Chapter 13. A Paradigm Shift to Universal Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity

Saint Paul spoke of “madness” (1 Cor. 1:18-2:16): that which is absurd for the prevailing morality. For the dominant, present rationality, which dictates the true and the false (as does Karl Popper in the Open Society and Its Enemies), the construction of the new Jerusalem is the absolute evil (because it calls in question the current system in its totality)…. The poor set out on their journey. They pass beyond Egypt’s frontier, they transcend the horizon of the system, they cross the barrier of death. Now there is nothing to follow, no one to heed, but the Lord. They have now embarked on the nothing-of-the-system, the non-being of the prevailing morality. They are on the road to the “wilderness”….

Praxis, as an action and a relationship of the members of the community, of a people that has transcended the morality of sin (as Nicaragua, after its 1979 revolution, became a “new land” – an earthly one, it is true, but nevertheless a historical “new land”), is utopian, meaningless, absurd, mad, subversive, destructive, dangerous, for the system left behind, left in the past: “But they cried out the more: Crucify him!” (Matt. 27:23)…. The practices of the liberators, those complying with ethical demands, have no meaning for the system…. The Israelites, however, who have moved out into the wilderness, know that God is with them.

Enrique Dussel

The vision of “what should be” – independent though it may sometimes appear of personal will – is yet inseparable from a critical and fundamental relationship to the existing condition of humanity. All suffering under a social order prepares the soul for vision and what the soul receives in this vision strengthens and deepens its insight into the perversity of what is perverted.

Martin Buber

Immediate Economic Prosperity under the Earth Constitution

The Constitution, as a framework predicated on the common good, making possible the growth of human beings toward planetary maturity, must provide for a transitional economics directed toward universal peace and prosperity. The central principle of the transitional economics will be to begin the process of restoring and protecting the global commons in land, technology, money creation, and information (Smith, 2003a). The economics of absolute property rights that now dominates the world through monopolies on land, technology, money creation, and information will be transformed over time to an economics of conditional property rights (derived, among others, from the principles of American economist Henry George (1946)) in which the common good and prosperity of the diverse peoples of the Earth will be ensured. The first steps in this process (the initial economics of the Earth Federation) will involve only a few, simple, common-sense changes in current economic practices.

At the founding ratification convention, it will be necessary for perhaps twenty-five nations to simultaneously ratify the Constitution and initiate federal world government immediately among themselves. For under the current global system of domination, any individual nation making a break for freedom by ratifying the Constitution would almost certainly be economically punished by the powers now managing the system (see Isely, 2000). One or two nations attempting to begin the Earth Federation would experience the devaluation of their currencies, withdrawal of investments, foreclosure of loans, economic sanctions, or blockades. As with Cuba, which attempted to make a break for freedom in 1959, economic penalties would be implemented ensuring the enterprise was largely unsuccessful.

However, twenty-five nations ratifying the Constitution together at a founding ratification convention will have among themselves sufficient resources, capacity for trade among themselves, productive strength, collective prestige, and capability to publicize the significance of their actions to the world at large to make them together fairly independent of the current world system of control and domination. Almost certainly they will achieve an immediate economic prosperity unimagined by the majority of the world’s poor nations. They will have the poor nations of the world knocking at the door to join the Federation. Naturally, the Earth Federation is for all nations and none willing to ratify and submit to the Constitution of the Federation of Earth would be excluded. Poor nations under the current world order have nothing to lose and everything to gain by joining the Earth Federation.

The first twenty-five or so nations who join together to simultaneously ratify the Earth Constitution will immediately achieve prosperity and an economic well-being undreamed of under the nation-state-monopoly-capitalist systems of the past five centuries. Achieving prosperity is not the difficult part, as we will see in this section. The difficult part is overcoming the economic myths and lies ingrained in the minds of the world’s citizens for centuries. These myths and lies are the core of the propaganda spewed forth by the dominant super-wealthy class controlling the world-order: from the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, the multinational corporations, the corporate owned mass media, the first-world imperialist governments, the CIA, and other national propaganda machines (see Smith, 2003b, ch. 3).

The new federated world government created at a founding ratification convention by an initial twenty-five or so nations will immediately act to make these nations economically autonomous from the present global system of domination and exploitation. Among themselves they will possess the technology, the resources, and the labor power to create healthy local and regional markets very rapidly through the assistance and guidance of the federal government. (Cuba’s wonderful progress toward food independence and food security over the past few years should be carefully studied in this regard (Koont, 2004).) Multinational corporations operating within the new federation can cooperate in the drive toward universal prosperity or they can risk being mundialized by the Federation or nationalized by the nations within the federation.

The federal government will immediately supply substantial lines of credit to all peaceful enterprises and all governments within the Federation to activate the available technology, resources, and labor power. Through the inflow of substantial credit, the economic multiplier factor at the heart of every healthy economy will rapidly create a substantial prosperity impossible under the development model now controlled by the world’s wealthy classes through the World Bank, the IMF, and other institutions. From the wealth created by activation of regional and local economies, the principal borrowed through these lines of credit will be repaid along with only a small administrative fee. Exploitative interest on loans leading to massive international debt will be immediately abolished (Isely, 2000).

One role the federal government must assume in this process of rapid economic development is to ensure the process does not further destroy the local and global environments. The government must facilitate the progress of rapid economic development while carefully monitoring and regulating the process to ensure the costs of production are not externalized into hidden social costs for the environment, society, and future generations (Daly and Cobb, 1994). The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is carefully designed to play both roles. It is the vehicle for a truly transformative praxis with regard to development and sustainability.

The Earth Federation will assume the former international debt of its member nations and begin payment on this debt at reasonable rates of return. Seeing the rapidly-developing prosperity of the new Earth Federation, other nations (of the world’s poor majority) will rapidly join until the Federation comprises the overwhelming majority of nations and people. People within the former imperialist nations will soon recognize the liberated nature of the federated nations. The propaganda machine owned by the wealthy in the imperialist nations will not be able to hide the healthy, non-militarized enterprises, protection for universal human rights, and new spirit of global peace and community within the Federation. Citizens of these nations will also soon clamor to become part of the Federation. Lastly, the governments of these first-world nations, which represent the tiny minority of human beings who profit from global exploitation, will be forced to take their place within the democratic Federation of Earth.

Neither corporations nor individuals will lose their accumulated private wealth. The economics of the initial Earth Federation is not about mandating equality of wealth, but about creating prosperity for all. The rich will retain their personal wealth (which may suffice them and their children for generations to come). The rich will lose only the means of continuing their exploitation into the future. The system of exploitation itself will be rapidly transformed to the point where the power of those who own but do not work to exploit those who work but do not own will be brought to an end.

The World Parliament of the Earth Federation will take a few practical steps to foster global liberty, equality, and fraternity in the economic sphere. In doing this, as discussed in Chapter Seven, it will be making possible not only universal human prosperity but also the emergence of greater human maturity. These practical steps do not change the present economic system in any radical way. (Eventually, an emergent human maturity may almost certainly evolve substantially new economic forms.) These steps use the authority of government to universalize the opportunities for development and to break what economist J.W. Smith calls the “subtle-monopolies” of domination masquerading under the ideology of “global free trade” (2003a). In taking these steps, however, the Earth Parliament will be using self-conscious social foresight. It will be taking the first steps away from the repressed self-consciousness of monopoly capitalism.

There are at least six simple economic principles that must be adopted by the Federation to rapidly create universal prosperity. As we will see, these six principles oppose six mythologies (sets of lies) perpetuated by the wealthy nations and financial institutions in today’s world. I will list these principles here, then discuss each of them below. (1) Create vast lines of credit available for development on the basis of people’s ability to work and produce goods and services. (2) Eliminate the bizarre legal fiction of corporations having the rights of persons, and restore to democratic government the power to regulate them for the common good. (3) Eliminate the absolute right of corporations over so-called “intellectual property,” so technology and productive techniques can spread rapidly throughout the world.

(4) Eliminate the corporate monopoly on media (radio, television, news publications, and so on), thereby effectively ending the propaganda system controlled by the wealthy. This will make many of the airwaves available for public health and development education. This will also activate real democratic dialogue and debate within the Earth Federation. (5) Write into law the principle of equal pay for equally productive work for all people. This will immediately end much of corporate domination over governments and regions while providing workers with the cash to buy goods and services. (6) Break the present global monopoly over land and resources through restoring a multiplicity of local land-owners and converting land ownership rights to conditional rather than absolute rights. All of these steps together will activate the “multiplier factor” at the heart of any prosperous economy.

The orgy of greed and destruction convulsing the world since the last half of the twentieth century can only come to an end through the advent of a democratic world government acting on these or similar principles. Under the nation-state system, we saw, the tiny elites controlling wealth and finance through their agents in the World Bank and elsewhere act to enrich themselves and the already wealthy elites in the countries whose resources and export economic potential is targeted. Catherine Caufield, in Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations, describes the result of this system:

The past half-century of development has not profited the poorest people, nor the poorest countries. Rather, they have paid dearly – and their descendants will continue to pay dearly – for the disproportionately small benefits they have received…. Fifty years of development have left the rich countries – and especially their richest citizens – richer than before. (1996, p. 338)

Only federal world government, representing, for the first time in history, all the world’s citizens, could possibly have the authority to end this system now controlling individual governments, the mass media, and the world’s gigantic financial institutions. Bruce Rich, in Mortgaging the Earth. The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development, describes the environmental consequences of the global system of greed and exploitation centered on “development” as engineered by the World Bank and the IMF:

Massive internationally financed development schemes were unleashing ecological destruction and social upheaval in areas larger than many American states or European countries. Huge forests had been destroyed, gigantic river basins filled with dams, and vast agricultural expanses consolidated into larger holdings for export production at tremendous ecological cost. What was occurring was not a reasonable, measured process to increase economic welfare, but the destruction of natural and social systems whose endurance are the prerequisite, and the goal, of any sane project for longer term human development. (1994, p. 25)

A world of unmitigated and unregulated diversity without any true political, social, or economic unity is a world in the process of self-destruction. Only the power of federal government under a quality document empowering the Earth’s people (such as the Constitution for the Federation of Earth) can turn around the disastrous course the wealthy and powerful have chosen for our planet. The Provisional World Parliament and other organizations working on behalf of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth have worked out a clear, common sense economics based on human realities instead of lies designed to accumulate further wealth for the already powerful. The principles of this economics are described below. The first of these global economic myths that must be overcome is underlined by Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms:

The question remains whether this global economic system based on the relentless accumulation of private wealth can be subjected to a process of meaningful reform…. Meaningful reforms are not likely to be implemented without an enduring social struggle. What is at stake is the massive concentration of financial wealth and the command over real resources by a social minority. The latter also controls the “creation of money” within the international banking system (1998, p. 27)

The central myth is the grand lie of money and loan-creation. On this lie the entire system of global economic domination and exploitation is predicated. This lie is exposed in Immediate Economic Benefits of World Government (2000) by Philip Isely and in Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-first Century (2003a) by J. W. Smith. The lie states that only governments or banks with wealth can create or print money, and only financial institutions with wealth can lend money. The lie asserts that accumulated capital is necessary for creating or lending money.

Under this system, when poor governments try to print money to activate their economies, their money is devalued by world financial institutions until practically worthless. In Ghana, in the summer of 2002, my colleagues and I had to fill plastic shopping bags with bundles of paper money at the bank to pay our modest hotel bill because the national money of that country was so worthless. Simultaneously, these poor governments are offered loans in convertible first-world currencies from already wealthy financial institutions with interest rates making a profit on the loan for the wealthy lenders. Those who have stolen the world’s wealth for five centuries, now use the wealth they stole from the world’s poor to increase their own wealth by offering to lend what they have stolen back to their third world victims.

All genuine wealth is created through a productive combination of capital, labor, and natural resources (Smith, 2003a). Wealth is created from resources through human productivity. A government does not need preexisting funds to create money or lines of credit. It can create these (for loans as capital investment) on the basis of the ability of people to use this credit, along with labor and natural resources, to produce goods and services. These loans can be repaid to the government from the wealth produced at a nominal additional cost for the administration of the loan. The Earth Federation does not have to bow to the Lords of the Earth to achieve rapid prosperity. All that is required is the political will of the initial group of ratifying nations.

The world federal government will also necessarily be a major employer itself as it activates agencies for fundamental economic conversion to sustainable energy uses, for reforestation of our denuded planet, reclamation of degraded agricultural land, restoration of fisheries, development of sustainable technologies, development of energy sources, transportation systems, and for the systematic demilitarization of the nations within the Federation. There is no danger of loss of employment for the many now engaged in military-related production and deployment.

The number of jobs required to restore our planet to ecological, social, productive, and cultural health will be immense. Large numbers of scientists (now engaged in the horrific work of designing ever more effective machines of death and destruction) will be required for developing sustainable engineering designs for housing, industry, transportation, sustainable sources of energy, and the restoration of integrity to our planetary environment. The “brain drain” will be reversed, as scientists from non-federation countries flee their nightmarish war-related jobs for employment within the Earth Federation using their skills for peaceful and productive purposes. People will work with energy and a sense of fulfillment, since they will be engaged in the project of saving the Earth and creating democracy for our planet for the first time in history.

When twenty-five or so nations simultaneously ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, they will create a common currency (call it “Earth Currency”) and will immediately be able to receive ample lines of credit for rapid development based on their productive capability, resources, and labor supply. Twenty-five or so nations combined together as the initial Earth Federation will have plenty of all three and will be able to eliminate money scarcity and devalued currency immediately. Their economies will be regional, emphasizing local, autonomous development and activating the economic multiplier factor that is the key to every healthy economy. And their economy within the Earth Federation as a whole will be large enough to function independently of the financial centers of control of the present world-system.

The economic multiplier factor means that goods produced make a profit for the local producers that is reinvested in the local economy. It requires good pay for workers who can then afford the products they produced and circulate their money through consumption of more goods and services. When this happens, all local consumers and services prosper because the money is spread widely among the population and re-circulated throughout the regional economy. There is a “take off” in which capital, labor, and resources, activated locally and regionally into production, enrich the region and reinvest the wealth produced back into the same region. Millions of new jobs are created in the private sector and in the governmental sector responsible for converting the emerging productive capacity to ever more sustainable forms.

This is exactly what is prevented by the globalized so-called “free trade” economy. In this economy, the already poor are in debt to the already rich and are forced to sell off their natural resources and cheap labor to wealthy foreign corporations (through structural adjustment programs) who then drain the profits (and resources) from the poor regions into the coffers of the already wealthy. Barriers are maintained between nations and regions protecting accumulated wealth in certain nations and regions who do business in the exploited nations. There is no one to tax or regulate the process of exploitation. The nation-state system makes a decent economic world-order impossible.

In this process, the poor of the world are in competition with one another for the business of the rich and must continually lower labor wages and the price of natural resources to try to attract business and stay afloat in their international indebtedness. There is a race to the bottom in which the multiplier factor can never operate since wages are never enough to allow the population to consume the goods they produce and since the wealth is siphoned into the coffers of first-world multinational corporations. If wages in Indonesia are lower than those in Central America, corporations will demand lowering wages in Central America or they will follow the “free market” and switch production to Indonesia.

Resources are sold off ever more cheaply as poor nations compete with one another to earn convertible currencies to pay off their international debt to stay afloat. Resources and services are privatized and purchased by the rich for a fraction of their value. The poor are paid starvation and dehumanizing wages. The IMF and World Bank, backed by massive first-world military capability, ensure the maintenance and continuity of this nightmarish system. Environmental destruction and militarism continue unabated.

We saw that it is imperative for the initial Earth Federation assume the international debt of all joining nations immediately, to be paid off at a reasonable rate of interest by the Federation. The Federation will be careful not to throw the non-ratifying nations into economic turmoil, only to show them by example how much they would benefit from joining the Federation. The principle behind the Earth Constitution is the good of all humanity, not the initiation of a new competition between the Federation and non-Federation nations in the early stages of world government.

Simultaneously with the assumption of the international debt of member nations, the Federation will issue ample lines of credit to activate the economies of its members. Trade outside the Federation would have to be done in Earth Currency, the value of which would not be regulated by present global financial institutions. Trade outside the Federation would not depend on offering concessions to exploitative corporations, since the Federation would be self-sufficient and economically independent. Investment within the Federation from outside would have to be done in Earth Currency and follow Federation laws. The global system of exploitation would immediately be transformed. Other poor nations would begin joining the Federation in great numbers upon seeing the freedom and prosperity activated by the Federation.

Is this “socialism”? Or is it “cooperative capitalism,” so-called by J. W. Smith (2003b)? Or should we term it the initial stages of “economic democracy”? We have seen that “socialism” most basically means institutions predicated on human beings as ends-in-themselves, not the exploitation of human beings by others. Why quibble over words or slogans when what we all want is peace, freedom, prosperity, education, health care, and social security for human beings everywhere on the planet? This can be done easily through democratizing the global economy and empowering regions to activate local economies to produce and exchange services, whenever possible, at the local level.

As J. W. Smith points out, a mere forty billion dollars a year “would provide clean water and sanitation, care for women’s reproductive health, basic health and nutrition, and basic education for all the world’s citizens,” while the world now spends an astonishing $800 billion a year on militarism (2002, p. 2). Activating local and regional economies can easily produce the equivalent of forty billion per year to provide these necessities to all persons, especially since all nations within the Federation will no longer be spending money on militarism. Global trade can be reserved for those commodities and resources not available within the industrially developed, healthy, local and regional economies.

The Earth Federation will have no trouble fulfilling these guaranteed economic and social rights (Article XIII), since it will activate a prosperous economy while eliminating all costs formerly dedicated to war and militarism. Under the present system of domination (nation-state-monopoly-capitalism), there is no intention of creating a prosperous world economy. Trade, like militarism and everything else, is directed toward preserving the system (see Chomsky, 1996a, pp. 7-28). Twenty percent of the world population benefit while the other eighty percent remain in perpetual poverty as the exploited source of wealth for the few.

Under the Earth Federation, personal private property is protected by law, and, within limits imposed by preserving the environment and the good of all, the quest for private accumulation within reasonable bounds is retained. The government does not own all business and industry, nor are decisions made in a “command economy” fashion. The goal of government is to activate regional and local economies and coordinate use of resources and development so no nation or group benefits at the expense of others. Only a planetary government can achieve this, since individual nations under the present system are subject to economic forces over which their governments have little or no control. And under the present system, nation-states promote their own economic interests at the expense of all others.

The transition toward economic democracy, therefore, will not mean transition to government ownership but to economic systems where the least labor and least waste is expended so all may live reasonably well (sustainably) and get on with valuable and meaningful living. Economist J. W. Smith predicts that once prosperity is rapidly achieved, efficient economic production with prosperity for everyone will result in a work week of two or three days for most people on Earth (2003a). Our planet is extremely rich in resources (even after half a century of diminishing resources under monopoly capitalism). And the technology for conversion to renewable or alternative resources already exists (Daly, 1996, chs. 5-9; Brown 2001). We can create reasonable prosperity for everyone if we begin to democratically and self-consciously organize the economy under a democratic world government mandated for this goal.

The transformation of the Earth’s globalized economy will not mean massive economic dislocation such as we have witnessed from the “structural adjustment” programs of the World Bank and IMF that have taken the land from millions of poor people in order to convert it to gigantic export crop operations or in order to create massive dam and irrigation projects (see Caufield, 1996). The changes needed are as simple as they are fundamental. Former World Bank economist David C. Korten, in The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, presents a list of some of needed changes closely related to the ones proposed here:

Curing the capitalist cancer to restore democracy, the market, and our human rights and freedoms will require virtually eliminating the institution of the limited-liability for-profit public corporation as we know it to create a post-corporate world through actions such as the following:

1. End the legal fiction that corporations are entitled to the rights of persons and exclude corporations from political participation;

2. Implement serious political campaign reform to reduce the influence of money on politics;

3. Eliminate corporate welfare by eliminating direct subsidies and recovering other externalized costs through fees and taxes;

4. Implement mechanisms to regulate international corporations and finance; and

5. Use fiscal and regulatory policy to make financial speculation unprofitable and to give an economic advantage to human-scale, stakeholder-owned enterprises. (1999, p. 15)

The Earth Federation, predicated for the first time in history on the welfare of all rather than the benefit of particular nations or classes, will also found its economic and political system free of the other lies or mythologies now serving global domination. The list offered by Korten expresses the same insight as the list I offered above. The global economy must be democratized. The power of exploitation and domination must be taken from the transnational corporations and imperialist governments protecting them. There is no force in the world capable of this other than the legitimate sovereignty of the people of Earth expressed in federal world government.

These practical steps are nearly impossible to implement under the current world-order. No amount of “world social forums,” international people’s movements, or guerrilla insurgencies can overcome the power of those who now control the world-order. On the other hand, these common sense changes would be easy for the Earth Federation to implement and enforce. Under the Earth Federation, people would no longer be trapped within a global economy beyond the power of individual governments. The corporations could no longer prevent government from enacting simple laws to democratize economics and ensure sustainability. For the first time in history, the Earth would have a federal government representing all people, directed toward creating universal prosperity as well as ensuring the sustainability of the Earth for future generations.

As soon as corporations are stripped of the fiction of being legal persons with all the rights of legal persons, they can be regulated by government in a sensible fashion, as Korten recommends. The question of the “absolute right of private property” for corporations can then be debated and modified as necessary by the World Parliament. But in a federated world, corporations will no longer be able to blackmail nations by threatening to move elsewhere if environmental laws and labor laws are not weakened to their satisfaction.

For the first time in history, businesses would assume their rightful place as contributors to the common good of society through the production of needed goods and services. There is nothing wrong with corporations or businesses in themselves. The world needs intelligent, inventive, and creative business persons. What is wrong is the current system that forces our business persons to sacrifice the common good in order to survive and flourish. What is wrong is the current system that encourages profit achieved through externalizing and transferring the true costs of production to society, the environment, and future generations. Sustainable production is sensible and possible (see Brown 2001).

In addition to the lie of money-creation and the lie of corporations having legal human rights, there is a third lie now promoted by the wealthy of the world. The lie of “intellectual property rights” is directly connected to their claim that corporations are legal persons. This mythology asserts their absolute right to control patents and their “intellectual property” as if they were human persons like authors, inventors, or artists. It asserts their right to use technology and ideas for corporate gain at the expense of the common good. Rapid development cannot take place for the poor of the world until this falsehood is fundamentally changed.

A slight change in the present patent laws, now favoring the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor, will end the monopoly on technology now enforced through the World Trade Organization by its system of global patents (intellectual property rights). As Vandana Siva (1997; 2000), David Korten (2001), Michel Chossudovsky (1999), and others have shown, the global patent system prevents technology from disseminating, prevents poor countries from developing, and serves a system of domination creating starvation and misery for millions. Under the Earth Federation, a simple system of allowing any patented ideas to be used by any enterprise for a reasonable royalty fee would give everyone access to needed technological innovations.

The fourth myth, the lie of a “free press” through the corporate mass media, could easily be overcome under the Earth Federation by encouraging a multiplicity of media voices and not allowing media monopolies to be concentrated in the hands of the rich as they are today (McChesney, 1997; Edwards, 1996; Chomsky, 1994). Breaking the monopoly on information held by the dominant nations and classes is essential for activating genuine democratic dialogue and debate within the Earth Federation. Korten’s related point above is fundamental to activating real democracy within the Earth Federation. The Federation must “implement serious political campaign reform to reduce the influence of money on politics.” The Constitution is already written to significantly reduce this danger.

The Earth Federation provides the same campaign possibilities for all candidates for office. Privately funded public relations campaigns now masquerading as a “political process” are eliminated. However, the initial World Parliament must take the further step of ending the corporate monopoly on information, and other forms of corporate influence on politicians. If the information monopoly can manipulate public opinion as it easily does today, then eliminating private campaign funding is not sufficient. Honest, decent journalism must be promoted. The election of representatives to the House of Nations, the House of Counselors, and the House of Peoples cannot be democratic as long as such media monopolies exist.

If the airwaves are repossessed by the people instead of given away to the corporate monopolies, the immense potential of radio and television for public education, heath education, economic development, and free expression of ideas is activated. The corporate propaganda hold over the public mind will be broken. The common good of all (as ends-in-themselves) becomes the criterion for leasing the airwaves to a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. Education and skills for a prosperous economy are free to all and widely disseminated. Education is no longer the private privilege of the rich who can afford to pay tuition, room, and board at some university. It is available to all the world’s citizens for free over numerous public radio, television, and computer systems provided to enrich life and foster sustainable development.

The fifth myth now promulgated by the Lords of the Earth, that wages must be determined by the “free market” just as the price of ham hocks and pork bellies are so determined, can easily be eradicated by the Earth Federation on the simple, common sense principle of “equal pay for equally productive work.” On this principle, and with a Federation government concerned to maximize the economic multiplier factor through good wages allowing money to circulate freely through the economy, the exploitation of poor countries by wealthier countries comes to an end. In Economic Democracy, economist Smith describes the effect of today’s wage differentials between nations:

The equally-productive worker in the poorly-paid Third World produces a unique widget, is paid $1 an hour, and is producing one widget per hour. The equally-productive worker in the developed world produces another unique widget, is paid $10 an hour, and produces one widget per hour. Each equally-productive worker likes, and purchases the other’s widgets…. The $1 an hour worker must work 10 hours to buy one of the widgets of the $10 an hour worker, but, with the money earned in the same 10 hours, the $10 an hour worker can buy 100 of the widgets of the $1 an hour worker…. At this ten times wage differential, in direct trades between each other – or between countries – there is an exponential 100 times differential in retained wealth. (2003a, p. 15)

The Earth Federation’s first goal is to create a global economy promoting prosperity for all. Under the lie of “free market” determined wage levels, exponential rates of exploitation are maintained and the economic multiplier factor is circumvented in poor countries. How to create economic prosperity through the multiplier effect is well known. All that is required is an Earth Federation dedicated to this principle and premised on the welfare of all. Equal pay for equally productive work is the fifth key to the initial transformation of the economic world order. Within the Earth Federation, the ability of businesses to move to poorer regions to exploit cheaper labor would be eliminated. Their ability to funnel their funds to off-shore tax-free accounts would be eliminated. Their ability to blackmail governments would be eliminated. The exponential rate of exploitation described by Smith would be eliminated.

Sixth, the mythology of the absolute “natural right to private property” is promoted world-wide through the media monopolies owned by the global corporations in cooperation with imperial nation-states. This is pure seventeenth-century and eighteenth century mythology taken from the social contract theory of John Locke and others who wrote to justify the legitimacy of the rising bourgeois class of property owners against the king and the declining aristocratic class. The World Parliament will enact carefully crafted laws to promote world-wide land reform so that the land and its wealth can be returned to the people of Earth. Under the present system of global absolute property rights, corporations can own huge tracts of land everywhere on the planet that are effectively out of the control of national and local governments (since property rights are considered absolute). Governments attempting land reform are overthrown or economically punished by the military might of the imperial governments in order to protect this system of absolute property rights.

Everywhere, the dominators have demonized attempts at land reform in the service of the common good as “communism” and have bombed, overthrown, or economically blockaded all attempts at breaking the concept of absolute property rights. This suppression of the move to conditional property rights was a key factor in dozens of imperial interventions and wars. Among these are the overthrow of democracy in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, and the economic punishment of Cuba, North Korea, and Libya for many years. This brutal history includes the destruction of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, in the destruction of democracy in Chile in 1973, the wars against Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1980s, the bombing destruction of Iraq in 1991, the wars against the people of Columbia since the 1980s, the military attack on Yugoslavia in 1998, the recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sabotage and destruction of the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during this entire period.

Under the system of nation-states, genuine land-reform is impossible not only because of imperial military domination of the world in the service of private monopoly wealth but because no nation attempting an alternative economics could succeed within an economic world-order predicated on absolute property rights and monopoly capital principles. The only force capable of creating an economics of sustainability and universal prosperity is federal world government. As we have seen, the initial economics of the Earth Federation is not “communism” but a mixed economics predicated on unity (recognition of the common good and the vital need for a sustainable future) and diversity (recognition of self-interest, rewarding individual initiative, and a multiplicity of forms of ownership).

The first step the Earth Federation must take will be to purchase (or appropriate from uncooperative corporations) unused land or large concentrations of land at its tax value. Corporate and other forms of land monopolies can be broken up by law, with due compensation to the owners. Much of this land will be transferred to the poor using lines of credit charging only an accounting fee. In some cases, huge private plantations with workers living in poverty upon them must be converted in stages to cooperatives, the workers becoming co-owners who share in the profits produced from their labor. Eventually today’s system of monopolistic private ownership to the exclusion of the well-being of others will disappear. Society will collect the land-rent from all people, as Economist Henry George suggested (1935). Land and resource ownership will be converted to conditional ownership, for the most fundamental imperative of the Federation will be the common good of the Earth, all its citizens, and the welfare of future generations.

Programs will be initiated for the hundreds of millions of Earth’s citizens now unemployed or underemployed to integrate them into their newly activated local and regional economies. The Earth Federation itself would employ millions of the currently unemployed in replanting the forests of the Earth and the hundreds of other environmental tasks necessary to restore the integrity of our planetary ecosystem. George understood that conditional property rights (rather than absolute property rights) would place the good of the planet and society at the heart of property law. Laws would be enacted (along with massive education) protecting sustainable development and prohibiting business, industry, and farming from externalizing costs to society, nature, or future generations.

On these six principles alone, the twenty-five or so nations in the initial Earth Federation will be liberated to rapidly create universal prosperity and democracy for themselves. Money-creation can and must be premised on the wealth that ample lines of credit for peaceful productive purposes can bring to the entire Federation. Eliminating military spending will provide an immediate influx of funds within the initial Federation. Private property, including intellectual property, would be a limited right of persons, and it would be carefully regulated for the common good, as in any truly democratic society.

There must be sharing of developmental technology and knowledge through a rational system of intellectual property rights predicated on the good of all, not the monopoly of the multinational corporations. There must be true freedom of information and dialogue through a media system not in the hands of media monopolies. There must be equal pay for equally productive work world-wide. And there must be meaningful land reform under a new, socially responsible, conception of property. On the basis of these six, simple principles, the economic multiplier effect will produce rapid development and virtually universal prosperity. The Earth Federation must encourage this process, monitor it for equatability and sustainability, and employ millions of citizens in the task of reversing the environmental destruction proceeding everywhere on Earth.

A truly efficient planetary system of production could provide enough for all (food, clothing, housing, education, health care, social security) within a sustainable system of production with a work week of two or three days distributed equitably among the Earth’s adult working population (Smith, 2003a). There is no mystery about this. “Human nature” does not have to be drastically changed. It is only necessary to found planetary institutions under the Earth Federation premised on this goal. None of these simple changes can be implemented on a planetary scale without the authority of democratic world government. None could be implemented among the initial twenty-five or so nations unless they federated under the Earth Constitution. This simple paradigm shift results in practical action for a new world order.

The Transition to Planetary Maturity

As I stressed throughout Part Four, the Constitution for the Federation of Earth supplies the framework making possible the practical utopia of planetary maturity through moving toward a new level of human existence. It cannot do this until the global system benefiting the few has been eliminated and genuine prosperity for all has been achieved. As a framework, the Constitution is absolutely essential to activate a process of rapid sustainable, development. The basic needs of all must be met before we can begin to talk seriously about a more mature consciousness for the majority. The Constitution does not enforce any vision of “utopia” on the citizens of Earth. It provides a framework through which basic needs can be met and the free quest for planetary maturity can be activated.

The economic principles outlined in the previous section are derived from the work of Michael Chossudovsky, Herman Daly, Henry George, Michael Hudson, Philip Isely, David Korten, Dada Maheshvaranda,Vandana Siva, J.W. Smith, and others. All these thinkers agree that global poverty can only be eliminated though democratizing the world’s economic operating principles. None of these thinkers assume that a fundamental change in human consciousness or so-called “human nature” is necessary. The “immediate economic benefits of world government” (Isely) require only the formation of the Earth Federation and initiation of freedom for sustainable development through eliminating the present global monopolies on money creation, corporate “human” rights, information dissemination, technology, wage levels, and land. This is as it should be, since the Earth Federation will make possible further transformation of consciousness. It does not require transformation in any substantial way prior to ratification and initiation of a fundamentally democratic political and economic order.

At the moment our goal must be the immediate elimination of poverty, militarism, imperialism, environmental destruction, human rights abuses, and control of population growth. Transformation to practical utopia will likely come speedily once we have dealt with our planetary crises. Errol E. Harris confirms our most immediate need:

At the present time, because the customary way of thinking is molded by the Newtonian paradigm, few people give serious consideration to the establishment of world federation; but if, in accordance with the new scientific holism, global thinking were to prevail, that would be our immediate political goal; for it is the only condition under which global measures could be enacted to cope with the global problems which face humanity and threaten the survival of the species. Clearly, such all-embracing actions cannot be accomplished by the individual efforts of private persons and organizations. They must be universally enforced, and that requires global legislation and the global maintenance of a rule of law, which is possible only under a world government. (2002b, p. 109)

The creation of world government under the Constitution’s guiding principle of unity-in-diversity will soon lead to a different conception of economics. The principles of Chossudovsky, Daly, George, Hudson, Isely, Korten, Maheshvaranda, Siva, and Smith will be further “socialized” so worker participation in productive decision making will increase and the concept of production itself will increasingly focus on what is needed and how to contribute to the common good instead of private accumulation of wealth regardless of what is needed for the common good. Harris describes this development in the following way:

The economic health and success of every country is dependent on that of all others, so the world economy has to be seen as a single system and must be treated as a whole. Further, the conception of profit must be transformed: It must be socialized rather than individualized. Production and supply have to be viewed as a cooperative enterprise rendering service to the community, rather than a venture undertaken for personal gain. Likewise labor is not to be exploited to ensure profits, but has to be employed in partnership with capital for a common good. (2002b, p. 107)

The conception of profit will quite likely be further “socialized” as human consciousness adopts ever more fully the principle of unity-in-diversity. Once universal prosperity and efficient sustainability are achieved, and under the Earth Federation this would not take many decades, people will likely begin to lose interest in spending their lives grubbing for money. Mature people will want to spend their time with other, more serious, and important pursuits. Eventually, practical utopia will emerge on planet Earth. Once the Constitution for the Federation of Earth is ratified and the Earth Federation has brought our planetary crises under control, transformative praxis will act to bring about planetary maturity.

The obsession with material wealth and domination will probably disappear from our planet. The nihilism now dominating intellectual life will disappear in with a new sense of fulfillment and joy in living. In previous chapters, we examined the intellectual and spiritual poverty of positivism, post-modern relativism, scientism, and fundamentalism. All of these ignore or distort the paradigm shift at the heart of twentieth-century science, theology, and philosophy. The fulness of life will soon come flooding back into existence soon after we have founded the Earth Federation and overcome the global crises threatening our existence on Earth.

In Fashionable Nihilism – A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Bruce Wilshire frames this issue in terms of our present intellectual nihilism and the alternative of a fulfilled and meaningful existence as mature human beings:

Nihilism means: to mangle the roots of our thinking-feeling-evaluating selves, to lose the full potential of our immediate ecstatic involvement in the world around us. It means to lose full contact with our willing-feeling-valuing life-projects: to have a shallow sense of what is valuable in human life. It means to be arch, smug, dried out – to be a talking head among other such heads. Speak and reason as we will, we are no longer moved in our depths…

What passes as education is not the educing (educare) of our needs, yearnings, questionings as beings who must develop ourselves or rot in boredom…. But it is rather instruction in data and methods for amassing more of it: instruere, structuring into….

For William James….all meaning and truth are a species of goodness, and this is the fruitful building out of the past into the present and future. Meaning-making and truth are essential features of being vitally alive and centered, of fully being, and philosophy is meant to nurture and feed us – we who are ecstatic body-minds. (2002, pp. 6 and 35)

Philosophers such as John Dewey, Errol Harris, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bruce Wilshire understand the need for a fundamental paradigm shift beyond fragmentation to an integrated fullness of “our thinking-feeling-evaluating selves.” This change will be made possible by the simple mechanism of ratifying the Earth Constitution and institutionalizing the principle of unity-in-diversity politically and economically for our planet.

In Chapter Five, we saw Henry David Thoreau express this principle of planetary maturity:

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation…. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. (1967, pp. 372-73)

The evolution of the economic system under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth may take on entirely unexpected forms once global and equitable prosperity has been achieved. We cannot predict, but can surely imagine, a beautiful system such as was envisioned by Karl Marx. We can imagine a transformation of our entire experience of life attendant upon an equitable and planetary economy based on human dignity and sustainable efficiency. Marx writes:

The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all the human senses and attributes, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become subjectively and objectively, human…. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility…either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses – the practical senses (love, will, etc.) – in a word, human sense – the humanness of the senses – comes to be…. (1978, pp. 87-89)

The possibilities for humanization of our being, for transformation of our being toward planetary maturity are immense. For Marx, they included a liberation of the senses to the point where the meaning and richness of existence flows into human lives through an awakened and living sensitivity to the inexhaustible depth and beauty of our precious Earth.

Marx writes of the liberation of our senses. He intuits their constricted nature under capitalism. Similarly, in The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure of Metaphysics (1989), David Michael Levin finds that the modern “hegemony of vision” constricts and delimits our deep possibilities for listening and attunement with being. In Chapter Three, we saw Jean-Paul Sartre describe our world system as an institutionalized “structure of scarcity.” Once the Earth Federation has eliminated the “structure of scarcity” dominating our thinking-feeling-willing selves, the possibilities for a transformed mode of being in the world are immense.

These possibilities cannot be realized under the present world-order of nation-state-monopoly-capitalism. For the perpetuation of exploitation and domination require that people be kept in a state of childish adolescence. These possibilities can only be realized within true economic democracy for our entire planet. Transformative praxis acts to make this happen. We need a planetary framework premised on the political and economic unity-in-diversity of all people, nations, and cultures.

We need practical, simple steps like those outlined here to create economic prosperity for all the world’s citizens. Peace, freedom, and prosperity are relatively easy to create once the institutions preventing their emergence have been transformed. The ratification of the Earth Constitution, plus these simple, common sense, economic steps implicit in the Constitution, is all that is required to make possible the realization of our higher divine-human destiny on this planet.

This is a chapter from the book, Millennium Dawn; The Philosophy of Planetary Crisis and Human Liberation. Visit that link for more information about the book.