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Proposals for Post-election Activities

Draft Resolution For Global Transformation

Whereas:

• More than 20,000 human beings die needlessly daily.
• The climate crisis threatens life on Earth.
• The wealthiest and most powerful individuals and nations tend to use their advantages to accumulate ever more wealth and power for themselves and their families.
• Advocates for this increasing accumulation of wealth and power use the myth of totally free markets, or unregulated capitalism, to justify their actions.
• Modernization undermines traditional cultures, extended families, face-to-face communities, and spiritual harmony with all life by promoting extreme forms of individualism, competition, materialism, and selfishness.
• By internalizing these values and uncritically supporting the rich and powerful, others, who often desire to become rich and powerful themselves, reinforce global problems.
• Progressive-minded activists often become too concerned about their own status or power, merely use others as goal-oriented instruments, and fail to develop rich relationships that include sharing emotions.
• Our world is filled with countless other problems that can and should be corrected.
• Each nation’s problems are connected with other nations’ problems.
• Correcting problems in any one nation will require correcting problems in other nations.
• Reforms in various nations will need to be consistent with one another.
• These reforms need not always be total, comprehensive, or fundamental, if they are steps in the right direction.
• We need not wait for conditions to worsen before making meaningful improvements.
• Global transformation will require a massive, unified, democratic, inclusive, joyous, global community rooted in a shared worldview.
• One way to grow this community is to promote small teams whose members commit to self-development, care for one another, work immediately to meet needs in their community, and push for changes in corporate and public policy within their own country and globally.
• Meeting in members’ homes, these action-oriented teams can enable each member to participate fully and consciously support one another’s self-development.
• By acknowledging our mistakes and working to prevent them, we can become more effective activists.
• In these ways, a global community of like-spirited activists could promote essential personal, social, and cultural transformation geared toward promoting mutual understanding, community, cooperation, self-development, mutual support, generosity, and an appreciation for other spiritual values.

Be it therefore resolved that:

• We, progressive-minded social and environmental activists who endorse this resolution, urge all humanity to clearly establish that our primary purpose is to promote the common good, empower communities, support self-development, protect our environment, and create a free, just, and peaceful society – by reforming our institutions, our culture, and ourselves to better serve that purpose.
• We support a focus on short-term, winnable, progressive objectives already supported by a majority of people in each country. In this way, we can build momentum by winning victories, open the door to new possibilities, and eventually achieve fundamental transformation.
• Since changes in public and corporate policies will never solve all of our problems, we encourage voluntary community service to address unmet needs.
• We believe corporations should serve the public interest and respect workers’ rights as well as earn a profit.
• We believe society should maximize worker-ownership and local production and distribution of goods and services. We respect the right of each nation to determine its own economic policies so long as they do not violate the rights of other nations or damage the environment.
• We recommend the development of new structures to increase popular participation in governmental decisions, such as regular public forums that provide a fair chance to all voters to engage in dialog with their elected officials on any issue of concern to the voters.
• We encourage activist organizations in each country that share this perspective to create a coalition to advance these goals by regularly (perhaps monthly) mobilizing massive numbers throughout the country to communicate to all members of their national legislature at roughly the same time the same message on a top-priority, timely issue.
• We encourage activist organizations throughout the world that share this perspective to form a global coalition to advance these goals by regularly (perhaps annually) calling for consumers to support a key boycott of a particular corporation or nation in order to achieve a specific change in that corporation’s or nation’s official policy.
• We affirm the formation of small groups of like-spirited individuals who endorse this resolution, commit to self-development and mutual support, get to know one another well, communicate feelings openly, participate together in joyful social activities, engage in community service, and decide together what political action to undertake regularly as a unit.
• We recommend that such groups select one or two representatives to join a Network for Global Transformation in order to share reports, provide one another with mutual support, and promote the network.

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