{The WorldVoter}. April 2010, Issue #26 of The WorldVoter

[The WorldVoter]

Hello from 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 President is Jim Stark; Vice President is Ted
Stalets
www.RescuePlanForPlanetEarth.com
This site, above, is for the companion book Rescue Plan for Planet
Earth
Issue #26, April, 2010
(This issue and all previous issues are posted at
http://voteworldparliament.org/about/newsletter/)
THE SCORE
As of April 18, 2010, 19,839 people have voted. So far, the votes are
95.2% in favor of
creating a democratic world parliament.
Quotes of the month
By supporting this [global referendum] initiative we can assist the
move towards a
unified global civilization, completing the great evolutionary trend
on Earth
towards increasing unification (from individual cells to multi-
cellular organisms to
families to societies, etc.). John Stewart, Evolution’s Arrow: The
Direction of Evolution
and the Future of Humanity
The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with
distributed renewable
energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is
both globally
connected and locally managed. Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic
Civilization:
The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher/
Penguin; January 2010)
(The WorldVoter strongly recommends that you read a summary of this
book, which is
posted at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146196)
News in brief
Vote World Parliament president hobbled by illness
VWP president Jim Stark has had a rough few months of illness, greatly
diminishing his
ability to work. He is finally on the mend. This situation explains
why The WorldVoter is
late for the first time ever. Below are two feature articles, one by
VWP CEO Bob French
and one by VWP VP Ted Stalets.
Rotary and World Community Service (WCS)
One Rotarian’s Opinion
A feature article by Bob French
The object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service
as a basis of worthy
enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster club,
vocational, community and
international service (WCS).
Rotary is one of many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated
to humanitarian
service. Our motto is “Service above self.” Guided by this mandate,
some 1.2 million
well-meaning Rotarians in over 200 countries and territories do “good
in the world.”
Rotarians in majority countries (with families earning less than $10
per day) lobby
Rotarians in minority countries (with families earning $10 or more per
day) to assist then
in any way possible to meet their basic needs (water, food, education,
shelter, health,
income generation, etc.). It should be pointed out that many Rotary
Clubs in minority
countries spend most of their donated or fundraising cash on
vocational and community
service at home.
Rotarians in minority countries return home from majority country
visits with stories of
people living in abject poverty, people requiring basics that we take
for granted at home.
These needs are often presented in Project Fairs or on the RI website.
The well meaning
Rotarians from minority countries return to their home Clubs with
shopping lists of
humanitarian service projects from people living in dire
circumstances. The Rotarians in
majority countries do feel a sense of hope that many of their concerns
will be addressed
by visitors or by those reading about the plight of those less
fortunate. When the cost of
delivering these needed services is added up, it is often considerably
more than the
“have” Clubs can provide. As a result, many hopes are dashed.
Rotary is a small player in the humanitarian service field. With a
multitude of NGOs in
the world and little coordination, one would expect that conditions
are unlikely to
improve for the less fortunate in the world. The “each NGO doing its
own thing”
approach to humanitarian assistance is not working.
The Earth Policy Institute (EPI) asserts in Plan B 4.0, 2010 that the
human population is
increasing by more than 70 million per year and that stabilizing this
population must be
our first priority. We can never expect to sustain our human
population if we do not
consider that the finite resources on planet Earth cannot feed an ever
increasing
population.
The EPI also calculates that with an annual budget of $187 billion
(US), we could address
the basic social goals and restore the Earth. Can we get a commitment
from nation-states,
major foundations and NGOs to provide an annual budget of $187
billion, or a
commitment from the people of the planet to support the creation of a
democratic world
parliament with a budget of this amount? These are huge numbers that
can make the
mind spin, but to not address the problem at this level is
unconscionable.
Let me give you an example of a futile program. Rotary made a
commitment to
immunize the world’s children against polio in 1985 and became a
spearheading partner
in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative three years later. The
other partners are the
World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control and UNICEF.
In 2009, the
Gates Foundation joined with a donation of $355 million US dollars and
challenged
Rotary to fundraise $200 million US dollars over three years.
Rotary set a goal for complete eradication in 20 years. It is now 25
years later, and this
has not happened, for several reasons.
We are dealing with a symptom of an underlying problem, namely,
preventable diseases.
Polio is one of the less serious ones. When we started the campaign in
1985, about 1,000
children were dying each day from polio. Today very few children are
dying from polio,
yet some 30,000 children under five years of age die of preventable
diseases each and
every day!
The “have” countries lack the commitment to address this concern.
Needless to say,
many majority countries have dysfunctional and/or corrupt governance,
and are
frequently in conflict situations—internal, external or both. The
Rotary pledge has
crippled Rotary’s commitment to World Community Service (WCS) and has
led to a
great deal of frustration for Rotarians in the minority countries who
have been pledged to
meet this commitment by our leaders and who blindly believe that in
the current global
milieu, polio can be eradicated. The Gates Foundation could have very
easily committed
$555 million and Rotary could have committed its global network of
community
volunteers to do what we can best do, namely assist with the delivery
of the needed
vaccines in countries where polio is endemic while dodging the bullets
and explosives in
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
I would suggest that Rotary can assist in two ways:
First, Rotarians can adopt communities in partnership with other NGOs
and municipal
governments to assist communities to become sustainable. Communities
are the
functional unit of society. In the 19th century, nation-states emerged
as empires crumbled.
Today many nation-states are dysfunctional, or lack the means to
address the
humanitarian needs of their citizens. Wars come and go and communities
are rebuilt.
Secondly, Rotarians can lobby the United Nations and participating
nation-states to get a
commitment to provide a global budget of at least $187 billion to
address the concerns of
all members of the human family. Rotarians contributed significantly
to the establishment
of the UN following World War II in 1945 because they believed that
global governance
was needed to prevent future global conflicts. Alternatively, we could
use our influence
to help establish a democratic world parliament to replace the non-
democratic UN, to
govern global concerns such as war, the environment and social
justice. Nation-states
lack the commitment to address these concerns.
I feel good when returning from a humanitarian mission in a majority
country but I am
soon disillusioned when the work we have done is inadequate to be
sustainable. I have
returned to the scene of previous humanitarian work to find no
evidence that Rotary had
ever been there.
If we focus Rotary’s small resources on as many communities as
possible while lobbying
for a democratic world parliament, then we can enjoy the satisfaction
that we have done
everything possible to ensure that future generations can enjoy a
quality life like so many
of us in minority countries have enjoyed.
Are Rotarians up to the task?
Please share your opinion. My email is pdgbob...@gmail.com.
Bob French
Past District Governor for Rotary
Currently CEO of Vote World Government
Vote World Parliament finds a valuable partner in WATUN
A feature article by Ted Stalets
WATUN is a network of individuals and organizations that are focused
on moving the
politics of the 21st Century onto a plane that can serve the needs of
the human species
and the biosphere. VWP vice-president Ted Stalets is our
representative on the WATUN
Governing Council, and attends meetings by way of telephone conference
calls. Here is
his report on the April 12, 2010 meeting, as pertains to VWP
priorities.
The World Alliance to Transform the United Nations (WATUN) was created
in 2008 to
encourage the United Nations to hold an Article 109 UN Charter Review
Conference to
determine what must be done to fulfill the obligations of the Charter
and the international
commitments and agreements that Member States so often make. WATUN
held its first
International Congress Meeting in September of 2009. There is a new
petition website to
support this mission of WATUN, found at: www.UNCharterReview.org.
Although only
weeks old, the site currently ranks #1 in the Google search engine
using the keywords
“UN Charter Review.”
The mission of WATUN is to urge and promote a review of the UN Charter
as a first step
in strengthening, democratizing, and transforming the United Nations,
starting with the
establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly and moving towards a
World Parliament
that truly represents all of the world’s people, as called for by Vote
World Parliament.
Delegates from 50 nations gathered in the Herbst Theater auditorium in
San Francisco 65
years ago and signed the United Nations Charter, establishing the
world body to “save
succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” In October, 2010,
WATUN and Vote
World Parliament are planning to celebrate the 1945 signing by
organizing a Model UN
Charter Review Conference in San Francisco, California, USA. Our
efforts to transform
the UN General Assembly into a World Parliament will be featured.
On April 9, senior members of WATUN met with the Deputy Chef de
Cabinet of the
President of the UN General Assembly, Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki. Deputy
Asim Ahmad
accepted the draft UN Resolution of Vote World Parliament on behalf of
President Treki
(www.voteworldparliament.org/allies-initiatives/draft-un-resolution)
and confirmed that
the UN would welcome further information from Jim Stark, the president
of Vote World
Parliament.
WATUN has also initiated a program to solicit more votes for Vote
World Parliament’s
global referendum. The IAM WATUN Membership Organization has launched
a vote
collection campaign called “Click the Vote,” using FaceBook to help
recruit voters. To
join, go to: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=167871821938&v=info&ref=mf.
IAM WATUN is chaired by WATUN Executive Committee Member Anna Veronica
Clifford. If you are interested in joining WATUN as an individual you
can write to Anna
at abay...@gmail.com or the WATUN Secretariat at in...@watun.org.
WATUN is a
proud supporter of Vote World Parliament, and it encourages all other
organizations to
support it as well.
PS WATUN is pronounced watt-U-N, and its website (which is still under
development)
is www.watun.org.
Ted Stalets
Vice President of Vote World Government

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