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Who Owns the World?

(Publisher's note: The following chapter, which we are serializing, is taken from my 2nd book, World Government, Ready or Not!, published in 1984. [ISBN 0-931545-00-5.] This chapter, along with the Ellsworth Declaration [of World Government] is now available on the World Citizen Web Site at https://worldcitizen.org. Professional economists Ñ is that an oxymoron? Ñ will surely find the ideas herein overly simplified. But that is the point. Any rational human is grossly offended by poverty, excessive riches, greed and explotation. I tried to put these in a global perspective. My thanks to Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kelso, Norman Kurland and a few curageous thinkers who dared to treat economics as part of the human equation for happiness.)

World Government, Ready or Not!

National "Security" vs, Global Affluence
As national economics are increasingly linked with "national security" and yet the inevitable outcome of a total arms race between them is war, let us start from the opposite polarity: general and total disarmament strictly from an economic viewpoint.

"World military expenditures since 1960 reached the $3 trillion mark ($3,000,000,000,000) in 1975."12 Then from 1975 to 1981, one-third the period, world military spending rose another $3 trillion. "National security" today costs the citizens of all states between 8 and 9% of the world's gross national product. Five nations, however, contribute 75% of the monstrous sum for sheer destruction: the U.S.A., the USSR, Great Britain, France and West Germany, the first two making up 60%.

The relationship between total disarmament and raised standards of living was indisputably established by a 1962 report13 entitled "The Economic and Social Consequence of Disarmament," prepared by 25 leading economists from both socialist and free enterprise countries and commissioned by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. "The present level of military expenditures not only represents a grave political danger but also imposes a heavy economic and social burden on most countries. It absorbs a large volume of human and material resources of all kinds which could be used to increase economic and social welfare throughout the worldÑboth in the industrialized countries which at the present time incur the bulk of the world's military expenditures and in the less developed areas.(Introduction, Part I, p. 14).

The unanimous agreement "that the diversion to peaceful purposes of resources not absorbed by military expenditures can and should be of benefit to all countries and lead to improvements in the social and economic conditions for all mankind" led former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, in transmitting the study to Member-States for comment, to state that "The most fundamental way in which disarmament affects economic life is through the liberation of the resources devoted to military use and their re-employment for peaceful purposes."

In that year, roughly $120 billion spent on armaments was at least two-thirds of the entire national income of all the developing countries, close to the value of the world's annual exports of all commodities, and corresponded to about one-half of the total resources set aside each year for gross capital formation throughout the world.

However, no decrease in military spending is envisaged by the Super-Powers themselves in the foreseeable future despite the common recognition of former as well as present leaders of both the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union of the absolute necessity for total disarmament if the human race is to survive.14

In its response to the 1962 Report, the U.S. delegation noted:
The motivating force behind the efforts of the United States to achieve general and complete disarmament is to save present and future generations from the scourge of war, and to attain for them more certain and beneficent security. This basic and vital objective completely overshadows any economic calculations of gain or loss connected with disarmament.15 The Soviet delegation, in perfect geo-dialectical harmony, echoed:
"The Soviet Union has resolutely and consistently championed the cause of disarmament. In our time, military technology has made colossal progress. States have stockpiled, and still are stockpiling, such vast quantities of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, together with the means of delivering them to any point on the earth's surface, that this abnormal situation, if allowed to continue, will in itself constitute a mortal danger to peace and to the survival of entire countries and peoples. . . The world, therefore, is faced with a choice between two alternatives Ñ either a monstrous thermo-nuclear war or disarmament..16

We have the right to conclude that both the United States and the Soviet Union are unilaterally opposed to the arms race, both politically and economically.

Further, neither sees any major problem in converting from a war to a peacetime economy."17

(To be continued...)

footnotes:
12 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook, 1979, MIT Press.
13 U.N. Publications, Sales No. 62.IX.1 (E/3593/Rev. 1).
14 Leonid Brezhnev on October 20, 1983 stated that "Only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war."
President Ronald Reagan on October 21, 1983 stated that "In a nuclear war, all mankind would lose."
15 Ibid, 13
16 Reply of the Government of the U.S.S.R., p. 194.
17 Stuart Chase interviewed Michael Bohr, a high official of Gosplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet Union, in Moscow in 1961.
In his book Money to Grow On, p. 146, he recalls the following conversations:
"What are you going to do about the transfer from bombs to butter; won't that bring economic disruption and unemployment?" The reply was, "Not too much. We have the transition pretty well planned. Besides, we've been through it before.... In 1959 we reduced the armed forces by two million, principally personnel for land armies and ships, now obsolete. Because of previous planning...we had no great trouble relocating the enlisted men... Placing the officers, however, gave us a good deal of trouble; they only knew how to do one thing...."


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