Privatopia

About a week ago John Robb at Global Guerillas posted a truly frightening little essay called Privatopia, in which he considers what the US might look like under a fully privatized, corporate regime. Robb's not known for his optimism, and he's true to form here: the vision he presents is one in which the entire US government (along with every government around the world) has been sold off at fire-sale prices to multinational corporate interests, with what's left behind mainly functioning to service the national debt. At one point, he mentions that the privatization is popularly but 'incorrectly' termed "The Great Theft".

He goes on to paint a picture in which most of the country is continuously paralyzed by riots and civil disobedience, controlled by a mixture of surveillance technology and mercenary security forces meting out summary justice to criminals (empowered to do so by automated court systems that give their verdicts in seconds, based on evidence collected from the surveillance network.)

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would've positively lusted for a future like this: grim, dangerous, gritty, straight out of the cyberpunk novels I feasted on as a teenager. Now, older and, if not wiser, at least more jaded, the prospect of the future John Robb sees is just deeply, viscerally terrifying. Give it a read, though, because he shows exactly what the New World Order has in store for all of us.

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Ron Paul's Bright Future As a Martyr

Assassinating Ron Paul would be a really bad idea.

I can see why the elites might find the idea attractive, and - according to Daniel Estulin - are giving it serious consideration. The man wants to dismantle the IRS and the Federal Reserve, the two main pillars of banker control in the US. Loosing those bonds would remove America from New World Order influence as effectively as Ghandi freed India from the British. Beyond that, he'd pull the US back from it's pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would effectively defuse the Third World War they'd been planning in order to consolidate their control over the globe. Ron Paul in the Oval Office would be an unmitigated disaster for their interests ... one from which they might never recover, given various trajectories in technology and the economic and social trends that are being driven by those developing technologies.

But you know what? As bad as Ron Paul might be for them, his assassination would be worse. Over the past several months, a networked political movement has grown around Paul as though a seed crystal were dropped in a prepared solution. The network's composed of an incredible diversity of groups, splinter movements and fringe elements and perhaps most strikingly, a generous helping of previously apathetic non-voting independents, people who have nothing in common save a disgust with traditional politics and entrenched policies. What they want isn't Ron Paul, it's to decisively squelch the fascist puppet government being put in place, before it's too late. Ron Paul is only a focal point for this movement because he's the only politician who wants to do this.

So let's say they go ahead and give the green light, and by bullet, bomb, or 'accident' Paul is shuffled off the political stage. Well, the movement would be thrown into chaos immediately after. But that movement is a creature of the internet, a social network that can coalesce around anything, be it a political candidate or an ideological martyr ... and can do so with blinding speed.

Paul is a great man. That someone as apparently morally pure and benevolent can even exist in this sad and twisted age is an astounding thing, one that is hard to believe until one looks, and sees, a man who is as without sin as any saint of old. Men like Paul are as rare as Ghandi. Alive, he would be a competent administrator and a popular reformer, one who would go down in the history books as one of the greatest presidents the American republic has ever enjoyed. Dead, and the social network that's chosen him as an anchoring point might turn him into a figure of religious adoration. The freedom movement would then become a religion, one as toxic to the roots of the global order as Christianity was to the Roman Empire.

Can they look that far ahead? I suspect they can, for I can, and I'm but one man. That killing Paul would turn him into a martyr is surely a possibility that has occurred to them, and with any luck the risk of that happening is enough to stay their hand. But you know? I don't think it will be. I have very little confidence that Paul will ever sit in the Oval Office; as he approaches the goal, as the movement around him swells, so will panic at the top spread. They will only be able to take so much before the pressure grows intolerable, and, not knowing what to do, they have Paul killed.

That might buy them a year or three, but in the long run it will seal their fates more permanently than a Paul presidency ever could.

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A WikiConstitution

Ah, a long silence there. This time I have a good excuse, though: I was wandering about in Cambodia for a week.

So, I've been thinking more about the idea of applying a wiki spirit to the creation of law. This is unlikely to happen soon, not down at the level of criminal law or anything else directly enforceable. But that doesn't mean the electorate of the planet can't start to get some practice in, and starting right now. What I'm thinking of is an open project to enumerate a sort of meta-constitution, a document that could be used as a model for constitutions all over the planet.

Now, the probability of some form of world government coming about sometime in the next century, and sooner rather than later, is hard to ignore. Multinational corporations, NGOs, and the UN have almost completed their coalescence into a meta-government of which nation-states are reduced to the status of less-than-sovereign duchies. This need not be a bad thing, and indeed is historically inevitable one way or another: once civilization started happening, the tendency was for larger and larger regions synergetic regions (cities, states, kingdoms and empires) to assert themselves. To predict that eventually one would rise to encompass the entire world is a very straightforward extrapolation of the historical record.

Of course, the first form of global government is likely to be a very bad thing indeed. The thing that is currently emerging is fascist, exploitative, wildly unequal and undemocratic, more like the Assyrian Empire than the United States of America that it will be superseding. It will be as disastrous for America as it is for everyone else subjected to it.

But it needn't stay that way. One possibility is that the internal contradictions of the first global empire will cause it to fall; if the fall is not too bad (economic collapse, rather than a nuclear spasm) something new, and hopefully better, might rise to replace it. Another possibility is that the citizens will reformat it themselves, demanding the imposition of true global democracy to accompany global corporations, global armies, and global bureaucracies.

A global democracy - a demosphere - would need a constitution, or at least a meta-constitution, something that would provide a limiting framework for the sorts of constitutions member-states are allowed to form. Something to enumerate the rights - and the duties - of people and organizations everywhere on the planet. And who better to write that meta-constitution than the people who will live under it? Throw open the doors for a year, a decade, or better yet, forever; allow anyone who wants to add or edit any passage they wish, with the officially adopted portion being that which consists of passages receiving the highest percentage of 'yes' votes.

Now, contrast this with the closest existing thing to a global meta-constitution, the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights. It's filled with a lot of very nice language about freedoms to this and freedom of that, all rather pleasing if dull to read. There is nothing there to immediately excite distress, though buried at the bottom is an item that allows any and all of those human rights to be revoked if they conflicted in any way with the UN ... an unsurprising condition, given that the document was composed by a small group of thinkers acting at the behest of powerful men, entirely without the consultation of the people it was meant (symbolically, at least) to apply to.

Now, just creating such a thing wouldn't, in and of itself, guarantee it's enforcement. Not directly, at least, and not at first. For a very long time - years, perhaps, but more likely decades - it would be nothing but some pages on the web. But the project could grow, perhaps to the point of millions around the world actively collaborating on the project, with billions more aware of it (and free to jump in whenever and wherever they felt.) The mere act of participating would raise consciousness about our rights in responsibilities in a global state, and that would in turn lend the project a moral weight that would eventually make it impossible to ignore, a global constitutionalist movement that one way or another would need to be confronted. Eventually, it could become the central text of an ideology of freedom and rule of law that pervades the world.

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