"Money can be anything that people in a community will accept as carrying on the basic functions of providing a unit of value, a medium of exchange, and a store of value."
Shann Turnbull, Coordinator of the World Economic Commission, WG
Building Sustainable Communities NY: The Bootstrap Press, 1989
"The quantity of physical , cosmic energy wealth as radiation receiving aboard planet
Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity."
Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St, Martin's Press, 1981
" Transparency in monetary policy is a goal we should all support.
When economic trouble hits, free markets and free trade often are blamed, while the harmful effects of a fiat monetary system are ignored."
U.S. Congressman Ron Paul
(Statement at Hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, February 15, 2007)
There are about 200 nation-states on planet Earth. Each one has its own currency. Given our instant communication technology, they are all "floating" in the digital world at any instant accessible to one and all with a computer with the capability of "going online." In short, you and I can buy and sell national currencies sitting in our kimonos at home. It's called "speculation." Buy low, sell high. Become a millionaire or even a billionaire like George Soros without producing any real wealth or providing any real community service.
National currencies have become simply a "product."
"...those who have learned to make money with money-which money can never be anything but a medium of wealth exchanging-have now completely severed money from its constant functional identity with real wealth. With their game of making money with money the money-makers and their economists continue to exploit the general political and religious world's assumptions that a fundamental inadequacy of human life support exists around the planet."
Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, Chapter, The World Game
Our government has its own currency: World Kilowatt Dollars.
"In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity" Fuller wrote, "costing will be expressed in kilowatt hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Kilowatt-hours will become the prime criteria of costing the production of the complex of metabolic involvements per each function or item. These uniform energy valuations will replace all the world's wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power=system-manipulatable monetary systems. The time-energy world accounting system will do away with all the inequities now occurring in regard to the arbitrarily maneuverable banker-invented, international balance-of-trade accounting"
The first printing was at Queen City Press of Burlington, VT, in 1992. The quantity was 5,000 bills, numbered, on quasi-security paper (not cloth), not engraved and signed by yours truly. Admittedly, it was a rush job as we were scheduled to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June, 1992 where our government had rented a 2 meter stand from which we issued our World Passport and other human rights documents.
The 5,000 bills were placed on the table facing the crowd which gathered around curious as to what the World Government and its agency, the World Service Authority was all about. As chief informator, I was explaining from morning till the evening close its principles, history and operation. Many world passports were issued directly from the stand. Many of the onlookers complained that "You Americans are rich while we Brazilians are poor." It was hot. The sun was blazing outside. Suddenly it occurred to me on the third day, that the World Kilowatt Dollars could serve a powerful educational purpose. I picked up a handful.
"You claim you are poor and we, Americans are rich," I started. "But that sun out there is pouring billions of kilowatts on your land every second.* That's energy and power. And that's what money represents: crystallized energy as a great thinker, Buckminster Fuller, wrote. "These bills I hold in my hand represent solar energy. They are the first world money. I'm going to give each person here one 10 kilowatt dollar bill as a free gift. This is a limited edition. You might not be able to spend it in your local grocery but hold on to it. It will become a collector's item in due course."
Eager hands stretched out immediately. Everybody wanted the "world money." The news spread around the conference grounds: "The World Government is giving away free money!" This continued throughout the entire Summit. I was continually reminded of Bucky's words of wisdom that
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Today's US economic news is replete with examples of crisis and disaster. Bailouts of prestigious institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehmann Bros., Merrill Lynch, the American International Group costing billions of fiat dollars are signposts of a global systemic breakdown. Again, Fuller exposes the underlying cause:
"There can be no planetary equity until all the sovereign nations are abolished and we have but one accounting system-that of the one family of humans aboard Spaceship Earth."
Moreover, practical innovator that he was, when asked what one program he would propose to effect such a revolutionary change in people's thinking, he replied
"The first step in bringing about the desovereignization will be the closing of the gaps in the world electric power grid. The world-unifying electric power accounting will be the beginning of the omnienergy accounting for world economic management." (See www.geni.org)
The World Government of World Citizens will open its own bank in the near future, the Mondo Mutual Bank Ltd. Discussions are being held now with world-class economists on this vital subject led by our own Coordinator of the World Economic Commission, Shann Turnbull.
In our next blog, we will report on the progress of this vital addition to World Government services. In the meantime, World Kilowatt Dollars are available in the "catalogue" section of our main web site: www.worldservice.org. Also, in our 2nd book, World Government, Ready Or Not!, the chapter, Who Owns The World? further elucidates the subject of world currency, etc.
*Because energy is wealth, the integrating world network means access of all humanity everywhere to the total operative commonwealth of earth." Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path.
*************************
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
World Government is 55!
Article 21(3), Universal Declaration of Human Rights
On this date, September 4th, since 1953, the founding year of our world citizen government, we have posted the above-quoted article 55 times either in press releases or "Letters to World Citizens." (See www.worldservice.org/ells.html.)
Given today's international headlines describing the leaders of the United States and Russia once again glaring at each other-over a tiny country, Georgia, fingers poised on upwards of 6,000 nuclear weapons apiece, many of them hair-triggered-this posting is the most important of any news item you, dear reader, can reflect on in our turbulent and potentially apocalyptic times.
Why?
First of all Nation States are political fictions - when we photograph our planet from space we see that these borderlines don't really exist; we (or our forefathers) have made them up. The leaders of these political fictions stay in power by protecting "us" against "them" in a condition of world anarchy. Thus the nation-states themselves perpetuate the condition of anarchy which breeds war:
"The real cause of wars has always been the same. They have occurred with a
mathematical regularity of a natural law at clearly determined moments as a result of clearly definable conditions:
1. Wars between groups of men forming social units always take place when these units - tribe, dynasties, churches,
cities, nations - exercise unrestricted sovereign power.
2. Wars between social units cease the moment sovereign power is transferred from them to a larger or higher unit. In
other words, wars always ceased when a higher unit established its own sovereignty, absorbing the sovereignty of the
conflicting smaller units."
(The Anatomy of Peace, Emery Reves, 1945)
Second, given the actual physical oneness of the world community, only a world government by definition can eliminate the anarchy between nations and divert us from our current path toward omnicidal war and environmental disaster.
No candidate for national public office, including the two who today in the current United States aspire to be president, can even mention "world security" as the essential component of their political platforms. For they are on the wrong power level. While the BOMB is virtually total in its destructive power, a national president's power and perception is, by definition, local, i.e. limited to its nation's "security."
And therein lies the danger for we've put in the hands of our political leaders absolute nuclear power, the very use of which is not only criminal in a legal sense but socio/politically, morally and humanly insane.
If we are to prevent humanity's demise, it is essential that we, the people of the planet, recognize our sovereignty on the global level thus acknowledging systems and institutions that not only reject the absolute power of national leaders like President Bush and Prime Minister Putin (or their successors) and all the other leaders of nuclear power states, but fulfill the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the 60th anniversary of which arrives December 10th. (Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized." Art 28, UDHR)
The evolving citizenry of the World Government, in its 55 years of existence, by definition, transcends national boundaries. It represents both the whole community and the particular individual. Simply to declare oneself a "World Citizen" is to claim the world as one's immediate community to be recognized by world law and protected by its accepted legitimacy.
In that public sovereign declaration, the individual effectively "outranks" the national leaders. (Thomas Jefferson: "Every man possesses the right of self-government. Individuals exercise it by their single will.")
In my last blog, I contrasted the Olympic games and one world principles with the presence of President Bush and Prime Minister Putin together in the Beijing "Bird's Nest" applauding and encouraging the trusting, while competitive, athletes.
Today, back in their furtive, fear-driven national bunkers, they eye each other through the deadly illusion of their respective nuclear gun sights.
While, ironically, the international Space Station continues silently circling the planet every 90 minutes at 17,000 mph, the human crew gazing at the earth in wonder and awe at its majesty and cosmic role being played out against the indifferent heavens for the past 4.5 billion years.
Will we humans ever wake up to the reality of our human situation in time to avoid a final holocaust? National soldiers are programmed to die for their particular country. How many of us are prepared to die that humanity survives? An intelligent species cannot organize its survival until and unless it first recognizes its fundamental unity. This is the message of all sages of the past. "One for all and all for one" is the prime formula for survival not to mention well-being and happiness.
But more relevant, do our children, all 2.4 billion of them, deserve to die before reaching maturity because of our own immaturity?
And so, despite skepticism, humiliation, doubt and daily fear of failure, we, lovers of humanity, carry on our sacred mission begun 55 years ago today.
The happiest birthday for me is to continue carrying the torch, ignited in 1948, which illuminated both the dangerous course we are still on, and the incredible potential we human beings have to build the world of our dreams, a peaceful and sustainable world governed of, by and for all on this, our home planet floating majestically in the starry sky.
***********************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)