An Alternative Post-2015 Agenda

As noted in my last post, the draft of the post 2015 agenda that governments have agreed upon is the disastrous product of a dysfunctional UN. To show what a meaningful agenda could be, I’ve drafted the text below. If governments go ahead with their agreed text I invite civil society organizations to consider adapting and adopting the following.

PREAMBLE

We live at a time when the growth of global connectivity has ushered in a range of new political, economic and social realities and opened up unprecedented potentials for sustainable human development.

Within the next 15 years we can realistically look forward to ending poverty and war, the most formidable obstacles to sustainable development.

In the process we can eliminate also the interrelated scourges of drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime which at present exact a huge cost in lives and treasure from the poorest countries of the world.

To realize these objectives there are two fundamental requirements.

One is the full partnership of men and women and nations large and small in repairing a world devastated by the poisonous processes of the industrial age.

The other is the fundamental reform of the United Nations system of agencies.

Progress towards these ends will be framed by the values set forth in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Within that framework we recognize that nations have a sovereign right to determine their own course of development.

GOALS

We endorse the Goals set out below and will take action to achieve them within our nations and in sub-regional, regional and global frameworks. We urge international agencies to prioritize South-South and Triangular modalities of cooperation wherever possible. In listing the Goals below, we set out the rationale that will guide policies and programmes and note (in italics) the action that we will take.

1. Eliminate Poverty: The extreme poverty afflicting nearly a billion people who live on less than $1:25 a day is caused by systemic factors rooted in the colonial era and sustained by current socioeconomic arrangements, especially those noted below under other Goals. We expect that as those are addressed, the problem of extreme poverty will be greatly ameliorated. To accelerate the process, we will frame specific policies and field well-funded programs to end hunger, extend good quality education to all children and ensure that the poor have access to health care.

2. Promote Social Inclusion: Poverty is not just economic; everywhere, it is associated with forms of social exclusion and discrimination. Many who are not poor also suffer exclusion and discrimination on the basis of their gender, age and sexual preference. To counter this, we will formulate appropriate laws and policies, initiate media campaigns targeting discrimination and make social inclusion a high priority in housing, education and access to the Internet and the worldwide web.

3. Combat Organized Crime: Most of the violence visited on societies around the world is the work of criminals organized around a nexus of economic interests, especially drug trafficking. They are empowered by existing financial and legal arrangements at the global level that must be changed if we are to root out all forms of organized crime ranging from sexual exploitation of children and women to trade in counterfeit goods and environmental crimes. To that end, we pledge to:

• Revoke the existing prohibitionist conventions on the manufacture, trade and use of so called “illicit drugs,” and replace them with one that will promote a medical and social approach to addiction and abuse. This will be done at the Special Session of the General Assembly that will convene in 2016 to deal comprehensively with the issue of “illicit drugs.” 

• Declare illegal all “shell companies” that allow criminals to hide behind corporate identities, and subsequently, seize the assets of all entities whose beneficial ownership is not verified. To this end, the Sixth Committee of the current session of the General Assembly will inscribe a new item on its agenda and come to an agreement within a year.

• Decree that banks caught laundering money will automatically lose their license to do business and that the individuals involved will be subject to mandatory prison sentences. 

4. Build Peace and Security: The action under 3 a, b and c above will eliminate organized crime as a major threat to international peace and security but state-sponsored terrorism and proxy wars for control of resources or strategic space will continue. To address those sources of violence a twin-pronged approach will be necessary. On the one hand, we must make a concerted effort to end the proliferation of small arms and light weapons and stop the illicit trafficking in arms. On the other hand, the defensive responses of victimized societies must change. Instead of relying on heavily militarized police and secretive agencies that conduct massively intrusive surveillance of their own citizens, the first line of defense should be community-level organizations working with lightly armed local police organizations. To these ends, we resolve to:

• Work with corporations manufacturing weapons to create a clear, transparent and global registry of small arms and light weapons

• End the illicit trade in weapons by putting brokers out of business and into prison. 

• Explore and promote community-level networks supporting local police to ensure security.

5. Change Production/Consumption Patterns: Existing patterns of production and consumption are rooted in the realities of the industrial era that are now fading under the influence of the technologies of the Information Age. The Internet and the Worldwide Web now allow small and medium corporations to identify and sell to niche markets, in effect destroying the mass markets essential for the survival of giant corporations. The rapid evolution of 3-D printing is making it possible for the highest quality of industrial production on a very small scale, in effect, setting at naught the single greatest advantage of mega corporations. As networks of small producers emerge to maximize their efficiencies, the mega corporations with their top-down decision-making structures and concentrated production/service centers will become increasingly inefficient dinosaurs. This will inevitably affect patterns of trade and urbanization, especially as cheap off-grid renewable sources of energy become plentiful. In sum, these trends will change all the wasteful production and consumption patterns of the last few centuries. To accelerate the process, we will:

• Review all policies based on industrial era assumptions of production and consumption, especially of fossil fuels.

• Promote the evolution of 3-D printing to meet the requirements of small and remote communities.

• Set in place educational systems capable of providing the highest quality of instruction in the remotest rural locations.

• Encourage entrepreneurs to meet the cultural needs of remote or widely dispersed rural populations

• Consider how best to adapt our nations to the reversal of long standing trends towards urbanization.

6. Reduce Social Inequalities: Growing inequalities within societies has been one of the most unsustainable of trends over the last decade, accentuating injustices that have been a characteristic of all civilizations. The most obvious difference between the haves and the have-nots, and historically the most irreducible, has been access to high quality housing. However, as the connectivity of the Information Age has made crowd-funding a new economic reality, that great divide can now be closed. A crowd-funded housing sector can not only eliminate the issue of homeless populations, it can, in the process, rapidly expand employment, build infrastructure and drive economic growth. To make this possible a range of monetary and environmental issues will have to be ironed out. We will initiate a global research effort to illuminate and address those issues with an eye to providing housing for all by 2030.

7. Reform the United Nations System: The system of international agencies set in place at the end of World War II 70 years ago continues to function with little change in its modalities. It adopts hundreds of resolutions every year phrased in arcane diplomatic jargon addressed mainly to governments. No one knows what actually happens to the resolutions, for there is no systematic feedback on their implementation To rectify this state of affairs, we will move to hook the operations of the UN System into the networked world of the 21st century. That will entail crisply action-oriented resolutions circulated on all public, expert and organizational networks worldwide, eliciting feedback and responses in a fluid interactive process.

In sum, the achievement of these goals will lead towards the long-standing UN goal of general and complete disarmament, anchoring sustainable development to deepening peace and security. It will result in a world transformed by 2030.

Open Letter to UN Diplomats

Hey Guys,

I’m writing to tell you what I think of your latest “Zero Draft” of post 2015 Development Goals .

Sorry to be so blunt, but it seems to me you're trying to avoid real issues.

 Take the first sentence. “Poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.”

That sounds fine, but is it true?

Isn’t poverty just a symptom?

Of what, you ask?

Well, to begin with, of the theft of trillions of dollars from poor countries by corporations that misprice their trade flows.

Then there’s the problem that economists call “commercial wars” that spring from the “resource curse.” (Don’t you just love how economists whitewash grisly realities? It’s as if some great wizard in the sky cursed us with wars that actually result from criminal conspiracies.)

Those little wars are a major cause of extreme poverty. Take the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s one of the richest countries in the world, but also among the poorest because ever since the Europeans “scrambled for Africa” in the 19th Century, they’ve been stealing its wealth under one pretext or other (take a bow Belgian and French diplomats!).

That has happened throughout English-speaking Africa too (British diplomats take a bow!).

In Asia, the theft of resources has happened most often under cover of “Islamic terrorism” (British get the credit again), and in Latin America “Left guerrillas” and “drug lords” have been the fall guys (Americans take a bow!)

Drug trafficking needs special mention as a generator of poverty. It’s a $500 billion a year phenomenon, but most of that money goes to the same rich bankers noted earlier. If you ever wondered why Western bankers get such astronomical “bonuses,” that’s why: they keep the global criminal economy going, to the tune of anywhere between $4 trillion and $7 trillion a year.

Of course, they share it with the people who help them manage that underground economy. Every terrorist group in the world gets a cut: Al Qaeda, Taliban, Islamic Caliphate, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Naxalites, Neo-Nazis; you name it, they get it. The Colombian drug cartels, the Mexican drug lords and the Central American murder squads all get funded too.

By the way, every one of those terror groups is a major producer of poverty for they make development impossible in many developing countries. The Naxalites we have in India specialize in destroying schools.

The bankers also plough much of the drug money back into other thriving businesses: producing counterfeit items in sweat shops in poor countries, environmental crime, and international trade of women and children for prostitution. The trade in counterfeit items, including medicines, now generates more returns than illicit drugs. The trade in endangered animals and body parts is a nearly $300 billion industry.

None of these “businesses” give non-criminals a living wage; all generate and sustain poverty big time.

I know you guys feel bad about all this and have just the right politically correct statements if the Press should call; but you’re also “realists” who know there’s no use wasting time on problems the rich and powerful don’t want solved, right?

So I know why your “Zero draft” is filled with noble goals like End poverty and hunger, Provide quality education for all, Attain health for all, as well as gender equality, secure water, sanitation, affordable energy, decent jobs, and so on.

Those are all issues poor countries can deal with on their own if they were free from massive theft of resources and constant economic and political subversion.

What we need the UN to do is deal with matters on which the poor have no purchase.

Those problems are not mentioned at all in your draft.

In case you are open to suggestions, here’s what I think the post-2015 Development Agenda should contain:

1. Introduction

The world stands on the cusp of a period of enormous promise. The new and emerging realities of the Information Age allow us to envisage a world in which we can make mass poverty, the threat of climate change and global environmental pollution the fading memories of a bygone era.

To realize that potential we have to deal effectively with the legacy of the Industrial era in which those issues are rooted. The first step in that process is to recognize the systemic nature of all existing global crises, including those already mentioned as well as endemic armed conflict, terrorism and rampant organized crime. They are not discrete problems and cannot be dealt with symptomatically.

The root systemic problem is a global criminal elite that rose to power during the colonial era; a meaningful post 2015 development agenda must disempower and dismantle it. The following goals are oriented to that end.

2. Goals & Implementation

A. Peace: The United Nations was meant to end war. The Security Council was created with its five “Big Power” Permanent Members to enforce action to that end. Instead, the five have become the world’s biggest arms merchants and supporters of war. Over the last six decades the five have promoted endless conflicts in poor countries that have not only killed well over a hundred million people but have drained them of wealth, blocked their development and trapped them in poverty.

To get things back on the track set by the UN Charter Development Goal #1 must be to end proxy wars in developing countries and establish a general peace by 2030.

The UN Secretariat should list all ongoing wars and create groups of independent experts to report on who is supporting them and identify the ultimate beneficiaries. The Security Council should be charged with meeting the 2030 goal and indeed, for accomplishing the larger task of general and complete disarmament. (In case you’ve forgotten, the General Assembly set the framework for such action in a 1961 resolution incorporating the McCloy-Zorin agreement between Washington and Moscow.)

B. Organized Crime: Through most of history, crime has been a local affair. It became global with colonialism and its ancillary crimes against humanity such as genocide, the slave trade and slavery.

When political decolonization set in after World War II, that criminal system disappeared “underground.” That is to say, the Big Powers that control world mass media began to pretend that it was all a deep mystery to them and that they had no control of it. The “war on drugs” is a typical outcome of such policy.

The trafficking of opium and heroin began as a “legitimate” colonial activity in the 18th Century; it was internationally recognized as a crime in 1912 but continued “underground” and became vastly more profitable as colonial Powers enlisted organized crime groups to expand markets and protect their turf.

Members of the British financial and political elite have continued to be in control globally because they run the system that launders drug money. They make obscenely large profits and spread corruption and endless violence throughout the world. Development Goal #2 must be to end all drug trafficking.

That will require ending the “war on drugs,” declaring all drugs legal, and providing them free as subscription pharmaceutical items. This will cost only a fraction of the “war on drugs” but will be far more effective: by knocking out all profit from trafficking it will remove the only reason why Organized crime is involved. Without drug pushers and their constant violence, governments can deal with the issue as one of mental and public health.

The General Assembly is set to have a special session in 2016 to focus comprehensively on the drug issue. Governments should use that session to amend the existing prohibitionist international drug Conventions and make them vehicles of the new policy.

C. Taxation: As long as there are taxes on income and profit, there will be people who cheat and honest people will always be at a disadvantage. That burden on the honest is a penalty on society as a whole. Governments should recognize that there are no police solutions to this problem; laws, regulations and enforcement agencies aimed at controlling economic forces only create more corruption. The only way to guide economic forces towards beneficial ends is by a market-driven system of incentives and punishments.

Development Goal #3 must be to abolish all taxes on personal and corporate income and profit while maintaining revenue neutrality with new imposts on immovable property.

Without taxes on income and profits there will be no incentive to hold black money; Governments should encourage all of it to surface by offering a general amnesty for those who invest their funds in long-term, profit bearing development bonds. Twinning that with the threat of prison terms for those found not to have revealed their holdings, and the offer to award all funds to informers should ensure full disclosure. These measures should make available a vast corpus of funds for development, more than enough to help all societies achieve the material goals in the current Zero Draft.

D. The Information Era: We are within a decade of having all people on the planet connected by mobile phone networks and broadband Internet. That opens the door to a range of new efficiencies in social interaction. It is not just e-governance and e-commerce, distance education and remotely administered medical care. There is spectacular potential in cloud-based data banks holding vast amounts of geospatially organized information that any smart phone can access and add to.

We are looking at the evolution of what has been called “the global brain,” with the strong possibility that a meta-consciousness will eventually emerge.

Two UN conferences in 2003 and 2005 promulgated the preliminary steps necessary for the healthy evolution of a World Information Society; it is now necessary to look farther ahead and decide on the mechanics, ethics, economics and politics of a fully interactive world.

Development Goal #4 should be to put in place by 2030 a global system to maximize the beneficial efficiencies of global connectivity.

The core effort to realize this goal should be the reform of the UN System, which is now a bureaucratic relic reflecting the brick and mortar realities of the 19th Century. The reform effort should aim to make each part of the thematically differentiated System the hub of global networks facilitating the work of a web of interconnected individuals, civil society organizations, corporations and governmental stakeholders.

C. Spiritual Development: As the world enters a new era of peace and material well-being, it will be necessary to address larger issues such as the nature of human evolution and its connection to universal realities. It will also be necessary to deal with the legacy issues of our swift ascent from barbarity manifested in attitudes such as religious intolerance, gender discrimination and abuse of other life forms.

Development Goal #5 should be an annually updated world map of spiritual progress based on the realization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and established standards for the ethical treatment of animals.

Every country should map its own progress and discuss it publicly before submitting it to regional and global forums for comment. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights should compile the national submissions into the annual map and flag issues for discussion in the Human Rights Council.

Dear UN delegates,
I hope you do not think these goals are too unrealistic for action. They are the bare minimum if our species is to survive on a liveable planet.

End of the Kali Yuga: 2

The Kali Yuga will not end because a great cycle in the ancient Mayan calendar draws to an close in 2012 or the heavens signal to astrologers that epochal change is afoot.

It will end because of a concerted global effort by people sick of the malignant reality we now endure.

There are three prerequisites to such an effort: a general awareness of the need for change, an understanding of what must be done, and a realistic hope of success.

The first condition has already been met: the varied economic, social, environmental and political crises of the last decade have created a global awareness that the world order is violently and grossly unjust, inefficient to the point of criminality, and increasingly dangerous to all life on the planet.

The second condition has not been met. As the broadcast debates about Capitalism at the recent World Economic Forum at Davos made clear, even the leaders of the existing world order don’t have a clue about what must be done. The problem is complex and profound but simply stated: corporate capitalism as a business model is obsolete. Just as the invention of the automobile pushed the horse and buggy into history, the Information and Communications revolutions have pushed into obsolescence the once formidable power of centralized, hierarchically managed corporations.

This has happened because the Network has dethroned Capital. The perennially corrupt grip of corporations on “other people’s money” that Adam Smith fulminated about has been broken and the “invisible hand” he conceived of is now, at long last, able to guide the Free Market to serve the greater good. (The "invisible hand" has been much derided by ignorant people, but Smith, who first rose to fame with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was undoubtedly correct: human beings are inherently moral, and a free market would reflect that quality.) 

To understand the new economic realities of the Information Age we have only to consider the Eurozone Crisis. It exists only because the small corporate elite that created and profits from the problem of sovereign debt is holding everyone else hostage to its own interests. European bankers have the temerity to insist that millions of ordinary people be thrown out of work and societies as a whole be subjected to austerity so that they can continue to rake in obscene profits; but like cartoon characters that run off a cliff and do not realize it until they look down, they no longer have the ground under them.

The power of bankers has been rooted in their capacity to concentrate and command the money that greases the wheels of commerce: Main Street, as the saying goes, is dependent on Wall Street. However, the Network has transformed that equation. The capital necessary for businesses to function can be raised from millions of ordinary people rather than from small groups of rich money lenders. If bands of entrepreneurs organize networks to do that, they can replace Wall Street and revolutionize the world.

It is not just banks that will feel the revolution of Democratized Capital. The entire housing industry can be made self-financing and the very concept of a “mortgage” – the word is of French origin, and literally means “engaged to the death” – rendered archaic.

To understand how this can be done, consider the United States “housing crisis.” It is essentially a crisis of liquidity: in the aftermath of a “real estate bubble” that drove up house prices beyond the reach of most people, the banks responsible for the situation went bust and had to be bailed out with taxpayer money. Prices are still too high for most people to buy, and banks unwilling to put themselves at risk again; as the housing sector stagnates, the rest of the economy has also slowed.

The simplest solution to the problem would be to create an online housing lottery, with arrangements for winners to sell houses they did not want to occupy; the United States has a licensed and regulated brokerage industry that should make such an arrangement relatively easy. This will have two quick results: housing prices will dip to realistic levels without sellers who paid inflated prices taking a hit; and the market as a whole will revive, with a tonic effect on the rest of the economy.

Such a solution would be impossible without the Internet and the Worldwide Web, which have made the market for housing as liquid as those for stocks and bonds. They have also flattened the playing field. If the lottery system of housing finance is properly institutionalized the whole concept of “low-income housing” would become meaningless. Further, the money generated by the lottery could be used to improve existing housing stock and modernize urban areas that are now languishing from lack of investment.

Networks of entrepreneurs and activists have the potential to transform every aspect of the national and international affairs. They could vastly accelerate the economic and social development of poor countries by creating an accessible global architecture for knowledge-sharing and technical support. Funding development could become much less bureaucratic, much less prone to the "leakage" that is now a major problem. The delivery of aid, both financial and technical, could be finely targeted.

More broadly, the entire United Nations System could be reformed and the processes of international cooperation brought down to the community level. In a networked world tyrannical governments would be at a huge disadvantage and could not survive. In every aspect of global affairs, the vicious cycles of special interests using violence to achieve narrow ends would be replaced with virtuous spirals benefiting societies as a whole.

As this process gets under way, people will be able to see that the end of the Kali Yuga is not an idle hope but a realistic prospect, and that will spur transformations that today we consider Utopian.

In Part 3: the profound possibilities for personal transformation as we exit the Kali Yuga.