OK Let's Be Constructive For A Change

George Monbiot, author of the new book, "Manifesto for a New World Order" and winner of the 1995 United Nations Global 500 Award, has some good ideas for making a better world.

He told the Institute for Public Accuracy that "many of the most important issues facing us -- climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, the balance of trade between nations -- can be resolved only at the global or the international level."

"Our task is not to overthrow globalization, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution."

"There is already a global governance system in place, dominated by the rich and the powerful. We need a new kind of global governance based on global democratic principles and moral authority. I propose establishing new institutions and making sweeping reforms in salvageable existing institutions.

"Simply scrapping existing institutions would not be enough. In principle, the United Nations is a good idea but in practice, it helps the strong to bully the weak, for three reasons: The permanent members of the Security Council have been granted absolute power; tiny nations have the same vote as the very large ones; dictatorships have the same voting rights as the democracies, and none of the attendant governments have any obligation to refer to their people before voting. The first steps in democratizing the UN could involve scrapping the Security Council and vesting its powers in the UN General Assembly, weighting the votes of the member states according to their country's size and their degree of democratization."

John Maynard Keynes had a much better idea than the IMF or World Bank, Monbiot said. "an International Clearing Union, a bank operating at the international level, in which nations held their trade accounts. They would be charged interest not only on their trade deficits, but also on their trade surpluses and therefore have a powerful incentive to 'clear' their accounts -- in other words, to end up with neither a deficit nor a surplus."