April 2011, Issue #38 of The WorldVoter

[The WorldVoter]

Hello from Vote World Parliament.

To view this, the 38th straight monthly newsletter as a .pdf file
(nicer, easier to read formatting with hotlinks), please click on one
of the links below, or copy/paste it in your browser...

http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/worldvoternewsletter38.pdf
or
https://www.voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/

Thank you for your interest in a democratic world parliament.
Support this important initiative for a democratic world parliament.
Become a Silver, Gold or Platinum member at http://www.VoteWorldParliament.com

Best wishes,
Ted Stalets
Co-President
Vote World Parliament

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The WorldVoter
the newsletter of
Vote World Parliament
— democratic world parliament through a global referendum —

https://voteworldparliament.org/
Vote World Parliament co-presidents are Ted Stalets and Jim Stark
http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/
This site, above, is for the VWP companion book, Rescue Plan for
Planet Earth

Issue #38, April, 2011
(This issue and all previous issues are posted at
http://voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/)

THE SCORE

As of April 16, 2011, 21,748 people have voted. So far, the votes are
95.4% in favor of creating a democratic world parliament.

* * *

Quotes of the month

We are living in the most critical stage of human history. I am proud
and honored to work with you on one of the most critical ideas of our
time: liberating democracy from the box of the nation-state. John
Dale, VWP member

Of course the result from a successful global referendum would trump
national law, but for an online global referendum there are problems
with voter fraud that would have to be overcome. (paraphrased) The
late Dr. Terrence P. Amerasinghe, professor of law and the former
President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association

* * *

News in brief

New Board member

* * *

A warm welcome is extended to William Dudley Bass of Seattle, WA, USA.
William has taken an interest in our initiative for a couple of years,
and we are very pleased that he is now on our Board. He is currently
finishing the writing of his new book, We the People of Earth: A Stand
for Democratic World Government. To see his photo and bio, please go
to https://voteworldparliament.org/about/who-we-are/ and scroll down.

* * *

New review of Rescue Plan for Planet Earth

“Very, very admirable is the way that Jim Stark has thought through a
global referendum in concrete detail. He uses fact, figures, numbers,
geography, tables and charts in an extremely thorough way. He is also
extremely articulate and well-reasoned in terms of the need for and
the useful methodology of computers, the Internet and social
networking in the process of a global referendum. These are areas in
which Stark’s thinking and book particularly shine.… Also very
concrete and admirably practical is the organization, Vote World
Parliament [formerly Vote World Government].” Rev. Dr. Karen A.
Hamilton, General Secretary (Ex Officio), The Canadian Council of
Churches and Executive Chair of the World Federalist Movement—Canada,
from a review of Rescue Plan for Planet Earth in The Federalist
Debate, March 2011 (edited by Dr. Lucio Levi) This quote is an
excerpt. Full review posted at http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/reviews.html
or in the current issue of the The Federalist Debate website at…
http://www.federalist-debate.org/fdb/index.bfr .

* * *

Slight change in ballot wording

The Board of Vote World Parliament has unanimously endorsed a proposal
from Mr. Per Norbäck of Sweden to insert the word “transparent” right
into the ballot proposition. The aspect of total transparency was
emphasized strongly in the book Rescue Plan for Planet Earth (to
confirm, go to http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/free3chapters.pdf
and scroll down until you find “Chapter 5”), so there is no
substantive change in our proposal, nor is there any reason to start
the vote count over at zero. The ballot wording now reads:

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

Per Norbäck is trying to get a municipal referendum done in
Vallentuna, Sweden, where he is a member of council as well as head of
the Demoex (for “democracy experiment”) Party. He is also a high
school teacher, so he asked his students to consider our initiative.
There was a strong consensus that the global referendum could be
dangerous because a world authority could degenerate into global
tyranny. The only way Mr. Norbäck could bring his students around was
to give them an iron-clad assurance that such a body would be
completely transparent. We just cannot act for peace and accidentally
set the stage for global tyranny. The only antidote to corruption is
transparency, so if we want a guarantee of protection against
corruption, we’ll need to have total transparency, now and forever, as
the basic operating procedure of a world government or parliament.

Mr. Norbäck asked (in an email to me) why we hadn’t included the word
“transparent” in the list of adjectives in the ballot wording? Well,
we thought of that and rejected the idea back in 2006. Now, it seems
we should have done that from the beginning, that in fact we made a
mistake in not including it. Now that mistake has been corrected. Our
gratitude to Per Norbäck for bringing this matter to our attention.

PS Mr. Norbäck’s first effort to get a municipal referendum failed,
but he (and we at the HQ of VWP) have not given up by a long shot.

* * *

A Talk with [Dr. Giulio] Gallarotti:
In Search of a World Parliament, Direct Democracy

NOTE: Giulio Gallerotti is a professor at the Wesleyan University, a
liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, USA and the author of
The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics. He is one
of the 120+ published authors who support VWP’s global referendum
initiative, and he is supporting efforts to have a referendum for the
university and another referendum for the city of Middletown.

Copyright © 2011 The Wesleyan Argus (http://wesleyanargus.com/
2011/02/25/a-talk-with-gallarotti-in-search-of-a-world-parliament-
direct-democracy/)

By Sam Korda, Assistant Features Editor (The Wesleyan Argus)

The Argus: When and how did you get involved with the Global
Referendum for a Democratic World Parliament?

Giulio Gallarotti: I got an e-mail from Jim Stark [founder of NGO Vote
World Parliament], and he said ‘Look, you’ve written about some of
these subjects, international organization and world politics, and I’m
looking to get a bunch of people—authors, thinkers, and scholars—to
support this initiative because I want it to be legit.’ There are
people who have thought about this and written about this, so I
thought I would join the initiative.

A: What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

GG: I guess our organization is a way of trying to establish some kind
of precedent. At this point, it may be nothing more than symbolic, but
it’s pretty powerful for those of us who look to the future and wonder
what it will look like from an international perspective. I and many
others who have thought about where we’re going with governance and
world problems foresee a day of greater political unification of the
globe. We’re seeing it happen in a lot of ways already—NAFTA, the
North American Free Trade Association, has pulled together three major
countries into one economic sphere. We saw a European economic
community come into existence, something that’s evolved into more of a
political entity, a European Union.

I see us as kind of pioneers. With pioneers, they don’t necessarily
think what they’re doing is going to get results, but they have to
make a statement. It’s kind of like when Ralph Nader runs for
president. He doesn’t think he can win, but Nader believes in the
future that people will choose people who want to work just for the
people.

A: How can a major revisioning of international politics be perceived
as legitimate?

GG: This is legitimate politically if we take existing international
and domestic law seriously—domestic law recognizes constitutional
changes if two-thirds of the people vote, and there are all kinds of
statements in modern democratic constitutions that ultimately show
that the power to decide resides in the people. This is recognized in
international law and some of the most important political documents
in world politics, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
the United Nations, which basically says that political authority
resides in the people. If we take that for the truth, if we believe it
and they stand behind it, then certainly some mass movement that
suggests people want a world government would be legally binding. The
only way to interpret this kind of language is to respect that
authority of the people.

A: Is accounting for such a massive vote feasible?

GG: The tricky part is trying to figure what the threshold would be
for such a vote to pass. Based on Stark’s calculations it would take
66 percent of about two billion capable people. These are rough
estimates, but they seem to be plausible. We’d like to get a lot of
votes, but we probably won’t get that many unless people start doing
an American Idol type thing: just voting 90 gazillion times. But
regardless, if we get many votes, it’s still a statement. Before every
change, you always need to have some sort of symbolic action, some
long string of failures. I like to say that every great revolution
starts with a bunch of misguided loonies. Maybe we’re the loonies, but
I don’t think we’re so misguided.

A: What is it about the current political climate that necessitates
this revision of world politics?

GG: We don’t have policies that are giving people what they want or
need—the political bargain is breaking down and that’s wrong. And so,
we’re trying to make a statement that global power is in the people,
and that to move towards a more civilized world we have to take these
toys away from little boys, take the ability to perpetrate violence
and destruction from people who have not shown responsibility and the
ability to use it in a humane way. Once that happens, we can move
towards a world where things are truly voted on democratically. In the
future we can do that with the technology available; people can make
themselves heard.

A: Do you think this is part of a larger historical trajectory? Are
there historical trends that the organization is drawing upon?

GG: There seems to be a pattern throughout history—small political
structures grow into larger ones. We started with farming villages
that grew into city-states, that grew into regional bodies, that grew
into nation-states. Now we’re seeing nation-states starting to come
together. I see this line in history, and I believe, that in the
future, we will have some sort of world government.

A: How would you see this system working?

GG: People will have to use whatever the leading communication
technology is. By the time something like this is taken seriously,
we’ll have the right communication technology for people to weigh in.
Something with filters so that it’s legitimate. And I suspect that, in
this particular case, if these apps take off I think you’re going to
see more referendums in countries because more people can weigh in. I
think you’re going to see much more direct democracy. In the future,
like anything else, it’s going to have to be a representative system
of some sort. You’re going to have to elect people who can shepherd
the policies and offer things that the people want.

A: Have you figured out what sorts of issues would be confronted?

GG: All sorts of issues. One important field is security: territorial
disputes, ethnic problems, secular problems having to do with
boundaries, countries wanting to secede from other countries. The
kinds of issues that make people want to pick up guns and make
countries and fight wars. Not just that but also issues of economic
justice. Should poor countries get more transfers from richer
countries? What would trade policies have to be like? Things about
health and food supplies. Who gets all the AIDS medicine? How are we
going to distribute vaccines and food supplies? Who’s going to cut
their carbon emissions? Every single important issue that is dealt
with diplomatically would now be more of an internal thing, and people
would eventually get to vote on that. It would still be a federated
system, in that countries would maintain a lot of sovereignty. But if
a ruling came down, such as, for example, the United States has to cut
their carbon emissions by 10 percent, then it would be law and we
would have to do it.

A: Has there been response from national government and politicians?

GG: Not really, we’re just starting out. I’d be interested to see if
we’re getting any coverage in the news over time.

A: If you encountered anyone who would disagree with the plan, how
would you persuade them otherwise?

GG: Well, I wouldn’t. Don’t forget this is a democracy, and everyone
has a say. Bottom line, count them up and see what the majority wants.
I’m not here to proselytize, I’m not trying to convert anyone. I just
have my idea and I’m pushing it, and we’ll see what happens.