefinitely, and that can be handled by police forces and intelligence agencies working in concert. There may well be rebellions. It is widely believed, however, that under a democratic world government where all people are equally represented and disputes peacefully arbited in courts of law two things are likely to occur. One is that wars between nation-states with corresponding use (waste) of resources toward military build-ups will cease and become nonexistent. The other is that ethnic wars and secessionist wars for autonomy or independence will also cease as all people will be represented upon an interdependent and unified democratic world. There will be no longer any point as all ethnic groups and stateless-nations will be free within a constitutional democratic federation subject to representative republican government, local-global cooperation, and the rule of law.

So after a legally established and defined period of time after planetary unification begins, say 5, 10 or even 25 years after reunification all military forces are to be disbanded or converted to police and peacekeeping forces or perhaps pioneering space exploration and settlement. Demobilizing an integrated global military force will also take time and may well be best to accomplish in phases. Perhaps a small core volunteer force would be maintained.

The risk, of course, in getting rid of our military is it leaves all humanity defenseless in the face of any military assault from extraterrestrial alien forces from other worlds. At first this seems laughable as we have not experienced such an invasion in our known history. Yet, let’s face reality here, folks. Our scientific knowledge of the Multiverse continues to expand with vast numbers of galaxies, stars, and planets including Earth-like planets coming into our observable and measurable awareness. We now realize the probability of life existing elsewhere other than on Earth is well over 100% and that the probability of intelligent life developing civilizations is also quite high. Some may be so far advanced beyond us here on Earth that we would be to them as ants to us. And we may also encounter civilizations not as advanced as ours that we may end up destroying as the Spanish Empire destroyed the Aztec and Incan Empires. Note the use of the term probability not possibility. The unresolved issue of UFOs is also not to be dismissed as all hoaxes and nonsense as there have been too many anomalous events involving too many people and credible people at that. It would be dangerous and foolish to assume that simply because an alien civilization would be both highly advanced and non-human that it would automatically be peaceful even pacifist. Obviously, let’s hope interplanetary and interstellar wars remain the realm of science fiction, and…how wise would it be for humanity to be prepared for hostile encounters with intelligent beings from other worlds? In distinguishing probability from speculation what best serves the interests of humanity here on Earth?

Perhaps one of the biggest concerns I have for global democracy, a concern I’ve heard echoed elsewhere, is while world government of any kind is probably going to happen like it or not, a democratic world government will take even longer to establish. Even worse, people have trouble conceptualizing global issues and grasping how urgent matters actually are. We are in a serious situation. No one really wants to confront all of our problems as they merge together. We can barely handle one of these challenges. We may be overwhelmed into a breakdown of civilization worldwide or worse, a mass die-off or even extinction. We may be forced to accept a one world dictatorship imposed upon us in the wake of one crisis after another, or wait too long till the worst arrives and then it will be too late.

Debating a deliberate phased drawdown of armed forces and their weapons that would in turn allow the nations of the world to peacefully integrate themselves into a united republic may end up being nothing more than a rearranging of chairs upon the deck of a sinking ship. With all due respect my fellow citizens, let’s get moving!

William Dudley Bass
October 5, 2009

Sources

Editors. “10 Questions. Kofi Anan will now take your questions.” Time. October 12, 2009: 4.

The World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy, http://www.wfm-igp.org/site/ .

Vote World Government, http://www.voteworldgovernment.org/ .

World Alliance to Transform the United Nations (WATUN), http://www.transformun.org/home .

At the United Nations: Awareness of the Need for Global Unity…but will that unity be democratic?

2009-09-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

The majority of New York’s citizens are frazzled by the traffic jams caused by the gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, wishing it would all go away to another country. People in other cities and other countries are probably glad the UN is not in their town. We all need to remember, however, we may be many countries but one world, many ethnicities but one species. Our finite resources are being consumed by wars and competition between peoples rather than cooperation to address the global crises of our time.

American President Barack Obama, on September 23, 2009, in his first address to the UN General Assembly noted the serious challenges confronting us these days. He listed some of them, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, poverty, protracted wars, pandemic disease, the pursuit of peace, and the global economic recession.

Echoing similar themes of global cooperation from his Berlin Speech in May of 2008 and his Inauguration Speech in January 2009, he declared “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone. We have sought – in world and deed – a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

President Obama went on to say to thunderous applause “The United States stands ready to begin a new chapter of international cooperation – one that recognizes the rights and responsibilities of all nations.” He concluded with a challenge for all there to be “honest” with each other, declaring “If we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that we are not living up to that responsibility.”

After receiving widespread applause, the American president puzzled many by leaving the room rather than taking his place among the other leaders of nations. It was commented on by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi who followed Obama to the podium. In a long, wacky speech noted for pent-up buffoonery, Gadhafi did make certain noteworthy points. He pointed out the inequalities inherent in the U.N. Security Council, the lack of representation by the majority of nations, and the failure of the Security Council to stop war. Gadhafi mentioned “65 wars,” although they’re more than that. Nor did he mention among the few wars he listed those that had involved Libya.

On the following day, September 24, President Obama presided over a historic session of the U.N. Security Council. This was the fifth time the Security Council met since the founding of the United Nations Organization back in 1945. Despite his criticisms of the day before, dictator Gadhafi was supposed to attend as a sitting member of the 15-chair Council. He no-showed, however, being the only head-of-state that was absent. Libya’s ambassador to the U.N. took Gadhafi instead. It was, however the first time an American president actually presided over the Security Council, as the U.S. holds its rotating presidency.

In an equally historic vote, the Council members unanimously approved an American-sponsored resolution that committed all nations to work for a nuclear weapons-free planet and affirmed a world-wide effort to “lock down all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years.” The resolution combined many similar and earlier international agreements into one consolidated resolution that was in turn backed by China and Russia. Many developing nations also supported this resolution, which gave it the very global clout and strong political backing necessary to tackle this serious problem. Nuclear weapons are devices for mass murder.

President Obama, gaveling the meeting around the horseshoe-shaped table, announced after the unanimous vote that this “historic resolution we just adopted enshrines our shared commitment to a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. And it brings Security Council agreement on a broad framework for action to reduce nuclear dangers as we work toward that goal.”

Obama went on to announce plans for a summit in April 2010 addressing issues of compliance and assistance for all nations.

The fifth U.N. Security Council gathering was unique in at least two ways. It advances the cause of world government. The U.N., however, is not itself a democratic regime. It represents nation-states, of which there are less than two hundred, while there remain many thousands of stateless-nations. A large number of those nation-states are not democratic, and of those that are, many were empires or retain remnants of empire. Not to mention the imperial and quasi-imperial nature of some of the non-democratic states. While the U.N. is part of the greater, informal Euro-American Global Empire, the leader of this quasi-imperium is the democratically elected President of the United States. As the good emperor, he is light years ahead of his peers in the movement toward global nuclear disarmament and realizing the need for unified global action.

The Soviet-American Cold War is over. Yet nuclear weapons remain and even grow in number as a threat as they seem to proliferate. Local conflicts such as between India and Pakistan, on the Korean Peninsula, and involving Israel and Iran threaten not just mass regional slaughter but the sucking in of more countries in a nuclear bloodbath. Other countries are considering joining in the nuclear arms race, and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda seek to get their hands on such WMD. Militarization drains resources away from resolving other serious challenges.

The quicker we move our planet to representative, democratic world government the better. We all assume creating democratic world government is going to be a long, slow, tedious slog. Politicians and diplomats can make historic agreements and momentous speeches, but the real work lies in action.

An arc of chronic war stretches from Central and East Africa across the Middle East, the Balkans, Caucasia, and South Asia, skipping over to the Koreas. Potentially explosive “volcanoes” such as Kosovo, Hezbollah, Israel, Iran, and Pakistan rumble and sputter with threats, alarms, and fears. Any eruption of all-out war in the Middle East and South Asia would most likely expand into a true world war. With such final unleashing of long pent-up hostilities the possibility of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction remain high. Such violence will delay the establishment of a democratic world government. In fact, it may well speed up the development of a one world dictatorship to suppress such mass destruction by force.

Democratic world government will negate this threat of war and tyranny. And as I’ve pointed out in earlier articles our choice is not between reclaiming national sovereignty versus world government but what kind of world government will we choose? World government is coming, like it or not, but will it be democratic? Not only do we have the challenges of nuclear weapons, regional and world wars, but the additional challenges of global climate disruption and a global economic recession. Both are serious challenges not well understood and, in the case of global warming, even believed by many people. It will take a united planetary response to resolve these challenges successfully. But will it be a democratic one? My stand is that we help make it so.

One pragmatic way to advance the grass roots stand for democratic world government is to vote in and vote “Yes!” in the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government. It simply asks “Do you support the creation of a directly-elected, representative, and democratic world government?”

American President Barack Obama, as current head of the U.N. Security Council, concluded that “This is not about singling out an individual nation. International law is not an empty promise, and treaties must be enforced.”

Let’s take this evolution of world law to the next step and help transform the United Nations into a truly democratic world body that represents all humanity among all the nations, including the stateless-nations, of Planet Earth.

William Dudley Bass
September 29, 2009

WATUN: Another Step Forward for Humanity on Earth

2009-09-20T01:32:00.000-07:00

Momentum is beginning to develop for the DWG (Democratic World Government) movements. Some individuals and organizations desire to bypass or even abolish the current United Nations. This is understandable as one considers the undemocratic structure of a large bureaucracy that continues to prop up legions of squabbling nation-state regimes. Others, however, seek a more pragmatic approach that involves working with what already exists and reform the UN. Another group combines vision and pragmatism to go even further: 1) to not just reform the UN but transform the United Nations, and 2) couple this with the Global Referendum on Democratic World Government, a grass roots effort poised to go “viral” planet-wide.

Recently people from across Planet Earth formed WATUN, the World Alliance to Transform the United Nations. It was founded by lawyer-activist Francisco Plancarte of Planetafilia Ferderacion Federale headquartered in Guadalajara, Mexico. The first International Congress of WATUN was held in Mexico City and was chaired by global democracy activist Rob Wheeler. This founding congress piggybacked onto the September 9-11, 2006 annual conference of the UN Department of Public Information and Non-Government Organizations to host its own gathering on September 12.

Some accounts, including the newsletter of the Democratic World Federalists, declared over 1,300 people participated in the UN DPI/NGO conference. Rob Wheeler estimates somewhere between 75 and 100 activists attended a WATUN Workshop held during the UN conference and the WATUN Congress held afterwards. At least 29 member organizations joined WATUN. Many more are expected to join. Those in attendance defined the Mission Statement for WATUN and established a Council to continue the work inaugurated in Mexico City.

Together the attendees hammered out a Mission Statement for the World Alliance to Transform the United Nations. It is long for a mission statement, yet detailed and to the point. The new WATUN Mission Statement, quoted from the WATUN website, follows as:

"The Mission of the World Alliance for Transforming the United Nations is to urge and promote a Review of the UN Charter as a first step in reforming or transforming the United Nations, starting with a UN Parliamentary Assembly and moving towards a World Parliament that truly represents the people, including via nation-states and world civil society. We'll work for the establishment of an effective system of global governance that is able to deal adequately with such global issues as peace and security, disarmament, sustainable development, adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law, and the protection and restoration of the natural environment. It should be based on the principles of justice, freedom, democracy, rule of law, equity, self-determination, mutual cultural respect and religious diversity, international fellowship and cooperation."

VWG (Vote World Government), the pioneering NGO founded by Canadian activist Jim Stark that launched the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government joined WATUN. VWG and the Global Referendum were represented at the first WATUN Congress by Francisco Plancarte, who recently joined VWG and sits on its Board.

The new WATUN Council planned to focus on eight upcoming campaigns to further the cause of planetary democracy. One of those campaigns is to work to support, educate, and publicize the Global Referendum. Rob Wheeler and Jim Stark crafted a resolution adopted by the Council for consideration. The Council intends to address the Global Referendum at its next meeting, scheduled for October 2009 in New York City. The resolution reads as follows:

"GLOBAL REFERENDUM ON DEMOCRATIC WORLD GOVERNMENT

In order to transform the UN into an institution that represents the genuine interests of humankind, we must surely use democratic means to achieve our goal. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government [and that] this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which … shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” A global referendum is feasible today, using the Internet, and a world vote on democratic world government is now underway at www.voteworldgovernment.org.

If the online voting goes “viral” and the ballot passes by a good margin, that mandate would be accepted by many people as legally binding under international law, and would be politically compelling no matter what its legal status. In such an emerging situation, we will surely be able to transfer ownership of the global referendum to the UN. A global referendum on democratic world government is a very powerful new idea, and it has already been supported by 119 cosmopolitan authors.

WATUN thus agrees to:

1) endorse the global referendum (as presented at www.voteworldgovernment.org);

2) encourage each member organization, and all other civil society organizations, to collect ballots however possible and as fast as possible, to be tabulated by Vote World Government (the NGO that developed this initiative);

3) support the idea of moving the global referendum from an online vote to a formal procedure by means of a resolution in the UN General Assembly (a draft UN resolution for this has been
prepared, and is posted at www.voteworldgovernment.org/draftUNresolution.pdf)."

As a reminder the wording of the Global Referendum is simple and straightforward. It reads thus: “Do you support the creation of a directly-elected, representative and democratic world government?”
These are powerful steps. Building democratic world government is a massive undertaking, more massive than landing men on the Moon. It is time. It is time men and women come together from across the planet to craft a constitutional planetary democracy that advances liberty, justice, equality, peace, and community. It goes hand in hand with the necessity to reform our global economic system and abolish war between not only nations but different ethnic and religious groups. This movement is a preventative stand for the survival of the human species so that we may resolve a historically unique convergence of global crises. There will be no individual liberty, nor financial prosperity, no journeys to the planets and stars, no world peace, no inner peace until we get our own planetary house in order as one united species.

See also:

1) World Alliance to Transform the UN @ http://www.transformun.org/home

2) Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum @ http://voteworldgovernment.org/

3) “The World Voter: The Newsletter of Vote World Government, Issue # 19, September 2009” with article on WANTUN & VWG @ http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/WorldVoterNewsletter19.pdf

William Dudley Bass
September 20, 2009

Vote Yes! For Democratic World Government

2009-03-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

As humanity continues to blunder toward global collapse where worse case scenarios are fast becoming the most likely scenarios, good people around the world wonder what they can do if anything. Many struggle alone or in small groups in the cause of their choices, large organizations have gone deep to stay alive but focus upon only one cause, while the rest of us feel resigned, cynical perhaps, apathetic, demoralized, even depressed. I call this the “whatever syndrome,” as in when you tell someone that this time the sky really is falling or the wolves are actually killing and eating the sheep they just shrug their shoulders, mumble “Whatever,” and go back to doing whatever they happen to be doing.

Folks, there IS something positive each one of us can do.

Vote “Yes!” for Democratic World Government. And do it now. I voted “Yes.” Tell others to do it, too. Go to the website http://www.voteworldgovernment.org/ and vote.

This is a worldwide internet-based voting via global referendum. You can find out more about it at its companion website http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/.

I recently had the pleasure of reading a new book called Rescue Plan for Planet Earth: Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum. The author is Jim Stark of Canada. He lives in rural Quebec and served as a global anti-nuclear weapons activist during the Cold War.

His is a brilliant book. I have long struggled without success over what we can do to work with nation-state regimes, stateless nations, the UN and the Bretton Woods Three, or bypass all of them in some local-global grassroots initiative. Established institutions are inherently resistant to overtly surrendering power. The answer is to leverage telecommunications technology including the Internet as well as mail-in paper ballots from across Earth to launch, maintain, and sustain a Global Referendum for planetary democracy.

Jim Stark throws down a challenge for all of us, and it is a challenge any one of us capable adults can answer. His Global Referendum is a way to involve all of us, even if we disagree with it.

Vote World Government is an NGO, a non-governmental organization, active in the pursuit and creation of transparent, democratic world government. While some people quibble over the wording of its ballot proposition as it currently exists, it is simple and direct. The ballot proposition asks:

“Do you support the creation of a directly-elected, representative and democratic world government?”

That is it: “Yes” or “No.”

There are things I like and don’t like about Mr. Stark’s book. It is short, and I love that. Short books are the way to go in today’s busy, hectic world. Our “24/7/365” pace leaves us with less time to read and contemplate, not more. The book is direct, to the point, and combines deep vision with direct action. Many similar books are either visionary or pragmatic. Few are both. Jim Stark's book is one of those few.

The language of the book is a bit shrill for me, and the author makes no apologies for it as we approach the tipping point of planetary catastrophe including the real possibility of what he calls “omnicide,” the killing of everything. In fact he seems proud of the word “shrill.” From a marketing standpoint I would have avoided shrillness as a psychological turn-off to any clarion call.

I also take issue with assuming the best form of democratic government is going to be a European-style parliamentary form vs. the American three-way checks and balances system. I myself have not made up my mind which would be best for humanity. Both systems have their pros and cons. It would be best to leave that up to wisdom councils to sort out and a planetary constitutional convention followed by another referendum on that. I would imagine the best and brightest among us to evolve something even more evolved than what we have now. This is especially pertinent as we have experienced the paralysis and fragmentation inherent in parliamentary systems and the abuses and creeping “stealth” despotism that mar the American system. Jim Stark is upfront, of course, as favoring the Canadian system, which is indeed among the better ones on Earth, as he is Canadian and thus more familiar with it. The fundamental issue of the people taking public control of the Money Power is not addressed in the book. Such an important economic and financial issue must be addressed. For now, however, let’s vote in this referendum!

These are all mere quibbles, however, quibbles. The greater priority is to get this referendum going worldwide. And that means starting locally.

Many will oppose us from all directions. There are those who desire world government alright, but are working hard to create a financial and political planetary dictatorship. It is a fascist regime disguised as "democracy." There are racists, religious fundamentalists, nationalists, and those in the Corporatocracy and the military-industrial-intelligence complex who will oppose democratic world government as a threat to their power. There are the quasi-libertarian conspiracy theory kooks who recognize the above menaces as real, which they are, but collapse every move toward a democratic world federation as part of the One World Government conspiracy. These me-firsters make no distinction between the forces of what author/activist David Korten calls Global Empire and Earth Community. Instead these freedom-without-responsibility types denigrate concepts of universal human rights and universal social responsibility.

There are also the capitalists who still cling to illusions of a free and unregulated marketplace and the communists who cling to the dictatorship of the proletariat as central state control who will oppose this. And there are the Anarchists who naively believe in no government or hierarchy at all but loose networks of individuals and neighborhoods cooperating together without competition and violence. I would imagine, however, that Jim Stark is right in his statistics-based assumption the majority of human beings would prefer a transparent, democracy world government of liberty, peace, health, and prosperity. And if the chance to vote in favor of such occurred most would vote “Yes.”

The one significant move I wished Jim Stark and his colleagues could have done differently is insert the word “democratic” into the name of his organization and website, as in “Vote Democratic World Government.” So many people, even if they laugh at the far-right wing conspiracy kooks, are still leery of the term “world government,” fear global tyranny, and view the term “One World Government” as scary and ominous. Maybe Mr. Stark tried and the term was already copyrighted, the domain name taken, or it was viewed as too lengthy to effectively market. And we set aside differences to work together now. One step at a time, breathing as we go.

And this Global Referendum to vote for a democratic world government is hands-down the best, most effective tool we have to leverage people and technology around the world in service of Earth and humanity. So go vote, and I encourage all of you to vote “Yes!”

Again, go here and vote: http://www.voteworldgovernment.org/ .

Declare yourself for Democratic World Government. And join me in thanking Jim Stark and his team for such a great book, a brilliant concept, and a hands-on nuts-and-bolts approach to implement their vision. Jim Stark and all of you at Vote World Government, thank you.

Bibliography

Stark, Jim. Rescue Plan for Planet Earth: Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum. Toronto, Canada: The Key Publishing House, 2008.

William Dudley Bass
March 8, 2009

© by William Dudley Bass

Obama: First World President

2009-01-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

Barack Hussein Obama is now President of the United States of America. His elevation to the Presidency is historic for a number of reasons, many of them obvious and oft commented on. What is not so obvious is that unofficially and energetically he is the President of Earth. This became clear during his Berlin speech in the Spring of 2008. There he addressed the throngs as a citizen of the world to point out nations of the world must work together to resolve the numerous challenges facing all humanity. We ARE one people. Today in his Inauguration speech he again alluded to the need for our community of nations to work together. Obama is energetically the unofficial President of the World. Take note. This is a historic first. And it is to be celebrated.

National sovereignty is as obsolete as the divine right of kings. An integration of personal and global sovereignty may well evolve to replace this outmoded and violent concept. We today have a planet of co-dependent nation-states and dependent stateless-nations. Yet nations still exist and their institutions can be leveraged in mass collaboration. We all must learn to work together to resolve a convergence of severe global crises unique in human history. President Obama clearly sees the United States as the leader in our march toward global harmony and prosperity. It has been noted not only do we have the technology to make institutions of democratic world government possible, but if there had been a planetary election campaign Obama would have won it. This psychological and cultural shift is a first in human history.

Barack Obama's global popularity became apparent during his campaign. Obama's hold on the world's imagination and his gift to inspire people across Earth has been noted in more than one publication. For the first time in history we now have the technology to hold global elections and operate planetary institutions. And it is uplifting that of all people to be celebrated as an unofficial president of the world it is Obama, a complex, inspiring and brilliant man of integrity and ethics who honors his body as a temple as much as his intellect. We could have a dynamic orator galvanizing people with fear, hate, violence, and misplaced glory as many have done in the past, and we don't. We have Obama with a clarion call not just for hope, change, and love, lots of love, but for sacrifice, responsibility, cooperation, and immediate action.

Of course, we do not yet have institutions for democratic world government. Obama's title of President of the World does not exist. I made it up. America is, for a number of reasons, the one nation most though not all look to as a beacon of freedom and opportunity. American history is a deeply flawed one, many terrible things happened, yet this nation-state continues to climb it's metaphorical mountain, learning and growing as it did in the past. Obama referred to "the bitter swill of civil war and segregation" and how Americans overcame that. Many around the world look to America renewing itself and taking the lead in a new era of truly global cooperation. Obama's message was at times blunt. Basically he was telling us that although "America is a young nation" it is time to "set aside childish things" and grow up.

In the midst of our global celebration let us not forget the reality we face around the planet. World institutions exist but are not democratic. We can shift from rocking upon an unconscious tipping point to a deliberate and intentional Great Turning. We can choose world dictatorship and the global collapse that would surely follow or we can choose democratic world government with the freedom, peace, and prosperity that must follow. We can continue to choose the failed systems of either finance capitalism or socialism or move toward a healthier new dynamic capitalism that integrates our economy with the environment and puts people before profits. Instead of tipping ourselves in the abyss of chaos and neverending war and poverty we can choose to turn away from Empire toward Earth Community and eventually transparent, democratic world government.

Let us not forget the unofficial, informal and very real Euro-American Global Empire exists. Ejecting the Bush-Cheney Regime and its Neo-Conservative Cabal and even the Neo-Liberal Cabal does not change the fact the United States with the European Union and all their complex alliances and control over international bodies constitute a de facto if messy imperium. The Americans have elected a "good emperor." And this "good emperor" has his work cut out for him as he rallies the world to stand with him as we face challenges severe and many and lead us toward more, better, deeper, and richer democracy. Part of our challenge is not to "spread democracy" but to turn together as one people and one planet toward global cooperation and world democracy.

This may be the beginning of a historic transition far more enormous than any of us can truly imagine.

President Obama has the last word. From his Inaugural Address today:

"For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace."

William Dudley Bass
January 20, 2009

Frankensteins and Blowback in the Middle East and South Asia

2009-01-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

Frankenstein monsters of humanity's own creation stalk the bloodsoaked Middle East. In the midst of heated emotions and bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, we often loose sight of the origins of such conflicts and end up taking sides. Instead of taking sides the world should unite and go in as a massive planetary police action to stamp out wars, arrest the perpetrators on both sides, and try them in a world court of law that recognizes war itself as a crime. We don't have such firm institutions yet, unfortunately, and the ones we do have are not necessarily democratic or transparent.

The bloodshed in Gaza, Congo, Iraq, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere drives urgency for us to create a democratic planetary republic. We witnessed political fragmentation, ethnic strife, and economic manipulation in the name of “democracy” and “independence” during the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the shattering of Yugoslavia. We see it again in the bloody turmoil all across Africa and many other places as well from Nepal to Indonesia to the Amazon. But let us regress to the horrors nationalism and superpower plays have created in the cauldrons of the Middle East.

This is the most complex superpower mess. We will consider the hypocrisy and consequences of the Global War on Terror and how it grew out of the Byzantine power plays and insidious manipulations of the Cold War. The most damaging, complex, confusing, and dangerous area for which the whole world continues to pay a bloody price is the Middle East, that historic crossroads of humanity that stretches from North and East Africa into South and Central Asia and intrudes into the European Balkans and Caucasus. The greatest concentration of the world’s oldest civilizations lay in this region as well as the origins of many of the planet’s dominant religions. So let us look at the labyrinthine Middle East from the perspective of the Soviet-American Cold War and its consequences.

As a reminder, it must be noted that during the following series of local and global conflicts spinning out of the Middle East, at the same time the Rockefeller family and others of the financial elite were strangling the US and global economies. Their primary intent was two-fold. First, to keep the US dollar solvent and thus the dominant currency worldwide at great cost to Americans. Secondly, to dismantle under both Democrat and Republican presidents (Carter and Reagan followed by the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations) the earlier anti-monopoly trust-busting reforms of Republican Teddy Roosevelt and the New Deal revolution of his cousin Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Rockefellers forced Democrat President Jimmy Carter to appoint their protégé Paul Volker Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who was eventually followed by Republican Ronald Reagan appointing Alan Greenspan before Ben Benanke took over under Republican President George W. Bush. The Volker-Greenspan “dynasties” engineered significant financial perturbations in the marketplace that enriched the superwealthy and fostered the illusion of wealth and prosperity while creating havoc and destruction in the economy locally and globally. This occurred during significant proxy wars between the Soviet and American empires in Latin America, Africa, and Asia with the most severe erupting in East Asia and the Middle East and Central Asia.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was provoked to invade and occupy that country by the United States. The American-Soviet superpower rivalry in Central and South Asia was in many ways an extension of the Nineteenth Century Anglo-Russian “Great Game” of imperial brinkmanship. The period of European imperialism and colonialism left a legacy of artificial nation-states with unstable regimes and warring ethnic groups across the planet. One of the most volatile regions on Earth, especially in the wake of both World Wars proved to be the Middle East and neighboring South Asia. The United States and the Soviet Union moved to fill the Great Power void after the end of the Second World War left Europe, including much of the western USSR itself, devastated. And Afghanistan is the bridge between the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. It has been ever since Ancient times when the Persians under Cyrus II the Great, his son Cambyses II, and Darius II the Great and then the Macedonians and Greeks under Alexander the Great carved vast empires from Egypt, Greece and the Balkans across Mesopotamia and Iran into India and Afghanistan.

Even in the latter half of the Twentieth Century Afghanistan proved a bridge. It remains a bridge between regions, although now terms such as “highway” and “pipeline” are now in vogue. And Afghanistan remains a barren if beautiful battleground that continues to suck in outside powers. Revolts, coups, tribal uprisings, and insurrections broke out against Soviet-backed regimes first in 1975 and again in 1978, leading to an Afghan civil war which in turn led to a massive Soviet invasion in December 1979. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, “secret operations” including actions by the CIA drew the Soviet Union to fall into “the Afghan trap” by design and thus give the Soviets their own “Vietnam War,” a reference to the recent and long-drawn out US loss in Indochina. The Vietnam War bled the American economy, undermined many domestic reforms, and catalyzed public turmoil and rebellion back inside the United States. The Americans hoped the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan would trigger similar economic and socio-political upheaval back in the USSR.

Brzezinski was and remains a member of the US Democratic Party as well as two influential secret societies, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberger Group. At first many progressives were relieved as they saw him as a cheerful and brilliant alternative to the equally brilliant but notoriously gloomy Henry Kissinger, but he turned out to be a different model of the same general realpolitik mindset. Brzezinski referred to latter-day versions of the “Great Game” as the “Grand Chessboard” and to many American allies as “satrapies.” In spite of President Carter’s public shock and dismay at the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Carter’s own CIA had been conducting covert operations against the Communists there starting in 1978. Even back in 1977 US National Security Advisor Brzezinski formed the Nationalities Working Group dedicated to inflaming ethnic strife inside the USSR and especially stirring up non-Russian Muslims against the Soviet Russians. This eventually led to US-backed raids by the Afghan Resistance into the USSR during the 1980s, a model in turn emulated by Chechens in their nationalist and Islamic revolts against the Russians. And if Islamic militants could strike deep into Russia, why not also, at a later date, strike deep into Europe or America? Which eventually happened in what even the CIA terms “blowback,” a violent version of the old saying beware of what you do in case it comes back to haunt you.

The US played a power game that was blatantly hypocritical. Yet this game was dubbed “realistic” by the Kissinger-Brzezinski school of Neo-Conservative/Neo-Liberal “Realists.” While on the edge of war with Revolutionary Iran under its Fundamentalist Islamic theocracy and taking Jewish Israeli sides in on-going conflicts against Muslim Arabs, the US in turn supported Fundamentalist Muslims in their war against Afghan and Soviet Communists in Afghanistan. And then the Soviet satellite state of Baathist Iraq, a fierce enemy of US-backed Israel, asserted its independence from the Soviet Empire and invaded Iran in September 1980, only nine months after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and twenty months after Fundamentalist Muslims overthrew the Shah of Iran. This in turn set the stage for conflict between Islamic extremists on both side of the Sunni and Shia divide, with the Shia primarily concentrated in Persian Iran and southern Iraq.

Iraq is the hub of the Middle East, and who controls Iraq exerts enormous influence in the region including the Persian Gulf. European nations allied with the USA such as France and Germany sold Iraq weapons including aircraft to quickly fill the Soviet void and to blunt the Ayatollahs of Iran. The US stepped in to help prop up the Baathist military dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, to keep the Soviets off-balance. Europeans funneled large sums of money to Iraq including the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro which funneled up to $5 billion worth of unreported loans. The United States exported chemical and biological warfare agents to Iraq and Americans assisted Iraqi forces in using poison gas on both Iranian forces and on Iraqi rebels in violation of the 1925 Geneva Accords. This progressed to the point where CIA assisted the Iraqi Army in calibrating mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops in 1984 and in 1988 the US Defense Intelligence Agency was heavily involved in Iraqi cyanide, mustard, and nerve gas attacks that killed many tens of thousands of Iranians. The Americans even attacked outright Iranian installations in the Persian Gulf in the so-called Tanker War Campaign.

Even though it was Iraq that attacked and severely damaged the American Navy ship USS Stark with French-made Exocet missiles fired from a French-built Mirage jet in May 1987 for reasons still not clearly understood (was it a tragic error of misidentification, or a capricious warning by Saddam that no one is his boss?), the US under Republican Ronald Reagan stood by Saddam as it viewed Iran and the Soviets as greater threats. In a similar, almost reverse and still controversial incident, the Americans shot down an Iranian civilian passenger airliner in July 1988 with great loss of life.

In another event evocative of regional political complexities, Israel, a fierce foe of Saddam’s Iraq even though both countries at that time were supported by the USA and Western Europe, attacked Iraq in June 1981 and destroyed Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Osirik. Iraq was deprived of developing nuclear weapons to bomb Iran and Israel with and thus resorted to chemical warfare including the use of poison gas. Israel had been allies with Persian Iran against the Arabs before Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, but at that time still viewed Iraq at the greater enemy. That viewpoint shifted after the Islamic Revolution with Israel and Iran considering each other implacable foes as the Iran-Iraq War ground to a halt with a cease-fire in August 1988. It was acceptable from the global imperial point of view for Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iraq or Iran. It was also acceptable for Iraq to actually use chemical weapons backed by the US on Iranians and Iraqi rebels in the 1980s but not in the 1990-1991 Gulf War on American and Coalition forces. The US threatened the use of nuclear weapons on Iraq should Saddam use poison gas on American troops. The Superpowers continued to play local and regional powers off against the other across the Middle East and South Asia in their Machiavellian Cold War maneuvers.

As such the USA, especially through the use of the CIA and eventually with training by US Special Forces, organized, armed, and bankrolled the anti-Communist Afghan Resistance, which came to call themselves the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen in turn declared an Islamic Jihad against Soviet and Afghan Communists. Many Muslims from other nations, including Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, and Egypt and Pashtuns from Pakistan arrived in Afghanistan to battle the Soviet invasion. These Arabs and Pashtuns usually found support from the Americans and their wealthy allies among the Saudis.

One of these wealthy Saudis supported by the American CIA in Afghanistan is Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden later dismisses the role of the United States in the Afghan defeat of the Soviet Empire, preferring to credit the victory to Allah. The CIA even disclaims responsibility for developing Osama bin Laden’s power base in their defeat of the USSR. The House of bin Laden also denies responsibility for Osama’s actions, claiming instead that he was a rogue black sheep who left the family fold. This Mujahideen victory, however, in turn led to a vicious and tyrannical civil war after the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan, as if this was also Osama’s interpretation and abuse of “God’s Will.” The Saudis funneled billions of dollars into both the Iraq war against Iran and the Mujahideen jihad against the Communists. There were close ties, too, between the Bush Family, the House of Saud, and the Bin Laden Family.

Muslim Pakistan, an enemy of India, the world’s largest democracy, was backed by the US because it was anti-Soviet and the Indians pro-Soviet. This demonstrates the Cold War divide between monolithic Communism and monolithic Democracy is a myth, as the Communists backed anti-American democracies and the pro-American democracies backed anti-Communist dictatorships. Pakistan itself wavered between corrupt civilians democratically elected and coup-happy military dictators. Both backed the Mujahideen including financing and training them, even joining them in battle. The Pakistanis also backed Islamic Kashmiri separatists in their terrorist rebellion against predominantly Hindu India. The United States, first under Democrat Jimmy Carter and then under Republican Ronald Reagan, saw the Afghan War as a Cold War battle between Communism and Democracy and the Iran-Iraq War as a way to blunt Soviet expansion into the Middle East and also strengthen Israel’s position as Israel itself was bogged down in Lebanon’s multifaceted Civil War while simultaneously battling Palestinian insurrections. In the end these positions fueled a global Islamic Fundamentalist militancy. And Afghanistan was the battlefield “for freedom and democracy” versus “Communism and socialism.”

In truth, too, the majority of the Afghan Resistance was not in favor of democracy at all. They were a mix of corrupt warlords, opium farmers, ultraconservative tribal traditionalists, and radical Muslim Fundamentalists. The only freedoms many of the Mujahideen fought for was the freedom of Afghan Muslim men to fight each other, suppress women and keep women in conditions of virtual slavery, dominate children, farm opium, and drive out not only Communists and atheists but Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists as well as secularists. Afghans that desired true freedom, equality, and democracy were either mostly killed off or fled into exile to seek those dreams in the West.

The Soviets were eventually driven out of their Afghan “Vietnam” by February 1989. Their Communist puppet state held until finally deposed in April 1992 by the Mujahideen, who then took to warring amongst themselves. Driving out first the Soviet Union and then their Afghan puppet regime was hailed as an American and Afghan victory for freedom and democracy. The Soviet Union itself dissolved by the end of 1991, and its defeat in Afghanistan was deemed instrumental in its collapse.

The Mujahideen resistance mutated into a patchwork of corrupt, feudal warlords whose quarrels then degenerated into full-scale civil war. From this bloody chaos emerged the strict and austere Taliban, who seduced many Afghans with the illusion of law, order, and stability. The Taliban conquered many of the warlords, rooted out corruption, and imposed an austere but oppressive Fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship over much of Afghanistan. Their desire to establish a Muslim Caliphate did not invoke the tolerant high civilization of the Medieval Muslim empires of the Arabs, Berbers, Persians, and Turks that contributed much to humanity, but a backward, rigid, barbaric tyranny.

Many of the Arabs and Pashtuns who infiltrated Afghanistan to fight the Communists were also Fundamentalist Muslims and in turn supported the Taliban against the other Afghan warlords. These foreign fighters came to be called “Afghan Arabs.” The secret security and intelligence services of Pakistan, the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, many whom were in opposition to the secular Pakistan Army, were riddled with Fundamentalist Islamic radicals. They gave enormous support to the Taliban and by extension the Taliban’s Afghan Arab allies. The Pakistanis gave so much support to the Taliban that some analysts consider the Taliban to be more of a Pakistani creation than an Afghan one.

With echoes of the Anglo-Russo Great Game, the Pakistanis sought to make Afghanistan a buffer against Soviet Russia. The Pakistanis also sought to outflank India through Afghanistan as well as connect with China. India was supportive of the Soviet Union, engaged in intermittent wars with Pakistan, thumbed its nose at both Great Britain and the United States, gave Tibetans including the Tibetan Dalai Lama refuge from the Chinese, and were later defeated in an embarrassing border war by the Chinese. The United States also sought to control both Afghanistan and Pakistan to create buffers against any Asian nation-state potentially a major US enemy such as the USSR or Red China. The Americans sought indirect control via financial clout, the sale of weaponry, and economic pressure. Thus the USA funneled millions and millions of dollars into Pakistan, which in turn funneled it through the ISI into the Afghan Taliban.

The roll of the Afghan Arabs and the Pakistani Pashtuns in the defeat of the Communists and the rise of the Taliban can not be underestimated. For reasons of national and ethnic pride, the Afghan Mujahideen and their replacement the Taliban maintain the fiction their victory over first the Communists and then the warlords was primarily an Afghan victory. True, the majority of Mujahideen fighters were Afghans and they fought with ferocious valor. Even so, their victory clearly would not have been possible without American support, both directly through the NSA, CIA, & Special Forces and indirectly through equally enormous US support of Pakistan and the Pakistani ISI. The Afghan Arabs also played a significant role in the defeat of the Soviets and the Afghan Communists. While relatively small in number, they still represented a major force. They brought in large infusions of cash, especially from Saudi Arabia, enrolled many Arabs and other Muslims to their jihad, and due to their fanatic fierceness and training in tactics and strategies as well as their family connections throughout the Middle East rose into prominent positions in military, political, and religious structures.

Clearly, the native Afghan Mujahideen played a significant role in their defeat of the Communists prior to turning upon each other, but their Muslim jihadist allies from other countries eventually numbered from 20,000 to 60,000 warriors recruited by Osama bin Laden’s mentor Sheikh Abdullah Azzam alone. Later over 100,000 jihadists came to Afghanistan and Pakistan with thousands more undergoing training in Pakistani madrassas or radical Islamic Fundamentalist schools. Those numbers from the perspective of both guerrilla warfare and the Afghan landscape and population represents an enormous quantity of non-Afghan fighters.

The Afghan Arabs, initially as they were enemies of the Soviets and allies of Pakistan as well as allied with the Mujahideen, also received funding and military support from the United States. They were also close with the Pashtuns of the Afghan-Pakistani border regions as the Pashtuns shared fierce traditions of warrior tribalism and were also, like many in the Taliban, relatively uneducated and prey to religious indoctrination by Fundamentalist Islamic radicals. The Afghan Arab leadership also sought to create a Muslim Caliphate, but as many of them came from different countries they envisioned the Caliphate as not merely an Afghan emirate but a restored Islamic Empire that would eventually span the globe. Interpretations of what this caliphate was envisioned to resemble varied considerably, yet it was an overarching goal.

The Afghan Arabs and the Taliban went on to greatly influence the Chechen revolts against the Russians and transformed a nationalistic war for Chechen independence into a Fundamentalist Islamic Jihad that spilled out into other regions and included Chechens fighting in Islamic conflicts in other lands. They also supported the Bosnians in the Yugoslav Civil Wars, the Palestinians against Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Kashmiri separatists against Hindu India as well as Muslim revolts in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Jihadists were involved in radical revolts and terror campaigns in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia and then after 2003 flocked into Iraq to fight the American and British occupation. It was blowback, indeed.

When the United States and its allies turned on Saddam’s Iraq and set up Western military bases in Saudi Arabia, viewed by Islamists as Muslim Holy Land off limits to “infidels,” and with the Taliban’s emergence as a brutal theocracy, both the Taliban and their Afghan Arab allies turned on the Global Empire of the West. They singled out the Americans as Arch-Enemy Number One as Americans were at the head of this secular Global Empire. American allies from Israel to Europe to Canada to Australia and India were issued dire warnings. From this Alice-in-Wonderland craziness grew the Frankensteinian monster known today as al-Qaeda and its primary leader Osama bin Laden. Even Benazir Bhutto, when she was Prime Minister of Pakistan and years prior her assassination in early 2008, told newly-elected American President George H. W. Bush Sr. back in 1989 that “You are creating a veritable Frankenstein.” Bush had been Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President and before that Director of the CIA. Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs, Richard Murphy, later admitted “We did spawn a monster in Afghanistan.”

Pakistani ISI agents wanted a royal Saudi prince in Afghanistan, especially as the House of Saud bankrolled much of the Afghan Resistance. The American CIA and Special Forces had begun covert training of Afghan Mujahideen soon after the Soviet Russian intervention. While the ISI did not get a true prince, they did get Osama bin Laden. The House of bin Laden is intricately linked to the House of Saud, and thus Saudi Arabia extended primary and massive financial aid to the Mujahideen. Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan early on, possibly as early as 1980, although the ISI did not actively began recruiting Arabs and Pashtuns until 1982.

At one point Osama bin Laden was established in Peshawar, on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. There in 1984 he helped run and finance a Mujahideen front group known as MAK, or Maktab al-Khidamat, also known as Al-Kifah. MAK was heavily nurtured and supported not just by the House of Saud with the House of bin Laden but also directly by the Pakistani ISI and indirectly by the American CIA. Through MAK Osama bin Laden also built close relations with corrupt warlords and opium smugglers such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a feudal warlord operating near the Afghan border with Iran. Hekmatyar was directly supported also by the ISI and the CIA in his guerrilla campaign against the USSR, became allies with the Taliban in the civil war that broke out after the Soviet defeat, and then in the wake of 9/11 turned on the United States after it invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. Hekmatyar today maintains links with both the Taliban and al-Qaeda as well as with Iran.

MAK was initially founded by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and Azzam’s son-in-law Abdullah Anas. Sheikh Azzam was one of Osama bin Laden’s primary mentors and strongly advocated a Muslim jihad to conquer the world. Supported by both the ISI and the CIA and bankrolled by Americans and Saudis, Azzam with bin Laden recruited tens of thousands of Arabs to fight in Afghanistan against the Communists. Azzam traveled around the world, including in the United States. In fact MAK set up about 30 branches or centers inside the USA. Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, while not as widely known as Osama bin Laden, was an incendiary speaker and very successful recruiter and organizer. He was a Palestinian and lived in Jordan and Saudi Arabia before moving to Pakistan to join the Afghan Mujahideen. He indoctrinated Osama bin Laden in many radical causes, including the concepts of global jihad and the creation of a worldwide Muslim empire.

Toward the end, however, Azzam fell out with many of his allies and followers even though the CIA supported him in trying to unify the Afghan warlords and end the civil war. After the Soviets had been driven out and the Mujahideen fell into civil war Sheikh Azzam was assassinated by car bomb in November 1989. Osama bin Laden moved to take over MAK/Al-Kifah and merged it with al-Qaeda, which he had formed the year before in 1988. The branch in New York City, named the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, became involved as the headquarters for the first terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA helped provide visas for not only for Azzam to travel to the USA prior to his assassination, but also for Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” to travel to New York City. The Blind Sheikh was the apparent leader behind the 1993 bombings of the World Trade Center.

We thus see how the United States and its allies from the United Kingdom to the House of Saud created a number of Frankensteinian monsters, from Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden, from the Israelis to the Pakistanis, from Sheikh Azzam to the Blind Sheikh, from the Mujahideen to Maktab al-Khidamat to al-Qaeda itself. We see amid the tangle of warring nation-state regimes and financial manipulation for control of resources such as oil the origins of blowback, continued imperialism and military adventurism, and terrorism. None of it had anything to do with “freedom,” “capitalist entrepreneurship,” or “democracy.” It was all about empire, money, religion, and control. Nor does it appear that the US Federal Government including the CIA deliberately aided these jihadists to attack New York City in 1993. Cultural ignorance, superpower greed, bureaucratic negligence, and interagency rivalries played far greater roles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Fundamentalist Islamic terrorist war against the United States did not begin with the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 but with the Iranian seizure of American embassy personnel as hostages in 1979. Hezbollah’s successful suicide bombings of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1988 were another early hammer blow, driving the US out of the Lebanon Civil War. There were a proliferation of Muslim terrorist groups across the Middle East, many of them Palestinian and Lebanese but also including many from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and other countries. Many of them such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria were suppressed by Arab and Persian dictatorships, some were bankrolled by Arab and Persian governments or wealthy families such as the Saudis, and the survivors coalesced under the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group or al-Jama’ah al-Islamiyah al-Musallaha in Algeria, and al-Qaeda across the Middle East and Central Asia.

The most famous al-Qaeda-related including pre- or embryonic al-Qaeda terrorist attacks launched were in New York City against the World Trade Center in 1993, a US military base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000, culminating in the controversial and spectacularly horrifying events of September 11, 2001. There were other scattered terrorist attacks and al-Qaeda instigated tribal warfare such as in Yemen and in Pakistan as well. Perhaps the most spectacular pre-9/11 US counterattacks were the bloody and failed 1992-1995 intervention in Somalia including the First Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, followed by the 1998 cruise missile attacks on alleged al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan. During these decades there were also violent repression and bloody terrorism in Egypt and especially Algeria between moderate Sunni quasi-secular governments and Fundamentalist Islamic jihadists.

These events unfolded under the US Democratic regime of President Bill Clinton. One could say they actually began under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. There is a direct link through the past, however, to the historic meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and King Adb al-Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in February 1945 toward the end of the Second World War. This event proved more significant than it first appeared at the time, as it brought the US deeper into the quagmire of Mideast politics where it became entangled in paradoxical alliances. It was this meeting in Egypt between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud that not only was a strategic yet non-democratic alliance forged but America began its addiction to Middle Eastern oil. King Ibn Saud had allowed American oil companies into Saudi Arabia as early as the 1930s, and that relationship quickly grew into one of great strategic importance as the Axis empires went down into defeat leaving the Soviet Empire in control of most European oil fields as World War II morphed into the Cold War.

Zigzagging back across time and place, we see how the British and French, supported by their American allies, carved up the Middle East after the end of the First World War and the defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Tsarist Russian defeat by the Germans in the First World War, made more ironic as the Germans lost to Russia’s allies even as it defeated Imperial Russia, and the subsequent Russian Revolution and Civil War also led to regional instability in that region. The current crop of anti-Western anti-colonial pro-Arab revolts and wars for independence broke out. We see the emergence of seemingly neverending Jewish and then Israeli and Palestinian conflicts and Arab-Israeli Wars, Kurdish nationalist conflicts, Arab-Arab conflicts such as between the Hashemite royal families and the House of Saud, Arab-Turk conflicts, Turk-Armenian conflicts, Armenian-Azerbaijani and Caucasian wars, Arab-Persian conflicts, Sunni-Shia battles, and in South Asia Hindu-Muslim and Indo-Pak riots, communal massacres, and wars.

Among the other Frankenstein monsters is the current mess in Iran. During the Second World War, Iran, along with Syria, Lebanon and Iraq sided with the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany and Vichy France. The Allies, primarily British Imperial units assisted by the Free French, occupied Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Next, the British and the Soviets invaded and occupied Iran in 1941, overthrew its monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi, and had Iran declare war on Germany in 1943 so Iran could join the United Nations. Ironically, the pro-German Shah appealed to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help against Britain and Russia, but Roosevelt deferred, citing “Hitler’s ambition of world conquest.” The primary reasons for the Allied conquest of Iran were to control the flow of oil and the Persian Gulf sea lanes as the Allies were concerned both would fall into Nazi hands. Axis military advances had only recently been pushed back from both Egypt and the Soviet Caucasus in what looked to Allied global strategists like a giant Nazi pincer on the Middle East and perhaps India, which was already threatened by the Japanese attacking out of Burma. So Iran was overrun with the Soviets occupying the north and the British the south. Countries proclaiming liberation end up conquering others is yet another mark of the hypocrisy, instability, and damage caused by the Westphalian system of nation-states.

The Shah himself had seized power in an army coup in 1921 in the post-World War I chaos. His young son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was declared Shah under Allied protection. The Soviets eventually withdrew, leaving the British with their American Allies with the greater influence. The Allies encouraged a parliamentary democracy to check the royal power of the Shah. To their chagrin, however, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh rose to power as a popular nationalist. He was elected Prime Minister in 1951 and nationalized Western, especially British oil industries. The British Empire responded with an oil embargo. Convinced the Soviets with Iranian communists were behind Mossadegh, as all-out war had broken out with Communists on the Korean peninsula and war with the Communists had only recently ended in Greece, British and American intelligence services including the CIA plotted a pro-Shah coup. In 1953, rioting broke out in the streets between different Iranian factions and the Shah launched a military coup that overthrew the elected Prime Minister. With Mossadegh out of power, the Shah moved to create a secular, anti-communist but authoritarian regime.

Iran modernized considerably, but much of its population had been alienated against the West. This sentiment was leveraged by Fundamentalist Shia Muslims who organized the revolution against the Shah of Iran. Fighting broke out in January 1978, ending with the seizure of power in February 1979 by radical Islamic clerics. Under the fiery and stern control of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the theocracy established what they called an Islamic Republic of Iran but was in fact an absolute dictatorship more tyrannical than the Shah and his secret police. Secular, communist, and military factions that had joined the ayatollahs to oppose the Shah now revolted against Khomeini but were crushed in city after city by Khomeini’s Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In November of that same year radical Islamic students took over the United States embassy in Tehran and accused the USA of plotting a CIA coup to overthrow Ayatollah Khomeini in a repeat of what happened to Mossadegh. The hostage crisis dragged on until early 1981, included bungled military rescue attempts by the USA, and brought Iran and the US extremely close to war. It also encouraged Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq, to take advantage of the turmoil and invade Iran, resulting in another disastrous and bloody war.

Saddam was supported by the United States in his failed war against Iran. As described earlier, that war ended in 1988. In a devious abuse of politics, Saddam was covertly encouraged by the Americans to invade Kuwait in 1990, which triggered the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991. The United States, under President George H. W. Bush, turned on Saddam, organized a global coalition against Iraq, trumpeted the New World Order, pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait, prevented Israel from retaliating against Iraqi attacks, and amassed enormous military forces in the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia. This inflamed the Mujahideen, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Nationalist insurrections by nominally Muslim peoples mutated into Fundamentalist Islamic terror campaigns in places as separate as Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Indonesia, Thailand, Somalia, and the Philippines. In the midst of this Saudi Arabia remained an absolute monarchy that dominates and oppresses women and all non-Muslims. Even Christians in the US Military sent to ostensibly protect Saudi Arabia had to keep their religion a low profile and not display symbols of their faith in Jesus Christ. Kurdish and Shia uprisings in Iraq were instigated by the US but not supported. The West stood by once again as Saddam slaughtered and gassed his fellow Iraqis in 1991 just as he did in 1988 after the war with Iran ended. The Kurds had been riled up time and again by Americans and Europeans in various rebellions against Arab, Persian, and Turkish regimes, only to be betrayed at the end.

The ancient Fertile Crescent has become a crescent of madness. Today’s Global Long War on Terror burns across the Middle East and Central Asia with flaming fingers extending down into South Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, even the cities of Europe and North America. The Euro-American Global Empire is on the march in its hunger for oil and other natural resources and a desire to establish more military bases around the planet than any other power. Its ignorance of culture, religion, and ethnicity combined with the obsession for oil leads to both the intentional and unintentional creation of multiple Frankensteinian monsters. The great irony is the majority of Europeans and North Americans actually favor the spread of liberty, democracy, and entrepreneurial capitalism and have been misled by both government and media to believe those good qualities drive economic expansion and military intervention. In return, however, we see the rise of a militant and radicalized Islamic Fundamentalism devoted to terror and slaughter to destroy the secular and Judaeo-Christian West and create its own worldwide Muslim Caliphate. The rest of us human beings, the majority of us including people from all the world’s religions, not wanting to support and empower either form of world empire, are caught up in the middle.

Together, We the People of Earth must take power away from this unofficial yet real Global Empire as well as radical Islamic terrorists to establish a transparent, democratic world government and an equitable, fair, and wealth-generating economic system. Together we can do this, in fact we must do this or the extremists on all sides will drown us all in our own blood. And one of the mechanisms We the People of Earth must oppose is the proliferation of nation-states, especially as they are done so in front of the covert banner of world empire. It is not enough to choose one side over the other, for both in their own way spread murder, mayhem, and exploitation. Both sides must be stopped. War is a crime and has to be seen as such with its perpetuators brought to justice.

Under a democratic world government with an equitable and prosperous fair market economic system of natural, dynamic capitalism there will be no so-called independent nation-states engaged in wars seemingly without end, no more oppressed ethnic states in rebellion, no more civil wars for power, but the opportunity to work together in peace to create wealth, health, and education. With the demise of poverty and ignorance there will be fewer opportunities for terrorism, despair, and violence. Countries and other groups must learn to work together to achieve a democratic world government with peace for all people. War will become a thing of the past with any criminal flare-ups addressed immediately. The underlying causes of wars, most of them based in economics, nationalism, active racism, and religious discrimination are removed under a united, integrated planetary democracy.

Excerpted from Chapter 3 - “The Transition to World Government” from copyrighted manuscript of book in progress by the author currently titled We the People of Earth move from Global Empire to Democratic World Government (C).

William Dudley Bass

We the People of Earth: It’s time for us to build Democratic World Government

2009-01-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

World government is coming, one our children and grandchildren may well live in. Some would say the beginnings of it are already here. Will our world government be one of freedom and democracy, or tyranny and dictatorship? Will it be one of openness and transparency, or one of secrecy and elitism? Will there be ongoing and increasing poverty and financial distress, or abundance of prosperity with equality of access to opportunity for all? Will it be a regime that focuses on the hard work of liberty or the illusion of security? Will this coming world government be one that plunders our common resources, accelerates climate change, and allows our environment to be destroyed or will it establish responsible stewardship for our planet? Our choices are not between whether or not we reclaim our various national sovereignties versus world government but what kind of planetary regime we establish. Will it be world government by the people, of the people, for all people, or by self-selected masters over the rest of humanity? We the People of Earth have choices. We choose which way we turn.

I choose freedom and democracy. I choose liberty for myself and all people. I choose wealth over poverty. I stand for our economy to be rooted in environmental reality with ourselves in control of our own money. And I stand vehemently for an economic system that puts human beings before corporate profits. Put people before profits, and all of us profit as a rising tide lifts all boats and civilization advances. Put profits before people, however, and the corporations increase their power, the middle class is driven into poverty, capital flows into the hands of the relatively few families that compose the global financial elite, and social breakdown accelerates.

Furthermore, even as I stand for the right to self-defense, I stand for peace in a world without war. Although not a pacifist, my stand is that war is obsolete. War must be criminalized and policed just as we have outlawed human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, crimes of revenge, and incest among others. Conflict can be resolved or at least managed without violence. There will never be true security, but as a unified planet we can have a degree of global security from the absence of war. That is freedom from war. I seek a global society based upon individual human rights and shared responsibilities. We must have a world where government and its institutions are transparent and not the secret manipulations of elitists behind closed doors. I stand for privacy, not secrecy. Justice is for all of us, and there is no justice without freedom. We can no longer live on a planet where some people are free and the rest of us work like slaves while pretending we’re free. I seek to live without fear in a prosperous, democratic world government. I emerge to stand with others as We the People of Earth.

The essence of the designation “We the People of Earth” is rooted in the American Constitution. That magnificent document echoed around the world from one revolution to another as republican democracy and middle class capitalism took root in what became the United States of America and began to spread. Unfortunately that spread mutated and at times the USA trampled on its own Constitution, most recently with the Global War on Terror, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a slew of Executive Decrees. Even so, those remarkable words crafted and agreed to by the Founding Fathers of America still have power and continue to inspire and empower those so moved by its message. The first paragraph states:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It is not my intention or desire as a current citizen of the USA to advance any American triumphalism at the expense of the dignity of other countries. Instead I acknowledge and celebrate the influence of the US Constitution as a generous contribution not just to Americans but to all humanity for the cause of democracy everywhere. This process began with the Cyrus Cylinder of Ancient Persia from approximately 539 B.C. through the great experiments in Athenian democracy in Ancient Greece. It unfolds today through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the Earth Charter in 2000, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Democracy has been fleeting and intermittent in human history, most of which has been seared by imperial quests for domination, the lust for power, ethnic bloodshed, the oppression of women, and religious intolerance.

I love the land of my birth, but I have no desire to return to the past or stay in the present danger. It is my every desire to move forward with open mind, open heart, and strong spine to co-create the next evolutionary step with this Constitution as a vibrant model. I may be wrong, but I daresay many of the Founding Fathers, were they alive and together today would sense the urgency to take this next and necessary evolutionary step. Thus we move from “We the People of the United States” to include all the world’s people and transcend all national borders to take this next step together as “We the People of Earth.”

To do so we must reclaim our personal and individual sovereignty, give up our many and conflicting national sovereignties as obsolete, and embrace a new vision together of planetary sovereignty and the responsibilities such demands. The six specific items listed in that first paragraph of the American Constitution are exactly what we seek to manifest for all humanity on a planetary level. We want those six items for all people everywhere. People everywhere, from all cultures, naturally in their own different ways seek out such blessings. Yet such blessings are difficult to establish and even more so to protect, uphold, and cultivate.

We reach out to those who oppose us, for they too are among the people of Earth, and invite them to join us in intelligent mass collaboration to co-create a global constitutional democratic federal republic. Planet Earth itself may finally achieve the status of a political jurisdiction, and a transparent, democratic one in alignment with the brilliant diversity of its environment and biosphere. Our other choice is to continue the on-going march into perpetual warfare, roiling economic upheaval, never-ending energy crises, increasing environmental destruction, cross-border pandemics, and finally, global dictatorship with accompanying social breakdown into a world of famine, fear, pollution, and poverty.

The challenges before us are already upon us. Wars spiral out of control wherever we look. Wars of all kinds rage around Earth from gang wars to drug wars, from international wars to civil wars, from riots, insurgencies, and rebellions to revolutions and coups, from border wars to foreign invasions, from state terror to global terrorism to domestic violence, from ethnic strife to religious hatred, from one genocide to the next genocide. Global climate disruption is but one vast part of environmental challenges that are upon us. Industrial pollution of our air, soil, water, and food, toxic waste, desertification, overgrazing, overfishing, deforestation, and overpopulation all threaten us. Health issues including hunger, sanitation, nutrition, epidemics, and pandemics erode away at the foundations of humanity. Economic, financial, and energy issues overwhelm us with yet another level of collapse.

Obsolete political structures and economic markets undermine and divide us. Religions of the world preach peace and unity yet agitate people to roar with hatred, fear, and violence. Technology outruns our ethical capacity to control them, including stunning advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, neurotechnology, and the loss of local community control over these technologies. The power of national military forces, local rebel and terrorist groups, the various military-industrial-intelligence complexes, criminal cartels, politicalized religious institutions, transnational corporations, and the central banking system have to be reckoned with as their rivalries and power plays threaten us all.

Transparent, democratic, and constitutional world government is not only possible but pragmatic. It is the next step in our cultural evolution as a species. And it is hard to turn a big ship around. Our current institutions have enormous inertia, yet without serious and fundamental change this inertia will carry us all off the cliff like a stampeding herd of bison.

We have the technology today, including the Internet, to facilitate local-global cooperation and planetary governance. We have the resources. Local, regional, and global institutions are already in place for us to use, reform, rebuild, and use as a foundation to build with during this transition. We need the will to do so. The average human being will be challenged to look beyond their local, tribal, regional, religious, and national allegiances to understand we are one species sharing one planet. All our local problems are now global. All our global problems are now local challenges.

The alternatives are increasing fragmentation and breakdown as global civilization collapses into a planet-wide Dark Age or dictatorship by the financial and socio-political elites in their attempt to prevent total collapse and seize total control. It may be dictatorship cloaked in all the trappings of democracy, and it will still be tyranny. We are rapidly approaching a tipping point in our history as a species if we haven’t already tipped. There is much to be done in all areas. And on the socio-political front that is working together to build democratic world government.

There are many models to work with. I have my preferences. My preferences, for example, include eventually establishing a United Federal Republic of Earth as a constitutional federation of tens of thousands of local regions with their representatives cooperating directly in a global parliament with a prime minister or world congress with a president, both with a supreme judiciary, that bypasses nation-states and allows for all ethnic groups to have a voice in planetary government. And my preference is not the point. The point is the time is now to wake up to what’s possible and work together in spite of all our differences. We can do it.

We must learn to forgive our enemies and forgive ourselves. We must remember love, dignity, respect, and honor are the ethical bonds that transcend the divisions of race, class, and religion. Compassion and kindness are contributions to world peace and global unity. Our work will be challenging. It demands patience, courage, open minds, open hearts, solid feet, and strong backs. Our challenges require vision, imagination, creativity, action, execution, and implementation. Together we can play to our various strengths and reach out across cultures to lead ourselves forward. Or be resigned to apathy, cynicism, fear, hate, and destruction. The choice is ours. The choice is yours.

Excerpted from Chapter 1- “Reach for Freedom” from copyrighted manuscript of book in progress by the author currently titled We the People of Earth move from Global Empire to Democratic World Government (C).

William Dudley Bass
New Year’s Day 2009

The Gaza Mess and the Need for Global Intervention

2008-12-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

Today is Monday, December 29, 2008. Already Jewish Israelis have killed more people in their airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Arabs in Gaza than Muslim terrorists based in Pakistan killed in Mumbai, India a month ago. While tensions between India on one hand and Pakistan and Bangladesh on the other seems to have subsided, at least for now, they have exploded between Israel and not just Hamas but the Arab and Persian streets. It is time for the international community to unite, invoke global sovereignty, and launch a massive planetary police intervention to stop this local and regional cycle of hatred, revenge, madness, and stupidity once and for all. This situation is so serious it warrants acceleration of human cultural evolution toward democratic planetary union.

First, a quick overview of this Gaza mess. After great violence Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Named after the city of Gaza, the Strip had been a corridor for imperial armies since the Ancient Egyptians and Hittites warred over the area. After the Second World War the Egyptians took the Gaza Strip in 1948 in the wake of the British departure during the First Arab-Israeli War and the Jewish-Palestinian breakup of the region. With the exception of a brief Israeli conquest in 1956, Israel occupied Gaza again in 1967 when it overran the Sinai Peninsula. That occupation weathered a series of bloody wars and uprisings until the Israelis withdrew in 2005.

Violence continued, however, with a Palestinian Civil War in which Hamas, representing radical and militant Islamic fundamentalists including terrorists, won a democratic election and then militarily ousted its defeated rival, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority from Gaza. There was another outburst of Gazan/Palestinian-Israeli border warfare in 2006, which in turn escalated into the Summer War between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel blockaded Hamas in Gaza with dire results for the Palestinians there. A shaky truce ended recently between Hamas in Gaza and Israel. Hamas declared the truce over and began firing large numbers of rockets and lobbing mortar shells indiscriminately into southern Israel. They violated the truce numerous times with rocket fire and occasionally the Israelis retaliated. Most of the time, however, the Israelis endured the frequent provocation without any retaliation.

Although the Israelis left the Gaza Strip in 2005, after Hamas’ violent victory they implemented an air, land, and sea blockade. This blockade turned into a humanitarian disaster with great suffering by the Palestinian people. The blockade was occasionally broken by smuggling and once, in January 2008, Hamas blew open the barriers on its border with Egypt. Not just food, fuel, and medicine but large numbers of weaponry including longer-range missiles manufactured or modified in China and/or Iran made their way through. The blockade led to such widespread deprivation that some accused the Israelis, most the descendents of genocide survivors, of being genocidal themselves.

The Israeli government appeared in disarray with its prime minister, Ehud Olmert, mired in corruption scandals. The Israelis also appeared indecisive and vacillating as they tolerated one provocation after another from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel appeared more interested in talking peace with Syria indirectly through Turkey while ramping up reasons to attack Iran while allowing both the American and Israeli election processes run their respective courses. In the meantime Israel maintained a brutal blockade on the Palestinians in Gaza while asking Hamas to continue the ceasefire. Israel also warned that it would not tolerate Hamas rocket attacks. The rockets kept coming, however, and Israel did nothing…at first.

In the meantime, other players on the world stage quietly performed their roles. It appears Iran created a unified command over Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syrian militaries. There may be a level of involvement with Shia militias in Iraq. There is also a degree of Iranina engagement with rogue but powerful elements in Pakistani military and intelligence forces as well as with anti-US Afghan warlords. As the politics of the Middle East and South Asia are a labyrinth of shifting loyalties and chess-like power plays, there remains much conjecture, speculation, and even wishful thinking. It seems likely there are three primary targets by Iran and its allies: India, Israel, and Egypt. The Persians are too clever to blatantly invade their enemies in open confrontations in which they would likely be defeated. The lessons of Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan as well as their own history lead the Iranians to choose another path.

Hindu India was at one time conquered by imperial Muslims before breaking up and falling under British dominion. Its post-independence actions against Muslim Pakistan especially over the divided region of Kashmir plus significant Hindu discrimination against India’s large Muslim minority has made India a large target for those who wish to establish another Muslim empire. Unceasing Israeli-Palestinian violence has made Jewish Israel a target and that crossroads of history has always been a target for those with both grand ambition and simple revenge. As an emotional and psychological target it far outweighs its relative value in a normal scheme of things.

Egypt, once a bitter enemy of Israel, made peace with the latter and suppressed its own violent Fundamentalist Muslim insurrection. Egypt mutated into an authoritarian, corrupt regime under President Hosni Mubarak. He is the last major secular leader of a significant Arab state. Mubarak’s Egyptian government is hostile to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran even as it champions the Palestinian people. Islamic Fundamentalists, having failed over the years to overthrow the monarchies of Jordan, which also signed a peace treaty with Israel, and Saudi Arabia, still technically at war with Israel and an enemy of India, is still a bastion of pro-Western support. Egypt is the pivotal hinge of the Middle East, which stretches across North Africa into Southwestern Asia. Iran has its own ambitious designs for regime change. As does the United States and the European Union.

While unforgivable, obnoxious, and deadly, Hamas rocket barrages inflicted little loss of life, injury and property relative to the recent Israeli response in Gaza. As I write Hamas feels justified in attacking Israel because of the Israeli blockade. The Israelis blockaded Gaza after the violence of Hama’s victory over the Palestinian Authority and its subsequent war with Hezbollah against Israel. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel at all. Israel feels justified in responding with overwhelming force, smashing Hamas with a sledgehammer air assault. It can not tolerate any more rocket fire upon its population and territory.

Gaza is densely populated with Palestinians and is small in size. Hamas has little room for maneuver, and also deliberately hides its military units and terrorist cells amid civilians even storing weaponry in mosques, homes, and schools. It is a recipe for disaster. Both sides feel justified in their mutual slaughter. As I write Israeli casualties remain small with a handful killed and injured by Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks. Israeli tanks and artillery mass on the Gazan border while its air force continues to pound Gaza and fly warning flights over southern Lebanon. Over 300 Palestinians are dead in Gaza with over 650 wounded.

The Iranians are organizing a military response to the Israeli assault on Gaza as the Arab and Persian streets explode with anti-Israeli protests. Violent skirmishes broke out on the Gazan-Sinai border between Egyptian security forces and Palestinians. Conflicting reports emerge whether or not Egypt is allowing humanitarian relief to and from Rafah on the Gazan border. Hezbollah and Syrian forces are on alert. Hassan Nasrallah, the Sh’ite mullah who leads Hezbollah, called upon the people of Egypt to take to the streets by the millions against their own government, an act angrily denounced by the Mubarak regime as a declaration of war.

Hamas is highly unpopular among many Arab regimes that support the Palestinian cause, but Israel is even more unpopular. Television images shock the world with dead and maimed Palestinian women and children among flaming and smoking ruins. Israel has little diplomatic support even if its actions are understandable or justified. In today’s age of mass media and digital technology any military assault that appears overwhelming lopsided turns the tide of public opinion against the government and then the people behind such a lopsided assault. This is even when such so-called lopsided military assaults is how one militarily wins battles and wars; one crushes the enemy before they crush you.

Israel fell into the Iranian trap. And it appears they fell into the trap sooner than expected. It was expected that Hamas rocket attacks would provoke Israeli retaliation but more gradually than occurred. At some point it appears that Hezbollah and the Lebanese would enter the conflict, then Iran and perhaps Syria. It would be a final war to the finish with Israel obliterated, forgetting that the Western powers would simply not allow that to happen and would provide the excuse long sought by the US Bush Regime to attack Iran. Forgetting, too, that Israel in a fight to the death for survival would likely resort to atomic weapons. The gamble is that the war-weary and fragmented Western countries are too distracted by economic and environmental challenges to ride to the rescue in yet another bloody misadventure.

In the meantime Iranian forces would assist the hoped for mass uprising by the Egyptian people against their secular regime. Any Iranian retaliation against the West would involve strikes against US and European naval forces, closing the Persian Gulf, mass missile barrages onto US and UK bases in Iraq, and terrorist attacks anywhere. Large and resentful Muslim populations in Europe could explode into riots and terrorism. Events nearby in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh remain wild cards. Russian and Chinese responses are unknown. It is quite conceivable these interlocking conflicts will spiral out of control and link up with other local and regional wars into one vast cauldron of violence reaching from Congo and Central Africa across the Middle East into Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Israel, Pakistan, India, the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain, and maybe Iran have nuclear weapons. So this Palestinian-Israeli problem has to be settled now or it ignites the planet.

Bluntly, this war is stupid. Each side has their reasons and their justifications, all understandable, and still this war is stupid. Both sides are stupid. There is only one way to win such wars, and that is for one side to exterminate the other, which is no longer acceptable. Stopping short of such mutual extermination leads to resentment, riots, rebellions, revolts, and terrorism by the weaker side and resentment, conquest, occupation, and eventual financial ruin and moral corruption by the stronger side. Those caught up in the passions and emotions of the moment, calling for the destruction of the other, are also complete idiots. No one will win and everyone loses. The locals ignite regional violence and the globals must respond before the wildfire spreads across the continents.

Forcing ceasefires upon combatants who hate each other only postpones the inevitable showdown. It may stop the current violence, but mutually enraged enemies rush to rearm for the next war as soon as the United Nations brokers a truce. Food, medicine, fuel, and clothing resupply the survivors, and agitators who know nothing but endless cycles of revenge and lawless power plays fueled by nationalist hatred and religious fanaticism gear up for the next showdown. War in the name of peace and terrorism in the name of liberation becomes a way of life.

If humanity is truly appalled by the violence in Gaza with the possibility of it triggering nuclear war and planet-wide conflict, if there is little or no room for peace and love in the hearts of so many enemies, if endless violence-ridden ceasefires fail to bring about a peace treaty, then international intervention on a massive scale has to occur. The concept of national sovereignty is a moot point and an obsolete one in today’s globalized and economically integrated age. Heavily armed United Nations forces will need to go in and physically separate the combatants.

Israel and Palestine will be given choices: they will be merged into a new nation as secular republic with a new name that does not represent any religion, or they will be forced into two separate states under UN arbitration of borders. Neighboring states such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt may have to join the Israelis and Palestinians in surrendering territory as a contribution to world peace and global stability. Or their obsolete national sovereignty will be imposed upon by the demands of global sovereignty. In lieu of any local agreement international arbiters shall carve out new borders for a new Palestinian nation unless they are integrated with the Israelis in a new republic. Perhaps Egypt can contribute the Sinai Peninsula to a new Palestinian republic while Israel gives up the West Bank. These are examples of what is possible. The locals need to get they have been asking for global help, and they also have demonstrated a glaring inability to resolve their disputes peacefully. The rest of the world needs to stand up and stop taking sides in the Middle East and simply state we are not going to let you kill each other anymore and threaten world peace with your endless, mindless violence and stupidity.

The bottom line is this: we the people of Earth need a transparent, democratic world government to overcome our addiction for neverending war and violence. The United Nations and its member nation-states have to step up to the plate with the willingness to enforce peace with armed forces. Yes, it is an oxymoron, but the intention is different. Instead of two mutually genocidal sides waging war to the death, a United Earth uses armed force more as superpolice to stop the crime of war, enforce peace, maintain law and order, and allow the courts and not the street to dispense justice. This is the beginning of the criminalization of war, for war must be criminalized to be abolished. And just as police forces resort to violence as a last resort, our Planet Earth superpolice resort to violence as a last resort to restore order and bring criminals to justice.

The beginnings of a democratic world government lay with the current institutions we have, so let’s use them as we transition with greater deliberation to more purposeful global democratic institutions. We have many challenges, including we have so many co-dependent nation-states, failed states, and stateless nations locked in ongoing cycles of violence without real democracy. And the human-created catastrophes and potential cataclysm in the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Africa demands immediate response from the rest of us who share the same planet.

It is really quite simple. The rest of us tell the warlords of Central Africa and the nationalists and religious zealots of South Asia and the Middle East to stop their mutual slaughter or we will stop it for you. We will go in not as conquerors but as police on territory not to be occupied as it is already humanity’s planet. As one Planet Earth we go in to squash the violence and bring the perpetuators to justice, offer choices and solutions, and impose what can not be agreed to.

It is time for humanity to come together to collaborate and cooperate with intelligence for political integration as we reform our economy. It is time for humanity to work together with respect for one another and zero tolerance for the crime of war. It is time for humanity to come together as one, that individual liberty without responsibility is as backward and undesirable as social cohesion without freedom. We must learn to overcome the hatreds and suspicions which we allow to so bloodily divide us time and time again.

It is time for humanity to grow up and seize life.

William Dudley Bass
Monday, December 29, 2008