Back to February 2021 Newsletter

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Theme for this month February 2021:
Global Civilizational State: the application of the Scale of Global Rights to the most important global issues threatening humanity's survival worldwide.
(with videos)

• Global Issue 1, sections 1,2,3, and 6 affected: Replacing both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Charters from all nations by the Scale of Global Rights will give more importance, substance, value, gravity, and urgency to human life, all life on Earth, and to the protection of the global life-support systems for this generation and future generations.

  Short explanation of global issue 1.
  Video about global issue 1.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 1.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 2, sections 1,2,3, and 5 affected: Human activities are responsible for the greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change, mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, and a tragic end to our present human evolution, without effective mitigation.

  Short explanation of global issue 2.
  Video about global issue 2.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 2.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 3, sections 1,2,3, and 5 affected: Our ways of doing business and trade are causing the destruction of livelihood worldwide and that of the next generations, endangering all lifeforms on the planet, putting in great danger all global ecosystems, in short threatening the survival of all life on our planet. We need a complete turn around of our ways of doing things in business and trade.

  Short explanation of global issue 3.
  Video about global issue 3.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 3.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 4, sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: The need of Evolutionity and Global Civilizational State leadership to educate Peoples for humanity survival, and to emphasize moral virtues and a healthy intellectual development.

  Short explanation of global issue 4.
  Video about global issue 4.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 4.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 5: sections 1,2,3,4, and 5 affected: Super rich Peoples and corporations became corrupted, greedy, no longer in line with humanity's survival on the planet.

  Short explanation of global issue 5.
  Video about global issue 5.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 5.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 6: sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: Global issues such as poverty, crime, racism, religious and ethnic conflict, terrorism, global warming, climate change, energy scarcity, are further magnified by the widening spread and quickening pace of globalization.

  Short explanation of global issue 6.
  Video about global issue 6.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 6.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 7: sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: There are several major global issues: conflicts and wars, no tolerance and compassion for one another, world overpopulation, human activities destroying and polluting, as population increases the respect and value of a human life is in decline, insufficient protection and prevention for global health, scarcity of resources and drinking water, poverty, Fauna and Flora species disappearing at a fast rate, global warming and global climate change, global pollution, deforestation, permanent lost of the Earth's genetic heritage, and the destruction of the global life-support systems and the eco-systems of the planet. Our goal for peace in the world can only be reached by resolving these important global problems. These problems have brought up a planetary state of emergency. Global Civilizational State found evidence that resolving all those global issues is the essential prerequisite for the effectiveness and exercise of all rights recognized for human beings. We need to build global communities for all life on the planet.

  Short explanation of global issue 7.
  Video about global issue 7.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 7.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 8: sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air travel links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case.

  Short explanation of global issue 8.
  Video about global issue 8.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 8.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Global Issue 9: sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: Issues threatening the health and future of children and of the next generations. Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, predatory commercial practices, and the rampant spread of Covid-19 threaten the health and future of children in every country. What is even more worrisome and fearful is that children stand on the precipice of a climate crisis. Wealthy countries are threatening the future of all the children in the world through carbon pollution.

  Short explanation of global issue 9.
  Video about global issue 9.
  Text of the speech in the Video about global issue 9.
  Full explanation concerning all nine (9) global issues.

• Summary Introduction and Conclusion

Introduction.

Global Civilizational State: the application of the Scale of Global Rights to global issues.

Abstract As global crises of all sorts on our planet further intensify, Global Community may have no alternative but to show Global Solidarity and help each other out of crises. Such solidarity can only be built on the basis of harmony, cooperation and moderation, and on respecting the political and cultural diversity of our multicivilizational troubled world. Global Civilizational State is proposing creative works toward saving humanity from self-destruction, and are a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, education, art, philosophy, technology, and material wellbeing. Humanity is dealing with issues related to the global warming of the planet, globalization, political instability and a social and political regress to irrationality. As Global Civilizational State begins to take on a much deeper kind of global leadership, one that earns more respect than envy and more gratitude than hatred, one that can catapult the whole planet forward into a future where war is no longer thinkable between nation-states, and a legitimate and beneficial Earth governance is able to cope with global problems.

Table of Contents

• Racism in America and Justice for All.
• The Covid-19 pandemic.
• Climate change and climate crisis.
• Capitalism vs socialism.
• The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change.
• Tipping Points, paths to extinction on our planet.
• Global Civilizational State.
• Issues threatening the health and future of children and of the next generations.
• Applying the Scale of Global Rights to global issues.

Racism in America and Justice for All.

Treating people on the basis of their ethnicity, language and sometimes their religion, is also practised equally by most Americans. Over past decades and centuries in the USA, there have been numerous such instances of racism unfolding in US states towards the minority groups. People have also indulged in giving them a second class treatment, and have also made them feel like less of a human, and we have also indulged in taking pleasure by mocking their identity. Such normalising and internalising racism towards a particular community is imprinted in a person over the years by numerous socialising agents.

Recently, what has sparked outrage among thousands of African descent Americans was the way in which an unarmed Black civilian, George Floyd, suspected of using a counterfeit banknote was killed by a White police officer. The officer had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 5 to 9 minutes forcing him to plead that he could not breathe until he went silent and limp. The Minneapolis officer, Derek Chauvin, has now been charged with second degree murder in the killing of George Floyd. Charges of “aiding and abetting” against the three other officers who were at the scene have also been applied. Discrimination against African Americans is still pervasive and is a manifestation of the larger marginalisation of the community. Through education there has been some mobility for groups within this minority especially in the decades following the civil rights movement but large segments remain trapped at the bottom of the heap. The current economic devastation caused by the pandemic has underscored the vulnerability of these segments and also revealed how the poor and disadvantaged in the US and elsewhere are more likely to be the victims of the scourge than others.

The US pursuit of global control worldwide has affected adversely the rights and interests of millions of Americans in a number of ways. By spending so much on the military in 2019, over 1 trillion US dollars, and maintaining some 1200 military bases encircling the world, the US has sacrificed the essential needs of its people such as well-equipped hospitals and schools. Gross neglect of the economic, social rights, and Justice for All of the people has emerged as a tragic reality for everyone to witness when the nation is confronted by a health and economic crisis of gigantic proportions, as well as climate change, greenhouse gases pollution, threat to natural ecosystems, guaranteed to generate irreversible tipping points or feedback loops that will precipitate human extinction in the coming generation.

Over time, there have been constant struggles and investigations in different areas to address the issues of the socio-economic disadvantages of African-Americans, from biases in allocation of state resources for basic social goods to the mass incarceration of black people to instill fear in the community and remove its working adults to prison. Police in America have always been the frontline of an absence of caring administration, which has deliberately under-invested in the upliftment of African-Americans. White officers do their superior’s bidding besides imbibing all the common prejudices against the African-Americans. Such is the threat that an oppressed, marginalized, brutalized community poses to them that their immediate reaction, despite whatever their training manual says, despite a child or an adult in front of them who is unarmed, is to pull their gun and deal with the supposed threat first.

The police should not separate itself from the larger beliefs and attitudes in a society. A historical stance of African-Americans as second class citizens, as dictated by the politics of  disposability, dominates the common attitudes and public policy. They are politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable. and in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. This greater police presence in black communities increased the chances of violent encounters and in many cases, resulted in black folk being swept up into the mass incarceration system.

Perhaps it is time for all governments, local, county, state or federal, to insist on a much higher standard for policing in America. Over the past decades, Democrats have proposed gun control legislation to take guns off American citizen hands so officers will feel safer when they are facing people with no hand guns. Republicans voted down the new legislation. Lately, U.S. Congressional Democrats also unveiled sweeping legislation on Monday, June 8 2020, to combat police violence and racial injustice, two weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody led to widespread protests. The 134-page bill would take numerous steps including allowing victims of misconduct to sue police for damages, ban chokeholds and require the use of body cameras by federal law enforcement officers, restrict the use of lethal force, and facilitate independent investigations of police departments that show patterns of misconduct. A profession where you have the power to kill should be a profession that requires highly trained officers who are accountable to the public.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the police reform legislation into law, more than two weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis sparked a nation wide movement. The governor called the package "nation-leading criminal justice and police reform bills," declaring it "a historic moment for New York." Governor Cuomo will also issue the executive order "New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative." The order mandates local police departments, including the NYPD, "to develop a plan that reinvents and modernizes police strategies and programs in their community based on community input." Each department's reform plan must address policies, procedures, practices and deployment, including but not limited to use of force. The plans must be adopted in order for police agencies to be eligible for state funding. "Today NY took a major step toward justice by enacting landmark police reform," Governor Cuomo tweeted. "To the activists and advocates who spoke out year after year, to all who marched and demanded justice in the last weeks, thank you. Your voices brought real change."

The laws will ban police chokeholds, make it easier to sue people who call police on others without good reason, and set up a special prosecutor's office to investigate the deaths of people during and following encounters with police officers. Some bills, including body camera legislation, drew support from Republicans, who opposed legislation that repealed a state law long used to block the release of police disciplinary records over concerns about officers' privacy. Eliminating the law, known as Section 50-a, would make complaints against officers, as well as transcripts and final dispositions of disciplinary proceedings, public for the first time in decades. One of the bills, the "Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act," mandates that a police officer who injures or kills a person by using a "chokehold or similar restraint" can be charged with a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The bill is named for Eric Garner, an African American man who died in New York City after a police officer put him in a chokehold during an arrest in 2014. Chokeholds were already prohibited by the New York Police Department at that time. One bill will clarify that a person not under arrest or in the custody of law enforcement has the right to record police activity and maintain custody and control of the recording. The Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigative Office will be established by another bill to review, study, audit and make recommendations on police operations and policies. The Police Statistics and Transparency Act will require courts to compile and publish racial and other demographic data of all low-level offenses, as well as require police departments to submit annual reports on arrest-related deaths. Another bill mandates that all state police officers be supplied with body cameras. In the USA, racism is experienced everyday through, racial narratives, appearance, language accents, racial colour, interpretations, radicalized emotions and stereotypes. Our Racism has been worshipped, practiced and experienced, practically by most people through everyday affairs, and how normalising and internalising such acts can actually escalate to an incident such as that of George Floyd’s.

The issue of for whom and for what the state keeps its territory safe has become harder to conceal over time. Nowadays, the state’s political processes and its structures have been almost completely captured by corporations. As a result, the maintenance of internal and external security is less about ensuring an orderly and safe existence for citizens than about creating a stable territorial platform for globalised businesses to plunder local resources, exploit local labour forces and generate greater profits by transforming workers into consumers. Increasingly, the state has become an almost hollowed-out vessel through which corporations order their business agendas to minimise the obstacles facing them as they seek to maximise their wealth and profits in each state’s territory. The state’s role is to avoid getting in the way of corporations as they extract resources through deregulation or, when this capitalist model regularly collapses, come to the aid of the corporations with more generous bailouts than rival states. To ensure its survival, the state needs to monopolise violence and internal security, to maintain its exclusive definition of what constitutes order, and to keep the state as a safe territorial platform for business. The alternative is the erosion of the nation-state’s authority, and the possibility of its demise as was seen since Trump became President.

This was the rationale behind Donald Trump’s notorious tweet, censored by Twitter for “glorifying violence” that warned: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Not surprisingly, he invoked the words of a racist Miami police chief, Walter Headley, who threatened violence against the African-American community in the late 1960s. At the time Headley additionally stated: “There’s no communication with them except force.” Trump may be harking back to an ugly era of what was once called “race relations”, but the sentiment lies at the heart of the state’s mission.

A healthy state, committed to the social contrac, should be capable of finding ways to accommodate discontent before it reaches the level of popular revolt. The scenes playing out across the US are evidence that state institutions, captured by corporate money, are increasingly incapable of responding to demands for change. The hollowed-out US state represents not its citizens, who are capable of compromise, but the interests of global forces of capital that care little what takes place on the streets of Minneapolis or New York so long as the corporations can continue to accumulate wealth and power.

Why would we expect these global forces to be sensitive to popular unrest in the US when they have proved entirely insensitive to the growing signals of distress from the planet, as its life-support systems recalibrate for our pillage and plunder in ways we will struggle to survive as a species? Why would the state not block the path to peaceful change, knowing it excels in the use of violence, when it blocks the path to reform that might curb the corporate assault on the environment, and human extinction in the near future?

The challenge to the protesters,  either those on the streets now or those who follow in their wake, is how to surmount the state’s violence and how to offer a vision of a different, more hopeful future that restores the social contract.

Lessons will be learnt through protest, defiance and disobedience, not in a courtroom where a police officer stands trial as an entire political and economic system is allowed to carry on with its crimes.

The Covid-19 pandemic.

The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case.

Coronavirus is highly contagious. It can enter the human body only through the mucosa, the membrane lining the inside of nose, mouth and eyes. It cannot enter through the skin of the hands. Coronavirus is contained in tiny droplets when an infected person sneezes, coughs or speaks loudly. If these droplets are inhaled by another person before they fall to the ground or onto door handles, etc., they enter the body through the mucosa of the nose and infect that person. Hence the need for all to wear masks – an infected wearer’s mask prevents spread of infected droplets and an uninfected person’s mask prevents their inhalation. Droplets can remain on, say, a door handle for a short time. If such a surface is touched by hand, Coronavirus can get transferred to the skin of the hand/fingers, where it will be harmless, unless the hand/fingers touches the edges or inside of nose, mouth or eyes which have mucosa. All this is equally true of the common cold virus. Now, by far the largest numbers of deaths are in the United States. Americans are dying by the thousands on an almost daily basis. Health systems worldwide have long been focus of the WHO and other medical groups. For decades, specialists have tried to ameliorate a lack of doctors, an absence of medical equipment, a need for more hospitals and greater access to healthcare.

As the country, pushed by President Trump’s reelection desires, reopens relatively quickly, at whatever cost in further Covid-19 deaths, many workers will undoubtedly be brought back or rehired, but there’s no avoiding the obvious reality that any number of temporary layoffs will become permanent realities. Meanwhile, the socio-economic level of the country has plummeted as middle-class Americans lose their jobs and begin the long fall into another existence.

A pandemic is a situation where a disease spreads to various countries and continents globally in a short time, and may be slow or fast in spread and vary in mortality. Today’s crisis has been catalyzed by a viral pandemic spreading across the planet, by supply-and-demand shocks the world over, and by the collapse of a global economic system, as well as widespread lockdowns. Though the first cases were seen and reported in Wuhan, there is no substantial proof to say that the virus originated there. The first studies identified the source of Covid 19 from bats and pangolins and highlighted Wuhan as the initial epicentre. Multiple arguments were put forward mostly by politicians and media of the west, accusing of vicious motives to China.

The Coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on the inefficient political, economic, and social systems. The human cost of the crisis makes our present look gloomy and the future is inconceivable. The discontinuity with everyday lives and emergency measures create an illusion that normality will return to its own place and pace. These illusionary desires help the crisis ridden bourgeois democracy and capitalist state to survive, and continue to create havoc in the lives and livelihoods of the masses. Over the past decades, a western world dominated the field of political philosophy. The fascinating factor is the ideological differences and the competition which took place between the western world and the non-western world.

The USA took no lesson from their past and acted with recklessness and carelessness about people’s life. On March 11th WHO declared Covid 19 as pandemic when the illness was seen in almost 110 countries and territories and over 1,18,000 cases were reported. WHO has many times pointed out the pandemic potential of the covid epidemic. Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a crisis that will touch every sector, so every sector and every individual must be involved in the fight against this crisis.

In truth, Trump, Vice President Pence, and the rest of the White House crew have a remarkable record when it comes to hijacking a pandemic and sending it crashing into the U.S., while leaving the USA unprepared for it. In fact, Covid-19 made it all the way to Washington and crashed directly into a White House that visibly had no interest in either social distancing or wearing face masks, even insisting that others take them off. While the record of the president and his administration has seemed almost uniquely destructive and inept, nationally and globally, you need to give that crew credit for one thing: they managed to bring war home big time and destroy what could prove to be the last vestiges of a sense of American exceptionalism.

In several countries, the Covid-19 pandemic has variously led to extraordinary emergency measures for the general good: free testing for Covid-19 infection, free emergency medical treatment, a safety net for the unemployed, on-line teaching and learning, and even emergency housing in 4 star hotels for the homeless. The big question is whether the end of the Covid-19 in capitalist economies will see a snap-back to rampant neoliberalism and brutal austerity imposed on the poor to pay for the Covid-19-related debt (socialism for the rich) or perhaps the world seizes the opportunity created by Covid-19-related altruism to emplace a just and sustainable economic stimulus package that aims to address climate change and economic inequality for all of Humanity. USA leadership is among world leaders is likely post-Covid-19 to revert to deadly, business as usual, merciless and unsustainable neoliberal socialism for the rich. Neoliberalism is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. Needs based economy such as promoted by a democratic socialism philosophy, includes food, shelter, health, education and culture versus the unnecessary, damaging and deadly such as smoking, alcohol, and speciescide, pollution, global warming , obesity, ignorance, violence-promotion, and wars.

The COVID-19 crisis is also exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry. Many of the serious threats that the world faces today are linked to excessive economic inequality. For example, both climate change and militarism are linked to the greed of corporations, whose disproportionate power derives from their extreme wealth. The loss of democratic institutions is also linked to excessive economic inequality. The laws of corporations do not allow their CEO's to have either an ecological conscience or a social conscience. Their only duty is to maximize the profits of the stockholders. If they do not do this, then, by law, they must be replaced. We can remember that Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatism”.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive experiment in telecommuting. Up to half of American workers are currently working from home, more than double the fraction who worked from home in 2017-2018. Many such workers had been largely unfamiliar with telecommuting technology when this grand experiment began, but have quickly mastered the necessary skills. Given little choice in the matter, high school and college students are also becoming more adept at telework as their schools shift to remote learning. Meanwhile, companies and colleges are investing massively in the necessary hardware and software for such communications and teaching. As a result, the outbreak is accelerating the trend toward telecommuting, possibly for the long term.

COVID has also brought into focus other battles Global Community will have to unite us to win if we are to survive as a People and emerge as a humane planet with several critically urgent problems to deal with: global hunger, homelessness, poverty, wars and climate change. We will have to unite and to see ourselves as one Global Community. Humanity needs a new multinational institution, Global Civilizational State, to be activated for the purpose of orchestrating a world-wide increase in the price of carbon from its first moment of entry into the humane system and its becoming a part of all derivative goods and services. Global Civilizational State must be given powers under and institutional authority well beyond existing global institutions today; powers of international law and enforcement. This is just the first step toward human planetary resource control and of human survival. Pricing in of other negative externalities harmful to humanity and all other life on the planet can come next. All nations need to acknowledge that our planetary problems can only be solved multi-nationally. The future of human civilization hangs in the balance.

With COVID-19 pandemic almost convulsing the whole world, global cooperation and a collective response seems indispensable to negotiate multiple challenges arising out of this appalling and merciless enemy. The challenges that range from threats to public health, economic recovery, food security, looming recession and unemployment demand a multilateral cooperation and a global solidarity; instead of countries going solo and acting on their own. To prevail against the pandemic today, we will need heightened solidarity. Instead, many countries, especially the USA, tend to adopt unilateral policies and act on their own.

The Pandemic world health crisis heralded by Corona Virus which defied national boundaries and crossed continents in its remorseless spread, has in the meantime exposed the deep divisions between and within countries, as they struggled to confront the situation arising out of this lethal enemy. The situation has been exacerbated by a deep campaign of anti-globalisation sentiment, erosion of a rule-based international order, trade and technology wars between big powers and rise of populist leaders, such as Trump, who reject internationalism and pursue ultra-nationalist and protectionist policies for their narrow political benefits.

In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures. The frozen subterranean soil in the Earth's polar regions accounts for about 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change, that great consequence of human arrogance, industry and tendency toward destruction, is causing that ice to melt at rates previously unseen. Studies show the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and a 2017 report from the Arctic Council suggests 20 percent of the uppermost layers of permafrost may melt by 2040. As the ice begins to thaw, each eroding layer will expose new layers, along with microbes that have been frozen away for thousands of years. That vast collection of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens may impact, or infect, our lives in ways that are best not to consider just before bed. What has caused the increase of world temperatures and climate change is the global warming of the planet due to the increase of the greenhouse gases (GHGs)in the atmosphere.

Climate change and climate crisis.

But we’ve gone three decades of failure to even slow the increase in burning coal, oil and natural gas, with consequential greenhouse gases increasing in the atmosphere, with a consequential rise in global temperatures, which in turn leads to more extreme weather, sea level rise, drought and forest fires, etc. Climate change damage is accelerating and becoming increasingly costly; devastating weather is already a growing threat multiplier in our tightly linked global society.

There is a remarkable contrast in the way that governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that they have responded to the climate emergency. The pandemic, which indeed represents an extremely grave danger to humanity, has produced a massive global response. Borders have been closed, airlines have become virtually inoperative, industries, restaurants and entertainments have been closed, sporting events have been cancelled or postponed, people have been asked to stay at home and practice social distancing, and the everyday life of citizens around the world has been drastically changed.

By contrast, let us consider the threat that if immediate action is not taken to halt the extraction and use of fossil fuels, irreversible feedback loops, tipping points, will soon be initiated which will make catastrophic climate change inevitable despite any human efforts to prevent it. This threat is by far even more serious than the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change could make much of the earth to hot for human life. It could  produce a famine involving billions of people, rather than millions. Catastrophic climate change would lead to the extinction of the human species; much of the world would become uninhabitable, the global population of humans would be very much reduced and civilization would be extinct forever.

A strategy to deal with the pandemic would require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world’s remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.

The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up and the thawing of permafrost in the Arctic either from global warming or industrial exploitation. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.

What is the reason for this remarkable contrast in our response to two serious emergencies? We see clearly and respond to what is close to us, and are relatively indifferent to what is far away. We hear of  people dying every day from the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is a danger that as many as 100 million people could die before it is over. By contrast, although immediate climate action is needed today to avoid disaster, the worst consequences of climate change lie in a few decades from now. We have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren, and to all future generations. A large-scale global famine will occur sooner than expected, and children who are alive today will experience it. Recovery from the pandemic offers climate action opportunities. When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, governments will be faced by the task of repairing the enorouus economic damage that it has caused. Today, the concept of a Global Civilizational State is being put forward globally. This concept visualizes government-sponsored programs aimed at simultaneously creating both jobs and urgently-needed renewable energy infrastructure.

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Under neoliberalism, climate change is extraordinarily difficult to deal with because it involves ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism, and is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.

The pandemic has laid bare the diverging gap between interests of the billionaire financial elite indulging in terribly destructive plunder of nature and labour on one side, and the needs and sustenance of the working class and broad masses of people on the other.

There is now no hope of effective mitigation in time without business. Global business, especially American business,   must consciously roll back the neoliberal capture of government so that transforming system change becomes possible, so that governments can organize under the leadership of Global Civilizational State to effectively regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production and use.

How have governments responded to the climate emergency? A minority, for example the Scandinavian countries, have taken appropriate action. Most governments pay lip service to the emergency, but do not take effective action; and a few countries, such as the United States under Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Saudi Arabia,  deny that there is a climate emergency and actively sabotage action. The world’s net response has been totally inadequate. The Keeling curve, which measures CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, continuse to rise, and the rate of rise is even increasing.

If business doesn’t organize itself to back off so that deep systemic change is possible urgently than we are all going to lose big time. If business doesn’t agree to and help form wartime-style coalition governments, the leadership of Global Civilizational State, and fossil fuel proliferation treaties across trade groups, and agree to government intervention, regulation and even triage support for markets in the transition to a hopeful post-carbon society, such a transformation will not happen.

There still is hope that we could conduct an emergency operation to save our very fortunate societies. If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’, effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. The world needs to activate Global Civilizational State. Then our kids, the world’s kids, can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.

Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4 °C is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the sciences.  Many governments are listening to medical science, implementing essential measures to combat the plague, instigating social isolation and economic support systems in order to avoid a potential demise of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives. As the human onslaught against life on Earth accelerates, no part of the biosphere is left pristine. The simple act of consuming more than we actually need drives the world’s governments and corporations to endlessly destroy more and more of the Earth to extract the resources necessary to satisfy our insatiable desires. For the first time in history, more than 100 billion tonnes of materials are entering the global economy every year, which means that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials each year extracted from the Earth.

Without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to increase by 4 degrees Centigrade (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above today’s normal during the 21st century and that is dangerously close to the temperature of 6 degrees Centigrade above normal that initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago when 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out.

How can our 21st century world society of seven plus billion people mechanistically orchestrate a turnover from fossil fuels to renewable energy? Will industries such as air travel, automobiles, trucking, ocean shipping and metals use for manufacturing now all so reliant on fossil fuels be able to make the transition; and if so, what can be the alternatives? How will highly carbon consumptive basic industries such as concrete and steel make the transition? How will the citizens country by country, region by region, respond to such a state of economic disruption and reorganization? There is a way that a relatively non-violent transition can take place. It will, however, require strong leadership throughout the world at the multinational level, it will require Global Civilizational State leadership.

Capitalism has neared a peak, mostly using capital to generate capital, unable to comprehend the challenges faced by its actions, going as far as it can go intensifying major problems it has created. Slowly and inexorably, the socio-economic system refutes a counter-productive capitalism, that is taking more than it gives, that is destroying more than it creates, and that has become more irresponsible than responsible. Life on Earth originated from oceans and remains the planet’s main life support system by dominating the processes that keep our planet habitable such as regulating the climate by absorbing excess carbon dioxide and heat while also giving us some idea of the impacts of this on the creatures that live in and on the oceans. The needed change does not arrive from ideological, economic, social, or political considerations; it arrives from the realization that the earth is on fire and only a strong willed and collective community can dampen the conflagration. Global Civilizational State will be needed to establish a healthy and prosperous governance of the Earth. The change comes from realization that private and civic initiatives cannot and will not resolve the forecasted problems, each will protect what they have and deny the challenges: climate change that modifies coastlines and arable lands; greenhouse gas emissions that heat the atmosphere and petition a handover from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources; robotics and artificial intelligence that change the factory floor, its administration, and the composition of the workforce; possibility of nuclear war in an atmosphere of intense international hostility and growing arms races; pandemics from new disease microbes that replicate quickly, defy conventional medicine, and spread beyond borders; security enhancements due to internal conflicts and external hostilities; political, economic and social polarizations that have stimulated populist movements; and population migrations that cause cultural conflicts and reassignment of resources. Allied to these challenges are the subsidiary challenges each of them creates: reallocation of food sources and shortages in food supply; economic upheavals due to bankruptcies of resource and transportation industries and nations dependent upon fossil fuels; re-orientation of the work force to prevent severe unemployment; forced arms controls to prevent global wars; sharing of resources to lessen predicted large scale migrations; international controls and research to prevent spread of disease; more equal distribution of income to assure all have basics for survival in a quickly changing economic landscape, and regulations that assure adequate privacy, security, and disease mitigation. Despite public awareness and concern for all the challenges, inertia is apparent. Escaping human extinction will require government intervention in all aspects of the socio-economic system.

In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse. In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’. This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

We should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.

We must come together as a global family, Global Community, to restore ecologically the places we inhabit and which we and our forebearers have senselessly allowed to be destroyed. One last time lets beat guns into ploughshares, to make the shovels necessary to plant the trees whose leaves we need to cool the frustrations of diminished prospects and restore hope in a mortally threatened world. By reconstituting ecology, society will reconnect to the wonders of nature. A sense of communal well-being will come; as guns, hard drugs, suicide, and over-consumption fade away. The focus will be upon shared advancement, well-being, and experience rather than insular, anxious lusting for the accumulation of more stuff. As planting of trees brings you closer to nature, it may provide spiritual wonderment and awe, and become a form of ritual worship for some. We will marvel at creation and the miracle of being as we work for her continuation. Once again, we will feel in our very cells our own intimate connection with kindred species with which we share this billions of years long evolutionary journey. There will be a resurgence in self-expression as art, sport, music, theater, science (and other knowledge), and the written word rise in prominence. Emerging technologies will be used appropriately, and only to the extent that they augment ecology, and are used exclusively for social good. Frequent long-distance travel, the military-industrial complex, fossil fuels, big government, abject despair, extreme poverty, and social want will fade away as a more just society based upon equitable and sustainable bioregional plenty re-emerges.

Policies to address climate change and other environmental problems include decarbonization policies (encouraging renewable energy sources, electric cars, heat pumps), energy efficiency policies (decreasing energy input/output ratio of appliances, vehicles, buildings), and behavioral change policies (encouraging people to consume and behave more sustainably, for instance by adopting the technologies promoted by the two other policies).

The first two strategies aim to make existing patterns of consumption less resource-intensive through technical innovation alone. These policies ignore related processes of social change, which perhaps explains why they have not led to a significant decrease in energy demand or CO2-emissions.

Advances in energy efficiency have not resulted in lower energy demand, because they don’t address new and more resource-intensive consumption patterns that often emerge from more energy efficient technologies. Moreover, renewable energy sources have not led to a decarbonisation of the energy infrastructure, because total and per capita energy demand are increasing faster than renewable energy sources are added. Consequently, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to focus more on social change. Energy efficiency and decarbonization policies need to be combined with “social innovation” if we want energy use and carbon emissions to go down. This is where behavioral change policies come in,and climate change policy can steer consumer choices and behaviors in a more sustainable direction.

Instruments and policy packages designed to achieve behavior change vary greatly, and can be economic incentives (such as grants for “green” products, energy taxes, soft loans), standards and regulations (such as building codes or vehicle emission standards), or the provisioning of information (more detailed energy bills, smart meters, awareness campaigns). All these policy instruments are focused on what are thought to be the determinants of individual behaviors. They assume that either individuals take rational decisions based on product price and information, or that behaviors are the outcomes of beliefs, attitudes and values.

Pro-environmental behavior is often considered to be less profitable, less pleasurable, and/or more time-consuming. Consequently, people need to make an effort to benefit the environment, and this is why, according to behavioral change researchers, pro-environmental values and attitudes are not necessarily matched by individuals’ behaviors. Behavioral change policies have been disappointing so far. Two decades of climate-change related awareness campaigns have not decreased energy demand and carbon emissions in a significant way. The reason for this limited success is that existing attempts to change behavior rest on a very narrow view of the social world. Behavioral change policies are based on the widespread agreement that what people do is in essence a matter of individual choice. For example, whether people pick one mode of travel or another, is positioned as a matter of personal preference. It follows that the power to change and responsibility for energy demand, consumption, and climate change are ultimately thought to lie within individual persons.

Individuals can make pro-environmental choices based on attitudes and values, and they may inspire others to do the same, but there are so many other things involved that focusing on changing individual “behavior” seems to miss the point. Trying to persuade people to live sustainably through individual behavior change programs will not address the larger and more significant structures and ideas that facilitate and limit their options. In fact, by placing responsibility and guilt squarely on the individuals, attention is deflected away from the many institutions involved in structuring possible courses of action, and in making some very much more likely than others.  The discourse of sustainable “behavior” holds consumers collectively responsible for political and economic decisions, rather than politicians and economic actors themselves.

Although individual behavioral change policies purport to address social and not just technological change, they do so in a very limited way. As a result, they have exactly the same shortcomings as the other strategies, which are focused on efficiency and innovation. Like energy efficiency and decarbonization policies, behavior change policies don’t challenge unsustainable social conventions or infrastructures. They don’t consider wider-ranging system level changes which would radically transform the way we live, and that could potentially achieve much more significant reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. For example, recycling garbage does not question the production of waste in the first place, and even legitimizes it.

The United States is the second-largest total GHG emitter in the world and the third-largest per-capita GHG emitter behind Saudi Arabia and Australia. The US is the largest producer of new fossil fuels. People in the US have a critical responsibility and role to play in the solution to the climate crisis. We cannot count on institutions such as the United Nations, governments and corporations to take appropriate actions without outside pressure. We need to organize resistance and build the solutions in our communities. A core requirement of effective social movements is to have a clear vision of what they are working to achieve. To be transformational, this vision must embody not only the goal (for example, reducing GHG emissions) but also the structure of the system that will achieve that goal. Two major components of that structure are the ways decisions will be made and how the system will be financed. So the world needs to activate Global Civilizational State leadership to take humanity and all life on Earth toward a healthy and prosperous life for this generation and future ones. There are a broad range of actions to take and a number of roles to play.

• Pushing agencies to address the climate crisis in their policies When the Trump administration announced it would allow more oil and gas drilling on federal lands, advocacy groups came together and sued the Bureau of Land Management to make sure GHG emissions are assessed in considering oil and gas leases. A court recently sided with the groups and hundreds of thousands of acres of leases are being suspended. Another example is the Beyond Extreme Energy campaign to transform the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which grants permits for energy projects, to the Federal Renewable Energy Commission.
• Direct action to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure  Major campaigns to stop pipelines, fracking and new oil and gas infrastructure are going on across the country. Oil and gas corporations cite this resistance as their biggest obstacle. Last week, activists in Wingdale, NY shut down construction of the Cricket Valley Fracked Gas Power Plant. They are pressuring Governor Cuomo to shut it down for good. And in Clearbrook, Minnesota, activists blocked construction of the Line 3 Pipeline. You don’t have to lock down or climb a tripod to participate. There are many roles required for direct actions such as media support, legal observers, jail support and more.
• Driving disinvestment in dirty energy Students, faculty and supporters took action last week to disrupt the Harvard-Yale football game with a message to their schools to divest from fossil fuels and cancel Puerto Rico’s debt. This was one action in an ongoing divestment campaign. The European Investment Bank took a positive step recently by promising to phase out investment in dirty energy over the next two years. Though it is promising to be the first climate bank, activists will still need to watchdog what the bank supports to make sure it is not investing in more false solutions.
• Protecting the right to protest  We know our actions are having an impact when the state tries to criminalize them. A new law was signed by the governor of Wisconsin making it a felony to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. This is the tenth state to pass such a law. In South Dakota, their anti-protest law was successfully fought in the courts this year.
• Pressuring lawmakers (and candidates)  During the Extinction Rebellion Global Hunger Strike, which started Nov. 20, a group of activists sat-in House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office calling for her to hold a public meeting with them. Two of them continued their hunger strike through this weekend. The Sunrise Movement has organized actions targeting lawmakers, candidates and the Democratic Party throughout the year. They, along with Fridays for Future, will target lawmakers with a climate strike on December 6.
• Constructive programs to build alternatives There are many programs to build positive alternatives from developing regenerative agriculture to a resurgence of small farmers and urban gardens to expanded public transportation, walkable communities, and bike lanes, to incentives for clean energy installation and the formation of worker-owned cooperative green businesses. Recently a new law was passed requiring new roofs in Brooklyn, NY to either have solar panels or greenery.

Scientists compared three scenarios of decarbonising the power sector by 2050: One focused mainly on solar and wind power, a second relying mainly on carbon capture and storage in combination with biomass and fossils, and a third route with a mixed technology portfolio. In all scenarios, land use requirements for power production will increase in the future. By far the most land-devouring method to generate electricity is bioenergy. The question for us then is how do we get there? If we adopt a mix of all three perspectives perhaps we will be closer to a solution. If we accept some version of a “categorical planetary ethic” then we as a species have an absolute duty to both the biosphere and all its inhabitants. We have a sacred duty of care and preservation. If this first premise is widely agreed upon then a number of possible restrictive actions follow:

1) Human being reproductive freedom should/must be immediately limited to a rate of replacement and thus 0 growth. It is neither rational nor ethical that human population growth should be unlimited while the capacity of the biosphere to sustain such growth is not.

2) Human being economic, political, scientific endeavors should be structured/organized in such a ways as to produce the maximum benefit to the biosphere and its inhabitants. The source of all life takes precedence over particular lives and their parochial interests.

3) Human beings should be educated and sensitized to their universal duty to the planet viewing themselves not just as “cosmopolitans” but as “defenders of the biosphere”.

4) Radical green politics should coordinate their policies on a voluntary, if urgent, worldwide foundation. Thus, Global governance should “green” with time.

Capitalism vs socialism.

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address the problems. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Under neoliberalism, climate change is extraordinarily difficult to deal with.

When Covid-19 first hit and self-isolation set in, the stock market plunged and many businesses were forced to shut down normal operations. Coming specifically to the political-economic situation, with GDP growth rates in US and Europe being in the negative territory and everything including production, trade and commerce, travel and tourism, etc. coming to a halt, world economy has entered in to a frozen state that is more dreadful than the Great Depression of 1930s prompting analysts to characterise the situation as an Ice Age. From a political economy perspective, COVID-19 has totally disrupted the foundations of globalised production, both its supply and demand chains. Initial estimates by Bretton Woods Institutions made in April indicate a contraction in global GDP by around $ 9 trillion (equal to the combined GDP of Germany and Japan) during 2020. The consequences of this economic pandemic including unemployment, poverty, deprivation, are turning out to be unimaginable and unmanageable within the imperialist system. And neoliberal-corporatisation policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society, continue unabated even during the pandemic are constantly channeling more wealth in to corporate coffers.

There is now no hope of effective mitigation in time without business. Global business, especially American business,   must consciously roll back the neoliberal capture of government so that transforming system change becomes possible, so that governments can organize under the leadership of Global Civilizational State to effectively regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production and use. If business doesn’t organize itself to back off so that deep systemic change is possible urgently than we are all going to lose big time. If business doesn’t agree to and help form wartime-style coalition governments, the leadership of Global Civilizational State, and fossil fuel proliferation treaties across trade groups, and agree to government intervention, regulation and even triage support for markets in the transition to a hopeful post-carbon society, such a transformation will not happen, at least not in the timeframe dictated by the science.

It is still possible that we could make the needed transition to renewables. There still is hope that we could conduct an emergency operation to save our very fortunate societies. If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’, effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. Then our kids, the world’s kids, can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.

As was mentioned previously here, a sustainability policy that focuses on systemic issues reframes the question from “how do we change individuals’ behaviors so that they are more sustainable?” to “how do we change the way society works?” This leads to very different kinds of interventions. Addressing the sociotechnical underpinnings of “behavior” involves attempting to create new infrastructures and institutions that facilitate sustainable lifestyles, attempting to shift cultural conventions that underpin different activities, and attempting to encourage new competences that are required to perform new ways of doing things. As a result of these changes, what we think of as individual “behaviors” will also change. These changes can be accomplished by a new type of governance base on the Scale of Global Rights . Global Civilizational States offers short and long term solutions to the people of all nations to assure the survival of life on Earth. Both solutions require the acceptance of the Scale of Global Rights as our guide for survival. As a first step, all nations should approve the first three sections on the Scale of Global Rights. Over the past several decades humanity has bettered itself through the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by most nations. But now is the time to leave it behind and reach to our next step of social evolution, that is the approval of a scale of social values, the Scale of Global Rights.

Human beings have fallen into a pattern of organizing around hierarchical institutions that centralize power. Capitalism vs. socialism is a false choice specifically because both, as currently understood and practiced, centralize rather than distribute power. Thus, they diminish local control and responsibility and suppress essential local adaptation to changing local conditions. Electing the leaders who head those institutions is only a partial corrective, better even to support a Democratic Socialism Plus.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is the rise of anti-capitalist protests around the world against neoliberalism, a model that drives privatization of land, water, services and more. We can’t solve the climate crisis using capitalist economic models because capitalism is fundamentally about extracting profits at all costs and is based on the overconsumption of a consumer-oriented economy.

Another promising development is the work to make connections between the many crises we face. We cannot solve the climate crisis in isolation because it requires a major restructuring of our entire society. It requires the establisment of the Global Civilizational State. This is the opportunity the climate crisis provides. Over the next decade, with a clear vision of where we want to go, we can shape the world to be one that respects self-determination, human rights and sustainability. That will only come about through organization, planning, and action to create a mass movement. The seeds of that mass movement are growing. The opportunity has never been so great and the stakes have never been so high.

Due to capitalism’s irresponsible behavior, our species is hurtling towards ecocide at a frightening pace. All of us in the global north are to blame, some more than others. The fossil fuel companies that have lied to us for decades to keep us hooked on their products, the large conglomerates profiting from the destruction of entire ecosystems to keep us hooked on the flesh of animals even as we are awakening to the fact that plant based diets are healthier and more sustainable, the agrochemical corporations that enrich themselves and their shareholders by forcing farmers to use their chemicals on the food we eat which in turn makes us sick and decimates insect populations and contaminates our soil and kills our earth worms, the car companies that lie about emissions and lobby our elected leaders so we buy more of their products are largely responsible for our current predicament.  These companies and the humans that lead them are complicit in nothing short of the manslaughter of millions, the destruction of the ecosystems we rely on for our survival, and the extinction of up to 10,000 species a year. They will also be responsible for the mass starvation of billions of humans in just a decade or so. This is the work of the greed that capitalism encourages and desires in us. Capitalism only survives by us buying more and more things so investors receive returns. The GDP must keep going up and up and up forever or the system collapses. But we all know this is not possible. We have extremely limited resources, and for the GDP to keep rising, we need more and more people. We cannot continue to expand our population in perpetuity. The system was flawed at the outset, and its flaws have never been more apparent than now as we start to see our life systems unravel before our very eyes.

The capitalists and our corrupt governments are largely to blame for this destruction and the extinctions. They will also be to blame for the deaths as food and water runs dry. They were told by scientists that this would happen if they didn’t change course, but they continued anyway to keep the system going, and they ignore the reality of our distress as they fly around in private jets and moor their yachts off shore in the same place they hide their wealth. We are also complicit in this crime of ecocide. We all benefit from the system that is eating itself. Every day that goes by that we continue to talk about trivial nonsense instead of accepting our dire situation and acting. Every day that goes by as we bury our heads in the sand. Every day that goes by that we carry on buying pointless crap. Every day that goes by that we continue to feed 70 billion farmed animals in factory hell holes while almost a billion humans go hungry. Every day we stay silent as ecosystems collapse, we are complicit in the manslaughter of the global south. We are complicit in the needless resource theft of future generations. We are complicit in the future starvation and conflict that is surely going to arrive at our children’s door. We are enabling the worst to happen to our own children. Blame capitalism for ecosystem collapse, extinctions and mass starvation.

The global ecological crisis: a crisis in which we are the virus.

1. our socio-economic model is environmentally unsustainable;
2. the entire world is interconnected, and can potentially discuss shared solutions;
3. modern technologies make producing the goods and services essential to human survival more efficient. We produce and consume too much, but each unit we produce and consume has an impact on the environment compared to the past;
4. it is now a consolidated fact that beyond certain levels of consumption, further consumption does not equal more well-being for human beings.

Thus, the real fundamental question is not whether it is possible to build a sustainable society, but rather whether it is possible to do so without sacrificing the fundamental values of the West and people’s well-being. If by ‘fundamental values of the West’ we mean things such as global rights, and political and civil liberties, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. If we instead mean unchecked capitalism and a lawless market, then the answer is ‘realistically, no’.

Progressively evolving means a new information-age of a global culture, Global Community, and a new proactive civilization, the Global Civilizational State, of strong bonds and affinity between people to people. Global Community is neither blind, nor inept, it defines its own purpose, meaning and identity for peace, harmony, and solidarity that the established institutions of governance, in America or Europe or elsewhere, miserably failed to recognize or value their importance in global political affairs. Given the inherent systematic deficiencies, moral and intellectual corruption in worldwide political governance, and policy formulation toward the international community, Global Civilizational State is actively organized and morally and intellectually powerful to halt all the belligerent nightmares planned and orchestrated by the few war lords now governing the world. Making the needed change is never easy, and can challenge our ingenuity, and unfold the best in us to open the new vistas of human, intellectual and global opportunities.

Capitalism will slowly evolve into a Democratic Socialist system that will be able to provide the structures for maintaining democratic substance and resolving the challenges of a difficult future. Theory and logic indicate Socialism’s possible superiority. If centralized planners, especially in the technological age of data mining and artificial intelligence, responsibly control the processes, allocate resources, create an agreeable work ethic, and capably enter into the international trading system. Severity of forecasted global problems indicates that neoliberal Capitalism cannot meet the challenges, and a new socioeconomic system is demanded. Pure Socialism is an economic and political system, where the government owns much of production and controls most prices.

Democratic Socialism defines an economy and society that is politically democratic, allows private enterprise to generate surpluses and uses government controls to assure profits are optimally reassigned for both business (profit reinvestment) and public needs (taxation). Government policies, such as subsidizing, regulating, and distributing, help shape the economy. Social ownership of businesses is encouraged. These include worker-owned cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives, and workplace democracy, where workers sit on corporation boards. Some inefficient and vital industries necessitate some form of state ownership, but most industries are best run as private enterprises. Democratic Socialists consider central planning for major  public industries such as mass transit, housing, and energy, and permit market mechanisms to determine the demand for consumer goods.

In recent weeks, the bankruptcy of global capitalism has been exposed to millions as the system has gone into deep crisis and its representatives have failed to take the measures needed to stem COVID-19’s spread. This has been no accident. As scientists and health care professionals shouted themselves hoarse over the need for an urgent response, Trump and the political establishment were slow to act out of a desire to defend business-as-usual and Wall Street profits. At the root of the U.S.’s vulnerability to coronavirus has been not only Trump’s breathtaking failures but also the lack of a Medicare for All style health care system. Both parties have long fought fiercely against public health care, their determination to put profit before human lives didn’t begin with the current crisis. In reality we need to go further than Medicare for All, toward a socialized medical system in which the hospitals, health care, and pharmaceutical industries are taken into democratic public ownership, and run by the workers on the basis of human health and not profit.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods and services, is a distortion that needs fixing. GDP distorts reality by giving an appearance of real economic growth even as living standards stagnate for lower/middling classes. GDP totally misses ecosystem collapse by abuse/misuse/overuse, which is only noticed by the general public after it’s way too late when it’s easily noticeable, even by those of low self-esteem that blindly follow tyrannical maniacs.

Politicians see positive GDP numbers, which inspires them to continue with the status quo, meaning they do not focus on key aspects for sustainability, as well as human well-being. GDP does not compute environmental degradation. GDP does not register societal divisions that build tension over massive wealth disparity. And, GDP overlooks calculations of lowered standards of living for the abandoned middle class, as they increasingly deploy mountain-loads of debt to support bogus lifestyles. GDP does not paint a true-life picture. Rather, it’s a wobbly ghostly statistic that measures business activity without consideration for humanity or ecology, begging the question: What’s really important in life?

GDP numbers do not hint at issues with (1) sustainability of resources, (2) climate crises, or (3) the well-being of the people. Yet, all three are crucial issues under stress like never before. Furthermore, GDP totally misses crucial points supporting societal existence from an ecological perspective. GDP does not calculate, does not represent, and does not hint at the scarcity value associated with overuse/abuse of natural resources accompanied by egregious planet-wide degradation, e.g. the gooey tar sands in Alberta, Canada. The missing GDP calculations result in cultural upheaval as people increasingly “hit the streets” in protest, aware that “something is not right.”

The most daring attack to multilateralism during the outbreak came, as was expected from Mr. Trump who levelled a stinging charge on WHO, of being China-centric and in the same breath, called for stopping the funding to the agency for mismanaging the outbreak. What we see happening in the world is resurgence of geopolitical competition between the big-powers, declining respect for international rules and go-it-alone strategies of populist leaders who for their narrow political ends sing the songs of unilateralism and protectionism.  The picture that emerges is an increasingly atomised international system, devoid of global cooperation and solidarity, with no respect for rule-based international order. Interestingly, if we are to cope the challenges in the post-pandemic world, solidarity is a must or else, a Hobbesian world order awaits us, involving unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilized competition among nations.

Corporate capital is unleashing a systematic disruption in the collective bargaining power of the workforce. That is, on account of the specific character of the service sector, that today comprises more than two-thirds of the global GDP, having relatively more white-collar professions, digitalization with its emphasis on home-based work, has made it easy for capitalists to deal with employees on an individual or personal basis. Together with this, digitalization coupled with the new advancement in processing technologies that makes it possible to decentralise or decompose production into several stages has enabled corporate capital to devise a neoliberal version of the putting out system of transplanting ‘toxic’ and cheap labour-based stages of production to the dependent countries. This is speeding up  a new division of labour in material production both at the global and regional levels  leading to super-exploitation of workers and toiling masses through various arrangements for organising labour such as ‘flexible specialization’, outsourcing, assembly lines, etc. To be precise, through what is called  ‘informalisation’ or ‘disorganisation’, of the workforce, digital imperialism is swiftly reinforcing its global reach ensuring the highest rate of profit at minimum cost mainly through pushing down wages using digital platforms and tools.

Probably, the most crucial issue that accelerates the decline of US imperial reach is with regard to dollar itself. Omnipresence of the dollar that provided American finance capital an unparalleled opportunity for neo-colonial control has also been the most conspicuous expression of US hegemony. Being the only generally acceptable currency for international transactions, countries had to hold dollar as unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value. While other countries have to forego real resources for dollars, as the issuing country of dollar, the US could print any amount of dollar and purchase from or invest in any part of the world. US could finance its aid programs and military adventures out of the printing of dollar. Governments and central banks the world over were bound to keep their reserves in dollars and so on. However, obviously and logically, there is another side of the picture. That is, this dollar-denominated international arrangement has become an obstacle and at many times came in to conflict with the interests of other imperialist powers contending with US imperialism. Moreover, the underlying and badly needed symbiotic relationship between dollar as vehicle currency on the one hand, and US as world’s leading trader and capital exporter on the other, has already been broken—a repetition of what happened to pound sterling during the final decades of colonialism when Britain was still continuing as formal colonial leader. To be precise, today dollar continues as the international currency not based on the economic strength of US but only because of the absence an alternative arrangement.

It is in this context that imperialist China’s efforts to deal with US interference in international monetary transactions assume strategic political importance. China had already started using its currency Yuan along with local currencies in trade with its closest partners comprising almost half of the global trade volume. The transactions here are settled through the CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payments System bypassing the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications headquartered in Belgium since 1973) network payment system that uses dollar as the medium of cross-border settlements and therefore alleged to have a partisan approach to US in sharing financial information.  Along with this, China is in the process of launching a digital or crypto-currency called e-RMB (e-Renminbi) for circumventing the role of dollar in global transactions. The digital currency/cyber money developed with the involvement of Chinese digital giants like WeChat and Alipay has already become acceptable in many Chinese cities and is widely used for almost all transactions including salary payments. In the present international monetary system in which dollar is the numeraire, many countries are already fed up with US interference in their transactions.  For such countries, the internationalisation of digital Yuan will be very attractive.

Revealingly, with the application of ‘digital intelligence’ through such technologies as blockchain, the Chinese digital currency is designed in such a manner as to accomplish total non-interference from the Chinese Central Bank and this is expected to strengthen the general acceptability of ‘Chinese digital Yuan’ among the international community. If the Chinese initiative becomes successful and digital Yuan starts functioning, it will erode the role of dollar as world’s main reserve currency. Parallel to this, China is also planning to divest its trillions worth of dollar-denominated foreign exchange through outright write-off of loans of its closest partners or purchase of foreign assets or as OBOR investments abroad.  Meanwhile,  as per reports, the US also is planning a counter-offensive by developing a digital dollar project.  No doubt, as manifested in the assassinations of Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, US imperialism will go to any extent to eliminate any threat attempting to replace the dollar with another viable international medium of exchange. The multi-faceted and concerted China-bashing and Sinophobia now unleashed by Trump administration is to be viewed in this perspective. However, according to latest information, France has successfully tested a digital euro, and similar experiments are going on in Japan, Canada and UK. No doubt, the outcome of such simultaneous emergence of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) including their use in global interbank settlements will be nothing short of a gunning for the dollar from rival contending centres.

In a socialized system, an epidemic will not lead to economic uncertainty; the public will know that basic care will be provided. Nor will there be confusion of for whom, how, where, and when health services will be available.

With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. The pandemic has laid bare the diverging gap between interests of the billionaire financial elite indulging in terribly destructive plunder of nature and labour on one side, and the needs and sustenance of the working class and broad masses of people on the other. Our present financial system is unsustainable, and it works for the interests of a few very rich people.  For the sake of the long-term future, we must build a sustainable, steady-state economic system, an economic system which reduces inequality, and which serves the broad public interest. Intolerable and unjust economic inequality is increasing rapidly, both within and between nations. Statistics show that half of the world's net wealth belongs to the top 1%. They own as much as the remaining 99% of the world's peoples, the other 7.4 billion of us.

There are only 2,153 billionaires in the world, according to the report, but their wealth matches that of more than 4.6 billion people, or about 62 percent of the world’s population, estimated to stand at 7.7 billion. The gap between the wealthy and all those who fare less well looks even more prominent if to compare the combined income of the richest of the rich, the top one percent, to that of some 6.9 billion people. The only way to tackle inequality is to raise taxes. Taxing additional 0.5 percent of wealth of the top 1 percent over the next decade will provide governments with enough funds to create 117 million of jobs in health, education, elderly care and other sectors.

The Covid-19 epidemic has proven the final test for the capitalist system, which had a temporary rescue by neoliberal free enterprise. The capitalist system cannot responds to the crisis and falls apart in all its formations: economy dropped precipitously, shortages of medical equipment appeared, health institutions did not know where to obtain supplies, workers were stranded, industry did not know how to proceed, and the Republican government reacted too slow and too uncoordinated. In a Democratic Socialist system, the economic emergency only means a delay in production. No matter how long a crisis lasts, in a Democratic Socialist society the community’s basic needs are provided and citizens are secure in knowing full employment is eventually guaranteed. For neoliberal free enterprise, in which production and GDP are dependent on debt, the economic emergency means a drastic decline in revenue that prevents many from meeting credit payments, a prelude to bankruptcies of industries, financial sectors, small businesses, and individuals. Recovery will be punishing, and, for many, unemployment will be high and insecurity prevalent. The dollar will fall, inflation will increase as import prices increase, and much of U.S. export market will be lost.

The pandemic has made it clear that a society of self-seeking individuals is not a society.  A society is a social system. A successful social system is one that can support its members.  Once a self-sustaining social system exists, then there is a basis for people to branch out on their own.  But without a sustainable social system, there can be nothing. Appeals to corporations to exercise conscientious self-regulation do not work. The reason is simple. Mentally healthy living humans have a conscience. Corporations are constructs of law. They have no conscience beyond whatever responsibilities the law may require of them. Corporations that are under the control of individual humans, rather than the financial markets, may act responsibly when those individuals possess a deep concern for the common good. Most large corporations are captives of financial markets that drive the pursuit of short-term financial gain with no concern for the social or environmental consequences. Not only do they fail to serve the common good, but they are also driving us all toward civilizational collapse. Indeed, they are driving us toward human self-extinction. These conditions create an imperative for urgent structural change. Fortunately, corporations are entirely human creations. Indeed, there is no equivalent in nature. If they do not serve our needs, humans have both the right and the means to change them.

Governments must act now to build a human economy truly matters to society, rather than fuelling an endless pursuit of profit and wealth. Investing in national care systems to address the disproportionate responsibility for care work done by women and girls and introducing progressive taxation, including taxing wealth and legislating in favor of carers, are possible and crucial first steps. One reason for these outsized returns is a collapse in taxation of the super-rich and the biggest corporations because of falling tax rates and deliberate tax dodging. At the same time, only 4% of global tax comes from taxation of wealth, and studies show that the super-rich avoid as much as 30% of their tax liability. Extremely low corporate taxation helps them cream the profits from companies where they are the main shareholders; between 2011 and 2017 average wages in G7 countries increased by 3%, while dividends to wealthy shareholders grew by 31%.

The USA political approach favors free-market capitalism, and generally associated with policies of economic liberalization including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. This currently dominant USA neoliberalism seeks to maximize the freedom of the smart and advantaged to exploit human and natural resources for private profit. In contrast,   social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, eco-socialism, the welfare state) seeks to sustainably maximize human happiness, opportunity and dignity through evolving, culturally-cognizant intra-national and inter-national social contracts. Neoliberalism has resulted in huge and growing wealth inequality that endangers democracy (Big Money buys public perception of reality and votes) and endangers the economy (the poor cannot afford the goods and services they produce), this impasse leading to demands for imposition of wealth taxes.

It is worth remembering that a corporation exists only when a government has issued a charter. There is no legitimate reason for any democratically accountable government to issue a corporate charter other than to serve a public purpose. Similarly, there is no legitimate reason why a corporation chartered by one government jurisdiction has any inherent right thereby to do business in any other jurisdiction unless granted that privilege by the people of that jurisdiction through their government. That current law contradicts these simple truths is a consequence of corporate interests’ ability to manipulate the legal system. Current rules governing corporate conduct encourage and reward what should be treated as criminal behavior.

Current laws governing corporations: 1. They allow corporations to reap the rewards of their decisions without bearing the full costs. For example, when they evade paying taxes, they evade paying their fair share of the costs of infrastructure, education, or other essentials of doing business.

2. They allow the corporation to assess value only in terms of financial costs and returns, thus ignoring the need to secure the health of Earth’s regenerative systems on which all life depends.

3. They allow corporations to use their enormous financial resources and centralized decision-making to shape public opinion and pressure politicians to assure that laws favor corporate interests instead of public interests.

Calls for corporate responsibility generally assume that those who work for corporations, especially top management, are free to exercise moral responsibility on behalf of the corporation should they choose to do so. This ignores an important reality. Unless they own the corporation, those who lead a corporation only appear to be in charge. They serve only at the pleasure of financiers who compete for control of any corporation that is not taking full advantage of opportunities to maximize profits – which often means externalizing costs.

Trying to set and enforce rules at a global level to force transnational corporations to serve the people and planet they were created and designed to exploit would be an exercise as futile as a call for voluntary responsibility. A better solution is to break up transnational corporations and restructure them in ways that assure community accountability. How this might be done to best serve the well-being of people and Earth is a topic worthy of serious discussion, with implications well beyond the corporation.

Capitalism is structurally flawed. Its dependence on ever-expanding consumption cannot answer the environmental crises necessarily entailed by such consumption. And economies that are being artificially “grown”, at the same time as resources deplete, ultimately create inflated bubbles of nothingness. Pandemics like COVID-19 are the outcome of our destruction of natural habitats: to grow cattle for burgers, to plant palm trees for cakes and biscuits, to log forests for flat-pack furniture. Other lifeforms are being driven into ever closer proximity, forcing diseases to cross the species barrier. And then in a world of low-cost flights, disease finds an easy and rapid transit to every corner of the planet. No, capitalism is now in survival mode. That is why western governments will, for a time, try to “bail out” sections of their publics too, giving back to them some of the communal wealth that has been extracted over many decades. These governments will try to conceal for a little longer the fact that capitalism is entirely incapable of solving the very crises it has created. They will try to buy our continuing deference to a system that has destroyed our planet and our children’s future.

The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change.

 

The US still is history mightiest military machine in terms of both the stock of weapons of mass destruction and the readiness to deploy it in accordance with its imperialist agenda. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had unequivocally proved that no ruling class on earth can ever surpass the criminality and terrorism unleashed by US imperialism. This characteristic of the US is not specifically connected with WW II or that of postwar neo-colonialism led by it. For, the whole trajectory of US ascendancy as the supreme imperialist power had always been filled with loot, plunder, horror and genocide. It perpetrated holocausts upon holocausts on defenceless and innocent people as documented in the extermination of Red Indians, slavery on African- Americans, mass genocides on people of Pacific Islands and in superimposing imperialism without colonies over Latin America before ascending as supreme arbiter in the postwar neo-colonial world order. During the postwar period too, with 1100 military bases in 90 countries and a nuclear arsenal large enough to wipe out the world many times over, the geopolitical tensions, terror and wars, both cold and hot, imposed on world people by US imperialism have surpassed everything that preceded. Military-industrial complexes throughout the world involve a circular flow of money. The vast profits from arms industries are used to buy the votes of politicians, who then vote for obscenely bloated “defence” budgets. Military-industrial complexes need enemies. Without them they would wither. Thus, tensions are manufactured by corrupt politicians in the pay of arms industries. Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons. Donald Trump has recently threatened to attack both Iran and North Korea with nuclear weapons. The United States, under Trump, is also threatening both Russia and China. Any such conflict could escalate uncontrollably into an all-destroying global thermonuclear war.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons, with the goal of leading towards their total elimination. It was passed on 7 July 2017. In order to come into effect, signature and ratification by at least 50 countries is required. As of 23 March 2020, 37 states have ratified the treaty. For those nations that are party to it, the treaty prohibits the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons, as well as assistance and encouragement to the prohibited activities. For nuclear armed states joining the treaty, it provides for a time-bound framework for negotiations leading to the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons programme. A mandate adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 23 December 2016 scheduled two sessions for negotiations: 27 to 31 March and from 15 June to 7 July, 2017. The treaty passed on schedule on 7 July with 122 in favour, 1 against (Netherlands), and 1 official abstention (Singapore). 69 nations did not vote, among them all of the nuclear weapon states and all NATO members except the Netherlands: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO member nuclear weapons sharing states (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey)

The Pentagon knows that America most serious enemy is climate change not China or Russia or terror. Assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons first, that means our real enemy is the endless war we’re waging against Planet Earth. The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.

There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth. In other words, in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the planet. In the process, they are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet. No country should be allowed to threatened the world with its nuclear military weapons and equipment. What’s the best strategy for our species survival: killing each other while ignoring that global warming is happening critically today, and that the Earth natural resources and ecosystems are near increasingly compromised or destroyed.

Today the world spends almost two trillion dollars ( $ 2,000,000,000,000) every year on armaments. This vast river of money, almost too large to be imagined, is the “devil's dynamo” driving the institution of war. Politicians notoriously can be bought with a tiny fraction of this enormous amount; hence the decay of democracy. It is also plain that if the almost unbelievable sums now wasted on armaments were used constructively, most of the pressing problems now facing humanity could be solved. Because the world spends almost two thousand billion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as an institution, and why it persists, although we know that it is the cause of much of the suffering that inflicts humanity, and that we live under the constant threat of an all-destroying thermonuclear war.

Money from wealthy oligarchs in military-industrial  complexes buys the propaganda of the mass media and the votes of politicians. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, the oligarchs are further enriched, and thus the circular flow of money continues. Excessive economic inequality is at the root of the problem of war, as well as the loss of our democratic institutions.

What can we do to avoid this crisis, or at least to reduce its severity? We must urgently address the problem of climate change; and we must shift money from military expenditure to the support of birth control programs and agricultural research. We must also replace the institution of war by a system of effective global governance and enforcible international laws. Let us activate the Global Civilizational State leadership in dealing with global issues.

So why do America’s disastrous wars persist? Many reasons, some obvious and easy to understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated convictionin Washington that a willingness to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Addicted to it, which is true enough, but here are five additional reasons for war’s enduring presence in American life:

1. The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable: No American leader wants to be labeled a "loser." Meanwhile, conflicts such as the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with several more years, or even generations, to go, continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly aren’t. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully resisted the Pentagon’s siren call for patience, and for yet more trillions of dollars, in the cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, far fetched, or far-off.

2. American society’s almost complete isolation from war's deadly effects: We’re not being droned. Our cities are not yet lying in ruins, though they’re certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infra structure, thanks in part to the cost of those over seas wars. It’s nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the media or elsewhere, this country’s never-ending war-making gets here.

3. Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially don’t know about? Learning its lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies, in plain speak covers up, the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn’t because the enemy could exploit such details, the enemy already knows, but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned orother wise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden, pursued and indicted for sharing honest details about the calamitous Iraq War and America’s invasive and intrusive surveillance state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be truth-tellers.

4. An unrepresentative government: a very long time ago Congress ceded to the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite recent attempts to end America’s arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen, overridden by Donald Trump’s veto power, America’s duly elected representatives generally don’t represent the people when it comes to this country’s disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly, largely captives of, and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go to work for, the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech, the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in Congress than you and I ever will.

5. America is a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we’re actually doing to them. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

Tipping Points, paths to extinction on our planet.

The climate system is approaching a tipping point, a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. This will create a cascade of devastating effects. There are already signs tipping points have been reached. For example, rising Arctic temperatures have led to major ice melt, and weakened the Arctic jet stream, a powerful band of westerly winds.

Together Global Community has arrived at the point where only the leaves of the tree can heal the nations. We have one last chance, and a closing window of opportunity, to restore the ecosystems that humans need to both survive and thrive. We must power down, demilitarize, reject industrial ecocide, and embrace centuries of ecological restoration as the penultimate focus of human endeavors. There is a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now imminent; that is, it will occur within the next few decades. There is also a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now inevitable; that is, it cannot be prevented no matter what we do.

There are at least three distinct paths or tipping points to imminent (that is, within five years) human extinction: nuclear war (possibly started regionally), biodiversity collapse (already well advanced and teetering on the brink), and the climate catastrophe. Needless to say, each of these three paths might unfold in a variety of ways. In addition, it should be noted, there are other possible paths to extinction in the near term, particularly when considered in conjunction with the three threats just mentioned. These include the cascading impacts triggered by destruction of the Amazon rainforest (which is now imminent) particularly given its critical role in the global hydrological cycle, the rapidly spreading radioactive contamination of Earth, and geoengineering for military purposes (which has been going on for decades and continues).

These interrelated threats have generated a shocking series of ‘points of no return’ (‘tipping points’) that we have already crossed, the mutually reinforcing set of negative feedback loops that we have already triggered (and which we will continue to trigger) which cannot be reversed in the short-term, as well as the ongoing synergistic impact of the various ‘extinction drivers’ (such as ongoing extinctions because dependent species have lost their resource species) we have set in motion and which cannot be halted irrespective of any remedial action we might take. Hence, taking into account all of the above factors, the prospects of averting human extinction are now remote, at best. Why has this happened? Because long-standing dysfunctional human behavior, which we have not even begun to recognize as the fundamental driver of this extinction crisis, let alone address, has now trapped us between a rock and a hard place. We are trapped by our grotesquely dysfunctional parenting and education models that mass produce individuals who are terrified, self-hating and powerless leaving them submissively obedient while unable to seek out and consider the evidence for themselves and take powerful action in response and who, as a result of being terrorized during childhood, are now addicted to chronic over-consumption to suppress their awareness of their deep and unconscious emotional pain.

Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change, a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point, is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops, or typing points. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.

The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet’s oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to the mass die-off of coral reefs, the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.

A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.

It is, however, the potential for “non-linear” events and “tipping points” that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as life extinction on Earth. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment. Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. Large-scale singular events (also called ‘tipping points,’ or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures. Such events, pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them.

Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. This might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed, and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities. Two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species, perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans, could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.

Climate scientists also speak of “singularities,” “non-linear events,” and “tipping points” the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing, for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point? It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it’s high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature. Arctic permafrost:  irreversible thawing and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) with Arctic warming about  2 times bigger than  the global average (CH4 has an estimated Global Warming Potential (GWP) as low as 21 relative to the same mass of CO2 on a 100 year time-scale, but on a 20 year time scale and with aerosol impacts included it is 105). Of immediate concern is the fact that as CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing the Arctic permafrost is warming. Excessive amounts of Arctic methane will be released. Methane is much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Human pandemics are not among potential climate-induced tipping points, but there is plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures. In the Arctic as melting permafrost steadily releases the hundreds of gigatons of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stored in soil, lakes and sediment in Canada and Siberia. Scientists have also witnessed methane boiling up from underneath the Arctic Ocean, which is estimated to contain thousands of gigatons of methane.

If these methane reserves are ever fully released, the results would be cataclysmic. The extreme weather events of the past decade would be only the precursors of much more devastating storms, longer heat waves, drier droughts and nonstop wildfires. Coral reefs across the world would die, eliminating significant parts of the food chain. Glacial melting and sea level rise would flood every coastal city on the planet, home to between one-third and one-half of the world’s population, potentially drowning billions of people. At least one million of the Earth’s species would die and continent-scale portions of the world’s surface would become uninhabitable.

Moreover, Earth’s temperature would no longer be directly related to the burning of fossil fuels, making it exponentially more difficult for modern scientific techniques to contain or reverse. The only way to avert such a scenario would be to implement a scientifically planned global restructuring of the world’s energy industry to transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy. This in turn would involve a transformation on the same scale of transportation, logistics, agriculture and ultimately society as a whole. Such changes would necessarily cut across national boundaries, corporate profits and national security interests, all of which are features of capitalism: the division of the world into rival nation-states and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of private profit.

The only way to place the world’s productive forces on such an internationally coordinated basis is to overthrow the profit system, nation-states and capitalism. Its opposite must be established, socialism, the democratic control of the world’s productive forces by the international working class, and replace by the Global Civilizational State.

Climate change is real, happening. It is human caused, mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, could be a tragic end to our present evolution, without effective mitigation.

There are also latent positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or the drying Amazon. Human induced warming is predicted to accelerate these positive feedbacks and the most worrying earth systems climate science strongly suggests we are near a threshold beyond which a cascade of such feedbacks is triggered that is irreversible, nothing then we could do about it, leading to a 5-7C rise in temperature and to the certain collapse of civilization and maybe even human extinction. Fossil fuels have been the lifeblood of our meteoric ascent to our very fortunate global civilization of wealth and opportunity today, but burning fossil fuels had an unanticipated side-effect and now adds unacceptable GHG emissions which are a potentially fatal toxin for all we know and love. Transitioning out of fossil fuels to a new, post-carbon economy and society was never going to be easy. The main reason for this failure to effectively mitigate has been the success of global business at creating a business friendly global governance that protects long term investment. While successfully boosting economic activity, wealth creation and lifestyle innovation, this ‘neoliberal’ governance has not allowed mitigation policies that could have restricted fossil fuel use or helped speed up the needed transition.

The thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human health. Putting aside long-dormant new viruses, there’s also the issue of “zombie diseases” that have been safely tucked away in the ice for tens of thousands of years. These could very well include infections that have wreaked havoc on human populations in previous eras, including smallpox, various flu varieties, bubonic plague, and other deadly illnesses long since forgotten. Other infections that didn’t kill previous generations, but which we’ve lost immunity protection for, could also emerge. A bacterium that had been encased in an Antarctic glacier for 8 million years was successfully revived by a team of scientists. A group of NASA scientists revived bacteria dating back to the Pleistocene period. These Carnobacterium pleistocenium shared the era with mastodons, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Though the microbes had been immobilized in a chunk of ice for 32,000 years, they were in fine form after things warmed up.

In 2016, an anthrax outbreak in Siberia killed a 12-year-old boy and more than 2,300 reindeer. More than 70 nomadic herders, among them over 40 children, were hospitalized during the health crisis, and at least seven other adults and children were diagnosed with the disease. The culprit? The carcass of an anthrax-infected reindeer who died of the infection way back in 1941.

Melting permafrost could potentially yield viruses from long-extinct hominin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and were riddled with various viral diseases.

Climate scientists also speak of “singularities,” “non-linear events,” and “tipping points” the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing, for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point? It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it’s high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature. Arctic permafrost:  irreversible thawing and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) with Arctic warming about  2 times bigger than  the global average (CH4 has an estimated Global Warming Potential (GWP) as low as 21 relative to the same mass of CO2 on a 100 year time-scale, but on a 20 year time scale and with aerosol impacts included it is 105). Of immediate concern is the fact that as CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing the Arctic permafrost is warming. Excessive amounts of Arctic methane will be released. Methane is much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Even within humans and other living creatures there exist micro-organisms whose nature we simply cannot ascertain. Science so far has been able to identify only one percent of bacteria and its nature living in human body, and 99% of other organisms living within us are still unknown. If this is how much we have been able to familiarize ourselves with vis-à-vis humans, then are we at a place to tackle challenges that lie buried, completely unknown and undiscovered? Many of these organisms change their nature with fluctuating climatic conditions, and become fatal and toxic with changing environs. Zika behaved differently in its endemic places, that is, Uganda and South-east Asia and differently when it travelled elsewhere. The immune response of a single virus or bacteria thus varies as it adapts differently to different environments, and science for long has been perplexed as to how to grab a hold of this unstable trajectory that viruses and bacteria follow. We need to be prepared to deal with unknown viruses and be prepared scientifically for many more such unknown strains to appear in the near future.

Between the world awakened to unknown dangers and a brief window of clean-earth to breathe in, lies the complicity of many of us who still live in denial. Denial that nothing will harm us, and we have no role to play in howsoever climate has been changing outside our cocoons.

If current national pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are implemented, they are likely to result in at least 3 °C of global warming. This is despite the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit warming to well below 2 °C.

(1). West Antarctica: the tipping point may have been exceeded  (this  could destabilize the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to a 3 metres of sea-level rise on a timescale of 100s to 1000s of years, noting that this has happened in the past).

(2). East Antarctic ice sheet:  approaching a tipping point ( 3-4 metres in sea level rise on a timescale of 100s of years).

(3). Greenland ice sheet:  melting at an increasing  rate and the tipping point may be the circa +1.5C expected in about 2030 ( 7 metres sea level rise over 1000s of years).

(4). Arctic sea ice:  massive sea ice loss already ( at +2C there is a  10–35% probability of near-total summer sea ice loss).

(5). Coral reefs: mass coral bleaching worldwide and loss of 50% of the coral of  Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef due to warming, ocean acidification, pollution and Crown of Thorn predator  population explosion (99% of tropical corals are predicted to be  lost at +2C with massive loss of  marine biodiversity and fisheries).

(6). Amazon rain  rainforest:  estimated tipping point at 20% – 40% deforestation with about 17% lost since 1970 ( the world’s largest rainforest, contains 1 in 10 known species, has a continent-scale  climate impact, and is presently burning on a huge scale).

(7). North American boreal forest: warming in the sub-Arctic has led to insect pest population explosion, boreal (high latitude) tree die-off and fires ( some boreal forest regions are converting from being carbon sinks to a carbon sources).

(8). Arctic permafrost:  irreversible thawing and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) with Arctic warming about  2 times bigger than  the global average (CH4 has an estimated Global Warming Potential (GWP) as low as 21 relative to the same mass of CO2 on a 100 year time-scale, but on a 20 year time scale and with aerosol impacts included it is 105).

(9). Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): a key salt- and heat-conveying Atlantic Ocean circulation system subject to a 15% slow-down since the mid-20th century  (Arctic sea-ice loss is increasing  regional warming;  Arctic warming and Greenland melting are putting  fresh water into the North Atlantic; slowdown in the AMOC is destabilizing the West African monsoon, impacting drought in the Sahel region,  drying the Amazon, disrupting the East Asian monsoon and warming the  Southern Ocean with increased  Antarctic ice loss).

Cascading effects might be common. There are as many as 30 types of regime shift spanning physical climate and ecological systems, from collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet to a switch from rainforest to savanna. This indicated that exceeding tipping points in one system can increase the risk of crossing them in others. Such links were found for 45% of possible interactions. As it happened, though, this planet proved anything but an impotent victim of colonization and exploitation. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest, for example, is altering Brazil’s climate, raising temperatures and reducing rainfall in significant ways, with painful consequences for local farmers and even more distant urban dwellers. And the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thanks to increasingly massive forest fires, will only increase the pace of climate change globally. Similarly, the technique of hydraulic fracking, used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground shale deposits, can trigger earthquakes that damage aboveground structures and endanger human life. In so many ways like these, Mother Nature strikes back when her vital organs suffer harm.

This interplay between human activity and planetary behavior has led some analysts to rethink our relationship with the natural world. They have reconceptualized the Earth as a complex matrix of living and inorganic systems, all (under normal conditions) interacting to maintain a stable balance. When one component of the larger matrix is damaged or destroyed, the others respond in their unique ways in attempting to restore the natural order of things.

Global Civilizational State.

It is an amazing thing that in less than a million years the human species has succeeded in covering the earth. The surface of our planet is now completely encircled, and mankind has completed the creation of a close network of planetary links. Every day this new integration grows in strength. The sense of the earth is the irresistible pressure which comes at a given moment to unite us all species in a common goal. The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build Global Community. Let us connect with the Global Civilizational State .

The fundamental question is this: Why are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own extinction in the near term? Surely, this is neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm, in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the time.

When looking at the big picture, from the direct emissions of power installations, to the mining of minerals and fuels for their construction and operation, to the lands necessary for the energy supply infrastructure – we found that the best bet for both people and environment is to rely mainly on wind and solar power. A main winner of decarbonisation is human health: switching to renewables-based electricity production could cut negative health impacts by up to 80 per cent. This is mainly due to a reduction of air pollution from combusting fuels. What is more, the supply chains for wind and solar energy are much cleaner than the extraction of fossil fuels or bioenergy production.

The situation is calling for far greater resolve. Heads of State must come together under the articles of a newly formed multinational body with powers beyond those of the United Nations and other such multinational organizations. Within the next 36 months such an organization, Global Civilizational State, must economically orchestrate an increase in the cost of carbon world-wide; from carbon’s first moment of entry into the system through to its becoming a part of derivative goods and services.

Over the next decades our biosphere will undergo drastic temperature change. That change may bring about our extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid or natural planetary happening. It will be self-inflicted by Homo sapiens. A theological impetus for dialogue is that once we see that our own religion is not the one and only true religion, we realize that other traditions may have truths and values that are not provided, at least as clearly, in our own religion. If civilization is to have much hope of surviving even the present century, we must find solutions to our global problems of war, imperialism, nuclear weapons and global warming, plus ocean acidification. The world’s religions, with their ability to motivate people could provide a powerful force for the kind of civilizational transformation we need if they cooperate toward that end in the name of their common values. But thus far the religions have been the source of discord as much as sources of solidarity. The growth of religious pluralism in the various traditions could encourage a mutual respect and appreciation that would facilitate cooperation. After a lifetime of study of the evolution of the human species , it was found that humanity was entering a new era with a higher, peaceful and more responsible sense of one Global Community . The emerging international situation is being shaped by a bipolar configuration between US and China in which the other imperialist powers will perform the role of third parties in consonance with their self-interest.  Though US imperialism is much weaker, declining and relatively isolated, as history shows, declining empires will not go down peacefully. On the other hand, the ‘neoliberal virus’ has totally exposed the political-economic and social bankruptcy of capitalist-imperialist system as a whole.

Year 2020 is a pivotal year in the struggle to define and shape the world to come. All of the multiple cascading political, economic, moral-spiritual, and, most importantly, ecological crises have been made so starkly visible by a single virus. What we have been witnessing, and will continue to do so, is intense pressure by elites to maximize state ‘socialist’ rescue of themselves from this crisis. That should lay bare what we are up against. What emerges from 2020 is entirely unpredictable. All of the objective factors are in front of us, including elite ruthlessness, scandalous inequality such as racism and apathy to the lives and deaths of ordinary working people. The world system as we know it is coming to an end, and the de-centering of the West is certainly a positive aspect of it. The new world order can be worse than the previous one, more unequal and authoritarian. Or, if we take seriously the emancipatory ethos from both our prophetic religious and secular philosophical traditions, we can struggle to make it a relatively more just and egalitarian one.

Issues threatening the health and future of children and of the next generations.

Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, predatory commercial practices, and the rampant spread of Covid-19 threaten the health and future of children in every country. What is even more worrisome and fearful is that children stand on the precipice of a climate crisis. Wealthy countries are threatening the future of all the children in the world through carbon pollution.

COVID 19 has also unmasked quite vividly the global moral divide, during the crisis while some countries extended their helping hands to assist affected countries, others tightened sanctions to deprive some countries of vital medical supplies to ensure that their dying die. Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s recent announcement under false pretexts of WHO funding cut, which is a proof that to US politics takes precedence over human sufferings – did not go down very well neither with most Americans nor with the international community especially at a time when the world is looking to WHO for universal guidance and technical support to tackle the pandemic. Six of the seven G7 countries have either regretted or condemned Trump’s decision and expressed their solidarity with the WHO. Trump’s WHO funding cut was an act of international vandalism. Indeed, WHO funding cut is yet another example of how much US has lost its credibility even among its own allies which is an indication that its tactic of bullying is failing.

Similar to waking up the day following September 11, 2001, we will be emerging into a new world after the COVID19 pandemic subsides. It is now being called the shut-in economy. The pandemic is not solely a health crisis; it is equally an existential crisis, an impasse in the global civilization that is forcing us to realize that our over dependence and perverse reliance upon natural resources, such as fuel, energy, food and corrupt banking and healthcare services, is fragile. We are learning that at every level there are numerous cracks in our structures of governance and our economic and social bases. Yet the virus did not break America; it has been broken for a long time. Only now more people are waking up from their dream. Furthermore, few people, including the mainstream media, now believe there will ever be a return to the normalcy of life that ended after Wuhan had its first patient infected with the virus. It is time for every individual to reassess her or his priorities. A life full of well-being is more possible today if we realize the virus has also been our teacher. But it is living a life that is founded upon simplicity, insight and wisdom, and community rather than consumption and competitive power.

This international situation forms the background to the emerging post-pandemic political-economic trends towards digital imperialism. When the COVID-19 battered world economy came to an abrupt halt, the only sphere that worked overtime was that of the internet and digitalization to convert analog information into digital information. To put it differently, in the absence of cross-border digital flows, the economic outcome of the pandemic would have been more horrific. That is, when COVID-19 disrupted everything and disconnected the world, it was the digital or cyberspace that kept the world moving. Of course, in the beginning of the pandemic itself, China with its advancements in robotisation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies succeeded in designing a suitable App to track and trace corona patients. In the course of the global virus-spread, several countries subsequently emulated it by devising their respective apps. Along with this many digital spheres including cashless payments and transactions also got a boost during the pandemic days.

Corporate media has already started talking on how post-pandemic work-place is to be re-arranged. Many professions can be moved online avoiding face-to-face-meeting and travel; that daily commuters will be told to work from home through video-conferencing or video calls or via other online platforms and in self-isolation, that wages also can be made digital through mobile biometric payments and so on. Online shopping and e-commerce, cloud business and services are to get new booming and as a manifestation, the fortunes of Amazon like companies that already gained much from the Corona crisis are sky-rocketing. A pervasive digital culture pertaining to education and research and a flourishing of online courses are also in the offing. Even the film industry is planning to re-orient towards direct to home releases using online platforms like Amazon. This emerging trend in many social realms is likely to continue in the post-Covid situation without any let up.

This is largely an unusual phenomenon in recent history when parents, grandparents, and children spending so much time together within their houses. This might have led to new familial relationships, understanding and responses including conflicts when children might have learnt new things about their parents and vice-versa during the extra ordinary length of lockdown time.  It could be both positive and negative with respect to the family dynamics. Because of Covid-19, the lock down and the confinement within homes initially were difficult. It led to considerable release of negative emotions which were addressed through the social media in the form of both panic-inducing. There is a tendency among people which is can be called as the ’not me’ attitude. It is a belief that the coronavirus infection may not affect them and they are outside the pandemic circle or have nothing to do with it. The sudden rush of people on to the streets when there is some relaxation is partly due to this syndrome but also due to a need for ‘jail break’. The pandemic has also transformed the thinking and worldview of people when they started seeing others as  potential carriers of infection. The pandemic has significantly influenced the social and psychological fabric of the society where everyone is fearful of getting infected despite the ‘not me’ syndrome.

Not a single country on the planet is properly working to ensure safety, wellbeing, health and suitable environment for their children. Despite dramatic improvements in survival, nutrition, and education over recent decades, today’s children face an uncertain future. Successful societies invest in their children’s futures and protect their rights. However, many politicians and governments in the world still do not consider such an investment as a priority. Even in rich countries, many children, especially in marginalized groups including indigenous people and ethnic minorities still suffer from hunger or live in conditions of total poverty.

Data show the largely negative impact the commercial sector on the well-being of children in all countries, with companies promoting “addictive or unhealthy commodities,” such as fast food, sugar-­sweetened beverages, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and social media. Companies make huge profits from marketing products directly to children and promoting addictive or unhealthy commodities, all of which are major causes of non-­communicable diseases. The commercial sector’s profit motive poses many threats to child health and wellbeing, not least the environmental damage unleashed by unregulated industry. Children around the world are enormously exposed to advertising from business, whose marketing techniques exploit their developmental vulnerability and whose products can harm their health and wellbeing. Children’s large and growing online exposure, while bringing benefits in terms of information access and social support, also exposes them to exploitation, as well as to bullying, gambling, and grooming by criminals and sexual abusers.

Industry self-­regulation does not work, and the existing global frameworks are not sufficient. A far stronger and more comprehensive approach to regulation is required. Children must be protected from the marketing of tobacco, alcohol, formula milk, sugar­-sweetened beverages, gambling, and potentially damaging social media, and the inappropriate use of their personal data. Even in rich countries, many children go hungry or live in conditions of absolute poverty, especially those belonging to marginalized social groups — including indigenous populations and ethnic minorities. Too often, the potential of children with developmental disabilities is neglected, restricting their contributions to society. Additionally, many millions of children grow up scarred by war or insecurity, excluded from receiving the most basic health, educational, and developmental services.

Wealthy countries generally have better child health and development outcomes, but their historic and current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions threaten the lives of all children. The ecological damage unleashed today endangers the future of children’s lives on our planet, their only home. As a result, our understanding of progress on child health and wellbeing must give priority to measures of ecological sustainability and equity to ensure we protect all children, including the most vulnerable. The poorest countries have a long way to go towards supporting their children’s ability to live healthy lives, but wealthier countries threaten the future of all children through carbon pollution, on course to cause runaway climate change and environmental disaster. Not a single country performed well on all three measures of child flourishing, sustainability, and equity.

The rights and entitlements of children are enshrined within the CRC. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, commonly abbreviated as the CRC or UNCRC is a human rights treaty which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children.ratified by all countries, except the USA. The report recommended that the CRC adopt a new protocol to protect children from commercial harm. The world’s countries agrees to leave future generations with a cleaner and healthier world. Early investments in children’s health, education, and development have benefits that compound throughout the child’s lifetime, for their future children, and society as a whole. Successful societies invest in their children and protect their rights, as is evident from countries that have done well on health and economic measures over the past few decades.

Decision makers need a long-­term vision. Just as good health and nutrition in the prenatal period and early years lay the foundation for a healthy life course, the learning and social skills we acquire at a young age provide the basis for later development and support a strong national polity and economy. High ­quality services with universal health­care coverage must be a top priority. Social movements must play a transformational role in demanding the rights that communities need to care for children and provide for families. Government has a duty of care and protection across all sectors. Countries that support future generations put a high priority on ensuring all children’s needs are met, by delivering entitlements, such as paid parental leave, free primary health care at the point of delivery, access to healthy — and sufficient amounts of — food, state ­funded or subsidized education, and other social protection measures. These countries make sure children grow up in safe and healthy environments, with clean water and air and safe spaces to play. They respect the equal rights of girls, boys, and those with non­conforming gender identities. Policy makers in these countries are concerned with the effect of all policies on all children, but especially those in poorer families and marginalized populations, starting by ensuring birth registration so that the govern­ment can provide for children across the life course, and help them to become engaged and productive adult citizens.

Countries might provide these entitlements in different ways, but their realization is the only pathway for countries to achieve the SDGs for children’s health and wellbeing, and requires decisive and strong public action. Since threats to child health and wellbeing originate in all sectors, a deliberately multisectoral approach is needed to ensure children and adolescents survive and thrive from the ages of 0–18 years, today and in the future. Investment in sectors beyond health and education — such as housing, agriculture, energy, and transport — are needed to address the greatest threats to child health and wellbeing. We give our children loving care, but it makes no sense to do so unless we do everything in our power to give them a future world in which they can survive. We also have a duty to our grandchildren, and to all future generations.

Today we are faced with the threat of an environmental megacatastrophe, of which the danger of catastrophic climate change is a part. We also face the threat of an all-destroying nuclear war. Humanity needs to embrace the path of Global Solidarity between all peoples of all nations. And this will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and global crises that might assail humankind, all life on Earth, in the 21st century. Because of population growth, the effect of climate change on agriculture, and the end of the fossil fuel era, there is a danger that by the middle of the present century a very large-scale famine could take the lives of as many as a billion people. We owe it to our children to take urgent action to prevent these threats from becoming future realities. We must also act with dedication to save our children from other social ills that currently prevent their lives from developing in a happy and optimal way, for example child labor, child slavery, starvation, preventable disease and lack of education. These, too, are threats to our children’s future.

Illiteracy in the less developed countries exceeded that of the developed ones by a factor of ten in 1970. By 2000, this factor had increased to approximately 20. As our economies become more knowledge-based, and the use of telecommuting thus making it easy to learn and work from home, education has become more and more important. Besides universal education, educational reforms are urgently needed, particularly in the teaching of history and sciences. As it is taught today, history is a chronicle of power struggles and war, told from a biased national standpoint. Our own race or religion is superior; our own country is always heroic and in the right. We urgently need to replace this indoctrination in chauvinism by a reformed view of history, where the slow development of human culture is described, giving adequate credit to all who have contributed. The teaching of other topics, such as economics, should be reformed. Economics must be given both a social conscience and an ecological conscience. The mantra of growth must be abandoned, and the climate emergency must be addressed.

The number of refugees from both conflicts and climate change is increasing rapidly. Several million refugees have fled from wars in the Middle East. Meanwhile, drought and rising temperatures in Africa have also produced millions of refugees, anxious for a better life in Europe. Similarly, in the western hemisphere, both conflicts and climate change have produced a stream of desparate people, traveling through Mexico to the southern borders of the United States. There they have been treated in an extremely cruel way by the Trump administration. Young children, infants, have been separated from their parents and put into cages.

Child labor is undesirable because it prevents children from receiving an education. Furthermore, when parents regard their children as a source of labor or income, it motivates the to have very large families, and our finite earth, unlimited growth of population is a logical impossibility. Population growth increases the threat of large-scale famine as well as ecological catastrophe. Child slavery is unacceptable, as is any form of slavery. Forced marriage, and very early marriage of girls as young as 9 in some countries are also unacceptable practices. The international community has a duty to see that existing laws against these practices are enforced.

People worldwide are threatened with famine will become refugees, desperately seeking entry into countries where food shortages are less acute. Wars, such as those currently waged in the Middle East, will add to the problem.

The primary human behaviours that are modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) whether through military violence, radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion and the effects of environmental modification,including climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however,  there are other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss.

These of course are just some basic ideas. The future of the Earth and not just humanity depends on both a change of consciousness and new ethical practices. We must leave our old nationalist, productivist, consumerist, paranoically competitive identities behind and become a new collectivity of planet loving “aliens” who have come to rescue us from ourselves.

Applying the Scale of Global Rights to global issues.

As global crises of all sorts on our planet further intensify, Global Community may have no alternative but to show Global Solidarity and help each other out of crises. Such solidarity can only be built on the basis of harmony, cooperation and moderation, and on respecting the political and cultural diversity of our multicivilizational troubled world. Global Civilizational State has proposed creative works toward saving humanity from self-destruction, and are a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, education, art, philosophy, technology, and material wellbeing. As Global Civilizational State has taken on a much deeper kind of global leadership, one that earns more respect than envy and more gratitude than hatred, one that can catapult the whole planet forward into a future where war is no longer thinkable between nation-states, and a legitimate and beneficial Earth governance is able to cope with global problems.

The 21st Century will see limitless links and symbiotical relationships with and within Global Community. The fundamental criteria is that a relationship is created for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The emphasis on the relationship gives more importance to the other aspects such as quality of life, protection of the environment and of the global life-support systems and the entrenchment of the Scale of Global Rights into our ways of life. Therefore, symbiotical relationships are very crucial for humanity as they will determine our survival or not as a species and, consequently, the survival of the next generations. It is now increasingly evident that only by sharing the world's natural resources more equitably and sustainably we will be able to address both the ecological and social crisis we face as Global Civilizational State. The evolution of societies can be greatly accelerated by educating all Peoples worldwide. For now the Peoples of our world need to learn to live in symbiosis with one another. There are many types of symbiotical relationships to choose from. Relationships allow more stable and inclusive global economy.  A global symbiotical relationship is created between nation-states and the Federation of Global Governments for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, genuine group concerns and unconditional support for the individual's well-being, all life on Earth, a giant leap in human behaviour. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development.

Over the past several decades humanity has bettered itself through the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by most nations. But now is the time to leave it behind and reach to our next step of social evolution, that is the approval of a scale of social values, the Scale of Global Rights.  Primordial human rights on the Scale are separate categories from those of community rights, the right of the greatest number of people, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights and religious rights. Ecological and primordial human rights are the only rights that have existed unchanged throughout the evolutionary origin of our species. Any major change would have threatened our very existence. All other human rights are rights created by human beings and can be changed depending of new circumstances; they are not stagnant but are rather flexible and adaptive, and they can evolve. Ecological and primordial human rights of this generation and of future generations are therefore much more important than any other human rights existing now and in the future.

Global Civilizational States offers short and long term solutions to the people of all nations to assure the survival of life on Earth. Both solutions require the acceptance of the Scale of Global Rights as our guide for survival. As a first step, all nations should approve the first three sections on the Scale of Global Rights. The approval would also supersede the political and physical borders of participating member nations. The approval would mean politics and justice without borders only concerning those three sections. In this way the Scale of Global Rights gives us a sense of direction for future planning and managing of the Earth. Earth management is now well defined and becomes a goal to achieve. We no longer waste energy and resources in things that are absolutely unimportant. It has also become a necessity of establishing the Global Trade and Resources Ministry that will be assessing, compiling, managing and protecting Earth resources, and the Earth Court of Justice prosecuting cases involving crimes related to the relentless misused of the Earth resources.

Global Civilizational State found evidence that the ecological base is the essential prerequisite for the effectiveness and exercise of all rights recognized for human beings. The stewardship of the ecological base has to be given priority before the fulfilment of various economic and social wishes. Demands resulting from the socio-economic system of a particular country have to find their limits in the protection of the global ecosystem. Vital interests of future generations have to be considered as having priority before less vital interests of the present generation. Supply chains have to be designed in a way that the goods can enter after usage or consumption into natural or industrial recycling processes. If serious damages to persons, animals, plants and the ecosystem cannot be excluded, an action or pattern of behaviour should be refrained from. A measure for supplying goods or services should choose a path which entails the least possible impact on the ecological and social system concerned. This way functioning proven systems will not be disturbed and unnecessary risks will not be taken. Supply strategies consuming fewer resources should have preference before those enhancing more resource consumption. When there is a need to find a solution to a problem or a concern, a sound solution would be to choose a measure or conduct an action, if possible, which causes reversible damage as opposed to a measure or an action causing an irreversible loss.

The Scale of Global Rights contains six (6) sections. Section 1 has more importance than all other sections below, and so on.

Concerning sections 1, 2, and 3, it shall be Global Parliament highest priority to guarantee these rights to Member Nations and to have proper legislation and implement and enforce Global Law as it applies. 

Section 1.    Ecological rights and the protection of the global life-support systems

Section 2.    Primordial human rights 

• safety and security
• shelter
• 'clean' energy
• a 'clean' and healthy environment
• fresh water
• clean air
• balanced diet
• basic clothing
• employment, health care, and free education for everyone.

Section 3.    The ecological rights, the protection of the global life-support systems and the primordial human rights of future generations.

Concerning Sections 4, 5 and 6, it shall be the aim of Global Parliament to secure these other rights for all global citizens within the federation of all nations, but without immediate guarantee of universal achievement and enforcement. These rights are defined as Directive Principles, obligating Global Parliament to pursue every reasonable means for universal realization and implementation. Section 4.   Community rights, rights of direct democracy and global voting, the right that the greatest number of people has by virtue of its number (50% plus one) and after voting representatives democratically Section 5.   Economic rights (business and consumer rights, and their responsibilities and accountabilities) and social rights (civil and political rights)

Section  6.    Cultural rights and religious rights

The following table is a comparison of the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Scale. It is made clear how little importance was given in the Universal Declaration to Sections 1,2,3, and 4 of the Scale of Global Rights. And it is made clear how urgent it is to replace both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Charters from all nations by the Scale of Global Rights.

Table 1: Comparison between the Scale of Global Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Charters from all nations.

Importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the Scale of Global Rights
The total degree of importance due to the Universal Declaration.
Scale	Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights	Total degree of importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Section 1	parts of Article 3; 1% importance	1% importance
Section 2	parts of Articles 3,4,5,9,13,14,25; 35% importance	35%
Section 3	no Articles; 0%	0%
Section 4	parts of Articles 16,18,21,29; 5%	5%
Section 5	parts of Articles 15,17,20,21,22,23,24,28; 100%	100%
Section 6	parts of articles 26,27; 70%	70%

Here is how the degree of importance was obtained. For instance in Section 1 it was found that parts of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was included as promoting very softly the protection of human life but was not promoting at all the protection of the global life-support systems. Section 1 on the Scale of Global Rights promotes both the protection of human life and the global life-support systems. No key rights were found in the Universal Declaration that would promote in any way the protection of human life and that of the global life-support systems. And it is a failure of the Universal Declaration to be in line with the Scale of Global Rights. As a result of this failure, a 1% importance was recorded in the table. What does it mean? It means that the Universal Declaration does not give any importance to human life and the protection of the global life-support systems. These results are consistent and in agreement with the fact that democracies hardly survive overpopulation such as are being seen in the world. What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate? It will be completely destroyed. Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.

Global Civilizational State has now a Vision of the Earth in Year 2024 and a sense of direction, and embarks on a new path in history. The inevitability of global societies that are living, sharing and creating symbiotical relationships interactively is, beyond doubt, what we must resolutely and heartily accept. Our creativity today may influence tomorrow's socio-economic strategies and contribute to the evolution of human societies, - an evolution directed towards a global partnership and cooperation with each other for survival.  Our time is about the courage to live a life in a harmonious peace order and showing by example, thus preventing poverty, wars, terror and violence. We need to educate the coming generations with good principles, show compassion, and demonstrate social harmony and global sustainability.

The world is in the global crisis. We are exploiting our natural resources, minerals and fuels faster than we are gaining access to alternative sources. We are polluting the natural environment faster than the environment can regenerate itself to reach the level suitable for human needs. We are changing climate dangerously. Our attitude and way of life show a moral degradation toward the existing forms of life on the planet. It's time for us to protect what is left to protect: life itself on Earth. This is the reason for the creation of biodiversity zones all over our planet.  We need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We need to reclaim the ideal of being a democratic middle-class people without extremes of wealth and poverty. We need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means letting go a sense of ourselves as consumption machines. We need a Global Civilizational State leadership for all of humanity.  Effective Earth governance requires a greater understanding of what it means to live in a more crowded, interdependent humanity with finite resources and more pollution threatening the global life-support systems. Global Civilizational State has no other choice but to work together at all levels. The collective power is needed to create a better world. Let us all work together to build a greater and most trusty Global Civilizational State. Humanity needs urgently this world system of governance.  The United Nations failed to satisfy the needs of the people of the 21st Century. It has never improved upon the old 20th Century ways and thinking. Its voting system no longer satisfies the 7 billion people on Earth. The challenges are different now and require a world organization capable of dealing with the needs of all Peoples. We need a Global Civilizational State.  Global Civilizational State opposes environmental, economic, population and military warfare and it was first to oppose any type of invasion of a people by another people. An invasion is either an environmental, economic, population or military offensive in which large numbers of combatants of one geopolitical entity aggressively enter territory owned by another such entity, generally with the objective of either conquering; liberating or re-establishing control or authority over a territory; forcing the partition of a country; altering the established government or gaining concessions from said government; or a combination thereof. An invasion can be the cause of a war, be a part of a larger strategy to end a war, or it can constitute an entire war in itself. Due to the large scale of the operations associated with invasions, they are usually strategic in planning and execution. Global Civilizational State has been witnessing such different types of warfare for decades. And now is the time to stop all types of invasion no matter what they maybe.

For the first time in human history, in 1985 Global Civilizational State has proposed a benchmark:

*     formation of global ministries in all important global commons of our lives
*     the Scale of Global Rights as a replacement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
*     Earth Court of Justice, Global Law, and Global Constitution to deal with all aspects of governance and management of the Earth
*     a new impetus given to the way of doing business and trade in line with a "democratic socialism plus"
*     geographical, economical, political, social, business, religious symbiotical relationships between nations, communities, businesses, and Peoples for the good and well-being of all
*     proposal to reform the United Nations to be under the umbrella of Global Civilizational State and Global Parliament 

Let our time be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life. Let our expanding consciousness blend with that of the Soul of Humanity.

Scale of Global Rights, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/globalcommunity/Scale.htm http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/globalrights/scale.htm

Global Leadership is needed to help develop and apply surviving solutions for Life on Earth. Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely and global warming, overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and poor choices of technologies are major drivers. Truly, the world is on the threshold of a global change and needs to proceed with the non-violent approach. Global Leadership is needed to help develop and apply surviving solutions for Life on Earth. We can no longer perceive ourselves as a People who could survive alone and a People who does not need anyone else. We belong to and depend on this much larger group, that of Global Community. Global cooperation brings people together for a common future for the good of all. Global Community was built from a grassroots process with a vision for humanity that is challenging every person on Earth as well as nation governments and has a vision of the people working together, building a new civilization- Global Civilizational State, including a healthy and rewarding future for the next generations.

Surviving solutions for Life on Earth and a system of global governance would consist of nine or more Global Governments described within the largest cultural groupings of people on Earth - Global Civilizational State. In such system core states would play a leading role, that is a variety of cultures, civilizations, religious worlds, historical traditions, and nation-states. Earth governance is about the rights of nation-states to self-determination in the global context of Global Civilizational State rather than the traditional context of a world of separate states. Earth governance does not imply a lost of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Global Civilizational State has no intention of changing the status and privileges of state governments. In fact, state governments become primary members of Global Community. Earth governance is a balance between the rights of nation-states with rights of people  and the interests of nations with the interests of Global Civilizational State. Global Parliament and the Federation of Global Governments would be the place of meeting between Global Governments. The power of the Federation was de-centralized to give each Global Government a better chance to find right solutions to global issues in its specific area and to take a larger share of responsibility and be more accountable to the people of the region where it operates. A Global Government is concerned not only with economics and trade, but also with the environment, health, agriculture, energy, as well as social, cultural and many other essential aspects.

A variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public; and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out. It also turned the "public sphere" into a site of self-interested contestation for the resources of the state rather than a space for the development of a public-minded rational consensus. The process of modernization was forced through by economic and administrative rationalization so much that our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption. Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one. In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens. An "ideal speech situation" requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors.

People worldwide are worries about unsolved problems related to the global warming of the planet, globalization, political instability and a regress to irrationality. Global Civilizational State  has proposed an alternative perspective encouraged by human social evolution and expanding global governance, including Global Solidarity. Evolutionity together with Global Civilizational State are a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, education, art, philosophy, technology and material wellbeing, and in fact both are a continuation of the previous epochs and both are proposing creative works toward saving humanity from self destruction.

For the United Nations to be revitalized, something drastic needs to be done about the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The major weakness of this Council lies in the fact that each one of these five members carries the power of the veto. This means if one of these five nations objects to the implementation of a law on a global scale, such a law cannot be implemented even if it would have the support of the rest of all the nations of the world! In essence, the welfare of the entire world as a top priority does not really mean anything by these permanent members of the UN Security Council. These countries are: United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China and France. Each one of them feels to be absolutely above the law and when it comes to doing what they want individually or collectively, they may become quite nasty and even dangerous. If we were to analyze the numerous vetoes these nations exerted, we will find out they served more to defeat the peaceful objectives of the United Nations rather than to promote them properly and effectively. This was done systematically to the detriment of the welfare of all people of the world without exception. For example, when the United Nations voted to abolish all nuclear weapons and all landmines, the United States objected and refused to accept such a plan. That was enough to destroy the chance for people everywhere to live in peace and security.   Besides, these members of the UN Security Council hardly ever took the initiative to develop an international program of disarmament and arms control, even though the UN Charter advocates it. Needless to say, this could be easily understood since all the members of the UN Security Council deal with the business of the manufacture and sales of weapons, above all the United States. The eventual waging of wars has become a lucrative business! Today, wars are no longer waged to defend one’s nations from unjust aggression. They are waged particularly by the United States because wars are now viewed as a lucrative business where one could make an enormous amount of money.  Since there seems to be no chance that such permanent five members would ever consent on the total dismantling of their nuclear weapons, their permanent seat should be abolished the sooner the better. At the same time, we need to create a federation of nations, the Federation of Global Governments, Global Parliament, that firmly believes in world peace through education that comes through healthy Global Dialogues, abolition of hunger and poverty, provision of shelter for all the homeless, environmental protection and the safeguard of people’s good health everywhere.   The five permanent members of the UN Security Council must make a simple decision: give up their veto power and try to develop international programs that are in the best interest of all people without exception. This would certainly be a gigantic step toward peace where everyone will be a winner and no one will be a loser. The alternative would be for the five permanent members to continue to retain their veto power, doing what they always wanted to do, even to the detriment of millions of people around the world.

In order to create a harmonious and compassionate Global Civilizational State, everyone needs to comply with Global Law. Global Law includes legislation covering all aspects of human activities. The Global Protection Agency (GPA) will train and lead a global force bypassing traditional peacekeeping and military bodies such as the United Nations and NATO. The GPA will enforce the law. And that is how Global Civilizational State can stop the global warming of the planet and protect the global life-support systems, thus largely improving the quality of life of the next generations. As we enact global law, we will begin to take on a much deeper kind of global leadership, one that earns more respect than envy and more gratitude than hatred, one that can catapult the whole planet forward into a future where war is no longer thinkable between nation-states and a legitimate and beneficial global government is able to cope with global problems.

A Global Civilizational State leadership in which core states play a leading or dominating role is a global government type world leadership. It is a leadership in which the exercise of influence by the core state is tempered and moderated by the common culture it shares with member states of its civilization. Cultural commonality legitimates the leadership and order-imposing role of the core state for both member states and for the external powers and institutions. In any given region of the planet where there is a dominant state, peace can be achieved and maintained only through the leadership of that core state. Regional power becomes responsible and legitimate when exercised by core states in relation to other members of their civilization. A core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it as cultural kin. Where core states exist, they are the central elements of the new international order based on civilizations, the Global Civilizational State. Now, in the proposal brought forward by the author of this Paper, it is clear here that Peoples from all over the world will keep their cultures within a specific Global Government. Global Parliament and the Federation of Global Governments would be the place of meeting between Global Governments of the different regions of the world. The power of the Federation was de-centralized to give each Global Government a better chance to find right solutions to global issues in its specific area and to take a larger share of responsibility and be more accountable to the people of the region where it operates. A Global Government is concerned not only with economics and trade, but also with the environment, health, agriculture, energy, social, cultural and many other essential aspects.

There is no greater task in the world today than for Global Civilizational State to proceed through the maturation of its leadership, emerging from a more self-interested adolescence as a global leader into a nobler adulthood. We have the potential to act as a torchbearer for a better tomorrow. Do we heed the call? It is hope this assessment has convinced at least a few people that the question of how to proceed with that maturation is of far deeper significance than the reforming of the United Nations. Let us move forward with wisdom, grace, clarity and love in the days, years, and even decades ahead.

Globalization is a process which involves growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide with implications and impacts on social, cultural, political, environmental and familial aspects and rights. With the globalization of the economy comes now the task for defining the obligations that go with the rights. This phenomenon is also present in the arena of international finance. In this area, however, the presumed virtues of globalization are far from being materialised. Until now, no orderly or stable financial system has been implemented. Furthermore, the current financial system does not succeed in channelling sufficient funds to finance crucial world problems such as adequate social development in poor countries. In consequence of globalization, the new economic and political distribution of power around the world has become very different then we were used to. Giant new markets are forming all over the world. Competition is hardening. National economies can no longer insure or guarantee rights of possession on any property. National borders no longer mean protection, security, cultural boundaries, resources ownership, political and economic control. We need to recognize the failure of fundamental systems, and to abandon the notion that what there is to do is to recalibrate the national and international institutions that structure our lives today. Indeed, we need to realize that the way we thought things would work out is long gone. Capitalism is at the core of this unsustainable system. It gives rise to the high-energy/mass-consumption of privileged societies.

Let us now define what economic system should be used to govern our planet. What would be best is a "democratic socialism plus". The "plus" means added essential elements for governing sustainably. For instance, people would have free health care, free education at all levels and employment for everyone. People would control and manage natural resources at all stages: exploration, production, transportation, manufacturing and distribution. A Global Trade and Resource Ministry would be formed to look after the management of natural resources worldwide and global trade. "Democratic socialism plus" advocates that the control and management of natural resources be under the control of the people. This new way of governing can be achieved through legitimate democratic means by voting in a party that represents this way of governing. "Democratic socialism plus" implies public, not private ownership of natural resources. Yet, the main reason that this global crisis will be curbed is a simple one: infinite growth, whether economic growth or population growth, cannot continue indefinitely.Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Accordingly, one can envision that a global crash is coming. In large measure, it's because environmental tipping points are on the way.

Although in theory the capacity development for peace building in post-conflict nations or societies seems to be logical, in practice things are different. Let us illustrate this by example. Over the last 6,000 years of recorded history, the institution of the military has always served for negative and destructive purposes. Hence, its very existence assures the continuation of the culture of war, that is, of constantly resorting to war to solve human conflicts or problems. The presence of the military has always had a negative and destructive connotation throughout history. It is the only institution that can disregard all laws without being penalized afterwards. It disregards the natural law as the manufacture of weapons does emit in the atmosphere tons of toxic wastes that, in the United States alone, has caused cancer to some two million people a year.

The formation of global ministries is the most important event in human history. Global Civilizational State values did not all exist at first during the early stage of human evolution. Most of them gradually developed over time. Today, it is not just about 'humanity survival' but also 'all lifeforms survival' on Earth we are fighting for. We need to create a Global Ministry for the economic sharing, production and distribution of resources on our planet. A Global Trade and Resources Ministry is needed urgently to look after the global sustainable management of Earth resources at all stages: exploration, production, transportation, manufacturing, distribution and economic sharing. In fact, we need global ministries for the proper management of the most important global commons. Global ministries will be given power to rule themselves in harmony with each other.

Over its long past history trade has never evolved to require from the trading partners to become legally and morally responsible and accountable for their products from beginning to end. At the end the product becomes a waste and it needs to be properly dispose of. Now trade must be given a new impetus to be in line with the global concepts of the Global Civilizational State. When you do exploration work and develop, manufacture, produce, mine, farm or create a product, you become legally and morally responsible and accountable for your product from beginning to end (to the point where it actually becomes a waste; you are also responsible for the proper disposable of the waste). This product may be anything and everything from oil & gas, weapons, war products, construction products, transportation and communication products and equipment, to genetically engineered food products. All consumer products! All medical products! All pharmaceutical products! In other words, a person (a person may be an individual, a community, a government, a business, an NGO, or an institution) becomes responsible and accountable for anything and everything in his or her life.

Just as corporations have social responsibilities and so do consumers in societies. Consumers are socialized to improve the quality of their lives. Quality of life is a multi-dimensional, complex and very subjective concept. For instance, people who have changed their consumption habits to ensure that their choices will make a better quality of life for themselves, the environment and future generations, may be seen by others as having a lower or inferior quality of life since they have removed themselves from the materialistic mainstream characteristic of our consumer society. They may feel that an absence of violence and abuse in their life leads to a higher quality of living even though they have fewer tangible resources, money, or shelter; peace of mind and freedom from abuse has increased the quality of their daily life relative to what it was like before. There are universal quality of life values which lead to "human betterment" or the improvement of the human condition. They include: adequate resources, justice and equality, freedom and peace or balance of power. A better quality of life for all people of the Global Civilizational State is a goal for all of us and one of our universal values.

Individuals, too, can help bring about a world that is more secure and more supportive of life, health and happiness. They can educate themselves on population dynamics, consumption patterns and the impact of these forces on natural resources and the environment. They can be socially, politically and culturally active to elevate the issues they care about. They can become more environmentally responsible in their purchasing decisions and their use of energy and natural resources. And individuals and couples can consider the impacts of their reproductive decisions on their communities and the world as a whole.  Comprehensive population policies are an essential element in a world development strategy that combines access to reproductive health services, to education and economic opportunities, to improved energy and natural resource technologies, and to healthier models of consumption and the "good life."

When looking across cultures of geo-cultural areas and across millennia, certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures. From ancient time to this day, morality in society made its way into our ways of doing business. So the set of behaviors that constitute Global Civilizational State ethic for a business also evolved largely because they provided possible survival benefits to increase evolutionary success. Consequently, peoples evolved socially to express emotions, such as feelings of empathy or guilt, in response to these moral behaviors. Humans developed truly moral, altruistic instincts. When looking across cultures of geo-cultural areas and across millennia, certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures, the major ones include: 

wisdom, knowledge, courage, justice, love, truth, empathy, kindness, and social intelligence.

These virtues were not always incorporated into the ways of doing business because the 1% super rich businesses became corrupted, greedy, no longer in line with humanity's survival on the planet. The 1 % super rich people worldwide, who thrive within capitalism, must be overthrown. But today, Global Civilizational State incorporates these virtues and proper behaviors into corporate citizen global ethics.

Is our system of governance a sustainable system? We need to recognize the failure of fundamental systems and to let go the notion that what there is to do is to recalibrate the institutions that structure our lives today. Somewhat like the US Congress is doing. Put money into the system and everything will be fine! We need to realize that the way we thought things would work out truly is gone. Capitalism is at the core of this unsustainable system. It gives rise to the high-energy/mass-consumption of privileged societies. We must setup measures to stop speculators benefiting from the misery of others, by punishing corrupt politicians. Ultimately, unless we begin to see the world as a whole, in which things are truly interconnected, our governments will continue their hostilities, oil prices will keep on rising, and when the time comes for us to complain, we will be faced with the guns of the police whom we have helped to create with the payment of our taxes.

Human morality is a natural phenomenon. On the understanding that Global Community ethics are sets of self-perpetuating and biologically-driven behaviors which encourage human cooperation and symbiotical relationships, then we all can see why Global Community concepts and approaches to humanity's survival become so urgently needed today.  All social beings have modified their behaviors by restraining immediate selfishness in order to improve their evolutionary fitness. This is why humanity needs to correct the present business world and corporate citizens as most of the wealth on the planet is in the hands of the 1% of the world population while the remaining 99% of the people are badly taken advantage of.  Human morality though sophisticated and complex relative to other lifeforms, is essentially a natural phenomenon that evolved to restrict excessive individualism of the 1%, including their human rights, that could undermine a group's cohesion and thereby reducing all life's survival on our planet.  After making the proper adjustment to ways of doing business in the world, morality can then be defined as an accumulation of interrelated behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviors includes empathy, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, a sense of fairness, symbiotical relationships, and have been included directly into the corporate citizen global ethics. A more inclusive Global Civilizational State can emerge gradually through the exploration and expansion of commonalities. Peace in a multicivilizational world requires finding of commonalities between peoples in all civilizations and expanding the values, institutions and practices they have in common with peoples of other civilizations. This effort would contribute to strengthening Global Civilizational State which is a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, learning, art, philosophy, technology and material wellbeing.

Modern morality and ethics are closely tied to the sociocultural evolution of different Peoples on our planet. Morality is therefore a product of evolutionary forces acting at an individual level and also at the group level through group selection. The set of behaviors that constitute morality evolved largely because they provided possible survival and/or reproductive benefits to increase evolutionary success.  Global Civilizational State ethics for a business are about how we treat others and about a commitment to respect every person humanely and with dignity. For this process to work, global citizens learn to forgive, be patient and compassionate, promote acceptance, open theirs hearts to one another, and practice a culture of solidarity and cooperation. We should let go narrow differences between us all for the greater good of humanity and future generations.  The increased interaction among peoples which includes trade, investment, tourism, media, electronic communication, is generating a common world culture. Improvements in transportation and communications technology have indeed made it easier and cheaper to move money, goods, people, knowledge, ideas and images around the world.   People in most societies have a strong moral sense, a morality of basic concepts of what is right and wrong. If people have shared a few fundamental values and institutions throughout history, this may explain some constants in human behavior but it cannot explain history, which consists of changes in human behavior. If a Global Civilizational State common to all humanity exists, what term do we then use to identify the major cultural groupings of humanity? Humanity is divided into subgroups such as tribes, nations, and broader cultural entities usually called civilizations. If the term civilization is elevated to what is common to humanity as a whole, then the largest cultural groupings of people would be a single Global Civilizational State that is a variety of cultures, peoples,  religious worlds, historical traditions and historically formed attitudes. Confusion occurs by restricting 'civilization' to the global level and designing as 'cultures' or 'subcivilizations' those largest cultural entities which have historically always been called civilizations.   Global Civilization State has extended the idea of sustainability to be a moral and ethical state as well as an economic and environmental state. We invite everyone and every organization to participate openly without fear. Paticipate in the process of the Global Dialogue . Again today we ask everyone throughout the World to scrutinize all of their values. No exception! You are asked to create new thoughts that will sustain Earth, humanity and all Life.

Global Community claims that everyone on Earth should be able to live in peace. This Global Peace Movement is about courage to live a life in a harmonious peace order and showing by example, thus preventing poverty, wars, terror and violence. We need to educate the coming generations with good principles, compassion, social harmony and global sustainability being some of them.   Human interactions often involve differences between important values. This can mean difficult choices. However, we must find ways to harmonize diversity with unity, the exercise of freedom with the common good, short-term objectives with long-term goals. Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership. The partnership of government, civil society and business is essential for effective global governance based on this creative leadership.

Science has a responsibility for the well-being of humanity. Science gives a person a set of rules, a way of thinking, a philosophy to look at the physical universe, to observe and analyze it, and to discover its making, its functioning, and its structure. The scientific method is very reassuring to oneself. It gives us the basic reasoning we need in order to make informed and sound policy and management decisions. Science is found everywhere in our societies. Because of science, new technologies and techniques were developed and used in the market place.

Science hardly has its own philosophical precepts, particularly the notions of Uniformity of Law and of Uniformity of Process across time and space. "We have to realize that a unified theory of the physical world simply does not exist," said Feyerabend; "we have theories that work in restricted regions, we have purely formal attempts to condense them into a single formula, we have lots of unfounded claims (such as the claim that all of chemistry can be reduced to physics), phenomena that do not fit into the accepted framework are suppressed; in physics, which many scientists regard as the one really basic science, we have now at least three different points of view...without a promise of conceptual (and not only formal) unification".

The products of science take important places in all aspects of our lives and actually save lives every second. They make our lives manageable in a million different ways. Science has also played a destructive role in our history and is continuing to do so today. Science, technology and engineering are directly or indirectly responsible for threats to our environment, for wasteful uses of the Earth's resources and for wars and conflicts in the world. Science, technology and engineering are major forces of socio-economic change. They cause humanity and its social and natural environment to evolve rapidly and, therefore, they carry serious responsibility and accountability. They are no longer regarded as benefactors of humanity. Ethical integrity has declined. In several parts of the world people have become suspicious and are questioning abuses of various kinds. Many scientists and other professionals have shown little regard to ethical problems arising from their work but they must become responsible and accountable just like everyone else. There are no exceptions. We are all asked in helping humanity and all life on Earth from complete extinction. It is a common goal. Science, technology and engineering must regain public trust, state ethical responsibilties and become a voice to present and future generations. Continuous discussions are needed on the ethical issues related to science, technology and engineering, their practices and ideologies.

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