to Science for Democratic Action volume 11 number 3,
Special Issue on Global Democracy
June 2003
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The usual fare in Science for Democratic Action is nuclear weapons, environment, climate, energy, water. This is a special issue on the structure of the global economy and society. There are many links. A few hundred people have more wealth in our world than the poorest two billion. It takes the threat of and frequent use of violence from local to global to sustain such inequalities. Nuclear weapons, oil, and world wars have been part of that equation. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was partly a clash between the determination of the Japanese imperialists to get to Indonesian oil and that of the United States to stop them. Two months before the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala, the U.S. government alerted nuclear bombers and sent them to Nicaragua. Imperialism is coming back into fashion, once more in the name of freedom. But the ideas of freedom that typify the views of, say, Winston Churchill and other imperialists are quite different from those of Tom Paine, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the latter whose inspiration we urgently need to set the world on a course for global democracy and peace, especially after the violent tragedy of September 11, 2001 and the wars that have followed. I present this analysis to SDA readers with less assurance than is normal for me that all its parts are on the mark. Lisa Ledwidge, IEER's Outreach Director, and I invite responses and comments. We will publish selected responses (possibly excerpted for length) so as to promote a conversation. I am grateful to the CS Fund for the generous grant for IEER's project on the global economy, of which this special issue is a part. Sriram Gopal did a fantastic job of researching the data on population and food and wages and producing the graphs in the centerfold. Lois Chalmers, as always, was the keeper of bibliographic integrity. I dedicate this issue to my friend and mentor, the late W.H. Ferry, who greatly encouraged me to write about these topics. --Arjun Makhijani
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Institute for Energy and Environmental Research