August 2010, Issue #30 of The WorldVoter

[The WorldVoter]

Hello from Vote World Parliament.

To view this month's 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/worldvoternewsletter30.pdf or
http://www.voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/

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 —

www.VoteWorldParliament.org
Vote World Parliament Co-Presidents are Ted Stalets and Bob French
www.RescuePlanForPlanetEarth.com
This site, above, is for the VWP companion book, Rescue Plan for
Planet Earth

Issue #30, August, 2010
(This issue and all previous issues are posted at
http://voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/)

THE SCORE

As of August 14, 2010, 21,381 people have voted. So far, the votes are
95.5% in favor of creating a democratic world parliament.

Quotes of the month

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will
not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved
and always will solve the problems of the human race. Calvin Coolidge
(submitted by Bob French, Co-President of VWP)

Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of
government recommended ... is impossible to accomplish. James Madison,
The Federalist No. 14.

News in brief

The Global Referendum Ballot Meets the Widget
Ted Stalets, Co-President of VWP

Right now all voting in the global referendum takes place at
VoteWorldParliament.org.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the ballot on the official
website of the referendum and allow other non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) to put it on their websites? Also, wouldn’t it be
great if an Internet visitor could just vote at that remote website,
and wouldn’t it be great if the statistics would update daily on that
same website?

Well, those are the capabilities we are currently working on. The
Internet continues to grow with more inter-operability. The primary
focus of the Internet has moved from static displays to interactive
sharing. What we are working on is called a “widget,” and
widgetbox.com is where we are currently having the coding implemented
for this remote voting capability.

Such a widget would allow Vote World Parliament to open up the global
referendum to other interested non-governmental agencies around the
world. These organizations as well as other interested websites would
then be partners with us in helping to spread the word about the
global referendum ballot.

The widget box code is not hosted on the partner’s website. Just a
simple three lines of code on the partner’s website is all that it
will take to add this functionality. For security, we are requesting a
three-tier format, so that the widget will interact with a special
page on our VWP server, and then that page will interact with the
referendum database. I know this is kind of technical, but the upshot
is that the remote ballot widgets will not directly interact with the
actual voting database.

As well, with smartphones now outpacing stationary desktop computers
and the whole Internet going mobile, voting on mobile/cell phones will
be extremely important during the next decade. The voting widget is
basically a portable component that can be placed in any website on
the Internet. If that particular site supports the new smartphones,
the widget will definitely display on the phones as well.


* * *
World Democracy podcast

Brian Coughlan, a member of our Board, has teamed up with Fred Brandi
and Deon Barnard (the three “core twiggers”) to construct a
professional and informative podcast on wide-ranging world democracy
issues, including the global referendum. The title is:

This Week in Global Governance
because there has got to be a better way to run a planet

For details, see http://twigg.squarespace.com/about-us/ You are all
encouraged to give it a listen. The guest this week was Ted Stalets,
Co-President of Vote World Parliament. The URL is:
http://twigg.squarespace.com/storage/podcast-files/podcast1_complete.mp3
The core group is seeking to add a female perspective to the project,
so if any woman is interested, please contact Brian Coughlan at
coughla...@gmail.com.

* * *

Problems with the VWP site

Apologies to all, but for the past several weeks, we have had a
technical problem with the active ballot on our site, a problem that
prevented new votes from being entered. We have no idea how that error
could have gotten into the programming, but it is now fixed, hopefully
forever. While we were reviewing the ballot, we also decided that
instead of “birth date” we would require only “age” to be entered in a
required field. We know this makes us marginally more vulnerable to
voter fraud, but there are entire cultures where remembering or
knowing your birth date is uncommon. We didn’t know of that situation
until recently, and we cannot disenfranchise large numbers of people
because they don’t know the day they were born on.

* * *

Fear, Intelligence and Transparency
Ted Stalets, Co-President of VWP

In July, the Washington Post commenced a three-part report by Dana
Priest and William M. Arkin on the massive growth of private contracts
and government organizations that are supposed to support the
post-9/11 American “war on terror,” and the funding required to pay
for all this frantic activity.

The war effort is exposed in great detail, yet no one knows exactly
how much money the American war actually costs, how many people it
employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many
agencies do the same work. Below are just four highlights from the
Washington Post. NOTE: The U.S. government was invited to comment
prior to publication, but there was almost no substantive response.

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work
on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and
intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live
in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-
secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built
since September of 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost
three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings, about 17 million square
feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating
redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and
military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of
money to and from terrorist networks.

The composite reports were quite extensive (see www.TopSecretAmerica.com)
and the whole revelation had my head in a fog for a few days. The
concept of transparency here was quite bizarre, due to the
juxtaposition of all this covert intelligence gathering with its
antithesis, a completely “opened up” operational detail of the United
States’ haphazard response.

I for one very much enjoy the privilege of living in the United
States, yet I fear that if the global referendum at
VoteWorldParliament.org doesn’t catch on quickly in the upcoming 2nd
decade of the 21st century, more and more disasters will outpace peace
efforts.

* * *

Tobin Tax may be feasible, but is it desirable?
Jim Stark, Founder and Past President of VWP

I am very nervous about the so-called Tobin Tax, and I am quite
surprised that respected organizations like UBUNTU think it’s a great
idea, and call upon “international leaders and [national] parliaments
to implement” such a tax.

Battles have been fought to establish the critical democratic
principle of “no taxation without representation.” And there is also a
saying that “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” And then there is
the comical modern version of the Golden Rule, to the effect that “He
who has the gold makes the rules.” In other words, if money transfers
between and among banks and trusts are taxed to fund the UN (or, for
that matter, a new world body), those providing the money will demand
a political quid pro quo, a veto, or an advantage of some other sort,
in terms of determining world policies. Surely we don’t need or want a
world run by the banks. (It is argued by some that that is what we
already have!)

No one wants to pay more taxes, but if we want global democratic
governance, like it or not, the ordinary people of the world should
ideally provide the tax base upon which the UN (or a global
parliament) operates. It is surely axiomatic that there will be no
effective global representation (of the will of the human race as a
whole) without such a system of individual taxation. In other words,
“he who calls the tune” should pay the piper, and “he who pays the
piper” must be us individual electors if the end result is to be
called world democracy.

* * *

Stark pens children’s novel

VWP founder and past president Jim Stark wrote a kids’ book entitled
Beaner Wiener some years ago, and it is now available for electronic
download from Amazon’s Kindle service. The book is ostensibly the
autobiography of a cat, the life story of a real cat as (allegedly)
told by the cat herself. The URL is:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Beaner+Wiener&x=14&y=17&ih=12_0_0_1_0_0_0_0_0_1.118_472&fsc=-1