June 2009, Issue #16 of The WorldVoter

[The WorldVoter]

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The WorldVoter
the newsletter of
Vote World Government
— democratic world government through a global referendum —
www.VoteWorldGovernment.org
Vote World Government President is Jim Stark; Vice President is Ted
Stalets
www.RescuePlanForPlanetEarth.com
This site, above, is for the new book Rescue Plan for Planet Earth

Issue #16, June, 2009
(This issue and all previous issues are posted at www.RescuePlanForPlanetEarth.com)

Quotes of the month

Illegitimus non carborundum. Mock-Latin aphorism originating from
WWII, jokingly taken to mean: “Don't let the bastards grind you
down.”

We’re not the public service of Canada. We’re not just another
department. We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to
kill people. Former Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier

A dead end is just a good place to turn around. Naomi Judd

News in brief

Authors’ Campaign: Now for the hard part!

There’s a link on VWG site (www.voteworldgovernment.org/
authorscampaign.shtml) to show the world that we have 63 published
authors who are lined up in support of a global referendum on
democratic world government. The next phase of the Authors’ Campaign
is about to kick in, where VWG volunteers will be emailing tens of
thousands of NGOs in an effort to make the online referendum go viral.
We’re still looking for more authors, but our original hope was to get
50, and we’ve done better than that, so we’re starting the second
phase now. A letter has gone out to all our authors asking them to do
a few little things (write a short quote about the initiative, etc.),
and then it’s off to the races. If you know an additional author we
should invite, tell us. If you know an NGO that we should contact,
tell us.

Mailing to WFI “Fellows”

There is an American outfit called the World Federalist Institute, or
WFI, linked with the Citizens for Global Solutions, or CGS. The WFI
has “Fellows,” two dozen scholarly men and women who are active in the
area of global governance. Four of these WFI Fellows were already
involved with our Authors’ Campaign, Joseph Schwartzberg, Ron Glossop,
Didier Jacobs and Saul H. Mendlovitz. At Schwartzberg’s urging, a
letter has been sent to the rest of the WFI Fellows, inviting them to
consider supporting our initiative.

Cooperation between VWG and Simpol

Recently, we have been encouraged by a new Italian supporter, Jill
Phillips, to explore a relationship with Simpol (which means
“Simultaneous Policy”), headed by John Bunzl. A series of emails have
gone back and forth, and there has evolved a considerable degree of
mutual respect. We have our site translated into Italian now, thanks
to Jill (and to Bob French, who paid for the translation). We have a
list of some 7,000+ NGOs from John (a “verifier” effort by our VP Ted
Stalets found that many of these emails were duds, but it still left
us with more than 1,000 NGOs that we can contact). Jill is approaching
Servas, an international NGO, to see if they will participate in the
global referendum. And we are happy to recommend that our supporters
visit www.simpol.org and consider giving this organization a little
support too (they have a newsletter that you may wish to receive).

Editorial

China’s contemplations tend to legitimize global referendum concept

In recent months, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to
former US president Jimmy Carter, has been talking up the idea of a
“Group of Two,” or G-2 (if two anythings can be called a group),
patterned after the G-7 or G-20. He has in mind some sort of
partnership between the USA and China, to make a world power sometimes
nicknamed “Chimerica,” presumably to establish some kind of “pax-
Chimericana.” Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has now rejected this
notion, saying at the Sino-European Union (EU) summit in Prague last
month: “It is totally ungrounded and wrong to talk about the dominance
of two countries in international affairs.”

China made the correct assessment of this very strange proposal, but
the aspect of how it was rejected is what brings our small newsletter
to comment on it. In a May 29, 2009 article in Asia Times Online
(Kowloon, Hong Kong) entitled “China says ‘no thanks’ to G-2,” Dr.
Jian Junbo wrote: “We can imagine the G-2 would be refused by most
countries if taken to a global referendum.”

This is one of the very few times the term “global referendum” has
shown up in the news, ever. As far as I know, I coined the term and
defined the concept in 1977 (see Cold War Blues, Chapter 2—available
free at www.voteworldgovernment.org/books.shtml). Whatever the case,
by definition, countries don’t vote in referendums. People do.
Countries vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations (for
whatever that turns out to be worth). Individual human beings vote in
referendums, and even the word “referendum” derives from the act or
“referring” a decision to the people. In my dictionary, the word is
defined as: “The submission of a proposed public measure or an actual
statute to a direct popular vote.”

Sensible people realize that we can’t run any government by
referendums alone—not even a city or town council—nor would we really
want to. People are far too busy earning a living and enjoying their
lives to study all the political issues and vote on every single one,
which is why we have “representative” governments to do the job.
However, there are times when important or very new proposals should
be “put to the people.” (There are also situations in which using a
referendum is inappropriate, such as to decide the outcome of a debate
on minority rights, since minorities have rights whether or not the
majority cares to acknowledge and respect those rights. Using a
referendum in such instances can lead to the so-called “tyranny of the
majority.”)

No issue is more suitable for “direct democracy” (another term meaning
the use of a referendum) than the question of whether humanity should
establish a brand new order of law at the global level. (This is not
to say “international law,” which consists primarily of treaties or
agreements among nation-states; it is to say “world law,” which
applies inter alia to individuals, just like national, provincial and
municipal law.) This decision—especially in the absence of a
representative democratic world government (DWG) to take such a
decision on our behalf—simply must be put to the entire human race in
a global referendum … which of course is the precise mission of our
NGO, Vote World Government.

But Jian Junbo is right, no matter how we read his words. A G-2 idea
would be voted down in a resolution in the UN General Assembly, and it
would most assuredly be voted down in a true global referendum. (It is
not absolutely certain that the creation of a DWG would be strongly
supported in a global referendum, but we obviously believe that it
will be, and should be.)

It is important to appreciate that the mandate from a “successful”
global referendum would be taken by most people as legally binding
under international law, although it is equally important to realize
that such a mandate would be politically compelling no matter what its
legal status. (If virtually the entire human race votes for a thing,
chances are we’re going to create that thing no matter who objects.) A
global referendum can be deemed to be “successful” if at least 50% of
all human adults cast votes and at least 67% of those votes are in the
“yes” column (see Chapter 10 of Rescue Plan for Planet Earth:
Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum for the
reasoning behind these figures). We, the people, have the power to
reshape our world, the power to decide to govern ourselves globally,
and if we at Vote World Government have our way, that is how the
future will play out.

Kudos to Jian Junbo for sensing, correctly, that the human race should
have a say in critical decisions affecting the entire world. Once it
is generally realized that national borders and most aspects of
national sovereignty are not going to disappear with the advent of
democratic world government, and that world law is the key to
perpetual peace and the sine qua non of human survival, and once the
online referendum has “yes” votes in the tens of millions or hundreds
of millions, surely a few sensible countries will table a resolution
in the UN General Assembly calling for a more formal global referendum
on democratic world government (www.voteworldgovernment.org/
draftUNresolution.pdf) so that we, the people of Earth, can finally
get past our current need to use the Internet for the taking of this
historic decision.
Jim Stark, Founder, Vote World Government

For Dr. Jian Junbo’s entire article, go to www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KE29Ad01.html
(Dr. Jian Junbo is an assistant professor of the Institute of
International Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai, China)