December 2010, Issue #34 of The WorldVoter

[The WorldVoter]

Hello from Vote World Parliament.

To view this, the 34rd 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/worldvoternewsletter34.pdf or
http://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

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

www.VoteWorldParliament.org
Vote World Parliament co-presidents are Ted Stalets and Jim Stark
www.RescuePlanForPlanetEarth.com
This site, above, is for the VWP companion book, Rescue Plan for
Planet Earth

Issue #34, December, 2010
(This issue and all previous issues are posted at
http://voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/)

THE SCORE

As of December 15, 2010, 21,541 people have voted. So far, the votes
are 95.4% in favor of creating a democratic world parliament.

Quote of the month

The common good of all nations involves problems which affect people
all the world over: problems which can only be solved by a public
authority … whose writ covers the entire globe. We cannot therefore
escape the conclusion that the moral order itself demands the
establishment of some sort of world government. Pope John XXIII in
Pacem in Terris

* * *

News in brief

Voting booth campaign beginning

After a ton of work (mostly by Ted Stalets), we are now the proud
owner of a portable voting booth, a device that allows anyone
(including you) to upload onto your website (or Facebook or Twitter
account) a graphic link that, when clicked on, opens our ballot up. It
keeps track of how many votes came in through your voting booth, and
it automatically adds each new vote to the main VWP tally! Cool, eh?

Ted and Jim are now busily emailing our Board members, all 123
supporting authors, the member organizations of WATUN (the World
Alliance to Transform the UN) and finally the 48,000 member
organizations of WANGO (World Association of Non-Governmental
Organizations). Let’s hope people respond favourably, because this
plan has the potential to lift the referendum from its sleepy present
state to a viral Internet phenomenon.

To upload a voting booth, full instructions are on a new video done by
Ted, and posted at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAiE-wIsU7U, and in an
illustrated but static document at www.voteworldparliament.org/votingboothinstructions.pdf.
(There is a shorter version at www.voteworldparliament.org/shadowbox/getballot.html.)

Please consider adding a voting booth to your Internet presence, and
feel free to invite all your friends, family and contacts to do
likewise.

Total transparency overwhelmingly supported in Canada?

Editorial, by Jim Stark

Canada’s very popular public broadcaster has an all-news TV channel
called CBC News Network, and they ask viewers to participate by
replying to a “question of the day.” On November 26, 2010, in
anticipation of the release by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of
classified or secret (although not “top secret”) diplomatic cables, US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called US allies, including the
prime minister of Canada, warning that this “leak” (more like a
tsunami) was likely to be highly embarrassing to the USA (and other
countries). The CBC asked its viewers to indicate whether they thought
WikiLeaks should release all these ill-gotten documents.

Bearing in mind that the public at that time had no idea what was in
those documents, the CBC reported November 27 that they received a
mountain of emails and other responses, more than they had ever
received in the past, on any subject. And they reported that 85% of
those “votes” were positive, indicating overwhelming support for the
general decision by WikiLeaks to publish that material. How do we
explain and interpret this astonishing result?

In my view, such a result should have been expected. There is a huge
thirst among people everywhere for transparency in government, for
more transparency than is customary, far more; indeed, for a form of
total transparency, as recommended in my book, Rescue Plan for Planet
Earth (available as a paperback or as an eBook from Amazon.com).

Here’s what I wrote in 2008:

There is no government at any level (that I am aware of) that is clean
enough or sufficiently immune from corruption to serve as a model for
the DWG [democratic world government]. The governmental traditions of
the past and present seem to dictate that everything is (or may be)
kept secret unless there is a very good reason to make it public.
There must be a new tradition at the DWG, such that everything is
public unless there is a compelling reason as to why it should be kept
private, and even in such instances, the reason for privacy must be
made public, and there must be an affordable appeal procedure whereby
a decision to conceal information can perhaps be overturned. The
people of planet Earth deserve this level of transparency, and
therefore we must insist on it. Anything said or done in the public
interest must be public. Anything not public is likely not in the
public’s interest.

I stand by that analysis and that prescription. Also, as I went on to
say in the book, if we manage to establish a democratic world
parliament (and/or world government) that has to abide by this
inverted rule of thumb, and it works, people are likely to love it,
even when their personal opinion turns out to be a minority view
worldwide. Such is the reality of the politics of democratic
countries, provinces, municipalities, NGOs, unions, and so on.
Sometimes the majority gets it wrong, but we must always defend their
right to be wrong or we will slide back to the bad old days when
arguments that couldn’t be settled through thoughtful words get fought
over with weapons (and with today’s weapons, that can spell an
omnicidal war). In my view, this virtually total access to information
from government is essential if we are ever to criminalize war and
protect the future of the planet from all human abuse, and if that
happens on the global lever, soon there will be sensible voices
calling on national, provincial (state) and municipal governments to
implement similar policies of total transparency at these other levels
of governance. To which I say hoorah!

Universal Internet access coming soon

VWP received an email (dated Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:35 PM) from
a long-time supporter named John Kintree. It concerned a recent
project of his that bears on our work here at VWP. It read:

I just created a wikipage at WiserEarth with the title “PC, Tablet,
Smartphone Sales.” It contains recently updated projections for global
sales of Internet access devices for 2010-2014.

2010 612 million devices sold worldwide
2011 814 million devices sold worldwide
2012 980 million devices sold worldwide
2013 1,265 million devices sold worldwide
2014 1,553 million devices sold worldwide
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Total 5.2 billion Internet access devices sold worldwide 2010-2014

We may have achieved Internet access for practically everyone by the
end of 2014; such a powerful tool for globally coordinated
cooperation!

Well done, John. Kudos. Very helpful.