Transforming the Global System to One of Peace and Prosperity

Glen T. Martin

Radford University

President, International Philosophers for Peace

Secretary-General, World Constitution and Parliament Association

September 2007

Abstract

This paper describes the global system as one of structural violence imposed by a tiny ruling elite in the world who control 40% of the world’s wealth.  It describes the dynamics of the world economy under the World Trade Organization, IMF, World Bank, global capitalism, and the system of sovereign nation-states.  This entire system is one of institutionalized violence in which the imperial nations use massive state terrorism to crush opposition to the system anywhere in the world.  The paper goes on to describe the changed fundamental assumptions behind the Constitution for the Federation of Earth that will ensure a global economics of prosperity for the vast majority and a global, non-military political system that will ensure peace as well as justice for the peoples of the Earth.

1.  Our World System of Structural Violence

            The central form of violence on our planet today involves a dynamic of structural violence that results in the impoverishment of the vast majority.  This structural violence is a historical consequence of the system of the private accumulation of wealth that has been imposed upon the world for the past several centuries.   Today, half the world — more than three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.    Nearly a billion people entered the twenty-first century unable to read a book or sign their names.  Less than one per cent of the one trillion dollars that the world spends each year on weapons could put every child on Earth into school.  The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.  The developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.  

            Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished.  30,000 children die each day due to poverty.  2.2 million children die each year because they have not been immunized. Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.  The slice of the economic pie taken by the richest 1% of the world’s people is the same size as that available to the poorest 57% of humankind.  The Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a twenty-five percent of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined. (These global statistics are found at http://www.globalissues.org, see also Brown 2007, p. 271).

            The global south has been colonized and exploited for five centuries by the ruling classes of the global northern imperial nations with no end in sight.  Today’s system of neo-colonial domination and exploitation is no less brutal than that exercised by Spanish conquistadors or British imperial troops.  Brazilian politician Luis Ignacio Silva writes:

The Third World War has already started…. The war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America, and practically all the Third World.  Instead of soldiers dying, there are children.  It is a war over the Third World debt, one which has as its main weapon, interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam. (in Brown 2007, p. 202)

2.   The Structure of Our Present World Order

            The second form of violence after structural violence involves the imperial violence of nation-states working to enhance, enforce, and control the populations subjected to structural violence.  This system of sovereign nation-states was first formally recognized in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (see Philpott, 2001).   These early imperial centers proceeded to divide the world among themselves, appropriating for themselves the cheap slave labor and resources of the majority of humankind who were organized as colonies of these imperial centers of power.  

            The imperial powers controlled this system under their ideology of sovereign nation-states and claimed imperial rights of domination over their colonies.  The imperial nations all adopted the ideology of Adam Smith “free trade” as a cover for their nationalistic competition to control the global wealth-producing process in their own interests (Smith, 2006, Chs. 1-4).  They affirmed the ideology of unlimited capital expansion (at the expense of nature and the poor) as the only possible route to development and prosperity, but simultaneously attempted to channel this process of expansion to the ruling classes of their respective nation-states.

            With decolonization (which largely took place within the twentieth century), many of these former colonies become wretched basket-cases of nations, impoverished financially, culturally, technologically, and structurally, and subject to manipulation, overthrow, destabilization, or outright domination by one or the other of their former colonial masters.  They also became subject to financial control by the World Bank and IMF.  Hundreds of millions of poor now live in these countries as in prison camps, unable to leave and utterly unable to improve their own condition – controlled economically, politically, and militarily from abroad.

               The structural violence of enforced poverty and misery is not an accident.  It is a direct consequence of the imperial conquest and exploitation of the world by the European nations and their imperial heir, the United States, from the time of Columbus to the present.  Today, despite decolonization, that system of domination and exploitation is continued in the global economic system in which the military might and political power of the imperial nations, under the leadership of the United States, globally enforces this system of structural violence and death with its military, economic, and political might.  As throughout U.S. history, this is done in the service, not of the people of the U.S., but of its ruling class and their powerful transnational corporations (Parenti, 1995).

            In her 2007 book, The Web of Debt – The Shocking Truth About Our Money System, Ellen Hodgson Brown writes concerning corporations:

Corporations are feudalistic organizations designed in the structure of a pyramid, with an elite group at the top manipulating masses of workers below. Workers are kept marching in lockstep, passing received orders down from above, out of fear of losing their jobs, their homes, and their benefits if they get out of line.  At the top of the pyramid is a small group of controllers who alone know what is really going on.  Critics have noted that the pyramid with an overseeing eye at the top is also the symbol on the Federal Reserve Note, the privately issued currency that became the national monetary unit in 1913.  (p. 104)

            Brown correctly describes the twisted logic of the corporation that has become a legal monster devouring our world, just as has the international banking cartel that creates most of the world’s money in the form of private debt.  A recent documentary film, entitled The Corporation (2005), describes the legally created characteristics of these monstrosities solely devoted to the accumulation of private wealth at the expense of people and the environment as clinically insane.  A corporation is a “legal person” with all the freedoms and rights of persons, except that it is legally and institutionally bound to maximize profits for its investors regardless of the consequences to the environment or other persons.  Hence, as a legal person, it also exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath: reckless disregard for the safety and well-being of others, chronic lying and deceiving of others in the service of its own advantage, inability to experience guilt or remorse, and failure to conform to social norms or obedience to the law.

3.  World Trade, International Banking, and the Coming Global Totalitarianism

            The world continues to move toward conditions of global totalitarianism under the control of the gigantic transnational corporations and financial institutions protected and promoted by the military might of the first world and the economic might of the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and IMF.    The Director-General of the World Trade Organization in the 1980s wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that began with the sentence “Globalization is a reality of our time.”  This globalization, as Vandana Shiva has pointed out, is a prescription for the dispossession of 80% of the planet’s population (1997b, see Shiva 1997a).  This “reality of our time” is not an accident, any more than the colonial exploitation and impoverishment of the majority of humankind was an accident, any more than centuries of slavery and violence against peoples of color were an accident.  It is a carefully planned and constructed process of the most powerful economic and political forces in the world to convert the economies of the world to serve their own interests.

            The rules of world trade require of nations (under the threat of severe economic penalties) to export and import the goods needed for their survival.  The engines of globalization imposed by the World Bank and the IMF impose structural adjustment programs on economically weak nations, forcing them to open up to the exploitation by the transnational corporations and to convert from subsistence, self-sufficient forms of production, to dependence on international markets and the dominant transnational corporations.  These principles, like powerful new rules of world intellectual property rights, were worked out in secret meetings between the giant corporations and the ruling elites of the most powerful nation-states and then imposed upon the rest of the approximately 120 nations within the WTO at the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that took place between 1986 and 1995.   Both structural adjustment programs and the rules of world trade formulated for the WTO were coercive instruments forced upon the poor of the world by its ruling elites.

            At the International Food Summit in 1996, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture announced that the U.S. would never accept food as a right because this would constitute an unacceptable interference with free trade (Shiva, 1997). People in the world today have no right to water, to healthcare, to sanitation, even to eat, unless some set of global corporations can profit from their basic human needs.  This denial of the right to exist outside of the control of the powerful is not an inevitable or “natural” development of trade; it is a planned and coerced construction of the global economic system for the benefit of the few. 

            Under WTO rules, corporations can now sue governments if laws enacted by those governments restrict their “free trade,” cutting into their profit margins.   The only forces capable of controlling the rapacity and destructive power of corporations, governments with enforceable laws, are now superseded and capable of being attacked by the very forces that only government can control.  Civilization has undergone centuries of political struggle by citizens longing for freedom in order to create the principles of democracy in which governments are responsible to their citizens and laws are required to be made for the common good of all.  All this is today being wiped away by the economic elite of the world and their agents in the imperial nation-states.  The destruction of democracy and the authority of government to control the domination and exploitation of the wealthy classes could not have taken place except through violence, precisely because democracy itself is the quintessential form of non-violent and non-coercive decision making for society. 

            The world system today is dominated by international banking and corporate cartels whose aim, in the words of Dr. Carroll Quigley, President Bill Clinton’s mentor, is “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole” (in Brown 2007, p. 2).   In When  Corporations Rule the World, American economist David C. Korten writes:

These forces have transformed once-beneficial corporations and financial institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that reaches across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet’s living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money.  (2001, p. 22)

Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky writes that:

This manipulation of market forces by powerful actors constitutes a form of financial and economic warfare.  No need to re-colonize lost territory or send in invading armies.  In the later twentieth century, the outright “conquest of nations,” meaning the control over productive assets, labor, and natural resources and institutions, can be carried out in an impersonal fashion from the corporate boardroom.  (in Brown 2007, p. 255)

Nathan Rothschild, head of the Rothschild banking cartel in the nineteenth century, wrote:

I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets.  The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply. (Ibid. p. 65)

The global elite of the world comprise only one percent of the world’s population but control 40% of the world’s wealth.  Global banking in the hands of unaccountable private interests, like transnational corporations in these same hands, translates into slavery for the rest of the world and destruction of our planetary home that should be the inheritance of future generations.  Today, no power on Earth can control the ever-further concentration of the wealth of the world in to ever-fewer private hands.

4.  The U.S. Empire Enforced with Massive Military Violence

            When the poor are hurt by globalized trade policies or by structural adjustment programs, they often rebel.  Their rebellion may take the form of trying to democratically elect or create programs that counter these imposed economic policies, or they may take the form of guerrilla warfare in an attempt to take control of their societies from the imperial forces of domination, or they may engage in acts of social or political violence.  Such acts of rebellion are often called “terrorism” by the propaganda outlets called “news networks” owned by these same dominant elites (Chomsky and Herman 2002). Such rebellion is an obvious and expected consequence of economic globalization. This expected consequence of the system of planetary exploitation has led the imperial powers to redefine the role of governments to adapt to the new neocolonial imperial system.  Governments no longer protect their people and act for the defense of their people and the common good.  In fact, as we saw, this power is being taken away from them since corporations now have the right to sue governments that restrict their economic exploitation within host nations.  

            Governments are now being redefined as security forces for multinational investors.  Their responsibility is no longer to consider their citizens’ basic needs, nor to provide essential services or utilities, nor to foster the common good.  All these functions are now placed in the hands of multinational corporate investors.  Rather, these governments are now to be solely concerned with their police and enforcement functions. Their military and police are being trained by first world imperial military forces to put down internal rebellion and subversion and to protect foreign economic assets within the host nations. 

  As political analyst Michael Parenti puts this: “Since World War II, the U.S. government has given over $200 billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in some eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend them from outside invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of anticapitalist insurgency” (1995, 37).  Thousands of concerned citizens have been working for 17 years to close the U.S. Army “School of the Americas” at Fort Benning, GA, which trains Latin American military in torture, murder, blackmail and other forms of “counter-insurgency warfare” (www.soawatch.org).  It is not an accident that they have been unable to convince the U.S. Congress to close this school.  The school is essential to the corporate interests that most members of Congress represent.

            The imposition and protection of this global system of exploitation and death goes far beyond mere training and funding for police repression of the poor worldwide.  Every empire in history has used massive systematic terror inflicted on dominated peoples to appropriate their land, labor, and resources.  The U.S. led global empire of today is no different.  The proper definition of the overwhelming quantity of violence to which the poor of the world have been subjected is “state terrorism.”  Compared to state terror, the private terror of weak and marginalized groups is a drop in the bucket.  It is not a major problem in the world.  The major world problem is global structural violence protected and enhanced by massive nation-state violence.  Michael Parenti writes:

U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy.  Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the U.S. national security state.

               The U.S. national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, and elsewhere, usually with dreadful devastation and loss of life for the indigenous populations.  Hostile actions also have been directed against reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, and elsewhere.

               Since World War II, U.S. forces have directly invaded or launched aerial attacks against Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, sowing varying degrees of death and destruction.  (Ibid. 38)

            In Vietnam alone, the U.S. genocidally wiped out the civilian population through massive saturation bombing of their villages and cities, causing the deaths of three to four million persons.  Private terrorism is a blip on the screen compared to the massive state terrorism of our world disorder led by the United States (Herman 1982).   This is not an accident.  Vietnam was not a “tragic mistake” as the propaganda system would have us believe.  It was part of the dynamic of global imperial domination in the service of capital exploitation of the cheap labor and resources of the entire world (Chomsky 1993).  No where on Earth is safe from attack if the people of some small nation want to take their economic destiny into their own hands. 

            The invasion of Iraq and utter devastation of their society and destruction of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives was not only about oil.  It was also about geopolitical control of the Middle East, indicated by the building of four gigantic, permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil, and about the fact that Iraq had begun converting its oil trade from U.S. dollars to Euros.  Iran, the next country to be attacked and devastated by the United States, announced in March 2006 that it was converting its petro-dollars to Euros.

            There is no intention of ever leaving Iraq, and the Democrats in Congress, that majority who are representatives of the ruling class, know this very well.  Yet there was still another purpose to the terrorist destruction of the Iraqi society and its people: the military “shock and awe” devastation of that country in a matter of days was intended as a public demonstration of the U.S. capacity for state terror.  It was intended to send a message to the entire world that if you oppose the empire of the United States you will be subjected to your own total destruction through a similar “shock and awe” inflicted by the superpower (Johnson 2004).  This is the very definition of terrorism: the use of violence for political or social purposes.  Every imperial nation in history has used massive state terrorism to achieve its political and social goals (Smith 2006a).

5.  Authentic Democracy Requires Global Market Socialism Under a Democratic World Parliament

            This value nihilism is merely the final result of the negation of our humanity by the imperative of capital accumulation.  When all human values are negated – love, kindness, cooperation, sharing, the value of people as ends in themselves – by an economic system that turns people into commodities whose labor is exploited in the service of capital expansion, and by the military might of nation-states who place themselves in the service of capital accumulation by their respective ruling classes – then all values eventually appear to be relative and the result is nihilism on the part of the ruling classes.  As political economist Istvan Meszaros expresses this:

From capital’s uncritical self-expansionary vantage point there can be no difference between destruction and consumption.  One is as good as the other for the required purpose.  This is so because the commercial transaction in the capital relation – even of the most destructive kind, embodied in the ware of the military/industrial complex and the use to which it is put in its inhuman wars – successfully completes the cycle of capital’s enlarged self-reproduction, so as to be able to open a new cycle.  This is the only thing that really matters to capital, no matter how unsustainable might be the consequences.  (2007, 26)

The inhuman construction of weapons of mass destruction, like the endless manufacture of bombs and others weapons and their use in wars for control of the wealth producing process, count, in the twisted economic calculations of capitalism, as economic health.  The result is value nihilism with its concomitant systems of violence and death.

            The system of monopoly capitalism, the system of class exploitation, the system of international banking, and the system of nation-states are all integral to the immense deep-violence of today’s world disorder.  All four of these involve institutionalized and intentional fragmentation of the human community and the consequent violence that this fragmentation entails.   All three violate the fundamental principles of democracy in which every person has a right to equality, liberty, and community with every other.  The rights of human beings, as expressed, for example, in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are incapable of being realized under these institutions.

            Authentic Democracy requires democratic, market socialism.  If democracy means a commonwealth that is run in the interests of the common good, or the interests of the vast majority of its citizens, then the central monopolies that make possible the common good must be in the democratic hands of the people.  These include water, major utilities, major transportation systems, major communications systems, and the banking system (Martin 2005a, Chs 7-9). 

             Since we have seen that control of the money system is fundamental to democracy and the common good, there is no compelling reason for private banking at all (Smith 2006b).  All banks must be democratically controlled public banks.  The idea of real democracy in America in which the people of the nation through their government controlled their monetary system was called by nineteenth-century Senator Henry Clay as system of “cooperative abundance” versus the British system of “competitive greed” (Brown 2007, p. 57; Blain 2004). 

            Cooperative abundance is exactly what democratic market socialism is all about.  As American philosopher John Dewey insisted, the democratic ideal cannot be realized under capitalism, which always places an oligarchy of the rich into effective power.  Democracy can only be realized under some form of democratic socialism (1993, 148-152).

            In the globalized twenty-first century, however, effective democratic socialism must necessarily take the form of planetary democratic socialism under a global civil Earth Federation. If democracy means that the inalienable rights and dignity of every person is respected by government and the rule of law, then democracy must transcend the system of sovereign nation-states, which is intrinsically a war system predicated on a national secrecy and espionage systems that are the antithesis of democracy. 

             The rule of democratically legislated laws predicated on the equality, liberty and community comprises the most fundamental principle of democracy.  Nation-states demand that their citizens respect the rule of law.  But they refuse themselves to submit to the rule of law in their foreign policy, claiming to be “sovereign” and recognizing no superior authority beyond themselves. 

            Ellen Hodgson Brown’s suggestion that we return “sovereignty” to the nations through their legislating for themselves debt-free “sovereign money” or “sovereign credit” (2007, p. 265) is unrealistic and unworkable.  It will not by itself eliminate war, militarism, population explosion, global poverty, resource depletion, or climate collapse.  For the competitive system of lawless “sovereign nation-states” that would continue would inevitably be unable to deal with these global crises that transcend the boundaries of all nations and require effective planetary planning and enforceable global law for their solutions.

6.  The Constitution for the Federation of Earth

            Our world disorder is predicated on absolute fragmentation in which 193 “sovereign” nations each does whatever it likes without regard to any global rule of law, for there is none.  Only under a Constitution for the Federation of Earth, in which each nation receives its rightful place as an equal member of the Earth Federation under the rule of enforceable non-military democratic world law, can there ever be both peace and prosperity on the Earth (Martin 2005b).  This arrangement takes away the power of imperialism from the nations, disarms them, and makes them cooperating units within a whole that is predicated on equality, liberty, community, and the protection of human rights, very much like the coexistence of the states within the United States today.

            The rule of enforceable democratic law in the world makes possible the restoration of democracy within each nation-state for it (1) ends the chaos of militarism in all nations which destroys democracy, (2) deals effectively with global crises beyond the capacity of nation states such as climate-collapse, exhaustion of natural resources, world population expansion, and militarism, (3) nationalizes the key resources, transportation, and communications systems of the world to the point where private wealth can no longer interfere with the common good of humankind.  Finally, and most fundamentally, the Earth Constitution (4) nationalizes the global monetary system and converts it to a debt free system of money creation and government-issued credit.  Government is taken out of a system of indebtedness to private banking cartels and placed, for the first time in history, in a position to regulate these cartels for the common good.

            Today, transnational corporations, like the transnational financial institutions, operate beyond the control of any nation-state, even the United States.  They amass their hedge-funds and other assets in the Cayman Islands or other off-shore havens, avoiding not only taxes but national legislation that might control their activities in the interest of the common good.  Like the nation-states themselves that refuse to recognize any law above themselves, the transnational corporations and financial institutions write their own rules of world trade and financial interactions.   A global totalitarian order arises beyond the ability of sovereign nations to control.

            The Constitution for the Federation of Earth was developed and ratified by thousands of world citizens in four international constituent assemblies held between 1968 and 1991.  The collective wisdom of these world citizens has given us one of the most important and legitimate public documents that we possess today on this planet. The eloquent Preamble to the Constitution reminds one of Thomas Jefferson’s visionary writings and of his statement that constitutions are not to be written in stone for all time but are to be enlarged and transcended to suit the times.  Today, we must enlarge our conception of what is necessary for the democratic rule of law to the planetary level.  Anything less remains preliminary and inadequate.

            Article 1 of the Earth Constitution specifies the “Broad Functions of the World Government.”   These six broad functions form the central responsibilities of the Earth Federation and are the central justification for its creation: (1) To prevent war and secure disarmament, (2) To protect universal human rights, including life, liberty, security, and democracy, (3) To obtain equitable economic and social development for all peoples on Earth, (4) To regulate world trade, communications, transportation, currency, standards, and use of resources, (5) To protect the global environment and the ecological fabric of life, and (6) To devise solutions to all problems beyond the capacity of national governments. 

            Each of these articles addresses a global crisis that is clearly “beyond the capacity of national governments”: (1) the problem of global militarism and wars, (2) the problem of nearly universal human rights violations, (3) the problem of global poverty and misery, (4) the problem of inequitable trade, uses of resources, etc., (5) the problem of a collapsing planetary ecosystem, and (6) the problem of no planetary authority capable of protecting the people of Earth and planning for the future.

            The Earth Constitution creates a democratic world commonwealth directed to the common good of humanity and future generations.  It is non-military by law (Article 2) and democratic at every level, leaving economic and political self-determination to the nations insofar as these conform to universal human rights and world law (Article 14).  Hence, the three non-democratic sources of the deep violence of today’s world outlined in this paper: sovereign nation-states, transnational corporations, and global banking cartels are brought under the democratic control of the people of Earth through enforceable world law.  All nations joining the Earth Federation must demilitarize.  All transnational corporations are regulated by the World Parliament.  And global banking is nationalized.  The Earth Federation now issues debt-free, interest-free money for the democratic welfare of the people of Earth.

            Article 4 of the Earth Constitution, entitled “Grant of Specific Powers to World Government,” item number 17, reads: “Establish and Operate world financial, banking, credit and insurance institutions designed to serve human needs; establish, issue and regulate world currency, credit and exchange.”  To do this effectively, Article 8 of the Constitution establishes the “World Financial Administration.”  Section 8.7.1.6 reads:

Pursuant to specific legislation enacted by the World Parliament, and in conjunction with the Planetary Banking System, to establish and implement the procedures of a Planetary Monetary and Credit System based upon useful productive capacity and performance, both in goods and services.  Such a monetary and credit system shall be designed for use with the Planetary Banking System for the financing of the activities and projects of the World Government, and for all other financial purposes approved by the World Parliament, without requiring the payment of interest on bonds, investments or other claims of financial ownership or debt.

Our global monetary system today is 99% composed of privately created debt-money (Brown 2007).  Because of this we live in a world of global scarcity and desperation requiring, as we have seen, massive military training for counter-insurgency warfare and massive military interventions by imperial nations designed to protect and promote the present world domination by a tiny elite.  The Earth Constitution is explicit that money must be created by the Federation as debt free money addressed to the common good and planetary prosperity.

            Under the authority of Article 19 of the Earth Constitution, a Provisional World Parliament has begun operating since 1982.  The Tenth Session of the Parliament recently took place in Kara, Togo in June 2007.  During its ten sessions, the Provisional World Parliament has passed some 42 World Legislative Acts designed to implement and develop the infrastructure of the Earth Federation under both the spirit and letter of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. 

            These acts include the creation of a World Economic Development Organization (WLA 2), an Earth Financial Funding Corporation (WLA 7), a Provisional Office for World Revenue (WLA 17), a World Patents Act (WLA 21), a World Equity Act (WLA 22), a World Public Utilities Act (WLA 38), and an act for a World Guaranteed Annual Income (WLA 42).  Together they are laying the economic foundations for a global market economy based on human rights, promotion of the common good, and a democratic world order that benefits everyone, not just the present 10 percent of humanity who today own 85 percent of all the global wealth (Brown 2007, p. 271).

            As early as the first session of the Parliament in 1982, when WLA 2 was passed creating the World Economic Development Organization (WEDO), the Parliament saw through the deception of debt-based money creation. Among the means of funding for WEDO is the directive to develop the financing potential and procedures defined under Article 8, Section 7, paragraphs 4, 5, and 6 of Earth Constitution to base finance on people’s potential productive capacity in both goods and services, rather than on past savings.

            From this principle of funding under the Earth Constitution, that is, the creation of debt-free fiat money and credit based on the potential of those funded to produce goods and services, follow all the other principles of the Provisional World Parliament that are building the infrastructure for an equitable and just world order.  With government-issued debt-free money, the Earth Federation will hire tens of millions of unemployed people in the Third World to restore the environment, replant the forests of the Earth, and restore the degraded agricultural lands of the Earth.  It guarantees everyone on Earth a minimum wage entirely sufficient to live with dignity and freedom.  It provides every person on Earth with free health care, free education, and ample insurance in case of accident or old age.  It provides every person over age 18 with a guaranteed annual income to eliminate extreme poverty and starvation from the Earth.

            The world order can be easily transformed into one of planetary peace with justice and prosperity. The present world-system of scarcity and domination is a result of the principle inherent in money created as public debt to private financial elites and on a global system of maximizing private profit at the expense of the common good of the people of Earth. The secret is in democratic money: money issued debt free in the name of the productive capacity of the citizens of Earth to produce goods and services.  But this global transformation cannot be accomplished without the ratification of the Earth Constitution and the basing of our world order on its fundamental principles of democratic market socialism and enforceable democratic world law.

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