An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Video)
One Global Democracy, via Blockchain Voting
Video Highlights Bold Vision for Solving World’s Problems Post-Trump
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, November 29, 2017 — A
small group of highly credentialed progressive leaders have announced
in a video a new movement for One Global Democracy — boldly challenging
Trumpism by calling for an end to separate countries, as a necessary
step to solving the world’s biggest problems, including climate change,
inequality, and economic opportunity for everyone.
This new video is online at: OneGlobalDemocracyVideo.com
Two new technologies can
now combine to transform governance worldwide: a Blockchain will enable
secure voting at a global scale, and a Liquid Democracy model will
enable everyone to vote directly on policy, or delegate their vote if
they choose, in a system of accountable yet flexible decision-making
that includes everyone equally, without electing representatives. We can
eliminate countries, and handle decisions at the most local level
feasible, while also giving everyone worldwide a vote on the big, global
issues. People will be able to move freely anywhere, with
constitutional rights guaranteed for everyone.
“The only way to build a future that works, one that can handle our increasingly global problems, is to include everyone equally — worldwide,” said Peter Schurman, formerly the founding Executive Director of MoveOn.org, and key driver of this new movement.
Global governance is not
a new idea. Reformers and elected officials called for a global
government following World War II because they did not think the United
Nations went far enough. More than 100 members of Congress, including
the future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, supported this
call in 1949.
Yet today, it is almost entirely absent from mainstream debate. With
today’s new video, One Global Democracy is kicking off a new
conversation on this idea whose time has come.
“Climate
change, inequality, lost economic opportunity: these are our biggest
problems. We seldom think about it, but all three are linked to a world
political system that’s failing because it’s comprised of separate
countries,” said Schurman. “The definition of a country is an entity
that’s accountable to nobody beyond its borders. In today’s
interconnected world, that just doesn’t work any more.”
“Separate
countries are a core reason why our world is breaking apart — this
isn’t an easy challenge to face or solve, but it’s clear that things
will continue to get worse until we do.”
Team:
Executive Producer: Peter Schurman
Director: Dennis Castro
Editor and Motion Graphics: Jacob Nasim
Voiceover Talent: Mara Junot
Additional Motion Graphics: Austin Cable
Social Media: Beth Becker
Web Developer: Jason Charter
Marketing Strategy: Maya Zuckerman
Development Associate: K. Stellar Dutcher
Social Media:
Facebook: Facebook.com/OneGlobalDemocracy
Twitter: @OneGlobalDemoc (launches today); #OneGlobalDemocracy
Fast Company: The Case for One Global Democracy
Fast Company recently published “The Case For Eliminating Countries And Instituting A Global Democracy.”
The article lays out the main arguments for One Global Democracy solidly. Here’s an excerpt:
“With Trump about to be inaugurated, the scales have really fallen from people’s eyes, and people are seeing that American democracy failed,” says Peter Schurman, who was the founding executive director at MoveOn.org and who now advocates for a global democracy through a project called One Global Democracy. “We really have to come up with a better design.”The article covers several other key points too. We encourage you to read it and share it.
In the model he envisions, city governments would still address local issues. But for the global challenges that countries struggle to deal with now—climate change, terrorism, Ebola and Zika—the global government would lead…
Schurman argues that other attempts at major international collaboration—from the U.N. to the E.U. to trade agreements—have been ineffective because individual countries still hold power.
“The common point of failure they all have is that they’re all based on the country as the fundamental unit of power,” he says. “And since countries only have to work together as far as they agree to, there’s every opportunity for disagreement and for failure to do what needs to be done… [The U.N] is hamstrung because separate countries are just not structurally designed to work together.”
This is a huge milestone — the first real news coverage of our nascent movement for One Global Democracy. Thanks, Adele Peters!
And it’s just the beginning. In the years ahead, it’s going to be more important than ever that we counter the darkness with a positive story of the future we can build together.
We’re going to do that by making a movie. We’re assembling a great team, and people are stepping up to support the project.
You can too, with a tax-deductible gift via our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Ecologistics.
We’ll have more exciting news soon. Stay strong.
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To Solve Inequality, We’ve Got to Think Bigger than Countries
Today we learn via OxFam that just eight men control half the world’s wealth. People are shaking their heads, but what would it take to change this?
Nothing on the current policy menu will do the job. As the Panama Papers highlighted last spring, the ultra-rich simply hide money in other countries to shirk their tax obligations.
Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, says the only way to solve this is with a global tax on wealth. And Piketty is not a lone voice.
Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, also says it’s time for taxation to go global.
The Vatican has been calling for a “global public authority” for “reforming the international financial and monetary systems” in response to “inequalities,” since even before Francis became Pope.
There is a growing consensus among people serious about tackling inequality that raising taxes country-by-country will fail, as long as there are countries willing to ignore the growing global consensus that we must limit the obscene disparities in wealth revealed by today’s headlines.
It’s a lot like the problem we face in handling climate change. Countries that don’t work together can doom the whole enterprise.
This begs a very big question: why are we still relying on countries to handle the world’s biggest problems? These entities are 350 years out of date, predating modern communications, motorized transportation, domesticated electricity, and even Newton’s articulation of the laws of physics.
The fundamental attribute of a country is that it is not accountable to others. This no longer works, and it’s time to call our broken global system of separate countries into question.
It’s clear that we need a new global system to tax wealth. It should be a democracy, a global one, with an equal voice for everyone: One Global Democracy.
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Separate Countries are Killing America
Until now, one of the main objections to One Global Democracy has been an assumption that America is better off on its own.
Are we?
America as we know it is now scheduled to end in 10 weeks, with the inauguration of Donald Trump as President on January 20th.
Our statue of liberty says “I lift my lamp beside the golden door”; Trump has promised a wall. Our Constitution defines checks and balances, such as equal protection, that Trump has vowed to ignore. Republicans have defied their constitutional duty to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat and will now lock up that all-powerful institution for another generation with right-wing justices, while also controlling both other branches of the federal government. Our supposedly nonpartisan FBI threw the election to Trump, yet will likely face no consequences.
Our planet’s survival, and with it our country’s, is directly threatened by Trump’s climate denial.
What drove Trump’s victory? Many factors, all having to do with our antiquated attachment to separate countries as our fundamental frame of reference.
Poor and middle-class white people have been hurting economically for decades. The financial benefits of technology, globalization, tax breaks and bailouts have gone to wealthy elites, leaving Trump’s voters to fight with progressives over scraps.
These elites have consolidated their economic privilege, and their attendant, outsized political power, in large part by hiding money overseas, where it can’t be taxed. They have evaded paying their fair share, then exploited their financial advantage by securing ever-more advantageous tax policies (e.g. the repeal of the estate tax), bailouts for bankers with zero accountability for defrauding people out of their homes, and locking in their power over our politics through Citizens United and related cases, through a corrupt approach and defying a bipartisan consensus.
Trump has managed to misdirect the rage of American voters, turning it against our neighbors in other countries, and against people who come here in search of a better life, as all of our own families once did.
Trade agreements have sent jobs overseas, without economic benefit for most Americans. They have allowed capital to move freely while otherwise maintaining borders that strip us of our rights when we cross them. In practice, wealthy elites can go almost anywhere and generally do as they please. But borders prevent the rest of us from traveling freely in search of work. Trump has correctly assailed these lopsided trade agreements, while falsely branding people in other countries who have benefited as our enemies. Yet his policies will likely make matters worse, not better, for American workers, while further magnifying elite privilege.
Russia has played a shocking role in supporting Trump’s campaign. Russia hacked the DNC, and Russian individuals allegedly financed both Trump himself and one of his top campaign advisors. (Although this money was ostensibly private, the biggest private Russian fortunes were originally acquired by well-connected insiders who gained control of major state assets at the collapse of the Soviet Union.) So Trump has been funded and otherwise supported largely by a foreign country.
With both our planet and American democracy in crisis, there are many reasons to consider an alternative to the antiquated system of separate countries we’re used to: One Global Democracy.
First, we can more effectively confront climate change together, rather than separately.
Second, we can finally deal with inequality by enacting a global tax on wealth. Nothing less will work. (And surprisingly enough, if the world’s wealth were redistributed equally among everyone, most Americans would be better off than they are today, because wealth is now so concentrated at the top. The combined wealth of everyone in the world is $241 trillion. If it were evenly distributed, each person in the world would have $51,600.-. That’s more than the median net worth of an American today: $44,911.-)
Third, we can also unlock tremendous economic growth, doubling the size of the world’s economy, simply by allowing people everywhere to move where their work is best rewarded.
We could dispense with the electoral college and other broken anachronisms of representative democracy and instead enable everyone to participate at will, through a new model called liquid democracy, at a global scale. We can do this online, and securely, on a blockchain (the technology behind bitcoin). We’ll be able to include everyone, worldwide, as the digital divide closes.
Brevity prevents this short piece from covering every detail, but there are many reasons to take the idea of One Global Democracy seriously. It merits a conversation.
___
Sign up to “Get Updates via Email”, at the top right of this page, and “Like” us on Facebook.
Are we?
America as we know it is now scheduled to end in 10 weeks, with the inauguration of Donald Trump as President on January 20th.
Our statue of liberty says “I lift my lamp beside the golden door”; Trump has promised a wall. Our Constitution defines checks and balances, such as equal protection, that Trump has vowed to ignore. Republicans have defied their constitutional duty to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat and will now lock up that all-powerful institution for another generation with right-wing justices, while also controlling both other branches of the federal government. Our supposedly nonpartisan FBI threw the election to Trump, yet will likely face no consequences.
Our planet’s survival, and with it our country’s, is directly threatened by Trump’s climate denial.
What drove Trump’s victory? Many factors, all having to do with our antiquated attachment to separate countries as our fundamental frame of reference.
Poor and middle-class white people have been hurting economically for decades. The financial benefits of technology, globalization, tax breaks and bailouts have gone to wealthy elites, leaving Trump’s voters to fight with progressives over scraps.
These elites have consolidated their economic privilege, and their attendant, outsized political power, in large part by hiding money overseas, where it can’t be taxed. They have evaded paying their fair share, then exploited their financial advantage by securing ever-more advantageous tax policies (e.g. the repeal of the estate tax), bailouts for bankers with zero accountability for defrauding people out of their homes, and locking in their power over our politics through Citizens United and related cases, through a corrupt approach and defying a bipartisan consensus.
Trump has managed to misdirect the rage of American voters, turning it against our neighbors in other countries, and against people who come here in search of a better life, as all of our own families once did.
Trade agreements have sent jobs overseas, without economic benefit for most Americans. They have allowed capital to move freely while otherwise maintaining borders that strip us of our rights when we cross them. In practice, wealthy elites can go almost anywhere and generally do as they please. But borders prevent the rest of us from traveling freely in search of work. Trump has correctly assailed these lopsided trade agreements, while falsely branding people in other countries who have benefited as our enemies. Yet his policies will likely make matters worse, not better, for American workers, while further magnifying elite privilege.
Russia has played a shocking role in supporting Trump’s campaign. Russia hacked the DNC, and Russian individuals allegedly financed both Trump himself and one of his top campaign advisors. (Although this money was ostensibly private, the biggest private Russian fortunes were originally acquired by well-connected insiders who gained control of major state assets at the collapse of the Soviet Union.) So Trump has been funded and otherwise supported largely by a foreign country.
With both our planet and American democracy in crisis, there are many reasons to consider an alternative to the antiquated system of separate countries we’re used to: One Global Democracy.
First, we can more effectively confront climate change together, rather than separately.
Second, we can finally deal with inequality by enacting a global tax on wealth. Nothing less will work. (And surprisingly enough, if the world’s wealth were redistributed equally among everyone, most Americans would be better off than they are today, because wealth is now so concentrated at the top. The combined wealth of everyone in the world is $241 trillion. If it were evenly distributed, each person in the world would have $51,600.-. That’s more than the median net worth of an American today: $44,911.-)
Third, we can also unlock tremendous economic growth, doubling the size of the world’s economy, simply by allowing people everywhere to move where their work is best rewarded.
We could dispense with the electoral college and other broken anachronisms of representative democracy and instead enable everyone to participate at will, through a new model called liquid democracy, at a global scale. We can do this online, and securely, on a blockchain (the technology behind bitcoin). We’ll be able to include everyone, worldwide, as the digital divide closes.
Brevity prevents this short piece from covering every detail, but there are many reasons to take the idea of One Global Democracy seriously. It merits a conversation.
___
Sign up to “Get Updates via Email”, at the top right of this page, and “Like” us on Facebook.
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