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Occupy Wall
Street through a Global Social Contract
Glen T. Martin Occupy Wall Street cannot
succeed without a global social contract. Our
demands must not destroy our solidarity with the
disenfranchised people of Earth. Only when truly
united with the rest of the Earth’s 99% can we
triumph on behalf of civilization and decent
human values. For more than two decades now top
scholars have clearly revealed the global scope
and interdependency of all planetary
institutions. It is time we took these facts
seriously. David Korten’s 1995 book
When
Corporations Rule the World showed the
domination of vast concentrations of private
wealth over the fragile legal mechanisms of
governments worldwide that no longer have the
ability to protect their own citizens. Michel
Chossudovsky’s 1999 book
The
Globalization of Poverty showed the immense
power of the World Bank and IMF to interfere in
the internal affairs of nation-states and
engineer their ruin in poverty. James Petras’
and Henry Veltmeyer’s 2005 book
Empire
with Imperialism: The Globalizing Dynamics of
Neo-liberal Capitalism made clear the
worldwide scope of the institutions of
domination throughout the world. F. William
Engdahl’s 2009 book
Gods of
Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American
Century showed the deep colonization of the
government of the United States by the power of
big money manipulating internal political life
and directing a foreign policy of brutal empire
in the service of private wealth-accumulation
for the ruling class. As German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas makes clear, within our modern
framework, governmental authority cannot any
longer be justified in terms of traditional
religious and metaphysical justifications for
the coercive power of government.
Today, governmental authority can only be
justified through processes of self-critical
rational reflection founded in a democratic
framework presupposing the equality of personal
freedom, voice, and procedural due processes of
law for all citizens.
National governments can be evaluated,
therefore, on their degree of legitimacy. They
lack legitimacy to the degree that they are
colonized by private wealth and institutions
protecting the ruling oligarchy from scrutiny
and critique. Institutions like the
industrial-military complex, vast private
corporations posing as “news” outlets,
legitimized lobbying by corporate lawyers,
campaign contributions, and debt-based financial
systems (like that of the US) ensure that
government will remain an illegitimate
instrument for promoting the interests of the
ruling class rather than a functioning
democracy. The social contract is broken for all
nation-states and cannot be repaired. The banking interests that
colonize the US government are global in scope,
the multinational corporations whose interest
the US government serves (both internally and in
foreign policy) are global in scope. Walmart
receives 91% of its goods from Chinese
manufacturing.
The industrial-military complex
accumulates its multi-billions in profit only
through perpetual foreign wars and the
militarization of the planet. The delegitimation
of the US government (and all other governments)
through a global economic and war system
corresponds to the delegitimation of all
nation-state governments by the multiple global
crises, the remedies for which are beyond the
scope of any and all nations. If one
justification of nation-state government is that
it be capable of serving the common security and
common good of its citizens, then no government
is any longer legitimate.
For global warming, pending climate
collapse, diminishing vital resources, the
spread of militarization, WMDs, and terrorism,
population explosion, spreading planetary
poverty, and global financial instability are
phenomena beyond the scope of any and all
nations. Citizens can no longer be protected at
the national level. Not only is no national
government any longer legitimate, but the 1% of
the world’s population who own 45% of its wealth
are global in scope, and no nation-state can
begin to control a force of this immense scope
and size. The Wall Street protests claim to
represent the 99% against the 1% who own and
control nearly everything, but their demands
will not and cannot be met by the US government,
nor by any other government.
The people of Greece, so much more
cohesive and organized than the people of the
US, recently brought their entire country to a
standstill with a massive general strike making
these same demands.
Yet their government could do absolutely
nothing to protect the people of Greece, for
Greece, like all governments, is part of a
global set of economic and quasi-political
institutions and is held like an insect in the
web of a planetary predatory spider. The only legitimate
government is one that represents the people in
their multiplicity and diversity and
institutionalizes sufficient economic and
political equality that allows people to
flourish in freedom, peace, prosperity, and
environmental sustainability.
Today,
the only legitimate social contract must be
global in scope. The US government is utterly
incapable of assuming this role, since it (being
the most militarily powerful) is the primary
focus of the colonization of governments by the
world’s dominant elite.
The Wall Street protesters need to be
representing the real 99%, not merely the 99% of
the 7% of the world’s population that represent
the privileged few who are US citizens. We live
in a globalized world situation in all the ways
described above and national solutions are today
clearly impossible.
In the unlikely event that the protestors
succeed in wringing some concessions from the
ruling class in the form of a new “New Deal,”
they will simply have been given a cut in the
spoils accumulated by a global system of
domination and exploitation.
There is no moral victory whatever in
such an arrangement. As philosopher Mortimer
Adler insisted, it is high time that we mean
“all” when we say “all.”
If all
people have the right to a reasonable economic
security (as Article 25 of the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights declares) then to
cry for economic reform in the US while the rest
of humanity struggles in a living economic hell
is wrongheaded and unproductive.
If all people have the right to “life,
liberty, and security of person” (as Article 3
of the Universal Declaration declares), then we
need a planetary system that ensures that.
Reform within the US (1) cannot be
successful for the above reasons, and (2) cannot
be reasonably separated from the moral demand
for justice on behalf of all people everywhere. The people of Earth (those
who are the true 99%) have the right and duty to
ratify the
Constitution for the Federation of Earth,
widely available and widely known since its
first public version was signed at Innsbruck,
Austria in 1977. The Constitution, available
worldwide in 23 languages, establishes the
people of Earth as sovereign and subordinates
both the rogue, militarized governments of Earth
and the rogue economic institutions of Earth to
the democratically legislated rule of law –
enforceable law legislated in the service of the
peace, freedom, prosperity, and environmental
sustainability mandated by the
Constitution.
With the global
communications and technology at our disposal
today, we can “Occupy Wall Street” in a much
more powerful and effective way by ratifying the
Earth
Constitution and instituting the reign of
decent constitutional democracy on behalf of all
the Earth’s citizens and future generations.
The time is now, the means are available
now, and tomorrow will clearly be too late.
The Earth cannot tolerate any longer the
moral and environmental outrages of the
centuries-old capitalist and nation-state
system.
We live in one world, on one planet, with
one human race, and one global ecosystem.
The only solution that corresponds to
these realities is one non-military, democratic,
world constitutional system.
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