“When Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas River, they don’t call out the National Guard in each state and declare war over it. They bring a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by the decision. There isn’t a reason in the world why we can’t do that internationally.”
Harry Truman
Many people believe as I do, that the Occupy Movement is at its beginning as opposed to its end. If that is the case, it will develop into a more mature movement that concerns itself with occupying not just the Wall Streets of the world, but the legislatures that purport to govern them.
The problem of course, and the reason for the occupy movements existence today, is that elected legislatures don’t govern moneyed corporate interests any more, quite the opposite is true. Legislatures all over the world have subtly been purchased by them, and infiltrated by them.
The success of a principled 21st century civilization that prizes democratic representative government, may depend on a Foundation/Occupy movement that is able to politically structure itself to stand firmly against these interests, not solely as protesters, but as elected representatives. It may be the only movement that can.
Does Foundation outline the qualities and policy concepts that could help the occupy movement achieve that? I don’t know, but I think you should consider it.
In Canada, by refusing to form a coalition to prevent it, our political opposition parties enabled or even engineered the corporate right wing takeover of our country with 39% of the popular vote, turning Canada into what is evidently going to be a fascist autocracy that may destroy our country.
New political representatives, perhaps Foundation/Occupy representatives will have to adopt an entirely new mindset and policy stance on vital issues related to 21st century reality. For now our self proclaimed “majority government” will insist on saving the economy by replacing polar bears with supertankers full of dirty oil, and defending them with the machinery of perpetual war. They are building prison cells, perhaps for those who dissent. Think of it, the genius of it all, and that good cop smile.
It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said that “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way”.
I therefore make a modest proposal for an entirely new plan.
It’s called Foundation.
Carl Joudrie. January 21, 20
I have no idea if Mr. Fox would approve of Foundation and don’t mean to imply that he does. I am linking his article here because I think it is the most important article written on the Occupy Movement since it began.
Carl Joudrie: Feb.12, 2012
Economics.
BND: The Bank of North Dakota
In searching for a banking system less prone to corruption and systemic failure, for both Foundation Canada and World Foundation, the best model to emerge so far is that related to the Bank of North Dakota. According to an article by Steve Lendman as published by Safehaven.com, American “states are currently facing one of the worst, if not the worst fiscal period since the great depression”.
However “One state stands out in the current environment, North Dakota, with its governor John Hoeven calling a December 15th (2009) news conference to explain that the state has so much money (a $1.3 billion FY 2009 surplus, its largest ever) that individuals and businesses will average $650 in 2009 tax savings from income and property tax cuts enacted by its legislature”.
According to Tax commissioner Cory Fong:
North Dakota has been able to weather the economic crisis. “While other state governors and legislatures are looking for ways to raise revenue through raising taxes and cutting services, we just came through a historic session of funding both our priorities and substantial tax relief…. The winners are families, business and the State of North Dakota, “because it’s unique in one important respect.”
It is the only state with a state owned bank.
Financial writer Ellen Brown explains that the BND “chiefly acts as a central bank, with functions similar to those of a branch of the Federal Reserve.” In contrast, BND is a public bank, 100% owned by the state, operating in the public interest and those of the state. It avoids rivalry with private banks by partnering with them. Local banks do most lending. “The BND then comes in to participate in the loan, share risk, buy down the interest rate and buy up loans, thereby freeing up banks to lend more: (One of its functions) is to provide a secondary market for real estate loans, which it buys from local banks. Its residential loan portfolio is now 500 to 600 billion in a state with around 700,000 people and thriving.
Its function in the property market helped it “avoid the credit crisis that afflicted Wall Street when the secondary market for loans collapsed in late 2007 and helped it reduce its foreclosure rate….(its other services) include guarantees for entrepreneurial startups and student loans, the purchase of municipal bonds from public institutions, and a well funded disaster loan program.” When the state didn’t meet its budget a few years ago, the BND met the shortfall.”
In sum, state owned banks have “enormous advantages over smaller private institutions….Their asset bases are not marred by oversized salaries and bonuses, they have no shareholders” demanding high returns, and they don’t speculate in derivatives or other high risk investments. As a result, BND is healthy with a 25% return on equity, paying a “hefty dividend to the state projected at over 60 million in 2009” and well over five times that amount in the last decade”.
There are, I believe, 14 U.S. states now considering the North Dakota model. Foundation will be adopting and adapting this system for both national and international financial services.
It is my understanding that Ms Browns next book will in part deal with some form of the BND for international use. Her book Web of Debt will be linked in the reading section.
Carl Joudrie: Nov. 24, 2010
Carl Joudrie
5 August 2005
Foundation
In the Jan-Feb 2005 issue of United World, I noted the thought that Federalists ought to be “insisting on the abolition of sovereign rights” rather than attempt to reform the United Nations. As a Canadian, I don’t want my countries sovereign rights to be abolished, nor would Americans or any other nationals. That is why these ideas have failed and why, for better or worse, they will continue to fail.
As a World Federalist I see it as our job to define states rights in a World Federation, and to bring them under democratic control, not to abolish them! Our job is to define a social contract applicable to World Federalism, that appropriately reduces the power of the state, and balances that power with democratic rights, not to abolish those rights in favour of some nameless guarantor. So far as the United Nations is concerned it is our job to replace it, not reform it!
The World Federalist movement in general, and in particular, is intentionally dividing us between competing visions of World Federalism which speak to no ones rights, not the publics and not the states, and which will find no support in either camp. It should come as no surprise then, that we are being led there to render World Federalism harmless to interests that World Federalism would be bound to regulate.
I did not become a World Federalist to become a shill for state or corporate interests, to create a world government, or to support an existing version of one, and I will not support tyrants no matter what they call themselves. We need to step out of this backwater that we have been led to. We need traction in the real world and we need it now. We need a political movement that average people can support and vote for.
Carl Joudrie
Feb. 28th, 2005
Lenin: New and Neo, a Media Story.
Lenin: “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves”. When J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, some 33% of the membership of the Communist Party of the United States of America, were FBI agents.
Operation Dismantle: Founded and run by Jim Stark in the 1980s, was Canada’s most successful peace organization and was having some success in the courts against cruise missile testing in Canada. That success led to a membership of about 10,000, and enough funds to move to the nation’s capitol, Ottawa.
A few months later, new members began pouring through the door, and a few months after that, these new members decided that Operation Dismantle didn’t need its founder any more and voted him out of his own movement. Not long after that these new members decided that there was no more need for Operation Dismantle, so they dismantled it. Jim Stark wrote a book about it titled “Cold War Blues”.
Several years ago I wrote an article published in United World wondering why the World Federalist Movement in New York would boast on its web site of having a few “Presidential Fellows” on its staff, when the success of that movement would diminish the power of the President. Could it be that they were there to make sure that World Federalism failed? Weather or not that was the intention, by any rational measure, that was the result.
References to Presidential Fellows were removed from that web site upon publication of the article. Before and since, World Federalism has blazed a trail to nowhere. The only viable political option to the existing Nation State, United Nations system, being World Federalism, was effectively co-opted, controlled and defeated. To this day you will open your daily newspaper and not find the words World Federalism in it. Most people in my experience think it’s a hockey team. If nothing else Lenin was a good teacher.
In my opinion the most vexing problems for Foundation are going to be the discovery and or use of a clean energy, and the management of that societal change, the other is going to be the reformation of something we euphemistically refer to as a free press. It actually isn’t free at all, except perhaps cosmetically. The press as we know it today is a for profit propaganda machine, the vast majority of which is owned and or directed by ideologically rigid special interests.
During the 1975 Church committee Senate hearings on CIA influence on the media, the CIA reluctantly disclosed that they had 400 agent journalists working in the United States, none of which were ever named. The New York Times estimated the number to be closer to 800.
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
According to the Congressional report on these activities published in 1976, “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services, and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”
For more information on this read The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford. Another book of interest is What Liberal Media, by Eric Alterman.
This covert propaganda will not plainly state, or allow it to be said, that without a radical shift in the way we govern ourselves, nationally and internationally, our children are not going to live better lives than we did, that they are going to live very difficult, miserable lives, if they live at all. They will not state that the ecological, biological, and economic underpinnings of a viable existence for all of us are being destroyed by the same elite interests that own, control, or influence the agenda of mass media. They will not speak to new realities incompatible with corporate profit motives or growth.
Media tells us instead that it is reasonable, or just a matter of opinion as to whether it is reasonable for national governments to spend vast treasuries on militarism, while our planet is physically going belly up. They are cheerleaders for the most destructive and profitable industries in human history, an oil industry that has quite literally killed a decent future for all of us, and a war industry that makes sure we don’t notice. They show little or no interest in a massive global bee die off, or the UG99 wheat virus that could cause global starvation in a relative instant.
This media continually nudges electorates to believe that they owe respect or reelection to the people, and to the offices of people who think this way, when what they owe us are imaginative alternatives to governmental criminal negligence that should be reported for what it is.
Today’s media however is heavily influenced and or owned by right wing ideologues and left wing proxies who think it more rational to fight wars, than to fight environmental or biological degradation, or even collapse. This is a fight which they perceive as too costly to the interests that keep them in power, and incidentally, keep the lights on at media outlets which serve their interests. These are the same interests that are formulating and executing the components of a dangerously centralized World Government, with minimal press scrutiny, or electorate knowledge. They have mastered the lessons of past tyrannies, and are apparently not shy about creating new ones.
Carl Joudrie, December 16, 2009
Re: Global Trilemma United World: 07
In response to an article published in the Sept-Oct. 2007 issue of United World.
The Global Trilemma article stated that the barriers to achieving a sensible global management system “are not technical financial or political. They are mental”. I agree so far as the technical barriers are concerned, and I do believe that the barriers are mental in origin, but no existing system with vested financial or political interests wants to be displaced, and will protect itself by placing every barrier possible between it and any internal or external threat. World Federalism, or Foundation as its proxy, represents that level of threat, because it would, of necessity, fundamentally alter the financial and political institutions of our times.
Evolutionary Psychology tells us that there are two common errors of thinking that we all fall prey to. The first is called the “naturalistic fallacy,” the tendency to believe that what is ought to be. The second is the moralistic fallacy,” the tendency to believe that because we believe certain things to be right, that’s what the reality is. A society that grew up on Orwellian warnings, thinks they are right to fear world government, and so that is the reality.
That was my reality until I understood that such power need not be concentrated, that the only real barrier to popular world federalism will not be found in differences between left or right, blue or red, but rather in the idea that world federalism has no obligation to distribute power, to the extent that people, of any political persuasion, need not fear that power.
I would be very much afraid of a world government that eliminated “independence, and its ugly sidekick national sovereignty.” It should be recognized that federations are meant to value these concepts, to modify them perhaps, but not to destroy them. There can in fact be no world federation without them, only a highly concentrated and potentially very dangerous form of World Government.
Could there be a United States without States Rights, or a Canadian Federation without Provincial rights? Should there be? No, and there will be no World Federation without some measure of protection for the rights of Nation States, and the independence of their electorates to determine the right to secede from that federation should it become tyrannical or unjust.
That reality need not refute “the interdependent nature of our existence,” nor need it be so poorly or thoughtlessly designed as to allow “unregulated experiments”. I have no taste for herring, red or blue.
Carl Joudrie.
Fascism in Canada: 04
Herb Dhaliwal, Minister of Natural Resources, recently expressed some concern that we in Canada are moving toward a “third world democracy”, “where the people who are in control make sure they control it and don’t let other people in”. Jeffrey Simpson has written that we live in a “benign dictatorship” where our Prime Minister has an inordinate amount of power. I think we are moving toward what essentially amounts to fascism.
Just so we are clear about our definitions here, I should state that I take my definition of fascism from someone who should have known what it was. Benito Mussolini founded the fascista in 1919. While the jackboots and national fervor are gone from public view, what remains is the core of an idea that has taken root in this country, primarily among our more finely tailored. It is called corporatism. Mussolini said that Fascism should more correctly have been called “Corporatism” because as he put it, Fascism is a “merge” of corporate and government power. I take him at his word.
That corporate power in Canada is represented by a group of 150 Chief Executives who now call themselves the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. These executives represent the most powerful corporations in Canada. I mention this group because it is they who have been identified by Peter C. Newman as being the people who actually run Canada, and have since about 1998. According to Mr. Newman, in a CPAC interview recently aired, they have a meeting with government about once a year, they tell the government what they want, and they get it, period.
This group has recently embarked on a campaign to influence you and me on a new plan for Canada which is more in tune with their interests. An article published in the Globe and Mail on January 15th, 2004, section B, Page 3, outlined their new plan for Canada and a timetable for its implementation.
According to the article, this council wants to “reduce the Canada U.S. border to an internal checkpoint, bring together the resource industries of the two countries, reform the regulatory and standards environment and beef up the Canadian Military as part of a perimeter defense against terrorism,” this will include “identity cards”. They intend to “effect the changes over the next 3 to 4 years”.
Canadians have always believed that the United States wants Canadian water, and we have always been assured that no such want exists or will be fed. I am suggesting that bringing “together the resource industries” is nothing more than double speak for give us your water, a demand that began to be heard in 1998 when the corporate sector began lobbying for the water market.
Two years later, multinational companies backed by the World Trade Organization successfully strong armed the U.N. into defining water as a human need as opposed to a human right. This human need in the United Sates, who’s leaders, like Canadian leaders, feel that we don’t need a national water conservation policy, is best represented by the Ogallala Aquifer.
The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from the Texas Panhandle to South Dakota, is mined by over 200,000 groundwater wells and is now being used at 14 times its natural replenishment rate. This aquifer is going to run out of water and when it does there will be strident demands to replace that water.
One of the member corporations of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives is Bechtel, (an American Corporation,) which coincidentally happens to be, among other things, in the water business. If you are looking for other corporations who would benefit from and have the capacity to produce the machinery of war, of managing the business of reducing human rights, or of controlling and manipulating the mechanisms of a free press, they are all represented by this council, and they are not benign.
Carl Joudrie: January, 2004
Nitinol:
I favor the use of Nitinol as the substance to replace oil as a primary energy provider. It may be possible for this alloy to supply all of our planets energy needs, and be mass produced in sufficient quantities quickly enough to essentially eliminate the use of oil as a fossil fuel, in less than 5 years. I base this belief on information gleaned from an article published in the October 1981 issue of Science Digest. The article, written by Kevin Saunders was titled Miracle Metal.
Since this article was published, Nitinol has been depicted as being capable of producing only minor amounts of power. The reasons for this misinformation can be speculated upon, and no doubt will be, but there are obviously corporate and political interests involved that did not want Nitinol to replace oil, and still don’t. This decision may have cost us the health of our planet and indirectly the lives of each and every one of us.
If Nitinol can prevent carbon dioxide levels from exceeding 400 ppm. which is the low end of the levels at which global warming becomes irreversible, it must be used, and any entity, political, corporate, or military, that stands in the way of its mass production needs to be put on notice that Foundation governments will have recourse to courts that will of necessity, be aggressively dealing with ecological crimes of criminal negligence, and crimes against humanity.
It is telling perhaps that according to the article, “In the United States, research and development of Nitinol heat engines has been done in a number of private and government research centers, supported by, among others, the Department of Defense, the Navy, NASA, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, General Motors, Goodyear, McDonnell Douglas, Grumman and Lockheed.” “Some of the research is sponsored by the U.S. military and remains classified.”
Research has also been done in “Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, West Germany and Japan”. It is also interesting to note that in 1981, “a delegation of scientists from Peking requested copies of all available material on Nitinol.”
As for the impact on oil producing nations, It would be prudent of them to begin spending the billions being made from the combustion of this dangerous commodity, on an educational system second to none, the goals of which would be to educate every child in every one of these nations, and to specifically produce engineers specializing in the use of closed loop systems to render the combustion, or other uses of oil, harmless.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be too concerned. A search on their web site finds no references to Nitinol at all. Inquiries as to why are met with silence despite the fact that it may be possible for Nitinol to allow us to leapfrog the Kyoto Protocol entirely, by simply rendering it irrelevant. Given the properties of Nitinol, it seems to me that it may be the Union of Concerned Scientists that is irrelevant.
As for the properties of Nitinol, judge for yourself.
Nitinol is a shape memory alloy which requires a vacuum furnace for its production. As of 1981 Nitinol could be made from nickel and titanium or brass alloys. A simple explanation of how Nitinol works would go something like this. Say you had a rod of nitinol, and two containers in front of you. One of these containers would have cool water in it, and the other warm water. If you take the rod of Nitinol, dunk it in the cool water and bend it 90 degrees to the left, remove it from the cool water and place it in the warm water and bend it 180 degrees to the right. Place it once again in the cool water and the rod of Nitinol will spring back to the shape you originally bent it in. Place it in the warm water again and it will spring back to the shape it was bent into the second time. This action can be repeated indefinitely, in say any natural thermo-cline.
It is also worth noting that according to this article, “Preliminary studies by the Department of Energy and the World Bank on the global distribution of nickel and titanium show that both elements are abundant and cheap” “and are fairly evenly dispersed around the planet. No Nitinol OPECs lurk.” (Note: at least not yet, so far as I am aware, but it may be useful to see which nations or cartels of nations or industries attempt to control these metals.) While it may or may not be related, China’s recent bid for Nortel was interesting.
Other information gleaned from the article.
1. “According to the latest Navy figures a nitinol heat engine could convert energy for a mere 6% of the current cost of photovoltaic conversion.” (“The team of scientists that developed the engine calculates that Nitinol power plants may have “an overwhelming cost advantage” over oil, gas and nuclear power generation.”)
2. “Researchers say” “that Nitinol if properly refined “ “could be vastly more powerful, able perhaps to respond to temperature differentials as low as 3 or 4 degrees centigrade.”
3. “Nitinol has a theoretical 8% contraction when raised above the transition temperature.”
4. Nitinol can “release forces as great as 55 tons of force per square inch.”
These numbers speak for themselves. If Nitinol cannot replace oil, we need to know why it can not. If the reasons are classified, they need to be declassified. If Nitinol can replace oil, we need to know what interests have benefited and continue to benefit from the delay of its manufacture and widespread use. We need to know the extent to which a purportedly free press, and scientific community, has been co-opted, or manipulated into rendering Nitinol invisible. We need these interests to understand that further delay on their part, will carry with it extremely serious consequences for all of us, particularly those who are responsible for corporate or political policies which continue to unnecessarily place us all, in extreme danger.
Carl Joudrie, Nov. 2006
Revolutionary changes in the way we govern ourselves, nationally and internationally, are at least as warranted today as they were during Jefferson’s time, much more so in fact, but the injuries that might compel people to risk the uncertainties of revolutionary change, are only beginning to outweigh the comforts of delay. As in Jefferson’s time that tipping point will be reached.
Foundation aims to prepare for that certainty in our time, based on the reality of a rapidly degenerating ecosystem that will require a politically co-operative global effort to repair, or to mitigate the damages of that decline.
A new social contract, defining limited but real powers for national electorates might move the global ship of state in a new direction less prone to violent collisions. Foundation could offer important federal protections for the rights of member nation states, and the independence of their national electorates to secede from that federation should it become oppressive or unjust.
Carl Joudrie
In the 20th anniversary issue of United World, I was pleased to see an editorial emphasis on securing “practical, workable, specific programs, not fairy tale castles in the sky platitudes”. “Too long have we wasted our time arguing over reforming the U.N. or creating a world constitution”.
It was interesting to note the reactions of college students in a course titled “Introduction to peace studies” who dismissed “world government” as “dangerous, too likely to become tyrannical”. An Interesting and deserved observation, which leads me to wonder why we still put that Orwellian foot forward, and then all but demand that people shoot at it. Dance pardner, dance. A kind of self flagellation. They are not confused, we are.
Mr. Shepherd plainly states that “We are clearly not answering people’s basic objections”. What we are continuing to do is what we have all done for the last half century. We have just reelected our favorite political parties and politicians to status quo political offices and institutions that will not have any interest in, or the power to advance the political machinery of Democratic World Federalism.
We have once more chosen to support the existing nation state and United Nations systems, no matter how dangerous they have become to the health of our physical world, or to our democratic freedoms. To add insult to injury we have sadly been maneuvered across the floor to aid and abet a form of United Nations sponsored World Government that will end in the same imperial tyranny that spawned it.
Does anyone in the World Federalist movement for instance, seriously believe that the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly will ever be allowed to control the United Nations Security Council? The idea is ridiculous, a tragic diversion of precious World Federalist resolve, and an embarrassment to a once proud democratically minded movement.
World federalists do not have another generation to waste, discovering that an assembly is not a government. At best an assembly is a low level legislature or a “group of persons gathered together, as for worship, instruction, entertainment, etc.” World Federalists should find their entertainment elsewhere, not in the foolish or manufactured idea that an appointed United Nations Parliamentary Assembly will somehow meet the standard of a republic, or that if it is elected, it will have the authority to enact, interpret and enforce world federal law, irrespective of what the United Nations Security Council wants.
This barrier to global democratic oversight is being constructed I am ashamed to say, with the full consent, cooperation, and active participation of people who claim to represent World Federalism. They don’t. At least they don’t represent me.
What they represent through their support of and involvement in the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which combined with the North American and European Unions, is the effort to consolidate an unelected corporate/political world order, moving toward a democratically unaccountable global deep integration. This United Nations sponsored “world government” and that is what it is, will not support any meaningful democratic national oversight, from any of its member national electorates. Not American, not Canadian, not Mexican, not European, not any.
Be mindful of the fact that the United Nations system was designed for, and essentially functions to support the Imperial ambitions of the United Nations Security Council, and then to clean up and salve over the debris it leaves behind through militarism and ecological damages. This system needs to be laid to rest, buried, as unworkable for this new century, in favor of a form of democratically induced and regulated World Federalism in which we can all have a stake.
World government or democratic world federalism? We can’t live in both worlds any more, at least not as far as those students are concerned, so end the argument now, choose one. Straight up, we would all be much better off if we let the United Nations do its own work, and if they left us to do ours.
What is ours? I would suggest that if we are to begin at the “ground level” of democratic world federalism, we start with foundation, and foundation starts with social contract.
According to the Canadian World Federalist National Charter, we were “To secure support for the establishment of a competent World Federal Government, elected by and responsible to the people under its jurisdiction” and “to strive toward the creation of a World Federal Government with authority to enact, interpret and enforce world law.”
World Federalism does not exist to “secure support for the establishment” of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, but “for the establishment of a competent World Federal Government.” This government is to be “responsible to the people,” not for them. That means that we need to secure the support of the people, among them, those students, and to do that, we need to define an appropriate social contract for them that distributes World Federal power in such a way, as to render that power subject to their full democratic consent and oversight, both as national, and as world federal citizens.
In doing so, we can achieve something that has the force of law behind it, that is to say national political party status wherever that is legally possible. We can also attain much of the moral authority to lead it, provided we are prepared to lead it in productive ways that reflect democratic values.
Through such an effort we could set standards that would otherwise take generations to bear fruit. We could for instance as regards equal rights, simply state as a matter of policy that one man and one woman will occupy what is now one seat, in any elected foundation national legislature, or world foundation federal legislature. There is important work to do in designing a space based industrial and transportation system, and in designing complimentary national and global polices to protect vital biological and ecological systems. With imaginative and relevant policy, foundation could popularize world federalism and bring it relatively rapid success.
There is potentially a very significant constituency for such a political movement, and a growing global pool of innovative leaders and ideas that are now without a unifying political home. In a politically united world, these forces could bring an exiting and essential change that is within the democratic grasp of nations and electorates everywhere. Perhaps we can stop dancing now.
Please read World Federalism: A Minority Opinion at www.foundationcanada.ca
Thank You: Carl Joudrie. November 6, 2008
