Episode 129 – Through the Eyes of Garry Davis: The World is My Country with Arthur Kanegis

Macro N Cheese – Episode 129
Through the Eyes of Garry Davis: The World is My Country with Arthur Kanegis
July 17, 2021

[00:00:05.080] – Arthur Kanegis [intro/music]

The only way you can have government of, by, and for the people was to elect representatives to send them off by horse and buggy to a distant city to govern for you. Well, Garry said, well, now we can all meet in the same room, the global room. We don’t need representatives. They’re just a magnet for special interest money.

[00:00:25.820] – Arthur Kanegis [intro/music]

Actually, one of the happiest and most advanced countries is Costa Rica. Back in the 1940s and so on, they were surrounded by hostile military powers threatening them. So what did they do? They abolished their army and then nobody could attack them. And they’ve been safe for 75 years.

[00:01:35.220] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.080] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, I am very lucky to be joined with a gentleman who created a documentary. His name is Arthur Kanegis and Arthur, I’m going to let him tell you a little bit about this, but I want you to understand before we get into this, so you understand the context by which this interview is going to take place.

With the work of Fadhel Kaboub and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, our own work here at Real Progressives, and Macro N Cheese, we are looking at a global green new deal. The borders that we have are not going to protect us from the ravages of climate change. In fact, the borders may serve as invisible prisons to people escaping inhospitable conditions.

And so we often talk about the economic impact. You understand that we can afford to take care of the world. There’s nothing that stops us. We create money out of thin air. There’s nothing that prevents us from taking care of this problem. However, it’s important to contextualize our place in the world. We often think of patriotism in terms of our little national boundaries, but that’s not what this interview is going to be about.

This interview is about being a citizen of the world. In fact, Arthur has produced one of the most incredible documentaries I’ve seen in the longest time, and that is “The World is My Country.” And when I saw it, I was moved to tears at least three different times because the individual that is the protagonist in the documentary, which we’ll get to, you realize that when you’ve been in war and you’ve seen things, you take a different view out of it.

Some people come back scarred. Some people come back ready to do a different kind of battle. And that’s what we see coming out of the documentary. And so with that, Arthur, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:03:42.860] – Arthur Kanegis

Yes. Well, it’s a real pleasure to be here with you, Steve. I love your whole approach talking about macroeconomics. And really, Garry was kind of a forerunner in having a macro view of politics of the world, a whole new way of looking at our planet.

[00:03:57.650] – Grumbine

It’s amazing. Substantively, it’s an idea. It’s more of an idea than it is a brick and mortar. Here’s the X’s and O’s. But there was so much that came out of this that just fueled the imagination as to what we could be. Instead of a warmongering society, we could find ways to be a peaceful society. And his takeaways from World War II as he flew over Nazi Germany bombing. It was just an amazing story of transformation as he came to realize what he had done and how he could atone for that. I wonder, could you give us a synopsis of the actual documentary?

[00:04:38.300] – Kanegis

Sure. I’d be glad to, Steve. Well, Garry started off. He was a song and dance man on Broadway. You know, his father was a very famous musician. His Meyer Davis Orchestra played for 11 different presidents all the way back from Hoover and Coolidge and Ford and Kennedy. And Garry had this big break at age 19 in showbiz.

He got to stand in for Danny Kaye of the Golden Age of Broadway. Danny Kaye was kind of the top star with his double talk members that he wowed audiences with. And when Danny got laryngitis, Garry went on stage and stood in for him. And people couldn’t believe this kid doing Danny Kaye’s numbers. Some people in the audience actually thought he was Danny Kaye and he ended up getting 13 curtain calls.

Danny would get three or four, which was a lot. He’d get 13. They were on their feet. He was on his way to a Broadway career. He had offers for a show on this new thing called television at that time. He had other Broadway shows wanting him. But World War II. Drafted. Finds himself in a bomber plane flying over Germany. He enthusiastically bombed Hitler’s war plant at Peenemünde, heavy metal experiments in the V2 rocket.

But then he’s ordered to bomb a city full of civilians and his own brother is killed, and his heart is broken. “Oh, my God. Why am I killing people in their homes and schools and factories for no other reason than they’re on the wrong side of an invisible line? I look from my airplane. I can’t see this line. It’s imaginary. There’s an imaginary line. I’m killing people for being on the wrong side of an imaginary line.”

And he comes back from the war and he sees the footage of the damage he did and he sees the footage of Hiroshima and he says, “Oh, my God, humanity’s in trouble. I’m still in the active reserves. What if I’m recalled to go bomb Moscow now in a war that would end life on earth? You know, not just my life, not just my community or my family, but all history, art, everything all destroyed for some crazy line that we can’t even see.

So he struggles with, you know, what can he do as an actor to prevent World War III? And he comes to an amazing realization. Inside countries with one government, we don’t fight wars. What about civil wars – two governments, two sovereignties? But if everybody accepts one government, no war. Indiana doesn’t fight wars with Illinois or even as right in our film, President Truman says, “When Kansas and Colorado have a dispute over water in the Kansas River, they don’t fight a war over it.

They take it to court, resolve it there.” And so he says, “Well, what we need is somehow to create law at the global level. We have treaties.” But even though, for instance, the Kellogg-Briand Pact says that war is illegal. The U.S. signed that. We already agreed war is illegal. Folks, maybe you didn’t know it is right there in the treaty. And the Constitution says it’s the supreme law of the land, but who’s there to enforce it?

There’s no governing system above that. So what can an actor do in this situation? Well, he goes to Paris, where the U.N. was meeting in 1948 before the building was built on the East River in New York. And he leaps up in the middle of the General Assembly and he says, “The nations you represent divide us and lead us to the brink of total war.”

He says, “We need one government for one world,” and he calls on them to hold elections of a government of, by, and for the people of the planet. And he says, “If you won’t do it, step aside. A People’s World Assembly will arise from our ranks to do it.” Well, as you see in the film, this is all caught on footage. It’s amazing. You actually see the delegates applauding him and you see 20,000 people rally to his cause. War-weary Europe is still in ruins.

They are so thrilled that this person would dare to challenge the whole nation-state system right to the United Nations. And so what happens is he has a huge rally at the velodrome on December 9, 1948, calling for this new United Nations to recognize the rights of humanity and the Soviets, who had been adamantly blocking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an intrusion on their internal security, they stepped aside, abstained, and let that declaration get passed unanimously.

As Garry said in the film, “We’ll never know why,” but on December 9th, we took over. We the people took over and said we have a right to the law protecting our human rights on this planet. And so that was the first step in creating international law. But it still wasn’t world law. International law, Garry points out, means law between nations with treaties.

But the nations still have the top sovereignty. So how can you enforce law over people if they’re the sovereign? But, you know, it’s funny, we just passed Independence Day and we were celebrating the Declaration of Independence. And he says in the film that document states that it is the right of the people, you know, when they’re not getting life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, their needs met, to institute new government.

What? We the people institute new government? Does that just mean old guys in gray wigs, or is that you and I? So then he says, “Well, I’m people.” And he gets the audacious idea of declaring a government of, by, and for the people of the world. Now he laughs . . . He says, “You may say this is crazy, but then I went down to Washington, D.C. and I set up the administrative arm.”

He set up the World Service Authority, issuing documents based on that universal declaration, not only based on it, mandated by it, because it says right in that declaration, in the preamble, that every individual and every organ of society is required to enforce that declaration. So he took that seriously and he set up this World Service Authority that issues world passports, world IDs, world birth certificates, all based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, mandated by that.

People said why don’t you create a world driver’s license? He said I know nothing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about the right to drive. We can’t do that. It’s very strictly enforcing our rights under that universal declaration.

And, you know, over four million of these documents have been issued and over the years they’ve helped incredible numbers of stateless refugees get out of refugee camps, escape from terrible situations. Now it’s getting much, much harder to travel with it since 9/11. Boy, it’s hard to travel with most passports in the world. But,

[00:11:04.470] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:11:04.470] – Kanegis

You know, this one’s particularly hard. And so it’s not an easy travel document, but it is a way to identify yourself with humanity as a whole, to have in your hand something you can feel, hold and identify to say I am a world citizen. And Garry said that’s the key to peace. The key is when we make that click in our heads from being citizens of just the United States, Russia, whatever, adding the top level.

He says, “You don’t have to give up your local citizenship. You don’t have to give up your national citizenship. It’s like concentric circles. You just add the top level. That’s what our forefathers did. They didn’t give up being ‘Virginianeers’ or Marylanders.” They just added the top-level United States of America, and that’s where they put their primary loyalty.

And now in today’s world, we have to take our loyalty and take it up to the global level or we’re toast. That’s the end. Climate change or nuclear war or even pandemics that get out of control, all this is going to end humanity. Kennedy said it way back then. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. And so that’s the revelation Garry had was to help us make that click in our minds from being citizens only of our separate states to the citizens of the world.

[00:12:13.760] – Grumbine

So Garry Davis was a really interesting character. He was kind of a jack of all trades. But I think the one thing that you didn’t say that I think is fascinating was the relationship that he had with Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him he felt like she was talking to everyone. But he took it very personally when she said, “Well, Garry, you should go ahead and do this.”

[00:12:34.190] – Kanegis

Yes.

[00:12:34.580] – Grumbine

And he’s like, “I’m going to do it.”

[00:12:36.500] – Kanegis

Well, what she did, here’s the thing she said in a column that went out all across the country called My Turn, Eleanor Roosevelt said four days after that huge meeting at the velodrome, he first explained that the United Nations was actually not set up to be a government. She said it’s a forum for nations to let off steam to talk so at least they’re arguing in the chamber instead of out there on the battlefield bombing each other.

But it’s not set up to be a government. She said, “How much better would be if Mr. Davis would start then and there his own worldwide international government?” And Garry was floored. At first he thought, “Oh, my God, me? I’m supposed to do what the U.N. can’t?” But she was responding to his call.

He said a people’s world assembly will arise from our ranks. She was kind of giving a signal. OK, go ahead. Let it arrive. Well, it didn’t quite happen that it arrived then, but Garry went actually through an incredible journey, as you’ll see, getting stuck on the borderline between France and Germany for months for all kinds of things.

So finally be actually using his world passport, went to India, met with Prime Minister Nehru personally who said this is the passport Gandhi would have carried. And there he studied with a guru, Guru Nataraja, and from that spiritual experience, he gained that inner light and power to finally go back and take seriously what Eleanor Roosevelt had said.

First, he kind of dismissed it. You know, she must be being sarcastic. I mean, how could she be saying something like that to me? But finally he said, “You know, this is right. I can do it. I’m people.” And he came back after that spiritual transformation and he went ahead on the steps of the courthouse in Ellsworth, Maine, he declared this government of, by and for the people, the world.

And as I said, set up that administrative agency. So it’s a really intriguing story. Go to theworldismycountry.com. You can go right there. You can watch the movie. You can click on the link and the store tab where you go to Vimeo pay per view and you can watch it. There’s also the short TV version.

There’s a 57-minute version we had to cut down because it’s on public broadcasting stations coast to coast. But the full version is much better. The 87-minute where you really get to hear and see more of Garry’s story. So if you go to that website, you get to choose either. But I would recommend the full version.

[00:14:49.260] – Grumbine

I can tell you, it’s worth it. So one of the things that jumped out at me also because the United States currently saber-rattling with China right now cause China seems to be getting some technological advances. And so Biden is busy breaking out Cold War rhetoric about competing with China. And in a cooperative world where we’re all part of the same mission.

And to quote Bill McKibben, “physics doesn’t negotiate.” We’re up against this existential climate crisis and it’s not happening in some future world. It’s happening right now. And there’s nothing wrong with you still having your morning tea and afternoon tea and second breakfasts out there in the UK and enjoying your football here in the United States.

But at the same time, though, we are called to a higher mission. And this concept, I really like the concentric circles because people are very proud of where they are. We saw a backlash of nationalism whip us into a fury the last four years. And we’ve seen a lot of fascism really sweep across Brazil and other places where they’re burning up the Amazon.

And it’s just tragic because people are protecting what they think is their identity. And I think one of the things that was brought up was the reason why the Soviet Union didn’t want this was because of the impact to their sovereignty and sovereignty seems to be a very key thing. It’s a key thing in economics and apparently in terms of laws.

But raising it up one level, it may very well be the key to our survival as a species. Life on earth as we know it is going to depend on us thinking out of the box. And it seems like Garry had not only been ahead of his time, but he seemed to really believe this in his heart. Can you talk a little bit more about what his vision of a global government, not the one world like the bad guys 1984, because he goes out of his way to make sure that nobody confuses this for that?

[00:16:50.120] – Kanegis

Yes. Well, let me do that. But let me just make a very quick observation before you do. And that is that challenging China, egging them into a new Cold War is suicide. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s instant ecocide. And let me tell you why. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor about 10 miles in diameter. Now, how many dinosaurs can you kill in a 10-mile diameter circle?

But what happened is that threw so much soot and dust into the air and it blanketed the earth, nothing could grow. And all the species at that time, these giant, mighty powerful dinosaurs died. And even a limited nuclear war like one between India and Pakistan or some of these new bombs they’re making that are smaller, more efficient.

We can actually try to fight and win them and challenging China to get into that. Even a small war, a tactical war, would actually be instant ecocide for the planet. So we’re either going to suffocate ourselves slowly with the ecocide, and it’s getting faster and faster, or we’re just going to go like that in 20 minutes if we get into this nuclear war. So you’re right.

It is crucial that humanity have an alternative and it’s crucial that we think outside the box. And that’s why Garry was a great out-of-the-box thinker. And what he did, he was really a forerunner. He engaged Bucky Fuller disciple, you know, Buckminster Fuller had that same idea that we could have a whole different way, that we govern and administrate and so on.

Well, what Garry developed with him was what he called integrity. And let me tell you. It’s sort of like this and it’ sort of happening with the Internet. And Garry was so thrilled when the Internet came along. He invented all this before the Internet. He actually invented a lot of things before the Internet. He invented kilowatt dollars before cryptocurrency.

He invented a lot of the forerunners, but he invented before the Internet was developed and so much easier now that it’s developed this idea that you would have these synergistic groups. If you take that old organization chart with the king on top or the president on top or the president of the company on top, and you have the people under him, the people under him, all go down to the bottom, that chart we’ve all seen and you change it into a geodesic sphere, like Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome but two of them together so it’s a sphere and you have that rotating in space.

Then everybody in an organization can be on top of the world. If you have a corporation, for example, company. Yes, the president is on top when it comes to administration and coordinating other people, but when it comes to keeping the bathrooms clean, you rotate that sphere a little bit and the janitor’s on top. If the bathrooms are all overflowing and can’t be used and the whole place is stinky, the whole company’s gasping out.

But he can’t do his job unless personnel is doing theirs. So you rotate a little more and personnel has to be paying his salary. Twist it around to supply. They have to be supplying the paper towels and the clean-up supply. So everybody in that whole organization is on top of the world in this sphere. And this is a different way of looking at the world than a model.

Now what he said is if we had something like these Zoom meetings, we’re all starting to have them all the world, but first of thought of this before we had them. And what they were in these Zoom meetings when you had people on opposite sides of political issues like Israelis and Islamic people or

[00:20:02.230] – Grumbine

Palestinians

[00:20:03.010] – Kanegis

Sure. Red states,  blue states, purple states, blue states. You get them together and you not say who’s right and wrong because you just knock heads together. You won’t get anywhere and you don’t vote for this side wins or that side wins. Instead, you get together and you say, OK, so you go through a whole protocol.

OK, what is it you really want in life? What do you see for your children? Tell your stories. And you start reaching a humanity with each other. You start finding that, oh my God, these Jews in our midst want the same thing we do – a better life for their kids. Safety, security. Gee, I wish all Jews were like you. I wish all, a lot of people were like you.

And they start finding that we cross these borders and we begin to develop a system where the purpose of each of these meetings is to evolve. What is the best decision we can make, for instance, to save our environment, for example, and out of these synergistic meetings, all interacting with other synergistic meetings?

You know, just when you go to Google and you put in a few words and it searches all the libraries of the world and gets you instant information that years ago would have taken months and even years of research to find, and it’s right there at your fingertips. You have algorithms, but open source, or we could see how they work that amalgamate the wisdom of all these different separate room type groups.

Synergy because a synergy means that if you just have this compromise, one side gives a little, the other gets. Nobody is really happy, but you create something you can live with. But above compromise is the consensus, but that’s very hard to reach. But even better than that is synergy, which is you come into the meeting and out of it comes something new that none of you thought about when you came into it.

Nobody won. Instead, you all won because you came up with something even better that each of you own, that you’re a part of. And all these synergistic groups coming up with ideas, synergizing the wisdom of the planet. And we come up, for instance, we show in the movie the synergy reached by all these different groups.

And the people are celebrating because we passed the Global Clean Air Act. OK, so now we have this global Clean Air Act. How are we going to enforce it? Are we going to use the weak force, guns and bombs? And we’ve seen how those are totally ineffective, useless. I mean, the United States, the most powerful country in the world with military bases all over the world spending as much on its military as half the other rest of the world combined.

And we’re weak and less secure than ever. We haven’t won a war since World War II. The Korean War is still going on. Each one of these wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, they’re all still going on. But the Taliban may be taking back. War doesn’t work. It makes more enemies. Isn’t the definition of insanity to keep doing something over and over again when it doesn’t work?

[00:22:30.190] – Grumbine

Yes!

[00:22:30.670] – Kanegis

War is actually an insanity. And what does work? Well, what brought down these powerful dictators? Nonviolent people power. How was the American Revolution won? There’s a very interesting book by Gene Sharp. It was actually won with the Boston Tea Party and all that and by the Colonies withdrawing their support from England.

And it actually was won before the American Revolutionary War was started. The war was started by a hothead as an after the fact, and it wasn’t necessary. We had already gained our independence. Canada gained it without violence. If you look at the real history read Gene  Sharp’s books. He’s got a whole range of books on the power of nonviolence.

The real power is people power. So all these things that are happening bad in the world exist only because they’re using our money, our consumer money. We the people are actually the superpower, but we’re stuck in these boxes called nation-states.

[00:23:23.240] – Grumbine

This is really exciting because my focus really does tend to be on economics, but economics is simply a matter of how we organize real resources, how we organize human life in general. And so when you look at the stuff that we’re talking about here, it is synergy, right?

This is synergy. And as we move forward, I feel like the angle that you’re talking about here, whether it be exactly the same or whether it be some new thing. Like you said, we all get together. We come up with something new. Here’s the synergy, right?

[00:23:58.850] – Kanegis

Yes. And that’s what Garry said. Garry said humanity is a very inventive species. Why do we have to be stuck in these systems that we started in 1776 when there was no telephone, no Internet? The only way you could have a government of, by, and for the people was to elect representatives and send them off by horse and buggy to a distant city to govern for you.

Well, Garry said, well, now we can all meet in the same room, the global room. We don’t need representative. They’re just a magnet for special interest money. Aren’t you so much more than a vote? And when you vote for Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum, does that really represent all your interests?

No, they compromise that’s a race to the bottom and we see that that race to the bottom is making things worse and worse and worse. But what if you get together in these synergistic meetings and you actually start evolving? What’s the highest and best of humanity? Not stuck with do we pick Tweedledee or Tweedledum? But what are the solutions?

We all become Solutionary. We have a weekly podcast called The People Powered Planet podcast. If you go to peoplepoweredplanet.com, and you can join our weekly podcast Wednesdays at 10:00 am Pacific, 1700 Greenwich Mean Time. But you can join them in going over how do we create these inventive solutions.

So the one that he and I came up with as we’re talking about it is just this is one idea, but there may be other ways to do it. But what he said is that he called it a people-powered planet. And if you think about it, back in Jefferson’s day, corporations were given like a 20-year charter to build like a railroad or serve some public need.

And if they didn’t do it, their charter could be pulled. They were serving at the behest of the people. But what happened is because we, the people are locked in these boxes called nation-states, and because money was operating globally, they gained all the power and they could buy the best politicians money could buy, and they became the ones pulling all the strings.

And now we have just a semblance of democracy. But it’s not a real democracy. It’s not what anybody wants. All the things that are happening in the world, nobody wants. Nobody wants us to be heading toward nuclear war. Nobody wants climate disaster. Nobody wants rising waters, floods, storms, tornadoes. Those are ecocide. Those are crimes, folks. This isn’t happening because some accident of nature or something.

[00:26:11.060] – Grumbine

Can you imagine?

[00:26:11.060] – Kanegis

This is a crime against humanity, ecocide. And it’s happening because we don’t have a way at the global level to enforce the will of the people. Well, now, if you have this kind of system Garry mentioned and we show this in the film, and you passed a law, a clean act for the planet. Now, first of all, law has a lot of power.

Generally, you stop at a red light whether or not you see a cop around, not because you expect somebody is going to bang you on the head, but this is the law. We respect it and make society work better. We stop at red lights. Most of us who follow the law and law has a power beyond force.

When you fight a war and you force somebody to do something against their will, as soon as you turn your back or as soon as you get a little weak, they’re going to jump back and get you. But when you have law, that doesn’t happen. If the U.S. is the cops of the world running around trying to fix everybody’s problems by bombing and killing people, we’re going to get more and more people hating the U.S. and it’s going to get worse and worse.

But if instead, we raise our sovereignty to the global level and we, the people create these world laws, they’ve got incredible power even before we do any enforcement. But then here’s how we actually enforce them. So say a corporation is continuing to dump pollution into the Gulf. We move from protest to power.

Instead of going in protesting this company, you bring a request for an injunction to the Global Court of Economic, Ecological and Environmental Rights. This would be a court of, by, and for the people. Now, you know, in courts, traditionally, the judges have been who’s ever supposed to be the wisest, best, but instead, you develop a kind of a synergistic system where the people who most study the law understand it, understand human rights and so on, they can kind of rise in ranks and have more impact on this case.

So, you know, it’s like these TV shows where you get to have a court, people get to vote on the decision. Well, this is more than voting. You get to have an input in hearing the case. And then the people who are most knowledgeable and all that about it and understand human rights and all, they’re helping to make a decision in this case. And the judge is brought, you’re violating this. The case is brought. It’s heard.

The company gives their point of view. We say, “OK, you must cease and desist this.” So then instead of protesters going out, your people are deputized as enforcing World Court. You go out with a cease and desist order. You block the roads and so on saying, you know, transport can’t come in and of course, you get so many people involved as world citizens that people go to a job site and you find as a world citizen, you see, oh, I’m going to apply for this job.

Oh, beep, beep, world law violator. Or you go into a store and you’ve got the app on your phone, the smart go in the movie, your up talking about called Smart Guy. He said, Why do we waste our genius inventing smart Smartbomb to do ourselves in then why not invent smart guy. So we show this little smart guy that what would happen if not invented yet, folks.

But it’s easy to invent. You go into a store, you scan product. Oh, this is a world law violator. Oh, they’re supplying a world law violator. Beep I’m not going to buy that product in another. Oh this is a green new deal product that’s following world law. It’s helping the environment. I buy that product. Well, this is already beginning to happen.

I mean, we even see big companies like Costco and stuff going for a lot of ecological and organic goods. But this would be even more powerful once we have these kind of tools. So if somebody is waiting right now, for instance, nuclear weapons are illegal. It was already past the nuclear ban and nations have ratified it. That’s officially international law.

And in fact, it says right in the treaty that anybody who aids, abets or in any way supports anybody making nuclear weapons is violating the law. But you don’t even know that’s the law. Well, once we all sign up, is this then even the nations that didn’t sign, which are basically the ones with the nuclear weapons like the U.S. even there, we can enforce that because if you’re buying a product and like, say it’s from Honeywell – thermometers, just a thermostat or something.

Oop, Honeywell is involved in making parts for the nuclear bomb. They’re a world law violator. We won’t buy that – Federer. And, you know, these companies, they are much more vulnerable to public pressure even than government because they depend on us. We’re their consumers. Where will they buy from?

So once they start seeing that you see these very same companies, where are they going to do? They’re going to jump aboard and say, “Oh, we’re all for world law. We’re for the citizens-based world law.” And they’ll start advertising campaigns. They’ll start contributing to it. They’ll join it. In other words, this isn’t against anybody.

Plus, these corporations you talk about the economy, the reason they’re going in a crazy direction is because the economy pushes them in that direction. When they have an economic-political system that is pushing them in the direction that helps humanity, they’re all going to jump aboard. They’re not bad people. They have to live on this planet, too. They’re just stuck in a broken system.

Once we create that better system, it’ll all function so much better. And part of this World Citizen website, this markup, there’ll be at stores, something like Amazon, but instead it’ll all be featuring, you know, the more green a product is, the more it serves humanity, the more points go to that. So that becomes the product everybody buys. The more negative their services to the world, the more they go down in points.

We already see a little bit of that, you know, with the ratings and all that, but it’ll even be better as we improve that kind of thing. We are the superpower. And once we break out of that box, the nation-state thinking, once we identify ourselves as citizens of the world and once we invent something new, maybe not everything I’ve said, but chomping, get all the young people’s imaginations fired up . . .

[00:31:27.270] – Grumbine

Sure!

[00:31:27.270] – Kanegis

They’re thinking about how do we use these new tools, the Internet, to invent a better way. And this is much more effective enforcement than guns and bombs. And if there are some people violating, there’s already a thing called the Nonviolent Peace Board. We had people on our podcast where tribes were actually killing each other – bloody. The Nonviolent Peace Force went in.

There was a woman, and they all stopped fighting to say, “Well, if she did that or he did that,” and they start mediating. And the Nonviolent Peace Force has gone into conflicts where no one else could go in and they’ve succeeded. I had on my podcast the former police chief of Santa Fe who took on the impossible task, the UN said it was impossible, in Bosnia.

Serbians and Croats had been killing each other in ethnic cleansing. And he got the job of putting together a unified police force. And they told him when he did, “It’s an impossible job. You sure you want it?” He said, “Well, first of all, I’m not going to take it if it’s impossible, but I know it is possible and I’m going to do it.”

And he took the job and the first thing he did is he said, “OK, we’ve got to start a new police force here and I’m going to have the Croat pick the Bosnians and the Serbians who will be on it. And the Serbians picked the Croats. They had to pick people from the opposite side who they most felt they could trust or work with.

And he put this team together and he put them through these processes of interaction and stuff. And he ended up taking the police from being the most hated organization to the most respected. He ended up creating a coherent police force that actually worked and functioned, community-based policing, helping people, someplace people could turn to when they needed help. A great model for the United States where . . .

[00:33:00.540] – Grumbine

Amen!

[00:33:00.540] – Kanegis

The police have become militarized. But there are many cities, Camden, I think, others that have done more community-based policing, and the police are members of the community. And they go out and work with the community and they even march with the community when they protest. And that’s the kind of policing we need.

So in other words, the law we’re talking about has to be not that old top-down Gestapo kind of law. I mean, Garry says right in the movie, “Does World Government scare you?” He says, “Well, it does me if it’s the same old forces of power and money controlling your lives from behind closed doors that the new world order, as they called it,” he said. “But what if we run it? What are we in fact? What if we figure out a new way to do that.”

And that’s the kind of world law we have to create – people-based world law, enforceable and forceful because we the people are the superpower. We have to be the ones enforcing it. If we withdraw our support, like people are doing a great job with divesting from banks, they’re doing nuclear war, climate change things.

People have gone to the board meetings and gotten the people elected to the Exxon board who are environmentalists. We the people have the power. These places are only in power because we buy their stock or we buy their products. We are the superpower and that’s the key thing. Garry said and when people tried to give him power, he said, “No way.”

You see this right in the movie. That’s why Martin Sheen fell in love with him. He said, “I’m not the one to lead you. I’m just one of the world citizens of a community of world citizens. You are the ones who are going to save the world. And Leonardo DiCaprio said the same thing in our movie.

[00:34:38.170] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:35:27.210] – Grumbine

Yeah, it’s fantastic. We have a friend of the program named Phil Lawn, who’s an economist in Australia, and he has been the champion of something called the Genuine Progress Indicator as opposed to GDP, which is just gross domestic product that is just grow, grow, grow. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter how bad for the world it is.

And so you’ve got degrowth movements going on. But he created and has been helping advance this thing called the Genuine Progress Indicator. And much like the idea of looking at different food and figure out which one is actually serving the community versus which one’s destroying it, this genuinely looks at those kind of metrics and about how is society functioning?

Are people well off? Is their health good? Is their nutrition good? Are they good at handling sustainability, et cetera? So it’s a fantastic part of this. I think there’s a lot of really great minds out there in each of their specialties that if we all came together, I love the idea of the utopian. It sounds great. It feels great. However, there’s a lot of entrenched interests.

There’s a lot of entrenched beliefs that are false, a lot of propaganda. We have been propagandized insanely for years and years and years. And the media is so controlled by so few people and the message is so homogenous, so standardized. There is no deviation unless you’re looking at the other side, which they’ve split it into two worlds, basically. And so you’ve got propaganda, the one side, propaganda the other side, and everybody’s in search of truth.

And I think that this is one of the most important things is having a independent media to help people get the real information, have them be able to hear the real stories, to be able to act on real change, because a lot of good people come home from a long workday, flip on the TV, and they’re listening to nothing but pure propaganda that fuels everything that we’re not talking about here, every negative thing that we’re talking about. And if we can’t pull away from that . . .

[00:37:38.940] – Kanegis

You’re absolutely right.

[00:37:40.320] – Grumbine

There is a small group of people that will get it, but there’s a much larger group of people that will stay stuck.

[00:37:46.980] – Kanegis

Well, you’re so right. And it’s very interesting when you look at it, some of the financial forces that were financing the divisions in this country were also financing different groups to hate another country. Didn’t matter who hated who, just get somebody to hate somebody else so that they could fight with each other.

So the power could be kept by the people who were extracting the resources. So they would go to the different Third World countries and exacerbate this or that dispute. And it’s all documented in this thing about immerge, analytics and all that stuff. So why would the same people be financing hate? They don’t really hate these people. It’s just this is a mechanism of control.

They get us divided and separated and hating each other. And once we the people realize that we’re being duped, once we come together and as you said, start getting the right information and start developing an economic system and developing this economic system is not as hard as it first sounds. It’s already beginning to evolve or you’re talking about the Green New Deal and we can evolve it more.

More and more people are aware that climate change is so shockingly real with the out-of-control temperatures and the wildfires that are taking off, they’re going to happen this summer. And the other things happening that we’ve already got the shock here enough to wake us up. And the only key to saving our planet is not going to happen inside the broken nation-state system.

Einstein said that you never solve a problem at the same level at which it was created. You’ve got to step out of that into a higher level. Bucky Fuller said that you never change things by fighting the old reality. You create something new and attract people to it. And my objective in the long run, and we actually had a terrific time with Martin Sheen on the Thom Hartmann Show, he read Garry’s book, My Country is the World, and he loved it.

He said this should be a series either Netflix, Amazon, any of these, because every chapter has astounding action and drama and helps elevate our thinking to being world citizens. And I think that’s part of the key. That’s why I became a moviemaker. I was so thrilled to hear you talk about the emotional experience you had, even crying, watching our movie, because that’s what’s going to change people, touching their emotions with a story, not facts and figures. And that’s why I’m a filmmaker.

[00:39:54.090] – Grumbine

Yeah, you did a beautiful job. It’s so well put together. Going back to Martin Sheen for a minute, how did Martin Sheen get involved in this? For something like this, there’s got to be more than just money and the like. He obviously felt compelled to be a part of this. So tell us how Martin Sheen got involved.

[00:40:11.280] – Kanegis

Well, what happened first, of course, I went to his agent and managers and I even managed the network through his personal assistant. And everyone told me Martin’s not interested. He’s not interested in this no, no, no, no, no. All these famous people have to have a lot of no people around to protect them because they’re deluged by everybody and their brother-in-law wanting this and that from them.

But finally, we got a friend to show it to Martin’s wife. And my wife and I are in bed about 11:30 at night. We’re half asleep. And the phone rings and my wife is who the heck could be calling at this time of the night? “Martin Sheen here. I watched your movie. When it got to the part where Garry could have had power personally and he refused it, I fell in love with the guy. What can I do for you?”

And he contributed all the time to do this for scale, because, of course, you have to have scale by union rules, but basically a pittance for him. He basically contributed his time and effort to being the person who introduces Garry in the movie and to being the person who’s been promoting it on extra TV on MSNBC.

You can see all of these wonderful interviews with him and with me and more about the story. If you go to theworldismycountry.com/talks. You can see all that and we’ll put your talk up there, too, so they’ll be able to tell their friends to come hear your talk here or right on your show.

[00:41:30.400] – Grumbine

That’s fantastic. I got to tell you, I can only imagine what it was like to receive that phone call. How great was that? This guy’s a legend.

[00:41:39.290] – Kanegis

Well, yes. And actually, just this week, I have that weekly podcast and I never take calls during it, like during your talk here today, I noticed glancing at my phone is on silent. My brother called, a few others. I’ll call them afterwards, but a call came in from Martin Sheen.

I had to take it during the podcast and my associate who helps run it with me said hi to him, but that’s where he called. He was talking about how do we go and make this series about Garry’s book. He really is dedicated to Garry’s story and just thrilled to have him a part of it. So yes, every time I get a call from him, I’m thrilled.

[00:42:13.190] – Grumbine

And Leonardo DiCaprio being a big star, he has really put his money where his mouth is. He has been a very vocal advocate for the environment for a long time.

[00:42:23.630] – Kanegis

Yes. He gave a beautiful talk to the United Nations. What happened with him is before he made his latest film on the environment he made another one. It was part of making another one called ‘The 11th Hour’ about how humanity stands at the 11th hour.

And, you know, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist Talk, which was created by the scientists who helped create the nuclear bomb, and it’s actually an indication that when it’s midnight, that’s the end of life on earth. And we’re now standing at 100 seconds from a midnight of unbelievable catastrophe due to climate change, nuclear war or pandemics and so on.

So Leonardo DiCaprio had the 11th hour about how humanity from climate change is standing on the brink at the eleventh hour of our doom. And he had a press conference on it and I was thrilled to get to go. And I asked him the question. I said you mentioned humanities and on the 11th hour, but, you know, in the movies, whenever the crisis gets really bad at the last minute, just when everything seems lost, there’s no hope, a hero comes along and saves the day.

I said, “Who’s the hero who’s going to save us?” And he gave a beautiful answer. You have to watch the film. But basically said, the hero is all of us. The hero is you and every one of us. He goes on quite some depth about that. Watch the movie to see. But he really talks about how, just what I was saying here. You are the power that can turn this all around. And it’s not just by going to recycle your cans and stuff, that’s fine.

But it’s even more by stepping into our power that’s right in our Declaration of Independence and almost every constitution. They all say that they’re based on the will of the people, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government. Well, where is the will of the people expressed at the global level?

You can’t vote for anybody globally. You can’t do anything. Well, basically what we’re talking about with this ‘smartgov’ is basically create a place where we express the world, the people at the global level, and give that the power of law and use that power of the people to enforce saving our planet from doom.

[00:44:26.420] – Grumbine

That’s amazing. You brought up something else, too, that I think we should touch on, especially given the timing of it all. The pandemic, it has been an unequal response around the globe for not only prevention and protection. We’ve got a bunch of cowboys here in the U.S. that fantasize about being maskless and not taking the pandemic seriously.

But around the globe, we see other countries that are not as advanced and don’t have access to the medicine that we’ve created. And quite frankly, the US tried really hard to prevent these folks from being able to have the vaccines. Now, all of a sudden, they’ve released some of them. But this is not being a very good global citizen at all.

[00:45:07.370] – Kanegis

If you go to the history of it, with the AIDS pandemic that was ravishing Africa, the U.S. government played the terrible role of being henchmen, enforcing the copyright of the companies that manufacture these vaccines. And we let millions of people die. We blocked them from getting the treatment that had been developed for AIDS in order to protect the profits of these companies.

I mean, that’s outrageous that one country should be able in other countries to talk about sovereignty, to keep the people of that other country from having the vital medications they need, whether it’s to prevent the pandemic or anything else, just to protect the property rights of private corporations. I mean, these corporations, what gave them the funding to do all this? Was all government funding.

[00:45:51.710] – Grumbine

Amen!

[00:45:51.710] – Kanegis

It was our money, folks. They didn’t do this out of money that they scraped by and got. We paid them to do it. We gave them the money. They got a free ride on that. And now they get a free ride on the profits by denying people who finally need it from getting it. And then they hold us up for, “Oh, you got to give us a whole bunch more money in order to make it available there.”

These medicines cost pennies on the hundreds and thousands of dollars they charge people for. And it’s all a racket, folks. And we, the people have to take control and say no. I mean, we funded this. We created it. We’re going to make it available to people who need it.

[00:46:26.110] – Grumbine

I want to say this. You said something very important, but this is where my economics hat comes on quickly because when a country has its own currency, like the United States has the US dollar, like the UK has the pound sterling, like Japan has the yen, Australia has the dollar, et cetera, each of these countries has the sovereign ability to spend whatever they want. It’s not tax dollars. It’s the country printing or typing or digitizing that money into existence . . .

[00:46:53.710] – Kanegis

Right.

[00:46:53.710] – Grumbine

. . .as they passed laws. So the idea of this scarcity, oh, we don’t have enough money  – bullshit. We have plenty of money. We create money at will. We create money every time we bomb someone. We can certainly create money every time we need to give someone a vaccine, every time we need to feed them, every time we need to clothe them, every time we need to provide shelter, we can do these things.

And when we say we funded it, we absolutely do with public money. You know, not Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal “there’s no such thing as public money. There’s only taxpayer money.” That’s a Ronald Reagan thing, too. That taxpayer dollar meme has killed more people because it’s a lie. Reality is our government creates that money at will. And we’ve been led to believe we’re too broke to do any of these things, which is a farce. A farce.

[00:47:38.560] – Kanegis

You’re absolutely right.

[00:47:39.880] – Grumbine

Neoliberalism has destroyed this planet and . . .

[00:47:42.820] – Kanegis

Yes.

[00:47:42.820] – Grumbine

It’s continuing to destroy lives one day at a time. And it feeds that patent mill that you’re talking about. It’s just horrible. It’s evil.

[00:47:50.080] – Kanegis

Right? Well, you’re absolutely right on that. And I actually had dinner with a fellow whose job was when they cranked out more currency, he had to go down in the basement and reset the computers to make more money. So his job was to go down there and released more money into the economy. And it’s actually a digital trick. It doesn’t have to really be borrowed from anybody or created. It’s what they call fiat money.

[00:48:10.840] – Grumbine

It’s by decree. That’s right.

[00:48:13.450] – Kanegis

And these cryptocurrencies, Garry had the original idea, the Kilowatt-dollar, but he wanted it to be a global currency that was a currency we could all have faith in. And what did he say? All over the world energy is the one thing that everybody needs, whether it’s energy of the sun, energy from wind, it all translates into kilowatts.

So he said, instead of basing the currency on gold and silver and things that don’t do anything, let’s base it on something that does something – kilowatts that actually serve humanity.

[00:48:42.520] – Grumbine

It’s interesting you say that because Steve Keen is an economist that’s a very good friend of mine, talks about when you factor in environmental and energy consumption into economics, it provides a very different picture. Guys that are really advancing the Green New Deal, the currency itself is almost irrelevant.

The currency issuer, currency user dynamic is very important because it’s a way of organizing. But without the global cooperation, it doesn’t matter what’s happening. Right now you see in Europe that they have a single currency in the euro. And what’s happened is the countries that are net exporters are kicking everyone’s tail end.

And the countries that are importers like Greece and Spain and others are getting their teeth kicked in. And so this very unequal process happens when you have a single currency that no one is sovereign over. So there’s some very important things that have to take place there macroeconomically to be able to facilitate that.

This isn’t really a macro talk, but I wanted to make sure that everybody understood or thought about it, that from an MMT perspective, we can have nice things. We can make this world the place that we’re talking about in this podcast. There’s nothing preventing us from being humane and being decent and being good global citizens. And I just love that angle. I want to be clear that I do have a macro perspective,

[00:50:06.190] – Kanegis

Well, the macro perspective is so important. It actually is true. It would be better for everyone, including the corporations that are screwing everybody. They’re not happy. There’s a movie called Happy where they found out that a rickshaw driver living in a shack in India is actually happier than a Fortune 500 CEO. Authenticate happiness out of all this.

The key is you’re absolutely right and that we’ve got the wrong economic indicators. Some countries have advocated that we use Global Happiness Index. Actually, one of the happiest and most advanced countries on those index is Costa Rica. Back in the 1940s and so on, they were surrounded by hostile military powers threatening them. So what do they do?

They abolished their army and then nobody could attack them and they’ve been safe for 75 years. Who can attack a country that doesn’t have a military? And when they did have disputes and somebody tried to move anyway, they took it to the Inter-American Court and the UN court. And even though the courts are usually ineffective, people followed it because here’s a country doesn’t have a military.

We’ve got to kind of follow the law for them. So they ended up using that and they have 100 percent renewable energy, where the highest happiness index is in the world. Everybody gets an education. Everybody has free, unlimited health care, and they do it all by just getting rid of their military. So there are answers and macroeconomics is a key part of it.

But we have to develop in this interactive governing system that Garry mentioned, one part of it, he said, would be that if you’re on this smart go map, you maybe have over on the left the dashboard. And what rises to the top are the highest and best practices they represent any of the things you’re talking about. If you’re talking about cleaning up your local river, you find out what other people have done in the world that work.

You see those highest and best practices and you can incorporate them into yours. We develop the tools. It’s already happening. It’s already coming together in the planet. We’re already beginning to create this neural network with a global brain of the planet. We have to keep applying ourselves to bring that together. So that’s really the key.

[00:52:05.010] – Grumbine

Garry is just amazing. One of the things that he brought up as he was standing there at the towers after 9/11 and he was talking about, “Hey, war is not illegal! Why is war not illegal?” And he says, “Couldn’t we take this to court? Well, we could if it was illegal.”

But there’s no standing. So all this stuff has to be enforced. And we talked about that and he talks about that in the documentary that we need some sort of world court, a world law, world court. Can you talk a little bit about his perspective of that World Court?

[00:52:34.440] – Kanegis

Yes, so as Garry mentioned, he said he was asking the question, why wasn’t I arrested for killing people in their homes and schools and factories? You know, he got arrested 34 times for not having national papers or other stuff, and he never got arrested for murdering people he murdered – 100,000 people, doesn’t know how many people in their homes and schools and factories with his bombs.

He never got arrested for that. And the people who killed his brother never got arrested. And he asked why. And he realized the reason. Inside almost every country on earth, murder is illegal. Outside countries it isn’t. They had Guantanamo Bay. They set it up because they didn’t have to follow domestic law. They could do anything they wanted, torture people, anything else.

So it’s kind of crazy that we have a system. As Garry said, anarchy is a definition of no law. There’s really no law at the global level. There’s pretty law which nations can break anytime they want because they’re the sovereign. There’s no law above the nations that divide us. So Garry said let’s create it. If all the constitutions and everything says we the people do it, we’ve got to create those laws and we’ve got to create them in a fair and equitable way that’s not something that’s like in these trade deals that can punish countries for doing good, economic good and other things.

We’ve got to create based on the people. And so I think you’re absolutely right. We have to have a macro perspective. But another way to look at is The New Earth Operating System. You look at your computer, the operating system coordinates all the diverse programs. It doesn’t tell you what you can do or not do, but it makes the way they all interact with each other so they don’t all crash with each other and burn and destroy your computer.

We need an operating system for the planet, a world operating system for humanity on planet earth. And we’re evolving toward that. And we just need to picture it, visualize it, create it in our minds and then bring it into reality. And it has to be economic, political. It has to replace the old broken political systems and divisions with something new that just arises from our ranks as the people.

[00:54:34.350] – Grumbine

Yeah, I love that. One of the things that jumps out at me is the champagne glass of the economy. You have this huge amount of wealth that makes up more than something like 70 percent of the entire global wealth, a handful of people and then everybody else is left to basically fend for themselves. Money being a creation of the state there’s no reason for that.

The state could tax that money out or it could actually just spend money on those people. But money goes up to the top every time. So I think that as part of this new design, we have to take into consideration what pooled wealth looks like and how it really destroys society from the top down.

And I think that this is one of the big keys in my mind when I was listening to this, what I kept thinking about was how do we dislodge all of that extra wealth at the top that literally serves to prevent democracy from really taking place. And with the fraud, I think it’s important that we address the inequality baked into the system as part of a new system.

[00:55:41.760] – Kanegis

Well, and what we have to realize basically if that’s our money, folks, and it’s all based on our giving some of our sovereignty or economic power to the people who are doing that, the banks and so on, and we withdraw that support and put it into something that we create, we can create something different. We the people are the sovereigns. We’re the basis of it all.

And when we wake up and recognize our power, we can rise above all of that. And when we do, it’ll actually be for the benefit of even those few, because even though they have all that money and power it’s not really doing them that much good. They’re not really happy. It’s just sort of a broken system that says those with the most bucks in their digital economy with that number is bigger, they win.

But what do they really win? They still die like the rest of us. They still have babies born. They still have wives and mothers and stuff. What have they gained by that? They’ve gained some fictitious figure that’s destroying the planet that doesn’t really serve anybody, even them. And so once we create this people-powered planet, it will actually be for the benefit of all.

Even then, they may struggle and kick against it for a while because that’s what money and power does. But when we the people really recognize their real power, we’ll rise above that and we have much more power than they do because they only get that money from us folks. They didn’t get it anywhere else. We are the ones who created these governments that then create these imaginary currencies. It’s all a system that humans created, and humans can create a new system.

[00:57:08.130] – Grumbine

I love it. Yes.

[00:57:09.870] – Kanegis

All these invisible lines that carve up our planet, they’re not real. They weren’t there in outer space. Now, people [inaudible 00:57:16] from all over the long term, but you could even see them from outer space. And they don’t really exist. They’re imaginary things that we’ve created and we can create something much, much better. All we have to do is imagine, visualize it and create it and then just do it.

[00:57:29.190] – Grumbine

On that note, that was a wonderful way to end this. I want to thank you so much, Arthur. You have been a tremendous guest. I love this documentary. Please let everybody know once again how we can find your work and this documentary.

[00:57:43.080] – Kanegis

Yeah. So just come to theworldismycountry.com. Actually right there you can click on our podcast to get our weekly podcast every Wednesday. You can also click there to watch these shows on extra TV where we’re talking with you and other key people. You can watch the movie and you can join together with us to create the world we choose.

[00:58:03.330] – Grumbine

That’s fantastic. And with that, I’m Steve Grumbine. Arthur Kanegis. Have a great day, everybody. We’re out of here.

[00:58:15.270] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.