Glen T. Martin

Adopted as an official policy statement of the Provisional World Parliament, Chennai, India, Dec. 28, 2003

World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) and Institute On World Problems (IOWP)

North America Offices: 313 Seventh Ave., Radford VA 24141, USA

gmartin@radford.edu,      www.earthconstitution.world

The system of domination within the United States and the world is moving toward perfection.   With the advent of the electronic age, and the capacity for computerized tracking of every aspect of the lives of citizens, mechanisms of domination are brought to perfection.  The possibilities for privacy, personal dignity, and freedom rapidly recede from memory.

Security screening increasingly present for all public functions, public places, or personal travel, is not only designed to humiliate and dehumanize citizens.   It is designed to record electronically all movements of citizens and, ultimately, to condition people to unquestioning obedience, subordination, and acquiescence to governmental authorities. 

Currently at U.S. airports, those persons randomly selected for “special security” must, after having their carry-on luggage x-rayed and walking through a metal detector (without activating the detector), still have their body electronically searched, removing their shoes for special x-ray, and have their baggage hand searched.   Citizens must be conditioned to unnecessary double and triple searches until the unquestioned submission to the system of domination becomes second nature.

The rationale of security against possible terrorist activity has little to do with the real motivations behind perfecting the system of domination.  The dominators (in top echelons of government, military, and the ruling class) know perfectly well that their global system of domination and economic exploitation (operating for the past five centuries) will always spark violent resistance in some people.   The exact consequence of their policies (occasional violent resistance) becomes the proffered rationale for perfecting the system of domination with the electronic apparatus now available (under the deceptive heading of “preventing terrorism”).

The economic and political system resulting from the collapse of the Middle Ages involved a dynamic confluence of emerging sovereign nation-states and newly borne globalized capitalism.   Nations forming the core of world military and economic power acted to control the wealth-producing process in their own favor.   As economist J.W. Smith labels it, “plunder by raid (of the Middle Ages) was replaced by plunder by trade.”

Every nation with power acted to privilege its capitalist class in the system of plunder of the cheap labor and resources of weaker nations in the periphery.  The ideology of Adam Smith’s “free trade” always was and remains a lie to cover a system of domination and exploitation over the wealth-producing process.   When economic coercion, unequal trade agreements, threats, or manipulation fail to give advantage to the imperial nation, the military is used to destroy all breaks for economic or real political freedom in the periphery. 

The wealth, resources, and labor power of peripheral nations must not be used for the benefit of peoples in these countries.  Their wealth and resources are forced into a system that feeds the coffers of the rich and powerful, backed by diplomacy and military might within the imperial centers of capital.   The past five centuries is a history of empires, the last of which is the current brutal empire of the United States, ensuring massive starvation and death of exploited peoples throughout the world.

Up to the present, nonviolent civil resistance (Gandhi, M.L. King, Jr.) or violent revolutionary resistance (Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh) was a perpetual threat to the system of domination and exploitation.  The dominators have viciously suppressed all breaks for freedom in the periphery.   They overthrew Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, massively bombed Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1960s, overthrew Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, supported genocide in East Timor from 1975 to 1995, overthrew the Allende government of Chile in 1973, destroyed the Nicaraguan revolution during the 1980s, brutally suppressed resistance in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and 1990s, destroyed socialism in Yugoslavia in 1998, invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 2001, and did the same in Iraq in 2003.  

They economically blockaded nations trying to act independently of the system of domination, calling them “rogue states” (Cuba, North Korea, Libya).   The destruction and occupation of Iraq is only the most recent repression of a nation refusing to lie on its back and open its veins to the vampires in the IMF, World Bank, Washington, DC, and corporate centers of capital.   Although resistance worldwide continues, since WW II some twenty-five million people have been slaughtered in wars, most of them civilians, and most of them due to the state terrorism of the imperial centers of power.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the global system of imperial sovereign nations inseparable from the global system of capital had solidified five monopolies over world-order that assured their control of the wealth-producing process nearly everywhere.  They solidified monopolies over weapons and military power, over money creation and lending, over private-property laws and rights, over technological mechanisms for the development of wealth, and over communications and information.  Below we will see how a liberated world-order entails breaking each of these monopolies and creating genuine democracy for the first time.

The monopoly on communication and information assures that news and programming worldwide will legitimize and affirm present systems of domination as normal, common sense, “democratic,” and the only alternative.  It also ensures the growing capacity to track, intimidate, and condition citizens to the system of control over their lives, thoughts, and movements.  It justifies and covers up the monopoly over a militarized world-order necessary to enforce global economic inequality.  The lion’s share of research and development resulting from the electronic revolution is directed to military world domination and to internal control and tracking of civilian activities.

The final stage of world military domination is envisioned in the Pentagon’s “Vision 20/20″ document, a plan currently being implemented to control the world from outer space and to destroy any competing attempts to militarize space.  The final stage of civilian domination is elaborated in the “Total Information Awareness” goals of the U.S. Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act.   If these projects come to perfection as planned, all resistance to the global system of domination and exploitation will be fairly easily destroyed.

The indomitable human spirit may inspire continued resistance, but it will quite easily be controlled and destroyed.   Just as, to the present, those who speak out worldwide are disappeared by para-military death squads (one of the most fundamental tools in their arsenal of repression),   so in the future total surveillance from space and total electronic information awareness on the ground will allow the identification, tracking, and disappearance of dissidents with relative ease.   The propaganda system (run by the communications monopoly) will easily demonize the victims and frame these repressions in the language of “fighting fanatical terrorists” so their sacrifice, courage, and liberating spirit will not easily spread to others.

The only way to a just, liberated, and equitable world-order for all the Earth’s citizens lies through democratic solidarity with the vast majority of humanity.   The fragmented world-order of some 190 “sovereign” nation-states allows the system of domination to operate unhindered and prevents the majority of humanity (in poor countries) from taking control of the wealth-producing process in the service of their own prosperity.   The impoverishment of poor countries by powerful countries in tandem with the capitalist classes in each country is insulated from spreading to global revolution through political fragmentation –  the system of sovereign nation-states.

The only way to a just and peaceful world-order is for the majority to create democratic federal world government over all the nations under a constitution that guarantees enforceable rights for all the world’s citizens and countries.   Since 1977, the Constitution for the Federation of Earth has been promoted worldwide and translated into twenty-two languages.  It establishes non-military federal world government over all the nations with bills of rights guaranteeing all nations and peoples equal right to control over their own wealth-producing process within a demilitarized world-order.

Under this constitution, every nation sends representatives to the House of Nations.   One thousand electoral districts worldwide each send one representative to the House of Peoples.   Two hundred more representatives are elected to the House of Counselors  from universities worldwide to represent the planet as a whole.  The combined three Houses form the World Parliament legislating common, enforceable laws for all nations and persons on Earth.  The legitimate authority of democratic world government derives directly from the people and nations of Earth, federating together, and electing representatives to the World Parliament.  No other form of authority is legitimate.

All thinking people agree that the current system of “international law” is dysfunctional.  This is because it is a system wherein a country can decide at the time of a law’s inception whether or not it wants to become a party to the law.  Even if it signs the “law,” it can later back out of the agreement.  This is possible because there is no direct connection between the people and these so-called “laws.”  However, when people elect representatives to a government, that government receives legitimate authority from the people. An effective and legitimate world legal system can only be based on this principle.

Only through the authority of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth can the five global monopolies cited above be broken: global militarism – all nations must demilitarize and the Earth Federation itself is non-military.  Global control of technology and trade – simple changes in Intellectual Property Rights laws can facilitate technology transfer and rapid sustainable development for the majority in the poor countries.  Global money creation and loans – the Earth Federation will provide immense lines of credit for rapid development without exploitative interest rates, and it will establish an Earth Currency that cannot be devalued or manipulated by the imperial centers of capital.

Fourth, global property laws can easily be modified by the authority of the World Parliament.  In the past, this “land reform” has met with brutal repression by the imperial powers and their secret police such as the CIA.  Many of the victim nations cited above were overthrown because they were attempting land reform which transferred small plots of land to the starving poor.  Land reform can never succeed under the current domination pact between global capital and imperial nation-states.

 Finally, global communications needs to be in the hands of a true multiplicity of public and private sources to foster freedom of thought and communication essential to planetary democracy.   Only a World Parliament legislating enforceable laws on behalf of the majority of humanity can accomplish this breaking of the global monopolies of domination.  No individual nation, taking over its own communication system and wealth-producing process can succeed against the power of the present global system.  Its communications will be swamped, sabotaged, and disrupted.  Its control over the wealth-producing process will be targeted by sabotage and strangled by economic blockades.   Witness the devastation of Cuba by the state terrorist forces of the United States.   Only a world authority over all countries and peoples can prevent the powerful from crushing the weak as they do within the current lawless world-order.

Twenty percent of the Earth’s population own or control nearly the entire, wealth, resources, and property of the Earth.  They live lives of pleasure, power, and privilege at the expense of the vast majority of humankind.  This system of economic domination, enforced and preserved by military might, is a direct consequence of the system of so-called sovereign nations in cooperation with monopoly capitalism.

All mere resistance movements can be easily destroyed.  The answer cannot lie with mere resistance to domination, exploitation, or globalization.  Without a vision of a truly democratic world-order that abolishes the corrupt system of sovereign, independent, nation-states in league with the corrupt system of globalized “free trade” there will never be liberation.   Billions of dollars are being invested in destroying the revolutionary liberation movement in Colombia.  Colombia can be isolated, targeted, and destroyed because it is a separate “nation-state,” even though all its neighbors and the majority of Latin Americans are in the very same plight. Billions more are spent on suppressing the brave resistance of the Iraqi people to the occupying army.  “Sovereign” nations can be isolated in this way, even though most of the countries of the Middle East face the very same issues.    Untold billions are spent each year in interfering in the affairs of nations worldwide in order to crush movements for independence and liberation.   The system of nation-states fragments humanity into small units, easily controlled by the centers of domination and imperial power.

Hundreds of U.S. citizens are going to prison every year for civil disobedience at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, or for protests in Washington, DC or non-violent resistance at nuclear weapons facilities.   Their struggle, as courageous and inspiring as it is, will make little difference unless they join the movement for a democratic, federal world government that can finally end (rather than simply resist) the global system of domination and exploitation. The oppressors do not need to “divide and conquer” since the system itself is already divided so they can conquer. The system of fragmentation  (nation-states and monopoly capitalism) must be replaced by a system of unity-in-diversity with the diversity of all protected and respected precisely because it is part of democratic, planetary political unity.

We at the World Constitution and Parliament Association and the Institute On World Problems are educating people about the Constitution in relation to global issues worldwide.   We are in a race against time.   Before the darkness of totalitarianism is perfected by the global system of domination, we must all learn that the only legitimate sovereignty is sovereignty of the people of the Earth. 

The Constitution guarantees enforceable political, economic, and social rights to all people on Earth, for they are sovereign over all governments, including the Earth Federation.  No longer will the few be able to hide behind the system of nation-states or globalized “free trade” to perpetuate domination and exploitation.   Human liberation can only happen through the rule of enforceable, democratically legislated law for all nations and peoples.    We must join all nations and peoples together in a legally constituted, democratic, and liberated world-order.