Milllennium: status and vision.

It seems it was only yesterday that millennium celebrations around the world were expressing optimism for a new age. Yet already that hopeful mood has changed to disappointment, trepidation, and, in much of the developing world, despair. Furthermore, as we witness the latest conflicts in the Middle East, the world seems haunted by the same ubiquitous violence as in the previous century--the most violent in human history.

No doubt it was an unwarranted hopefulness that led so many to imagine that, by crossing an arbitrary and mythical line in time, humanity would suddenly acquire the ability to leave troubles behind and start fresh with a new beginning. But it appears to have surprised many of the most thoughtful of us that matters would become so much worse so quickly and that rejected concepts left behind would suddenly make a comeback.

Today we look around us to discover trouble growing on a number of fronts. The risk of nuclear as well as conventional war has increased. Environmental degradation is worse than ever before. The gap between haves and have nots grows wider. And through it all is woven the irony of an expanding religious fanaticism in an age of rapidly accumulating scientific discoveries.

Here in the early dawn of our new century, the world remains not only saturated with nuclear weapons but also affected by a return of the Cold War mentality. We have recidivistic national policies, particularly with the United States, and new countries in the nuclear club. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia maintain the Cold War policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). This means we continue to live every day under the threat of nuclear incineration, by accident or design, with only a thirty-minute warning after missile launch. MAD is the ultimate suicide bomber pact.

The weapons industry has so much influence on U.S. politicians through massive campaign donations that it gets just about everything it wants. This includes a $393 billion military budget for fiscal 2003 that, according to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., is equal to the military budgets of the next largest fifteen countries combined. In concert with this, the Bush administration, ignoring world opinion, bas scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to proceed with the son of the Star Wars antimissile scheme. And the Pentagon's secret Nuclear Policy Review (NPR), ordered by George W. Bush and his team of reconstituted Cold Warriors, includes a nuclear hit list of seven target countries. NPR further calls for the incorporation of nuclear capability into many conventional systems now under development and recommends placing nuclear warheads on cruise missiles.

In July 2002 the Los Angeles Times published details of another secret document that provides further evidence of Pentagon war planning. The Pentagon's document "Defense Planning Guidance" for 2004 to 2009 calls on the military services to develop the capability to launch "unwarned" preemptive strikes. This is the new doctrine that President Bush detailed in his address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 1, 2002. The five-year program places emphasis on "high-volume precision strikes" and calls for laser and microwave-powered weapons as well as nuclear-tipped "bunker buster" bombs.

On September 21, 2002, the Bush administration presented to Congress a comprehensive foreign policy document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States." This document lays out a strategy for pre-emptive military action against any country the United States deems hostile.

No nation will be allowed to challenge the military supremacy of the United States. Bush contends, "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." The new world empire has spoken!

This planned development of new weapons of mass destruction prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the minute hand of its famous "Doomsday Clock" up from nine to seven minutes to midnight. George A. Lopez, chair of the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, which publishes the bulletin, states: "Despite a campaign promise to rethink nuclear policy, the Bush administration has taken no significant steps to alter nuclear targeting policies or reduce the alert status of U.S. nuclear forces."

Seven minutes before midnight is exactly where the clock was set when it first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1947. This is another indication that little has changed in a world where more than thirty thousand nuclear weapons are stockpiled.

And the situation regarding conventional war is no better. On July 12, 2002, members of the United Nations Security Council capitulated to Bush by passing a resolution exempting U.S. military personnel from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court (ICC). The United States accomplished this by threatening to withdraw its money and support to UN peacekeeping operations if the United States didn't get its way. Now, apparently without fear of prosecution, the United States can continue to use cluster bombs at will and more B-52 saturation bombing on small and mostly impoverished countries.

Globalization, in the sense of creating a world community, is a positive ideal for our time. But this good word has been coopted by the financial sector to mean a globalized corporate economy. Marketed as the key to prosperity for everyone on the planet, it is in reality wreaking disaster for millions.

Forty years ago three dollars flowed north (from the poor countries to the rich) for every one dollar flowing south. In the past ten years this ratio has increased to seven to one. In 1970 the richest 10 percent of the world's population earned nineteen times as much as the poorest 10 percent. By 1997, during the glory years of corporate globalization, this ratio had increased by twenty-seven times.

UN Secretary General Koffi Annan reminds us that half of humanity--three billion people--live in poverty on less than two dollars a day. The United Nations reports that 80 percent of the world's wealth is held by 15 percent of its population. The richest 1 percent of the world's people collectively has the same income as the poorest 57 percent, and the same rich 1 percent consume the same amount as the poorest 44 percent.

Even within the rich countries there is a widening disparity. In 1980 the pay of corporate chief executives was forty-two times the salary of the average factory worker. By 1995 chief executives were earning 141 times as much as factory workers, and today it has grown to 517 times. Economist Edward Wolff of New York University states, "We're becoming an oligarchic society, with an extreme concentration of wealth. This concentration of wealth is protected through a political process that's making it difficult for anyone but the monied class to have a voice." Professor Huck Gutman of Vermont University reports, "In the United States today, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 percent." In short, the United States isn't a democracy but a plutocracy. The rich rule.

Adding to this, corporate fraud has bankrupted many ordinary citizens in the wealthier nations who had hoped through investments to benefit from the growth of corporate power. The cover of the May 13, 2002, issue of Business Week asked the question: "How Corrupt Is Wall Street?" and inside gave the answer as "extensive." But the matter goes deeper. The Enron scandal has definite links to Congress and the White House. A total of seventy-one senators and 188 congress-people have been on the Enron gravy train. And Republicans in the House of Representatives included a $254 million corporate welfare check for Enron as part of their "economic stimulus plan."

Further demonstrating the systemic nature of the problem, the Bush administration has been able to initiate a $1.35 billion tax cut over a ten-year period, with half of this money going to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Gosselin writes in the January 10, 2002, issue: "President Bush relies on one source of new money more than any other to pay for his proposals: the trillions of dollars in Social Security funds being set aside for the start of the baby boom retirement." The administration is essentially robbing the future of working people to serve a corporate elite and rich campaign donors. Compare this policy with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt who stated, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have so little."

Deregulated free-market globalization not only guarantees the poor get poorer while the rich take the spoils, it also causes an environmental nightmare because the system is dependent on mass consumption with constantly expanding markets and waste. This translates into a polluted and resource-depleted planet.

The UN World Summit on Social Development held this past September in Johannesburg, South Africa--though disappointing in how it was largely made into a trade summit with corporate displays filling the conference rooms--managed to shine a spotlight on mounting environmental problems. Environmental groups were forceful in pointing out that the human race is consuming the planet's resources at a rate 20 percent faster than it can replenish itself. Therefore, we must make changes in our lifestyles, practice conservation, create renewable energy sources, and adopt a new attitude based on environmental respect along with a commitment to leave something for future generations. Environmentalists also called for a new economics based not on an unending consumption that transforms the entire planet into a giant marketplace where everything is for sale but on a recognition of the limited supply and value of natural resources.

Overpopulation is part of the problem. Today's human population of 6.1 billion is likely to increase by 50 percent to 9.3 billion by 2050. The world's forty-nine least-developed countries will see their numbers triple from 668 million to 1.86 billion. Under this pressure, more than eleven thousand species face a high risk of extinction in the near future. Forests cover one-third of the earth's land surface, but they have shrunk by 2.3 percent since 1990. The World Resources Institute predicts that about 40 percent of the remaining ancient forests will vanish in the next ten to twenty years.

Overpopulation also affects access to water, making this a major environmental issue now and for the years ahead. Around 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion to improved sanitation, mainly in Africa and Asia. The water table is now a major problem in parts of India, China, West Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and the western United States. Half of the world's rivers are seriously depleted or polluted.

In the face of these and other harsh realities, delegates at the Johannesburg conference were appalled that Bush didn't join other heads of state there and viewed his snub as an insult to both the United Nations and the world community. Indeed, some delegates from developing countries wore T-shirts emblazoned with the question, "What are we going to do about the United States?"

Although the new millennium has gotten off to a bleak start with all of the above, combined with the events of September 11, 2001, we dare not lose hope or give up our determination to bring about dramatic change. By working together as responsible citizens of the world and stewards of the environment, we can make a difference.

One place to begin is in the political realm and at all levels. Politicians who avoid making hard decisions in order to please campaign donors need to be replaced by individuals of integrity and vision. Former Senator William Fullbright succinctly defined the type of leadership we need when he said:

   The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear
   age calls for a different kind of leadership--a leadership of intellect,
   judgment, tolerance and nationality, a leadership committed to human
   values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The
   attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion
   and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and
   understanding between cultures.

Another place to begin is with our own motivations and goals. John F. Kennedy summed up the necessary ideal in his 1961 inaugural address. Most people are aware of the first part of his statement, but the second phrase, clearly the most important, is virtually unknown. He said, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man" (emphasis added).

Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, "Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human rationality, the ability of all peoples of all kinds to live together and work together in the same world at peace." In a similar context Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth together as brothers."

Toward such a goal of cooperation, a document entitled A Human Manifesto appeared in 1972 as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. Its original inspiration came from then-UN Secretary General U. Thant, it had been created by an organization called the Planetary Citizens Registry (no longer in operation), and it was signed by some of the most prominent individuals of the time. These signatories included active and former heads of state, internationally renowned jurists, founders and heads of major organizations and unions, religious leaders such as the Dalai Lama and the president of the World Council of Churches, Nobel prizewinners, scientists, educators, and many others. Some of the more well-known signers were Leonard Bernstein, Pablo Casals, Judy Collins, Buckminster Fuller, Thor Heyerdahl, Edmund Hillary, Coretta Scott King, Marcel Marceau, Marshal McLuhan, Yehudi Menuhn, Arthur Miller, Linus Pauling, Jean Piaget, Pete Seeger, Leopold Stokowski, Arnold Toynbee, John Updike, Peter Ustinov, and Kurt Vonnegut.

On United Nations Day, October 24, 2002, the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with branches in fifty-one countries, reissued the manifesto in its original wording but with a new list of signatories. This document and a list of its signers appear on the following pages in the hope that its words and those who stand behind them will inspire others to work against the harmful trends already present in our new millennium and toward a better world.

Douglas Mattern is president of the Association of World Citizens (www.worldcitizens.org), a San Francisco-based international peace organization with nongovernmental organization status with the United Nations, including consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council. His e-mail address is [e-mail].